Pyrophobia & Fire college

[DaddyVince]

One of my character is a wizard and have a phobia of fire. I was wondering if it's off limit to learn fire spell for the prerequisite? Lots of spell have prerequisite to having some spells of each elemental magic. And For having some spell like Deflect Energy or Resist Fire you need some spell that create or manipulate flame. Is it possible to learn spell without practicing it? If not it will be hard to even learn Ignite Fire.

What do you think?

[Varyon]

Eh, the best phlebotomist I've ever known was terrified of needles, to the extent she actually passed out when she was given a Hepatitis vaccine. I wouldn't object to someone being able to handle creating fire in a completely controlled environment if that's necessary to actually learn the spell. Using the spell in an adventure or similar would typically be a nonstarter, thanks to the phobia, but having it as a prerequisite would be a non-issue. If the GM disagrees, just see if you can pay [1] for a "prerequisite stand-in" that lets you be treated as though you know the relevant spell for purposes of meeting prerequisites, without actually knowing it - sort of a variant of the Charm Perk (which lets you ignore the prerequisites for a single spell).

[DaddyVince]

Thank a lot It's exactly what I wanted to know

[Sam Baughn]

It's also possible that:

• They learned the spell before they developed the phobia. Something going horribly wrong with fire magic (and with standard GURPS magic rules, that happens a lot if you cast fire spells regularly) is an excellent justification for having a pyrophobia.
• Spells can be learned in a purely theoretical way without ever practising them. This is probably setting-dependent, so check with the GM.

[Polkageist]

Phobias are tricky things, so you could play it something like "If it's MY fire I'm ok, but any fire that's not under my direct control (such as something ignited by my fire) triggers the phobia"

Also there are plenty of spells in the fire college that don't directly produce fire. Several in fact extinguish it. Beyond "ignite' fire a lot of the fire manipulation can be used to eliminate a fire which would be very welcome to a phobic mage.

[Flyndaran]

They could also have been under some hypothetical fear suppressing magic while learning the spell.

[Rolando]

Real phobias, as depicted by the disadvantage, are nasty things. I know a friend that have a phobia to cockroaches, she get's very upset even if people talk about it in front of her, also have an aunt that can't tolerate seeing snakes, even in a painting, nor talk or hear about them.

If the phobia is severe I don't think the character will be able to learn even ignite fire, not even the theory.

The only alternate would be that the character developed the phobia after learning fire magic.

Mild phobias, I may allow for learning the theory only,, for the less powerful spells at least.

[David Johnston2]

There are four ways to go about this that I see. The first is to have quirk level pyrophobia. "Fire. Why did it have to be fire?". The second is "I learned my fire magic and my pyrophobia at the same time. That fumbled spell near killed me." The third is "I learned an alternate fire magic path that's all about suppressing fire. It came naturally to me." The fourth is "In this world you don't need to cast magic to learn magic".

[Plane]

Originally Posted by DaddyVince

One of my character is a wizard and have a phobia of fire. I was wondering if it's off limit to learn fire spell for the prerequisite?

I don't think so. In fact a spell like "Extinguish Fire" (M72) is probably going to be something a pyrophobic mage REALLY wants to learn.

Of course since the prerequisite for that is "ignite fire" it's certainly worth thinking about.

B149 distinguishes between rolling against the Self Control number when exposed vs when it's threat...

In the case of you actually being the one creating the fire I don't know if it counts as just a 'threat' though, since it seems more like a guarantee.

A mage who passes the self control roll is able to master the phobia but gets a DX/IQ penalty.

Since you need to roll every 10 minutes, this could complicate long-term studying if learning Ignite Fire actually means needing to be close to fire.

You could avoid the IQ penalty by casting the fire far away enough (Ignite Fire is a Regular Spell so -1 per yard) so I guess it's a question of "which is worse". I'm thinking the Regular Spell penalty since avoiding a Fright Check altogether is generally the safer bet: you don't want any permanent disadvantages!

Social Engineering involves making skill rolls when studying (as if it were a job) so applying the IQ penalty during that process could make learning the spell feasible, but probably slower-going, like maybe you spend extra time to offset the penalty, waste a lot of hours, etc.

I could see circumstantial modifiers too: a pyrophobe drenched in gasoline is probably going to have his phobia amplified, while a pyrophobe drenched in water is probably going to have it diminished.

B150 gives a "cigarette within five yards" limit, so one thing that comes to mind is that since Ignite Fire is a regular spell, you could cast it five yards away (at -5 to skill) and presumably not be affected at all by your phobia.

I think GM would make case by case judgments: even casting a cigarette-tier flame should scare you if you're casting it near a bunch of flammable paper/gasoline that could erupt into a larger fire, whereas if you're casting a larger-than-cigarette flame on a piece of wood that's floating in a pool of water, it's probably going to be something you're more able to tolerate since there's not a threat of a larger fire looming.

If 1-energy fires cannot ever possibly scare you when they're beyond five yards away (even at the worst possibly type of Phobia: 6 or less) then it's sort of like there being a basic -12 to your roll at that point, but if it was written for the least severe (15 or less) then it'd only be a -3.

I could see doing a -1 to the number you roll under for each yard closer than 5 something is, and for each "energy cost" you go up, like if it's a torch (-1) within 4 yards (-1) then instead of 6 or less, perhaps you should roll 4 or less?

Originally Posted by DaddyVince

Lots of spell have prerequisite to having some spells of each elemental magic.
And For having some spell like Deflect Energy or Resist Fire you need some spell that create or manipulate flame.
Is it possible to learn spell without practicing it?

Pg 26 of Thaumatology (Unusable Prerequisites) says the standard assumption is that you can learn "useless prerequisites" based purely on theory.

It does however note this creates suspension-of-disbelief problems.

In the case of lacking magery to cast a spell (ie you're a non-mage learning a spell in Normal Mana despite only being able to cast it in High Mana) it suggests workarounds, like you have to go to your school of magic (which is High Mana) to go practice it during the study process.

While I like the idea of being able to learn the theory, I also like the idea of penalizing it too if you haven't actually practiced the spell.

B169 "Familiarity" is perhaps something we might apply to spells in addition to TL? Lack of familiarity creates a -2 skill penalty and you need eight hours of practice to lose the penalty with 'new equipment', so maybe give mages that until they've spent eight hours casting the spell? Or maybe lose -1 per 4 hours.

If there's no book/teacher to learn the theory from then (in theory) you can't learn a spell under the standard system AFAIK (unless you have Wild Talent) though there's a couple approaches to circumvent that without special advantages:

"Spell Defaults" opens up higher-tier spell in colleges by highly penalized defaults from lower-tier spells, but still doesn't help you learn that "first spell".

To open up the "first spell" what I like is the idea of assuming from the Wizardly Dabbler perk that actually first-tier spells DO have (-6) defaults.

Assuming the -2 for lack of familiarity would prevent mass-casting by the muggles, as would hunting out other impediments like the optional "Magic Ingredients" rule (M8) where you can say that even though muggles in theory could cast a spell (if they had the ingredients) they just don't tend to have those ingredients on hand: they don't know what ingredients to seek out.

I think a halfway approach to Magic Ingredients is best: allow ingredient-less casting at -5 to skill (as B345) which functions like a soft cap against unequipped low-IQ muggles casting spells at default.

M222's Magically Potent Materials for Fire College is consumables (Chile peppers, mustard, sulfur) and reusables (Carnelian, gold, ruby) so I guess someone who coincidentally is chewing on a chile pepper or has a gold ring might be more prone to spontaneously casting fire magic if using such defaults, though I still think you'd need the intent, and to know that magic actually exists (ie you have a thaumatology skill) and pass a thaumatology check to know that a specific magic spell effect exists (such as ignite fire).

I'm thinking to be aware of higher-tier spells maybe it's prereq cost should be a penalty on the Thaumatology skill? Knowing that Ignite Fire exists should be more common than knowing Burning Death exists.

[Lisandro]

Maybe you can work on these spells as Fixed Magic. The character developed a pyrophobia e unconsciously created a magic knack to extinguish fires.

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=110052


Or this could be worked out as an uncontrollable advantage putting out fires even when they are beneficial to the characters.