07-22-2021, 02:41 PM | #21 | |
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Cost to cast spells as a service
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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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07-22-2021, 03:52 PM | #22 |
Join Date: Dec 2020
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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. |
07-22-2021, 08:45 PM | #23 | |
Join Date: Apr 2020
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Re: Cost to cast spells as a service
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It would, to be fair, be a very different economy from the one we have. |
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07-23-2021, 05:25 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: May 2021
Location: Eastern Kentucky
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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. |
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07-23-2021, 08:33 AM | #25 | |
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Cost to cast spells as a service
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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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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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07-23-2021, 09:00 AM | #26 | |
Join Date: May 2021
Location: Eastern Kentucky
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Re: Cost to cast spells as a service
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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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07-23-2021, 09:00 AM | #27 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Cost to cast spells as a service
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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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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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07-23-2021, 09:39 AM | #28 | |
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
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Re: Cost to cast spells as a service
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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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Sean "Dr. Kromm" Punch <kromm@sjgames.com> GURPS Line Editor, Steve Jackson Games My DreamWidth [Just GURPS News] |
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07-23-2021, 09:48 AM | #29 |
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Berkeley, CA
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Re: Cost to cast spells as a service
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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07-23-2021, 11:32 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Feb 2009
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Re: Cost to cast spells as a service
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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