GURPS Powers and Enchanting

[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%.

[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.

[Celti]

Originally Posted by whswhs

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.

“Enchanting” is not usually creating an object — it is imbuing an already-existing item with a permanent magical (or other power-sourced) effect: i.e., an advantage. What trait is more appropriate to give an object (living or inanimate) an advantage than Affliction?

A simple and generic sort of “enchantment” affliction would be Affliction 1 (Accessibility, Only for enchanting items with clearly-defined abilities of the same power modifier, -40%; Cumulative, +400%; Extended Duration, Permanent, +300%; Variable Enhancement, Advantage, Any 1-point trait, +100%; PM, -10%) [85] (or [45] if you prefer Multiplicative Modifiers). As you rightly should. ;-)

ETA: Mind, that simple of an enchantment Affliction is horribly horribly broken without some extra limitations and some sort of meta-game rules around it to keep people from just enchanting thousands of character points of abilities into a magic ring in a single day! It's an example of the basics — I do not suggest using it directly! End Edit.

Thaumatology: Sorcery piles on an assortment of other modifiers to make it fit Sorcery. I could probably come up with a similar assortment of modifiers to make a few versions of it to fit Psionic Powers — a Telepathy ability that requires a properly-prepared crystal of appropriate value, that allows you to imbue it with various other Telepathy abilities — a psychotronic generator, created with a power.

Affliction is indeed the right ability here; Sorcery just happens to have a worked example of how to do it, and some very clear notes on how it was done so that it can be adapted to other powers.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Celti

“. What trait is more appropriate to give an object (living or inanimate) an advantage than Affliction?

A.

Character pts. You've got these Powers that are expressed as Advantages and paid for with cp. Now you want to put some of those Powers into an object. It looks to me like you're still talking about dealing in character pts.

[ericthered]

"Enchanting" is usually one of two situations:

1) I have a ridiculously prolific power set I can lend to others via objects
2) I've entered a magic as technology system

Identifying which of these you have entered is key to figuring out how you should be doing enchanting. Most of the time, you've entered a magic as technology system. Which means everything should be expressed in terms of money, and the most relevant advantages are wealth, High TL, or possibly gadgeteer.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Celti

“Enchanting” is not usually creating an object — it is imbuing an already-existing item with a permanent magical (or other power-sourced) effect: i.e., an advantage. What trait is more appropriate to give an object (living or inanimate) an advantage than Affliction?

I don't think that matches the source material at all. Consider, for example, the One Ring of Power, a quintessential enchanted object. It was forged in the fires of Mount Doom and imprinted with words in the Black Speech; and those very acts were what gave it its power, or were integral to that giving. I can't see claiming that Sauron made and inscribed the One Ring and then took it away to some magical work area or temple of dark gods and performed a separate ritual.

Likewise the blades of the Elder Days borne by Gandalf and Thorin and Aragorn and Frodo/Bilbo, or the cloaks from Lorien, or the other Rings of Powers. And this seems also to be true, for example, of Mjollnir and the gloves and belt that came with it, or of Zeus's thunderbolts. When I think of myth, legend, and folklore, making and enchanting seem to be bound together; the enchantment is bound into the object in the course of its making.

So there does not seem to be an object to afflict.

Moreover, either Create or Afflict is a superpower, and a high point superpower. A being who could do that would be a demigod or the like. The GURPS model for making objects that have special qualities is either the College of Enchantment, or Gadgeteering, both of which can be done by a talented and specially trained human.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't think that matches the source material at all.

Your source material. There's a lot of other source material (particularly non-literature sources) that involve object manufacture being a separate step from imbuing it with fancy abilities.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Your source material. There's a lot of other source material (particularly non-literature sources) that involve object manufacture being a separate step from imbuing it with fancy abilities.

Cite some examples.