Enchantment only Spells

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by hal

COLUMBIA GAMES has a magic system that has but 6 colleges, 7 if you include GREY MAGIC as a college. How would one simulate that kind of game universe using GURPS MAGIC rules? ;)

I'd go with 10 spells with at least one from each college in the universe.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It seems to me that to make an item that allows the spell to be cast, you would have to know everything required to cast the spell. It might make sense for those spells where the item does something different than that.

It's probably not a particularly efficient use of points even if you permit it. If you are planning to take more than a handful of them, you'd get the same +1 to them, plus whatever other minor benefits come with it, from buying 1 more level of Magery with the enchantment only limitation.

Huh. Good point. Very good point.

Originally Posted by hal

Snip

A bit to think about there. I suppose that overall its probably not the best of ideas.

Magery (Enchantment Only, -30%) [7/level] seems the way to go

Ghostdancer

[Ts_]

How about using Ritual Magic for dedicated Enchanters? That is, spells could default from Enchantment Spell/Skill with prereq counts as modifiers. It's quite diverse (for dabbling purposes at least) and effective in terms of character points. Well, you need Enchant 20 to do reasonable things, but this should be doable.

I would also rearrange some prereq counts, in particular ignoring the prereqs of the Enchant spell if you have it at high levels would seem reasonable. It has 12 prereqs and makes all dedicated enchantment like Accuracy quite difficult to attain.

Depending on the point limit, limit on skills and attributes etc, some spells might still not be enchantable this way. The requisite count and the 15+ limit that enchanting has, might just be incompatible. So you would have to learn them as regular spells, which I wouldn't be be opposed to.

One minor warning, though: A master enchanter can create small tokens, each letting him cast a specific spell through them and learn "Fast Draw (Spell Thingies)" ... Then the enchantment-only magery isn't much of a big limitation anymore (although it takes resources to make all these), unless you want enchanters to be unable to use their own products.

Regards
Ts

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by Ghostdancer

Magery (Enchantment Only, -30%) [7/level] seems the way to go

Personally what I do is give them additional levels of highly limited Magery, getting it down to 2/level, so I can have Enchantment Mages with 20- to enchant an item, but if they were to cast that same spell in combat they'd be at like 12-

[Captain-Captain]

As an alternate way of doing this, and taking the Enchant spell out of play in the procedss, we making enchanting (Spell) a technique Defaults to Spell -7 (standard penalty for a Very Hard skill). You have to have the Tecnique known at skill 15/20 in low mana regions and the rules established for enchanting still apply otherwise.

This will have the in game effect of allowing any spell caster to enchant an item providing the technique is learned at a high enough level. Specifically, it's possible for a non-mage character who knows a basic spell to go into a High or Very High Mana region and enchant an item.