Does Premonitions give a combat bonus?

I thought we could go the same way ... at least in terms of how we play the game. :handshake:

Oh, okay. If you like. I think I've made my position abundantly clear, at least with respect to Premonitions. What else would you like to discuss?

I am sure we will find something another day ... but this topic seems exhausted. I too would sometimes give the PCs additional clues that the players are not entitled to expect from the letter of the rules.

I strongly agree with this. To get any combat bonus, it should be a major virtue and a defining aspect of the character.
This isn't an occasional moment where his eyes glaze over few a few seconds and he knows something, or a prescient dream which is how I see the virtue.

This is all the time extra knowledge which isn't impacting on all the usual other 5 sense. That's amazing!

The thing about a warning is that it may not come to pass. If I receive a warning of a potentially fatal encounter a week in advance I might choose a different route and avoid the bandits, or take action against those plotting against me so that they hold their daggers. Pre-knowledge on the other hand means that what you foresee will happen, because you know it will- we get into the realm of (in modern terms) quantum loops or(in older terms) predestination, in which the present is determined by the future. If you are using precognition that the crossbow quarrel will be fired at you and take a specific trajectory, regardless of what you do. If you move to avoid it they cannot adjust because you have forseen their actions, or if they do move to adjust it is a motion to the exact trajectory you have already witnessed. That is what gives the cinematic combat bonus of foreknowledge, because you know exactly where the attack will come from and go to.

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If anyone has seen the movie "Next" (it is a cheesy Nick Cage flick), it does a good job of showing what short term seeing the future actually allows in a fight.

There would actually never be a requirement to roll dice, with the person having the ability to choose the outcome from any that are possible. They would never be hit, always in position to cause the maximum damage, and able to launch completely blind attacks against targets that are not even in their line of senses yet.

That is one writer's understanding. Both relativity and quantum mechanics suggest this is not the case, but of course its better to trust a Hollywood writer over actual science.

The ability to see a short distance into the future, including how your actions affect said future, is actually an extremely common literary trope. It is not common in TV and film because of the difficulties of effectively and entertainingly capturing it.

But please, continue using the "Because Science!" argument to counter a fantasy power in a fantasy RPG in which the actual laws of physics are different from our own.

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The issue here is that in film, TV, and literature time loops and precognition is trivial because there is no free will- the author says "this is the future" and that is the future. In a world with individual choice if those choices have meaning every one of them can change the future you would foresee.

Premonitions is not intended as a round-by-round ESP-like precognitions. It's somewhere akin to the visions flaw, but focused to be more of a danger sense ability. If you want combat bonus from a form of premonitions in your game, there are spells for that in Ars Magicka, like Shriek of the Impending Shafts, and more can be designed with other forms.

I'm gonna throw a thought out here: Premonitions does not, and should not, give a combat bonus because (barring actual spellcasters) the fully armored knight should be the baddest bitch on the battlefield, and the more bonuses you can get to combat totals from sources other than physical characteristics+weapon skill+weapon+armour, the weaker that dominance becomes. An unarmored man should lose 99-100% of the time to a fully armored one, and if it's possible to stack up enough skill and miscellaneous bonuses for that not to be true, it's against tone and it shouldn't be allowed to exist. I don't want wushu blademasters in silk robes in my Ars Magica, I want Roland and Arthur in gleaming mail and Hercules in the Nemean Lion's pelt.

Rather obviously, YSMV, and if you do want a Mythic Jedi combat premonitions seems a decent way to go about it, just be careful about adding too many (or any) rolls to combat.

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