DFRPG Spell Charts

[Michael Thayne]

I know I'm not the first person to bring this up, but I find creating wizards in GURPS extremely painful without help from GURPS Magic: Spell Charts. I recently sat down to try to figure out how many places there are where DFRPG's prerequisite chains deviate from GURPS Magic, and the number not only appears to be non-trivial, and there's not a clear pattern to them. There are cases where a spell's prerequisites changed because one of the prerequisites was dropped AFAICT for just not being that useful—but these often leave me wondering why the spell further down the chain was kept (for example, why was Copy kept but not Dye?) There are also cases where spells were made cleric and/or druid only, but again without a clear pattern. Notably, these cases don't match the suggestions in the old "Wizardry Refined" Pyramid article.

So I'm left wondering if anyone ever got around to making a version of Spell Charts for DFRPG, or at least a list of cases where prerequisites have been changed. I've started work on such a project but it looks rather daunting honestly. (I've been going alphabetically and I've gotten as far as "ethereal body".)

[Michael Thayne]

Occurred to me that it would be at least a start if I posted my notes on differences between standard magic and "Wizardry Refined":

• I count seven spells that have multiple prerequisite paths in standard magic, but get narrowed down to a single path in wizardy refined: alter visage, beacon, control creation, fear, lend energy, sense danger, and teleport shield.
• I count eight spells that needed prerequisites changed because there was no path to them that didn't pass through a forbidden spell: atmosphere dome, blink, divination (astrology and extispicy only), geyser, hide object, sanctuary, steal energy, and zombie.
• Finally, "Wizardry Refined" omits Magery 1 as a prerequisite for Recover Energy—though I wonder if this was a mistake, since this change was not carried over into DFRPG.

I put this list together by looking at the principles that are supposed to underly "Wizardry Refined" and skimming Spell Charts for cases I knew would require changed prerequisites. It's possible I missed some stuff, especially if Kromm failed to follow his own rules, but I've made a few wizards using Spell Charts and "Wizardry Refined" side-by-side and changed prerequisites honestly seem pretty uncommon, so sixteen total changes feels plausible.

[Michael Thayne]

Found a small handful of other cases where "Wizardry Refined" differs from standard magic. Reshape (edit: also lend language and possession) falls into the "fewer options, but no new ones" category, while frost, ice slick, rain of ice daggers, and vigor all got new methods for meeting their prerequisites.

[prospero]

Thanks for bringing this up again! I'd enjoy working on DFRPG spell charts, but I have no idea when I'd get the time.

[Michael Thayne]

I haven't managed to do a comprehensive review of DFRPG vs. Wizardry Refined yet, but my impression is that the differences between DFRPG and Wizardry Refined are greater than the differences between Wizardry Refined and Standard Magic. I think the reason is that Wizardry Refined was uninterested in removing spells from the game, just clarifying what spells are exclusively for various other types fo casters, DFRPG cut massive numbers of spells on the grounds of being unbalanced or irrelevant. It's been a long time since I've used GCA (I'm primarily a Mac user), but maybe I can do something clever with GCA files and a Python script? I'm not sure.

[Michael Thayne]

Update: I've successfully done some data munging on GCA files, though initially I decided to focus on identifying spells that remain the exclusive domain of mana-based casters at least as of "Wizardry Refined". I'm pretty confident I can extract prerequisites, but the regex will be hairier, so it might take me awhile.