Healing through aging

Games Discussion Ars Magica
21

Your right, credit for the microscope falls to 1590, Hooke improved the design, still far beyond where we are in mythic Europe. Your wiki source is not an academic source and only sites one book for your Chinese water microscope, I have found no other academic references, so it's not a valid resource. Though glass that could magnify things was invented (a magnifying glass), they are not microscopes. But if we are going off the premise of what "has been" invented in the period, I should be able to have all the cannons and rockets I want, as the Mongols have a cannon, and the Chinese have invented rockets. But that isn't what was in Europe. China was closed off and it's not like you had a way to share academic progress around the world. Technology was at a near stand still in Europe. This is one of the reasons we all it the dark ages.

The term Metabolism refers to the biological cellular function. Something unknown until the development of cell theory. Defiantly not in the dark ages. Most medicine and healing of injuries was based off balancing the humors. Inflammation would be cured through bleeding for instance. Disease was caused by demons or imbalances in humors.

Making a blossom out of season in a moment is under rego yes, but to make it stay that way would require vis, otherwise the spell only lasts as long as it's duration. Then reverts to its original state. Also, Brutus, bringing someone to maturity over night is CrCo not Rego. This fits the hermetic model that you reach your most perfect form at maturity. Than you degrade away from that with age, predo.

Now you are saying that you will heal by making something that will occur in the future happen in the present, so thereby effecting something that will happen the the future, This is in violation of the limit of time. We have now violated 3 of the limits of magic and are using Rego to age, which you cannot do, and making an effect permanent that makes something better (creo) without vis. Show me where you can heal with rego under the descriptions of the arts. The descriptions are pretty clear that creo is the only healing art. aging is not a side effects, aging is the effect, you are causing time to pass faster for the person, that falls under predo, which does not heal. Bane of the decrepit body ages you 5 years, but you don't get healing roles. If you want to call it a side effect, why can't I just muto their head to fall off and then they die as a side effect. Even turning someone to stone does not kill them. This completely ignoring the underpinnings of magic in order to make these spells work. Which is the idea of the prefect form and essential nature. Aging takes you away from your perfect form. Another example is under the same idea I could rego someone into eternal youth, stopping their body energy, or kill them the same way. I'm just slowing the bodies processes and thus I don't need longevity potion or to make aging roles ever. But again, I'd be ignoring the limits of magic.

Having someone heal faster is already under creo, that's what the instant healing is and giving bonuses does in effect.

If you want to do this for your game, that's great! More power to you. But justifying it into the hermetic model, the rules, the cannon. It's not going to fit at all. Again, show me anywhere in the books that rego can heal and that is not strictly a purview of creo. I cannot see rego working this way with anything short of a hermetic breakthrough.

22

By RAW, that is blatantly incorrect. If it was Muto, then it would revert. A Rego change does not.
The blossoms would probably freeze rather quickly if it was the middle of winter, but the effect would still have happened, end of story.

You are aware i hope about how the "dark ages" was in fact a very good time to live? That high medieval times was a very positive era? That the "renaissance" reduced life expectancy? Obviously you missed that part.

Please do a forum search about "dark age" and "renaissance". You´re not the first to be ignorant.

Go find a specialist at a museum or better yet find at least half a dozen and ask.

No, lenses are not microscopes, but they can be used the same way, to magnify.
That´s really irrelevant however since your basic assumption is wrong.

:unamused:
Do you have any idea just how ignorant and narrowminded the above claim is? That represents a tiny part of reality.

And the TERM metabolism and its EXACT and correct definition may be a more recent matter, but general understanding of the concept most certainly is NOT. If you read about the history of herbal medicine, which i might add mostly has nearly nothing in common with the "humors theory", you will find such knowledge to go back long before medieval times.
And if you spread your search a bit, you will find that just 13th century holds at least half a dozen "theories" of healing.

:laughing:
Shows how much you know.
High medieval times was an era of inventions and development. Not to forget population peaks due to the beneficial climate and the good crops that produced.

Did you know the reason why you call it the "dark ages"? :mrgreen:
Because you believe one single hyperegotistic and pompous poet, because he considered any time before his own poetry to obviously be a dark age. If you do that forum search, you will find me naming him in whichever thread it was.

The dark ages is a myth that just keeps coming... And people like you keep falling for it just because of the name it seems.
Like the myth of how people supposedly thought earth was flat before 15th-16th century. That idea was used to sell books about Columbus in the 18-19th century by a US author. Before that, well:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthen ... cumference (c. 276 BC – c. 195 BC )

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_ ... iddle_Ages
Europe definitely saw the first use of cannons in the 13th century. But do i have to tell you that this only regards KNOWN occasions?

Huh? Just how can you come up with such a stupid interpretation?
No, you manipulate the body to work "faster". Since the limit on this for a body is fairly low, that is why i previously added that Muto is probably needed as a requisite.

No, it´s the only DIRECTLY healing art. You can use Muto and Rego to heal quite well if you just step out of your little narrowminded box. You can even use Perdo even if it skirts the outsides of game limits and paradigm more than a little bit.

:unamused:
sheesh
Can´t you think even a little before you rant? Perdo is destruction. You are NOT destroying the body. Aging IS a sideeffect because you are not doing something that aims to destroy the body. You are CONTROLLING the "working speed" of the body. Time is not involved in any way or form.

Incorrect as a broad and generalised statement. Aging someone up to adult age is not Perdo. Not that it´s relevant as aging isn´t the effect you´re causing.

Your argument is basically that to drop a tree on your head by conjuring it above you, i have to use CrCo, because the tree is hitting you as it falls.

No, CrCo is direct healing. It has nothing at all to do with healing FASTER. That is also a sideeffect If you heal something directly, it happens NOW, but it does not speed up healing, because once cast it is already done. There is no time healing involved at all.
And bonuses to healing does not speed up healing either, they increase the chance for the fastest possible NATURAL healing.

You´ve already shown clearly that you do not understand RAW anyway.

:unamused: The only Rego in the books showing this, you have already rejected on the grounds that you dont understand how it works.

You want a workable example? How about setting a broken leg using Rego? How about controlling poison inside a body? I wont bother coming up with more, either you start thinking or i´m done.

23

Direwolf75: No one here is an experts on "all" of the middle ages, nor can any one person be expected to know everything about it. Don't insult people because they are missing facts and be constructive. If you have something constructive to say, say it, but don't insult people because they are trying to constructively criticize an idea.

If you are going to blatantly ignore my arguments and only pick and choose sentences and ignore the surrounding data I have presented, you are not constructively approaching the argument. You are not rebuking my statements, you are insulting me and ignoring context.

As to Rego, none of the descriptions you have presented actually heal wound levels. They are akin to using finesse to perform something you could do with your hands, or magically stopping a foreign fluid in your body, not healing it, when the spell stops the poison will take it's coarse. None of the rego or muto guidelines in any of the books have any way of healing wound levels. Also, read the descriptions for predo and rego in the main book. Predo can destroy, but is primarily takes something away from it's most perfect form (making something worse), which gives it the capacity to disintegrate. Creo brings something closer to it's more prefect form. By adding a bonus to healing rolls you are making someone heal faster than they normally wood if they failed said rolls. Please reread the RAW. Aging is listed both in predo guidelines and in the rego description as taking away from the perfect form in the main book, and under rego states that is why aging falls under predo, because it makes something worse. The guidelines for creo give you the capacity to bring something to maturity, a more perfect state, from there predo ages.

You might want to look up Plato's Theory of Forms which is what Ars Magicas magic system is based on. Lets look at page 78 of the main book shall we? "Rego allows a maga to change the state of a thing to some other state that the individual can naturally have" (78, Tweet) Now yes this can be stretched to say a person can naturally heal, but in the same context you can naturally have a heart attack, or be dead, or have his arm removed, or decompose. If your fine with that great, lets get rid of Creo and Predo. Because if I can make someones heart stop with a level 25 spell by changing thier natural state, the little munchkin inside of me is all for :wink:. But the book explicitly makes a comparison that can carry into other arts. "Rego cannot make an animal old because aging takes away from the form (so Predo can do this)" (78, Tweet) In the same light, healing is adding or improving the form, so by Plato's Theory of Form you would be making that thing a better example of itself and thus Creo. It does not matter how you heal the person, if you are making it better or healing you are talking about Creo. It is more viable to make a guideline that allows a person to make an immediate healing role under Creo than Rego, but without using vis, the penalty would have to be pretty sever to balance. A single aging role is not sufficient in my opinion, suffering an immediate aging crisis or at least an aging role with a +15 or more bonus to insure there are side effects and that you risk going into crisis from shock and agony of healing at such an accelerated rate or by suffering all the effects of healing simultaneously. I still think this requires a breakthrough as you are healing without vis and creating a new guideline all at once. If you want to talk about this from a modern biological standpoint, the cytokine storm would probably kill you through sepsis and/or you would developer cancer through rapid cell mutation caused by all your cells dropping the Creb cycle and using glycolosis to rapidly divide. But, this is mythic Europe, so the modern biology is moot :mrgreen: .

24

Munchkin in me couldn't resist. :mrgreen:

Stop the Motion of the Heart
ReCo 25
T: Part D: Conc R:Voice

This spell was discovered by Fidelis of Bonisagus when he was studying the anatomy of mice and Regos effect on different organs before they died on the dissection table. He observed that if you physically stop the heart from beating the subject would die relatively quicker than subjects who's hearts he allowed to continue to beat. Using this observation he developed a Rego spell that targeted only the heart and held it motionless causing the subject to die. Subjects of this spell double over in pain unable to take any other action and begins making deprivation rolls at 6+ increasing by one every round. Each failed roll causes a wound starting with light and increasing one step every round until the subject dies.

(Base: 5 Hold a target's body motionless, +1 Part, +1 Conc, +2 Voice)

Even better if you change the target to group and give it a size +1, duration of sun, you can kill 100 people with a level 40 spell. Master for multi cast and you can lay waste to armies, villages without anyone knowing what is happening. Much more effective than Clenching Grasp of the Crushed Heart.

The low casting level means it will be much easier to kill a maga by penetrating his Parma.

25

This.

He has yet to learn to apply this to himself.

26

Ah, but first sense the heart :stuck_out_tongue:

Though you could use the same spell to stop the movement of the chest, they cannot inhale so have to make depravation rolls.

It is not an immediate death, so shouldn't really contradict any of the RAW.

27

T: Part isn't the target of heart, it's the part of the targeted individual. You have to be able to sense the targeted individual, not the heart. IMO.

28

This spell wouldn't have quite as good an effect as you're giving it. (Assuming it does what you mean it to do in the first place)

You're using a pure rego effect, it doesn't get to directly cause pain, let alone incapacitating pain. They might have to make concentration checks or similar, but instant incapacitating pain is definitely out. People having heart attacks aren't immediately incapacitated by pain.

There doesn't seem to be any good reason to break the rules of how deprivation checks work for this spell.

First they have to force you into unconsciousness, before giving you any wounds; so it's going to take a while before they start dying. One check per 1 or 2 rounds (as opposed to per 30 seconds for lack of air) would make sense.

The duration sun is a pretty much guaranteed kill. However target group doesn't work: You can't have target group and target part. So you can't use this spell to kill large groups of people at once.

29

Distinction without a difference, at best. I might be inclined to bump the difficulty up a bit or require a successful finesse check, but even then, it's probably not an unreasonable spell.

Maybe it's a confusion of the modern and mythic paradigms, but the pain isn't caused by the spell. The pain is caused by the heart not pumping anymore. Much as if I created a ReCo 25th level spell to transport any individual in Voice range 50 paces into the air. The rego part isn't causing any damage, nor is the fall, it is the impact that causes the damage. Which in this case is +75 damage, and I don't even need a finesse roll, unless I'm trying to drop the body atop another unfriendly.

Rego spells can and do deliver direct damage. They often don't, because they can be aimed, to bypass MR, but there are several Rego spells that do cause direct damage.

30

My point is: That doesn't cause incapacitating pain instantly in the real world.

It's not a natural effect of stopping the persons heart. So it shouldn't be in there.

31

It doesn't always, but it can.

One could argue that it is equivalent to Air deprivation, but if any character were trying to conduct combat while deprived of air, I'd be moving up the deprivation checks to every round, instead once every 5 rounds.
They'll be going down fast.

32

There's no good reason to throw that additional benefit onto the spell. Being held stationary can hurt you a lot, or can not hurt at all; if it's done by rego corpus it doesn't hurt. (Although, if you're in a fire at the time, that's not much comfort)

Your heart stopping can hurt a lot, or not at all. If it's done by rego corpus...

Sure. But fast isn't the same thing as instantly. Throwing the instant incapacitation in there is making it much more powerful with no good reason. In a combat situation every round counts.

33

I can throw a Call to Slumber on people for Sun duration, they are effectively incapacitated.
Or I can cast a ReCo spell that paralyzes someone for Sun duration, and they are effectively incapacitated. Although that's probably a ReCo 30 spell. Spells of 20th to 30th level can be incredibly devastating to mundanes, helping your grogs quickly dispatch anyone who is still conscious or capable.

34

I haven't actually been looking at this primarily from a balance perspective: I've been looking at it primarily from a "does it work that way" perspective.

It causing incapacitating pain through any means other than the deprivation rules doesn't fit with the ars magica ruleset.

Sure, at one deprivation roll a round, with diameter duration, they'll be dead by the end of it. Hell, even at one every two rounds there's a chance they'll be dead (and if they're not dead, they'll probably be close to it). It's deadly either way. The point is, it doesn't incapacitate with pain.

35

There is no balance in Ars. :smiley:

36

I would be inclined to agree, but I think it would require a stamina 9+ to act in any given round aside from move. Heart attacks cause you to cough to try and make your heart pump, and you have only a short period till you loose concussion and cause excruciating pain when the heart is fully stopped. Once blood stops, there is no oxygen to the brain, you fall unconscious and die. Brain death sets in quickly. The deprivation roles are there to simulate this. You could use standard deprivation but the starting roll should be much higher as you should loose conciseness rapidly, this isn't like drowning where your heart is still pumping. This could easily be observed on a dissection table by a maga.

I disagree here, how else would you target a group of parts. There is nothing in the group or part description that suggests that it cannot target a group of parts, the wording seems to infer that it is possible. p.113 I think it would be silly if a maga could not target a group of branches on different trees to hit people because they are parts.

This I disagree with this as well. I may be misunderstanding your argument though. If you mean that the target is individual, great, knock it down to 20, that's half the level of a predo kill spell. Why do you even need predo? :wink: Parma/MR would be really nerfed. You could make a version for animals and kill dragons with ease, vis problem solved. :laughing:

If you mean you cannot perceive the heart I beg to differ. I think the term perceive is being used too narrowly here. You cannot see the water in a person but you can destroy it with curse of the desert, because you know it is there. You can destroying still air, you cannot see, feel, smell or taste it, but you know it is there. If you must absolutely be able to perceive the target with one of the senses why not just put a black globe over a wizards head at the beginning of combat? Now he can't target anything he can't touch and it doesn't even need to blow through parma. Or hold up a bed sheet in front of you, hold still and don't talk. He cannot perceive you so he cannot target you. Perceiving, in my opinion, includes what you know for certain is there as shown by spells like curse of the desert.

I would like to reiterate that I made this spell as an abuse of the rules showing how you can misinterpret them to make a Level 40 predo spell a level 25 rego spell, but if you read the rego and predo descriptions it's pretty clear you cannot make this spell, it's primary intent is to kill, which is predo. I could similarly make a spell that just rips someones head off by teleporting as a part target a few steps away, it's an abuse of something that was intended to fall under another art (predo) by making a target a worse example of itself. Arts (IMO) should fall under the primary intent of the spell. If it is to heal, creo, to harm, predo etc.

Cheers :smiley:

37

No, I'm saying you need to perceive the individual, and that the part targeted must be capable of removed from the T:Individiual. If it can't, T:Part must fail.

This is a restatement of what I said. You're sensing the individual, and you know he has a heart, or water in his body. But keep in mind that it must have a Corpus requisite, so it's a bit more of a difficult spell to cast than the one you designed.

Cheers :smiley:
[/quote]
There is no abuse of the rules, and there is no misinterpretation here in my opinion. And you're not being precise when you say that the Level 40 Perdo spell can be copied by a level 25 Rego spell. The level 25 Rego spell operates differently, and as has been echoed by many would cause deprivation, it doesn't kill outright, there is a small but slim chance of survival. The Level 40 spell you mention is relying on the Base 30 effect to kill a person, while the Rego spell is relying on the base effect to hold motionless. The Perdo Corpus spell, Clenching Grasp of the Crushed Heart does not actually crush the heart, or if it does, it is a cosmetic effect. As far as teleporting someone's head off of them, yes, you could do that, too. It's not an abuse of anything. There are all kinds of unbalancing things that are possible within the magic system. But what happens to grogs when confronted with a magus who has a tendency to rip off opponent's heads. Ars is never really about what you can do, it's about what happens after you do it. Are grogs going to want to adventure with the guy who rips off his opponent's heads? Has this magus done it to anyone in the covenant, even accidentally, say because he botched?

38

You can not target a group of parts. They are two distinct targets. The something is only Part of the target. The heart is even given as an example of a part of a body. Something that you can put into a bag. A group is a collection of people or things. They are individual things. A group of grogs acting as a combat team is a group. You can see/sense them. Same for their swords. They can be sensed. Now you get to the point were you can not sense their hearts and therefore can not target them as a group.

Even your example is for PARTS of a tree. The branches. You can not target the branches of a group of trees because the branches are a part of a individual. The swords from my previous example are not parts of an individual and thus can be targeted as a group if they can be sensed.

39

"The spell effects a group of people or things" (113, Tweet) It does not specify a group of individuals or individual targets, it also does not state discreet things, inferring that it would be individual targets as in the description of individual and part, so I am inclined to believe you can cast a group spell on a group of parts. Plus it does not make sense that I can uproot a group of trees and throw them at you but I cannot swing a group of branches at you. At most I'd say the only difference is adding a magnitude for complexity, if you felt it was unbalancing in your saga. Still a level 45 effect to do what a level 55 effect does, still much better, which is why I think that this should not be allowable, and spells should fall under the technique of their primary effect first. I am trying to harm you, therefor Predo.

As to sensing the target, as stated above, you can destroy water in a person with Curse of the Desert, PeAq, because you know the water is present in the persons body. You can destroy still air at voice range, you cannot see, taste, smell, or touch it, but you know for certain it is there. As long as you can see the person, you should be able to discern that they have a heart and target it. Like people have water in them you cannot sense, but still destroy, they have hearts. But under the five senses pretext, a person in a full set of armor with a full helm is technically not detectable, because he is inside the armor. You could only target the armor because you can only see and hear the armor unless the person inside is talking. Corpus spells could be thwarted by holding up a blanket in front of you. The idea that perceiving something does not include known conceptual context of what is contained within, or what is known to be present would make most Aurum spells moot along with a lot of other spells in other categories like Curse of the Desert, or a voice range Eyes of the Cat if the target is facing away from you. Countering spells would be as simple as covering the target with a bed sheet or wearing cloths and armor that cover you head to tow. The heart is inside my body, you cannot sense it, I am inside the bed sheet (or armor) you cannot sense me :mrgreen:

I'm all for that ruling, I'll invest in Intelligo spells from now on and wear a magical bed sheet that I can see through like a one way mirror. They will call me Casper the friendly Maga! :wink:

Cheers :smiley:

40

What are you talking about? I already stipulated to the sensing issue. But let me state it plainly so there is no doubt. You are sensing the individual with Curse of the Desert; your experience tells you that there is water inside people. You need a Corpus requisite to affect the water inside the human body.