House Rules: Initiative Score

So one of the concepts I really like from GURPS is a static initiative score. It is derived from DX and one or two other stats if I remember right. I don’t necessarily dislike 5th Edition (or any edition’s) initiative system of d20 + Dexterity modifier + whatever other random modifiers there are. But I would like something a little more comprehensive and something that doesn’t involve rolling. Initiative has always been a chaotic time in my groups. Whether I’m running games or participating as a player, people just roll and then yell numbers. It is chaotic and confusing and detracts from a DMs ability to set up a fight because he’s trying to assign numbers to voices to characters while doing the same for his NPCs. DnDs system of initiative is also super abstract and doesn’t incorporate real time modifications to your ability to react and stuff. Like you can roll a 20 for initiative, get subjected to a sleep spell, miss four rounds of a fight, and then pop back into the fight at the highest initiative as if your character isn’t just waking up and going “What the fuck happened just now?”

Just as a heads up, I’ve already created the majority of these rules for my Seasonal Arc campaign. This blog post isn’t so much about creating the rules as it is about going over my thought process during the creation of them and refining what I currently have. 

So, let’s work on creating an initiative score. This is a static number that won’t change much from fight to fight. My theory being that attentive characters with an ability to rapidly respond to events will tend to always be attentive and able to rapidly respond to events, while slow unobservant characters will tend to always be slow and unobservant. Unless the former are completely surprised and the latter are doing the surprising. 

So the first thing we need is the base of your initiative score. We need to factor in your physical ability to respond to the events surrounding you as well as your awareness of your surroundings. That’s one thing DnD’s initiative lacks in my opinion. It measures your ability to respond to your surroundings via Dexterity, but doesn’t factor in whether or not you are aware of the events surrounding you. So let’s do something simple. We’ll start with a base of 5. Obviously we’ll add in your character’s Dexterity modifier, because duh. The other ability score modifier I want to add is your Wisdom modifier. This is like when you make Wisdom (Perception) ability checks. It represents your awareness of your surroundings. 

So your base initiative score is as follows 5 + Dexterity modifier + Wisdom modifier. Plus any other relevant modifiers like that one feat Alertness and that Rogue archetype ability that adds your Charisma modifier to initiative checks. 

One thing I should mention before we continue is that I’ve house ruled in some modifications to armor and how that works. It just seemed to make sense to me that if medium and heavy armor affect how much your Dexterity can improve your AC, they should also affect how much your Dexterity affects initiative and Dexterity saving throws. Being unarmored has no effect, wearing light armor limits you to applying a maximum of +4 from Dexterity modifier to initiative, saving throws, and AC. Wearing medium armor limits you to +2 and wearing heavy armor limits you to +0. Don’t wear full plate and try to pull off flippy ninja shit. Hmm, should I limit how much of your Dexterity modifier can carry over to ability checks as well? 

So here is where I get into a bit of an argument with myself. My current iteration of these house rules says being unarmored grants a +1 to initiative, wearing light armor has no benefit or penalty, wearing medium incurs a -1 penalty, and wearing heavy incurs a -2. My logic here is that armor is heavy and would slow your reactions down a bit and that I’ve never moved as fast as I have when I’ve been streaking. However, this portion of the rule kind of goes against 5th Edition’s design goal of not having a bunch of little situational modifiers shitting pluses and minuses all over the place. I think I might simplify it down to say that being unarmored or wearing light armor has no additional penalty to initiative, but wearing medium or heavy armor incurs a -1 penalty to initiative, -2 if the armor in question has a Strength requirement and you do not meet it. That still does the whole modifier thing, but it’s a little simplified. Kind of. Fuck off, it’s my game.

So one thing that bothers me that I mentioned above is that spells and effects that knock you out and restrain you have no effect on your initiative. My current rules have a bunch of penalties to your initiative that depend on how long you’ve been affected and what type of effect it is. Just like above with armor, this flies in the face of 5th Edition’s goal of reducing the modifiers that are all over the place. So here’s my idea for how to reduce that. If you are physically restrained in a way that prevents you from interacting with your surroundings, but are still aware of them (like if you are paralyzed or restrained), you lose your Dexterity modifier to your initiative score. If your senses are impaired, but you are still able to physically interact with your surroundings (like if you are blinded or deafened), you lose your Wisdom modifier to your initiative score. If your senses are impaired and you are physically impaired (like if you are unconscious or something) your initiative becomes last place. The only caveat to this is that if you can get out of these effects by the end of your turn or the end of your next turn if you are afflicted with them on someone else’s turn, they do not change your initiative. 

I like that, it’s a little simplified, but it keeps the core idea that if your senses or physical mobility is impaired, you’ll naturally be impaired in combat.  The final issue I have is the question of whether or not your initiative goes back to normal after these effects end after you’ve been affected by them for a few rounds. Like I said earlier, you shouldn’t just pop up from being unconscious/asleep/dying and be back in first place in the initiative order. I think with being unconscious, you’ve missed too much to hop back into the initiative order. With your senses being impaired and your physical ability being impaired, you’re still aware enough of your surroundings and stuff that you can get back into things quickly enough. That seems reasonable. I think for simplicity’s sake instead of the lines about ending the effect before the end of your next turn not impairing your initiative in the impaired senses and physical impairment sections I’m just going to say that whenever the effect impairing you ends, your Dexterity modifier and Wisdom modifier are restored to your initiative score. 

Alright, let’s talk about a tricky issue: surprise. I’ve gone back and forth with a few ideas about this. The surprisers gain a +5 to initiative score. The surprised have a -5. The surprised lose their Wisdom bonus to their initiative scores. Etc, etc. Most of the options I’ve toyed with fly in the face of 5th Edition’s reduction of situation modifiers. Apparently I can’t escape my let’s have all the situation modifiers of my Pathfinder/3.5 roots. 

This is awkward. I’ve just discovered that they have changed the surprise rules in 5th Edition. In past editions, the surprisers had a surprise round where they could take one action before normal initiative starts. In 5th Edition, if you’re surprised, you can’t move or take an action on your first turn of combat, and you can’t take a reaction until the end of your first turn. This actually works quite well in my opinion. I don’t really feel like it needs any additional modifications from my own house rules. It penalizes those that are surprised in combat enough that I feel like adding anything additional to how surprise and initiative interact might be too much. I could probably make a case for granting an initiative bonus to the surprisers in combat, but that feels kind of unnecessary. I think surprise works as is in terms of how it affects combat and initiative and whatnot. We’ll leave it as is. 

There are a couple more odds and ends, but nothing too noteworthy. When you critically hit in combat, your initiative score gains a +1 and when you critically miss, your initiative gains a -1. Just like normal, when you delay or ready your action, your initiative becomes one higher than the triggering action. If an effect would normally grant you advantage on initiative rolls, you instead gain a +4 and if an effect would normally impose disadvantage on initiative rolls, your initiative score gets a -4.

I think this has been productive. I’ve refined the rules I had already come up with, slightly. I discovered a rule change I was previously unaware of. Good times. 

House Rules: Death and Dying In the Desert

So one of the things I’ve always been irritated with DnD about is the abstract and completely divorced from reality nature of hit points and dying. In the current edition, you drop unconscious at 0 hit points and then have to make death saves. Which are DC 10 d20 rolls  where you either stabilize or die. Three failed death saves in a day and you die. There are other rules for rolling bad on death saves, being attacked while at 0 hit points, rolling a natural 20, and so on and so forth. But here’s the thing that really bugs me, the thing that has always bugged me. Regardless of what your current hit point total is, how many death saves you’ve failed today, and how many hit dice you have left, you are as fine as you are when you’ve just finished a long rest. You operate at peak efficiency regardless of how numerically rough your health is at a given moment. I understand it, but it aggravates me. There should be a cost to getting into combat repeatedly and throwing yourself into the meat grinder with wild abandon, and there isn’t.

On a side note, would you like to know the name of a system that abstracts health and wellness and death and dying but has statistical penalties for having low hit points and low reserves of energy and treats combat like it is always a dangerous thing to engage in? Fucking GURPS.

GURPS treats combat like it is deadly and risky and you can get pretty fucked up in any fight because fights are chaotic and deadly and you’re never a giant sack of hit points. You can always die by being stabbed once or twice and a super high HT only serves to make it slightly easier for you to survive being grievously injured. GURPS was designed to make combat difficult and dangerous. DnD has a different design goal. DnD rules are designed to have X amount of encounters each scenario with the assumption that each encounter will consume Y of the party’s resources with only combat encounters that are specifically designed with a certain level of difficulty in mind having the risk of player death. Basically, DnD is weak sauce easy mode. Which has been the case for the past few editions. In 2nd Edition do you know what happened when you hit 0 hit points? You died. No death saves, no you can still be healed and pop back up, etc. You died. You ran out of hit points and you died and the group's Cleric had like six spell slots total. You still operated at peak efficiency whether you were at 1 hit point or 90, but still. Anyway. 

So my goal for The Seasonal Arc has been to portray Hasta as a deadly world of harsh deserts and murderously hungry desert creatures. Part of the way I want to portray that is to make the creatures tougher and nastier, the combats more difficult, and the death and dying rules a little more aggressive. I also want to slightly increase the player’s capabilities to show that the races of this world have evolved to be tougher just like the beasts have. 

The way I’ve decided to show that being at low hit points is bad is by leveraging levels of exhaustion. There are six levels of exhaustion and at level one your ability checks (skills) have disadvantage. The negative effects scale up until level six, which is death. So I’ve instituted a house rule that says when you’re at half your max hit point total, you gain one level of exhaustion. This level of exhaustion is removed when your hit points rise above half your hit points. This makes it risky to remain at low hit points in battle. But it’s not something that will completely cripple a character and mark him for death immediately. 

The other aspect of health and wellness in DnD is death saves. There’s no real mechanic for showing that you’re in rough shape if you’ve failed two death saves. A character with max hit points, max hit dice, and no failed death saves should be in better shape than a character that’s used a bunch of hit dice and and has failed two death saves. This is all abstract, but it should feel like that second character is closer to death, shouldn’t it? I feel like it should. But that’s just me. 

There are two ways I’ve thought of going about this. The first, and this is the one I currently have listed in my house rules for The Seasonal Arc, is to say that every failed death save you have imparts one level of exhaustion. This means that a character at 0 hit points with two failed death saves will have disadvantage on ability checks, their speed reduced by half, and will have disadvantage on saving throws and attack rolls. The second way I’ve thought of doing this is that each failed death save you have reduces your maximum hit point total. So one failed death save reduces your maximum hit points to ¾ normal and two failed death saves reduces your maximum hit points to ½ normal. 

Part of me, the sadistic part I suppose, is screaming to do both. I feel like both is too much though. With access to unlimited healing, the reducing of hit points isn’t that much of a penalty. It just ties up the characters with cure wounds and healing word studs more, which has value I suppose. I think we’ll just stick with the levels of exhaustion for failed death saves. It’s the quickest and easiest and doesn’t bog down combat with a bunch of “how many hit points do I have right now and how many can I have total” questions and math. 

The main point of this post is to figure out what I want to do with hit dice. I have instituted a house rule that says long rests restore all your hit points, but only restore hit dice equal to your Constitution modifier, minimum of 1. But that’s not really a penalty. If characters have access to unlimited healing magic, they won’t really need to spend many hit dice. So the rule is effectively pointless. But hit dice are tied to health and wellness and recovery and stuff. They represent reserves of energy, I think. So I need to represent that in some way. 

The easiest way to do that is to say when your hit dice are low, you gain a level of exhaustion. Just like with hit points. But again, we run into the issue of hit dice aren’t going to be used as much because of unlimited healing magic. We could go the 4th Edition route and say that healing is done by curative magic allowing you to spend hit dice and boosting the effect of spending them. But that’s silly to me and fuck 4th Edition. It does tie in with what we see in a lot of fantasy novels where healing exhausts the person being healed. But that’s not really the way magic works in my universe. 

Another option is to take a note from GURPS where prolonged periods of exertion like combat and stuff drain your hit dice. But this runs into the problem where in a group of characters, the Wizard with a Constitution of 8 has the same amount of energy reserves (hit dice) as a Barbarian with a Constitution of 16. Fourth level characters will all have four hit dice, regardless of hit points and Constitution and whether or not they are a physically tough class or a physically fragile class. I like the idea that hit dice represent a reserve of physical energy. I like the idea that if they run low or out, maybe just out, it would impact your overall physical capabilities. When you’re exhausted, you don’t run or fight as well as you would you’re well rested and full of vitality. 

Hit dice are a restorative mechanic in 5th Edition. They’re useful because the game isn’t designed for characters to have unlimited access to healing from magic. So it’s pretty safe and easy to completely change how you gain them and what they’re used for. 

So let’s do a little spitballing here. They’re not really dice anymore, but let’s keep calling them that because I feel like it. How about each character has hit “dice” equal to the highest number on their hit dice. So Barbarians have 12 hit "dice" and Rogues have 8 and so on. Let’s also say that you increase/decrease your hit “dice” by your Constitution modifier. So the Barbarian with a 16 Constitution has a total of 15 hit “dice” and the Wizard with a 8 Constitution has a total of 5 hit “dice.” Let’s also say that when you run out of hit “dice” you gain a level of exhaustion. Because you are exhausted.  

Ok, hold up, I’m being stupid. 

So we’ve established that, at least in my opinion, hit dice exist as a form of more limited healing for characters to recover from fights because healing is not infinite. They’re not used for anything else as far as I can tell. So in the first place, limiting their recovery and having negative effects for using them is kind of pointless. They’re not something that’s going to be used often enough to really have an impact except in that one irritating instance where the group splits the party in the middle of the desert and can’t safely take a long rest or walk into a clinic in one of the towns or cities. In talking about this all with some other DMs, Lance also made the point that hit dice and the healing they provide are a mechanic designed to help prevent the 15 minute adventuring day where healers would expend all their spells on healing and then everyone would rest and reset all of their abilities after adventuring for an hour or two.

So if hit dice are essentially useless in a campaign setting where the PCs have access to unlimited healing and spell slots, why bog down the game with additional mechanics tied to hit dice and how they affect you when you run low on them? A more sensible solution would be to just remove the hit dice as a mechanic of the game. This also serves to make those extraordinarily rare situations where the players do not have access to unlimited healing more difficult and a little tense because the players and their characters know that they can’t spend an hour resting and restore all their hit points with their hit dice. 

I like it.

This has been productive. I’m glad we were able to do this. Usually I spend so much time adding rules to games and modifying existing rules. It’s kind of a strange experience to be removing a major mechanic like hit dice from the game. 

Alternate Rules: Dire-er Wolves

In our Curse of Strahd campaign one thing I have tried to show is Navere entering a more feral state. He has been driven to this by the dreary fucked weather patterns and day/night cycle, the malicious subversion of the natural impulses of wolves and other creatures, the widespread subversion of the natural cycle of life and death, as well as the redneck fuckhead Druids that worship the vampire Strahd because the weather changes when he's butthurt. To represent Navere's feral upbringing among wolves being closer to the surface, I've decided to begin taking levels of Barbarian and Kyle has allowed me to change from a Circle of the Land Druid to a Circle of the Moon Druid, which is more focused on wild shape and less on spells. Navere's savage feral nature is closer to the surface, but he is still intelligent and has experienced civilization and has an above average Intelligence and Wisdom. The way I represent this struggle between feral wolfiness and civilized intelligence is any time something that trips Navere's predator/prey instincts happens, I roll a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. Navere has a pretty significant bonus on his Wisdom saving throws, but if he fails, he uses wild shape and becomes a dire wolf. Once he's in dire wolf shape, the same thing happens. If Navere's predator/prey instincts are tripped, he makes a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw. If he fails, he rages. The rage capabilities coupled with his ability to sacrifice spell slots as a bonus action to heal while in wild shape is a pretty good combo. I've also decided that when this happens, once he is in his dire wolf shape, he doesn't leave until the timer runs out on the use or he is forced out of it. In extreme situations I may decide to let him make a Wisdom saving throw to transform out of it. He can still willingly choose to transform into an animal with his wild shape ability, but I'm planning to describe the transformation differently. 

In our last session (which at the time this posts happened slightly over three weeks ago) we saw a saber toothed cat and Kyle mentioned to me that I was one Druid level short of being able to wild shape into a saber toothed cat. Navere is a 5th level Druid and Circle of the Moon Druids can transform into animals with a CR equal to their level divided by three, rounded down. This got me thinking though. Wild shape is somewhat limited because your attack bonus will always be limited by the stats of the form you take. So when I have a +5 proficiency bonus, I'll still be using the dire wolf's +2 proficiency bonus on attack rolls. I got to thinking, what if Kyle just let me upgrade the dire wolf (which has a CR of 1) to a dire-er wolf with a CR of 2? Kyle OKed it, so that's what I'm about to discuss doing here.

So the rules for modifying monsters in this edition are a little goofy. Like in Pathfinder or 3.5 I could just apply a template with a CR adjustment of +1 and boom, we have a CR 2 dire wolf. In 5th Edition, you basically take five categories of abilities from a chart of suggested CRs, add the CRs of the defensive traits together and divide by two and then do the same with the offensive traits and divide by three. Then you compare the results and figure out what CR you want your critter to be.

The categories are as follows: armor class, hit points, attack bonus, damage per round, and save DC. The first three are the defensive traits and the last three are offensive traits. The CR 1 dire wolf currently sits at AC 14 (CR 4), 37 hit points (CR 1/4), +5 attack bonus (CR 4),  one attack per round with an average of 10 damage per round (CR 1), and the DC for its trip special ability is 13 (CR 1/8 - 3). If we add our defensive CR totals of 4, and 0.25 together we get a net CR of 2.125 for defensive traits. If we add our offensive CR totals of 4, 1, and 0.125 together we get a net CR of 1.71 for offensive traits.

Ok. This is seriously confusing. The guidelines in the DMG that I'm looking at say to round up and down to compare the creature's offensive and defensive abilities. So we have CR 2 defensive traits and CR 2 offensive traits. Looking at all this somewhat confusing information, the dire wolf is a CR 2 creature in the first place. But they made it CR 1 in the Monster Manual. Why?

Looking at the rules for encounter building, a CR 1 creature is supposed to be a medium challenge for a group of 4 to 5 first level PCs. Looking at the dire wolf's low AC (14), and hit points (37), it's probably not going to survive more than a few rounds against a group of 1st level PCs. The average damage of the dire wolf (10) and its +5 attack bonus are definitely going to make it a threat, and it could conceivably drop a low hit point character like a Wizard. We also have to consider the fact that dire wolves are pack animals, so you're not really going to encounter them alone, so they're not really ideal for low level encounters. So yeah, a single dire wolf could do some damage to a 1st level party, but one probably won't TPK them and lone dire wolves are not an ideal monster to pit against 1st level characters. During testing they probably justified making them CR 1 by saying that dire wolves are pack animals and if we keep them at CR 1 DMs can use more of them against higher level characters that have more survivability.

Or they just winged it and came up with these monster creation guidelines way after the fact.

Looking at other large size CR 2 animals, they seem to have a slightly higher Strength and more hit points than our large size CR 1 dire wolf. So let's experiment with that for our CR 2 dire-er wolf.  The easiest way I can think of to tweak the dire wolf's stats to achieve slight increases to damage and hit points is fairly obvious. We tweak its Strength and its Constitution. It currently has a Strength of 17 and a Constitution of 15. With just a +1 to both of those ability scores we create minor tweaks to its current stats that make it more comparable to creatures like the saber toothed cat.

With the +1 to the dire wolf's Strength (making it 18) we end up with an attack bonus of +6, an average damage of 11, and we increase the DC for its trip attack to 14. With the +1 to Constitution we make its hit points 42 (it has 5 hit dice). This is comparable to the giant (dire) boar, the giant (dire) hyena, and rhinoceros.  These are all large size, CR 2 animals. I think I could make a case for giving it a sixth hit die as well, but I'm not sure. The giant boar has 5, the giant hyena and rhino have 6, and the saber toothed cat has 7. So I dunno.

Kyle suggested making the dire wolf huge or creating a variant of the winter wolf (a CR 3 monstrosity with 70ish hit points) that has a howl that dealt thunder damage. Huge size is kind of ridiculous. It makes Navere's wild shape ability completely impractical for adventuring. It also jumps the dire wolf's hit points from 37 (5d10+10) to 42 (5d12+10). Which does make its hit points more in line with the previously mentioned CR 2 large size creatures. I'll admit it, I really like the idea of a giant wolf with a thunder damage howl, but it is totally not in keeping with everything Navere is about. Monstrosities are just that. They are unnatural. Wild shape can't transform into them as far as I know. Plus, it doesn't fit with Navere. Navere was raised by wolves, a thunder howl wolf isn't natural and doesn't make sense for his background. It's definitely a cool thing I would totally be for in another situation, but it doesn't fit Navere. Navere's whole reason for going semi-feral is because of the unnatural shit going on in Barovia. He wouldn't go feral because of this bullshit and then embrace an unnatural wolf form. 

One special note about wild shape, you can't cast spells in a wild shape form (at least not until a higher Druid level that I am probably not going to achieve in this campaign), but you can concentrate on spells while in a wild shape form. So one of the cool things Navere can do is cast call lightning and transform into a dire wolf and then emit a deep as fuck howl to "call" down lightning from a storm of his creation onto the heads of his foes. That just sounds like a cool thing to describe. I'm also very excited by the idea of Navere casting haste on himself and then wild shaping. That's going to be a fun time. 

The only problem with these ideas is that if he does fail his Wisdom saving throw and rages, he can no longer concentrate on or cast spells. So that's not ideal, but oh well. I still have plenty of options to do cool things. 

After all this talking and going over monster creation  and wild shape rules and whatnot, my real wish is that you could replace the creature you transform into's proficiency bonus with your own. Period. End of sentence. That would make low CR forms more useful for magical wild shaping, but the rules as written say that you use the creature's attacks as listed and only replace its proficiency bonus on skills (and I think saving throws) if yours is higher. So it kind of clearly states that you use the critter's proficiency bonus for attacks made in that form. I can definitely see the logic for not allowing attacks to use the character's proficiency bonus. You're transforming into a dire wolf and attacking like a dire wolf and Druids, not having giant ass jaws, would not really be terribly proficient in attacking things with giant ass jaws and dragging creatures to the ground with them. I get it, but the special entitled snowflake inside of me wishes things could be different. 

Alas, I have become the thing I hate. So begin the End Times. 

GURPS Hekinoe Magic: I'm Bloody Fucking Brilliant

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!