"exactly by the guidelines"
I don't have a book nearby. Is the base guideline that design for 'changing eyes into cat's eyes' uses really the base guideline for a design that 'changes eyes so they can see more'?
The exact wording is... "Change someone to give them a minor ability".That's it.
(The MuCo Guidelines have about 6 short paragraphs of other info, but nothing pertinent to this point.)
Thanks.
That is interesting. It makes me wonder if the spell isn't a vestige of some previous system development reasoning that changes in abilities needed to 'hook' onto other concepts from the realm of forms. One wonders if 'the ability to see' is a natural characteristic of a human and that to change it would actually require Rego. Of course, being able to see in the dark is not a natural characteristic for humans and thus Muto. OTH having no weight isn't a natural characteristic for anything solid, but there is it is in the Rego description.
Hmmm
It is - we've said as much. It's a legacy spell from 3rd ed (or earlier?), when spells still showed as much influence from random "D&D" type spells as the 15 Arts. Techniques were not nearly as tightly defined, and sometimes spells still did "stuff", with "other stuff" being taken into consideration. Like this one.
Back then, you took a spell effect, gave it some bells and whistles, and then shoehorned it into one of the abstractly defined categories of Technique + Form - which did not always demonstrate the same relative black-and-white distinctions that the current ones do. The Guidelines were more vague, and so "explanations" of effects, or spells that were "traditional" (from any of a variety of fantasy traditions) were often imported wholecloth.
(My favorite inexplicable legacy effect is Whispers thru the Black Gate, which - somehow, with only Intellego - makes the corpse actually speak aloud so anyone and everyone nearby can hear it, plain as day. No Imagonem, no Rego Corpus, yet that dead clay is chattering away like your Aunt Betsy.
Not in my sagas - but in canon, yeppers, you betcha!)
Would Muto Corpus really be it rather than Intellego Imagonem? Detecting light species more sensitively rather than change my body to detect light species more sensitively. I think you could make a case that MuCo spells that enhance perception should really be InIm. Also, I think that I'd add a magnitude for the straight MuCo effect without the requisite for complexity to add the ability to 'recover and adjust' to normal light again without ending the spell (which I assume is already built into 'Eyes of the Cat').
MuCo gives a person an unnatural ability - whether that's to see in the dark or leap tall buildings in a single bound, it changes the way the body works.
InIm allows you to use your senses at a distance - but it does not change the way those senses work, how you perceive those images. An image of a very dark room is very dark, unless your body, your sense, has the ability to see in very dark rooms.
This is like the "Rego = Control" confusion in a different current thread - the Guidelines are very specific about how they work, both Techs and Forms separately and a given Te/Fo together. It's too easy to generalize and make assumptions and "read into the explanation" and "I've always just assumed that..." - and stray way off from what is written.
I like the distinction. Very helpful actually.
You say that as if it's a bad thing.
Exactly right, I think.
I think it is still basically cosmetic. The spell (ReTe) would still be able to carve rock without the requisite.
I think that, to make a spell that specifically carved a rock into an animal shape I would apply a "free" requisite that doesn't add a magnitude much like the requisite in Eyes of the Cat...but that's very much a judgement call.
On the other hand, I believe that another strategy could be to create a vanilla ReTe spell that merely carves a rock "like a sculptor does". But such a spell would then require a Finesse roll to actually make it look like something in particular. And given that sculpting rock realistically is a highly skilled job that takes a long time it would probably be against a large Ease Factor.
So I think that my options would be:
A ReTe spell that carves rock. This spell would only successfully make the rock look like an animal if it was both successfully cast and a Finesse roll was made against a (high) Ease Factor.
or
A ReTe(An) spell that explicitly carved the rock to look like an animal, with the An requisite not adding a magnitude. This spell would be successful, assuming it could be cast. (Possibly this would require a Finesse roll too, but it would be against a much lower Ease Factor than the ReTe version).
YSMV.
When I run a game, I use this as an example of what experimentation can lead to. It's a defect in the spell. It cannot work on bones, but only on bodies with functioning mouths and tongues. It was just happenstance that this version of the spell and Eyes of the Cat with an Animal requisite became the standards in the Order.
PS. It's a really annoying defect, especially when the dead witch you want to interrogate was mauled to death by horse-headed dogs sent by the Devourer. But is vaguely amusing watching the storyguide mimic the mangled witch. The relevant parties know exactly what I mean.
Play by Post rarely excells vs. a good tabletop sesssion.
And those are great rationales for keeping the spells as written in the game.
I'd have to dig out my 3rd ed book, but iirc many of those spells relied less on the Guidelines, and more on comparing the desired effect of a spell against canon effects in the same Te/Fo, and gauging rough equivalence. So, complications, restrictions, side effects, traditional or colorful interpretation and "cosmetics" were all important parts of the spells and their balance.
So, a spell to see in the dark would not be a mere mechanical effect, but would require an "explanation" of how the Corpus was being Muto'd to that end. This abstract and imaginative approach has since given way (for better or worse) to more tightly defined guidelines and fewer otherwise inexplicable aspects of individual spells.
If it's a replacement for a measured and thoughtful understanding and weighing of the RAW, I believe it is. It's the difference between knowing the rules of a game, and deciding to change them, and not knowing the rules and making something up. The end result may be the same, but the process that got you there is far more random and less defendable in the latter case.
And it leads to people making statements on these boards that sound as if they had never read the rules (or at least never understood them), rather than did and then altered them for their own reasons.
Both of those are, indeed, "bad things" in my book.