GURPS Man to Man.... how to add magic?

[Giovanni]

Me and a couple of friends of mine want to use GURPS Man to Man as a fantasy skirmish wargame....
how we can add magic?
The natural way should be to use GURPS Magic 3e but I suspect that a lot of spells require the Narrator judgement to be applied and are so not suitable for a wargame (where there is no impartial Narrator) plus the prerequisites sub-system make the magic PC creation procedure too long.

What I'd like to obtain from this discussion is...
1. a subset of the spell contained in Magic 3e: each spell in the subset should be usable in a wargame.
2. a way to buy those spell as skills ignoring prerequisites.

or... since in GURPS 3e and 4e there are a lot of alternative magic system, you could suggest something simple that could work in wargame....

[Taneli]

I believe it was the GURPS Fantasy 1st edition that added magic to GURPS, but that's out of print and not available as a PDF, so it's probably not the best choice.

Honestly, I would look at The Fantasy Trip, and figure out equivalent spells from that to GURPS Magic, and use those, but that's of course not a simple slot-in solution, but one that requires a bit of building.

[Giovanni]

Honestly, I would look at The Fantasy Trip, and figure out equivalent spells from that to GURPS Magic

My first impression also was in this direction...

But just to explore differents possibilities....

Is there something adaptable in Thaumatology 4e supplements?

[Anaraxes]

A lot of people play Melee / Wizard / Fantasy Trip as a wargame, rather than an RPG.

(If you're unfamiliar with TFT, it was Steve Jackson's game before GURPS, designed as a skirmish game, used as the core of an RPG later. You might think of it as GURPS 0th Edition. Though that's not entirely accurate, the lineage of thought is clear enough. Pretty significant jump from "0e" to 1e, though, bigger even than GURPS 1/2e to 3e or 4e.)

TFT isn't immune from needing judgement, if by agreement of the players rather than a third-party GM (Narrator), though. I'm not sure any game is; I've certainly had enough rules debates over straight-up tabletop wargames with no pesky magic, and before the the notion from RPGs (or real-world wargaming) that players could try anything reasonable and the referee would adjudicate overtook the strictly literal rules interpretation of the 60s/70s.

GURPS Magic certainly isn't perfect in this regard, but most of the combat spells just do what they say. I don't remember a lot of arguments at the table over those. In a skirmish game, you don't have to concern yourself with economic or world-building implications of the existence of various spells, so that class of complaint isn't relevant. And there's some flaws from a hasty rework of that book from 3e to 4e.

Man to Man is GURPS 1e, released just before the full product was completed. (Hey, it worked for TFT...) So you'd ideally want to dig up an old Fantasy 1e. (SJG books have their own edition numbers; they don't necessarily match the overall edition of the system.) No PDFs back in those days, so you'd be looking at the collector's market to find a physical copy.

You could get a 3e/4e Magic, but you'll need to invent some range increments for the missile spells. (Those went away in GURPS 3e, replaced by an Accuracy stat and a range table.) I'd suggest just using the numbers from Man to Man for a bow. Copying TFT would give you an increment of 6. The other range numbers (for Regular spells, distance to an Area, etc) should be fine as is.

[Giovanni]

I own TFT but never tried it: to be honest i could try Warrior and Wizard together and it will be just perfect but I'm more attracted toward GURPS Man to Man because it looks more complicated/rich. I will try your suggestion about the range in order to convert from Magic 3e to Man to Man...

[Fred Brackin]

the 3e Gurps Basic book has a limited number of spells. A quick count makes it 88 but if exclude the Enchantment Spells that no one will be using it drops back below 80 and most of them are focused on a "gladiatorial" scale of combat.

4e Basic (Characters & Campaigns) has a few more and maybe a little less gladiatorial emphasis but it's been a criticism of Gurps Magic that things like its' Missile spells are only useful; on such a scale.

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by Taneli

I believe it was the GURPS Fantasy 1st edition that added magic to GURPS, but that's out of print and not available as a PDF, so it's probably not the best choice.

Which was carried forward almost completely unchanged up through to GURPS 3e Magic.

And even despite the few significant edits between 3e and 4e, I'd say just use GURPS 4e Magic as is, or even better DFRPG Spells if you have it.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by Giovanni

What I'd like to obtain from this discussion is...
1. a subset of the spell contained in Magic 3e: each spell in the subset should be usable in a wargame.
2. a way to buy those spell as skills ignoring prerequisites.

Simplest method for 2 would be to borrow the Charm Perk from GURPS 4e. That is, just charge an extra point to learn a spell while ignoring prerequisites.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Giovanni

2. a way to buy those spell as skills ignoring prerequisites.

In GURPS 4e at least, you can ignore all the prerequisites (beyond the minimum level of Magery, anyway) for a single given spell with the Charm Perk, worth [1]. With that in mind, and with the fact I don't think the prerequisite chains were ever meant to be a balancing factor, you could either just require everyone to invest [1] into the ability to buy up a given spell's skill or simply ignore the prerequisites, I don't think it'll break anything (or at least not break anything further than bringing the spells in in the first place would).
EDIT: Ninja'd. An alternative option is to steal the rules for 4e's Ritual Magic (B242) - characters have a Ritual Magic or Thaumatology base skill, then a separate IQ/H skill for each College that defaults to the base skill at -6 (if defaults are a thing in Man to Man) and cannot exceed the base skill. Each spell is then a Hard Technique that defaults to the College skill at -1 per prerequisite in the chain. I think there are online resources that will tell you how many spells are in each prerequisite chain that would help immensely here.

[Anthony]

The easy way to deal with magic is to use a really limited list of spells. You're not going to create problems with interpretation for spells like fireball.