oops, marked all as read

also injured my back again...

First!

And once more Jareth('s player) has inflicted a "too complex ruleset" headache...

Couldn't quote the message about perks vs. enhancements vs. limited Luck (thread closed), but as I'm reading it, Stabilizing Skill would (by the time I bought up a suitable skill for each important college) wind up costing more than plain unmodified Luck or even one of the upgraded forms of Luck with shorter cool-down -- and even then it only converts crit fail to ordinary fail.

Increasing skill in spells I use a lot would cost 1 cp per spell (assuming recommended Base Skill 15) to get to the point where only an 18 is a crit, except for Very Hard spells.  Ordinary failures are treated as critical, though, when casting in Very High mana, and there's still that 1/216 chance of something "spectacular" happening.

Yes, I knew this (except those complex and deeply buried compensators) when I built the character.  Part of the fun of this kind of limitation is finding a non-cheaty, world-compatible and in-character way to work around it.  A guy with Bad Vision might work up Blind Fighting and Echolocation and adventure without lights or even get a Darkness amulet; one with No Arms might become a kick boxer (of sorts, there are kicking techniques for a couple of the unarmed fighting skills) or invest in custom made spurs to do cutting damage with kicks (or get blades on his stumps like the X-Men Origins: Wolverine version of Deadpool/Project X).

Best bet might be to seek out a Blessing.  Raise important spell skills to 16 (equivalent to what I've been doing with taking Extra Time), and have a Blessing that modifies rolls by 1, and I should be able to avoid genuine crit fails, and only have to worry about normal fails (=> critical due to Very High mana state) when there's a skill penalty in force (footprint, for instance).

Virgil doesn't have a high IQ?


Or 10 for Magery, or 20 for IQ.  Which is cheap once you've exceeded 10 or 20 spells.  Common Wizard build is 1 exp per spell, making it IQ+Magery-2, -3 if it's one of the few VH spells, and then once you've got "the spells you need/want" just up Magery and IQ to the sky...


Ah, your fun is not my fun.  And I'll note, none of your examples actually overcome the Disadvantage, they allow limited workarounds.  The same as if you just raise spell levels to 16.  Armless kickboxer still can't pick up a package and run, bad sight guy can't read signs down the street, nothing get's around the core of the Disads.  Likewise you'd still suffer crits on a 17+ (because you remove possibility of lower rolls inducing a failure), but you're not overcoming skill failure and critical failure completely.

Which a cheap Luck build would do (even regular Luck does that, kinda).


Bless doesn't work the way you think it does*...  it's because the wording is a holdover and needed an edit for 4e.  Bless does not alter die rolls.  It explicitly cannot mitigate a critical failure or create a critical success.

If you roll an 18, you still rolled an 18 (ditto with rolling a 17, or really any other roll).

As clarified by Kromm (Sean Punch, Line Editor for GURPS):
http://forums.sjgames.com/show...555&postcount=11


I mean, if you can score one, it still raises your skills to get closer to to 16, but it won't mitigate a truly bad roll.


* It didn't work the way I thought it did either, or the way I'd run it for twenty-five years... granted Bless has come up more frequently in this game than in all my previous 25 years of running and playing in GURPS, so maybe if we used it more frequently we'd have sussed out how to properly use it as well (of course we also never applied skill penalties to casters when they healed themselves, and that's been in the rules since 1e... so... maybe my tabletop group would have never just stumbled over the correct way on our own).

Yep, work-arounds, the same way we real people work around our real-world Disadvantages.  My own Bad Sight (Mitigator: Wears Glasses) I've turned into my superpower (Microscopic Vision), using my myopia (and the mental habits of making the most of what I do see, developed since about first grade -- more than half a century) to read model numbers and serial numbers on repair subjects that no one else in the shop can see (I can also read the microprint on a dollar bill with my naked eye, if the light's good).

But yes, my fun is not your fun, "and that's okay," to paraphrase one of the parallels between gaming and the BDSM/fetish lifestyle proponents.  I'd note that increasing Magery in play is, um, relatively difficult from a game mechanics point of view (impossible, in original GURPS canon, without special GM dispensation), and raising IQ is a long wait for any benefit, while increase skill helps the affected spell immediately.  In a game where advancement takes player years, the latter will surely be favored.

Bless.  Hmm.  That interpretation is consistent with the way everything else works in GURPS, but it surely would have been helpful to have that corrected in print at one of the several edition changes.  Not all of us ever even see errata documents, never mind incorporate them in our printed books or memorize them -- and this is a little more game-altering than a typo in the damage for a greatsword.  I think the reason we see Bless a lot in this game is that the boss is still remembering the 3e and older interpretation as well, which for high skill effectively eliminates crit fails.

So I guess I'll need to just start pumping the skill level for spells I'll use regularly, continue taking Extra Time when situation permits (skill 16 makes a 17 NOT a crit, says B382).  That gives 3/216 of "ordinary" failure (=> crit effect due to Very High mana), and perhaps build a small shrine to the dice gods on my desk...  ;)