[Magic] Combat-usability of Wizards

[TJA]

Ludo, i don´t play all those things - don´t even know them.
I also don´t know the "modern" D&D or d20 or whatever.
I just knew "old" D&D (boxed red, blue, green, black and golden sets), a little bit FUDGE and GURPS.

I love GURPS in most about everything.

And i love seeing Dungeon Fantasy! Bought all of them even if i don´t play it - as reference and source of ideas only.

And our group plays only *one* campaign - since over 20 years.
It came from D&D and is played in GURPS since many years.
Same world, same characters ... the world itself is still from D&D.

Only Magic - out of the box - is not what we like.
It got better at GURPS 4E, but still ...

And our mage - important part of my group - is just not happy with his magic.
I am trying to change that ... emulating the things he would like to see again.

I sneaked into Thaumatology for ideas around this problem, but neither the minor or major system changes realy appealed. Path / Book or Syntactic magic also were not the real thing for us ...
And i never realy dared to use Powers for this.

And now, in this very topic, i found two solutions!

One, just allow Mages to have more energy that renews fastly in a still limited and balanced way (Arch Magery) or an energy reserve that allows something similar for bigger energy cost (for priests maybe - read "Raise Dead" 10 times a day).

AND finaly a nice way to create Advantages as magical Power abilities that can be bought and learned like a skill and used in form of Modular Abilities!

For me, those are *great* news that empowered my interest in gaming a GURPS anew!

Just let me in that happy state, please :)

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by TJA

Average damage output per turn under a theoretical combat situation.

This is not about "roleplaying" it is about "game system theory" ...

Such calculations are very valueble - for me at least :)
I always start with the maths of a system - if that is OK, the rest is fluff.

That is what I covered.
Your saying average is 9d every 4 turns and I am saying that with magery 3 it is 3d every other turn.
So 1.5d per turn. Note that if your going with average per turn your figure is even higher at 2.25 per turn for the same M3.

And I did not bring up roleplaying I am talking about game balance. Factoring in DR (with and without) and the effect of having a 3d attack against say DR5 vs a 1d attack is part of the thing you have to consider in game balance and theory. Also simple tactics.
Also for that matter range and risk assessment.

From what I have read your goal is to have a mage be able to do more damage then a warrior and have the attacks not be defensible since you also stated you do not want defense rolls or resistance.
If you want to do that in your game ok go ahead.
GURPS allows it and gives you several options but you want a RAW rather then house rule method and that means the broader balance issues have to be considered.

By the way house ruling what you want..
Cosmic irrestable attack in the fireball, build as power or adding enhancements as techniques.
Remove or alter the damage cap per level of magery.
Trading skill for energy. Without mods that skill 21 warrior in fireball would be -2 cost.
High ER, possibly with regeneration or Threshold magery.

[TJA]

Originally Posted by Refplace

That is what I covered.
Your saying average is 9d every 4 turns and I am saying that with magery 3 it is 3d every other turn.
So 1.5d per turn. Note that if your going with average per turn your figure is even higher at 2.25 per turn for the same M3.

Ohmm.
And ... what? :-O

Originally Posted by Refplace

From what I have read your goal is to have a mage be able to do more damage then a warrior and have the attacks not be defensible since you also stated you do not want defense rolls or resistance.

No, i did not state that.
You already told in #97 and i answered to that in #101

Originally Posted by Refplace

GURPS allows it and gives you several options but you want a RAW rather then house rule method and that means the broader balance issues have to be considered.

I just don´t get it ...

We´re talking RAW here - and it seems to work.
So what you´r talking about?!?

Originally Posted by Refplace

Cosmic irrestable attack in the fireball, build as power or adding enhancements as techniques.
Remove or alter the damage cap per level of magery.
Trading skill for energy. Without mods that skill 21 warrior in fireball would be -2 cost.
High ER, possibly with regeneration or Threshold magery.

We discussed some of that above already.
Nobody wants an "cosmic irrestistable attack" or removing caps of magery (contrary to that, i would like to remove such things from Magery - as already written above!).

I *have* my solutions already!
Gained in this topic!

Now, i just would like to talk about variations, implementations or additional idea - would be fine you could contribute!

[Kuroshima]

Sometimes I toy on building an equivalent to the D&D 3.5 Warlock. The warlock was an oddball in 3.5. It was an arcane "caster" that had only "at will" spell like abilities. They all had an Eldritch Blast attack, an untyped ranged touch attack that scaled (badly) with level (started at 1d at level 1, and went to 9d at level 20), and then had some other abilities they could chose (12 at level 20, divided in 4 tiers), called Invocations.

Invocations could be classed into 3 types:

• Essence Invocations: Added some side effects to the blast, and often changed the the damage type of the blast (from untyped to elemental). There was one that reigned supreme, at least when I played, called Vitriolic Blast, that allowed you to bypass spell resistance, and left a DoT. Most were so awful that they weren't worth the paper they were written into. You could only use one at a time, and Vitriolic had no drawbacks, other than changing the damage type to acid.
• Blast Shape Invocations: Alter the shape of the blast, from a ray, to a cone, an area centered in you, a melee attack, a chain lightning kind of effect, etc etc. You could only use one at a time. You usually took one or at best two.
• General Invocations: Provided miscelaneous effects like Dispel Magic and heal by absorbing the spell energy, fly, dimension door, spider climb, etc etc.

The thing with Warlocks, is that they didn't use the vancian system at all. No spell slots, and even though you had less variety than a Sorcerer, you were supposed to have greater endurance. You dealt less damage though, quite a lot less, and endurance was a non-issue, since the party stopped adventuring when the vancian casters (specially the cleric) ran out of spells anyway. In the end, it was a gimped class, one that required twisting the system into a pretzel to get decent performance.

Now that I think, the mentalist (Dungeon Fantasy 14: Psi) fills this niche almost perfectly.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Kuroshima

Sometimes I toy on building an equivalent to the D&D 3.5 Warlock. The warlock was an oddball in 3.5. It was an arcane "caster" that had only "at will" spell like abilities.

They were the only one, the Dragon Adept was like that too.

[Snaps]

Originally Posted by Ludo

That's it. Illusion. Just not true. Note I'm a fan. Anyhow, GURPS can do many things, but the system has a feel. And the feel stains the genre. And not all genres can bear any stain.
You do not play Paranoïa with GURPS rules. You do not play Toons. You do not play The Whispering Vault. You do not play Zero. These games have engines designed specifically for them. And I think D&D falls into that part, its rules were first designed for something so specific... And GURPS is not, at all, specific.

GURPS is made to be Generic. Each game has whatever feel that the GM wants (and has the ability to create).

I personally feel that GURPS does D&D Style Fantasy better than D&D does. The biggest difference is that D&D has tons of books filled with cool monsters with histories and details that the GURPS stuff lacks. The problem with D&D though is that when you try to run games with those monsters and settings the system usually fails or turns into just endless dice rolls and multi-hour combat encounters.

I've converted D&D monsters into GURPS and they just just seemed to work a lot better in GURPS than they did in D&D. Beholders, Hydras, Golems, etc. Just seemed to work a lot better in GURPS and the fights were so much more epic then they would have been in D&D. (And don't let me forget Mind Flayers, my players still give me **** about that one...)

The biggest problem I've seen with D&D to GURPS conversion is that they do these pansy watered down conversions, trying to convert the stats over instead of the descriptions of the monsters.

[Ludo]

Originally Posted by Snaps

GURPS is made to be Generic. Each game has whatever feel that the GM wants (and has the ability to create).

I personally feel that GURPS does D&D Style Fantasy better than D&D does. [...]

Well, to me Generic is opposed to Specific. Generic does more, but can't be specific, however big the adaptations made are. To illustrate my point I'd give some vid games examples:
2 hits - 2 close to RPG industry - 2 very different feels: Diablo and Fallout. Liking them, any, both or none, is not the issue. They illustrate different systems for different feels.

And I'll stop discussing it here because it now really looks like an attempt at thread-jacking. Take it as my personal POV, based on my personal observation of thread topics: GURPS is slowly but massively sliding towards something it is not meant to become, that is D&D feel. Maybe it is a conscious edition line decision*, maybe not, anyhow, I feel it, and resent it.

*MH and DF look like trying to stomp over WoD and D20 grass, and I think it's a commercial shortsighted deadend, GURPS built its reputation on quality references (worldbooks, historical, background, and stuff).