Commonality of Enchanters

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I also disagree with Varyon's point that learning Enchantment is no worse than an AA degree. Having the determination to sit in a classroom and closely follow a lecture, 4 hours/day and 50 weeks/year, is not normal.

I may be overestimating how many hours college courses would count as under GURPS. My thoughts were that being a full time student requires comparable time investment to being employed full-time, for 40 hours a week. But it occurs to me that more than half your time is actually spent doing coursework outside of class (an AA degree calls for 60 credits, where 1 credit calls for 1 hour per week for a semester; thus for a 4-semester degree, you'd be in class for around 15 hours per week, with the remaining 25 hours being out-of-class work), and I don't know if that would count as direct learning, self-study, or something in-between. If it all counts fully, then every 5 credits (representing 200 hours - 5 hours per week in class, 8 hours and 20 minutes per week out of class, for 15 weeks) is worth [1] and an AA would be worth [12] - just [1] shy of enough points to be an enchanter. If the out-of-class work counts as self-study, thus being worth half as much, then 15 credits would only count as a bit over 400 hours and thus you're looking at [2] per semester - a 3-year program would get you to the same [12] as above, with [1] left to go. If it's somewhere in-between, where the time spent out of class is 75% as effective as the time spent in class, you're looking at a bit over 500 per semester and 2,000 for a 2-year program, for [10].

But in all cases, the fact remains that you need 2.7x as much study (and have IQ 13 to boot) to be a physician. Or, at least to match the BT template - BT also has the job requirements to be a General Practitioner, and that's Physician and Diagnosis at 12+ each. For a character with IQ 10, that calls for [23] (Physician at IQ+2 is [12], this gives a default of 8 for Diagnosis so you only need to spend [11] to get it up to 12), which isn't quite as stark of a difference (~1.75x as much rather than ~2.7x as much)... but I'm not certain someone with just those two skills would be able to get a job as a doctor, let alone have earned an MD. Of course, there's also the fact that a doctor of above-average intellect wouldn't have to invest as much into becoming a doctor as one with IQ 10, but enchanters don't have that option - an IQ 13 doctor would only need [4] invested in Physician and Diagnosis ([2] each to get them to IQ-1), but an IQ 13 enchanter would still need to invest those [13] into their skills (they'd be much better enchanters than their IQ 10 counterparts, with starting skills of 10 or 11 rather than 7 or 8, however).

I still believe you'll likely see more mages becoming enchanters than you have people becoming doctors. Your estimates of ~1 in 35 to ~1 in 70 mages becoming enchanters (1 in 5,000 to 1 in 10,000 of the general population) feels like a decent spread.

[Whitewings]

There’s a mention in the basic set that 1 credit in post-secondary is equivalent to 1 character point. The same statement was made in 3e, with a detailed breakdown.