Suppose you cast a spell with no obvious physical manifestation, say a ReMe spell commanding a person to "come visit me this evening". Can you know if your spell penetrated the target's magic resistance?
Presumably it may depend on the wizard's sigil. But generally.
This is a very interesting question. I don’t think you can!
Feels like something you’d need a separate Intellego spell for, to determine if a person is under the effects of a spell. Which, presumably, would also need to penetrate.
I suspect you would have to rely on physical signs - is your target on fire, is he making ouchie noises, &etc - rather than a mystic understanding that your effect broke through any relevant resistance.
Is it possible to build a Hermetic (Intelligo Vim, I suppose) spell that lasts for a specific duration, and targets 'all spells I cast during the duration' which could tell (and report) whether the subsequent spells penetrated? Or at least report 'I could not penetrate, so cannot tell if the other spell penetrated'?
If you can see active magic, you should be able to see if your spell failed or not. This is still problematic for Group or similar spells that may be active but have failed to penetrate against certain targets, though. It could also be problematic if you cannot get it to penetrate, but that may well give you the information you need anyway.
A container Target could be used to do what OakRover suggests if the InVi can be designed using it.
I believe so. The base Individual of Vim is pretty flexible.
This seems like it should therefore be feasible at a fairly low magnitude to simply detect whether spells that the caster casts while it is active are still there and active, even if nothing else is incorporated into the design, with an effect that targets the caster as the Individual and therefore includes applicable magic/spells (any, in the context of a detect any magic effect) that they use for the duration.
I like your interpretation but this is the bit that is tripping me up:
So it seems like a mage could cast this as a 'Self' spell, and it will let them know their buffs and so on are still active -- but it is not clear that it could affect spells that mage casts at someone or something else.
Do you think including a Muto requisite (to alter other spells to report 'penetrated' or 'did not penetrate') would be viable? Useful? Superfluous?
I mean, it might ultimately just be a troupe call -- but it doesn't seem like interpreting it this way would be terribly disruptive.
Especially as spells are cast the Magus is playing an active role in casting them, and indeed channeling the energy through their Gift etc. This is why, for instance, Muto Vim spells say that Touch is sufficient range to affect your own spells as you cast them but more range is needed to affect the spells of others.
I would also argue that the description is subject to interpretation across the techniques in the Form and the wording may not have been written so much with say Intellego in mind.
It seems reasonable that at the moment of completion the spell either takes effect and you would (arguably) lose immediate mystical connection with it due it departing range, or it would fail and cease to be. One might interpret that as simply "no longer detecting the spell" either way, though it seems like something that wouldn't be purely identical with variations in nature/feel and timing. But say we err on the side of caution and say something more is needed to be absolutely sure every time, one bump in magnitude for complexity seems like it should be sufficient to tell the difference.
The question is more academical than practical. E. g. the
can easily be rephrased as a ReMe spell commanding a person to "come visit me this evening and nod now" without adding complexity or level - or having to invent a new spell.
I reckon, that most magi make their provisions to check penetration of their more subtle spells - and do not advertise these.
Things become more tricky, if a maga affects targets she is not even aware of - like people hidden in a Room Target.
I could not find anything specific in the rule book. It seems this one is up to the Story Guide to decide? I am happy to be contradicted by someone more well read than I, if there is something in a book I missed.
If a spell fails to penetrate a target’s Parma, and presumably MR, the Target is aware that they were targeted by a spell that was blocked.
So presumably in order for the targeted person to realise this, their Parma must react in someway to a failed Penetration.
Can you scry on an active Parma and tell if it reacts to a spell casting with the failed Penetration state?
Children of Pralix perhaps?
That raises a whole new can of worms. First, scrying on another mage is illegal; second, does the 'The Parma Reacts, and the reaction can be sensed' mean that an otherwise uninvolved mage tell that an spell was cast? Resisted? Penetrated?
I'm not sure what the consequences would be if all of those were 'yes'.
I would say "not automatically", but as people have said, there are a lot of possibilities for finding out.
If you'd asked this a few years ago, there would probably be a sentence in ArMD about it…
if you can, adding a MuIm pink dot additional effect to all of your spells when you need to know they have not penetrated is an idea.
In my saga, I raised the fact that ingame, no magus know his LR is broken when the "age roll" is bad and the crisis avoided. The player are now considering a breakthrough to have this in the LR process.
A relatively low level InVi spont cast in winter should show if it's broken.
In fact, a low level would detect magic but not be able to say "the LR is down". Because familiar link, or being subject to an aegis or normal active effects are all "magic active" on that character. To detect the form and the technique you are already at +2 magnitude. For a base 5 for any active magic, at personal range, we are already looking at InVi 15 which is not a low level spell if you are not at least interested in Intellego or Vim.
And that is you are not under a powerful CrCo effect for recovery, in case it's a vain effort since it will say "yes" and the SG will probably either ask a duration and a finesse roll or a complexity in the spell to discrimnate between LR and other CrCo effects.
If your LR is powerful, you can bring the spell level lower, but you never really know the level if you have not done it yourself (ingame) since the labtotal is not your and you may at most have contributed to it. And some flaws have nasty effects on the LR power itself so it's really a roleplay thing.
And that is assuming you are able to use spells, which is not always the case (especially if you are a mundane or a redcap, which is where the question came from.)
An item can do the job, but items can be stolen or not available at the right moment.
So that's so numerous reason they want to have that information in the LR itself. As a SG, i'm all for PC's having ideas of breakthrough.
Why wouldn't they know? How can you possibly miss that you're spending an entire season recovering, unable to do other things?
A Longevity Ritual is effective until the character suffers a crisis. When the crisis occurs, the ritual assures that the character survives
A character who survives a crisis, even through magic, needs the rest of the season to recover fully, and thus cannot undertake any other activities.
I think you may be missing that the LR doesn't avoid the crisis, just guarantee you survive it.
The crisis may be bedridden for a week/months, etc. and you will survive, sure.
How do you know you were bedridden from the aging crisis rather than from a disease, in game? Mostly either because the SG doesn't want to play that, which is fine. Or because as a player you rolled a bad roll and that's not a knowledge from the character, but the player.
And the knowledge that if it happens in winter it's due to the LR is purely from a meta point of view. In game, the characters do not all suffer crisis from old age in winter, that's unrealistic and really easy to abuse.
If players renew their LR at each time they spend 1 week or more in bed during winter/at any moment, it becomes costly very quickly. Oh yeah they can use InCo and have a good medecine roll to know what happened. That's also a good in game solution.
Now I'm wondering if a physician can know whether you're having an aging crisis or a disease... I'm not sure he can.