GURPS Powers and Enchanting

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by scc

So if using Powers, Magic as Powers, Chi Powers, Psi Powers or pretty much anything else Powers based, what do people think would be needed for people to enchant or perform an equivalent task for their Power Source? I'm thinking that one or more Afflictions would be a minimum necessary, but additional skills or techniques or instructional books are likely needed for item made.

I'm not asking just for PC manufacture here, if the PCs need to buy an item in such a setting figuring out these basics is needed to know how hard it is to find someone to perform the task, and if the PCs need to perform a task like lifting a curse that's been somewhere for a while, knowing this gives me an idea for what they'll need to lift said curse.

If you mean "What sort of trait do enchanters need?" I would go with "0 point feature" or "perk" or "Gadgeteer." If it's a feature, it's assumed that all people can imbue objects with power. If it's a perk, then it's assumed that only some people can do it, but it's not a huge advantage. If it's gadgeteer, then there's a steep cost (but presumably a steep benefit). What's pertinent here is that you're making an item, which in principle anyone can do, it's just the item you're making happens to have unusual properties.

The easiest way to handle enchantments-as-advantages is to treat them as advantages. 25 "energy points" will give you 1 character point, therefore 25 8 hour "days" or work will give you an enchantment worth a character point. Then it's just a matter of working out the costs of the advantages you want to give the items.

[starslayer]

I get bills list there, but I think that may be unreservedly harsh. The GM wants to make enchanted items available, and wants to know what that will look like. Here are my thoughts/suggestions.

Biological: often times biological powers are granted by nanomachines, symbiotes, or weird organelle. Creating such a thing is weird science, xenobiology, or high TL tech or biology skills. 'getting' there item means surgery or injection. Generally this is one time permanent install. Rules should be for fantastic inventions.

Psi: 'focus' technology, or psi attuned items. Focus technology is technology (built with some sort of 'understand psi' skill), built with invention rules. Attuned items are built as per 'enchanting through cp' 25 days effort == 1cp.

Spirit/divine: if your powers come from others than items that are either separately empowered, or more appealing to requests for aid, should be possible. For things that grant powers use devotional enchantment. For things that increase the odds of existing prayers being answered I would go with a 'power stunt' on an influence roll against your spirits/deities (ie. Permanent is +300%, by taking a -30 on your influence roll you can produce something that always grants it's bonus while carried)

Super: super powers are all over the place, but super science gadgets are a pretty common 'power source'. Enchanted items are invented. They may not conform to science as we know it (crystal helmets and power rods)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

The easiest way to handle enchantments-as-advantages is to treat them as advantages. 25 "energy points" will give you 1 character point, therefore 25 8 hour "days" or work will give you an enchantment worth a character point. Then it's just a matter of working out the costs of the advantages you want to give the items.

It's also possible to treat them as results of gadgeteering, which is what I would recommend for anything weird science-y.

[Anaraxes]

Time, skill, and exotic material requirements are all also world-building decisions. If you were mixing many power sources in one setting, you might want them all to have the same basic mechanic (like the one Mailanka suggests) for fairness, leaving the rest as details, but not terribly different in overall cost and time from each other. Or you might have several power sources, but choose to have only a few of them be any good at deliberately making enchanted objects. (Say, the gods might be perfectly able to imbue a weapon with great power, but it's awfully hard to find one and get a favor when you need one. On the other hand, the local wizard is at least predictable and available. In this case, you'll see a lot more "magic" items than "divine" items, even if both are built on the same Advantages.) If the setting features one particular power source, the GM will probably want to tune that to suit the feel the world is supposed to have.

Perhaps a fantasy world has rare enchantments of great power, meaning you want them to take a lot of time, high skill, rare skill combinations, and/or hard-to-get heart-of-a-dragon and tail-feather-of-a-phoenix kind of materials. Perhaps the fantasy world has much more common magic -- perhaps even "gadgeteer" mages, who get the job done by making an item, and cart around a bunch of them if they need to have something suitable at hand on an adventure -- in which case it really can't take years of lone study in a tower to make each one of those items, and there might be an entire industry of adventurers collecting "rare" materials to feed the thriving enchantment industry (which really means those materials aren't actually all that rare).

Similarly, a game expected to have a slow pace over decades (say, Ars Magica's default setting) or a generational / immortal game, can afford much more time-consuming enchantment than the quick pace of a ticking-clock, world-in-peril setting.

The magic rules and also any enchantment rules are usually a strong part of a setting's feel, and so such rules have to be customized for such settings.

[scc]

OK, so far Ceti's one that's given me the sort of answer I'm looking for, I'm looking for things like making magical swords and stuff, not giving someone else my powers (Where did people come up with that idea?)

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by scc

OK, so far Ceti's one that's given me the sort of answer I'm looking for, I'm looking for things like making magical swords and stuff, not giving someone else my powers (Where did people come up with that idea?)

We're not talking about giving people your powers. We're talking about "powers as advantages."

If your powers are advantages, then your enchantments are probably advantages too. Say you want to make a flaming sword. You don't have a "GURPS Magic Flaming Sword Enchantment" because you're using Powers-As-Advantages, so you need to devise a set of advantages that represent a flaming sword. There are a lot of ways to do that: You can just give the sword a set of advantages, or you can require that players pay for the cost of the advantage themselves with the gadget limitation, etc.

In GURPS Magic, you'd then need to spend a ton of fatigue to make your enchanted sword. How do you determine the cost of a magical sword in a powers-as-advantages system? The first option is to use Gadgeteer, as Bill points out, and simply assign it a difficulty and creation cost. My proposal is to treat it like energy again, but with 25 energy (or days of work) counting as 1 character point. Ergo, if the final advantage cost for the sword is 5 points, it'll take you 125 days to "enchant" it.

If you need a standard cost for items enchanted using powers-as-advantages, I recommend the Metatronic Generator articles by Christopher Rice, as they translate point-cost into $ fairly nicely.

[Atreyu_Hibiki]

You want this:
Affliction: advantage, +x%; Inanimate objects only, -20%; duration, permanent, enchantment ends when object is broken, +150%.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Atreyu_Hibiki

You want this:
Affliction: advantage, +x%; Inanimate objects only, -20%; duration, permanent, enchantment ends when object is broken, +150%.

Is Inanimate objects only listed in the books somewhere? I'm curious because it's not inherently clear to me how afflicting an advantage on an inanimate object makes that advantage useable by a user of the object.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by scc

OK, so far Ceti's one that's given me the sort of answer I'm looking for, I'm looking for things like making magical swords and stuff, not giving someone else my powers (Where did people come up with that idea?)

Well, you talked about Afflictions, and that advantage is normally primarily used to confer powers on people, not to create objects. In fact, it's kind of weird to use it to create objects at all. So I figured you were asking about "How do I confer powers on people?" and brought up creating objects as only one strategy for doing that.

I'd also note that you asked about power sources. Well, Magical as a power source is heavily tied to creating magical objects. But other power sources are less so, and with some of them you just don't. I don't know how you would use Biological or Chi to make an object with powers (well, maybe with Biological you could design a genetically engineered symbiont, but I'd probably build that as an Ally, not a gadget).

So I was looking at the ways that people in the source material have powers conferred on them. And I was looking first at superheroes, because that's where my brain goes with "powers."

So I was trying to address the question you asked by looking at a larger question that subsumes it. It's all a question of how the issue is framed.

[Pseudonym]

Pyramid #3/46 has metatronic generators which is a way to turn an advantage into a dollar cost to figure out how long it'll take to build a machine.
Thaumatology: Sorcery has a system of calculating "Enchantment Points" from the character points of an advantage, and from there, some guidance on either calculating a price for the item, or approximate time to create the item. This has a more "magical" bent and might be more appropriate, but I threw out the former as an alternative because they both have pros and cons.