Ok, misunderstood you.
In order to bring clarity:
How?
On this, you don’t agree that R:Personal is not intended to target solely the magus clothes? Or you don’t agree the intent is demonstrated?
It seems to me that this
does demonstraste that carried and worn items are not supposed to be, by themselves, valid targets.
To address this, you are mixing two different things.
Room and Structures are Targets. Their specification says they can affect things inside themselves. As I see there is no inherent conflict between this and Personal.
Personal is a Range to the thing affected. Something inside your hand is not at R:Personal. It’s at range Touch.
I can see the appeal of allowing R: Personal to affect things within the caster (obviously, as I did allow it). However, I worry that it might open a…
Can of Worms
Lesser Enchanted Device
ReAn 20
R: Personal, D: Mom, T: Group, 24/day
When this can is filled with earth, it generates dozens of worms from the earth. The worms are a natural product, and persist indefinitely.
So, should the above effect be possible? (The guideline is from Art & Academe, page 40.) Non-creation effects could also use T:Circle, and effects that persist after the target leaves the Circle, to affect an arbitrary number of things at R: Personal.
If you change Target to Room instead of Group (at Group I think it’s not valid indeed), why not? Is it that different from a R:Touch, T:Room spell using the same guideline?
EDIT: the matter is not of spell design. If that effect troubles you, that’s a problem with the guideline. For every intended purposes, a change on R:Personal will at most require range to be increased to Touch for certain effects to be valid…. But they will be valid.
The matter is of consistency. Inner consistency on RDT definitions. Outer consistency on spell design across books. And of weighing which is more important (or less troublesome).
Notice the old "or" v. the proposed "and" after the comma. With "or" the statement allow for just the person or the clothes or both. With "and" after the comma, it gets separated out to say it must hit the magus to hit the clothing. The problem with this "and" is that it's not showing the you have the option of affecting the magus without the clothing.
Have you read "Individual" recently, where the clothes are considered part of the person?
So an effect like this might save 5 levels over using touch, and that is a big deal as compared to issuing 20ish errata and changing how a rule has worked from the beginning? You yourself have talked about not wanting to change the core book when unneeded recently on these forums. Longer ago there was an actual error that you decided was easily-enough house-ruled that you didn't want to issue a much, much smaller amount of errata. Here is a clearly unneeded change, as it was working fine as it was, and it's easily-enough house-ruled away if desired, but you're strongly considering making 20ish changes. I just don't get it.
Not to the exclusion of the person from the effect.
Go check "Room" and "Structure" to see where it says you can hit the contents separately from the room/structure itself.
I saw that. The issue is that if the "robed magus" is an Individual, it seems to me that the robes are Part of said individual, just like the magus' eyes. Thus, at the very least a R:Per, T:Part effect on the magus should be able to affect them without affecting the "rest of the magus".
They do say you can opt to have the Room/Structure included on the effect or not. No such allowance for Individual.
Or rather, Structure says the structure itself is considered within the structure. Room does not, but I don’t think you have a problem with that.
Still no allowance for an individualess Individual as far as I can see.
True, you could go the Part route.
Where do they say that???
The robe and the magus are not a discrete thing. Part affects parts of a single discrete thing. And at that point, why are you not using R: Touch, T: Individual to target the robe?
I edited my comment briefly before you answered.
Personally, I do not really think that particular effect to be abusive. Then again, I do not think disallowing it creates problems either.
I have some issues with allowing R:Per T:Group effects because I feel somewhat wrong that a magus should shave 1 or 2 magnitudes from an effect affecting his grogs (R:Per vs. Touch or Voice) by including himself, but this is probably just from long play habit. Similarly, R:Touch + T:Circle is already "efficient enough" that I would dislike it getting even better with R:Per + T:Circle.
Chamber of Ultimate Death
PeCo 30
R: Per, D: Mom, T: Circle
This wooden ring kills all people within it when the phrase "Sucks to be you" is spoken. Note that, as a Personal effect, it ignores Magic Resistance.
On the ring, yes. On the people inside the ring? Why?
Sense spells don’t ignore MR from people targeted when cast at R:Personal. Obly that of the caster himself.
Well, the corebook (assuming I have not missed some crucial errata) says:
Individual: The spell can affect a single discrete thing, such as one person or one object... Clothes on a person or moss on a boulder are part of the person or boulder for these purposes.
Because the "caster" (e.g. a talisman) might be touching the magus, but not his robe.
Saving five levels is not an issue at all. The problem is that this is really long way from what Personal Range was supposed to do. Ars Magica's spell system is supposed to allow people to design spells, in a consistent way, and get answers that most people will agree with. That relies on having basic concepts that are clear. We had a long discussion to clarify what "inside a circle" meant, for example. This sort of problem can make the system difficult to use, and actually seems to be doing so, and that is potentially worth 20+ errata.
For the same reason that a magus doesn't need to Penetrate his own Magic Resistance to make his clothes invisible as well.
Sense magic is a kludgy special case to make a certain class of spells work, and cannot be used to draw conclusions about how other spells should work.
Your post still says that, and the later part doesn't address it. So I still wonder where that first statement comes from. It looks like you've misremembered because I can't find that option you claim is listed for both.