Ritual Magic with prerequisites, too

[dataweaver]

In GURPS Thaumatology, p.72:

A complication that arises in the ritual magic system is exactly how to handle spells that have non-spell prerequisites. It's easy enough to count prerequisites when only other spells are involved, but some spells list requirements such as minimum IQ scores, Magery, other advantages, and skills. The are a couple of ways to handle this.

The simple answer is to require a ritual career to possess the non-spell prerequisites for any spell he wishes to attempt (even at default) or improve as a technique, reading “Magery” as “Ritual Magery.” This can prevent many strange results. For example, Scroll normally requires substantial literacy in the language used, and removing this prerequisite means that illiterate ritual mages can suddenly start writing magical scrolls! Furthermore, certain spell definitions makes some such prerequisites hard to eliminate on practical grounds; e.g., Fireball lets the caster put energy equal to his Magery into the spell each second, so a magician without at least Magery 1 can logically get no use out of it.

It then goes on to discuss the other option, which involves a combination of replacing all prerequisites with default penalties and implicitly retaining “common sense” prerequisites such as the need to be literate in order to create a Scroll; and that's the method that's become the standard for Ritual Magic in GURPS. But I'd like to explore the former approach in a little more depth here, and possibly even expand on it; because one rather serious drawback to dumping everything into the default penalty is that you quickly get to double-digit default penalties; which arguably breaks Ritual Magic.

Now, an argument can be made that part of the point of the system is that ritual magicians can attempt any spell — albeit with little chance of success. And Thaumatology makes this very point in the next paragraph just before introducing rules for converting every prerequisite into a default penalty. For this project, I'm seeing that aside and assuming that it's okay if some spells can't be cast until their prerequisites are met. What are the implications of this?

First of all, the Spell Charts would still technically be needed for this version of Ritual Magic. Animal Empathy is needed to perform Beast-Soother; and by extension, that takes (Animal) Control, Master, Beast Summoning, and in fact just about the entire Animal College out of play; the most notable exception is the Shapeshifting branch. If you don't have IQ 11+, you can't perform Lend Skill; but you also can't perform Borrow Skill. If you have No Sense of Taste/Smell, Far-Tasting is unavailable; and so are Know Recipe, Wizard Nose, and Wizard Mouth. IQ 13+ is needed for Slow Time, Accelerate Time, and Teleport; and therefore is also needed for another 13 spells in the Gate College. The entire Healing College requires Empathy. The entire Illusion & Creation College requires that you be able to see, and have an IQ of 11+. And so on.

But there are still benefits to using Ritual Magic with prerequisites: for one thing, you don't need to spend points in each spell that you want to be able to cast. You do need to spread the points around some more if you want all of your Colleges to be fully unlocked; but that's not necessarily a bad thing. And several of the Default Penalties are reduced (albeit not by much): you need to buy Empathy to cast Healing spells; but all of their default penalties get reduced by 1. More significantly, your levels in Ritual Magery are required to unlock significant parts of pretty much every College; but spells that were locked away behind the Magery prerequisites have their default penalties reduced by up to 3 compared to the default Ritual Magic system.

And that suggests another possibility: if we're accepting that use of the Spell Charts is pretty much still needed for Ritual Magic with defaults, we can take some of the spell prerequisites and turn them into College prerequisites instead of default penalties. I'm thinking in particular of the likes of “requires one spell from each of ten Colleges”, “requires four Body Control spells”, or “requires six spells of any type”. Say that these become point spending requirements, at one point per spell: “requires one spell from each of ten Colleges” becomes “requires one point in each of ten College skills”; “requires four Body Control spells” becomes “requires four points in the Body Control skill”; and “six spells of any type” becomes “six points in any combination of College skills”. For this purpose, I'd say that points spent in spell Techniques defaulting off of a given College count as points spent in that College.

This will drastically reduce most of the higher default penalties, dropping virtually all of them into the single digits. Enchantment, for example, drops from a –12 default penalty to a –0 penalty — though you need Magery 2 and a point in ten different Colleges before you can attempt it. Lesser Wish drops from –13 to –1, but bears the same restrictions; and Wish drops from –19 to –2, while increasing its requirements to 15 Colleges instead of 10.

In short, this gives a middle ground between Ritual Magic's normal “apply a potentially insurmountable penalty to your casting roll” on the one hand, and standard Magic's “learn each and every spell as a separate skill” on the other: you get to learn multiple skills at once, but the default penalties become manageable.

Thoughts?

[dataweaver]

Should you be able to use Optional Specialization to purchase a “sub-College” skill in the Ritual Magic system? I'm thinking of things like Lightning as an optional specialization of Air, or Shapeshifting as an optional specialization of Animal. Possibly apply some sort of prerequisite to the sub-College skill to compensate for its ability to give comparatively easy access to spells that might otherwise have higher default penalties, such as “six points in the Air College” for a Lightning sub-College, or “six points in any Colleges” for a Shapeshifting sub-College? What conditions would have to be met for something to be permitted as a sub-College? I chose the examples above because Lightning Armor has a prerequisite of “5 Lightning spells”, and Shapeshifting requires you to specify what animal you can become, a decision which then propagates to all subsequent spells. But in the other hand, I wouldn't feel comfortable letting someone take Beast-Soother and everything that follows from it as a sub-College of Animal, as that would include just about everything in Animal except the Shapeshifting branch and the Beast-Rouser spell. So is there some sort of simple test that would allow the former two but reject the last one?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

IThe entire Healing College requires Empathy.

Thoughts?

Sorry if I skimmed over something that explains it but this comment about the whole Healing College requiring Empathy mystifies me.

The (evil) prerequisite count system may have counted Empathy as a prereq for every healing Spell but the actual text lists "Magery 1 _or_Empathy". It's only non-mages who require Empathy.

I had hear that the prereq counts in Magic did this sort of double-dipping fairly often and were therefore wrong but I wasn't interested in saving prereq count.

[johndallman]

There is an overhauled and more correct list of prerequisite counts in Appendix C of Thaumatology. That was used in the campaign I ran that used Ritual Magic.

To make Ritual Magic more "ritual", you could try things like reducing the prerequisite count penalty if the caster takes significant amounts of extra time, although this removes ritual casting as a combat activity.

[dataweaver]

Originally Posted by johndallman

There is an overhauled and more correct list of prerequisite counts in Appendix C of Thaumatology. That was used in the campaign I ran that used Ritual Magic.

I'm well aware; and they suffer exactly the same problem as the ones found in Magic: for the most part, the penalties are too high.

Originally Posted by johndallman

To make Ritual Magic more "ritual", you could try things like reducing the prerequisite count penalty if the caster takes significant amounts of extra time, although this removes ritual casting as a combat activity.

I don't want to make Ritual Magic more “ritual”; that's what Path/Book Magic is for. My only complaint about the name is that they got it backwards: what's called Ritual Magic should have been called Path Magic; and what's called Path/Book Magic should have been called Ritual Magic.

And yes, one way to deal with the overblown penalties is to introduce bonuses to offset them (I personally prefer the “Mandatory and Significant Modifiers” from Thaumatology for this, as they're more interesting than “take extra time” bonuses); but that doesn't change the fact that the penalties are excessive.

[Plane]

I was thinking for every IQ you're missing from the prereq it could be an extra -1, like when you use weapons below their ST requirement

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Plane

I was thinking for every IQ you're missing from the prereq it could be an extra -1, like when you use weapons below their ST requirement

There is very, very little point in creating rules for low IQ mages.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

There is very, very little point in creating rules for low IQ mages.

What if using custom rules where Will or DX can substitute for IQ in spellcasting? I think Thaumatology discussed those somewhere, or possibly Pyramid.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Plane

What if using custom rules where Will or DX can substitute for IQ in spellcasting? I think Thaumatology discussed those somewhere, or possibly Pyramid.

If the spellcasting Attribute is not IQ then the Spell Prerequisite probably isn't either. The Prereq is what you have to have to make the spell function. If you make the Spell casting but are too stupid to understand what you're doing then the Spell is cast but probably used stupidly.