GURPS Magic in hours
Jan. 6th, 2014 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethToday I am in a numbers sort of mood. It's like when I like sorting beads; even imaginary rule system numbers feel like putting everything in its right places. So I'm playing with GURPS to see how many hours of studying it takes to be a wizard.
I've played with GURPS Improvement through Study rules before. They're for figuring out what down time between missions adds up to.
Normally, it takes 200 hours of learning to gain one point in a skill. But some methods of study are more effective than others.
Intensive Training is usually only available via the military, requires expert teachers, costs quadruple, and students need HT 12+ to keep up the pace. It can be done for up to 16 hours a day; every hour is worth 2 hours learning / 100 hours gains one point. That means it takes 6.25 days to gain one point.
Education with a professional teacher can be done 8 hours a day; this is the normal learning condition, so every hour is one hour learning / 200 hours gains one point. That takes 25 days to gain one point, and most education is not available 7 days a week; but see Self-Teaching for ways to speed it up.
Self-Teaching can be done by reading, exercise, and practice, for up to 12 hours a day, or cumulative 12 with Education or Jobs (so you can add 4 hours homework to your 8 hour day, for instance). Every 2 hours study is one hour learning / 400 hours gains one point. Self Teaching alone takes 33 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Combine 8 hours Education and 4 hours Self-Teaching per day, and you get 10 learning hours for a point in 20 days.
Learning on the Job is least effective because most jobs are very repetitive, but you not only count 8 hours a day at a full time job, you get paid for it. 4 hours work is one hour learning / 800 hours gains one point. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 2 weeks holiday a year, you get 2.5 points per year from your job alone.
But again you can combine that with Self-Teaching, so 8 hours Job plus 4 hours Self-Teaching equals 4 hours learning per day, 50 days for one skill point, or 10 work weeks.
It doesn't explicitly say you can combine Education and a Job, but you can have a part-time Job for 4 hours a day, so that would be 8 hours Education and 4 hours Job for a bone tired 9 learning hours a day earning small money, 22 work days per skill point, or 4 and a bit weeks. It's entirely possible a GM would say that's too many hours of doing and the fatigue precludes extra learnings though.
I'm putting that on the internet dodgy math and all because I'm forever looking it up in the books again again.
I've fiddled around trying to figure out how many points I got from my college degree, and it comes out different than the GURPS page suggests, since I added up how many hours we're supposed to study ourselves and how many were classroom hours and I think they did a lot of rounding up and made assumptions from a different education system.
10 credits at CCN or UEA is supposed to be 100 hours of study, and there's 360 credits in a 3 year degree. Figuring out how many of those are taught takes fiddling around by unit. Dissertation, Diss Prep and Study Skills were all go do it yourself in a library units, so that's... 70 credits? Most people did another 10 credits of Work skills but I took another option on account of work not being a likely future. The other units were taught, but with varying hours to study ratios as the years changed the rules. 1 taught : 3 study was how I worked it out once, but with some error margins. So, 290 credits were taught, 2900 hours, 725 of them with a teacher, 2175 without. 2875 Self-Teaching plus 725 Education. 2162.5 learning hours. 11 skill points, rounding up, for the whole 3 year degree. That's roughly what the GURPS rule book reckons you get every year at college, from two 21 week semesters at one point per subject studying 5 subjects each semester. Either there's odd math involved or one education system really shortchanges us.
There's quite a few hours a year not accounted for though. I didn't spend all of them consuming science fiction, fantasy and fanfic. Also, I reckon poking around on the internet eventually adds up to Research, Computer Operations and Typing points, even if you're mostly looking for random stuff. That would count even slower than a job though.
But the rules are set up so you can't skip sleeping and eating to cram more hours in, because Fatigue would just eat what you were trying to learn, and you can't gain more skill points from working overtime, though clearly you can earn more money if your job is set up that way. So a lot of what I was doing on any given college week was letting my brain recharge before my next attempt at absorbing knowledge.
The fastest way to learn anything though is to be shot at while you're doing it. ... in GURPS. You can spend points gained while adventuring on your skills without having to do math about hours of study. Which makes highly stressful situations excellent learning tools. Which explains the behaviour of certain teachers of my acquaintance...
What I was wondering when I woke up this morning though is how many hours of effort it would take to be able to cast even a small spell.
In a world where magic is a teachable skill, rather than an inborn ability, this matters a lot. If everyone could be doing it, why aren't they? Answer is the same as brain surgery, really, there's a lot of prerequisite skills requiring long study with highly skilled people before you've got a hope of achieving it.
The requirement for skilled teachers is non-trivial. A “professional teacher” is someone with Teaching skill at 12 or higher. In order to teach you a given skill, he must either know that skill at your current skill level or better, or have as many or more points in the skill as you do. An expert teacher has Teaching skill at 12 (or higher), plus a higher level and more points in the skill being taught than you do.
Teaching is an IQ/Average skill with Default: IQ-5. They'd need an IQ of 17 to use it at default and still be of the required quality; anything above 15 is Amazing, and even 13-14 is immediately apparent to any observer. As an Average skill it requires 1 point to be learned to IQ-1, 2 points to be at IQ, 4 to be at IQ+1, 8 for IQ+2 etc etc. For someone of strictly average IQ they'd need 8*200 hours study, 1600 hours at 8 hours a day, 200 days, or 40 working weeks. One solid school year could make an average person a professional Teacher. But that's after the subjects they're going to Teach. (Or one graduate study year, huh.) Teaching is also unlikely to be a skill one can plausibly say one learned through adventuring. It is very rare to be teaching under pressure or under adventure conditions. I'd also suggest the Intensive Training version of Teaching does not translate well to less Intensive conditions... plus it would have the same HT 12+ prerequisite or the Teachers would be dropping from exhaustion too...
To teach a given skill (and spells are skills) a professional teacher can get by with having a high IQ or DX and having 1 point in the skill. But even 1 point represents 200 hours, or 20 work days / 4 weeks in Education for that specific skill alone. An expert Teacher isn't getting by on good basic stats, they've also put in more learning hours than you. You can learn slowly from the talented and quicker from the skilled. But they get pay commensurate with their experience.
I tried looking up how much a teacher would cost / could earn, but couldn't figure. Probably a lot.
Spells range between Hard and Very Hard skills, meaning 1 point gets you to IQ-2 or IQ-3. Bearing in mind that an effective skill of 10 gets you a 50% chance of success and 12 about 75%, you're going to want to start teaching people with an exceptional IQ. IQ includes all your default knowledge, the kind of things you're likely to know by age 16 or to pick up without actually studying, so it's not only biology, but it is meant to be a measure of brainpower. Personally I'd have liked it if they did a bell graph and marked IQs for humans along the curve, but they didn't, they just said 'most normal humans have attributes in the 8-12 range'. So the people you're after for a chance of quick progress in wizard school are the ones on the slope at least, preferably the skinny pointy end, mensa types. Anyone starting with an average or lower IQ is going to need to put in spectacular numbers of hours to have any slightest chance of success, and focus like that is going to define their personality and waking hours. But it's perfectly possible to grind your way to competence. 4 weeks for one point, 13 points per year; if they're all devoted to a Hard spell that's IQ+2 in your favourite and 1 point to be going on with. It would just require you to be studying the exact same thing for 12 hours a day 5 days a week 52 weeks a year. Where 'the exact same thing' is a spell that is likely to be cast in seconds.
If you start with average IQ, you would basically be spending your entire year saying 'Wingardium Leviosa'. All day. Every day. Or studying the wand flick, or reading up on the theory of magic behind it. And that would be it.
And you would still screw it up one time out of four.
... the character that can do that will be rare indeed.
Magery adds to IQ, so it's possible to be smart only at magic. But that's under the standard GURPS magic system where you need Magery 0, the ability to perceive magic, to do any magic at all in Normal Mana conditions; spells also have no default – you can only cast spells you know, that is, have at least 200 learning hours in. If I want to have absolutely anyone be able to use magic I probably want to be using one of the other magic systems, like Ritual Magic, where there's a core skill and spells default off of it. Magery 0 would also need to be a learnable advantage, like Trained by a Master, or granted from above, like Power Investiture. Magery is 5 points for Magery 0, +10 points/level. Power Investiture is just 10 points/level, but gets you access to a fixed spell list with no prerequisites, and requires a self imposed mental disadvantage such as a vow or disciplines of faith [B121]. In effect, Power Investiture comes with a built-in Pact limitation (see B113); so Magery with a Pact would act like Power Investiture? Trained by a Master is a specific Unusual Background, and the points cost reflects some things bundled with it. Perhaps being initiated is an Unusual Background?
The idea of Magery is it is a sense that allows you to perceive Mana and also an ability to manipulate Mana. Mundanes don't have this sense or ability, so they can't do magic. I dislike settings where people are just born different, so I don't want inborn Magery, but since the game rules have Mana as a whole different set of energies already, I can see the need for it. You could give all humans a racial advantage of Magery so they're simply starting on a level playing field, which would be an unusual world, but put no one above another. You could make it a High Mana world, which comes with drawbacks but there's at least rules for already. Or you could adjust assumptions.
If you can see and manipulate mana directly, there's one version of magic you can do.
If you can find items that effect and are effected by mana, that's a second kind of magic.
If you can get in contact with beings who see and manipulate mana, thereby doing deals for spells, that's a third kind of magic.
The first kind of requires humans to be different than baseline. But there's a lot in esoteric lit about opening the third eye and learning to perceive things in a new way.
So I think I'm just going to make Magery a learnable advantage. Which it actually is already if the GM wants, "Other advantages require extraordinary circumstances: divine revelation, ritual ordeal, etc. This is typical of Magery, Power Investiture, and True Faith. In addition to points, these traits require the GM’s permission and suitable in-game events!" So acquiring it should in GURPS logic be a bit spectacular, in addition to saving up the points. Spiritual Quests to kick things off are a classic. Magery 0 at 5 points requires 1000 hours of learning. That's a 20 week course, just to be able to see what they're on about. Or, possibly, it's an hour a week for 20 years, say with meditation lessons that start when children are very small and many of them give up before they get anywhere while a few follow through. A bit like music lessons, where small children get a lot of chances at the basics and there's a lot of extra curricular stuff available, but not many will try and follow through. Only it would be like learning to listen to music rather than play it. Which actually humans do have to learn. Huh.
It would require skilled teachers to get anyone to pay attention for long enough to notice what there is to pay attention to. But meditation teachers do that anyway. So it's plausible.
Inventing cultures due to RPG rules = my idea of fun.
1000 hours to be able to perceive magic well enough to start studying spells; minimum 200 hours after that to cast any spell at all. To get good enough at it to cast reliably, either many years or much IQ. That's going to limit spellcasters plenty without making it a genetic advantage.
If Magic School has to dedicate entire 200 hour courses to a single spell, one that can be cast in a few seconds, that's going to be... a niche interest. Like learning to use the violin but only being able to practice one song on it. Or possibly just play scales. Even if there's multiple lessons in a semester, that's still like 5 spells, or songs, or poems. Who would even concentrate that hard for that long for that little?
I actually don't see the standard spell system attracting, well, anyone. It seems implausible for actual humans to do that. Ever. At all.
Path magic on the other hand has a core skill to devote a lot of hours to, then paths that improve the default on a lot of spells at once, and anyone can attempt those spells at default or pour hours into any of them. It looks more attractive, even if the outcomes work out balanced. Humans can skip around getting a general overview of Thaumaturgy or whatever, then dive in to Food spells or Light spells or whatever gets their attention, and have a go at any of it immediately. They'd be bad at it for just as long, but it's more like picking up a violin and attempting to play symphonies. You fail badly, but the attempt is more fun.
God granted magic means you get gifts presented for being a good little worshipper. You don't have the boring grind phase, you have... the boring daily grind phase? Like, live as a monk successfully, maybe get a spell. It would be the being a monk that would appeal, and then the spells are shiny bonuses.
On the other hand, I just realised I have spent more than 200 hours easily doing the exact same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
It's called video games, and I play match 3 games or tetris or other really simple clicky things loooooooong past the point where you'd think they'd be annoying. So, spell training in really simple tasks would appeal, to the same kind of people as play tetris, for the same kind of hours. In a modern setting you'd even get games designed to help learn spells. Apps for improving wand technique. Wii games where you have to move in funny squiggles. Dance dance games where you practice spell footwork. ... because spells in GURPS require foot movements, hand movements, and vocal components. They're a song and dance, basically.
Tons of people learn songs and dances, but if you had to do the macarena for 200 hours before it turned into a shiny spell, I suspect very few people would have done the macarena enough.
... that would be 3000 macarenas.
... yes I looked it up and did the maths.
... now I'm wondering if reality does in fact have unlockable achievements like that, but since people invented more music and more dances, nobody pays attention long enough or does enough waltzing to ever find out...
Even if you're studying multiple spells, that would still be 20 weeks each, even if you were doing a different thing every day of the week. You could get 7 spells in two and a half years with no weekends, so say a three year degree. 7 spells at 1 point each.
And that's what a wizard would have to do before they could take them adventuring. If you can't cast at default, and you haven't been watching someone using them in an adventure, you can't use adventure gained character points on them. "You can only spend character points to improve skills or techniques that, in the GM’s opinion, saw significant use in the adventure during which you earned the points." You have to grind before you can go quest.
It does, however, explain what so many wizards are doing questing, since even a fairly small one can give them so much more skill than doing the same song and dance back in the tower.
... if Path magic can be done from default, it can be learned much, much quicker... if you are willing to risk your neck trying. Huh. Useful.
The effort is more narrowly concentrated than for any other skill, since studying judo or karate means lots of different moves and activities in any 200 hours, but studying a spell is just studying those few seconds of spell. Even if getting the hang of it requires understanding underlying principles and biomechanics, that's still a lot of the same song and dance.
Conclusion: Wizards would have to be very odd people to put the hours in necessary to the learning of spells. Very. They would have to be getting something out of the process, rather than just the goal. Like, I can understand meditating for 200 hours, even if it would take a while mixed in with regular life, and meditating looks pretty repetitive. Dancing is good, even if it's the same dance a lot. Like t'ai chi, same moves, nice meditate, plenty people do that many many hours. But the more concentrated their 200 hours are, the less of their day has anything else at all in it, the more mentally unusual they have to be.
... in ways somewhat familiar to autistic spectrum me...
Further, the spells you may want to learn are likely to be at the end of very long chains of prerequisites. Maybe you fancy casting Lightning, but you need 6 air spells first, and they start with Seek Air, which you'd think there's not often use for. That means it don't cost 200 hours for Lightning, it costs 1400 hours for all the prerequisites. Obviously you get the benefits of all those spells too, but that's your 3 year 7 spell course, just to get the flashy one that first caught your eye.
Again, it seems less plausible to me that humans would put in the effort; more plausible the Path magic would appeal, since you can at least attempt Lightning very early on. Badly, but you can do it.
It explains why so many wizards in stories are grey beards. Add up all the prerequisites and hours, and you have to both find a teacher willing and able to teach the entire chain of spells, and put in all the multiples of 200 hours to get all the way along it. Many much long studying to get much of anywhere.
Okay, it's two in the afternoon and this is a lot of fiddling around for not much reason.
Mostly I just woke up thinking of Michael Fassbender as a magic tutor, and then math happened.
I've played with GURPS Improvement through Study rules before. They're for figuring out what down time between missions adds up to.
Normally, it takes 200 hours of learning to gain one point in a skill. But some methods of study are more effective than others.
Intensive Training is usually only available via the military, requires expert teachers, costs quadruple, and students need HT 12+ to keep up the pace. It can be done for up to 16 hours a day; every hour is worth 2 hours learning / 100 hours gains one point. That means it takes 6.25 days to gain one point.
Education with a professional teacher can be done 8 hours a day; this is the normal learning condition, so every hour is one hour learning / 200 hours gains one point. That takes 25 days to gain one point, and most education is not available 7 days a week; but see Self-Teaching for ways to speed it up.
Self-Teaching can be done by reading, exercise, and practice, for up to 12 hours a day, or cumulative 12 with Education or Jobs (so you can add 4 hours homework to your 8 hour day, for instance). Every 2 hours study is one hour learning / 400 hours gains one point. Self Teaching alone takes 33 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Combine 8 hours Education and 4 hours Self-Teaching per day, and you get 10 learning hours for a point in 20 days.
Learning on the Job is least effective because most jobs are very repetitive, but you not only count 8 hours a day at a full time job, you get paid for it. 4 hours work is one hour learning / 800 hours gains one point. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 2 weeks holiday a year, you get 2.5 points per year from your job alone.
But again you can combine that with Self-Teaching, so 8 hours Job plus 4 hours Self-Teaching equals 4 hours learning per day, 50 days for one skill point, or 10 work weeks.
It doesn't explicitly say you can combine Education and a Job, but you can have a part-time Job for 4 hours a day, so that would be 8 hours Education and 4 hours Job for a bone tired 9 learning hours a day earning small money, 22 work days per skill point, or 4 and a bit weeks. It's entirely possible a GM would say that's too many hours of doing and the fatigue precludes extra learnings though.
I'm putting that on the internet dodgy math and all because I'm forever looking it up in the books again again.
I've fiddled around trying to figure out how many points I got from my college degree, and it comes out different than the GURPS page suggests, since I added up how many hours we're supposed to study ourselves and how many were classroom hours and I think they did a lot of rounding up and made assumptions from a different education system.
10 credits at CCN or UEA is supposed to be 100 hours of study, and there's 360 credits in a 3 year degree. Figuring out how many of those are taught takes fiddling around by unit. Dissertation, Diss Prep and Study Skills were all go do it yourself in a library units, so that's... 70 credits? Most people did another 10 credits of Work skills but I took another option on account of work not being a likely future. The other units were taught, but with varying hours to study ratios as the years changed the rules. 1 taught : 3 study was how I worked it out once, but with some error margins. So, 290 credits were taught, 2900 hours, 725 of them with a teacher, 2175 without. 2875 Self-Teaching plus 725 Education. 2162.5 learning hours. 11 skill points, rounding up, for the whole 3 year degree. That's roughly what the GURPS rule book reckons you get every year at college, from two 21 week semesters at one point per subject studying 5 subjects each semester. Either there's odd math involved or one education system really shortchanges us.
There's quite a few hours a year not accounted for though. I didn't spend all of them consuming science fiction, fantasy and fanfic. Also, I reckon poking around on the internet eventually adds up to Research, Computer Operations and Typing points, even if you're mostly looking for random stuff. That would count even slower than a job though.
But the rules are set up so you can't skip sleeping and eating to cram more hours in, because Fatigue would just eat what you were trying to learn, and you can't gain more skill points from working overtime, though clearly you can earn more money if your job is set up that way. So a lot of what I was doing on any given college week was letting my brain recharge before my next attempt at absorbing knowledge.
The fastest way to learn anything though is to be shot at while you're doing it. ... in GURPS. You can spend points gained while adventuring on your skills without having to do math about hours of study. Which makes highly stressful situations excellent learning tools. Which explains the behaviour of certain teachers of my acquaintance...
What I was wondering when I woke up this morning though is how many hours of effort it would take to be able to cast even a small spell.
In a world where magic is a teachable skill, rather than an inborn ability, this matters a lot. If everyone could be doing it, why aren't they? Answer is the same as brain surgery, really, there's a lot of prerequisite skills requiring long study with highly skilled people before you've got a hope of achieving it.
The requirement for skilled teachers is non-trivial. A “professional teacher” is someone with Teaching skill at 12 or higher. In order to teach you a given skill, he must either know that skill at your current skill level or better, or have as many or more points in the skill as you do. An expert teacher has Teaching skill at 12 (or higher), plus a higher level and more points in the skill being taught than you do.
Teaching is an IQ/Average skill with Default: IQ-5. They'd need an IQ of 17 to use it at default and still be of the required quality; anything above 15 is Amazing, and even 13-14 is immediately apparent to any observer. As an Average skill it requires 1 point to be learned to IQ-1, 2 points to be at IQ, 4 to be at IQ+1, 8 for IQ+2 etc etc. For someone of strictly average IQ they'd need 8*200 hours study, 1600 hours at 8 hours a day, 200 days, or 40 working weeks. One solid school year could make an average person a professional Teacher. But that's after the subjects they're going to Teach. (Or one graduate study year, huh.) Teaching is also unlikely to be a skill one can plausibly say one learned through adventuring. It is very rare to be teaching under pressure or under adventure conditions. I'd also suggest the Intensive Training version of Teaching does not translate well to less Intensive conditions... plus it would have the same HT 12+ prerequisite or the Teachers would be dropping from exhaustion too...
To teach a given skill (and spells are skills) a professional teacher can get by with having a high IQ or DX and having 1 point in the skill. But even 1 point represents 200 hours, or 20 work days / 4 weeks in Education for that specific skill alone. An expert Teacher isn't getting by on good basic stats, they've also put in more learning hours than you. You can learn slowly from the talented and quicker from the skilled. But they get pay commensurate with their experience.
I tried looking up how much a teacher would cost / could earn, but couldn't figure. Probably a lot.
Spells range between Hard and Very Hard skills, meaning 1 point gets you to IQ-2 or IQ-3. Bearing in mind that an effective skill of 10 gets you a 50% chance of success and 12 about 75%, you're going to want to start teaching people with an exceptional IQ. IQ includes all your default knowledge, the kind of things you're likely to know by age 16 or to pick up without actually studying, so it's not only biology, but it is meant to be a measure of brainpower. Personally I'd have liked it if they did a bell graph and marked IQs for humans along the curve, but they didn't, they just said 'most normal humans have attributes in the 8-12 range'. So the people you're after for a chance of quick progress in wizard school are the ones on the slope at least, preferably the skinny pointy end, mensa types. Anyone starting with an average or lower IQ is going to need to put in spectacular numbers of hours to have any slightest chance of success, and focus like that is going to define their personality and waking hours. But it's perfectly possible to grind your way to competence. 4 weeks for one point, 13 points per year; if they're all devoted to a Hard spell that's IQ+2 in your favourite and 1 point to be going on with. It would just require you to be studying the exact same thing for 12 hours a day 5 days a week 52 weeks a year. Where 'the exact same thing' is a spell that is likely to be cast in seconds.
If you start with average IQ, you would basically be spending your entire year saying 'Wingardium Leviosa'. All day. Every day. Or studying the wand flick, or reading up on the theory of magic behind it. And that would be it.
And you would still screw it up one time out of four.
... the character that can do that will be rare indeed.
Magery adds to IQ, so it's possible to be smart only at magic. But that's under the standard GURPS magic system where you need Magery 0, the ability to perceive magic, to do any magic at all in Normal Mana conditions; spells also have no default – you can only cast spells you know, that is, have at least 200 learning hours in. If I want to have absolutely anyone be able to use magic I probably want to be using one of the other magic systems, like Ritual Magic, where there's a core skill and spells default off of it. Magery 0 would also need to be a learnable advantage, like Trained by a Master, or granted from above, like Power Investiture. Magery is 5 points for Magery 0, +10 points/level. Power Investiture is just 10 points/level, but gets you access to a fixed spell list with no prerequisites, and requires a self imposed mental disadvantage such as a vow or disciplines of faith [B121]. In effect, Power Investiture comes with a built-in Pact limitation (see B113); so Magery with a Pact would act like Power Investiture? Trained by a Master is a specific Unusual Background, and the points cost reflects some things bundled with it. Perhaps being initiated is an Unusual Background?
The idea of Magery is it is a sense that allows you to perceive Mana and also an ability to manipulate Mana. Mundanes don't have this sense or ability, so they can't do magic. I dislike settings where people are just born different, so I don't want inborn Magery, but since the game rules have Mana as a whole different set of energies already, I can see the need for it. You could give all humans a racial advantage of Magery so they're simply starting on a level playing field, which would be an unusual world, but put no one above another. You could make it a High Mana world, which comes with drawbacks but there's at least rules for already. Or you could adjust assumptions.
If you can see and manipulate mana directly, there's one version of magic you can do.
If you can find items that effect and are effected by mana, that's a second kind of magic.
If you can get in contact with beings who see and manipulate mana, thereby doing deals for spells, that's a third kind of magic.
The first kind of requires humans to be different than baseline. But there's a lot in esoteric lit about opening the third eye and learning to perceive things in a new way.
So I think I'm just going to make Magery a learnable advantage. Which it actually is already if the GM wants, "Other advantages require extraordinary circumstances: divine revelation, ritual ordeal, etc. This is typical of Magery, Power Investiture, and True Faith. In addition to points, these traits require the GM’s permission and suitable in-game events!" So acquiring it should in GURPS logic be a bit spectacular, in addition to saving up the points. Spiritual Quests to kick things off are a classic. Magery 0 at 5 points requires 1000 hours of learning. That's a 20 week course, just to be able to see what they're on about. Or, possibly, it's an hour a week for 20 years, say with meditation lessons that start when children are very small and many of them give up before they get anywhere while a few follow through. A bit like music lessons, where small children get a lot of chances at the basics and there's a lot of extra curricular stuff available, but not many will try and follow through. Only it would be like learning to listen to music rather than play it. Which actually humans do have to learn. Huh.
It would require skilled teachers to get anyone to pay attention for long enough to notice what there is to pay attention to. But meditation teachers do that anyway. So it's plausible.
Inventing cultures due to RPG rules = my idea of fun.
1000 hours to be able to perceive magic well enough to start studying spells; minimum 200 hours after that to cast any spell at all. To get good enough at it to cast reliably, either many years or much IQ. That's going to limit spellcasters plenty without making it a genetic advantage.
If Magic School has to dedicate entire 200 hour courses to a single spell, one that can be cast in a few seconds, that's going to be... a niche interest. Like learning to use the violin but only being able to practice one song on it. Or possibly just play scales. Even if there's multiple lessons in a semester, that's still like 5 spells, or songs, or poems. Who would even concentrate that hard for that long for that little?
I actually don't see the standard spell system attracting, well, anyone. It seems implausible for actual humans to do that. Ever. At all.
Path magic on the other hand has a core skill to devote a lot of hours to, then paths that improve the default on a lot of spells at once, and anyone can attempt those spells at default or pour hours into any of them. It looks more attractive, even if the outcomes work out balanced. Humans can skip around getting a general overview of Thaumaturgy or whatever, then dive in to Food spells or Light spells or whatever gets their attention, and have a go at any of it immediately. They'd be bad at it for just as long, but it's more like picking up a violin and attempting to play symphonies. You fail badly, but the attempt is more fun.
God granted magic means you get gifts presented for being a good little worshipper. You don't have the boring grind phase, you have... the boring daily grind phase? Like, live as a monk successfully, maybe get a spell. It would be the being a monk that would appeal, and then the spells are shiny bonuses.
On the other hand, I just realised I have spent more than 200 hours easily doing the exact same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...
It's called video games, and I play match 3 games or tetris or other really simple clicky things loooooooong past the point where you'd think they'd be annoying. So, spell training in really simple tasks would appeal, to the same kind of people as play tetris, for the same kind of hours. In a modern setting you'd even get games designed to help learn spells. Apps for improving wand technique. Wii games where you have to move in funny squiggles. Dance dance games where you practice spell footwork. ... because spells in GURPS require foot movements, hand movements, and vocal components. They're a song and dance, basically.
Tons of people learn songs and dances, but if you had to do the macarena for 200 hours before it turned into a shiny spell, I suspect very few people would have done the macarena enough.
... that would be 3000 macarenas.
... yes I looked it up and did the maths.
... now I'm wondering if reality does in fact have unlockable achievements like that, but since people invented more music and more dances, nobody pays attention long enough or does enough waltzing to ever find out...
Even if you're studying multiple spells, that would still be 20 weeks each, even if you were doing a different thing every day of the week. You could get 7 spells in two and a half years with no weekends, so say a three year degree. 7 spells at 1 point each.
And that's what a wizard would have to do before they could take them adventuring. If you can't cast at default, and you haven't been watching someone using them in an adventure, you can't use adventure gained character points on them. "You can only spend character points to improve skills or techniques that, in the GM’s opinion, saw significant use in the adventure during which you earned the points." You have to grind before you can go quest.
It does, however, explain what so many wizards are doing questing, since even a fairly small one can give them so much more skill than doing the same song and dance back in the tower.
... if Path magic can be done from default, it can be learned much, much quicker... if you are willing to risk your neck trying. Huh. Useful.
The effort is more narrowly concentrated than for any other skill, since studying judo or karate means lots of different moves and activities in any 200 hours, but studying a spell is just studying those few seconds of spell. Even if getting the hang of it requires understanding underlying principles and biomechanics, that's still a lot of the same song and dance.
Conclusion: Wizards would have to be very odd people to put the hours in necessary to the learning of spells. Very. They would have to be getting something out of the process, rather than just the goal. Like, I can understand meditating for 200 hours, even if it would take a while mixed in with regular life, and meditating looks pretty repetitive. Dancing is good, even if it's the same dance a lot. Like t'ai chi, same moves, nice meditate, plenty people do that many many hours. But the more concentrated their 200 hours are, the less of their day has anything else at all in it, the more mentally unusual they have to be.
... in ways somewhat familiar to autistic spectrum me...
Further, the spells you may want to learn are likely to be at the end of very long chains of prerequisites. Maybe you fancy casting Lightning, but you need 6 air spells first, and they start with Seek Air, which you'd think there's not often use for. That means it don't cost 200 hours for Lightning, it costs 1400 hours for all the prerequisites. Obviously you get the benefits of all those spells too, but that's your 3 year 7 spell course, just to get the flashy one that first caught your eye.
Again, it seems less plausible to me that humans would put in the effort; more plausible the Path magic would appeal, since you can at least attempt Lightning very early on. Badly, but you can do it.
It explains why so many wizards in stories are grey beards. Add up all the prerequisites and hours, and you have to both find a teacher willing and able to teach the entire chain of spells, and put in all the multiples of 200 hours to get all the way along it. Many much long studying to get much of anywhere.
Okay, it's two in the afternoon and this is a lot of fiddling around for not much reason.
Mostly I just woke up thinking of Michael Fassbender as a magic tutor, and then math happened.
Correction, I forgot a rule for Magery
Date: 2015-04-01 04:58 am (UTC)Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 25 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 10 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 33 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
With spells, those numbers would be for Magery 0.
I had forgotten this, but levels of Magery take 10% off the time to learn a spell.
Magery 1 - 10% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 5.625 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 22.5 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 9 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 30 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 2 - 20% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 5 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 20 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 8 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 26 2/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 3 - 30% off
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 4.375 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 17.5 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 7 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 23 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Magery 4 - 40% off (the maximum)
Intensive Training can give you a single point in a skill in 3.75 days.
Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 15 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 6 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 20 days per point, with no need for weekends.
Re: Correction, I forgot a rule for Magery
Date: 2015-04-01 05:05 am (UTC)I usually max Magery at 3. So if there's such a thing as wizard boot camp, with intensive military style training, then 4 16 hour days plus 6 hours will give them 1 spell. And that sounds great, you could learn a spectacular grimoire at that rate, but the entire 70 hours is spent chanting 'Wingardium Leviosa' while doing the wand flick. There are monk disciplines that do mantra and moving meditation quite intensively, but even so, that's... I just have a lot of difficulty believing in real people who can study at these rates.
If magic is simple repetition, I can only believe in the daily dance version, doing a little rote repetition every day. If it involves a much wider sort of study, like magical principles, then okay, maybe people can do 12 hour days and get one spell down in a week. But thaumatology is a seperate study, so in the ordinary Magic system, that just doesn't seem to be the case.
It's the best argument for the path/book version of magic I can think of. That is based on a central systemising principle, not simple rote learning of individual spells. I can actually believe people studying that just like college.
correction to my correction
Date: 2016-07-29 08:16 pm (UTC)Education with a skilled Teacher will give one point in 25 days, but probably have weekends off.
Education plus homework is one point in 20 days, and again probably have weekends off.
Teaching yourself alone, if possible, takes 33 1/3 days per point, with no need for weekends.
... double all the numbers for teaching + reading.
Magery 0 20 days
Magery 1 18 days
Magery 2 16 days
Magery 3 14 days
Magery 4 12 days
how did I slip on that one?
this is embarrassing.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-01 05:35 am (UTC)Go look at the dreamwidth comments for more details.
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Date: 2018-01-06 01:13 pm (UTC)