Why I limit magical healing

Why I limit magical healing

In my opinion, supernatural (magical, psi, etc.) healing is a very important factor that affects your entire game both from the point of view of mechanics and roleplay. In this post, I will describe how and why I severely limit supernatural healing in my games.

Sorcery: New Prismatic Spells

Sorcery: New Prismatic Spells

Not long ago I wrote a post on making attacks with a random damage type. So, let's create three basic spells that employ that mechanic.

Sorcery: The rest of the personal spells

Sorcery: The rest of the personal spells

Ah, what the hell, I'll just post the rest of them in a single post.

Sorcery: Personal Gate and Gravity Spells

Sorcery: Personal Gate and Gravity Spells

Another batch of personal spells.

Sorcery: Personal Food, Force, Fungus Spells

 Sorcery: Personal Food, Force, Fungus Spells

None of the aforementioned colleges have many buff spells, so let's combine them into a single post.

Sorcery: Personal Fire Spells

Sorcery: Personal Fire Spells

Fire buffs converted into personal indefinite spells.

Sorcery: Personal Earth Spells

Sorcery: Personal Earth Spells

The Earth college has quite a few buffs, so here are the personal variants of them.

Sorcery: Personal Communication & Empathy Spells

Sorcery: Personal Communication & Empathy Spells

The college of Communication and Empathy doesn't have that many buffs, so there's going to be few personal spells.

Sorcery: Personal Body Control Spells

Sorcery: Personal Body Control Spells

The Body Control college is very big and has many buffs. So, let's make it even bigger with the personal buff spells.

Sorcery: Personal Animal Spells

Sorcery: Personal Animal Spells

The Animal college does not have that many buff spells, so there's not many personal spells to make.

Sorcery: Personal Air Spells

Sorcery: Personal Air Spells

By default, Sorcery buffs can be applied to any friendly creature. Most of the times it is enough, but in some situations you would only want to be able to affect yourself - either because you want to save points, or because the additional capability to buff others isn't really necessary. For example, D&D is full of "Personal" spells that can only affect the caster. For it to work as an actual buff, you have to remove Increased 1/2D, 10x, +15% and add Accessibility, Self Only, -50%. Alternatively, just take the advantage that is granted by the buff, replace Magical, -10% with Sorcery, -15%, and in most of the cases you will get an indefinite version of the spell that must be maintained. Such spells could be taken as "lesser" versions of spells and then improved to the proper buff versions. I think I will have to rework all the converted monsters with spell-like abilities to have personal versions instead of what they have right now, because it rarely makes sense to have an actual buff spell as a racial ability. Let's go through the air buff spells and create the personal indefinite versions.

Monster: Song Dragon

Monster: Song Dragon

And this is the last true dragon from the Monsters of Faerun. I think I remember a song dragon character from some Forgotten Realms novel. Anyway, this is a pretty cool creature, in my opinion.

Martial Arts: Dragon Magazine Styles

Martial Arts: Dragon Magazine Styles

Aside from the Kara-Tur styles I converted in the other post, there's also an article about some other martial styles in the issue 309. Let's convert those too. Many of them are quite simple and can be used as a base to develop more complex styles.

Monsters: Marid and Dao

Monsters: Marid and Dao

I find it surprising that the dao and marid (earth and water genies, respectively) appear only once in the Manual of the Planes for D&D 3.0. They were never updated to 3.5, which seems weird. But anyway, here's the two genie templates (and there's two more in D&D 3.5). Also, I've never thought that marids are this large.

Monsters: Miniatures Handbook Monsters

Monsters: Miniatures Handbook Monsters

Miniatures Handbook is an interesting splatbook for D&D 3.5. It introduces rules for mass combat and

skirmish warband combat with lots of interesting scenarios. It also has a chapter on random dungeon generator for playing without a DM. However, I have never heard anyone talk about these rules. People usually focus on the two new classes (that aren't very good), and the prestige classes (iirc, some of them enable incredibly cheesy builds). But I also like the monster chapter of that book. The introduction to the chapter describes the design principle - they wanted to design monsters that are easy to use, so most of them have only one special ability. And honestly, for D&D it's a good thing - you don't have to browse through the huge list of spell-like abilities and lots of special rules. And such monsters are also easy to convert - I already did convert some, so let's have another batch.

(P.S. I only now got that "ramadeen" is a ram paladin - it even has smite evil. I'm dense.)

Everything about hearing in GURPS

Everything about hearing in GURPS

Remember my post about vision? Let's compile all the data about hearing in GURPS. This is probably going to be another long, detailed post, but less so than the one about vision.

How to adapt/convert an ability?

How to adapt/convert an ability?

A person asked me to describe my way of thinking when adapting or converting an ability from another system/game/medium/whatever to GURPS. To me it seems intuitive, but I'll try to expand on my thought process here.

Sorcery Spells Overview: Enchantment

Sorcery Spells Overview: Enchantment

Let's go over the Enchantment college. Despite its name, there's actually a lot of useful stuff for characters who are not planning to enchant any items.

Monster/Racial Template: Forestfolk

Monster/Racial Template: Forestfolk

We all know that Wizards of the Coast is a very reasonable company that would never do something stupid like delete a huge collection of D&D articles from their own website and force people to rely on fans who archived all that stuff. Right? I believe that if you really like something, then you should download and archive it. (Despite that, some of my blog posts only exist on the blog.)

But jokes aside, one of the Fey Feature articles described an interesting fey creature - the forestfolk. These arboreal humanoid creatures have skin membranes that allow them to glide in the air, and can emit stunning sonic cries. They are even called sonic elementals in the description despite being fey. Their template is cheap enough to be used for PCs.

Powers: Innate Attack (Prismatic)

Powers: Innate Attack (Prismatic)

From my earliest exposure to GURPS I've been thinking on how one can accomplish random effects. For example, an attack that has a random damage type. GURPS has alternative abilities that combine abilities into a single one, but you still have to choose which one you use and take a maneuver to switch. I believe that I've seen an RPM spell that had an array of effects taken as alternative abilities; that one said that the effect being random compensates for the lack of need to "switch". That sounds fair. However, attack normally do not have such a requirement - you don't have to take a Ready maneuver to switch. This is why I suggest introducing something new - alternative random abilities. If all the abilities are attacks, then you divide the cost by 6, not by 5. If there is even a single non-attack ability, then keep the divisor at 5 as per normal alternative abilities. But why don't we come up with a new "damage type" as something of a shorthand using this framework?

Monsters: Crab People

Monsters: Crab People

There's several humanoid crab races in D&D and Pathfinder. Yurian (also known as aldani in the Forgotten Realms setting) from Fiend Folio seems to be an update of the crabman from 1e Fiend Folio, judging by the almost identical descriptions. Crucian is a more humanlike crabfolk species that appears in Sandstorm and Miniatures Handbook. Karkinoi is a brutish crab monster from Bestiary 4 for Pathfinder. Karkanaks are interesting crab people from the third-party Cerulean Seas setting for Pathfinder (that setting is great, I highly recommend checking it out - I'm going to steal a lot of content from it). And there's also Sartani from the Al-Qadim setting. Karkanaks and crucians can be used as expensive racial templates for PCs.

Sorcery: Wordcasting

Sorcery: Wordcasting

So, not that long ago I reworked my rune magic framework, making it more in line with the D&D lore. However, I had to abolish the Verb/Noun symbol system. But I do like verbs and nouns! I have decided to do something around that concept. I'll call it wordcasting after the variant spellcasting system from Pathfinder. This was quite the headscratcher for me. The end result looks interesting to me, but something in the back of my mind is telling me that I came up with garbage. I guess this will require some testing. Everything here is subject to change.

Martial Arts: Raiden Torpedo Technique

Martial Arts: Raiden Torpedo Technique

I love the Drop Kick technique in GURPS Martial Arts. But what if we "reverse" the drop kick? That's right, we will get Raiden's torpedo slam move. I'll try to utilize the technique-building system from GURPS Martial Arts to accomplish this. Also, this is not the same as the Human Missile technique from GURPS Supers.