Oh, they're dumb as heck, but we interpret things very differently.
Consider two players playing similar magi in the same saga. I have Magus A. A new player has Magus B.
Magus B invents these three spells: Ball of Abysmal Flame Ball of Dreadful Flame (CrIg 30) (Identical to above except its rules read "A ball of flame shoots from your hand to strike a single target, doing +25 damage.") Balls of Terrible Flame (CrIg 35) (Identical to above except its rules read "Ten balls of flame shoot from your hand to strike up to ten targets, doing +20 damage each." and use Group.)
These are all fine.
Magus A invents three spells: Ball of Unfathomable Flame (CrIg Gen) (Identical BoAF except its rules read "A ball of flame shoots from your hand to strike a single target, doing +(level-10) damage.") This is invented at both levels 30 and 35. Balls of Unfathomable Flame (CrIg Gen) (As the prior one, but using Group and so doing +(level-20) damage.) This is invented at level 35.
These are not, because there is no General guideline for Creo Ignem on which they can be based. You are allowing the more experienced player to extrapolate a general CrIg guideline from the given examples, and use it as a base for his spells. I would not; I would limit him to the existing, specific guidelines, unless he undertook Original Research to invent a General Creo Ignem guideline.
Your reading unfairly advantages more experienced players over newer ones; mine merely unfairly advantages Vim over Ignem.
Which, don't get me wrong, is still extremely silly. But it's not as aggressively unfriendly to players.
General guidelines are not required for General spells. That is a common mistake. You could disallow in-between levels, but that is the case with other canonical General spells, so this wouldn't stop it from being a General spell. You could disallow going beyond a certain cap, but that is the case with other canonical General spells as well. So, while your are welcome to do so, this is in distinct disagreement with the rules.
Meanwhile, your house rule is arbitrarily punishing other inexperienced players who don't know they'll be punished for taking the classical CrIg Flambeau. For example, your rule advantages CrAq attacks over CrIg attacks.
Now there's something I've been looking at and pondering for years.
Shouldn't there actually be a General guideline that each and every canon spell is based on? Wouldn't these guidelines actually be a direct representation of Bonisagus's work on his Unified Field Theory of Magic that we know simply as Hermetic Magic Theory?
Whether it ever makes it into a canon supplement or not, I think that would actually be a very realistic feeling detail for sagas to have. Every covenant would be willing to pay a bit of extra vis or silver to add copies of Bonisagus's Original Research to their own libraries.
There could be political story seeds to be mined from that as well, since Durenmar may well insist on preserving their exclusive ownership of these texts for years before being persuaded otherwise.
This spell has effects as defined in the Spells chapter of ArM5, as supplemented by guidelines scattered throughout supplements.
All spells use this guideline, so all spells are General spells using the same guideline, all spells are similar, and Adaptive casting applies to everything.
OK, obviously not, which is why I want to look at whether there is a sensible way to specify similar spells in a way that makes sense within the fiction, not just because of the way it is most convenient for us to write spells in the rulebooks.
Philosophers of science have spent about a century trying, without success, to give a clear and objective definition of "similar". There is going to have to be some fudging in the game rules.
I do not think that spells doing +level fire damage at levels 5 and 40 have the same effect. (If you disagree, we can have a Parma-less duel. You can cast the level 5 one at me, and I can cast the level 40 one at you. If they have the same effect, this is obviously fair.) I do not think that the way you write the spells makes the difference between whether they are similar or not, and part of the reason is that it is possible to write spells in such an abstract way that all spells have the same effect.
So, how about this for a definition of "same effect": Two spells have the same effect if it makes no immediate difference to the target (or one of the targets) which version of the spell is cast on it.
That might say more about philosophers of science, than about the difficulty of defining "similar": The concept of similarity is pinned down fairly rigorously in Euclid's Elements
It is not 100% clear if this means:
a) for every target, the choice between the two spells make no immediate difference.
b) for at least one target, the choice between the two spells make no immediate difference.
I think it's not b) because otherwise any flame-creating spell would be the same, given that characters with Greater Immunity to Fire exist. But if you go for a), note that the "same" 7th magnitude healing spell, designed for one grog in one case, and designed for another grog in another case, becomes two different spells, because each warps one of the two grogs but not the other.
I want to add that pinning this down is probably not useful just for Similar Spells, but also for the MuVi base guideline "Superficially change a spell", that applies to changing a spell into one "with the same primary effect".
So, if a magus with a R:Per version of the Incantantion of the Body Made Whole wants to "upgrade it" into the standard R:Touch version for his shield grog, then the magus must either give up the Similar Spell bonus, or warp the grog with each casting, right?
It's not the way we play it, and it feels a bit strict, but I am not saying it's necessarily wrong.
This doesn't solve the problem you think you've solved. It almost solves half of it, and in so doing creates a distinction between types of general guidelines. Considering two PeVi spells to dispel effects, the only difference being the level of the guideline. They can both dispel the same low-level effect with the same results. To that target it makes no difference which version is cast on it. Therefore, any level of the guideline may be used and it's the same effect. So there would seem to be a big distinction between the all-or-nothing general guidelines and the others. But how about the Flambeau with Greater Immunity to Heat and Flames? It makes no difference if it's that +5 fire damage or that +40 fire damage effect, so these are still the same effect.
As ezzelino has said, this basically said shifting anything from Personal to Touch would no longer even be similar because the effect is different as well as the Range. If you do this you'll have to do even more editing.
The rules currently have it being a different version of the spell, somewhat like each magus has a different version using their own casting sigil.
You could probably write it more simply by focusing on the guideline used. E.g. It's the same effect if it uses the same guideline with the same choices of how the guideline is applied.
Two spells have the same effect if they do exactly the same thing, excepting any purely cosmetic differences.
With this definition a level 35 version of Pilum of Fire, doing +30 damage would have the same effect as a standard Ball of Abysmal Flame since they both create a fire which does +30 damage to the target.
That one spell shows up as a spear of flame, and the other as a ball of fire is a purely cosmetic difference.
A level 15 version of Demon's Eternal Oblivion would not have the same effect as a level 25 version of DEO though since one strips 15 points of Might from its target while the other strips 25 points.
With such a definiton it will not matter how the spell is described, or what guideline it is based on - only what the end effect is.
Now, I am sure there is some way some sufficiently clever rules lawyer can find problems even with a definition this simple, so I am most interested to see what problems people here can find.
I think the main problem of this definition (i.e. David Chart's) is that occasionally it might be a bit too strict: spells that "essentially" do the same thing might have some very minor differentiator that still disqualifies them as having the same effect. One example was identical spells, but "tailored" not to warp someone. Another might involve sigils, or Potent Spells - I'm not sure.
Still, as I said, maybe being a little stricter than intuition might warrant is a fair price to pay for less ambiguity...
It's to clarify what that means. Look at this version: Spear of Flame does level-5 damage. Spear of Flame does level-5 damage.
They do exactly the same thing, right? Now what if they're not the same level as each other? They still each do exactly the same thing, "level-5 damage"? Or they do different things, +25 damage v. +30 damage?
This was essentially what existed before, and it didn't clear things up. So why would it suddenly clear things up when it has failed to for 15 or so years.
But that's just it. They do exactly the same thing or not depending on how it is written, not depending on the result. David is trying to fix that issue.
It's not even a rules lawyer thing. To many mathematically minded, your way is the backward one. For instance, in 2-D we can write
Aâ˘B=AxBx+AyBy
or Aâ˘B=ABcosø
While those two formulas may look very different, they're the same thing: scalar products. They only look different because of notation.
Or for a different view: Do you think gravity behaves totally differently with respect to your body than it does with mine? Or do we just have different distributions of mass through our bodies with gravity behaving the same way with respect to each bit of mass?
A level 25 spell doing "level - 5" damage and a level 30 spell doing "level - 5" damage do not do exactly the same thing - one does 20 damage, and the other 25 damage. How it is written does not and should not matter.
Basically you have to unroll any level-based formulas before comparing the effects. End effect is what matters, not formulas.
From one perspective. And from the other perspective this is completely backward. I accept that you see things your way. But just because you say my perspective is wrong because I disagree with you doesn't make you right. Do you really think gravity behaves totally differently on you than on me? Or do we just have different distributions of mass? I go with the latter, which is fundamentally important to the success of physics. I'm fine if you choose to go with the former, but you'll never get me to agree with you.
But that's just it. Your definition is nearly identical to the existing definition; just rewording things a little. And within the existing rules, what I gave you is not only the same effect, it's actually the same spell.
David is trying to adjust for that. I don't see how not adjusting will be an adjustment to fix it.
Not at all.
The existing definition talks about the rules description - i.e. it implies a textual comparison of the description of the spells involved. Then it matters greatly if the spell effect is written with a generic formula or with specific numbers.
My proposed defintion just looks at what the spells actually do in the end and ignores how you reach that result.
Or to use your example with scalar products: Is the final value the same? Yes or no? Which formula was used to calculate it is irrelevant.
