GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 19: Incantation Magic

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Since it is basically a +5 bonus with the added advantage of allowing tactical improvised casting, I will probably reprice it at 25 and see what happen.

Please let both Toni or I know how that played out.

Originally Posted by Celjabba

I got some of my players late yesterday for drinks, and we played a bit with the system ... they grasped the mechanic quickly, now I just want another Gurps GM around so I can play an incanter.

Hehe.

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Another question : for town casting (GM made rolls), I imagine the GM can and should use luck if the player have it, using 'game time' (so, 1/day at the first level) ?

No, Luck can't be used on magic just like it can't be used for standard magic. In general, if regular magic can't do it neither can this. If you change that - then, of course. But tell the player what you're doing (or I would).

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by Ghostdancer

No, Luck can't be used on magic just like it can't be used for standard magic. In general, if regular magic can't do it neither can this. If you change that - then, of course. But tell the player what you're doing (or I would).

Luck cannot be used for ceremonial magic (magic p12). Otherwise, afaik, it can be used for regular magic or RPM magic. (unless granted by a spell, rpm pg 15).
If i am wrong, then I used luck wrong for years ...

Does town casting constitute ceremonial magic ?

[Celjabba]

Originally Posted by Ghostdancer

Please let both Toni or I know how that played out.

Will do. I have a new campaign starting soon. It will be either DF or ATE, so we will see.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

Luck cannot be used for ceremonial magic (magic p12). Otherwise, afaik, it can be used for regular magic or RPM magic. (unless granted by a spell, rpm pg 15).
If i am wrong, then I used luck wrong for years ...

Does town casting constitute ceremonial magic ?

Yeah, that's what I was referencing. As for that, if you're getting a bonus by taking more time I'd disallow, but for raw skill I'd be ok with using it.

[Celti]

I had an idle thought for an optional rule, based on a half-remembered quote from a novel.

When preparing an incantation, one can increase the time it takes to prepare the incantation to negate penalties, but the resulting incantation always takes precisely one Concentrate maneuver to release. What about the reverse: negating penalties by increasing the time it takes to release the spell? On first glance, Limited Spells on p. 15 already covers this... but that would require Takes Extra Time 4, or 16 seconds, for even one step of change — and that seems much more limiting to me.

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For those who don't quite get the intention, the quote in question may (or may not) help clarify:

Originally Posted by Blood of Amber, by Roger Zelazny

I lined up the spoken signatures and edited them into a spell. Suhuy would probably have gotten it down even shorter, but there is a point of diminishing returns on these things, and I had mine figured to where it should work if my main guesses were correct. So I collated it and assembled it. It was fairly long—too long to rattle off in its entirety if I were in the hurry I probably would be. Studying it, I saw that three linchpins would probably hold it, though four would be better.

I summoned the Logrus and extended my tongue into its moving pattern. Then I spoke the spell, slowly and clearly, leaving out the four key words I had chosen to omit. The woods grew absolutely still about me as the words rang out. The spell hung before me like a crippled butterfly of sound and color, trapped within the synesthetic web of my personal vision of the Logrus, to come again when I summoned it, to be released when I uttered the four omitted words.

The basic idea being, using more “linchpins” (omitting more words) makes the incantation more likely to hang about (makes the attachment roll more likely to succeed), but requires a longer time to release the incantation (because you quite literally have a longer incantation to cast it, and you can only say so many words in a second).

[Anders]

How about basing skill on Perception for Sense effects and Will for Control effects? What do you think about that?

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Celti

I had an idle thought for an optional rule, based on a half-remembered quote from a novel.

When preparing an incantation, one can increase the time it takes to prepare the incantation to negate penalties, but the resulting incantation always takes precisely one Concentrate maneuver to release. What about the reverse: negating penalties by increasing the time it takes to release the spell? On first glance, Limited Spells on p. 15 already covers this... but that would require Takes Extra Time 4, or 16 seconds, for even one step of change — and that seems much more limiting to me.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

For those who don't quite get the intention, the quote in question may (or may not) help clarify:



The basic idea being, using more “linchpins” (omitting more words) makes the incantation more likely to hang about (makes the attachment roll more likely to succeed), but requires a longer time to release the incantation (because you quite literally have a longer incantation to cast it, and you can only say so many words in a second).

Hmmm. That seems fair to me. Though I think you might get more mileage out of just using the Time to Cast chart and going up. Every step increases the spell's time to cast and decreases cost by 10% for the purposes of Limited Spells.

Originally Posted by Anders

How about basing skill on Perception for Sense effects and Will for Control effects? What do you think about that?

Yes. This is a special effect. See Illusion and Invisibility (p. 27) for two examples.

[benz72]

Originally Posted by Kuroshima

Part of the problem is that we only had 32 pages to play with (and we started with less, trust me, word count limits are EPIC LEVEL FOES). It was only with the help of great editors that this book came to life.

sorry for the off topic but I have tried multiple time to get my head around this idea and flubb it every time. In a PDF world who cares how many pages / words / graphics you use to get the point across? The data file would have to be EPIC LEVEL ENORMOUS for storage or transmission to be an issue in all but the most restrictive of cases.
Heck, I get much more data as junk email every week than most of the PDFs that I gladly buy contain. I just don't get it, and even if someone tried to explain it to me now I expect it would pass right over my head.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by benz72

sorry for the off topic but I have tried multiple time to get my head around this idea and flubb it every time. In a PDF world who cares how many pages / words / graphics you use to get the point across? The data file would have to be EPIC LEVEL ENORMOUS for storage or transmission to be an issue in all but the most restrictive of cases.
Heck, I get much more data as junk email every week than most of the PDFs that I gladly buy contain. I just don't get it, and even if someone tried to explain it to me now I expect it would pass right over my head.

Layout, editing and art costs all go up with page length, yes? Cover price is in some way therefore pegged on length and SJGames has set price points that they aim at. For Pyramid articles the per word author costs go up too (not true for book royalties though).

[Kuroshima]

Originally Posted by benz72

sorry for the off topic but I have tried multiple time to get my head around this idea and flubb it every time. In a PDF world who cares how many pages / words / graphics you use to get the point across? The data file would have to be EPIC LEVEL ENORMOUS for storage or transmission to be an issue in all but the most restrictive of cases.
Heck, I get much more data as junk email every week than most of the PDFs that I gladly buy contain. I just don't get it, and even if someone tried to explain it to me now I expect it would pass right over my head.

The longer the work, the harder the editing step (and it's certainly NOT OPTIONAL - I barely recognize some passages I wrote after PK used his master wand on them). The longer the work, the more work there is for the layour and indexing guys. The longer the work, the higher the number of images you need to add. The longer the work, the more you need to charge, and more often than not, the less sales you get.

Page counts are not the actual metric we had. We had word count, and an expected page count. Not, getting the works to fall into multiples of 16/32 pages might be a relic of the past, but the concept of word counts is certainly current still.