stat enhancing spells

[mike_ravenwood]

The predistilled spell Strength of the Ox grants the target +2D to Power. What about abstraction? What kind of guidelines are people using? Is +2D the best one can do, or an extra success = increase in power? Can you Gray someones stat throught magic temporarily, or even permanetly if you set the Objective high enough?

[luke]

the way i play it (and the way it was intended) is that spells can't have heroic/supernatural effects unless cast by heroic or supernatural sorcery (and will.)

For damaging effect spells, we know that is possible to get a gray result with extra successes, but one can't start in the gray without a gray Will.

-L

[Kublai]

Here's where the Abstraction rules kind of come up short. There's no further guidelines beyond the intent of the spell. I do feel that some more mechanics would help out a lot of GMs combat munchkinism. If the intent of the spell is "increase target's Power," how much can that spell increase it by? I like Luke's idea of needing Grey Will or Sorcery to create Grey effects and would want to see this and other such advice in writing.

On the other hand, allowing intent to govern the affect does work if the GM is responsible. To begin with, the base Obstacle for a Power increasing spell would be something like 3 + Target's Power, which will certainly limit the effect. And then, it depends on the GM's world. If it's low-powered and gritty, the GM can rule that the effect is +1 Power per every three successes. But in a high-powered world, +1 Power per each success seems fine.

I don't think the Abstractions rules were meant to be a player free-for-all. I think it's meant to be the basis for GM/player cooperation, which is cool.

[luke]

what's wrong with using extra successes as extra dice?

what and when you distill the spell, the extra successe you get in the final distillation can go into spell effect (bonus dice to Petunia Picking) or into reducing time. (Standard Diligently and Carefully rules).

-L

[Redoid]

What and when you distill the spell, the extra successe you get in the final distillation can go into spell effect (bonus dice to Petunia Picking) or into reducing time. (Standard Diligently and Carefully rules).


Let's try to abstract a stat enhancing spell...

Iron Mind

Enhance the Will of the caster (which, together with Iron Body, the Forte enhancing spell, allow for experimenting with abstractions a little more safely, to cast spells successfully and to resist tax afterwards).

Raw abstraction: ob 12, syllables 44

Anima (ob 5 syllables 10)
Enhance (ob 4, syllables 24)
Personal (ob 0, syllables 2)
Sustained (ob 2, syllables 4)
Single Target (ob 1, syllables 4)

By casting patiently and carefully, and taking a little over eight hours, a world-class archmage (B8 Sorcery, B8 Will) could decrease the obstacle by 8, leaving an obstacle of 4.

16 open-ended dice yield an average 7.2 success, enough to cast the spell without variance around half the time.

Once formalized, the spell could be distilled like that:

First distillation: ob 8, syllables 27

Anima-Enhance (ob 4.5, syllables 17)
Single Target (ob 1, syllables 4)
Sustained (ob 2, syllables 4)
Caster (ob 0, syllables 2)

Second distillation: ob 7, syllables 23

Anima-Enhance (ob 4.5, syllables 17)
Single Target-Sustained (ob 1.5, syllables 4)
Caster (ob 0, syllables 2)

Final distillation: ob 3, syllables 12

The aforementioned master wizard could easily make that test by four or five , and more using artha. With a triple extension sigil, the final spell would be

Iron Will (ob Target's Will (minimum for Anima spells), syllables 7500)

This incantation takes about three hours, and adds +5D to Will (can't be more than 10, so no point in boosting the effects more anyway.Of course, the Wisdom of the Ancients spells only takes 50 syllables, so the God of Magic who distilled the spell obviously put a LOT of successes in reducing the casting time... But I guess it would be more useful to increase drastically the effect.... +6D is not that difficult to get by the rules, and who cares if the spells takes a day to cast, given the power of the spell...

I don't advocate munchkin spells of course, just pointing out that the recommanded method doesn't produce the spells presented in the Character Burner.Not that I have any suggestions for consistent and infallible guidelines :)

[Kevin]

I don't advocate munchkin spells of course, just pointing out that the recommanded method doesn't produce the spells presented in the Character Burner.

That would probably be because the Abstraction rules was written after the Character Burner. I think the Revision is supposed to fix this.

[luke]

where'd the +5D come from? that's a lot. Why not successes over the obstacle? I'd add a Majoris for a big flat bonus like that.

-L

[Redoid]

where'd the +5D come from? that's a lot. Why not successes over the obstacle? I'd add a Majoris for a big flat bonus like that.

-L

Because if the hypothetical character burning the spell could beat the ob 12 raw abstraction in order to formalize the spells, we can guess he can often get around 16 successes (to prevent variance).


What and when you distill the spell, the extra successe you get in the final distillation can go into spell effect (bonus dice to Petunia Picking) or into reducing time. (Standard Diligently and Carefully rules).


And if the final distillation is ob 3, or even ob 3+Target's stat, some sorcerer gathering 16 success will have a lot of extra successes to put into the spell effect. So my point was that IF you can distillate a spell and beat the very high initial obstacle, then you will have a VERY high resulting spell (provided you don't put many successes in reducing casting time).

So having spells like Wisdom of the Ancient, with a reasonable dice bonus, is awkward in the abstraction rules: you either can't get past the first distillation, or you are powerful enough to distillate a very powerful (game-breaking) spell.

[Calypso]

As for distillation and such, since abstractions are based on the Target's will (or whatever stat) with each casting, I think the easy rule would be simply that you must distill the spell separately for each individual on whom you want to cast it.
And if their relevant stat changes, you must start over.
Combine this with a distillation time in the realm of months, and either you need to speed up your campaign to have stat increasers as game-breakers, or somebody's forgetting how hard it is to keep up "sustained" spells in the first place.

[Redoid]

As for distillation and such, since abstractions are based on the Target's will (or whatever stat) with each casting, I think the easy rule would be simply that you must distill the spell separately for each individual on whom you want to cast it.

That's great, but it would rule out of existence spells like Arcane Kindness.


And if their relevant stat changes, you must start over.
Combine this with a distillation time in the realm of months, and either you need to speed up your campaign to have stat increasers as game-breakers, or somebody's forgetting how hard it is to keep up "sustained" spells in the first place.

I was not thinking of players abstracting gamebreaker spells, just some random sorcerer in the game world, who would have spent his life researching a stat enhancing spell, taught thereafter in Sorcery 101.

A solution would be to remove spells entirely and have each wizard learn only facets during its training, and abstracting his own spells. That would explain the lack of generic countermagic (ala D&D) because if each spell is personal to the wizard, you couldn't recognize it when hearing the incantation.

PC wizards would be able to abstract spells during their lifepath in order to start the game with some usable magic (at the cost of skill points, maybe, rather than resource, since they are supposed to spend time researching their spells rather than learning them from a master, for example). And that would reinforce the concept of old wizards, because young ones are generally either ineffective or downright dangerous if they try raw abstractions without doing it patiently and carefully.