Can energy from Lend Energy be banked like that from paut?

Question

At the simplest, Lend Energy (Healing college) and paut (as defined in Dungeon Fantasy/DFRPG and from GURPS: Thaumatology) are both intended to replace Fatigue Points spent in casting magic (faster than resting would).

However, the Thaumatology description of paut also states that if you drink more than required, the excess remains, and can be used for casting up to an hour after the dose. I never knew that until last night, because I've never owned or handled a copy of Thaumatology.

This, including the realization that GURPS has thousands of pages of rules I've never seen, leads me to ask whether the same is true of Lend Energy -- that is, if Alice the Mage casts a small spell, and her apprentice Bob the Younger uses Lend Energy to restore her fatigue, but miscalculates and Lends a couple more points than needed, will Alice be able to use that excess energy to cast without further depleting herself? Or will it be wasted? Or is there some other outcome?

Answer 1

No, Lend Energy's effect description has two sentences, one of which says that it can't do that:

"Restores the subject’s lost Fatigue Points, at an energy cost to the caster. Cannot increase the subject’s FP score above its normal maximum." (GURPS Magic, p.89)

The Dungeon Fantasy RPG version of the spell has the same limit, and also mentions it can't be used to recharge DF's Energy Reserves or power items.

As you say, there are so many GURPS books that there may be one that has a version that does allow this, but I (who has read countless of them, though certainly not all) don't know of any that does.

(Of course, a GM can trivially add a version that DOES allow that. A PC wizard could even try to research such a spell, the possibility of which again would be up to the GM. (See "Inventing New Spells" and "Player-Created Spells", GURPS Magic, p.14-15))

As for what happens tries to use the spell to lend more energy than the subject can receive (which could happen often, since it's not generally known by characters what fatigue level everyone is at), the caster would say how much they are trying to lend, and the spell would take as many as the subject could receive, up to the amount offered.

Answer 2

Agree with Dronz, but adding some extra information.

The reason against banking would be that it would potentially allow multiple people to Lend Energy to build up a bank in order to cast an overly powerful that the other mages don't know.

Second is that there is already the existing Share Energy spell which allows this ability, though at the cost ratio of 2/1 shared.

Paut, as defined on Thaum:52, works like a liquid Manastone, so works differently from a standard spell. It does allow the user to drink excess and use it within 5 minutes. There is also a limitation on how much Paut a mage can drink in a 24-hour period.