10-18-2014, 05:26 PM | #1 |
Join Date: Feb 2013
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Ritual Path Magic and Magic Item Creation
The Ritual Path Magic system is awesome, but its means for creating enchanted items seems a little lackluster to me. In particular, it doesn't jive very well with a setting in which magic items can be bought, sold, or found as loot.
I recently picked up Pyramid 3-66: The Laws of Magic, and loved every article in it. The one on Material-based Enchanting particularly caught my eye. I'm aware that a treatment exists over at Ravens N' Pennies, and I'm hoping to expand on that. For example, while I understand Rice's rationale for measuring everything in terms of "hours" (where 200 hours of work = 1 character point worth of gadgets), I found it was awkward to write like that. Instead, I'll be measuring things in points of Essence. This is purely a naming convention: 1 point of essence is still worth 0.5% of a character point. I'm hoping to allow granularity on a level finer than multiples of 200 Essence. For example, since 1 point of ER with -80% worth of limitations works out to [0.6], it stands to reason that a sufficiently limited 1-point powerstone equivalent should be producible for only 120 points of essence. (This means that the point-cost of powerstones will scale linearly with their capacity. Is there an important game-balance reason why the cost of GURPS: Magic powerstones scale quadratically with their capacity, or is that just an artifact of the enchanting method? The formula is explained pretty clearly on p 20.) On a somewhat related issue, I find that building the traditional "Magic Sword" using the items-as-advantages approach is surprisingly awkward. The obvious thing to do is to price it as a ST-based Innate Attack, with whatever other modifiers are appropriate, but the cost of most of those modifiers scales with the ST of the wielder (see Powers p146 or Power-Ups 4 p9). What happens if I enchant an Armor-Piercing sword for my ST 12 buddy (swing damage 1d6+3 cut), and he later gains another point of ST (changing his swing damage to 2d6 cut), and therefore changing the base cost of the "virtual innate attack"? Does the sword stop working for him? Does it limit his ST to 12 while he wields it? Do the bonuses from the sword somehow only apply to some of his strength? Does it work just fine, and for marginally cheaper than it would have been to enchant a sword for someone with ST 13 in the first place? The last one seems the simplest, but what if his ST was raised to 17 instead (swing damage 3d6 cut)? That would represent a pretty significant discount, and seems rather unfair to warriors with naturally high ST. In that case, I'm tempted to just pick a default "reference ST" for enchanted weapons, and just price them based on that. If so, what would an appropriate reference ST be? 10? 20? The "minimum ST" value for that particular weapon on the table? For that matter, what should the gadget limitation on a sword even be? The Breakable part seems like a simple function of SM and DR, and the Can Be Stolen part clearly belongs at the 30/15% level, but what about the fact that the bonuses granted by the advantage only apply to attacks made with the sword itself? Intuition tells me that that's already baked in to the Melee Attack limitation and the gadget limitations above (and thus worth no extra points), but I could maybe see it as being a -5% nuisance effect or accessibility modifier. |
10-18-2014, 10:46 PM | #2 | ||||||
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: Ritual Path Magic and Magic Item Creation
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Assuming your shortsword is just a "normal" magic sword and gives a bonus to damage and to hit it'd look something like this: Magic Shortsword: Cutting Attack 1d (Armor Divisor 2, +50%; Breakable, DR 6, HP 10, SM -3, -25%; Can Be Stolen, Thief must win a quick Contest of ST, -30%; Double Knockback, +20%; Double Blunt Trauma, +20%; Magic, -10%; Melee, Reach 1, -25%; Reliable 2, +10%; ST-Based, +100%; Thrusting Blade, +15%) [15.75] + Modified ST damage* (Armor Divisor 2, +50%; Double Knockback, +20%; Double Blunt Trauma, +20%) [29.7]. Gives a +2 to Shortsword skill and does swing+1d (2) cutting or thrust+2 (2) impaling. Damage is doubled for the purposes of knockback (for cutting) or blunt truama (for both attacks). Has a Reach of 1 and a minimum ST of 8. Can be stolen and used by the thief immediately†.46 points. * Based on ST 24. † If the thief can't use it immediately, cost becomes 47 points, not 46.
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10-19-2014, 12:36 AM | #3 | ||
Join Date: Feb 2013
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Re: Ritual Path Magic and Magic Item Creation
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I'm currently planning on having ten different types of Essence- one for each Path, plus one which can only be obtained by sacrificing character points. Maybe some items will require essence from more specific sources than that, it depends on how much paperwork my players are interested in doing. Quote:
Let me run a simpler example by you to make sure I understand. A Halberd (ST 13‡), wielded by someone with ST 39, has a 7d6+4 cutting swing [57.4], a 7d6+3 impaling swing [63.2], and a 4d6+4 impaling thrust [41.6]. If I want to add Armor Divisor (2) and nothing else, that's a +50% modifier on the most expensive of those attack modes and therefore [32]. Gadget modifiers and power modifiers don't apply to this cost, only to extra damage on top of this, right? Almost anyone worth equipping with a weapon this freakng expensive is probably going to have some form of Weapon Master and the skill to back it up, and therefore be doing another +14 damage on top of that. Should I add that on to the cost as well, or is it a "freebie", calculated afterwards? Yikes, that isn't cheap. Meanwhile, I was able to build a (non ST-based) 5d6 burn sur "cattle prod" wand for a mere [5]. Also, I thought you weren't allowed to apply Reliable to attack advantages, but apparently it's only forbidden for ranged attacks. Looks like I learned something else new. Since you also wrote the section on buying spells-as-powers advantages as an alternate abilities to RPM Magery, I've got another related question: While my Magery or Ritual Adept advantage is switched "off", what exactly do I lose access to? I expect that the ER granted by the Magery will be "locked", and I can't cast any new rituals (or if I do, I'll do so as if I didn't have the advantage in question, which probably means I'll being doing it at lower effective skill), but I'm not sure whether any spells I currently have ongoing will be affected. If my incantation inflicts a debuff on my target as a side-effect/symptom, and I switch back to Magery, does the debuff instantly go away? Can I still activate Charms I prepared in advance? To keep the above question from being off-topic: If I do take an incantation, can I also apply gadget limitations to it? Can I apply the limitation to only some levels of the advantage? (eg: Barry Drosden can toss a 3d6 jet of fire from his bare hands, or a 6d6 jet of fire from his specially prepared Blasting Rod) Thanks again for your time. |
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10-19-2014, 01:06 AM | #4 | |||||||||
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: Ritual Path Magic and Magic Item Creation
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Sure. Hope I helped. I personally use Metatronic Generators for RPM items because it ignores some of the headaches the regular system can cause. I'll note though that I do like RPM's base enchantment system better than I like most point-based gear (which I really don't like at all).
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10-19-2014, 02:51 AM | #5 |
Join Date: Feb 2013
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Re: Ritual Path Magic and Magic Item Creation
So by contrast, if I wanted to make a magic shortsword as a metatronic generator, it would look a bit more like this:
Cutting Attack 1d6 (Armor Divisor (2), +50%; melee weapon, reach 1, -25%; magical, -10%; reliable 2, +10%; ST-Based, +100%; thrusting blade, +15%) [21] I'm not sure whether it would have Apparatus (+0%). Some of the example generators have it, some of them don't, and it doesn't make a difference to their cost either way. I wouldn't have to worry about the fact that a ST 24 person swinging the shortsword has a 4d6+2 cut swing attack [33] and a 2d6+2 imp thrust attack [21], I'd just calculate the metatronic generator price based on the profile above. If I call the sword a "small" class generator, it should have a cost of $52,500, weigh 3 lbs, an XS power cell for 6 hours (unless it it loses "shots" with each swing?), a bulk of at least -5, and a minimum ST of 4 (which gets replaced with the sword's minimum ST of 8). I'd then take the shortsword's 2 lb. weight and $400 base cost (unless I make it Very Fine, which is probably worth it), multiply them each by 0.8, and add them to the above for a final weight of 4.6 lbs and a final cost of $52,820. If I think that weight is a bit much (or I've got money to burn), could I use the "mini" class instead, and pay $63,320 for a sword that weighs 2.24 lbs and uses T cells? |
10-19-2014, 03:04 AM | #6 | |||||
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Portsmouth, VA, USA
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Re: Ritual Path Magic and Magic Item Creation
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Yes. Sure. One thing, if magic items are rare in your world use the listed costs. If they are uncommon reduce final cost by 10% to 20%. Common items could reduce final costs up to 50% - this might lead to the DnD problem of too many +1 weapons though.
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Tags |
magic items, ritual path magic, thaumatology |
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