How to make magic use friendlier?

[mlangsdorf]

Using standard GURPS magic, a low point value spellcaster can expect to cast 6 FP of spells per hour without doing anything fancy. That's a fast enough rate to maintain 35 castings of Daylight bright Continual Light a week and light up a fantasy village, or create 35 cubic yards (roughly 200 tons) of iron in a week, and be more productive than most iron mines, or 70-80 nutritious and unspoiled rations in a week.

A slightly skilled or dedicated spellcaster learns Restore Energy-15, and doubles his rate of FP recovery and therefore his sustained spellcasting. There's also tricks such as using Steal Fatigue to borrow energy from other people, or (more efficiently but somewhat more expensively) having apprentices that cast Lend Energy on the primary spellcaster. And of course, exceptional (ie, PC grade) casters know all their spells at level 15+, and can reduce the base fatigue costs.

Personally, I find that the standard magic system gives wizards too much energy, not too little, for my world-building tastes, while paradoxically giving them too little energy for combat use. GURPS Thaumatology introduces the Threshold magic system, in which wizards have a daily energy limit and a fixed recovery rate. This system lets wizards cast a few big spells, but since the recovery rate is usually less than the 48 to 240 FP per (working) day that a wizard with high level of Recover Energy gets under the standard magic.

(ninja'd by everyone else!)

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

I'm in the process of putting together a fantasy campaign (and actually a campaign world, from the ground up). In the process of this, I find myself going over the GURPS: Magic system a few times. While I don't mind complexity, it isn't exactly "pick up and go" and does require significant player investment (in order to understand proper spell use, plan ahead, develop a capable spell library, etc).

This isn't my quandary, however.

Unless I've been doing it wrong since I picked up GURPS - which is a valid possibility - Magic is something most mages (read: mages that aren't walking around in a Very High Mana Field or that don't have some sort of absurd energy regeneration from some source) are only able to utilize magic very infrequently. The reason for this is, frankly, energy/fatigue costs. Even with a high-HT character (and most mages aren't exact Olympic athletes), a small handful of spells (or one or two large ones) will leave him effectively spent for hours..

Yeah...no. In the worst case scenario, you can recover 1 point of fatigue per 10 minutes. Which means a HT 10 wizard would be fully recharged from 0 in under two hours even without Recover Strength and would have at least one spell in him in something like half an hour. Also assuming that the setting is usually normal mana, it's a very good idea to have some low cost spells at at least 15 for the fatigue cost discount so you can cast them even when you are tapped.

That being said, I personally like the idea of an alchemical energy recovery potion.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

Without buckets of CP into exotic advantages, is my assumption on the limited rate of spell usage accurate?

Magic use won't be very frequent, true, but you've overlooked numerous things:

1. Buy a small Energy Reserve, of 4 or 5 ER (costing 12 or 15 points). That'll recharge in parallel with Fatigue Points, making it very valuable for the character.
1b. Slap a Gadget Limitation onto it to reduce the cost from 12 or 15 points to something much lower. Soething like a staff or ring type Gadget is about -40%.That's a significant costs saving.
1c. While you're at it, look into reducing the cost of Magery too, with Gadget or even One-College. You don't have to take Limitations on all of your Magery. You can buy 1-2 levels of full Magery and then another 1-3 levels of Magery Limited wth Gadget or One-College or both, then use those saved points to buy more Energy Reserve, or more (Limited) Magery.

2. The cost to cast spells goes down with increasing skill. I think (but it's been years since I touched that foul magic system) the first cost reduction happens at skill 15, the 2nd at skill 20. It's very common for players to create spellcaster characters whose base skill level with Hard (not VH) spells is 15 after 1 point invested into them (I think you get there with a combination of IQ 14 and Magery 3, or IQ 12 and Magery 5, or any other combnation that sums to 17), in order to get the cost reduction.
2b. Also with One-College Magery it might be fairly feasible to get the baseline up to 20 with just 1 point invested, or at least to 18 (thus you get the 2nd cost reduction with 4 points invested, so it'll at least affect your "favourite" spells).

3. Powerstones are a thing. They should be used.
3b. In combination with One-College Magery look into One-College Magery Powerstones. I seem to recall that those exist as a creatable item in GURPS Magic. If you go for a specialist caster rather than a generalist, you can get some benefits, some point savings, and get closer to skill level 20 to cast more efficiently.

(Neither of the things mentioned above are Exotic Advantages. Energy Reserve is from GURPS Powers, but is a core part of GURPS as indicated by its casual presence in the GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series.)

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

In your GURPS travels, have you ever run across a magic system that allowed for more regular, consistent magic use? Did it work out well?

Spellcasting is a subset of magic use. The obvious place to look to is GURPS Powers. Very few of the Advantages in GURPS have any intrinsic FP cost to use, meaning if you have them then you can use them constantly or at least for long periods of time without paying FP or ER for it. E.g. Detect. Innate Attack. Ally (Summinable Undead or Elementals). Et cetera.

So it's very easy, using the GURPS Powers system, to build characters who are magical and can do magical things, without being limited to FP/ER costs.

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

If I were to develop a world where magic was more frequently used (like, say, the Harry Potter universe), could you pose any theories as to how I could manage that?

I like the concept of spell levels, where spells are organized into tiers, such as one tier for spells that are fast to learn and cast, cheap to cast and fairly safe to cast, another higher tier for more serious spells, and several more tiers above that culminating in miracle/wonder-type spells that are so hard and costly and dangerous to cast that they're only used very rarely.

But I have no good ideas for how to implement such a spell-based system in GURPS, one that achieves that effect.

You can get most of that, just not the spell levels effect, by using GURPS Powers.

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

Do you feel like the GURPS magic system is perfectly fine as it is?

I think it's utter garbage. GURPS Magic is bad to begin with, and the updated supplement for 4th Edition was barely updated at all. It feels like a rush job, the writers just taking the two 3rd Edition supplements, GURPS Magic and GURPS Grimoire, and stuffing them into a blender.

GURPS Magic has no merits, no redeeming virtues. But you have overlooked some important mechanics, and some very useful non-Exotic options, which I've outlined above (at least the central ones - if I think of others I'll come back to this thread and write more).

[FF_Ninja]

Thank you very much for the information. I'll go back over this a few times and internalize some of the more important bits.

Side question: If you dislike the GURPS Magic system so much, what makes it so odious? If there was a system that did magic well, what system, and why in particular? Just curious.

[Peter Knutsen]

Oh, yes, my Eidetic roll kicked in delayed (it often does).

The two other things I had thought about, while reading the OP on my phone but before going to the keyboard, was prerequisites and the Very Unfit expoit.

4. There are several ways to skip a few prerequisites. One is a Perk from the PDF with all the Perks for GURPs Magic. I forget what it's called. It's basicaly a 1 point Perk that lets you pretend to know a particular spell for the purpose pf prerequisites. You can take it multiple times, once for each spell you don't want to learn. The other is an Enhancement, I think from GURPS Thaumatology, that you can take on Magery to get to ignore prerequisites. I think it's +30%. I don't recall how it interacts with One-College, but it's probably not overly complicated. You might not want to bother with either of those, unless you or some of your players find the prerequisite system to be annoying.

5. The Very Unfit disad gives you 15 compensatory points and doesn't have any effect on FP spent on magic. It doesn't make you lose FP faster that way, compared to if you didn't have VU, and it doesn't make you regain the spent FP more slowly either. It only affects FP spent on physical activities. I called this an "exploit" above but it's not actually abusive (any GM who fails to get this needs to have his GMing license revoked) as there is a severe inherent "suck factor" in the many physical problems that this imposes upon an adventuring faster, or even on a civilian caster (VU gives -2 to HT rolls, including to resist or recover from diseases). So that's one way to get a further 15 points to spend on something more useful for your concept, like more (Limited) Magery, or more Energy Reserve (Energy Reserve can be Limited too, although here GMs might have to be a bit careful, as I recall, about exploits - but -40% One-College should probably be acceptable).

(Disclaimer: Item #5 above pertains to the GURPS Magic magic system - some other magic systems for GURPS may have some magics that involve vigorous physical activity, like dancing, in which case Very Unfit should realistically have the same effect on that as it has on non-magical activities.)

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

Side question: If you dislike the GURPS Magic system so much, what makes it so odious? If there was a system that did magic well, what system, and why in particular? Just curious.

You're new to GURPS, and my explanation would confuse you. Ask again in a year; then I'm sure I or someone else will dig up an old thread where I talk at length about why GURPS Magic is an abomination.

[hal]

What has me shaking my head in all of this, is the fact that back in the day when all we had was GURPS 3rd edition revised, and GURPS MAGIC 2nd edition - the problems everyone alludes to in this thread never seemed to be an issue.

Take a peek here:

http://www.gurpsnet.org/Archive/Magic/Alaconius/

Back when all we had was GURPSNET as a mailing list, we had some pretty good times. Long and short of it is this:

The challenge of playing a mage is in being creative with one's spells and spell choices. Try to get the most bang for your buck when you pay the points to know spells, and more points to know the spells to a high enough level that you can finally reach the point where maintaining a spell was almost effortless.

CREATE ANIMAL is a good spell to know when you can maintain an 85 lb wolf at zero maintenance cost. Knowing the spell CREATE OBJECT is especially handy when you need to get access to tools that you don't have on you at the time. There were enough spells out there where the costs were minimal and applying the right spell at the right time was the stuff of literary legends and GURPS gaming experiences.

Back in the early days of GURPS, the idea was to keep mages starved for energy in casting spells as a means of play balance. Being able to gather a crowd together for ceremonial spell casting was not easy, no where NEAR as easy as it is in GURPS 4e. Truth is, much of GURPS MAGIC for 4e is "RUINED" in my eyes for reasons that you can discover from my other posts on magic. ACID RAIN, ENLARGE, EARTH TO METAL (in 6 ton lots for Iron for example), had me shaking my head mournfully. ALACONIUS lectures were based on the premise of "What if the spells in GURPS CLASSIC MAGIC really existed, how would it work in the game world, and how might a mage get maximum use of his spells?"

Hell, I even ran a MAGE WARS project over the net where we had one culture that practiced Master/Apprentice style of teaching spells versus a culture that organized universities and had books for teaching spells. It was Rome versus Carthage kind of scenario. There were some REALLY creative uses of spells, including the use of a shapeshift Seagull sequence where the seagull would drop stones with linked "Essential flame" atop enemy triremes and troop ships. Zombies and divinations had a major role in the scenario.

So, make the spell caster so it is more user friendlier? I thought it was a challenge to play a spell caster successfully as it was, without making it so that the mage could cast spells non-stop. Being able to cast 1d fireballs without fatigue was easily enough accomplished. Back then, a healing potion, when drunk by an uninjured individual, received 2d6 fatigue points back immediately upon drinking the potion. That was for all intents and purposes, making spell casting more easily accomplished.

Different strokes for different folks.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

Yeah, see, I might actually be over-stating how potent or capable a mage should be. A smart apprentice built on a 100 or 150 point budget should be able to do those things you mentioned - although I highly doubt they're going to have any spells as high as 15, let alone 20 - not without some significant base Magery and very good IQ.

Only persons building dabblers build mages without significant Magery and IQ. If you're only going to learn a few non-combat spells you can get by with Skill-12.

Dedicated, professional level Mages are usually built at IQ14 and Magery 3 and have all their Mental(H) Spells at 15 for 1 pt. This will definitely include Recover Energy.

I know the 80+35 cp for those scores seems lie a lot but there are things to consider. first your budget is probably more likely 185-195 cp when you add in Disads and Quirks. fighters will probably be spending 115pts on a combination of ST and DX too.

You can also do things like sell back some PER and Will. Drop those from 14 to 12 and you've gotten back 20pts and still have decent scores in those attributes ad you've only spent half your budget.

Raise your HT to 11 for 10pts and you've not only improved your base unmodified HT Roll from 50% success to 65% you've also gotten another FP. Also, because of breakpoints the amount of FP you can spend before your Base Speed drops to half from 6 to 7. Raise your FP by 3 for 9pts and that half-Speed pt goes up to more than 9.

Now you're at 124 pts out of a likely 190 or so. Spend 30pt son spells and you'll have a decent selection at 15. Now instead of 2 3pt spells before you risk not being able to run away you can cast 4 spells with abase 3pts(down to 2 each for Skill) and a 2 pt spell too. you'll be back pt to full fP in 45 minutes rather than 60 as well.

Out of your remaining 36pts you can spend 12 pts and have Staff at 12 for 12 pts and you've got a Parry of 1l (12/2+3 + another 2 for staff) which is quite good for someone starting out. Your remaining 24 pts can go to other Skills (most of them IQ-based of course) and some Perks too.

I don't think this is really too complex but Gurps does reward some small investment in detailed character creation.

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

If you don't want to bother with the skill tree system there are guidelines for buying spells as 'Knacks' which ignore the need for prerequisites.

In 4e, there's basically the same thing. They're just called Perks, and cost 1 point/spell.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by FF_Ninja

Yeah, see, I might actually be over-stating how potent or capable a mage should be. A smart apprentice built on a 100 or 150 point budget should be able to do those things you mentioned - although I highly doubt they're going to have any spells as high as 15, let alone 20 - not without some significant base Magery and very good IQ.
.

Which is how PCs are generally built...but even without those things, it's easy enough to buy up a few key spells to 15.