Secret Spells and using Ward

[Plane]

Pg 9 of GURPS Magic in "Secret Spells" mentions how it's rarely clear what spell a wizard is casting, and that unless it's something like Fireball there are spells "with no obvious visible effect" which can "be kept a secret".

It mentions if a spell is not cast silently then observers can make a Thaumatology roll to recognize the magic words to understand which spell they are hearing - I would figure that would first be a Hearing-based Thaumatology to hear the words (subject to distance penalties) then an IQ-based Thaumatology roll to understand what spell the words represent?

Obviously stuff like Far-Hearing (M173) could be helpful in using this to glean what spells are being cast far-off.

There also might be room for something like Far-Sight if you were a deaf mage capable of lip-reading?

There's no mention for gestures but I was thinking a Sight-based Thaumatology roll could also make sense here if you are able to have a line of sight to whatever hand movements are being made.

In either case, where seeing+hearing in concert matters, maybe the MoS in the hearing and sight rolls could act as a bonus to the subsequent IQ-based check?

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This is for "a spell they do not themselves know" though, so it might mean that recognition (at least the IQ-based one... I think a hearing check would still make sense) is automatic for spells you have already learned.

This creates a somewhat odd situation for Ritual Magic though because then the person in theory knows ALL spells. Should they just freely recognize everything?

Rather than that, one idea would be that if a thaumatology check fails, a person gets an additional 2nd roll against their own capability of casting a spell (if applicable).

This way people more highly skilled at casting a spell would be more able to recognize it. Someone knowing Ritual Magic might be more prone at recognizing no-prereq spells but they wouldn't have extremely high chances at recognizing the high-PRC spells.

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Ward (M122 - costs 2 mana) is a spell you might be more likely to cast against certain spells than others, if you know which spells is coming. In a mage's duel, for example, if an enemy is peppering you with a bunch of cheap spells that cost 0 energy, you're going to exhaust your FP using 2-FP wards against all of them. You might be better off just letting them happen and saving that FP for something else - but you're probably going to want to use that 2 FP if there's some 10 FP monster spell incoming.

That's why the meta-knowledge of which spell is being cast (assuming you know a spell is being cast at all - it might be a surprise attack, right?) is important for RPing when it makes sense for a mage to Ward.

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A second consideration here, apart from recognizing a spell being cast, is recognizing a spell's target.

For example, if you are a wizard with "ward", M122 also allows you to spend 3 energy to block a spell cast at someone else, so long as you can see them.

I'm not sure why there's that sight requirement (pretty crippling for blind mages) personally I think it'd be okay to allow Ward to defend unseen targets at a -5 penalty like with Regular spells. Is that too broken? Seems like something a perk could allow ala Magical Styles though I don't recall seeing it.

But lets say you see 2 allies - one of them is just a token skeleton - you have hundreds of skeletons, you don't really care much if that skeleton gets hit with a spell. You DO however care if your ally healer gets hit with a spell.

So if you KNEW who was being targeted with the spell, you would Ward your healer fellow PC but let your minion get hit.

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So here's the issue - assuming this is an unknown spell and you pass your hearing roll (you hear magic words) and you pass your IQ-based thaumatology (you figure out what spell is being cast) what ways exist to discern who the spell's target is?

M102 has Identify Spell which gets closest to this idea but even that isn't heavily informative.

Identify Spell is a spell with a 'subject', so here are some examples of who you could target using Identify Spell: (keeping in mind it takes 1 second to cast)

1) cast it on the person who is chanting
2) cast it on your healer ally
3) cast it on your skeleton ally

A success means you identify ALL spells cast "on or by" a subject, including "being cast" or "just cast" (last 5 secs) ones.

The problem with (1) is while it will tell me which spell they're casting (ie if I had failed my hearing check, or perhaps they aren't speaking words at all) that won't tell me anything about the intended target AFAIK

This basically means if I want to know when my ally is being targeted by a spell, I need to have Identify Spell cast specifically on them (meaning very hard to guard a group of allies - you need Identify Spell cast separately on every one of them!)

Another huge problem is that this spell has no duration - it is instant. Meaning you can't just park Identify Spell and maintain it as an ongoing protection to inform you when your ally is being targeted. You would need to re-cast this spell EVERY SINGLE TIME you heard someone chanting magic words, just to figure out if it's the healer being targeted or some useless skeleton.

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Identify Spell's 1-second casting time already makes it pretty worthless to inform whether to Ward a 1-second spell in process - it'd only help you know whether to ward spells that take 2+ seconds to cast.

Even if you were to Reflex an Identify Spell so that you could use an active defense to identify the spell immediately - that will already use up the "One Blocking Spell Per Turn" limit meaning you couldn't Ward it anyway.

You could take two instances of Blocking Spell Mastery (one for Reflexed Identify Magic, one for Ward) from pg 23 of Magical Styles which would mean after using RIM you could Ward at a cumulative -5 penalty, I guess.

Maybe having some kind of sensory powers could also help here to offset that -5 for lack of sightline?

This all makes it incredibly inefficient to guard a huge group of allies though. I'm wondering if anyone knows if there is any sort of AE version of Identify Magic so that I could reflex something which would identify incoming spells being cast at any member within a group of allies?

Even if you happen to know the spell Great Ward (M122) where you arguably don't need to know which ally is being targeted (just protect all of them!) the expense could get pretty huge if you have a bunch of allies. If you took this strategy an enemy mage could easily exhaust your FP by just pinging your useless token skeletons while you keep throwing out 10-energy Great Wards to protect yourself and your 11 primary allies.

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M130's Linking Spells are the only place I can think to find what I want. This depends on how the Regular-spell Delay is meant to work though. I know you cast Delay on either a movable object or in a fixed location in space, whereas Link is cast on an Area.

The normal "something that could reasonable determined by a normal person at the Delay site" doesn't seem to be of help with normal spells (normal people do not have Thaumatology or know spells to recognize them)

We do know however this can be altered:

If the Delay is to be triggered by a more esoteric event, an appropriate spell such as Mage Sight may be cast on the Delay.
The Delay may also be triggered by the activation of another spell, such as Watchdog
..
Both the Delay and the linked spell count as “on” for spellcasting purposes;
if an Information spell has been added, it is also on.
The linked spell does not need to be maintained, though the Delay or its Information spell may need to be.

Delay lasts 2 hours, so the "may need to maintain" is I guess if you need it to last longer than 2 hours. I assume that's the same for an information spell with a duration.

Mage Sight (M102) is a maintable spell, it lasts a minute at a time so it would be very expensive to keep a mage sight running to inform the activation of a Delay. It pretty much only makes sense to do that if you have it at skill 20 (-2 cost) so you can maintain it for free.

Watchdog (M167) conversely lasts 10 hours at a time so it's an excellent way to trigger a Delay.

I figure the value with Watchdog is that it broadens the sense of sight. Assuming that Delay makes a Vision-based perception-check at the point it is cast, casting Watchdog to synergize with Delay would mean that you could give a triggering condition like "when somethign with hostile intent enters area, trigger the spell" rather than "when you see something enter an area" since the latter won't work if you fail a vision roll or if the target is invisible.