[Magic-as-Powers] Power Stunts as Spells

[Prince Charon]

Power Stunts (GURPS Powers pp170-174) can be quite useful, and it occurred to me recently that in a Magic-as-Powers system, the power stunts could be the spells. This sort of magician might have very few 'power' advantages, but would use lots of power stunts; the more commonly used ones (or the important ones that have a high penalty) could be bought up as techniques. This was partly inspired by naloth's Spellforging thread, though it's probably closer to the Psi Techniques from GURPS Psionic Powers (p8, text box on p9). It might be useful for characters to keep a list of commonly-used stunts/spells, even ones not bought as techniques; maybe use the Grimoire Form from GURPS Magic (there's a PDF of the form on that page, under Excerpts). A lot of this would be rather cheaty if only one character were using it, but that's true of all magic systems.

The Rules As Written don't mention adding temporary limitations with a power stunt, or not that I noticed, but I believe it should be possible in this sort of system. Normally the combined modifiers from all the enhancements and limitations in the stunt should be positive, so it's still an enhancement, but if I were GMing I'd allow it as a negative number as long as it made thematic sense, and the player accepted that it was still going to have an energy cost and a skill penalty.

Depending on the setting (or the style, or the individual caster), there might be a single core advantage, or the core plus some alternates, or a small set of separate advantages. An Innate Attack with No Wounding is a plausible core ability, with many of the spells being based on Side Effect or similar enhancements. Affliction is arguably a better option, since afflicting advantages and disadvantages is built into it - the main difficulty would be that the primary effect of the Affliction would normally still be there, though adding a limitation that removes it to your power stunts may be acceptable to some GMs, as would having one advantage for helpful spells and another for harmful ones (e.g. 'Affliction (Advantage: Fit)' for positive spells and 'Fatigue Attack (Malediction)' for negative ones).

For 'elemental' styles, Control and Create make sense as core abilities, whether bought for a single element or a set of them. For a more mystical or 'spooky' style, something like the Second Sight advantage (GURPS Horror p18) could be interesting, though it might need some work, perhaps switching out one of the component advantages for Medium or Channeling.

Illusions is a potentially interesting core advantage for some styles, perhaps with some inspiration taken from Glamours (GURPS Fantasy pp20-21, 168). One possible enhancement would be a variant of Stigmata (Powers p95) that is not dependent on the Mental enhancement (see also this thread, though it hasn't gotten responses as of right now).

Power stunts normally never allow permanent effects, but if the GM and players want long-term magic items in this system, fudging that rule with additional requirements should be acceptable. What those requirements are should depend at least a little on the fluff of the setting, but I suggest requiring special materials, special locations and times to perform the ceremony, and possibly using the Combining Powers rules from pp170-172. Alternatively, stunting up some variant of Snatcher or Gadgeteer (limited to magic items) could also work - and some limited variant of Snatcher could also possibly work as a core power, for that matter.


Thoughts?