GURPS PDF Challenge Reviews: How to GM: Ritual Path Magic

 Even before we start, this book comes at two disadvantages.  First, its title starts with the letter "H" rather than "G" which messes with my alphabetical ordering of my folder. Second, I don't use RPM for a variety of reasons. Thus, for me, this was definitely in the camp of "I got it in a bundle" rather than something I would buy if it showed up on Warehouse 23. This will doubtlessly color my review and make it hard for me to objectively judge the quality of this book, but I'll do my best!

The book breaks down into

• Tips, Tricks and More, which covers what you'd actually expect the book to be about
• Ritual Path Magic Ultra-Lite, which was quite a surprise, but not an unwelcome one
• Examples, a list of pre-rendered spells.

Overall, from my biased, uninformed perspective, it looks like a pretty good book.  I  mean, I've looked into RPM, and I had questions and concerns, and this book addressed those.  It didn't make me rethink my position on RPM, but that wasn't its purpose.  So I'd call this work a success: If you actually do want to use RPM, but you find you struggle with it, this may well be a book for you, if you don't mind paying $3 for some GM advice (which, we must admit, is a pretty small asking fee.)

Musings

This covers a whole variety of things.  Let me hit some of the highlights.

So right off the bat, Chris addresses whether or not to treat something as "Lesser or Greater."  It's a good analysis! RPM leaves it in the hands of the GM, which is fine, but some guidance is welcome.  This doesn't try to take it back out of GM hands, just illustrates some of the thought processes you might want to engage in while pondering what to rule on.  In all honesty, I walked away from that section thinking there should be three levels: lesser for "Yeah, sure, that's basically nothing so it's fine," Greater, for "That's some serious magic," and then some higher level for serious, world-shaking magic.  This is not a knock on the book: a good discussion should make you think, make you engage and ponder how best to go about tackling thing sort of thing.

There's a section on "Damage over time" that highlights one of my issues with this sort of magic system.  He lays out a very good thought process for how you can create such spells, but unless I misread it, it amounts to "If you want to do 1d per second over 10 seconds, you're doing 10d, and the fact that it's over time is a special effect." I would argue that dealing 10d over the course of 10 seconds is generally less effective than just dealing 10d. This is not to knock his advice: the fact that he tells you to skip duration is a good thing! It's just one of those things that emphasizes how superficial most elements of a free-form magic system really are.

There's a section in Pitfalls on "limiting Grimoires" by adding "Spell Familiarities." I find this an interesting section, as it seems to run against what a "free-form" magic system like RPM should be: players should say "I want to do X, what do I roll against?" and the GM should just tell them. However, a friend of mine suggested that the real strength of RPM is that it acts as a spell-design system, and this part of the book seems to agree. The real intent of this section is to limit the number of spells the GM needs to think about, and thus to design.  There's a side-effect of this suggestion, which is that characters will have a limited number of spells they generally rely on.  This is key to maintaining a niche, in my opinion.  What's the difference between a Dream Mage and a Mind Mage? Between a Fire Mage and a Forces Mage? Why, what spells they're familiar with.  

If you were hoping for RPM as a hand-wavey "If you want to do X, just do roll Y," that's where RPM Ultra-Lite steps in.  I rather saw it this way since it was introduced in Monster Hunters, but I think it's grown quite a lot since then, and this trims it back to something simple and streamlined.

So what about my objections to RPM? For example, I don't like the Energy Raising "roll until you don't roll no more" mechanics. Does this address that? Nope! But that's not its purpose. It's purpose isn't to fix RPM for people, like me, who don't like it. Chris actually has a Pyramid Article that does that. The purpose of this book is to help people who do like it, including people like me who might try something a little out-of-the-box but still need some guidance, figure out how all of this works.  I think it succeeds at that.

Also, goddamn that art.  These little PDFs have really raised the bar.

Conclusion

I wouldn't have bought this supplement, and I'm not hip deep into this system the way I am in, say, Psionic Powers, Sorcery, Ultra-Tech or Divine Favor, so I can't really speak to the things the RPM community regularly argue over, but from this looks good from where I'm sitting. If I did change my mind and decide to use RPM, I'd surely open this book up.  It doesn't feel too long, or too short, or like it's addressing things that don't need to be addressed. It reads like an experienced GM guiding you through the RPM process and helping you avoid issues.  It doesn't "fix" RPM, but that was never its purpose and I'm pretty sure the sort of people who buy this book wouldn't think of it as broken; this is to their tastes, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who did want to use RPM.