Can you indirectly target using a T:Individual effect?

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

In context - trying to hit a demon you know is in a summoning circle with Demon's Eternal Oblivion, even though the demon is invisible. (Of course, the easy answer is "spont a T:Circle version, and just fry everything inside the ring"). My thought is "yes, you just target the area you think the demon is in, and they get a bonus to defense". But another player said that no, you need to be able to directly perceive your target to hit him.

Now, obviously you have the indirect targeting rules - like dropping a boulder on the target, and whatnot. But that's REALLY indirect, as opposed to simply aiming a direct spell in the target's general direction.

EDIT - of course, if this is true, then this explains why Wizard's Sidestep is so freakin' useful - it's an automatic "I win" defense against direct-target damage, unless you can perceive the wizard some other way.

2

According to the RAW, that player is right.

Indeed, that's the difference. You need to perceive the demon to hit it with a T:Individual version of Demon's Eternal Oblivion.

Quite the opposite. You are perceiving the wizard. You are just perceiving him in the wrong position. So he's hard to target with aimed spells, but probably (I've seen troupes differ on this) not with a spell like Clenching Grasp of the Crushed Heart.

3

Throw a fistfull of dust, you see the silouette BaZzAM! Crispy demon for dinner

And uer IMOO the player is rigth. You aim where you percieve.

4

That works if you're throwing something, eg. via the Invisible Sling of Vilano, because it technically targets whatever you are throwing.
Baring that, you must be able to percieve anything you target with a spell (ACs are a special case here).
The obvious answer is not Circle though I'd argue, since any demon with any sense would simply leave before the circle was finished.
Try T: Room, in which case you simply have to percieve the room...

See ezze's answer above.
But that's why invisibility is so useful.
And perhap you're also finally beginning to see why demons can be such pests, what with combining invisibility (immateriality) and the ability to lie to Intelligo magics...

5

A fistful is quite a lot of dust. Which is why flour is so popular for this purpose.
Ofcourse, if the demon has gone immaterial, there will be no silouette.

6

All rightie - thanks for the responses, all! Looks like we're going with the Ring target effect. (Retroactively, anyway - the fight is actually already over, and now the Troupe is retroactively fitting what happened, now that we're looking up the rules.)

The summoning circle is an effective lvl 30 Circular Ward vs. Demons (with 30 levels of penetration) - from what I understand of those, if you have it prepped beforehand, you can force a summon into one, and they can't leave until you dismiss them. (There's an example of a "demon trapped within a circle in an abandoned covenant" story seed in RoP:I). Is this not the case?

So in this case, the circle is already engraved in the ground - it's just an issue of walking up to the edge of it and touching it, and sponting the rest. (yes, I do agree that would be harrowing to do, and may very well require a Finesse or Concentration roll to pull off.) The PC does have the True Name of the Demon, of course, which can give him 15 levels of penetration - but it requires an Arcane Connection range, which bumps the spont up +20.

EDIT - I was under the impression that ring effects could be cast on existing rings. Do you need to create a new ring for each new effect?

7

Ah, you were actually sane enough to atleast use a circle - that was not a given from your previous post :wink:

No problems there really.

Nope, that works well - I just haden't caught that you'd already caught the demon in a circle.

8

Bah! Dont be so much "tiquis-miquis" ( spanish word meaning scrupulous simillar to tickler)

Dust-dirt- flour- water.... Spit if you want :laughing:

Inmaterial, ok you are reminding my own SG putting stones on the way... whats next? Will fill the circle with sulphurous smokes that appears as an unfathomable pustulent blister? :imp:

9

RAW answer to the title of the thread is "yes." Take a look at the self-immolation spell in HoH:S for an example. It also hits those nearby. If you Creo a large enough Individual (or Muto, etc.), you may well engulf the target. But that only works if you're working with materials to engulf the target. In the way you want it done, I would agree with the others and say "no."

Chris

10

This is essentially the same thing as Aiming.

11

IIRC you can't just touch the engraved circle, or the iron band on the ground, you still have to trace along the circumference of this circle. Sure, it still beats having to actually draw a circle in the ground with your staff. But it's not instantaneous.
Or am I remembering RAW wrong?

12

No, that's absoutely correct.
However, if the demon is bound within the circle, it cannot touch the circle.
Or you ca simply make a new circle an inch further out.

13

Sure, if it's trapped first then casting a second Circle spell is easy. Tracing along the outside is all good, the demon cast touch you. The bigger the circle the more time it takes, we have adequate rules for this.

But does the Warding Circle keep demons in or out? Or both?
I always imagined such Wards as made to keep the magus inside safe. That's what i understand a Ward does. THis is actually what the spell is written to do in RAW, possibly even all the way back to 1st ed.
But a lot of people seem to want this circle to use to trapping demons. Fine, if that's the general consensus. But it's one or the other, not selectively.

If the magi cast the Circle of Warding in advance, and force the demon in so it's stuck - this circle obviously only keeps demons in. So the magi can't use this circle to protect himself inside, since the demon can obviously enter it.
Some may argue that there is a difference whether the demon willingly steps inside (which it can't) or is forced inside (BTW: how do you force it? use Rego Corpus or Animal depending on form?). But IMHO this is reading too much utility into a spell only mentioned in RAW to keep demons OUT and prevent them harming the person inside.

Personally I'd prefer having Warding Circles keep demons out and (let's call 'em) Binding Circles keeping them in. Same difficulty of Guideline, but different effects.

Sorry, I'm off the original topic now

14

He's right, but, IMO, this is where things can get muddy.

There's, as I see it, a tendency to assume that Perception = Sight, so if you don't see your target, you can't affect it.

But what if you're hearing it, and thus knows it's there? What if you can't see him, but sees the footprints he leaves in the mud? What if he stinks an awful lot? What if you've got a spell that allows you to see odors or sounds? What about Eyes of the Bat? What if it's invisible but you're touching it?

One could make an argument that, whatever your means of perception, so long as they allow you to tell that there's someone here, you can target it. Otherwise, being Blind is one of the worst flaws any magus could have, clearly worse than Short-Ranged Magic (Major Hermetic).
So, here, how do you know you demon is still in the circle? How do you know he hasn't escaped? If you've got a way to tell, one could argue that you are perceiving it.

On Wizard's Sidestep, it gets discuted in the Ranulf thread, if you're interested, with arguments going both ways.

Now, in order to maybe spark some discussion, let's see...

You're using Creo Terram to create a Stone Wall at a given point. Your Target is the stone wall. But what's the target you're perceiving? The place where you are creating the wall? Could you create a boulder over someone’s head or not, and if so, why?
Going by analogy, you’re using Creo Ignem to create a Fire in a fireplace. Your Target is the fire. What about your target? And what if your point is the inside of a circle inside of the fireplace?
=> Can a magus create a stone wall at voice range inside a circle he’s seeing, but not a fire? In fact, Circle if Encompassing Flames works not unlike your stone wall, in this instance. Couldn’t he cast it inside the circle?

So, what would I do?
I’d disallow non-perceived spells where the Target and the target are the same, that is, Mentem spells, Vim spells and such. There’s nothing you can target here.
I would allow “conjuration” spells targeted at the circle’s ground, or at the space above it. That’s the target you’re seeing, just like if you where creating a boulder there. If something invisible happens to be there, too bad for them. BUT you may very well miss, especially with a Pilum of Fire, that may pass aside the invisible beastie, and you’ll have no way of knowing it.
Now, if you’ve got Circle if Encompassing Flames and cast enough of them to engulf the entire circle interior in flames, your demon will be charcoiled, even though he was never directly targeted by the spell.

15

Perception can work by sight, hearing, smell, touch or even taste. So yes, you can target a demon you can only smell, or hear, or touch.

However, knowing is not perceiving. So you can't target a demon through Eyes of the Bat, or through the footprints it leaves in the mud, because in those cases you are only deducing the demon's presence rather than perceiving it.

16

If I see footsteps, and see them moving about in a circle, am I perceiving something is there? The suggestion that I'm deducing it is secondary to the perception that something is making it. I think the use of perceived was intentional, rather than sensed. Perceiving involve some way of becoming aware, by collating all the information of the senses into a conclusion that something is there. It is entirely true that perception is harder when one of the senses is removed, but perception is still possible. And again, going to Fixer's point, a blind magus can generally sense something with hearing, but he may have some problems with targeting, but some magic doesn't require targeting, and it would require some deduction to get a better approximation of the location if all magic required targeting...

Now going back to the OP, I would still require some evidence that the demon be perceived. Knowing it is in the summoning circle isn't enough if it is totally silent, invisible, and emits no smell. The other options require touching it (crossing the circle is probably bad) or tasting it, which has the same problem. I find it unlikely that a demon summoned would behave like this, because he would want to attempt to gain control over the summoner, and steal his soul, but there could be a good reason if it was a powerful and smart demon being summoned, and had greater designs. The alternative to targeting something in the circle is, of course, to use T:Circle. And it's entirely reasonable that a summoner would have spells developed to be T:Circle, too. Because you're perceiving the circle, and your desire is to effect everything in the circle.

17

By RAW, it does both simultaneously. (AM5th, pg114) - "Wards with a circle target...prevent things warded against that are within the circle from leaving, and prevent things warded against that are outside from entering. Warded things cannot act across the circle, n matter which side they are on, nor can they damage the circle, directly or indirectly."

When summoned via a ReVi spell, if you have a circle prepared, you can force them in as part of the summoning - I believe you're just using the spell to command them where to appear, which happens to be inside the ring. (Abjuration of the Hellsworn Spirit - RoP:I, pg. 122).

18

I stand corrected, the general talk about Wards on p114 is clear. What fooled me was the specific dexcriptive text for Circular Ward against Demons, which only talks about protecting the magus inside.

Also, as we're talking about magi summoning demons specifically I think all bets are off. That should be doable, to summon the demon into the ward.

19

Follow-up - So, I'm reading through the Flambeau section of HoH:S for the first time. (I've owned the book for a while, but just flipped through to the Ex Misc section whenever I've read it.)

Anyway - there's an entire section in here on "Fighting Invisibly" - and it does answer this question. (pg. 32-33): "A character who is invisible gains the following benefits...He cannot be hit by missile weapons unless his opponent is able to locate him first. Likewise, aimed spells can only hit him if the caster knows his location...He cannot be targeted by spells unless the caster either has an Arcane Connection to him, or is able to locate him. area-affecting spells, such as Arc of Firey Ribbons, work normally against invisible characters within the affected area. Aimed spells are treated like missile attacks (see the point above)."

So, from this, I take it that there are 3 ways of attacking an invisible foe with magic: with a normal (non-aimed) spell, with an AoE spell, and with an Aimed spell. AoE spells work fine if you cast them in the general area. Aimed spells work like missile weapons. Otherwise, if you wish to cast a 'normal' spell, you must locate the target first.

OK - what counts as "locating the target"? Thankfully, they've got a section on that, as well.

"Locating an Invisible Character - In order to target an invisible character with spells or missile weapons an opponent must be able to locate her to within a half-pace or so. Usually this is done by visual cues (shadow and footprints) but when these are faint or non-existent, it is possible (but difficult) to locate an invisible character by sound alone. Beasts may be able to locate an invisible character by smell."

The text then goes on into the game mechanics of locating a target by indirect cues and sound.

So, if you can figure out within a half pace of where a character should be (ie, within a foot or two), then you can cast a normal (non-targeted) spell on them. Or, I suppose, you can just GUESS where the target is, and blast that area. However, because the combat system is abstract, it assumes you fail at your random blasting unless you've got an actual lead to go on. So I guess it's binary: with a normal spell either you don't know where they are, and you automatically miss, or else you've got a pretty strong idea where they are, and you automatically hit (and have to deal with magic resistance.)

Huh - OK. That'll work. Although it's interesting that, in the original case of the demon in the circle, it might not actually work - summoning circles have to be at least 2 paces wide (6 feet) in order to hold an average-sized individual (ie they're actually summoning SPHERES, if I understand their 3rd dimension correctly) - which means you can't just blast the center of it with Demon's Eternal Oblivion.The demon could be anywhere inside the circle, although being near the edge would require that they lay down and scrunch up. And if you assume that each casting takes 6 seconds or so, then the demon would have time to move around. And in an abstract combat system, that's enough to avoid the spell.

20

It is indeed an excellent read. Very informative.

R: Touch, T: Circle version of DEO works fine though.