Lesser and Greater Magic

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Silverblade

1. Use a single Magery advantage for all spellcasting.
2. Use Ritual Magic (not Ritual Path Magic) (low level) for spellcasting.
3. Rearrange College skills into something that is also useable for Syntactic Magic -> As "nouns"
4. At the higher levels, Syntactic Magic becomes available (or effective)
5. When using Syntactic Magic, College skills are capped by Magery, it doesn't add to it - like for "low" level spells
6. What verbs the mage can use is determined by his Magery similar to Realm Magic -> Higher level, more difficult Verbs.
7. Use Margin of Success for all Parameters, disregard Energy costs for now.
8. At some point, extended workings (repeated attempts, but not for Energy Accumulation, you gather Margins of Success to achieve greater range, area effect and so on as described in Thaumatology)

You have a lot of moving parts here. I anticipate your players finding some interesting exploits at the boundaries. On the subject of players, some questions:

1) Is this going to be the sole magic system in your game? If not, you're at considerable risk of your players avoiding it, since it is complex, and will require years of play for characters to make use of the higher-level parts.

2) Are all the player characters meant to be magicians? If not, you may well end up with all your players deciding to leave the complex magic system to someone else.

If the answers to (1) and (2) are both "yes" then you need to think about the starting character point levels for your game, and the rate of character growth. You may well find that the high cost of Magery makes the players feel they "aren't getting anywhere."

I've GM'ed a character who used Ritual Magic, and found that it has some problems. The character was run by a very detail-orientated player, which is necessary to use the system effectively. He found after a certain amount of character growth that he could meet all of the challenges of the campaign, and lost interest. That campaign started on 150 points plus up to 75 points of disadvantages and quirks. Since it was basically Call of Cthulhu under GURPS, I had to keep the challenges somewhat constrained to avoid wiping out the characters.

I've GM'ed and played alongside characters who used a threshold-limited syntactic magic system that is intended to model mystic Zoroastrianism. They just don't use it much, and stick to their other abilities. The comments other people are making about players preferring to avoid Threshold magic have some truth to them.

Bonus: I can work Sorcery in there, too.

I'm afraid there are no prizes for this.