Teleporting: The indignities we suffer

Alright - I have to ask this. :blush: Do your magi travel naked?? :open_mouth:

I expect most of us to shout no in unison (please disregard the naked Criamon in the corner), but the reason for my inquiry are the teleporting spells. None of them mention Casting Requisite for the magus' clothes and equipment. I know no mention of those Casting Requisites doesn't mean they arent needed, but I just feel that his is such an important detail that it cannot have been overlooked by the masters of the Order (or maybe it's just the cause for unbridled laughs whenever young ReCo magi attempt to arrive at their first Tribunal in style...).

How do you tackle this in your troupe? Ignore it? Adds He, An, Te, etc. Casting Requisite? Regularly have ReCo magi drop butt naked from the skies?

Many of the teleport spells are rather high level - at least for junior magi - and few would be broad spectret enough in several arts to be able to pull this off if piling Casting Requisites on.

Casting requisites are usually not mentioned with the spells of ArM5. See also ArM5 p.115, cp. 'Casting Requisites' for this.
That casting requisites can be applied to the usual teleport spells is easily seen from the definition of the 'Individual' Target on ArM5 p.112.

Yes, there is a trap hidden in this: newbie players might design their characters with teleport spells, only to find out that the characters cannot cast them with the casting requisites they need. It's an SGs responsibility to make them aware of that issue.

Kind regards,

Berengar

My assumption is that ReCo Teleport effects , cast w/o requisites ,
transport the caster and anything protected by his Parma.
His clothes , Talisman and not much else.

This is a houserule that might work in some campaigns - perhaps with the explanation that, if the body is moved, what is stuck to it will move with it.
Just that walls do not appear to block the transported magus, which makes such an explanation, referring to assumed natural consequences of the transport, spurious.

Kind regards,

Berengar

Unless blocked by a ReVi (or ReCo) Ward ,
then as long as the Arcane Connection exists , natural barriers would appear to be no impediment.

Well, I reckon I knew the answer, I just cannot for the life of me recall whether I have 'enforced' this uptil now or simply forgotten it... If I have I stand to have an argument or two with my players, or at least to disappoint them. :confused:

There has to be a "reasonable" amount of flexibility here. Teleporting a target teleports that target and what they wear/carry/hold, within reason. Teleporting a barrel of wine might require both Herbem and Aquam, but teleporting a man holding a bottle of wine using only Corpus & Terram does not leave the liquid behind.

Otherwise, such anal adherence to the letter of the rules would lead to such sophistry as this: All one needs to avoid Corpus spells is to wear a sheet over themselves- because. after all, you can't effect anything you can't actually see without an Arcane Connection, right?Yeah, right- get back to me on that. :wink:

:shock: ... tsk, tsk ... :unamused:

It was "Hermetic magic cannot affect an unsensed target without an Arcane Connection", wasn't it? Now isn't the bloke wearing the sheet sensed? 8)

Kind regards,

Berengar

Nope, not by the letter- you're sensing the sheet, pure Herbem, not anything "Corpus". Identical effect could be achieved with a Rego Herbem, or a Creo Aurum, or any "body-shaped" effect under a sheet - no real telling what is inside that sheet, now, is there? 8)

(anal!)

From p112 under the definition of individual "Clothes on a person...are part of the person... for these purposes."

I am afraid that your particular anal-ness is incorrect.

I would also say that a person underneith a sheet moving around still qualifies as sensed, notice the last sentence of the limit of Arcane connections on page 80 "...but perdo corpus magic cannot affectthose people until the magus is aware of them." (emphasis mine)

(Not "my" analness, just the type I've seen, far too often. Pls note the use of the word "sophistry", and that those were negative examples, not anything I was promoting myself.)

:wink:

The most common example i see on the D&D boards ,
is "if the Rules do not explicitly forbid it , then is doable".

no insult was intended

Not wanting to interrupt your discussion on analness and bodyshaped shhets (anyone say latex?? :laughing: ), I just wanted to return to another notion mentioned before: teleporting a man with a bottle of wine (or barrel for that matter).

Is holding objects in your hands (larger ones especially) alone not more a challenge - since it in itself contradicts the target Individual a bit? The case of the content inside of less importance?

Now I am very tired (having just returned from a long night at a row of larger emergencies), but it seems to me that Cuchulainshound and Erik is discussing two different things (when putting aside the talk of anal stuff)?? Erik is arguing whether the liquid can be effected with the same teleportation spell as the bottle/barrel or not. Cuchulainshound is arguing whether this effect requires a Casting Requisite or not (Aquam). Am I off track?

Yah, I vote for casting requisites. I wouldn't see a problem with subbing Terram for "all" in this case.

What do you guys think of using a low level spell to muto clothes to corpus material (besides "ew!") so that the requisites on the high level spell aren't so killer.

Turning a human body into cloth would be a base 25. Diam + Ind = level 30 (with a Herbam req...not a lot of use here).

Is this the correct guideline? It seems like it should be harder to turn a man into a turnip than turn cloth into man-jerky.

Muto Herbam guidelines place turning plants to rocks at level 4, but no other.
Refering back to the Muto Corpus guides, Terram and Herbam are the same level. What do you think of putting them the same level under Muto Herbam? This would make the spell level, what, 10 including Part target.

Obviously the idea is to emiminate the casting requisite on a high level spell with a previously cast low one.

Thiis would likely be a houserule, as from spell examples like ArM5 p.155 'The Unseen Arm' we see that even ReTe spells need casting requisites to move non-Terram objects.

This should work, AFAICS. The duration of the Muto spell could be Diameter, so that spell would indeed be low level.
The most difficult objects to transform would be metal objects, because the Terram guidelines add magnitudes for affecting them: so young magi relying a lot on ReCo transport spells might wish to do without 'luxury items' like metal buttons, coins and daggers.
To avoid the "ew!"-effect, a more versatile magus could instead transform all the stuff on his body to Animal or Herbam material, and only use that one casting requisite with the ReCo spell. Or just wear only animal-based equipment in the first place, as many magi relying a lot on MuCo(An) spells do anyway.

Kind regards,

Berengar

Yeah. My thoughts went in the same direction.

My challenge now is to talk it over with my troupe that we might have forgotten this a couple of times. The problem is that at the moment they are in the midst of a story in which they planned to rely heavily on 'teleportation'. I guess I'd better prepare some sort of apeasement... I guess we will be having a feast of a cake come next session. :astonished:

Or make this the last "freebie." You know your players best, but if they already have "a plan" (not to mention have already developed the spells themselves), it may seem a bit inelegant.

You may want to try to rewrite history a bit, if they could have developed the more complex spells. If the spells they now have only t-port naked targets, I doubt they would have been seen them as very useful.


(cross-edit with the below- reposting as separate at bottom)

No, I wasn't planning to axe them in the middle of a story. I think we might have remembered those CR before but just forgot them in this case again. In any instance this plan of theirs at the moment rests on the use of a Casting Tablet - so in the end it is mostly a question of the amount of fatigue.

100% agreement here, one of my pet peeves is a well studied scholar being surprised by a change in the paradigm and left "out in the cold" (literally, here). If the rules are updated with no "in-continuity" reason, players should be allowed to know ahead of time, and make any adjustments available.