Magic High School
Jun. 19th, 2018 06:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI bought the GURPS Worminghall and Back to School supplements and am still poking them
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3554615.html
but considering that I've been reading Harry Potter fanfic almost exclusively for a while now
you can guess what I'm thinking about.
Not that GURPS is a good fit for HP magic, if you can just pick up a word in a book and do a spell of it, but there's some suggestions for making school more exciting for mages by letting spells be cast from really early on in the learning process.
I usually think about magic university, not high school. At 11 the students haven't grown in to their full basic attributes yet, whatever those will be.
A 10-year-old has 80% of his adult ST, 90% of his adult DX and IQ, and SM -1.
A 15-year-old has adult scores.
I tend to mis remember that as 16, because end of high school beginning of A levels seems like the natural cutoff for establishing IQ and defaults. But no, GCSEs, just barely, specialise on top of IQ. ... or OWLs and NEWTs.
What you can roll at default is culturally specific. Muggleborn wizards who watch TV might be able to roll for SCUBA or other TL dependent skills. Purebloods logically cannot, but ought to get defaults on the wizarding equivalents. Except spells have no default, so they'd get, what, default Savoir Faire and Thaumatology? Or just an Unusual Background that lets them study all the things? Except everyone at Hogwarts has the necessary Background, obvs, by being there.
Buying the same level of IQ in a different culture that is effectively a much lower TL isn't going to be the same sort of useful. I have no idea how to math that though.
I do think that a Hogwarts education straight up doesn't give the same IQ as a muggle education for the same ages would. Those points might go into Magery, somehow, but they aren't giving them a broad background such as you could roll against to know random things. It's not even great at teaching them everything kids of that culture are expected to know, too many things are left to parents or nice adults if Harry is any template.
Magery in HP is somehow tied to wands. If wandless magic is difficult yet possible, it could be a question of Familiarity - having been taught with a wand they are Unfamiliar with wandless. But that could be overcome with eight hours practice, which isn't exactly what's implied as I understand it. If wandless magic were simply impossible, that would be easy too, Magery would be bought with a bunch of Gadget limitations. But it's somewhere in between. So my guess is
Magery 0 [5] makes one a witch or wizard, allowing them to sense and manipulate magic in a normal mana world.
further levels of Magery are bought with the Gadget limitations
and spells in GURPS already might require higher levels of Magery to cast, so wandless magic is difficult for some spells (losing the Magery bonus) and impossible for others (that need Magery to cast at all)
Magery costs 10 per level
Limitations can reduce that by up to -80%
Can Be Stolen lists Wands under Quick Contest of ST -30%
Halve that if the wand will not immediately work for the thief, but I think in HP it does?
The value of Breakable depends on the wands durability and size modifier.
Wooden tools have DR2. A 10" wand has SM-5, if I've read the table right, but I'm not at all sure because equipment tables don't have SM on them. Still.
That's -20% for DR2 and -10% for SM-5.
You probably cannot repair it but whether it takes inconvenient effort to replace depends on setting and definitions. If it do it's -15%. I think a trip to one specific shop is inconvenient to the adventurer in the middle of a fight, especially since they lost the ability to teleport when it broke. And to replace it yourself takes some Rare ingredients like bits of dragon or unicorn or phoenix.
-30% + -20% + -10% = -60% limitation, or -75% if wand shopping is officially inconvenient.
Magery with the Wand limitation, Breakable, Can be Stolen by ST, replaceable but will immediately work for the thief, costs 4 per level. Or only 3 if wand shopping is Inconvenient.
Magery 0 + Magery 4 would usually cost 45 points, but with this limitation costs either 21 or 17.
Discount.
What that represents though... is it that some wizards can't cast some spells, or that some wands can't? Or some awkward combination of the two? The wand chooses the wizard. And some wands are more powerful than others. But you can buy wands in a shop. Can you buy Magery in a shop, or just a tool to express what you already have? Significant difference in character. Interesting argument if wizards don't agree.
Does the wand have power or channel it?
... it has the Staff spell on it, does it have any others?
If each wand is sufficiently distinct to count as Unfamiliar then that's a -2 penalty until 8 hours of practice doing spells with it, which could take a lot longer than 8 hours if you want to be picky given that spells take a couple seconds to cast and rather longer to recover from. Doing a spell you know so well you can just keep doing it for 8 hours would be most efficient but also not very interesting. Still, potential easy mechanism for disadvantage in using the wrong wand.
However it works - and it do seem like a substandard wand can hold people back - an 11 year old gets a wand and it's off to the races.
So an average human has IQ 10, but an average 11 year old has only 90% that and IQ 9.
With the suggestions in the magic school supplements, in order to start casting a spell, you need to spend enough time studying it for Familiarity. That's 8 hours. At that point you learn it at what would be default for other IQ skills, IQ-6 for Hard and IQ-7 for Very Hard. Skill rolls assume you're under adventuring conditions: time pressured, high stakes, probably involving violence. "In nonadventuring situations when you have lots of time to prepare and face minimal risk, the GM may give you +4 or more to skill." And the magic school supplement says "Initially his teacher will provide easy tasks and favorable conditions, worth +4 to +6 to skill". So once you have that Familiarity with the spell, you can cast it at between IQ-2 (alone, unhurried, no stakes, no one shooting at you) to IQ (with a teacher nudging the odds even better). And that's what you do for the rest of the 200 hours, if you want to learn it well enough to use as a prerequisite to studying other spells.
... I can imagine students who put in their 8 hours and wander off, or course designs that give you all the spells with no prerequisites in 8 hours each and then start testing you...
IQ-6 on an IQ of 9 is just barely possible if you crit. But they probably have enough Magery to get a better chance than that.
Skill ___Probability
Level ___of Success
3 ______0.5%
4 ______1.9%
5 ______4.6%
6 ______9.3%
7 _____16.2%
8 _____25.9%
9 _____37.5%
10 ____50.0%
11 ____62.5%
12 ____74.1%
13 ____83.8%
14 ____90.7%
15 ____95.4%
16+ ___98.1%
(sorry clunky underlines trying to make it display in columns)
On a lot of that probability curve the -2 for Familiarity makes a lot of a difference. About 25% difference around the average. You want a familiar tool for most tasks.
Magery makes a heck of a lot of difference. It's entirely up to the GM how Magery is distributed, but a player is likely to buy it as high as the setting allows. Some spells in supplements require Magery 4 but beyond that is no odds to prerequisites. In character though, how special is what you just splurged on? And exactly what is it?
If there's differences in power that are in born then you get the pureblood obsession following pretty naturally, and if the differences are ones you can buy by getting a better wand, well, whatever wands sell for it is very much worth it.
Spell failures don't always just mean it sputters out.
HP never has 'accidentally summon a demon' as a spell fail, does it? GURPS does.
A couple points of skill can be crucial to survival. For bystanders.
So you'd also want smarter wizards, but evidence in HP is they train everyone with Magery. Evidence being Crabbe and Goyle, and possibly distorted by Gryffindors not liking them very much, but still.
Someone of average intelligence with a superlative wand might be better at magic than a smart person with a less powerful one... if wands are where the Magery lives.
Magery is very, very much cheaper than IQ with these settings on. IQ is 20 per level, Magery above 0 is usually 10 but now 4 or 3. Very much more efficient to specialise.
And as previously noted, wizards and witches would have enough difference in ability to learn muggle stuff that it would be noticeable to them. Their time and skill bonuses for magic make them whizzes. Specialising would be easy and good for the ego.
... a broad range of IQ based skills can eventually be traded for raising your actual IQ, in this school supplement, so studying a lot of muggle stuff would eventually make them better at everything IQ based, including magic. I say again, a broad muggle education would raise their IQ...
... but spells are IQ based too, so they could trade points there. The problem with that being that usually wizards spend minimally on each spell in order to learn as many as possible, so they never get the kind of accumulation they'd need for trading in, where you need two or more points in eight different skills that would have their points cost reduced if you converted it to IQ. Also, the rule is the skills need to be 'sufficiently varied'. It would be entirely fair to call magic one specialisation and say different spells are insufficiently varied. And it's all an optional rule anyway. But. Decent broad education, better IQ, better magic.
Am not impressed with Hogwarts.
ANYway.
Once a student knows a spell at all, they can end up in adventure type situations and try and cast it
even at IQ-6
at which point they can put earned points into it if they're successful.
That does require there to be significant stakes. Screwing up could cost their lives.
But if they somehow beat the odds and roll successfully, they get better really, really fast.
Which might explain some about the Hogwarts learning environment, if they noticed that the most magical students have a fighting chance even at fighting, and decided it was worth it.
Students attain that last 10% of their IQ when they turn 15. Just in time for exams, so that's nice. That would be another jump in skill.
... if it was really that precise in world there'd be all sorts of things that were suddenly allowed because Adult. But no, much study required. And as for emotional maturity... really roleplaying kids should be about buying off disads in that area...
There's actually a box about what kids learn in school, and it is mostly buying off disads like not being able to read or do math.
Also the attributes are supposed to change smoothly between ages, it's just if the change is 1 whole point it has to happen all at once, so, jump. But if you have more than 1 point left to change you'd do it in between times.
GURPS spells with no prerequisites
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/2683969.html
is 51 spells, that could be taught for 8 hours each, and then, in theory, the teacher could shrug and leave the students to polish them up.
some of them have other prereqs like Empathy.
And the Worminghall way teaches at most one spell a week, with holidays
but still
imagine one year of making your students really bad at such a range of spells
and what the students could do with them.
... mostly sense, seek, and set stuff on fire. oh dear...
It wouldn't be the most useful way at all, but you could get a lot of dabblers that way, which is it's own kind of fun.
There's also techniques for practicing while asleep. Dream Rehearsal, where you can go over your successes again while you snooze. Seems a bit cinematic to me, but we are talking about cinema, so...
I was thinking, if Our Hero somehow has other people's memories in his head, would that give him more Familiarities or some kind of skill bonus? Can other people's hours be transferred? Not a great plan for PCs, too messy, but still seems logical.
Buffy did sleep study, dreamed her Slayer memories, was far too good at martial arts because of all the extra practice.
Okay, so I'm reading more than I'm typing, I'll go read.
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3554615.html
but considering that I've been reading Harry Potter fanfic almost exclusively for a while now
you can guess what I'm thinking about.
Not that GURPS is a good fit for HP magic, if you can just pick up a word in a book and do a spell of it, but there's some suggestions for making school more exciting for mages by letting spells be cast from really early on in the learning process.
I usually think about magic university, not high school. At 11 the students haven't grown in to their full basic attributes yet, whatever those will be.
A 10-year-old has 80% of his adult ST, 90% of his adult DX and IQ, and SM -1.
A 15-year-old has adult scores.
I tend to mis remember that as 16, because end of high school beginning of A levels seems like the natural cutoff for establishing IQ and defaults. But no, GCSEs, just barely, specialise on top of IQ. ... or OWLs and NEWTs.
What you can roll at default is culturally specific. Muggleborn wizards who watch TV might be able to roll for SCUBA or other TL dependent skills. Purebloods logically cannot, but ought to get defaults on the wizarding equivalents. Except spells have no default, so they'd get, what, default Savoir Faire and Thaumatology? Or just an Unusual Background that lets them study all the things? Except everyone at Hogwarts has the necessary Background, obvs, by being there.
Buying the same level of IQ in a different culture that is effectively a much lower TL isn't going to be the same sort of useful. I have no idea how to math that though.
I do think that a Hogwarts education straight up doesn't give the same IQ as a muggle education for the same ages would. Those points might go into Magery, somehow, but they aren't giving them a broad background such as you could roll against to know random things. It's not even great at teaching them everything kids of that culture are expected to know, too many things are left to parents or nice adults if Harry is any template.
Magery in HP is somehow tied to wands. If wandless magic is difficult yet possible, it could be a question of Familiarity - having been taught with a wand they are Unfamiliar with wandless. But that could be overcome with eight hours practice, which isn't exactly what's implied as I understand it. If wandless magic were simply impossible, that would be easy too, Magery would be bought with a bunch of Gadget limitations. But it's somewhere in between. So my guess is
Magery 0 [5] makes one a witch or wizard, allowing them to sense and manipulate magic in a normal mana world.
further levels of Magery are bought with the Gadget limitations
and spells in GURPS already might require higher levels of Magery to cast, so wandless magic is difficult for some spells (losing the Magery bonus) and impossible for others (that need Magery to cast at all)
Magery costs 10 per level
Limitations can reduce that by up to -80%
Can Be Stolen lists Wands under Quick Contest of ST -30%
Halve that if the wand will not immediately work for the thief, but I think in HP it does?
The value of Breakable depends on the wands durability and size modifier.
Wooden tools have DR2. A 10" wand has SM-5, if I've read the table right, but I'm not at all sure because equipment tables don't have SM on them. Still.
That's -20% for DR2 and -10% for SM-5.
You probably cannot repair it but whether it takes inconvenient effort to replace depends on setting and definitions. If it do it's -15%. I think a trip to one specific shop is inconvenient to the adventurer in the middle of a fight, especially since they lost the ability to teleport when it broke. And to replace it yourself takes some Rare ingredients like bits of dragon or unicorn or phoenix.
-30% + -20% + -10% = -60% limitation, or -75% if wand shopping is officially inconvenient.
Magery with the Wand limitation, Breakable, Can be Stolen by ST, replaceable but will immediately work for the thief, costs 4 per level. Or only 3 if wand shopping is Inconvenient.
Magery 0 + Magery 4 would usually cost 45 points, but with this limitation costs either 21 or 17.
Discount.
What that represents though... is it that some wizards can't cast some spells, or that some wands can't? Or some awkward combination of the two? The wand chooses the wizard. And some wands are more powerful than others. But you can buy wands in a shop. Can you buy Magery in a shop, or just a tool to express what you already have? Significant difference in character. Interesting argument if wizards don't agree.
Does the wand have power or channel it?
... it has the Staff spell on it, does it have any others?
If each wand is sufficiently distinct to count as Unfamiliar then that's a -2 penalty until 8 hours of practice doing spells with it, which could take a lot longer than 8 hours if you want to be picky given that spells take a couple seconds to cast and rather longer to recover from. Doing a spell you know so well you can just keep doing it for 8 hours would be most efficient but also not very interesting. Still, potential easy mechanism for disadvantage in using the wrong wand.
However it works - and it do seem like a substandard wand can hold people back - an 11 year old gets a wand and it's off to the races.
So an average human has IQ 10, but an average 11 year old has only 90% that and IQ 9.
With the suggestions in the magic school supplements, in order to start casting a spell, you need to spend enough time studying it for Familiarity. That's 8 hours. At that point you learn it at what would be default for other IQ skills, IQ-6 for Hard and IQ-7 for Very Hard. Skill rolls assume you're under adventuring conditions: time pressured, high stakes, probably involving violence. "In nonadventuring situations when you have lots of time to prepare and face minimal risk, the GM may give you +4 or more to skill." And the magic school supplement says "Initially his teacher will provide easy tasks and favorable conditions, worth +4 to +6 to skill". So once you have that Familiarity with the spell, you can cast it at between IQ-2 (alone, unhurried, no stakes, no one shooting at you) to IQ (with a teacher nudging the odds even better). And that's what you do for the rest of the 200 hours, if you want to learn it well enough to use as a prerequisite to studying other spells.
... I can imagine students who put in their 8 hours and wander off, or course designs that give you all the spells with no prerequisites in 8 hours each and then start testing you...
IQ-6 on an IQ of 9 is just barely possible if you crit. But they probably have enough Magery to get a better chance than that.
Skill ___Probability
Level ___of Success
3 ______0.5%
4 ______1.9%
5 ______4.6%
6 ______9.3%
7 _____16.2%
8 _____25.9%
9 _____37.5%
10 ____50.0%
11 ____62.5%
12 ____74.1%
13 ____83.8%
14 ____90.7%
15 ____95.4%
16+ ___98.1%
(sorry clunky underlines trying to make it display in columns)
On a lot of that probability curve the -2 for Familiarity makes a lot of a difference. About 25% difference around the average. You want a familiar tool for most tasks.
Magery makes a heck of a lot of difference. It's entirely up to the GM how Magery is distributed, but a player is likely to buy it as high as the setting allows. Some spells in supplements require Magery 4 but beyond that is no odds to prerequisites. In character though, how special is what you just splurged on? And exactly what is it?
If there's differences in power that are in born then you get the pureblood obsession following pretty naturally, and if the differences are ones you can buy by getting a better wand, well, whatever wands sell for it is very much worth it.
Spell failures don't always just mean it sputters out.
HP never has 'accidentally summon a demon' as a spell fail, does it? GURPS does.
A couple points of skill can be crucial to survival. For bystanders.
So you'd also want smarter wizards, but evidence in HP is they train everyone with Magery. Evidence being Crabbe and Goyle, and possibly distorted by Gryffindors not liking them very much, but still.
Someone of average intelligence with a superlative wand might be better at magic than a smart person with a less powerful one... if wands are where the Magery lives.
Magery is very, very much cheaper than IQ with these settings on. IQ is 20 per level, Magery above 0 is usually 10 but now 4 or 3. Very much more efficient to specialise.
And as previously noted, wizards and witches would have enough difference in ability to learn muggle stuff that it would be noticeable to them. Their time and skill bonuses for magic make them whizzes. Specialising would be easy and good for the ego.
... a broad range of IQ based skills can eventually be traded for raising your actual IQ, in this school supplement, so studying a lot of muggle stuff would eventually make them better at everything IQ based, including magic. I say again, a broad muggle education would raise their IQ...
... but spells are IQ based too, so they could trade points there. The problem with that being that usually wizards spend minimally on each spell in order to learn as many as possible, so they never get the kind of accumulation they'd need for trading in, where you need two or more points in eight different skills that would have their points cost reduced if you converted it to IQ. Also, the rule is the skills need to be 'sufficiently varied'. It would be entirely fair to call magic one specialisation and say different spells are insufficiently varied. And it's all an optional rule anyway. But. Decent broad education, better IQ, better magic.
Am not impressed with Hogwarts.
ANYway.
Once a student knows a spell at all, they can end up in adventure type situations and try and cast it
even at IQ-6
at which point they can put earned points into it if they're successful.
That does require there to be significant stakes. Screwing up could cost their lives.
But if they somehow beat the odds and roll successfully, they get better really, really fast.
Which might explain some about the Hogwarts learning environment, if they noticed that the most magical students have a fighting chance even at fighting, and decided it was worth it.
Students attain that last 10% of their IQ when they turn 15. Just in time for exams, so that's nice. That would be another jump in skill.
... if it was really that precise in world there'd be all sorts of things that were suddenly allowed because Adult. But no, much study required. And as for emotional maturity... really roleplaying kids should be about buying off disads in that area...
There's actually a box about what kids learn in school, and it is mostly buying off disads like not being able to read or do math.
Also the attributes are supposed to change smoothly between ages, it's just if the change is 1 whole point it has to happen all at once, so, jump. But if you have more than 1 point left to change you'd do it in between times.
GURPS spells with no prerequisites
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/2683969.html
is 51 spells, that could be taught for 8 hours each, and then, in theory, the teacher could shrug and leave the students to polish them up.
some of them have other prereqs like Empathy.
And the Worminghall way teaches at most one spell a week, with holidays
but still
imagine one year of making your students really bad at such a range of spells
and what the students could do with them.
... mostly sense, seek, and set stuff on fire. oh dear...
It wouldn't be the most useful way at all, but you could get a lot of dabblers that way, which is it's own kind of fun.
There's also techniques for practicing while asleep. Dream Rehearsal, where you can go over your successes again while you snooze. Seems a bit cinematic to me, but we are talking about cinema, so...
I was thinking, if Our Hero somehow has other people's memories in his head, would that give him more Familiarities or some kind of skill bonus? Can other people's hours be transferred? Not a great plan for PCs, too messy, but still seems logical.
Buffy did sleep study, dreamed her Slayer memories, was far too good at martial arts because of all the extra practice.
Okay, so I'm reading more than I'm typing, I'll go read.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 04:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-21 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 12:38 am (UTC)I looked up Worminghall
GURPS Worminghall is a whole other place
but it might have a dragon in it.
says the start of chapter 1
"Worminghall stands on the west bank of the River Severn in Shropshire. It’s not far from Wales, and in less civilized times, Welsh warbands raided it." says chapter three.
This is supposed to be an alternate universe, hence magic university, suggested to be set in "a close parallel with minor geographic divergences".
no subject
Date: 2018-06-22 12:39 am (UTC)In 1300 AD it gives the Worminghall town population as 9600, including 100 masters and 1200 students. Worminghall is meant to have spun off Oxford with the specific purpose of teaching magic in 1256.
In our world Oxford University in 1300 apparently had 1500 people, per quick google, and looking that up found the name Worminghall attached to some of them. But on the wiki page there's only a ranking by size, the next census with numbers on was after the Black Death, so I don't have a scale for town sizes in 1300. London had maybe 80,000 people and was four times bigger than the next largest place, http://www.thehistoryoflondon.co.uk/in-brief-late-middle-ages/ It was a quarter that size in 1377 on wiki. Oxford 1377 had 2357 adults so maybe four times bigger in 1300 is reasonable? 1400 properties in 1279 http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/oxon/vol4/pp3-73 and the biggest it got if I read that right. http://www.localhistories.org/oxford.html multiplies houses by 5 to get a population guesstimate, which would translate to 7000.
9600 just seems big for medieval place.
But Worminghall seems to be a cool name wrapped around a mythologised Oxford with bonus magic and plonked down near enough to a fighty Wales for adventuring purposes. The plausibility problem is there continues to be Oxford and Cambridge as well, so there's suddenly a lot more students. But since the ones here can do magic, plausibility is not top of the list.
There isn't a references, bibliography, or further reading bit in the GURPS thing that I can find. Some of them have, this one only refers to other GURPS Magic rule books.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-24 09:52 am (UTC)