Revising GURPS Magic

[Refplace]

For Infusions try Imbuements.
For additional levels I like Lenses, sometimes multiple prerequisites for higher powered lenses. You can have a lens that takes the points and ability of another Lens and creates a new ability, removes or adds a modifier for example.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Refplace

For Infusions try Imbuements.
.

They actually are Spell effects. It's just they have a "Must drink small vial of stuff" requirement. They aren't the hard part anyway.

[Jürgen Hubert]

I've cleaned up my alterations and put the first part up on my blog.

[kmunoz]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

I've cleaned up my alterations and put the first part up on my blog.

I like these tweaks. They're relatively subtle and don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

Making and Breaking

Copy: This is not relevant to most medieval fantasy games, but the amount of data that can be copied should probably be scaled to the TL - copying a single kilobyte per casting is… not a lot.

Explode: Basically, the IED spell - if you need to kill a large number of unsuspecting people, accept no substitute. My players loved to combine this with Delay and Teleport Other - teleporting it into an enemy camp at night where it would do massive fragmentation damage in a rather wide area.

Here is how it works: If you have enough energy and time to prepare, every single fragment does 3d+6 cutting damage. Since it is fragmentation damage, everyone in the area will be attacked by fragments, which have a base “attack skill” of 15, modified only by the usual distance modifier on the speed/range table. That means everyone at a distance of 15 yards (and not behind cover) still has even odds of getting hit by a single fragment - and an average of 16.5 cutting damage has a fair chance of killing an ordinary unarmed human and will hurt even an armored warrior a lot.

And those closer to the detonation point have a good chance of getting hit by more than one fragment - one additional fragment hits for each three points the attack roll succeeded. Those close to the center will likely hit by two of the fragments, and quite possibly by three.

As far as I can determine, this is the single most devastating area effect spell in the book (though to be fair, most of the “Explosive” spells are lousy as written - the reasoning for my earlier house rule). My group decided to limit the damage a fragment could do to the hit points of the exploding object (so that you could no longer use a pebble for this), but this only alleviated the problem to a small degree. Frankly, I will probably ban this spell entirely in future campaigns unless I can come up with a more reasonable version.

I just had a thought: This spell is an "enhanced" version of Shatter, but with Shatter the damage described is the damage dealt to the object that is being destroyed. And with most mundane explosives that do fragmentation damage, the damage done to the object and the fragmentation damage are separate values, with the latter being less than the former.

So... maybe the damage to the object itself is as described in the spell, but the fragmentation damage is only 1d cutting (1d+2 cutting when doubling the energy). This would make even multiple hits much more reasonable.

However, it should still matter how many "damage dice" you pay for with the spell. Therefore I propose the following:

Instead of the default "attack skill" of the fragments of 15 (see the rules for fragmentation damage on B415), the effective attack skill is 10 + the damage dice bought. Thus, if the initial object is destroyed with 3d damage, everyone in the area is subject to an attack with a skill of 13 (subject to size modifier and distance modifiers as usual).

This should probably capped at an effective skill of 15 (at Magery 5), or else the fragments will fly a very long way.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Okay, I re-read the section on fragmentation damage, and discovered that fragmentation damage is already inherently limited in range - equal to twice the initial dice of damage. Thus, no further fiddling around with the fragmentation damage rules is needed - if the damage of the object is 5d, then that means that the fragments can fly to a distance of 10 yards.

[Jürgen Hubert]

The second blog post is up, detailing my tweaks to individual spells.

[kmunoz]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

The second blog post is up, detailing my tweaks to individual spells.

Again I like that you're only making subtle changes to make the system work rather than rebuilding it from scratch.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by kmunoz

Again I like that you're only making subtle changes to make the system work rather than rebuilding it from scratch.

Yes, as I have said in the beginning I believe that most of the spells and the system works fine - it's only some specific spells that are problematic.


Of course, my next project will involve rather radical changes to the prerequisite system. But that's best kept as a separate discussion, and a separate threat - the rules tweaks so far should stand on their own.