It seems like Momentary may be longer than just a "moment", and in fact more like 10 or 11 seconds.
Gift of the Frog's Legs: Momentary Duration: The leap must be made within 10 seconds. Does this mean you can't use it on yourself? Your next action will be (as near as one can tell) 10 seconds later. I'd say that's good enough.
The Momentary Curse of Rotting Wood indicates that a door takes two rounds to rot. Does this require two castings? Does this mean a moment is a round? Or is the spell just poorly phrased and means the door rots in an instant, but falls apart under its own weight in 2 rounds (you could smash through it easily in the meantime). OR is this spell the result of some kind of GM/PC negotiation along the lines of "A door is bigger than a standard plant size, so this spell can work on it, but it's slower". Or perhaps some experimental lab mishap (and bravo to any PC in character enough to experiment on a level 5 spell )
Wizard's Boost indicates that you boosted spell must be casting as you cast this spell (I assume one or the other caster must delay to the same initiative). This spell seems to take "momentary" a bit more at its word.
Are all Muto/Rego Vim spells like this? Can you never affect your own casting unless you up the duration to Diam/Conc?
Could you , for example, use a momentary spontanous magic to assemble a corpse, then next round, animate it (assuming the following spell also held the corpse together)? Or would you have to make the duration of the assembled spell the next step up?
Same with a fire....could you create it one round (with nothing to burn) and then control it the next round (say to leap on something flamable). Or fire one round and oil the next...etc etc
Can you use momentary magic to make armor weaker then have the oppertunity to try to break it yourself before the magic wears off?
Can momentary magic build on itself like this? These effects seem to be a far cry from magic that lasts Diameter (2 minutes), and seem like a logical lowering of power from the longer magic.
I suspect more than anything else, that the Momentary issue is the leght of the spell itself, how long it takes to "go off". NOt how long it's effects take to occur.
I don't think you'll find any guildelines on how long a given wood piece takes to rot, or anythign like that. And that the text, while mechanically an issue, is more or less fluff, added to the text to make the spell interesting. Since there is nothing at all to stop you from say, spontaneousing the same exact spell with an instant effect as well as a momentary duration.
Interesting....are you suggesting that you could design a spell of no higher level that would "delay" its casting for a round and go off when you cast your next "momentary" spell? Thus the leap is one "moment" of power anytime you need it within 10 seconds.
What if you wanted a "1 charge spell" that lasted an hour. What would the guidelines for this be? This is obviously different power-wise than allowing you to jump all you want for an hour.
Unless a door is larger than an "individual" for Herbam (1 pace across).
As was discussed before, for Perdo spells, the duration is how long the spell keeps on destroying things. The two-round duration for the door's destruction is fluff. As I view things, Momentary duration spells perform one action or enable you to perform one action, which must be undertaken (reasonably) immediately. Metamagic spells must be cast at the same time as the spell they modify: before, they lack a target, and once the spell is cast, it is too late to modify it. Fast-casting might be your friend.
As things stand, both are equally difficult. Some special durations like If, or Cursed may give you what you want, but I cannot remember their level off the top of my head.
Yes, AFAICS it lasts a-very-few-seconds-and-don't-you-argue-with-the-SG-over-it. You will find, that, like for spell casting in combat, ArM5 rules are just not organized around precise durations, and even less around strict exclusive sequences of precise durations.
Given that the combat round is about six seconds, the spell description tells me that you can cast 'Gift of the Frog's Legs' on yourself or anybody else, to enable the target to make the leap immediately after the casting.
The latter interpretation fits to "things that size take up to two rounds to decay" quite nicely.
Here again ArM5 is not organized around precise durations, but around rules how to do several things at once or in very short order. ArM5 p.159: "Second, you must make an Intelligence + Concentration roll of 9+if you are casting both spells (that is, the MuVi spell and the spell it is affecting)." "It is not possible ... to use Muto Vim to affect another spell after it has been cast."
Yes, you can. (Provided that there is nothing - like gravity or a malcontent familiar - ripping apart the assembled corpse again while you cast the second spell.) Note, that D:Mom Rego spell effects are not undone at the end of the spell's duration, but left to the laws of nature: the bones of a corpse laid out with D:Mom ReCo remain sorted, and the guard put to sleep with D:Mom ReMe remains asleep.
Here you would stress an SGs good will to the limit. Still I would allow Fast Casting the second spell, with a goal of your own Initiative.
No - an attack action is nothing to fit in directly behind your normal spellcasting. An attack action is also far more complex than e. g. the jump with 'Gift of the Frog's Legs'.
Attacking with a weapon and then Fast Casting (-10) without Gestures (-5) in the same round is feasible, however - though unlikely to amount to much.
Sorry, I was thinking a round was 10 seconds...at 6 seconds this spell represents a break-through in Momentary Magical Duration.
Or we have another "SG/Player negotiation", since the base effect of the Froggy Jump is "transport the target instantly 5 paces" and this isn't that good.
And if the consensus is that momentary can't last longer than a round, or even a whole round, then that's a break-through duration aching to happen.
So either it's a "partial magnitude" (say +2 levels), or like Momentary, but with some kind of negative feature, or like Diam/Conc with a positive feature. Or, you know, it's not possiable in a meaningful way.
Or it is just another of the many hints to take explicit short time spans in ArM5 (excepting, of course, the Astrological Durations calculated with the help of an armillary sphere) with a pinch of salt, isn't it?
Jokes aside: given that the ArM5 rules are clearly not about counting the seconds until a spell is cast or ends, or an attack lands or misses, the authors could have saved their readers some thinking by throwing a few unnecessary references to explicit durations out of the text.
I think you're trying too hard to peg down the duration to a fixed number. 10 seconds, 6 seconds... it's pretty much the same thing. I strongly doubt you are supposed to read that as "a bit over one round", but rather that you don't have to try and time your jump to the exact moment when you are done casting the spell. Yes, metamagic spells are more demanding.
Might be, since the spell has been interpreted as a jump spell rather than a teleportation spell. It basically allow you to take a running start before you jump. I'm perfectly OK with calling it Momentary.
Momentary lasts long enough for the spell to do its stuff. If you are generally ready to use it when it is cast, you're fine. If you need to do something else before, too bad for you. If you were to pull a Momentary dove out of your hat, it would last long enough to have people turn their heads as it flies away rather than just blink in and out of existence. How long is that exactly? I don't know and I don't really care. It would depend on what the spell does anyway
I don't really see what kind of features you have in mind, and I don't really hold with partial magnitudes. If you need your spell to last long enough to do a few things with it, go for Diameter. It's easy, it's standard and it gives you a comfortable margin.
I'm just looking for "cheap" easy magic that can build on itself. Stuff that a beginning mage can do with spontaneous casting, like create a fire and then create a pool of oil for it to light. Or pull a dove out of a hat and then have it turn into a boquet of flowers the next round.
I get that Diameter would allow this.
After a while thinking about it, I'm leaning toward the partial magnitude. Let's say you cast a spont. spell with enough mojo to create a bonfire, but not with a good enough roll to get another magnitude for Diameter. Any "extra" levels can be put toward more fire or more duration (in addition to other effects). 1 extra level would probally be enough to last an extra round, where as 4 extra levels might be a whole minute.
For ArM5 p.81 "open ended" Spontaneous magic this nicely follows the spirit of ArM5 magic rules. But I'd rate an SG applying it to Formulaic magic as Masochist +2.
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You will find, that, like for spell casting in combat, ArM5 rules are just not organized around precise durations, and even less around strict exclusive sequences of precise durations.