Hard-to-Find Rules

How great a penalty?

Well, total invisibility gives +9 attack and -9 defense if I remember correctly. Unseen attacks are covered in HoH:S.

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Multiple Penetrators:

We have a target with Magic Resistance 20.
We now attack this target with enchanted weapons, and have the following cases:

  • We have a sword enchanted with the Edge of the Razor (ArM5, p. 154) with a penetration of 15. According to the rules for Magic Resistance (ArM5, p. 85-86), because this effect does not penetrate the resistance, the sword will bounce off the the magic resistance. No damage will be inflicted.
  • We have a sword enchanted with the Blade of the Virulent Flame (ArM5, p. 140), with a penetration of 25. Again, we look at p. 85 and find that it appears that - because the penetration exceeds the Magic Resistance, the sword will strike the target and cause damage.
  • We now have a sword enchanted with both of the above effects:
    • Edge of the Razor, pen 15
    • Blade of the Virulent Flame, pen 25

The target still has a magic resistance of 20. What happens?

Please note that I'm looking for RAW and not house rules or well-meaning 'solutions'.

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My troupe has never even briefly considered this dubious.
We think it's "obvious" that the sword gets stopped (though it will still burn the target).

By the RAW MR blocks any insufficiently penetrating spell, individually.
If that spell is "attached" to a physical object, that object is stopped too.
This is independent of any other spells penetrating the MR, including those attached to the object.

It's a little like when you need to advance something through the cogs of bureacracy: any portion of it, however minor, that gets snagged in a regulation, stops the whole thing. I guess that's why it seemed so obvious to us :slight_smile:

Yes, this can be abused via the infamous "pink dot", but it's something only tangentially related to multiple penetrators. Note that the reverse, which I'll call the "reverse pink dot", could be abused even more readily: put a lot of low penetration, highly effective spells on an item, and then top it all with a super-high penetration pink dot.

Where should they be? The general rules for Hermetic Arts seems like the most obvious place for them — but that's where they already are, and apparently that's weird.

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Good question. Even if there's a reminder in the combat section that "Magi can get soak bonuses for their Forms, see page xx" that would be very helpful.

That makes sense. Somewhere around there…

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It's mentioned briefly elsewhere, but the rules for craft magic (both creo and rego) are likely worthy of being in the CRB and are so hard to find. Covenants, Societates, A&A, and City & Guild are all separately required to figure out how hard it is to make things with magic.

There also inconsistencies (or perhaps my lack of ingenuity) - Societates says creating artificial things with Creo magic is the same finesse EF as rego magic. The next page says Creo magic doesn't require finesse rolls unless the difficult is above EF 9. Are the thresholds less? Does it not apply in this scenario?

A collected list of finesse guidelines with examples would be extraordinary.

If not slated for the CRB, I would hope a reorg and relaunch of them occurs sometime. A single reference would be an enormous help.

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Also, if there's an explicit rule for when Intelligence, rather than Perception, is combined with Finesse, I can't find it. It seems implied that crafting practical things requires Perception and artistic endeavors call for Intelligence. If that's a rule somewhere, it's hard enough to find that I've missed it.

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One more thing comes to mind, which is Penetration and Magic Resistance for creatures with Might. It's second nature to everybody once you've played a game or five, but I kind of recall having to put them on a small reference sheet for the first 5th edition games I ran.

I don't mean to say that the rules are unclear, which they aren't, or that there's anything wrong with them. I even think they're in the right place. They're very clearly called out in bold "asides" on page 191, at the beginning of the Bestiary, where they should be.

But it might be helpful for first-time players and SG to have them cross-referenced in the Penetration and Magic Resistance sections of the Hermetic Magic chapter, on pages 84 and 85. Not the full explanation, just a mention that the formulae for Pen and MR for creatures with Might are to be found on page 191. Same thing with Supernatural Abilities' penetrations.

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One thing that recently popped up is that the Magical botch from realm interactions. I always played that Magical Auras add to botch dice, but recently found out this is a house rule. The actual rule is buried in page 183, not on pg 87 where the Dangers of spell casting show up. Vis is mentioned in pg 82, but could be restated there too.

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Rules for reputation come to mind as difficult to find. IIRC Reputation is mentioned early, in the character generation chapter, concerned with defining af quantifying Reputations.
But the rules for changing reputations is somewhere else.

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Minor Virtue Relic what Faith score does it have? (Without a Faith score the Faith Point is only a 1 time use?!) Does it have a magic resistance and is the holder included by this magic resistance? Does it spread the Dominion? The info needed for a Relic is spread over multiple books and partial not even sure if this info there also count for the Relic bought as virtue.

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I think the wording "with one Faith point in it" makes it easy enough to understand it has a Faith score of 1. The rules on p189 of the Core book let you know this means it gives Magic Resistance at 10 and allows you to use one faith point which is regained at dawn makes it hard for new players to find the benefits. You get just enough to play from the Core rules, although reading RoP: The Divine and the Church makes relics a lot more useful and understandable.

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There seems to be a typo there, worthy of an erratum. Even the True Faith virtue assigns a faith point, rather than a faith score of 1. The concept of a score in relation to faith pops up very late in the description. To make it consistent, I think many occurrences of faith points has do be replaced by faith score.

I do not agree that you need many books. I think it is playable from core, with some imagination, but where core (and previous editions) seem

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The concept of a Faith Score was introduced with RoP:tD, and thus slightly changed the rules for True Faith, Faith Points, and relics.

Anyway, the relic from the minor virtue Relic should have a Faith Score of 1 - though that is never quite spelled out anywhere, only implied.
The major virtue Powerful Relic on the other hand gives you a relic with a Faith Score of 3 - which is clearly spelled out.

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…in the section of rules for how auras impact spell casting.

It might be helpful to add a list of common sources of additional botch dice there. Foreign aura and use of vis are the two big ones. What else is common enough to go there? SG's call, obviously, but are there any other standard ones from the general rules?

The rules for changing everything are somewhere else: in the Long-Term Events chapter, which is where the rules for changing reputations are, as well, in the section entitled "Changing Reputations".

Where do you think they should be?

(No sarcasm intended in either of these cases: what was the "obvious place" for the rules in my view is clearly not the "obvious place" for other people, so we should try to make them easier to find for everyone.)

One. Because that's a rule introduced after the core book, you do have to work it out for yourself, but that's not something that can be fixed with errata — those have to work for someone who only has the the errata'd book.

Nevertheless, that was a very useful comment, thank you.

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That would have made perfect sense if there was no mention of a faith score at all in the core book, but there is, towards the end of the section on page 189. While the virtue assigns faith points to the relics, they suddenly do have a score on page 189.

That section is simply unclear, and can't be fixed with errata because they would be too extensive. (Basically, you would have to cut and paste in from RoP:tD.) As it stands, "score" is simply a way of talking about the base number of Faith Points something has, rather than a separate existence within the rules.

Would it be possible to add (through errata) an updated version of the Relic virtue to RoP:tD - next to the Powerful Relic virtue? Updated, as in using the new rules for relics and faith score given in RoP:tD.

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