So one of the reasons I switched to the college skills for casting spells instead of having characters buy spells was because I wanted to represent the fact that there are not individual spells with specific incantations and uses in Hekinoe. You're just using fire magic and shaping it with your will. This style of magic is normally called wildcard magic and you typically purchase a very hard skill called magic at triple the cost and apply penalties to your effective skill level for each prerequisite spell the spell has. I split it into very hard college skills for two reasons. The first was to reduce the cost of magic, at least for specialists that don't want to cast all types of magic. The second reason was so I could associate a skill with each college that allowed you to buy it higher than the normal cap on purchased level, in addition to certain advantages granting that permission.
Those advantages were Unfazeable, Versatile, and Visualization. This coupled with the skills associated with each college allowed the college skills to be purchased at up to attribute+5. The reason I capped the college skills was because there is only so much you can do to get better at making magic in a certain way. It's not something you can endlessly get better at. I also increased the Magery cap of The Known World to 10. The reason I did that was because of the prerequisite spell modifier to effective skill level issue.
I had discussed adding a technique that allows you to negate the prerequisite penalties, but I felt that that was not in keeping with the intent of techniques, which is to modify specific uses of a skill, not every use of the skill.
Last night (two weeks ago) I think I hit upon a solution that balances all of my goals and desires here.
The first step is to switch the college skills back to one very hard magic skill that is triple the normal cost. The next step is to cap that skill at attribute+2, with having the Unfazeable, Versatile, and Visualization advantages each increase the purchase cap by +1, allowing you to potentially purchase the Sorcery/Magic wildcard skill at attribute+5.
The second step is to drop the Magery advantage cap back down to 7 (with the one individual on Hekinoe with the highest Magery having a 7, not a 10).
The next step is to add a technique associated with each college of spells that allows you to negate part of the prerequisite spell penalty for that college. So there will be a technique associated with the fire college, air college, technological college, etc, etc, etc. This fits more with the design of techniques, instead of modifying every use of a skill, you're modifying using the skill to cast air spells or fire spells, or whatever.
Now the issue becomes representing the fact that knowledge of a certain type improves your ability to shape magic of a certain type. My thought is that each of these techniques, regardless of how high you buy them, only negates 1/3 of the prerequisite penalties to effective skill level with a spell. So with fireball having three prerequisite spells, regardless of how much of Fire College Better Yeah technique you had, you would only negate a -1 penalty to effective skill level with fireball. My thought is that having a skill level of 15 with a college's associated skill would allow your technique to remove up to 2/3 of the prerequisite penalty for spells of that college, and having the associate skill at 16+ would let your technique remove all of the prerequisite penalties for spells of the associated college.
With this system, I'd separate the colleges of spells again to be closer to the way they appear in GURPS Magic. Metal would still get lumped in with earth and weather would still cease to exist. The whole purpose of reducing the amount of colleges was to reduce the amount of points it would cost to be a generalist sorcerer, and switching it to one wildcard skill for magic instead of one skill for each college already does that.
So yeah, I'm brilliant and whatnot and that works pretty nicely for my tastes and purposes and allows the prerequisite penalty issue to be handled.
Wee!
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