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Old 01-25-2022, 10:01 PM   #21
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

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Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
, the discussion of how to use magic to overcome the difficulty of generating that much power in a Low-Tech setting with Magic seems reasonable.
The problem is that the discussion seems to focus on using _ingenuity_ to evade fundamental limits of low tech engineering rather than using "magic".

I man I posted a scheme a little earlier for using Shape Metal and orichalcum to create a Niagra Falls scale power plant a few tLs early. That's fine. It's the determination that there absolutley must be some way to handle MWs of power using only low tech materials.
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Old 01-25-2022, 11:53 PM   #22
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

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Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
So, making use of the large amounts of power involved requires the use of Magic. That makes the whole discussion one involving Magic. Magic kicks realism and scientific fact in the jimmies by its very nature. Therefore, the discussion of how to use magic to overcome the difficulty of generating that much power in a Low-Tech setting with Magic seems reasonable.
Leaving aside Fred Brackin's accurate comment, no. The standard magic system in GURPS is (and has been since the start) a highly mechanical system with well defined parameters: it's the moral equivalent of scientific laws. We know, for instance, that a Dancing Object item can only produce the amount of energy that a ST 15 man could produce; it can't deliver so much as 1 horsepower. Dancing Object is not an open-ended spell. Few spells in GURPS Magic are.

Now sure: you can houserule things to do whatever you please. (As it happens, I do allow "brute" Dancing Objects with scaled up fatigue costs.) But it doesn't take a discussion running a bunch of posts to decide how many Objects can Dance on the head of a pin. One can just say, "With Draw Power you can draw 1 FP per X cubic meters/second of flow rate from a waterfall/river," and have done with it. Or some such.
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Old 01-26-2022, 03:52 AM   #23
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

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Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
So, making use of the large amounts of power involved requires the use of Magic. That makes the whole discussion one involving Magic. Magic kicks realism and scientific fact in the jimmies by its very nature. Therefore, the discussion of how to use magic to overcome the difficulty of generating that much power in a Low-Tech setting with Magic seems reasonable.
I think that misunderstands magic both in general and in the specific case of GURPS.

* Magic in narrative is not a source of unlimited power without restrictions; for it to be so would take away the possibility of meaningful challenges to the protagonists. There are always restrictions.

* Spells in GURPS work on common sense categories of objects: air, animals, (human) bodies, fire, light (and darkness), (human) minds, weather. The Tech college adds another common sense category: machines.

* If we're talking about machines, it makes sense to apply quantitative limits of size and energy and power and so on; such limits are part of our common sense understanding of machines.

* In a medieval setting there simply are no machines that generate or transmit megawatts of power. Even machines in the kilowatt range are rare. In GURPS Thaumatology: Urban Magics, I made up added spells that tap kilowatt power sources, but you need at least 12 kilowatts to get 2 FP/minute (exceeding the cost of casting by 1 FP/minute); that's 16 horsepower or 120 average men—and people didn't build mechanical power transmission systems that big till the early Industrial Revolution.
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Old 01-26-2022, 04:23 AM   #24
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

Hey I'm just spitballing ideas for a magical enemy really.

I'm now leaning towards something with Ley Lines.

It's just I've already got one set of villains that's doing serious large scale necromancy and I'd established in my head that they were doing it because of a war. So then I thought... who are they fighting?

(And I don't mind upping the TL of the bad guys from that of the campaign, they come from a different dimension and all that.)

Thanks for the help everyone, even those who just want to tell me I don't understand GURPS. It's cool, I get it, you do you. I'll carry on with my whacky shenanigans.
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Old 01-26-2022, 04:53 AM   #25
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

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Hey I'm just spitballing ideas for a magical enemy really.

I'm now leaning towards something with Ley Lines.
Have you considered the Sacrifice rules from Thaumatology (pp. 54-58). A mage can get a quite respectable amount of spell-casting energy from human sacrifice, and it blatantly telegraphs "these are evil magic users", which may or may not be an advantage depending on how you want to play things.

EDIT: Alternatively, you can simply say "whereas drawing energy from natural sources is impossible with the Draw Power spell, these mages have secret rituals that allow them to do it". You're the GM-- who's going to stop you? Anyway, NPCs with weird and inscrutable magic that the PCs cannot access is very much in keeping with the best traditions of tabletop roleplaying.
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Old 01-26-2022, 07:32 AM   #26
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

Quote:
Originally Posted by scimon View Post
Hey I'm just spitballing ideas for a magical enemy really.

I'm now leaning towards something with Ley Lines.

It's just I've already got one set of villains that's doing serious large scale necromancy and I'd established in my head that they were doing it because of a war. So then I thought... who are they fighting?

(And I don't mind upping the TL of the bad guys from that of the campaign, they come from a different dimension and all that.)

Thanks for the help everyone, even those who just want to tell me I don't understand GURPS. It's cool, I get it, you do you. I'll carry on with my whacky shenanigans.
Honestly, a group of baddies with big machines that do nothing but generate mana for their warmongering sounds pretty awesome. Now, the default rules don't allow for this, because you need MW-scale power generation.

So, don't use the default rules.

So, you want a bunch of slaves working a giant contraption for generating mana? Go for it. The Wheel of Pain in the linked video needs (8x3)=24 kids, 8 adults, or 1 Conan. Assuming ST 7 kids, that's a combined BL of 235.2, implying ~ ST 12 adults (which makes sense) or an ~ ST 34 Conan (which is pretty insane, but it's Arnold; note if we want to assume just ST 10 adults, that's a combined BL of 160, and Conan still needs ~ ST 28 to push that thing by himself). I personally just use BLx5 for sustained Watts (technically, this would deplete FP at the same rate as hiking), so you're looking at around 1,176 W. If you want one of these Wheels of Pain to produce 1 FP for purposes of Draw Power, that's something like 1 FP per kW. Play around with the numbers and what you want your baddies doing and see what works for you, then just say "this is the rate Draw Power uses in this setting." If you're worried about the PC's making use of it, have some reason why the baddies get such a good exchange - perhaps what they're actually doing is using the small amount of energy produced in order to torture harvested souls, and the actual energy they use is what they extract from this torture. Or, given you're thinking of doing something with ley-lines, perhaps this is the way they extract energy from said ley-lines, so they can't setup their Wheels of Pain just anywhere.
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Old 01-26-2022, 08:35 AM   #27
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

Quote:
Originally Posted by scimon View Post
Hey I'm just spitballing ideas for a magical enemy really.

I'm now leaning towards something with Ley Lines.

It's just I've already got one set of villains that's doing serious large scale necromancy and I'd established in my head that they were doing it because of a war. So then I thought... who are they fighting?

(And I don't mind upping the TL of the bad guys from that of the campaign, they come from a different dimension and all that.)

Thanks for the help everyone, even those who just want to tell me I don't understand GURPS. It's cool, I get it, you do you. I'll carry on with my whacky shenanigans.
You can use Mana Basins, it is from some old article, I think it was the Roleplayer magazine, or Pyramid, but old. It is basically naturally occurring areas where mana is pooled and can be taped like a powerstone.

These are the actual mystical places mages want to control.

Ley lines will also work, but they may have other considerations, mana basins can be independent location tied to nothing or anything you want, no need to map where those lines come and where they go, or if they cross somewhere else near by, etc.

Edit: you may even say this particular basin is the result of some unique and very special ritual or "machine" the necromancer built, advised by some otherworldly entity.
Edit 2: Also remember that in vehicle 1st and 2ed there was the Soul Burner power plant that siphoned attached victims souls for power. It is a necromatic powerplant, it can produce a lot of WK's but not MW's unless you have a lot of people. But you may have something that produces energy instead of power, so it burn souls to produce magical energy to use in spells and enchantments.

Last edited by Rolando; 01-26-2022 at 08:42 AM.
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Old 01-26-2022, 08:39 AM   #28
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

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Originally Posted by Rolando View Post
You can use Mana Basins, it is from some old article, I think it was the Roleplayer magazine, or Pyramid, but old. y.
They are in a sidebar in Magic Items I.
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Old 01-26-2022, 12:31 PM   #29
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

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Originally Posted by Rolando View Post
You can use Mana Basins, it is from some old article, I think it was the Roleplayer magazine, or Pyramid, but old. It is basically naturally occurring areas where mana is pooled and can be taped like a powerstone.
Yep. In fact, as a result of a magical disaster on my gameworld, ley lines AND Mana Basins have just now appeared.

The basics of a Mana Basin is that it supplies X amount of free mana a day. But that's the secondary benefit. The big benefit is that it acts as a free extra mage for the purposes of enchantments, so even a piddly 1-pt basin still halves the time for a Slow & Sure for the lucky enchanter sitting on one.

You can well imagine that these are things that enchanters will want to secure at all costs. Indeed, I threw this in to my wife's one-on-one sessions. Her character (the most powerful wizard in the campaign's history) has recently been appointed the Grand Master of the local Grand Chantry of the College of Mages, and as such, is in charge of all the chantries within the empire. So, systematically, she's traveling to each of the chantries in turn to see how they're managing, have sitdowns with the leadership, etc.

One of the chantries has just bought the premises of a secret temple to a pariah cult that had been worshiping an evil god, and doing Bad Things in their Badness. Grand Master Elaina was (understandably) very curious why in the name of all that's holy these idiot wizards bought the temple grounds and are spending their money on renovations and their political capital getting priests in to cleanse the evilness -- and wondering whether she needed to dismiss their demonstrably-idiot leadership -- and that's when they showed her the 30-pt Mana Basin.
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Old 01-27-2022, 05:07 AM   #30
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Default Re: Low Tech Draw Power

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
I think that misunderstands magic both in general and in the specific case of GURPS.
Whoa now, I am not talking about in general at all. I am talking about the specific case of GURPS, more particularly the case of GURPS Magic, and I am referring to several posts in this thread which attempt to work out the details of using GURPS Magic (or "Magic" for short, with the capital letter) to sidestep real-world technology limits. Many of those proposals were impractical (15,000 Golems!), but were still looking for what could be possible given those assumptions.

Quote:
* Magic in narrative is not a source of unlimited power without restrictions; for it to be so would take away the possibility of meaningful challenges to the protagonists. There are always restrictions.
Yeah, cool. I wasn't proposing any unlimited power. I was simply saying that, given GURPS-style Magic, it is possible to make propositions that are not physically possible in the real world using the sorts of technology under discussion. This was to counter the proposition that the whole discussion was moot because low technology made everything impossible on the face of it. You may disagree, of course, but that means ignoring every single proposition already made in this thread, or several from your own works as you note.

Quote:
* Spells in GURPS work on common sense categories of objects: air, animals, (human) bodies, fire, light (and darkness), (human) minds, weather. The Tech college adds another common sense category: machines.

* If we're talking about machines, it makes sense to apply quantitative limits of size and energy and power and so on; such limits are part of our common sense understanding of machines.

* In a medieval setting there simply are no machines that generate or transmit megawatts of power. Even machines in the kilowatt range are rare. In GURPS Thaumatology: Urban Magics, I made up added spells that tap kilowatt power sources, but you need at least 12 kilowatts to get 2 FP/minute (exceeding the cost of casting by 1 FP/minute); that's 16 horsepower or 120 average men—and people didn't build mechanical power transmission systems that big till the early Industrial Revolution.
I agree that might be a good argument for why Draw Power and similar spells should not be previously existing, or allowed to be invented, in a typical low-tech setting that is limited to historical technologies. But then there's that TL^, and there's that TL3+N. There is the ability to arbitrarily specify the parameters of any given spell (which was your answer, as you note). Sure, the GM should know where to make those specifications, but there's this weird assumption that people's imaginations have to be shut down that I see on occasion in this forum that is rearing its head, and I think that there should be some pushback on that. Rather than "such and so is not possible at low tech levels", the argument should be more of the form "it requires unusual technology assumptions or unusual magic assumptions, which you may or may not want to shape your worldbuilding, to make that work". The discussion should be one of how to make it possible, not how it is supposedly absolutely impossible.

In context, the only comment I was addressing was the one that proposed that "it can't be done" should always be either immutable or handwaved with no room in between. That's an attitude I find frustrating. It's doubly frustrating when it is leveled at an element of the game (GURPS-style Magic) that already manifestly doesn't exist in anything but fiction and so can be arbitrarily altered to make whatever impossible thing possible.

Sorry for not replying directly to others joining the brief (and fortunately relatively small, all things considered) dogpile, but I think that responding to whswhs hits all of the main points your comments covered.
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