I suppose that would be a good idea.
That's the second sentence of the last paragraph.
My apologies, that was obvious.
The file has gone to Atlas. Thanks for all your help.
12 Likes
Thanks for the hard work and allowing us to participate.
4 Likes
Agreed.
2 Likes
Some thread necromancy, as I don't want to derail the thread this was from.
I've always thought Mercurian magic, especially with it's spontaneous magic issue, is one of the weakest Great virtues. People want an NPC in the covenant with Mercurian, but don't want it themselves. Would it be a worthwhile game balance option to add this to the errata?
"You automatically master every ritual spell you learn or invent. All your ritual spells start with a 1 in the corresponding spell mastery ability."
4 Likes
I think that sounds like a good suggestion.
We might be doing something like that; discussion ongoing in the other thread. Thanks for the suggestion.
1 Like
This is a detail, within a book full of mass confusion, but in ROP:M the spells to strengthen an aura indicate a minimum level of 25 and 30 based on a magnitude 0 guideline plus 5 or 6 magnitudes, but the first five increases in level should be 1-5, not 5-25, meaning the minimum magnitude for the spells should be less than 20 which is already required by them being ritual spells.
The spells appear correct to me. Rather than basing off the effect from the spell level, they calculate the bonus based on the number of magnitudes rather than the effect level. A spell of 5th magnitude is level 25, so by substracting 5 magnitudes, you end up with a bonus of 0 for feeding the font of the covenant.
If I start with a magnitude 0 effect and add +4 for boundary and +1 for touch that gives me a total of 5. The addendums should add to levels before adding magnitudes. Going your direction once we hit level 5 the next subtraction would be to level 4, which might technically be considered 0 magnitude but is also 4 higher than the required minimum.
Fair enough - I thought you were looking at the exemple spells which are clear to me, and not the guidelines. It looks to me that it's mostly the "thus" that's a problem there.
I'm suggesting the following:
Potentially strengthen a Magic aura; roll on the Aura Strengthening Table with a modifier equal to magnitude of the base effect; a modifier of 0 is calculated as a base 4 effect (Ritual).
Potentially weaken a Magic aura; roll on the Aura Weakening Table with a modifier equal to magnitude of the base effect; a modifier of 0 is calculated as a base 4 effect (Ritual).
What do you think, silveroak?
That would certainly fix the issue, rather efficiently.
That looks like a fix to me, as well. May I add these to the errata as is?
2 Likes
I think a clarification of the ReCo 10 guideline: "Eliminate the penalties of Fatigue and wounds" (ArM5 p.134) might be needed, as there are some obvious disagreements on its meaning.
The most crucial one is whether Unconsciousness, Incapacitation and Death count as "penalties" in this sense. Endurance of the Berserkers (ArM5 p.134) suggests Unconsciousness does not; The Tireless Flight (HoH:TL p.102) may be read as suggesting otherwise. Both are silent on Incapacitation and Death. As I see it, it would be highly unbalancing to allow the guideline to prevent Unconsciousness and Incapacitation/Death.
A secondary issue is what "Eliminate" means in the context of the guideline; in particular what happens when the effect ends. From Endurance of the Berserkers, it seems that the penalties return in full at that time, and this is how almost everyone ends up playing it. If so, I think "suppress" would be a much clearer term for the newcomer to the game.
Thus, I think the guideline should be clarified as:
Suppress all penalties from fatigue and wounds, short of Unconsciousness/Incapacitation.
Third, by either wording, it seems very clear to me that a character under the effect for a prolonged period still recovers fatigue/heals wounds. I've seen a few troupes that assume otherwise, mostly by analogy with healing spells that suppress "natural" healing for their duration. I am not sure how the wording could be concisely improved in this regard. Perhaps adding:
A person under this effect still recovers fatigue and heals wounds normally.
To be fair, having the effect suppress natural healing and fatigue recovery might be indeed the best solution: even with this limitation it is a very useful, potent effect - without, it may be unbalancing. Then a clarification is certainly needed. Perhaps, instead of the above, something like:
A person under this effect does not naturally heal or recover fatigue.
Fourth, related to the guideline,but much broader in scope (so much that it may not be worth addressing, but I think it's definitely worth considering) is what happens when a character "overspends" fatigue levels past Unconsciousness - which can happen in several situations, from casting Rituals, to using Life Linked Spontaneous magic, from Scuffles to strenous exertion. Most (but not all) situations do provide a rule for accounting for overspent levels, but it seems different in every case. While this does not necessarily need a fix, I think a unified rule could make the game simpler and more consistent.
1 Like
I'm not convinced that this is a sufficiently major problem to be worth causing problems in the sagas of people who interpreted it the other way — it's one guideline. I could still be convinced, but I'm not yet.
I think a unified rule for this would be too large a change for errata. Were there a new edition in the works, it would definitely be worth considering, however.
I shall strive to do so. In particular, I shall strive to show how damaging to the game can be for the guideline to read as "you effectively have unlimited Fatigue and Wound capacity for as long as the effect lasts" (stressing that some people already assume that's the case, as you have pointed out).
Let's start with Fatigue - which is the simplest, as a character has a limited number of levels to spend and slowly earn back. The first problem with allowing one to reach "Unconscious" without consequence is ambiguity: what happens next? Endurance of the Berserkers says "you do drop Unconscious and the effect ends" (whether the fact it ends is due to this being R:Per D:Conc or an inherent limit of the guideline is unclear). The Tireless Flight says "you can keep exchanging fatigue levels for light wounds". Some people might simply assume that if you have no more fatigue to lose, you simply can't lose it - that's what happens with some supernatural creatures.
If you go with the latter two interpretations, as callen pointed out, certamen becomes simply an exercise on who botches first (or you can disallow other magical effects in certamen, but that opens all sorts of other cans of worms and conflicts with canonical material). Magi can keep casting spells forever - note that the Limit of Energy was introduced exactly to avoid that; in particular, magi with Life-Linked Spontaneous Magic can constantly push themselves. The entire limiting factor of the Ettin-mod, i.e. that fatigue will mount for the non-Ettin body, disappears. These are just a few of the major implications: I could go on and on. Ultimately, fatigue is one of the main currencies of the struggle economy, and by allowing you to borrow arbitrarily large amounts paying very very little interest, or none at all, you break that economy.
Let's now move to wounds. They have a different dynamic in that they can, in principle, accumulate in arbitrarily large numbers; though a sufficiently severe wound is still able to kill a character in one shot. So the outcome of the ReCo effect appears mostly unanbiguous (particularly if you replace "Eliminate" with "Suppress").
It also appears less unbalancing: when the effect expires, the effect's recipient will be saddled with all the accumulated wounds and pay his debt in full. In particular, any killing wounds will take effect then, no escape.
Or maybe not? There are three things to consider here. The first is that, dead or not, the recipient has been able to take an infinite amount of punishment, and thus, by virtue of stress dice, also dish out an infinite amount of punishment. The greenest grog has the certainty of eventually defeating the most dreadful dragon. If one does not care too much about that grog - perhaps because it's not a human, but something created on the spot via Conjure the Expendable Berserker - that means nigh-insurmountable effects can be surmounted for little cost.
Second, note that in principle one can keep the effect constantly up, renewing it e.g. every Moon (the clever way to do this is to make the effect R:Touch D:Conc, so it does not warp the recipient as a high-level effect, and keep it up with a D:Moon Maintain the Demanding Spell). Sure, it will end up warping your favourite grog a bit but not that much.
Third, you get mass discounts for healing wounds. This comes from three sources: a) wounds heal in parallel, and nothing in the way the spell is written suggests it inhibits natural healing(of course, this makes sense for the lighter wounds) b) there is a guideline (in HoH:S) to improve all wounds of a target by one level c) via T:Circle, you can heal an arbitrary number of characters at once without extra costs. So the vis cost of actually healing that heroic grog is actually very manageable.
I'd note that simply allowing Incapacitation and Death to break through the effect avoids the issues above, or reduces them to a point where they no longer seriously affect playability. Otherwise, even if restricted to wounds, the effect "breaks" the wound economy; unless troupes just ignore it, whether because the saga sees no combat, or politely pink-dot-style - but then, why not clarify it?
Good arguments, thank you.
My first observation is that errata as you suggest would require us to delete The Tireless Flight entirely. It assumes that Unconsciousness, at least, is suppressed by this effect, and the spell makes no sense at all if it is not. That's a big change to make in errata, and we need a really good reason to do so.
I'm not actually very concerned about the edge cases. Conjure the Expendable Berserker is going to be fairly high level, and if you can cast that with enough Penetration to affect a dragon, you should be able to defeat the creature. It is also part of the point of Ars Magica to allow player characters to do absurdly powerful things by clever application of the magic rules — there is a whole chapter in Transforming Mythic Europe on building your own island, and with careful design you could do that with a group of magi fresh out of apprenticeship.
The idea that you could just keep these spells up indefinitely and thus not need to worry about Fatigue at all is a problem. (Certamen, less so. It is a formalised duelling system, and using these spells would obviously be cheating, so the certamen would not be binding, or the cheat would be deemed to have lost.)
Something needs to be done, but I am still thinking about what.
1 Like
How about a wound build up? Instead of getting 223 Light Wounds, make it X light wounds, X Medium Wounds, X Heavy Wounds, Incap or Death (at which point the effect ends - you've pushed yourself too far). There may be some calibration to do as to how many wounds of which levels before the next wound upgrades.
I'm not sure this is much of a problem. If it doesn't shut off, you start taking Light Wounds. Eventually you have to worry about them healing v. worsening. And there are other issues as suggested in The Tireless Flight, where it's pointed out that being able to cancel it is good so you can start recovering. I've worked with variants of this spell for a long time and have never seen big problems arise except when people decide spells should be arbitrarily allowed in Certamen. In the few cases where it could be really messy, those special cases have their own rules for going too far that can override these rules (e.g. Life-Linked Spontaneous Magic).