What are the best magical systems in GURPS?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by awesomenessofme1

I haven't seen Ritual Magic mentioned yet.

<shrug> I've taken a look at it and not liked it much. It takes what was originally a minor restriction on learning spells (prerequsites) and turned it into a major limitation on castng spells (prerequisite count) while still keeping the original system's limit on casting which was energy cost.

Look at Prof. Headley in the sample characters in Basic. He does Ritual Magic but to me it looks like he's spent a lot of pts and gotten not much in return. Even the cleverest looking thing he's done which is to let him improvise any Plane Shift on an 11 or less has problems (besides 11 or less not being that good a roll). It's still going to cost him 20 FP (minimum) and he doesn't seem to have that much handy.

The real problem may be that Plane Shift will only take him and not his adventuring party. He can try and improvise a Create Gate but that has a prerequisite count of 24 and still costs 200 FP.

Infinite Worlds does some things with magical planar travel in its' Cabalist Templates but it doesn't use Ritual Magic.

There is a munchkin trick where you buy Ritual Magic Skill up into the 30s and double-default everything from that but it still doesn't help with the energy costs. Or the sarcastic GMs who ask "So? Your father's the God of Magic?".