GURPS and why you should be playing it!

[Morty]

Magic, as detailed in the Basic Set and GURPS Magic supplement is skill based, and generally requires access to an advantage to use.

Standard GURPS Magic defines locations (game worlds, buildings, planets, etc. it's up to the GM) in terms of mana levels. Normal Mana means that you need the magery advantage to cast spells. Low mana imposes a skill penalty, no mana means no one can cast spells. On the other side, high mana allows everyone to cast spells, and very high mana gives mages a bonus to skill (but is dangerous, all failures are critical failures).

Thus, anyone can learn spells, but barring situations relating to the mana levels, only people with Magery can cast them. The spells themselves are thematically divided into colleges. There are colleges like fire, air, mind control, plants, necromancy, etc. Some spells belong to more than one colleges. Most spells with have some kind of prerequisite. Sometimes they're just certain levels of magery, others it's you need certain spells, either a specific spell, or x number of spells from that college.

The spell colleges are mostly thematic though, and the GM is encouraged to make his own spell colleges or prerequisite lists, as this isn't part of balance so much as flavor. This is one of the largest criticisms of the core GURPS Magic system, in that it isn't very generic.

Spells require fatigue points to cast. So more powerful spells have higher FP costs. Extremely powerful spells have very high fatigue point costs, so they are usually cast with a group of mages pooling their FP. This slows them down and makes them easier to foil but provides deeper resources of energy.

GURPS Mages actually will pick up large amounts of spells over their lifetime, because they can spend lots of points on attributes and magery, and then only one or two points on spells each to learn them at high levels. This is the major balance complaint, not that they become ultra super powerful and make "fighters" irrelevant, but because with the number of spells available to them they could easily get break into other peoples niches. Like D&D though, going for pure damage isn't usually their best bet in a fight.

On top of this though, there's plenty of other magic systems, such as Ritual Magic (which uses the same system but altered so magic is more versatile but weaker), Path/book magic, syntactic magic, or Powers (which is building spells as advantages like Flight (Costs Fatigue, Requires Rituals & gestures) )

Hm, interesting. I don't mind it that it's not generic, quite the opposite in fact; and quite I like what I see here. And if it's indeed possible to houserule just about anything in GURPS, then it gets even better.