GURPS Powers and Enchanting

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by scc

OK, so far Ceti's one that's given me the sort of answer I'm looking for, I'm looking for things like making magical swords and stuff, not giving someone else my powers (Where did people come up with that idea?)

We're not talking about giving people your powers. We're talking about "powers as advantages."

If your powers are advantages, then your enchantments are probably advantages too. Say you want to make a flaming sword. You don't have a "GURPS Magic Flaming Sword Enchantment" because you're using Powers-As-Advantages, so you need to devise a set of advantages that represent a flaming sword. There are a lot of ways to do that: You can just give the sword a set of advantages, or you can require that players pay for the cost of the advantage themselves with the gadget limitation, etc.

In GURPS Magic, you'd then need to spend a ton of fatigue to make your enchanted sword. How do you determine the cost of a magical sword in a powers-as-advantages system? The first option is to use Gadgeteer, as Bill points out, and simply assign it a difficulty and creation cost. My proposal is to treat it like energy again, but with 25 energy (or days of work) counting as 1 character point. Ergo, if the final advantage cost for the sword is 5 points, it'll take you 125 days to "enchant" it.

If you need a standard cost for items enchanted using powers-as-advantages, I recommend the Metatronic Generator articles by Christopher Rice, as they translate point-cost into $ fairly nicely.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by scc

OK, so far Ceti's one that's given me the sort of answer I'm looking for, I'm looking for things like making magical swords and stuff, not giving someone else my powers (Where did people come up with that idea?)

Well, you talked about Afflictions, and that advantage is normally primarily used to confer powers on people, not to create objects. In fact, it's kind of weird to use it to create objects at all. So I figured you were asking about "How do I confer powers on people?" and brought up creating objects as only one strategy for doing that.

I'd also note that you asked about power sources. Well, Magical as a power source is heavily tied to creating magical objects. But other power sources are less so, and with some of them you just don't. I don't know how you would use Biological or Chi to make an object with powers (well, maybe with Biological you could design a genetically engineered symbiont, but I'd probably build that as an Ally, not a gadget).

So I was looking at the ways that people in the source material have powers conferred on them. And I was looking first at superheroes, because that's where my brain goes with "powers."

So I was trying to address the question you asked by looking at a larger question that subsumes it. It's all a question of how the issue is framed.