unusual background for Magic!, and magery>3

[starslayer]

In my own campaigns (a fantasy campaign and a modern multi-genre campaign) I like the option for both 'traditional' magic and mages who are a bit more uncapped in there abilities, IE have magery in excess of 3 levels, and/or access to the magic! skill.

Right now I am handling that with a hefty unusual background cost compared to regular mages- 50 points to be able to have magery 4+, and 50 points to have magic!

To balance magic a bit in both the fantasy and modern campaign I have identified depleted necrominum to be a result of any enchantment, and is thus very expensive, but prevalent enough that most non-mages will have a DN tipped arrow or two, or a backup knife with DN (and DN bullets in a modern campaign would be encountered by non-mages who are 'in the know')

Now, I've been running these campaigns for a fairly long while and it seems to work quite well super-mages are generally very good at magic, but seem to have traded in significant survivability compared to there more mundane companions, but one of the things I notice is that when someone else is GMing and I build a character I pretty much cannot resist paying the 50 points for magic! just as much for reduced bookkeeping (as spending ~60 points on spells will give you a good selection but takes a while to put together) as for increased versatility, but there is always the potential for improvement.

My question is what are the thoughts/ideas about those costs; too low, too high; high magery and magic! are inherently out of scope with any campaign that has regular people and spellcasters without those benefits?

[Kalzazz]

I personally would completely scrap the unusual background for High Magery . . . at least for 4 levels, since after all, in the Talent section it says 'cannot have more than 4 levels of a particular talent'

I then would potentially charge 15 for 5-8, and call it Magery Talent Talent, with all the benefits of a Talent (Reaction bonus etc), since it is a talent with 13 or more related skills (Large talent). Since well, Joe Bob Normal Mage might have Magery 1-4 and its kinda boring, but Joe Bob Talented Mage has Magery 8, and it is Cool (and thus gets reaction bonus and such)

I would do this setup instead of charging UB for high magery. Or I might simply just allow 'magery is 10pts a level, buy however much you want'


As for the Magic!, eh, I think 50 works alright, not sure

I personally dont find your Super Mages particularly easy to kill, even if I use badguys with DN, certainly no easier to kill than anyone else

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by starslayer

My question is what are the thoughts/ideas about those costs; too low, too high; high magery and magic! are inherently out of scope with any campaign that has regular people and spellcasters without those benefits?

I don't care about the cost being too ow or too high. I care about your solution being insufficiently flexible.

What if a player wants 4 levels of Limited Magery? Or 2 levels of normal Magery with 2 levels of Limited Magery on top of that? Your system cannot provide a good answer to that question ("the UB cost is just the same as for 4 levels of normal Magery" is not a good answer).

Instead of charging an UB for Magery beyond a specific level, charge an UB for CPs beyond a specific value in Magery. This could be 35 CPs, or 38 CPs, or 34 CPs, and the UB could be that each CP in Magery beyond your threshold costs quadruple.Thus Magery 3 for a character would cost 35 CPs, and Magery 4 would cost 35 + (4x 10) = 75 CP. Magery 5 would cost 115, and another 40 CPs for each level of Magery after 5. At the same time, another player can build a character with 1 level of Magery and 4 levels of One-Collegery Magery for 51 CPs (15 CPs for Magery 1, base cost of 4 levels of One-College is 24 CPs, that totals to 39 CPs, we're 4 over the threshold, so those 4 CPs becomes 16 CPs, added to the non-UB'ed cost of 35 CPs for a total cost of 51 CPs).

Much more flexible that way.