Obv I will discuss with troupe, but wanted to test the hive-mind’s opinion:
Would a focus in “Tools” be Minor or Major?
You will have to define more precisely than just a word to prevent “funny interpretation” (= abuse). For example, a weapon could be considered the tool of fighter.
So “tools” as items to perform a craft would help prevent such abuse. As you said, to be clarified and discuss with your troupe. One behaviour that I, as ST, despise, is when I agreed on something, then the players, a few sessions later, pull such kind of trick, which devolved into lengthy discussion, derailing completely the story.
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At first glance it feels like a small portion of terram objects. As just stated above, it’s important with Foci to define a few limits, even if it seems obvious initially.
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makes sense, it was intended to be tools for craftspeople.
Some canon examples might help
Minor Magical Focus (Swords) HoH:MC p.121
Minor Magical Focus (Wooden Wands) - HoH:MC p.122
Focus tend to be pushed into major when you start to poke into multiple forms. Do you intend on the focus applying to tools made of wood? Animal? Human Bones?
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My favorite question for Magical Focus is the enchanting aspect. This is particularly important for a ‘Tools’ focus. Does the focus care about the item being enchanted, or just the effect? It clearly applies to an enchanted saw to remain always sharp… but what about a woodsaw enchanted to shoot fireballs and transform it’s holder into malleable ice?
This feels like an obvious ‘yes’, especially with the cannon mMF(Swords). But.. what about the canonical MMF (Metals)?
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Healing covers multiple forms and is minor, so yes I was considering covering multiple forms.
Healing is already a specific activity that applies to living things which is quite restricted. It is a CrCoAnHe with maybe some rare cases in Vim
Tools in its widest definitions would apply to all Techniques and a specific subsection of An,Te,Co & He. As such it is too wide for even a MMF. You could narrow it down to “Destroying Tools” or “Controlling Tools” or a specific tool set such as “Hammers” or “Knives”
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I think it would also encompass herbam and even animal objects. But still only a small portion of possible objects.
As others have said tools is incredibly broad. I would say you would need to at an absolute minimum, restrict it to something like one-use tools.
I have a companion who coincidentially uses a war hammer. A hammer is a tool a smith uses, so my MMF affects it. Um… No!
Never, ever grants any focus to enchantment where the effect is not related to the focus itself. I played a Verditius with Major magical focus: ring (as in jewelry, not target), and it was utterly broken. As a Major magical focus. There was absolutely no reason not to craft a magical item using a ring as support, making lesser enchanted item trivial even for mid-level effect (20-30) once my magi had time to become a decent generalist.
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I think it could be minor as long as the magic worked on the “tool-nature" of the tool. Create or summon hammer, yes. Hurl hammer, no. ReTe(He) to make a hammer hammer in nails unaided, yes (with a Finesse roll). Use hammer in a fight, no. Fly by standing on a flying chisel, no.
A lot of what you can do with a tool you can do unaided with magic, reducing the value of the focus.
If you want it to include anything you do to anything that can be a tool, yes, that's definitely major.
I would rank a Focus in "Craftsman Tools" as Minor - with the understanding that a Focus in X does not automatically apply when enchantments placed into X, but only to magics that creatte, detect, change, destroy, move, ward etc. X.
While it can reasonably cover multiple Forms (mostly Terram, Herbam, and Animal, though it could of course warp the memory of a hammer - Mentem - create the illusion of a nail - Imaginem - or disenchant an enchanted Anvil - Vim), it only covers the tiniest fraction of those Forms; keep in mind that a Minor Focus spread out over many Arts is much less useful, for the same total ground covered, than one covering most of a single TeFo combination, because it forces you to spread you Arts very thin to take full advantage of it.
Also, and this is fuzzy and subjective, to me it seems rather hard to squeeze a lot of practical "oomph" out of such a Focus, not because there is a lack of potential effects to which it may be applied, but because a) most of those I can think of are relatively low-level effects that do not need penetration, and thus a Focus is only marginally useful and b) several of those that would benefit from a Focus are relatively Shape-and-Material independent, and you could squeeze most of the functionality out of a much more ... focused Minor Focus such as Round Stones.
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A flaw using the reverse of a Magic focus would be valid? I was thinking about a character with Healing focus and necromancy “anti-focus”.
Wouldn’t it be best to open a new topic for a new question?
As it is for all focus except if it applies to Familiars such as wolf for a wolf familiar.
And all techniques…
It would allow to target all the crafting tools of Magi of house Verdi which they need to cast any of their spells… but I guess this is only 1/12 of the houses with maybe a few stranglers that have the same flaw.
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If you look at the list of virtues and flaws, there are flaws which are the reverse of some virtues. But the scope of the flaws is usually much wider than that of the equivalent virtue, or its severity much worse. For example, the reverse of Puissant (Art) which gives a +3 bonus, is Deficient (Art) which cuts all totals in that Art by half.
That is because the area of interest of a mage is usually much narrower than the global scope of hermetic magic. And it is often easy to get around a flaw, because hermetic magic is so flexible. So it would become really easy to select a bunch of areas that you magus has really no interest in and free-load with flaws about them.
Most healers find the mere thought of necromancy abhorrant, and would never even want to dabble in it. So why give them a free flaw that makes them bad at it? Take Deficient Perdo instead, and then you have a real flaw.
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