beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I am bored at two in the morning so obviously the important thing to be doing right now is thinking what GURPS spells I most want.

With minimum IQ 13 and Magery 4 you can do pretty much everything in the books I got.

I bought the Artillery Spells supplement so I now want to build up to the really epic cleaning spell that can take care of any pesky out of place organisms, up to and including people if you pour enough power in. It's a Healing spell but 'No safer for living beings than being bleached, autoclaved, fumigated, and irradiated'. So you could have a one college healer mage with a spell chain up to Remove Contagion and then oh hey, oops, didn't see that whole army there, guess they're autoclaved now. ... okay, that would take either serious fatigue or a powerstone big enough you probably want to save it for ressurections, but still, area effect cleaning spell from the least expected person does a whole lot of damage. Has style.

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I 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.

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I bought a couple GURPS supplements of new spells
Death and Artillery spells
and I now have so many nasty ideas for every college

my eyes went all 00

but they're mostly so nasty there's very little use for them as story parts, because boom, now there's death.

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So I've been wondering about the social structures of wizardry, and how much they'd be influenced by the nature of magic itself.

If magic is one in a million then you train everyone you can find. The group identification is wizard, or mage, or whichever term means you can do magic. But identifying as a separate country seems less likely, since inside Britain you can barely scrape together a school year between you, and globally you're a small town, maybe.

If magic is one in a million per year then you end up a town inside Britain. That's nice, lots of friends, but once you've got lots of friends there's room to decide to ignore everyone else. But how that relates to being British, for instance if you're raised thinking of yourself as British first or a Wizard first, that... could get interesting. ( Read more... )

It would depend a lot on tech level they want to maintain and where they get their food supply. I mean if they've got the magical equivalent of replicators then they just need enough people to learn the spells to keep it going. Magic has such different conditions and requirements they'd end up looking quite different to the here now.

Also magic can be tech level equivalent, with the healing spells and all. Sufficiently advanced technology. But then population to maintain tech level comes up again.

If every wizard learns every spell they have to live a really long time. ( Read more... )

With a span of 45 to 85 years just to learn everything, wizards specialise simply because there aren't enough years in a lifetime.

And that's a version of Everything that is just spells. Potterverse canon has every student also learn Alchemy (potions) and Herbalism (Herbology) and ... I don't actually know, many related skills. If they're learning Runes for magical as well as historical or languages purposes then Symbol or Syntactic magic is another sort that works in their 'verse. And every sort adds a whole bunch of years before you could even in theory know it all.

Conclusion: wizardry is like science, too wide, everyone must specialise.

GURPS colleges of magic exist partly because wizards have to narrow their possibilities to extend their expertise, same like the rest of us.

Nobody knows 'magic', they all know a tiny bit of a corner of magic.

And that means they absolutely have to get some social organisation together, or entire colleges of magic could get lose from going out of fashion, and some spells would become impossible from losing the people who could teach the prerequisites.

Finding teachers at all would be a task and a half. The university model looks great, but every hour spent teaching means you're only putting 1/8 of an hour into studying the spell you are teaching, rather than an hour into a new spell. Every new spell lets you make a new and interesting set of changes to the universe. And along several different prerequisite chains some form of immortality awaits. How do you lure someone into teaching when they could be trying for that instead?

You've also got the problem of power. Casting ceremonially gives you a great big boost for that, but means you need lots of mates. ( Read more... )

So when I sat down I intended much less maths. I wanted to figure out a basic social unit for mages, if the limitations of their magic were where we start.

For most people the limit is span of control, which varies on way too many variables, but I learned it from... http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006707.html Incident Command System, I think, with the phrasing Span of control coming from other posts. There the number is three to seven people, optimising around five.

Which coincidentally now I've done the digging for rules and maths is the number of mages a Master Enchanter can have in their circle at once.

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Then you've got a set of 13 as a basic unit of Enchanters. Grand Master, two Masters, five in each of their Circles, overlapping teaching hours so everyone gets 8 hours teaching and 4 hours job every day, with the Circles having extra job on the weekends. And each Circle is in some way different from the partner, because they know different spell sets well enough to teach each other. That might be a binary difference that a Grand Master can bring together somehow, or it might happen in many and varied combinations, shifting and changing when they've taught each other all they can. Brighter or more magically talented students wouldn't need to grind for as long before they could lead a Circle of their own, so people would join and leave at different times. But they'd all need to know matching spells to work an Enchantment together, so whether there's two sets or many colleges, each Circle would specialise in particular jobs, then get less distinct and more varied by the time they can be Masters. And Masters would be able to do things their students could not, more and more over time, so they'd want time off for their own projects. Slow and Sure spells might mean holidays, or they could work as a pair on new Quick and Dirty enchantments, but it would work best if their students had someone else to study with when they do. Like a Grand Master who knows all the spells they can work combined, and then some.

And this more or less flows from the GURPS rules for how to Enchant.

But Enchanters would organise differently from Ceremonial Magicians, because there's not that -1 per person for Ceremony. For Ceremonial Magic you want a huge great crowd that all know the spell.

And a lot of magic can of course be cast by a single mage. But learning it in the first place requires either a really long time or a teacher.

So. I guess I just spent hours typing about completely imaginary rules. But.

What if the two sorts of Circle were Light and Dark? And the longer they work together, the more they blur the lines, until a Grand Master can cast all the spells of both.

But people who are not Enchanters don't have that incentive to cross the streams, they might go deep into their own half of the binary instead.

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All these number rules are boring until they turn into ways people act.

... okay, they're probably still boring, and this didn't go in the direction I expected
but
rules can imply interesting social structures, and that part is fun.


I shall go do something else for a bit and maybe make another post
for the bit I sat down to write in the first place...

Pathfinder is complicated.

I realise that I, a GURPS reader with *gets tape measure out* over 22 inches of GURPS books plus a substantial pdf collection, cannot say this without sounding a tad ridiculous

but I read those over like twenty years. and also dont think I understand them all or could play them all plugged in together.

I'm currently trying to understand one (1) core rulebook with very different assumptions. havent got close to reading it. it's not a cover to cover sort of read.

Pathfinder? complicated.




... also all this reading is making me want to find somewhere to rpg, but then I'd have to, like, bring a brain and actually successfully rpg. so. *sigh* maybe...

I have been playing with imaginary numbers and considering the social results again.

So, magic in Gurps, hours of study per spell learned, and the way extra magery makes you so much quicker.

Everyone they let in to magic college has magery 0. They can see magic and are technically a mage. Yaay.

But there's also people there studying up to 40% quicker (30 if you only have M3 in that universe, which was the assumption of my math.)

How do you schedule lessons so everyone can study?

At lower levels you'd have mixed Magery classes.

I did some maths and a M3 mage needs 17.5 days of 8 hour classes to learn a single spell. They are just that good. So to optimise use of teachers time, that's what you schedule. Do it across 28 days, four weeks of 5 days of lessons and some weekends and half days, and you leave enough time for M0 students to keep up. If they do the reading. For enough hours to round up to 12 hours a day studying. Every day.

So that means the most basic students, the ones who know there's an upper limit on what they'll ever be able to do, are having to study all the hours of all the days, while M3 gifted types can stroll it.

Resentment seems to naturally follow.

But on top of that there's all those hours the M3 can be pursuing their own studies. ( Read more... )

Going to effect how mages see themselves, each other, and the kinds of magic they do. How long someone had to study and if they needed a teacher? A hierarchy gets built in.

And if some colleges are simply not taught there, but make excellent prerequisites? There's another complex hierarchy to bump into.



Is fun.

I've been thinking about magic, again again. I get like that when I feel like I can't get things done in brickspace life, so, a lot. But I'm also attempting plot in a magic using 'verse, so, some understanding of system and reach required.

I've previously done endless spreadsheets to figure that, by the GURPS rules for study hours in character point equivalents, a mage can learn between 5 and 19 character points a year, depending how much is job, how much study by yourself, how much taught.
It can actually be as low as 2.5 if you only have a job and don't study, but, GURPS does reckon you get 2.5 CP every year from just doing a job, so that's nice, even if you do have to put them all into job related skills.
I didn't include Intensive because that's boot camp and the rule book is pretty clear there are very limited opportunities for that, but with sixteen hour days of twice as effective study and no weekends or holidays in the base assumptions you get about 58 CP a year *without* the Magery boost, which is enough to boost your basic stats, let alone your skills. However such courses are very much assumed to run for much less than a year, so, not so much likely.
Studying things that are not magic caps at a lower level, because Magery gives you a percentage boost to speed of learning magic. At Magery 0, or for things unmagical, between 5 and 13 CP a year is the best you get.
GURPS assumes college gives you 10CP a year, which isn't what I get from doing the math on actual courses, that comes out way lower with holidays and fewer teaching hours. But it's in that range of theoretically possible.
Magery gives the boost to learn spells up to 19 a year, and if you're learning that fast, you have enough Magery to learn any spell in existence.

I have previously got that far and noted that 19 spells gets you to Resurrection by the longest chain, so who would even need more than a year? That's spectacularly complex magic, and world changing, and you can do it as a freshman, if you can power it. Seems a little wonky.

But today I was thinking, there's 850 odd spells in my GURPS spreadsheet, and I haven't even added the gender spells from that one Pyramid. I invented a bunch of elemental spells last time I was poking those colleges, for things that should be logically possible cause they are in other elements. The Fire college looks kind of rubbish compared to a decent TL8 flamethrower, let alone grenades, and nobody has invented a magical nuke, even assuming the power requirements would be spectacular. You can't even say it would unbalance the game, because see real nukes. Plus every single Shapeshift spell is a separate spell, so if you want to be a wolf and an owl you learn it twice, and that's just for starters.

So if a magic user is zooming along a particular prerequisite chain to achieve a specific thing, they can do it in a year. But if they want to learn Magic, in general, they've got their 19 a year and like 900 options in front of them. Anyone spending a solid year thinking of nothing but magic kind of has to want one of the other very badly. So you'd get mages who really wanted That One Thing, like for example raising the dead, but you'd also get mages who just have to know how it works, and would feel like a smart kid with a university prospectus and only the one lifetime to go around.

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Game balance as a concept, making sure all the character classes are going to be useful, kind of makes magic not special by design. I mean, the same number of points in any other skill would add up as useful, if designed properly. So that leaves you stuck wondering why risk it.

Plus the entire reason the real world shifted to boom sticks instead of archery was the same amount of time going in *didn't* get you the same amount of skill or ability to hurt people coming out. Archery takes a lifetime investment of regularly maintained work and minimum stats, like magery. Firearms have some chance of hurting the enemy if you know which end the boom goes out of. They can be used at default, and spells cannot. It would take some spectacular advantage to magic to make it worth the time.

And the kinds of things we can't so at all with science tend to dip into the Restricted section, like Mind Control or Necromancy.

Or any variety of shapeshifting. Got to admit, many people would put in the time to be able to be a cat. Or whatever else.

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GURPS rules based magic says:
you can only use one powerstone at a time
you must be touching it, or touching something with the Staff spell enchanted on it that has a powerstone in it
powerstones recharge normally if six feet away from another powerstone, otherwise they divide the points among the stones, take twice as long for two, three times for three etc.

Obviously the simplest way to carry multiple stones is just take them off and put them different places. But then someone can wander off with them.

There's also the spell Knot which knots a rope or cord in such a way as it can only be undone by the password or by magic.

I was thinking: a bracelet can be made of a complexly knotted cord. Like I found one with 24 feet of paracord in it. You could fit a longer thread in if it was skinnier, and more complexly knotted. Obviously this stretches the definition of knot really really far, but that just means there's a more complex spell to learn or invent.

... in theory you could have knitting that won't unravel without a password. Or crochet. Or... stuff.

But what I was thinking of was a bracelet that packed a number of different powerstones close together, around your wrist or wrists, maybe even knotted so they touch your skin. Can't be removed without a password. But with the password they unravel to just be rope.

And then you can throw one end up a tree or use the thing to make a circle around you or some other shape as long as every stone has at least six feet of cord between it and the next stone. And it would recharge at normal speed. But you would have it knotted back around your wrist again - assuming no tree branch based critical fail - in a single casting of a two second spell.



Or you could have complex magic items where each bit had it's own power source and you needed to run a cord up a flagpole at night to recharge the thing.



Obviously you'd end up with different math than just getting one huge powerstone and letting it recharge at normal speed. Less overall bang, but faster recharge if you want to do a lot of smaller things in a row.

And it's always easier to find many small powerstones than one big one, because chance of crit fail destroying larger stones.



Of course this goes well with any knotting or fabric based magic, but those usually assume the knots or weaving or whatever happens at normal speed and are the gestural components of an enchantment. This is more like instant items.



I don't know. Might not be useful, but it's interesting flavour or spin.

The thing with GURPS is that I think I like it for its versatility and flexibility and diversity
and the way there's a rule for just about everything
and then when I sit down and decide what things to actually use
I simplify.

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When inventing religion for the new fantasy world I... first decided that world without Jews would put me in bad company and so clearly Jews got Banestormed there, and then I read a lot of fics about Captain Cold, and then I ended up with a corner of plot about Cold as jew in a fantasy world, but I have absolutely no idea how to write it without just copying that one fic I rad, I don't even know enough to start learning more.

This is how I end up writing nothing, my failure to be omniscient enough to be a narrator.

But.

Fantasy world religion, based on the months of the year, so there's twelve different gods. Except secretly there is a thirteenth, who is god of gates and doors, beginnings and endings, and intercalary days, because I always incite Janus. But if they had Gate magic my plots would work out very different. So.

Twelve gods who grant their priests twelve spells each, except there's secretly thirteen and so each priesthood has a secret spell.

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Okay, I didn't get as far as trying to figure out spell sets, and this computer needs recharging. I'll post this and come back to it later.


Pantheons are hard though, you really need to go back and forth with your plot and figure out who you need, and twelve seems too many and too few.

Four are for living things, four for crafts, and four for ways of organising humans. That could work.


Ugh, power plug.

Today I started writing but it was just not coming alive
and I realised I hadn't figured the game mechanics or the in world economics well enough to know what actually happened.
So I've read a bunch of GURPS rules to come up with my preferred flavour of arbitrary numbers, and now I know how magic hospital works.
It involves a very specific reading of how one optional spell from Thaumatology works, and how Ceremonial Magic can maintain a spell forever, and how that means you can bank energy for later as long as enough people keep a dance going.
I have to handwave prerequisites or set up new ones, but there's rules for systematically ignoring the rules, so they'll have that covered. It's mostly about keeping the number the same, so that's straightforward, just say any 14 spells in addition to Lend Energy... simples!
... this world is not simples.

But once I've applied my imaginary numbers I work out that getting Alter Body done costs a maximum of two weeks working for the hospital, donating your FP to heal or Alter other people.
And then I know why my character is walking out alone
and roughly what they've been doing and for how long
and why the story was grinding gears.
Two weeks knowledge of the city due to helping out in hospital is going to get you a different knowledge base than a new arrival would have.


Also the other character in an earlier scene has prepaid, so they have two weeks apart to be all anxious about things.

And since you can see all the major locations of the City around the central plaza, either hospital has no outward facing windows, or my character has already spent down time staring at the other buildings and the great big building site.


So, I need to start somewhere else and write a different thing
because the arbitrary rules I pick and mixed say so.

... I actually find this fun, and also a great excuse to read instead of making word count.
*sigh*

I looked at an old entry on GURPS magic and I epic, epic failed at maths.
epic. fail.
my math is bad and I should feel bad.

now I have remembered how to math, that whole line of speculation is rubbish.
so I have private locked it so only I can see my fail.
I mean it remains an interesting what if, as in what if demons were a frequent result from magic, but my math missed some zeros somewhere somehow and then it's orders of magnitude more frequent than it should be.

one spell in two hundred and sixteen crit fails at high skill levels, or one in 108 at slightly lower skill. a critically failed spell does something you don't want to do. possibly painful or a problem for bystanders. but it's another roll of 18 on 3d6 to get a demon. so demon only happens when you roll six sixes in a row.

1 in 6*6*6*6*6*6 is one time in 46,656.

that's a lot more spells between demons than last time I worked it out, and I don't know how I failed so bad last time.

but of course I might be failing again.

ugh.


So then you have the opposite story problem, where it's really unlikely a given mage has accidentally a demon, so why would they even believe they exist?

( Read more... )





Yesterday I read GURPS Technomancer, which puts a Magic Comes Back event at the first nuclear bomb test and has a whole atomic horror thing going on. ( Read more... )



Technomancer had mages be something huge like one percent of the modern population, in some areas, or one in a thousand where it's rarer. On a planet that had discovered Cure Disease and potions of Youth and any number of agricultural spells, and was experiencing a demographic boom and a half. That is very plenty many students. And given urbanisation they're much more likely to meet, and with standardised printed grimoires and plentiful university courses they're going to be able to get trained. Whole different effect to the medieval stuff.

Medieval magic should still pretty rapidly change the world to look not medieval, unless mages are very scarce and cannot get the training. a society that only progresses as rapidly as our history did is one that found really large disadvantages really often. otherwise cure disease is more effective than antibiotics and the collected agricultural spells can feed a lot more people for a lot less work, even if magic cauldrons that create food aren't in common use.

you're pretty much left with war, out of the horsemen.

mage war is epic bad though. it might be plenty. and it would try and take out mages first.




anyway, demons not as much of a problem as previously calculated, what was I thinking, ugh.

I was reading around about GURPS and found
http://ravenswing59.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/ggf-3.html
and
http://ravenswing59.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/magic-as-technology-take-ii.html
which postulate that on the whole magic does not change society, because maths.

But I think their math is wrong.

Take their example magic item that would change the world: Purify Water.
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Basically, if you can get enough mages in one place to even teach each other a broad enough range of spells to make an Enchanter, and if those Enchanters understand the value of working together, and if they feel like making money on a regular basis through making simple enchanted items, then magic will change the world. Even the simplest items could make pure water for all of London in a few days. Even one Purify Water item could make clean water for a whole medieval sized town. And be made in an hour.

The only way for magic to not change the world is to mess with mages: make them too scarce, uncommunicative, uncooperative, or too unlikely to become Enchanters. If the basic GURPS assumptions for magic can be met, then Enchanted items will pile up and nudge the effective tech level upwards, starting a demographic upward spiral that puts more mages into the system.

Of course if demons are a serious and regular problem, you can also get a mage downward spiral, or outright crash. See 'too scarce'.

But OP's math is just peculiar, for someone who says they're using GURPS, and I disagree with their conclusions.

Again.

Because it's a fun puzzle. It's like deciding what's most important in life, and how to carry the most of it with the least fuss.

Desert island discs don't make sense any more, you can fit a terabyte in your pocket easy, probably several, and carry a solar charger for your devices, so you've pretty much got all the media forever.

But deciding which books to take is still a compelling puzzle.



I have made no progress figuring out what's the better version of the GURPS Infinite Worlds suggestions for time travellers: "Don’t neglect guides to low-TL medicine and chemistry. The Way Things Work, A Barefoot Doctor’s Manual, and Henley’s Formulas can start you off."

( Read more... )



I know survivalists have a lot of pages of suggestions on stuff for surviving the end of the world. I know this because I was much more paranoid in the 90s. It's probably helpful and relevant if you can scrape the... survivalism off it, because there's a lot of weird ideology to go with the practical solutions. But there's also an epic underestimation of how much society does for you. ( Read more... )



Plans for what to carry to the new universe come in different sizes. Like, if you surprise step through the fog, you might be carrying just your handbag, or just the stuff you'd take to a convention or on holiday, or you might be driving. If you're moving across country you get the excuse to load the most stuff, but that's almost the least fun. And the difference between this version and the deliberate colony planning is that this is just stuff you could plausibly have on you, if the universe blipped.

( Read more... )

It's most fun for the character if they've packed well and wisely for the long term, but it's most drama if they just went for a quick walk in the sunshine and somehow ended up through the wardrobe.



There are some technologies very nearly here that'll make a big difference. Solar's a bit of a trick right now, and batteries will wear out with repeat charges, but they're both getting better rapidly. There's cars getting in the news with solar panels on them, though they're hybrid rather than all electric. Nudge the tech just a little and you can go exploring new worlds like a mars rover, put your solar panel wings out and keep rolling.

And water purification is improving in leaps and bounds.

But it's still very tricky to be a one person civilisation.



I keep looping back to the Pratchett & Baxter Long Earth books, because they poked this exact problem extensively, after putting in the twist about specific metals you can't bring.
Reading the Infinite Worlds books I kept wanting to make them go read that series, though chronologically they couldn't have.

I like a long string of empty earth because it's a way of testing survivalist fantasies without going all post apocalyptic on homeline.



Going to the kind of alternate that is an alternate history can get you all sorts. You might pack real careful for a low tech soc and then get very high tech civ that thinks you're a dancing monkey.



But usually the suggested alts are based so much on European history it's really ridiculously implausible. ( Read more... )



I need to read an entirely different set of history books. England was not that interesting for a really long time and I have a very small window on a whole lot of history.