Revising GURPS Magic

[Jürgen Hubert]

Knowledge

Aura: I think the spell list is missing an equivalent spell for inanimate objects - “Psychometry”, if you will, sensing the general emotional association of a place or thing. Neither Mage Sight (which is only for magic items) nor History seem to quite cover this.

Making and Breaking

Copy: This is not relevant to most medieval fantasy games, but the amount of data that can be copied should probably be scaled to the TL - copying a single kilobyte per casting is… not a lot.

Explode: Basically, the IED spell - if you need to kill a large number of unsuspecting people, accept no substitute. My players loved to combine this with Delay and Teleport Other - teleporting it into an enemy camp at night where it would do massive fragmentation damage in a rather wide area.

Here is how it works: If you have enough energy and time to prepare, every single fragment does 3d+6 cutting damage. Since it is fragmentation damage, everyone in the area will be attacked by fragments, which have a base “attack skill” of 15, modified only by the usual distance modifier on the speed/range table. That means everyone at a distance of 15 yards (and not behind cover) still has even odds of getting hit by a single fragment - and an average of 16.5 cutting damage has a fair chance of killing an ordinary unarmed human and will hurt even an armored warrior a lot.

And those closer to the detonation point have a good chance of getting hit by more than one fragment - one additional fragment hits for each three points the attack roll succeeded. Those close to the center will likely hit by two of the fragments, and quite possibly by three.

As far as I can determine, this is the single most devastating area effect spell in the book (though to be fair, most of the “Explosive” spells are lousy as written - the reasoning for my earlier house rule). My group decided to limit the damage a fragment could do to the hit points of the exploding object (so that you could no longer use a pebble for this), but this only alleviated the problem to a small degree. Frankly, I will probably ban this spell entirely in future campaigns unless I can come up with a more reasonable version.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

Copy: This is not relevant to most medieval fantasy games, but the amount of data that can be copied should probably be scaled to the TL - copying a single kilobyte per casting is… not a lot.

Copying computer hard drives would be a different spell.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Copying computer hard drives would be a different spell.

Still, I wonder how you select the one kilobyte you are copying with the Copy spell...

[Jürgen Hubert]

Meta

Ward/Great Ward: The utility of these spells is rather limited, since the total spell list is large and the odds of knowing a particular spell that needs to be warded against is low. Perhaps a Ward can work against spells the caster doesn’t know for twice the casting cost? A mage defending against hostile magic is very much in-genre, and I always approve of more ways for mages to spend their energy. ;)

Penetrating Spell: A similar problem as with the Penetrating Weapon enchantment - although less of one, since (a) this spell always costs more time and energy to add to another spell, while the enchantment can be used continuously, and (b) most damaging spells (with the exception of Explode, above) aren’t that great to begin with. Thus I’d leave it in.

Bless: A +1 (or more) to all dice rolls is very, very powerful - too powerful, in my opinion. The PCs in my campaigns made sure to always have a one point Bless active on them, and hopefully a two point Bless if they could get it - which is probably a good sign that this spell is unbalanced. I’d just transform the levels of Bless into one-time (or two-time/three-time) uses of the Luck advantage whenever the PCs need it, i.e. they can reroll any single dice roll twice and pick the best result. That’s still very useful that PCs will want it, but no longer as absurdly powerful.

Curse: Probably less problematic than Bless as written - I can either leave it as it is, or exchange it for “force to reroll successes twice, picking the worst result”.

[benz72]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

Meta

Ward/Great Ward: The utility of these spells is rather limited, since the total spell list is large and the odds of knowing a particular spell that needs to be warded against is low. Perhaps a Ward can work against spells the caster doesn’t know for twice the casting cost? A mage defending against hostile magic is very much in-genre, and I always approve of more ways for mages to spend their energy. ;)

I agree but I'm a bit hesitant to go around doubling the costs of blocking spells since they do not benefit from reduced casting costs for high skill.
An admittedly bookkeeping intensive solution is to add a casting penalty for each prerequisite the defender does not know. (-4 to Ward a Fireball if you don't know any fire spells or -6 to Ward against Sleep if you don't know any Mind spells).
There is also the question of how, game mechanically, a defender knows what is going on... It is pretty obvious what that guys swinging a sword in your vicinity is doing, but I'm not sure what RAW rolls are supposed to be made for a potential defender to even know about the spell being cast.

[benz72]

General Comment:

I'd like to see move varied spell effects based on caster attributes/advantages/skills.

I'm thinking about things like:
'Magical ST = (Thaumatology Skill + Magery)/2'
'Magical DX = (IQ + Spell Skill)/2'
'Magical IQ = IQ + Magery'
'Magical HT = Will'

These scores could be used to do things like calculate how much Apportation could lift per FP or how fast an Illusion can move. Putting a variable or two into the spell description adds a lot of flexibility and flavor in my mind. I admit it also adds complexity, but not really moreso than when the Warrior gets a new weapon and has to calculate out all the attack modes and damage scores.
It would help make casters, and the results of their spells, unique and add credence to the idea that someone can 'read the signature of Joe the Inflammable' in this spell.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by benz72

I agree but I'm a bit hesitant to go around doubling the costs of blocking spells since they do not benefit from reduced casting costs for high skill.
An admittedly bookkeeping intensive solution is to add a casting penalty for each prerequisite the defender does not know. (-4 to Ward a Fireball if you don't know any fire spells or -6 to Ward against Sleep if you don't know any Mind spells).
There is also the question of how, game mechanically, a defender knows what is going on... It is pretty obvious what that guys swinging a sword in your vicinity is doing, but I'm not sure what RAW rolls are supposed to be made for a potential defender to even know about the spell being cast.

What one GM permitted my one wizard character to do is to have an Improved Counterspelling Perk, specialized by spell college, which enables Counterspell, Ward, and similar "uh, nope!" spells to work against all spells of the selected college. The prereqs for the perk were "six spells in the given college", which made sense; you need slightly more than a passing knowledge of the college to be able to adapt to spells in the college you don't yet know.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

Making and Breaking

Copy: This is not relevant to most medieval fantasy games, but the amount of data that can be copied should probably be scaled to the TL - copying a single kilobyte per casting is… not a lot.

Explode: Basically, the IED spell - if you need to kill a large number of unsuspecting people, accept no substitute. My players loved to combine this with Delay and Teleport Other - teleporting it into an enemy camp at night where it would do massive fragmentation damage in a rather wide area.

Here is how it works: If you have enough energy and time to prepare, every single fragment does 3d+6 cutting damage. Since it is fragmentation damage, everyone in the area will be attacked by fragments, which have a base “attack skill” of 15, modified only by the usual distance modifier on the speed/range table. That means everyone at a distance of 15 yards (and not behind cover) still has even odds of getting hit by a single fragment - and an average of 16.5 cutting damage has a fair chance of killing an ordinary unarmed human and will hurt even an armored warrior a lot.

And those closer to the detonation point have a good chance of getting hit by more than one fragment - one additional fragment hits for each three points the attack roll succeeded. Those close to the center will likely hit by two of the fragments, and quite possibly by three.

As far as I can determine, this is the single most devastating area effect spell in the book (though to be fair, most of the “Explosive” spells are lousy as written - the reasoning for my earlier house rule). My group decided to limit the damage a fragment could do to the hit points of the exploding object (so that you could no longer use a pebble for this), but this only alleviated the problem to a small degree. Frankly, I will probably ban this spell entirely in future campaigns unless I can come up with a more reasonable version.

I just had a thought: This spell is an "enhanced" version of Shatter, but with Shatter the damage described is the damage dealt to the object that is being destroyed. And with most mundane explosives that do fragmentation damage, the damage done to the object and the fragmentation damage are separate values, with the latter being less than the former.

So... maybe the damage to the object itself is as described in the spell, but the fragmentation damage is only 1d cutting (1d+2 cutting when doubling the energy). This would make even multiple hits much more reasonable.

However, it should still matter how many "damage dice" you pay for with the spell. Therefore I propose the following:

Instead of the default "attack skill" of the fragments of 15 (see the rules for fragmentation damage on B415), the effective attack skill is 10 + the damage dice bought. Thus, if the initial object is destroyed with 3d damage, everyone in the area is subject to an attack with a skill of 13 (subject to size modifier and distance modifiers as usual).

This should probably capped at an effective skill of 15 (at Magery 5), or else the fragments will fly a very long way.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Okay, I re-read the section on fragmentation damage, and discovered that fragmentation damage is already inherently limited in range - equal to twice the initial dice of damage. Thus, no further fiddling around with the fragmentation damage rules is needed - if the damage of the object is 5d, then that means that the fragments can fly to a distance of 10 yards.