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Old 07-22-2021, 02:41 PM   #21
Kromm
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Default Re: Cost to cast spells as a service

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Originally Posted by Willy View Post

Maybe, but you wrote at least a important part of 4th Ed Basic Set and also got Banestorm and Fantasy 4th Ed. on your desk
Look again. Banestorm (2005) and Fantasy (2004) were both edited by not-me, and in fact slipped into the same gap regarding magic revisions for Fourth Edition that Magic (2004) did. I did write the Basic Set, Fourth Edition (2004), but I didn't cover jobs for wizards there, and I returned to the editorial rotation three years after that was released, in 2007! Jobs for wizards – and indeed most rules and advice tied to the standard magic system – don't reflect what I'd have done. Whence my words:
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I'm saying that I think the precedents are wrong.
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Old 07-22-2021, 03:52 PM   #22
Willy
 
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Default Re: Cost to cast spells as a service

That may be at it is, but the problem still is the same. We have a decades old and highly functional roleplaying game, but it´s overgrowing with possibilities you can choose. In fact we have so many add on stuff now, that the system is even more encrusted than in the end of the 3rd Ed. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because it give GMs and player a wealth to choose from.

But the problems, which were still in the 3rd Ed, are partly transfered in the 4th Ed, sometimes out of pure necesstiy, because GURPS is a system were one part is designed to work with the other parts changing one may make a radical change of other parts a pure need - so some things remained the old way. The other problem everytime there is the lack of resources, which make it impossible to plan long time.

The only part to change this would be a revised 4the Ed or even better a 5th Ed, and both are not possible for lack of money and staff.

There are other systems to make magic worklike sorcery, and other ways to make magic happen in game terms

Since the standard magic and the templates are at least partly canonical, often even expanded in various supplements, we have to work with them, ignoring the problems would make them just bigger.

So in the end we need to find a way to give mages a income, ways to learn / study magic and all that, even if it´s for most scenarios just background flavour. But that is the same for most other jobs player can impersonate in game.
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Old 07-22-2021, 08:45 PM   #23
Micah Davis
 
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Default Re: Cost to cast spells as a service

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Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
Really, the whole model of professional adventurers who hunt treasures left out in the world by mad wizards, lost civilizations, and random gods, and live outside the social structure of civilization, trashes sensible economic analyses. Magic just makes it worse. This is one area where appeals to the real world won't help you much.
I'll admit a world with magic abundant enough to hire a mage for whatever you're looking for, it's probably going to be functionally TL 3^ with widespread healing magic, abundant food, truth assaying magic, and very fast ships. But such a society would be productive enough to handle the influx of wealth from adventuring and have enough magic to genuinely unlimited amounts of magical disasters and fallen civilizations while not solving the standard problems of a fantasy setting and thus subject to sensible economic analyses.

It would, to be fair, be a very different economy from the one we have.
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Old 07-23-2021, 05:25 AM   #24
Emerikol
 
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Default Re: Cost to cast spells as a service

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Originally Posted by Micah Davis View Post
I'll admit a world with magic abundant enough to hire a mage for whatever you're looking for, it's probably going to be functionally TL 3^ with widespread healing magic, abundant food, truth assaying magic, and very fast ships. But such a society would be productive enough to handle the influx of wealth from adventuring and have enough magic to genuinely unlimited amounts of magical disasters and fallen civilizations while not solving the standard problems of a fantasy setting and thus subject to sensible economic analyses.

It would, to be fair, be a very different economy from the one we have.
Not necessarily. If mages are rare and the cost is high, then sure you can hire a mage to cast a spell but you'll only do so when you really need it. If you are wounded, you won't run and pay to get healed if you have made it back to town. You will wait on your fellow adventurer to heal you or you will just rest up and heal naturally.

One way I am preventing mages from turning my medieval world into a quasi-technological one is magic requires magery which is inborn and can't be learned. The populace only produces so many people with magery. 1% of the population gets magery 0 and it goes down dramatically from there.
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Old 07-23-2021, 08:33 AM   #25
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Default Re: Cost to cast spells as a service

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One way I am preventing mages from turning my medieval world into a quasi-technological one is magic requires magery which is inborn and can't be learned. The populace only produces so many people with magery. 1% of the population gets magery 0 and it goes down dramatically from there.
I've found that the easiest way to prevent that transition is to fiddle not with Magery, but with the game world's social framework.

In several of my non-hack 'n' slash fantasy worlds, mages' access to gifts that most people lack leads society to greet them with jealousy and/or fear. Mages return the favor by keeping ordinary folks at arm's reach, which adds "aloof" and "power-hungry" to the charges they face. And so on, in a downward spiral of mistrust. Thus, ordinary folks are in no hurry to follow mages down the road to a technomagical paradise. As for the mages, they develop an aversion to working together because cooperation tends to be seen as conspiracy (making persecution worse) and because they're just in the general habit of avoiding people, so they never really achieve the critical mass needed to transform civilization. And they don't particularly want to uplift society anyway, because it mistrusts and persecutes them.

Mage PCs are stepping into this scene with no special destiny to change it. They're free to act, but individual actions are exceedingly unlikely to change a centuries-long status quo unless backed with exceptional magical power, patronage, funds, contacts, and other resources. And while I don't deny the PCs the chance to try to accumulate these things, I don't start them out with these assets and I generally throw adventures in their path that divert them indefinitely from seeking and accumulating such means.

So, even if the PCs can buy Magery 6 in play, and learn all kinds of potent spells, they're basically kind of like superheroes in one of those comics where, despite the existence of living gods, society looks just like ours.
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Old 07-23-2021, 09:00 AM   #26
Emerikol
 
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I've found that the easiest way to prevent that transition is to fiddle not with Magery, but with the game world's social framework.
In my setting there is no doubt a degree of this approach exists but at high levels of power for people in the know magic is seen as a very useful tool and as a weapon. So sure a peasant might cross the street rather than walk past a known wizard but a King will view them as weapons against his enemies.

So your approach is completely valid and good if you want that flavor of a game. There are a variety of ways you can approach the matter.

In my own current setting, and for sure the reason may change with every campaign I'm not married to one approach, I am going with the idea that people are born with magical aptitude (called magery) and without it they can't work magic. Now a low level of aptitude and a lot of patience can still be effective. I have a mages guild (I call mine wizards but whatever), they spend a good bit of time tracking down those with latent talent.

Now one twist on this is that outside of the "normal" channels of magic, there are those who not only manifest magery but also develop "powers". The Church officially condemns such uses of magic and they live in fear for their lives because the Wizards want them dead too so as to keep the "church" off their backs.

In my world there are officially "accepted" forms of magic and officially "condemned" forms of magic. So the condemned fall under your idea but to the extreme. The accepted are no doubt feared by the ignorant but not as much by those in power.

It's a set of choices. I'm using a form of RPM with techniques as spells that have to be discovered for my standard wizardry. The non-standard stuff is using something fairly close to sorcery.
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Old 07-23-2021, 09:00 AM   #27
whswhs
 
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Default Re: Cost to cast spells as a service

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Originally Posted by Kromm View Post
I've found that the easiest way to prevent that transition is to fiddle not with Magery, but with the game world's social framework.

In several of my non-hack 'n' slash fantasy worlds, mages' access to gifts that most people lack leads society to greet them with jealousy and/or fear. Mages return the favor by keeping ordinary folks at arm's reach, which adds "aloof" and "power-hungry" to the charges they face. And so on, in a downward spiral of mistrust. Thus, ordinary folks are in no hurry to follow mages down the road to a technomagical paradise. As for the mages, they develop an aversion to working together because cooperation tends to be seen as conspiracy (making persecution worse) and because they're just in the general habit of avoiding people, so they never really achieve the critical mass needed to transform civilization. And they don't particularly want to uplift society anyway, because it mistrusts and persecutes them.

Mage PCs are stepping into this scene with no special destiny to change it. They're free to act, but individual actions are exceedingly unlikely to change a centuries-long status quo unless backed with exceptional magical power, patronage, funds, contacts, and other resources. And while I don't deny the PCs the chance to try to accumulate these things, I don't start them out with these assets and I generally throw adventures in their path that divert them indefinitely from seeking and accumulating such means.
Or, as Marx put it, men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they choose.

I find myself thinking of the analogy of owners of capital in pre-Enlightenment societies. Their wealth also caused them to be regarded with jealousy, which led them to take protective measures, which led to charges of aloofness and alienness; particularly in societies where moneylenders tended to be Jews living among Christians, they were likely to isolate themselves. So their accumulated wealth went to rather limited uses.

You could get a magical revolution akin to the Industrial Revolution in some ways through cultural and institutional changes that made mages less vulnerable to the Angry Villager Rule. That might be an interesting setting for a campaign.
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Old 07-23-2021, 09:39 AM   #28
Kromm
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Default Re: Cost to cast spells as a service

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You could get a magical revolution akin to the Industrial Revolution in some ways through cultural and institutional changes that made mages less vulnerable to the Angry Villager Rule. That might be an interesting setting for a campaign.
My Dawn of Magic campaign had a heavy dose of that.

Magic was known to have existed – but so long ago that it was seen as folklore, legend, even myth. Most of what people "knew" about it was at best bleached of all color and contrast by the suns of time, and at worst poppycock. Mostly, magic was reduced to superstition, tales of bogeymen, and "asking for proof betrays a lack of faith" religion.

Then magic started to come back. Most of its practitioners were ostracized, sometimes at the witch-burning level, thanks to superstition, tales of bogeymen, and the urgings of priesthoods who had everything to lose. Practitioners who were exceptionally magically talented and/or already socially influential weren't shy to exploit their gifts in various ways in order to avoid such fates. Most of these felt that security resided in grabbing power; some went very far, creating zombie armies to conquer, setting themselves up as living gods to demand worship, or just perverting social systems from within to claim imperium.

Into this stepped the PCs. The entire campaign goal was to play out the transition from "magic doesn't exist," through "magic is sinister and can't be trusted," to "an age of magical enlightenment." This involved very little use of their magical powers and a great deal of assassination of troublesome magic-wielders, conventional warfare, and exerting social influence on rulers. It was quite the epic campaign.

Of course, I also tossed in forgotten wisdom in ancient scrolls that identified the waxing and waning of magic with an eternal cycle of golden ages and apocalypses. The PCs knew that their peace wouldn't last forever, that at some point, the magic-wielders would challenge the gods, the gods would yank magic away, and the world would plunge back into mundanity and superstition until the next Dawn of Magic.
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Old 07-23-2021, 09:48 AM   #29
Anthony
 
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Default Re: Cost to cast spells as a service

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I've found that the easiest way to prevent that transition is to fiddle not with Magery, but with the game world's social framework.
Hard to make that feel sensible. I mostly just ignore the problem, but if I were trying to be simulationist I'd probably require mages (and anyone else I think should really be an adventurer) to have disadvantages that make them very unsuited to a 9-5 job.
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Old 07-23-2021, 11:32 AM   #30
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I think your standard 50pts of disads PCs can be fairly dysfunctional and rely on their innate awesomeness for society to tolerate there existence (top end athletes and movie stars etc have a chance of getting away with antics that would see lowly minions fired 10 times over)

Actually I tend to give rank and file adventurers less disads to, the stars and hot prospects can get away with stuff, guys who are there to fill out the roster tend to have 'intangibles' and one of the Big Intangibles is 'not being a screwball people hate'
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