Perhaps it would be more fair to say that it isn't quantified as to how one would assign Long Term Fatigue to someone who undertook the activity.
Regardless, my position is that while the mechanics certainly allow it, no one is crazy enough to do it. If you want to do it, you're going to annoy me, and I will be instituting SG fiat, probably much more punitively than Long Term fatigue. It is a trope to line up your shot and put everything you've got into it and make it count. Depending upon the story it either succeeds or it doesn't. You get one bite at the apple. If you swing and hit, great. If you swing and miss, you have to approach the problem from a different angle. Half the stories are about missing and going at it from a different direction. That's what makes it interesting. It is utterly boring to think that someone would realistically know that he could safely attempt to cast a spell on someone until he just happens to get through his resistance, counting on plane old luck. I've never, ever, designed a magus who relied upon luck. If he has combat spells, he has penetration in spades, or will as his Arts grow. They all have plans, and none of them involve sitting around until they get lucky. My aesthetic may not be anyone else's, granted, but I seriously doubt that anyone's idea of fun is to sit and roll dice until they get lucky.
He has a point. My only concern is that it isn't quantified. Would you assign a long term fatigue penalty who spend 30 minutes in combat (and survived without any damage)? As unlikely as it is, that's a really long time. Having done a fair bit of public speaking, heck even GMing, if you're doing a lot of talking and flailing your arms about, you're going to get tired. There's a reason why game sessions last about 4 hours, fatigue... Is it unreasonable to speculate that trying to cast 10 spells a minute isn't going to tire someone faster than a 4 hour gaming session?
the attacking mages has the 2 ars he is going to use(regardless of which specifically)
at 20+20=40. he has penetration 10. his opponent has parma magica 10. his defending form just happens to be 20.
going back to the attacking mage. he has (naturally or not) intelligence 5+ stamina 5. le't s say the magic aura is 5. he is casting a ritual so let's say 5 in ars liberales and 5 in philosophae.
he has an fixed arcane connection and a sympathetic modifier totaling 6 his die roll in the spell comes as 5.
if im not mistaken this is 130 penetration total. - 50 for the spell.= 80 this bypasses the other guys resistance by 10.
tha attacking spell is perdo corpus . the target dies.
and i was pretty strict with the attacking wizard. he could have found more sympathy modifiers, he could have been in a stronger aura. he could have mastered the spell he could have puissant art virtue or whatever
Back on topic.
As has been mentioned, Magic resistance is more than Parma, it's Parma + Form. In addition the Magic Resistance Spell Mastery ability can double resistance totals against certain spells. I recently started a thread that discussed how it would work, too. As I indicated, in my first response, it is rather easy for certain builds to achieve high penetration, even without an AC. I have a weather maga that is about 9 years out of gauntlet and she's starting at a +30 penetration for the Incantation of Lightning. It is hard to withstand that, even without an AC. Then you add dice and she can juice it with Life Boost to, and she's a Tytalus, so she can add another 6 with self confidence. On an average roll, if she boosts 5 fatigue levels, and uses self confidence, she's getting 6 +30 +25+6=67 penetration. Yeah, she passes out. But she does take out a serious bad guy if they have that kind of magic resistance.
There is, perhaps a better argument to be made that Parma, as a resistance, is a bit underwhelming in the face of Hermetic magic. I have considered making MR Parma Abilityx10 +Form for Hermetic magic. It does pretty well against other magical traditions, though.
Well, it's what the rules say.
I've seen repeated casting used a few times in my sagas to do a lot of "mundane work" over a single day or night, typically with Rego magics - from tilling fields to weaving cloth. At least once I've seen a magus, who could cast with certainty of no fatigue a D:Sun spell that created and commanded a single raven, cast said spell repeatedly over the course of several hours -- creating an "army" of some three thousand ravens, that he then used to attack and defeat a small force of some 20 knights and some 100 yeomen.
And the other guy could have all that, too. In fact, if he had Magic Rresistance mastery for the spell (or effect) designed, his MR goes from 70 to 140, or rather (70+aura)x2. Auras add to resistance, and so if the defender is in a higher, complementary aura it adds to his resistance. Probably need to kill the guy while he's in church...
And the math is wrong on the penetration. Fixed AC is a +4 bonus to the multiplier, so +5, the Penetration score is 10, so that would be (5x10) +50 penetration from the AC. Then you have to include Casting Total - Spell level, which looks to be about 5+die from your given data. So, even in your scenario, the spell doesn't penetate, I get 55+die in penetration...
Definitely not.
Remember, a long-term fatigue level can be regained only after a good night's sleep, and only level can be regained per night. Do you assume that grogs who train to fight can only afford 30 minutes of action per day? I can definitely keep playing a sport for 30 minutes, rest for 15, and play for another 30, every single day, for weeks on end (I've done it, and quite a bit more).
Again, if you don't use exaggerated gestures, you are not "flailing your arms about" when casting. I'd say your are moving them on par with what a piano player does. And you can definitely do that for eight hours per day. Just like you can work as a potter for eight hours per day, or work in the fields for eight hours per day -- interspersing the occasional break. Similarly, unless you are using a booming voice, yes, you can speak to the public for hours on end, with the occasional break.
Well, you have the constitution of Rasputin, then, ezzelino.
Doing martial arts in a dojo, and doing martial arts because you're being attacked are completely different activities. A couple of rounds defending myself left me far more tired than anything I had done in practice. Some of it may have been adrenaline, granted. And it wasn't anything like 30 minutes. Training is not the same thing as actually doing it. You train so that you can come up with a broad range of responses to a broad range of situations, so that you know how to do something when it needs to be done. Being tired while you train doesn't help with retention, either. I have been tired after two hours at the dojo, and I have been tired after 4 hours SGing a session. They are completely different things, but they both tire and tax the body. Being "on" is tiring, period.
Speaking to your point about playing a sport, I've seen it tallied that the actual time spent doing anything in the average pro (American) football game is 11 minutes, out of an hour of game time, which takes over 3 hours to complete. 11 minutes of hard, physical activity, the rest of it is walking around and waiting for commercial breaks to be over. The interesting stat is 11 minutes out of 60. Less than a fifth of the time is heavy physical exertion, or being on. Are they tired when it's over? Or could they go another 3 more hours at the same level of intensity?
The defender is probably sitting at home, in his own Magic aura of 5 and protected by his covenant's Aegis of at least 20. Both of these add to his magic resistance, bringing it up to 95. The spell fails to penetrate.
He felt his Parma being attacked, so he knows someone tried to affect him with a spell. He casts an Intellego Vim spell to detect and analyze the magical residues of this spell and probably recognizes the casting sigil of his attacker. At a minimum, he will inform his fellow covenant members of the attack. Chances are that the attacker is known to him. In any case, the attacker will eventually be identified.
Even if the attacker ultimately succeeds, he will be identified. He just commited murder against a fellow member of the Order of Hermes. If he didn't succeed, it is still an attempted murder, which constitutes breaking the Code. A case is brought before Tribunal. The attacker is found guilty, Marched and killed.
Killing another magus isn't that hard if you really want to do it, with or without an arcane connection. But it has consequences. Ars Magica is a game about the consequences of wielding power.
A magus doesn't live in a vaccum, he lives in a society of other magi. As in most societies, murder is not taken lightly in the Order of Hermes. And the player's magus isn't usually the most powerful of all the magi in the Order. In the event that he is now, then he had to get there first. If he displayed a propensity to murder other magi, others would have taken note and dealt with him before he got too powerful.
Now, if that all happens during a justified and formally declared Wizard's War, then it's another story altogether. But in that case, since the Wizard's War must be declared a month in advance, the defender will also have had the opportunity to gather an arcane connection. Or to work on bolstering his défenses.
I hate the "I try until I get lucky enough with the dice" tactic. It can certainly work by RAW, in many cases. I personally disallow it when I run the game - exceptional success is for drama in-scene, not off-scene book-keeping.
If this is considered a problematic, mechanical issue (and, therefore, a serious in-setting issue) then there should probably be a counter. Someone will have developed one. I'd be interested in adding things like Effigies (stuff like Voodoo dolls, etc): simulacra of the magus designed to 'lightning rod' harmful magic, and take the hit instead. It goes without saying that these Effigies would also be Arcane Connections to the magus - possibly very potent ones - and I don't think they'd help against all spells (intelligence gathering spells would be unaffected?).
Making ACs bi-directional is a good counter. Sure, a magus can use that AC to keep pounding his enemy, but once the attack is detected that foe can hit back just as easily.
Excuse me, but did you read the earlier portions of the thread? It was discussed, but there wasn't a definitive answer.
Aegis stacks with Parma when the enemy caster is within the Aegis by subtracting half the level of the Aegis from casting totals. I think it is a strong implication that it subtracts the full level of the Aegis, when the caster is outside of it, but that is my inference.
Hm...probably a unique-ish lab activity, much like making a Talisman. You open the simulacra for enchantment, and forge an arcane connection with it- taking a season of work. Then perhaps you spend a bit more time instilling it with a certain number of charges (like a charged item), and the Effigy can spend charges to neutralise damaging, hostile R: arcane connection attacks (that breach your MR).
I'm thinking the charges give you one day of protection per charge. You probably want to limit the number of charges in some way: max # = to magic theory? 1/2 MT? 2x MT? Something, something. This would give you a window of time (but not a great one) to find the person trying to murderise you; hopefully giving you more options that the current RAW of 'oh my God, someone's trying to kill me and in the next half hour I'm probably going to explode!'
I don't think it would have any effect on non-damaging R: AC spells. I see it as purely a lightning rod for overtly harmful spells.
If you wanted to spice things up a little more, you could make these effigies potentially dangerous to the user. If someone else got a hold of one, they could physically damage the effigy to cause damage to the magus. Making the effigies powerful, useful, but also very, very scary.
