Is Sorcery even a system?

Is Sorcery even a system?

In the comments, I've been asked why I dislike Sorcery despite having written hundreds of spells for it, and it made me realize that I forgot to post a transcript of one of my videos here on this topic. Here's my rant about why I think Sorcery isn't a system and isn't good, and I don't even talk about people ignoring or misunderstanding rules and then blaming Sorcery for it - this is not my problem, but their problem.

GURPS, being a flexible and generic system, gives us multiple different magic systems right out of the box and also provides the players extensive guidelines for creating their own system – just take a look at GURPS Powers, GURPS Thaumatology, and GURPS Fantasy. One of the systems loved or hated by many is Sorcery. But… is it really a magic system? I believe it sort of isn’t, and I’ll try to explain what I mean.

Let’s go back to GURPS Magic. You have a very interesting and fun magic system that unfortunately isn’t customizable enough and has some problems working with the rest of GURPS as a whole. You get more than two dozen colleges, with certain colleges overlapping and spells belonging to multiple colleges at once. You have my favorite part – the prerequisite tree that limits certain powerful spells to those who learn a chain of weaker spells first. Some spells are even limited by the level of Magery or other advantages. You have specific ritualistic movements and incantations that need to be performed, and these requirements change with your skill level, as does the casting cost. Typically, powerful spells have a high casting cost, a long casting time, or both. There are hundreds of pre-written spells, some with unique effects that cannot be replicated with advantages, and some of these spells have unique interactions with each other. A spellcaster built with GURPS Magic in mind has a specific feel to him – he typically is an intelligent person who learned these spells and walked the entire path from Apportation to Teleport. He also probably uses an enchanted staff to shorten the effective distance for the purpose of spellcasting. Unlike GURPS, this spellcaster definitely is not generic. This is one of the common complaints about GURPS Magic – it just isn’t generic, which feels weird, considering that it is the default magic system in GURPS. And yes, it definitely is a system.

Now, let’s take a look at Sorcery. Sorcery uses advantages as a framework, using some more involved rules from GURPS Powers and introducing some minor, questionable additions. The design goal was to be generic – everything is built the same way, everything costs the same, everything has the same casting time, etc. However, for some reason, the author decided to reuse not only the college structure, but the spells themselves from GURPS Magic, porting them to this framework without much of what made GURPS Magic an actual magic system. In a way, GURPS Sorcery tries to be generic and not generic at the same time, ending up failing at both of these tasks. Sorcery doesn’t really add anything novel or unique, or provide a system that is geared for gameplay – if you’ve seen my sorcery spells on my blog, you probably know that the vast majority of spells is actually not something that is likely to see any use, even with hardcore improvisation in mind. I was intentionally following the generic limitations of sorcery, forcing every spell to have the same casting cost, casting time, etc. without any regards to actual playability. The result is a bland, generic slop.

In my opinion, one shouldn’t simply “use Sorcery.” It’s not a system, but merely a framework, and a framework that is based on GURPS Magic at that, and it won’t provide you with anything satisfying even if you use all the spells converted by me and other people. It’s up to you as the GM to provide the structure and details that turn it into a true magic system. I believe that there shouldn’t be “generic Sorcery” in the game, even though we might have “generic mechanics for Sorcery.” This is something I've been struggling to explain to my players at first. When you come from D&D, you expect sorcerers and wizards to work almost identically, and since there's no Vancian magic in GURPS (usually, at least), then the differences are even less pronounced. This is why I tried my best to emphasize the flavor differences and turn them into mechanical differences while keeping a good share of "generic mechanics." This way, sorcerers are closer to psis - they usually have powers with a narrowly-limited scope, and they feel more generic - they might cast Create Fire or Fireball. Wizards, however, have a different base advantage (I named it Wizardly Study) that works differently, and have spellbooks, college skills, and a wider scope by default.

Unlike sorcerers, they can cast spells that definitely wouldn't fit any sorcerer. For example, Evard's Black Tentacles - what kind of GURPS power would it even fit? And if you go further and separate wizardry into different traditions, for example, “dwarven runecasting,” “elven spell archery,” “hexblade arts,” “conjuration”., then it becomes even better - by defining these traditions, you make it easier for the players to make characters, enhance the worldbuilding, and even provide novel ways of interacting with the world. For example, if a PC encounters a dwarven rune, he might roll vs. Thaumatology/Occultism and go "Hm, somebody is using the dwarven runecasting here, judging by this rune. Now I know what else I can expect and what kind of spells I should not expect." What’s important is to set meaningful limitations and, if possible, unique special rules for all the traditions. I believe that limitations are what makes a magic system interesting. This is one of the roots of my disdain for flexible magic systems – the flexibility on paper should reward creativity, while in practice it has the opposite effect. The players try something creative once, twice, thrice, and then just fall back to tried-and-true cookie-cutter spell builds that are simply mechanically effective. This is the same as some tabletop RPGs or GMs tell you to describe your every attack. You do it once, twice, thrice, and then you just go “I use full attack with the Power Attack feat” Limitation is what breeds creativity – coming up with an ingenious way to solve a problem using a limited array of tools feels a good deal more rewarding and memorable than casting Greater Solve Problem every time.

In short, I don’t really like Sorcery as-is, and I don’t think it even works well. I know that it might be a surprise, coming from me of all people, but I stand by my words. If you are a GM, I suggest you think about Sorcery not as a magic system, but just as a sample. Reading through the entirety of GURPS Powers and GURPS Thaumatology is a great idea if you need flavorful and mechanical inspiration for your game. Essentially, I believe that Sorcery shouldn’t be a generic power – and by that I mean “power” in the sense of a GURPS Powers power. Each spellcasting tradition should be its own power, and while they may share some generic mechanics, they shouldn’t be the same. For example, right now I’m deep into the design process of my Wizardry system. While on the first glance it may seem very similar to sorcery, and it does indeed have some mechanical similarities, I approach it from a very different direction. I have a certain “feel” that I want a wizard to have, and all this is accomplished by applying specific limitations. I do not convert D&D and GURPS spells mindlessly, I think about every spell. Would it be useful? Does it add anything new to the wizard’s spell repertoire? Would this spell be invented in the game world? Does it make any other spells obsolete? How does it interact with other spells? Do I even want the wizards to be able to cast this spell? How do make it practically useful and have a reasonable point cost? So far, I’m absolutely loving the result. It might sound counterintuitive, but learning GUPRS made me understand D&D and its design principles better.

In the same way, each sorcerer bloodline could be considered a separate power. Clerics also in effect will have different powers that depend on the patron deity. Certain traditions could be their own powers too. For example, remember the duskblade class from D&D 3.5? While it feels that they may just be wizards with swords, you could impose a limit on their spell repertoire to make them able to cast only spells that affect their weapons. Then, in play, the duskblade may find a normal wizard’s scroll and transcribe it into his spellbook, possibly gaining access to a spell that normally is outside of his tradition. How cool is that? If you want a good example that isn’t my unhealthily obsessive D&D reimagining, check out Mailanka’s Psychic Sorcery that he wrote up for his Psi-Wars setting – it’s an excellent piece of work.

Anyway, I’m not very good with words. I hope this rant was coherent enough and you understood what I meant by all this rambling. All the stuff I’m suggesting requires a lot of effort, I will not deny that, but I think that it’s worth it. After all, everything good takes effort, and it’s much easier to complain about something instead of actually trying to put in some effort and fix it, right?