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richardwilkes
Minor but annoying issue with Ritual Magic spells
As it's set up now, when editing Ritual Magic spells, you need to input a Base Skill and a College, and it looks for the Base Skill with the College as a specialization. This doesn't make much sense to me. The Base Skill isn't directly relevant for spells, since the College skill will already be capped at Base Skill. And as it stands now, for a mage with a decent variety of spells, I'd need to write out their skills as (for example) Thaumatology (Air), Thaumatology (Illusion), and Thaumatology (Water). It's not anything game-breaking, but I find that tedious and ugly on the sheet. It's also not how Ritual Magic characters have been written up in official sources (See Prof. William Headley from the Basic Set.)
Actually, it looks for both the specialized base skill as well as the base skill and uses whichever will give the best result. If you don't know the specialized version, you get a default to the base skill without it. As far as I'm aware, this is correct. Please point out specific text in the book that contradicts this.
Sorry for not noticing this earlier, didn't check my email. My point is that Ritual Magic skills aren't written as, for example, Ritual Magic (Necromancy). It's written as Path of Necromancy (as seen on B315). It's not a specialization of the base skill at all. It's a separate skill that defaults to and can't exceed base skill.
Hmm... OK. I don't use Ritual Magic, so have virtually no knowledge of how it works other than a cursory skimming of the text when I was reviewing the changes that were submitted for this.
However, what you're stating would mean that there would be no way for GCS to know what the fallback skill is when that "Path of Necromancy" isn't actually on the sheet. That's not correct, either, as far as I can tell. Things are often noted differently in GCS exactly for this reason. Humans can make leaps of logic or refer to information not present on the sheet -- the computer can't.
Thinking about this some more... what is likely needed here is something similar to the Defaults section of a skill, rather than the way spells normally work.
Although I'm not sure why having a skill named "Ritual Magic (Necromancy)" vs "Path of Necromancy" is really significant in terms of what you have to do. In both cases, you still have to have the specialized skill on your list to get the correct results.
My suggestion would be to keep the window the way it currently is, but look for a skill with the same name as the "College" box and only use "Base Skill" if there isn't a skill by that name.
As for why it makes a difference, well, it doesn't really. As I said in the title, "minor but annoying". I think it looks ugly to have to write it that way.
I'm certainly not opposed to making this work better... just struggling to find a way the code can do what you want and still have the appropriate effects.
Is there a way that we can simply provide a list of Path Skills that are needed to cast the spell? RPM spells use the lowest of the Paths, with an additional -1 per Path after two, how hard would this be to implement? I am normally used to using the Paths used as standalone skills, not as something like Thaumatology (Path of Blah). So far everything pretty much works out, aside from the correct calculation of skill.
-edit: Looks like this is almost fixed as of 4.31
Ok, I see as of the 4.31 I can put in something like "Path of..." in the Base skill and use the actual path name in the college. I just need to redesign the path skills to use the path names as Specializations. No problem there. However, it still picks the highest skill of the listed colleges. Can it be changed to use the "floor" of the listed colleges with an additional -1 per college after 2. That should fix the RPM skill calc problem. And of course, this change should only be for RPM spells, not normal ones. Edit: Tested this, and yes, making a Path Magic as a master skill with the Path names as specializations works great. It also allows me to use my custom magic system for Channeling to work as well. ;)
GCS doesn't have any actual awareness of it being an RPM spell. Ritual Magic, yes, but Ritual Path Magic, no. As I don't use either, I'm not clear on whether your suggested change would end up breaking the original use for this -- it certainly sounds like it would, though.
I see. How hard would it be to add a checkbox to Ritual Magic spells for "Uses Path Magic"? If that would make it able to determine an RPM spell, then it could branch to a possibly different method of calculating the skill? It seems so close to working right now, as we just need the lowest skill taken instead of the highest one, with the additional path penalty.