I gave a pass back over the remaining Animal spells, added comments to the few that didn't have any and added my vote to others. There are a couple that @Red-Shadow-Claws could move to the final document, a couple for deletion and a couple that could be moved to the holding area for later. Marked as resolved several comment threads where we reached a consensus and the change was made to the spell to cut down on the number of comments (only when all issues in the thread were resolved).
If the less active reviewers could take a little time to go through the Animal section and add their vote for some of the stuck spells it would help clear them out.
Realized I was working through too fast (into Auram) and that was causing a large backlog of unresolved spells. Will hold off for awhile to avoid excessive comment bloat.
I think it would be good to have separate places to debate the different rules decisions for large numbers of spells I'm looking at you, everything involving ice.
Also, I've stopped doing most spelling and grammar fixes, because it adds more comments. We can do that at the end when we all agree on what spells work or not.
Per a discussion between reviewers, requesting that from now on the title of spells be only used for a "thumbs up or thumbs down". Notes on the spell should be placed on some part of the body of a spell. This will greatly speed up future review by placing the votes for or against in a consistent and easy to access location.
Since I covered further in the document than others have,have been going through my comments and moving them from the title to somewhere in the body if no one else has commented yet.
This is the rule "The amount of material you can change is limited by the guidelines for each end." the stone to gemstone is then an example. I don't think shrinking is required as long as the size magnitudes are accounted for. In this instance, +1 size is enough to account for the volume of the stone after the transformation.
Sorry for the slight hiatus in commenting. I'm back and will try to catch up.
@temprobe : Earth that Breaks No More (MuTe 20) is lazy written. You can change only the hardness of the dirt, so it stays as dirt, but hard as stone. That way there is no csange in the amount of material. It is detailed in A&A p. 22.
With the original text - but maybe the intent was not to change the dirt into real stone, but have really hard terrain to walk on - there will be size change.
You should never take the title of a spell like its a description. The description is pretty clear that dirt becomes stone, not that dirt is made tougher. I have no idea why you're refering to A&A 22, but I'm sure such a reference is not needed to explain a base book spell.
As far as Muto individual-type changes, the question needed to answer is, RAW/RAI, we know a cubic pace of stone can turn into a cubic foot of metal... but can we also turn a cubic foot of stone into a cubic foot of metal?
I agree that the issue with Earth that Breaks No More is a bit sloppy.
I believe so. If volume conservation was impossible, beyond Earth that Breaks No More, The Crystal Dart would require a huge boulder to form the small gemstone which is launched and Armatura Vitrea would make the armor expand to become a room.
Leave it to a fan project to find multiple things that need developer input and errata.
EDIT: Just to add another one, Clouds of Summer Snow affects "an area about a mile across". It has Group and +1 Size, which is 1,000 paces across or a little more than half a mile.
Yeah.... I think a lot of the size issues for Auram are because it just lists 'one weather effect' as the base indivudal, without any really good commentation for how big those can be.
I would note that that spell does not say it remains the same size. I would also note that there is nothing wrong with the original text's Target size, but then an erratum was issued despite no actual error and in a way that is confusing. It looks as though the original author was thinking one thing, and then someone asked for an erratum due to a different reading. But still not including any comment about the size remaining or changing, it just looks worse now.
This really isn't necessary. The spell doesn't say it makes a gemstone. It says it makes a crystal. While many crystals are gemstones, there are crystals that are not gemstones, ones that are generally just considered other types of stones, And no, I'm not getting into modern chemical definitions of what makes a crystal. Meanwhile, there are other things like pearls that are considered gemstones but not pearls. There is heavy overlap between things labels crystals and things labeled gemstones, but they are not synonymous.
Here we're looking at things backward. There is no reason to expect that just because bigger Base Individual things shrink smaller Base Individual things must expand. And there are canonical spells showing this is not the case.
Hmm... Just where is the Base Individual for glass listed? With the ordering in the core book, we know it's between a cubic pace and a cubic foot, inclusive, but it doesn't specify.
We certainly should be able to, because we know we can expand the resulting metal. You can MuTe rock into metal, which seems to shrink it. You can MuTe metal into bigger metal. So you should be able to add magnitudes for the combination of the two; this just suggests getting the same-size metal will require more magnitudes than getting the smaller section of metal, but you won't need more stone.
And yet we see this happening in canonical spells where it is specified. E.g. Mimic the Christ's Miracle requires a greater amount of water. If this weren't the default case, a cup of water could make a cup of wine and fit within both Base Individuals just fine.
The same section specifies how big twice in one sentence:
I think the issue that raccoon is talking about is just how big many weather phenomenon are.
For example creating an actual storm cloud system would require more than Group and +2 Size seen in many spells. These are often 5 miles or more across, so Group and +3 Size would work for a small to lower mid sized one. For the largest you are looking at Group and +4 (or maybe even +5) Size.
@Red-Shadow-Claws, I tend to read the logs to see what has been said on spells I commented. You often come in and close the comments box, and then the spell disappears into that other document, where it's always clear what decision you took unless there was a consensus. In some cases, we were still discussing options to fix the spell. Any way you can share that progress document and perhaps leave a message in the comments before closing the comments box so we know your decision from reading the logs?
I generally close the comment box once a consensus was reached.
The progress document will be shared once we go through this document, so that you can give one more pass of reviews, in case some new insight is reached, or in case I messed up what the consensus was.
Have I mentioned recently how much I HATEThe Trackless Step? Dozens of spells which attempt to function like it are where we currently are. All of them need to be changed (often completely different Arts) or deleted.
