A Sorcerous Obsession

 

Sometimes, I just can't get something out of my head.  Back in the good ol' days of the blog, it would end up as a blog series.  Lately, since I need to curate my material more, I hesitate to just brainstorm on the blog, but perhaps that's a bad approach.  After all, the point of this blog is to blather on in a way that gets my juices flowing, which helps me to think, and helps you to think about your own setting, and often starts a conversation. So while this post may or may not result in some changes to Psi-Wars, it will be useful for me to get some thoughts straightened out, and perhaps to inspire you as well, dear reader.  Consider this less of an "article" and more a musing.

So here it goes: The though I can't get out of my head is "Does Psi-Wars need magic?"

The Strength of Weak Magic

Slightly off-topic from things I normally discuss, but I had a lively debate, triggered by the Pyramid Kickstarter, on the problems with GURPS Magic.  Now, while I don't hate GURPS Magic (it offers some very interesting ideas, and I love RPGs that offer that wealth of non-combat-oriented, problem-solving spells), I think Sorcery is an objectively better system.  I think Magic is a symptom of one of the problems that plagues GURPS 4e (and 3e, really) which is point crock, this insistence on having secondary systems that can do what advantages do, but are, for whatever reason, cheaper.  So, instead of buying an innate fire attack, mages learn fireball, and instead of purchasing DR, mages learn shield spell. The result of this is to "hide the true costs" of the mage, and to let him sneak into higher power levels, especially when point totals start to get particularly high.

The discussion turned to why this is. Why unbalance the mage? The argument made by others is that the fiction fantasy emulates often pairs a powerful wizard with a grim and gritty mercenary; a Gandalf with a Boromir.  Players had an expectation that the wizard could perform some very powerful magic, but accepted that they might have a limitation on it, such as being able to only cast once or twice before being depleted. This emulates the fiction, where a wizard is a larger-than-life character, certainly more interesting and powerful than those without magic, but often doesn't use their godlike power (muttering about the position of the stars and the temptation of power) and allows the mere mortals to sort out their problem, until dramatically solving the crisis with a wave of their hand if they're strictly necessary.  GURPS Magic does this, and it works very well at the 100 to 150 point level common to older GURPS editions.

The fear, then, is that if we required people to use Sorcery, the magic user ceases to be "interesting" at the point totals where we tend to see grim-and-gritty mercenaries.  Now, there are some arguable assumptions leading to this conclusion, but I think while it's true that a genuinely priced wizard, as most people conceive of a wizard, is closer to a 500-point street super than he is to a 150-point gritty mercenary, but the assertion that the 150-point sorcerer would be boring rub me the wrong way. Some of my favorite stories are about "weak" sorcerers (such as "With a Single Spell"), and I think they have a lot to offer a group.

The point of this post is not to argue that GURPS Magic is a problem, or that Wizards, as written, are a problem, or even that Sorcery is superior, though I think all these things are, to some extent, true. Rather, it's to try to alleviate any fears someone might have about "weak sorcerers being boring," to show what they can do, and why low-powered magic-users can often be more interesting than high-powered magic-users!