I am sorry if I appear lazy, but it was like 6 years since I was active at the Berklist and I have never been very active here. What I wonder is if there is any nice house rules in circulation regarding the fact that e.g. people don't die by being hammered by Pilum of Fire for a month or two.
There are other situations as well, but this is a rather straight forward one. What do you do, except the common sense to kill of the poor bastards - any rule hint?
From memory:
You roll soak against spell. It is affected by wound penalties. Thus, the more PoF you take, the worst damage they'll cause.
Combat death is instant death. I believe the idea with multiple wounds - that do not cause instant death - is that you take so many wound penalies that your recovery is impossible (sans magic). However, this is death outside the combat.
You might consider house ruling a 'Death from shock' rule. i.e. the victim loses so much fluid they go into shock and die. i.e. if you exceed a total wound penalty of 10 + Sta. However, this is still often a process that takes a while to happen, it isn't instant (unless you take a fatal wound).
No, as you don't roll soak the wound penalty is not used. And you can't evade the PoF so you just continue to get the X type of wounds until the scene is over (the magus dies of starvation or boredom).
So I hope there are some widely used house rule for this silly kind of issues. Aslan2's suggestion is ok:
That could work. Do you use it? What do others use? Has this not been discussed before? I am curious.
You do roll soak against damage inflicted by spells as specified in ArM5, page 181 under the Injuries heading.
If this roll is simply to add some random element into the event, then wound modifiers should not be applied.
If they represent some sort of defensive reflex then wound penalties make sense. i.e. the person is raising his arms or twisting to avoid the blast hitting his head for instance. In other combat events this is encompassed by the defence roll. As spell effects stand outside this normal mechanic this roll adds it in (a bit of a kludge). However, by this logic the Qui attribute should add to the roll.
As Qui is not added to the roll my position is that it is just a luck element. So no wound penalties.
In any case, I cap defence and soak rolls at zero. For me a defence of 0 is the equivalent of no defense; surprised, unconscious, incapacitated or so inept at combat that you might as well be... This means your soak cannot be lower than its base value. So wound penalties cannot lead to the sort of killing feedback suggested.
On a related matter, imo projectile creating spells are worked out like any other projectile. They have a base damage and the caster rolls an attack.
Thanks!