How would magic interact with late TL5 naval warfare? & Campaign idea

[RGTraynor]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

I'm not arguing about the overall accuracy - as I said, 25% accuracy is enormously superior to naval artillery. I'm concerned about the effects of failed teleport spells: "If you miss your roll by more than 1, you suffer no physical injury – but you go somewhere else. The location is up to the GM! A critical failure with this spell can send the caster anywhere the GM likes – make it interesting! – and cause physical injury, as long as it doesn’t kill the caster outright." Having 0.5-2% of your teleport bombs appear within your own ships' armor envelopes is not acceptable, nor is having 2/3rds of them going somewhere undesirable, even if you're getting 25% hits overall. Making attacks that rarely hit is acceptable, if you make enough attacks, but not if some of those attacks hit your own ships.

Mm, but here's the rub: the critical failure rate of magic generally might work for a tabletop RPG game, but would not remotely cut the mustard in real life. If for ANY spell there was nearly a 5% chance it didn't work, and (generally) a nearly 2% chance of a critical failure, no one who wasn't insane or desperate would be a spellcaster. Think of that naval artillery, for instance: if a naval gun suffered a critical failure one shot in fifty, either they'd have to use condemned criminals as gunners, or they'd hang the engineers from the yardarm. But, according to GURPS rules, unless the gun crews all have Gunner-16+, that's exactly what would happen.

HMS Warrior, as an example of late TL5 naval technology, had a 15-gun broadside, which guarantees a critical failure a little better than once every three broadsides. So ... do we put a higher failure rate on military magic than anyone IRL would accept with military machinery?

Originally Posted by Witchking

If I am reading the OP correctly he was thinking late 1800's max and since the thread seems to have a current of ironclads rather than pre-dreadnoughts the actual date might be closer to mid-1800's.

According to High-Tech, TL5 runs to 1880, which is why I figured on the Warrior-class ironclads as representative of "late" TL5. I'd be interested in the OP clarifying that.