While idly daydreaming about medieval slaughter the other day (as is my wont), i had a thought about crystal dart style spells.
Crystal Dart is target individual as it creates 1 dart. If you upped the level by 3 magnitudes you could get 100 crystal darts (+2 group, +1 size).
In the view of my fellow GMs (i'm my groups rules lawyer so i need some outside input on this), would you allow those darts to be targeted as the magus pleases? i.e. 100 darts in one bloke, and if so would this be standard damage 100 times? or would you say only one dart per target? or even just have much bigger (but a single amount of) damage?
my thinking extends thus. If you could do it with crystal dart you could probably do it with even lower level attack spells (that do +5 or +0 damage) but having that attack hit 100 times would easily shred an unarmoured foe. Of course, even 100 times, a well armoured target will remain unharmed.
Sure, yopu can do it. I wouild make it a +25 damage spell and they go against a single target. For spreading it out I would require an other version of the spell or high finesse rolls.
The downside is that you suffer falling damage and concentration rolls to cast it while falling, since you are basically removing all the earth around you to cast this spell. It is a Mu(Re)Te, since the dart is removed from the ground and not created from thin air.
Your TARGET is GROUP, so you cannot point all the darts at one opponent.
The effect feels more like a volley of nonmagical arrows. You will probably hit all individuals in your targeted group, though approximatly two thirds of the darts will miss.
Distribute the rest evenly and do more damage instead of small damage multiple times.
No need for finesse rolls due to the large number of darts.
Targeting a single foe should be far easier than a group (since you need to mentally direct the missiles at your targets). The target:group would in this case apply to a group of stones, as opposed to a group of people...
I would let the missiles do damage individually (probably consider them an untrained group, in order to save rolls). This probably leads to several minor wounds (as opposed to a single mortal one).
Btw - note that this has the disadvantage of reducing the penetration by quite a lot, so you probably don't want to try this versjon on anything with might...
If the desire is to target one individual, would it not be roughly the same idea to just move a huge chunk of earth, and smash them with it? Not as cinematic, perhaps, but could potentially do the same amount, if not more, damage.....
I'm pretty sure the target means how many darts you are making, not how many people you are hitting. Corpus you target bodies, Teram you target earth and so forth.
As to the spell itself, I had a discussion on this about a year ago on berklist and we had decided it would probably be best to just increase the damage by the number of levels you increased the spell by. If you wanted to hit a group I'd say it would be more like arc of firey ribbons as suggested above or like a rain of arrows on an area dealing +x amount (probably +15-+20) to everyone within a certain range.