Changes to spells from GURPS

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by Michael Thayne

Oh huh, that's interesting. It took me a few minutes to take down the relevant references, but it seems Magic itself is actually pretty vague about what spells count as "on", though the FAQ took the position that only maintainable spells count as "on". Spells in contrast says non-maintainable spells with finite duration do count as "on".

For mainline GURPS, Magic seems fairly clear to me. Page 10 says "temporary spells are spells that require the continuing expenditure of energy to maintain. [...] Only temporary spells count as spells on", so spells give a penalty for being 'on' if and only if they have a specified maintenance cost, whereas Bless cannot be maintained. DF, by contrast, talks about "spells that specify a finite duration (in seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc.)" (Spells p.11), so I don't know what the general rule is for spells that last until a specific event occurs rather than lasting for a particular amount of time, but Spells includes a note in the Bless spell (under duration) specifically stating that it counts as a spell 'on'.

EDIT: Another change in Bless is that different levels of the spell no longer offer different degrees of mitigation. In DF, even a +1 bless can turn a foe's critical hit into an outright miss when it gets used up rather than (as in the listed example in Magic) merely causing an arrow to hit the arm instead of the heart. The +3 level of Bless is also absent from Spells, but, with Ceremonial casting gone, no one was going to come up with the 500 energy points for it anyway.