Limitations for Magic as Powers

[Kallatari]

Originally Posted by nerdvana

This looks well thought out. I'm going to borrow heavily. :)

Hope it works just as well for your group.

And since you're building your own magical systems Powers-style, here are a few more modifiers from my house rules you may like:


Nuisance Effects (Requires Minor Maintenance): While this ability is active and being maintained, you have a cumulative -1 penalty to activate all other abilities of the same power source (in this case, all other magical spells). value: -5%

Although GURPS Psionic Powers has made this a -0% feature of a power source, I still view this as a limitation, as it would allow me charge different costs for two identical Power systems in which the only difference between the two was the cumulative -1 penalty. After all, you could take GURPS Psionic Powers as is, replace Psionic with Magic, and voila, magic system. If this "magic" system didn't have the cumulative -1 penalty, then it should result IMO in spell abilities being more expensive than psionic abilities, so psionic abilities would get an extra -5% limitation. Now, it's not that important in a setting with only one power source where they all have the same cumulative -1, but my primary campaign is an "anything goes" style game, so I need a way to distinguish these effects when some players have them, and others don't.


Cost Fatigue (Margin-Based): Works just like Cost Fatigue limitation for determining the FP to cast (activate) and maintain each minute, except that, for every 2 points you succeed your casting skill roll, you can reduce the cost to cast and maintain by 1 for that particular use.

For example: You have a spell with Cost Fatigue (Margin-Based) 5, it would cost you 5 FP to cast, and 3 FP each minute to maintain. If you succeed your casting roll by 2, it only costs 4 FP to cast and 2 FP to maintain. If you succeed your roll by 4, it costs 3 FP to cast and 1 FP to maintain. If you succeed by 6, it's 2 FP to cast and 0 to maintain. A success by 8 and 10 gives 1 FP to cast, and no fatigue respectively.

I created this to make the spells feel a bit more "magical" and unpredictable... and to somewhat mirror (but not exactly duplicate) the -1 Energy cost with a skill of 15 and every +5 to skill of the skill-based magic system without needing as high a skill level. And the randomness keeps them guessing, as they never know how much fatigue it will cost them until they cast. Oh, I also charge full FP to cast on a failed skill roll.

Anyway, Cost Fatigue (Margin-Based) is worth 10% less than the normal Cost Fatigue. So, it's -0% for levels 1 and 2 (which you're likely to succeed by enough to eliminated any FP cost with any half-decent skill), -5% for 3, -10% for 4, -15% for 5, etc.


Reduce Fatigue Cost (Margin-Based): Rather than fully eliminating the inherent FP cost to use an advantage that costs FP (such as Healing), this enhancement changes it so that it becomes margin-based, reducing the FP cost of a given use by 1 for every 2 points you succeed your skill roll to cast. This is worth -10%/level.



Anyway, those are my key ones, along with Malediction, of course.

Finally, I recommend having a framework for designing your spells in your campaign setting to keep them inherently consistent. For example, in my games, you cannot have a spell whose base CP cost (the cost before enhancements and limitation) or final cost (after modifiers are applied) is greater than 50 CP x Magery Level, thereby keeping the most powerful spells for those with higher levels of Magery. Also, spells will have a FP cost of 1 per 10 CP or fraction thereof of base cost, except Innate Attack which is 1 FP per level, and should take the appropriate Cost FP (Margin-Based) and/or Reduced FP Cost (Margin-Based) to attain that cost.