Chopping Block: GURPS Magic

[FF_Ninja]

Greetings, everyone.

So, I've been playing with the idea of creating a new RPG system from scratch. I've been hesitant up until now because of one of my personal rules:

"Thou shalt not reinvent the wheel."

It's an important rule that I end up applying to every part of my life. It keeps me from wasting my time (and everyone else's, as well). And back a few years ago, when I discovered GURPS for the first time, I felt like there was no point to developing a new system. Here I'd found a generic system with amazing depth and versatility, that could accomplish pretty much anything.

Lately, though, I've begun to reevaluate my original, er, evaluation. GURPS, for all its greatness, is also inherently flawed in a lot of ways. I found myself wondering out loud, "How could this be done better?" far too often.

The first step for creating anything is research. That's why I'm writing this post today.

One of the particularly ugly points to GURPS is how the vanilla game handles magic. It's clumsy, convoluted, and disorganized, and that's just for starters. A lot of players instead choose to make use of magic variations listed in Thaumaturgy (namely, Syntactic and Ritual magic), but those are supplemental to the core magic system and don't fix any of its inherent ugliness.

My question to all of you for this edition of Chopping Block is:

Referencing your experiences with the magic system laid out in the GURPS Basic Set, what are your thoughts on it? What does it get right, what does it get wrong, and what issues would you address to make it more viable?

[(E)]

While my views differ from the usual ones expressed on this forum to do with standard GURPS magic. I personally think that a convoluted and disjointed magic system suits a medieval or renaissance setting where most "science" type knowledge was relatively ad hoc. That is to say a world where the fundamental rules of magic are not known and guess work and incomplete understanding underpin all the applications.

I also find the basic magic system quite amenable to patch type house rules that can be applied unevenly to make different practitioners styles more unique.
My $0.02 worth anyway.

[tbone]

To toss in a few positive words about the Basic Set magic system:

Its core idea builds on an existing game subsystem, not something new: skills. Want a spell? Buy it as a skill. Easy enough.

There are far more flexible, freeform ("noun + verb", etc.) magic systems out there, but those can call for a lot of careful GM attention and adjudication. BS's system lets a PC just cast a spell without having to build it first; effects and other details are already worked out. It can be very fast in play. (The idea of carefully defined spells will also feel familiar to newcomers from D&D – a game that's done pretty well despite a rigid magic system.)

Thanks to the above factors, the system is pretty simple. LITE for 3e included the basics of the magic system, with 14 spells, in one and a half pages. That deserves a moment of admiration, both for LITE's writing and for the magic system's simplicity.

So... there's the above, and more. There are things to like about BS's magic system. Aaaaand things to not like, too. I'm sure those will get plenty of airing...

[JoelSammallahti]

I agree that spells as skills is solid design, very easy to understand.

However, in the switch from 3e to 4e, it became a little less flexible in practice due to skill costs being changed. It used to be you could spend a half-point per spell; with half-points gone, spells now cost twice as much. Also, in 3e, most spells were Mental/Hard, meaning they cost only 2 pts/level to improve indefinitely. With Magery costing 10 pts/level, it made sense to raise 3-4 of your favorite spells to really high levels, to enjoy energy cost reductions and soak up range penalties. Very Hard spells cost double, so it was a lot less likely someone would have bought them past the 2- or 4-point level.

In 4e, the skill costs were restandardized so all skills cap out at 4 pts/level. That means you want to buy at most one or two spells above the minimum level, and Very Hard spells are just one level lower than your other spells, instead of also more costly to improve. So, all in all, you end up with less variation between wizards: most of the time, they'll take just enough IQ + Magery to get skill level 15 in Hard spells with 1 point, and put just one point in each spell. For good, rational reasons.

Long story short, to take what's good in the basic set magic system, I'd roll back to third edition, where spells-as-skills took greater advantage of the versatility of the Gurps skill framework.

[Þorkell]

Originally Posted by JoelSammallahti

I agree that spells as skills is solid design, very easy to understand.

However, in the switch from 3e to 4e, it became a little less flexible in practice due to skill costs being changed. It used to be you could spend a half-point per spell; with half-points gone, spells now cost twice as much.

You also had to spend one point on a spell in 3e.

GURPS Magic, second edition, p.4: "To learn a spell, you must put a minimum of one point in it - even if you are brilliant and blessed with magical aptitude"

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Þorkell

You also had to spend one point on a spell in 3e.

GURPS Magic, second edition, p.4: "To learn a spell, you must put a minimum of one point in it - even if you are brilliant and blessed with magical aptitude"

Was that the same with Eidetic Memory? Or was that only a 2e hack?

[JMason]

When I first picked up GURPS (3rd edition) all those years ago, I remember being struck by how simple and obvious it was to make magic just use the skill system. No other RPG that I had played up to that point had anything like that. More often the magic system was a convoluted sub-system that almost always felt like a different game being tacked on.

[Stormcrow]

The point of GURPS isn't to be systematically constructed; it's to pay attention to the fine detail that other games overlook. In D&D games, one typically makes a single roll to "search the room." In GURPS, there are many types of rolls possible when searching a room, depending on the circumstances. See this post by Kromm as an example.

This applies to magic, too. Unlike spells in D&D, whose parameters are largely fixed, in GURPS magic you can usually modify all of a spell's parameters. You can learn the spell at various skill levels, thereby changing the required rituals. You can choose to spend HP instead of FP to power spells. You can maintain most spells as long as you can spare the fatigue. Most spells can be cast at any range you can manage with your skill level; likewise with the area of area spells. Many spells have variable effects for different fatigue costs. And knowing the big, flashy spells means you also know the smaller spells—most D&D magic-users who can obliterate you with a Fireball can't magically light a candle, but they can in GURPS.

I personally wouldn't want to design a new game just to make its mechanics aesthetically pleasing to someone who wants regularity and consistency. The GURPS magic spells aren't ugly; they're just not constructed according to a systematic view of magic in the universe. But the list of spells isn't informed by a systematic, real-world model; they come from fiction, legend, and other RPGs' spell lists. They represent the sorts of spells that players have always wanted in an RPG, only given more detail and flexibility than in other games.

[David Johnston2]

The foremost change I would make to GURPS Magic is that instead of just automatically giving the ability to drop ritual elements with higher skill levels, I'd add task difficulty modifiers for dropping them from the specific spells. Or I'd let people drop them based on the number of points invested in the specific spell.

I would also incidentally make Styles mandatory. And I'd give every college it's own spell for recharging energy so the one college stylists wouldn't be crippled.

[Refplace]

I like the various new systems but I also like the system in GURPS Basic and GURPS Magic.
When it first came out I was amazed at it, despite my familiarity with Fantasy Trip.
Its benefits...

• Spells are cheap so easy to add to any character design
• Uses the same skill rules so easy to understand
• Spells are logically group (with a few exceptions)
• The idea of learning basics then advanced attracted players to GURPS
• You could have a wide variety of spells, yet they were for the most part already written and understood. This isstill a feature over say RPM

As for the cost difference between 3E and 4E thats a valid observation. You could just make all spells Techniques. They already have a major Talent like boost compared to other skills and are pretty narrow compared to most skills. So while this would boost a mages capability its not so large a boost as the Ritual Magic system.