Sure, a fireball the size of an individual would have a small 'hitbox', regardless of cosmetic effects. It would be roughly the size of a large campfire. Which is quite a bit larger than a basketball. But a group fireball would be roughly ten times larger than that, which is even larger (if you can imagine such a thing). Ten times larger.
You keep saying the same thing, that I have to be targeting a discrete group. I keep telling you that Creo works differently. I don't need to perceive a group as being discrete. I need to perceive my fireball as being discrete. The target and size differences affect my created fire, not the hapless fools sitting in the middle of it. We don't need a house rule, we can simply follow the RAW. We can go back and forth all day, but we're apparently not going to agree on this.
Exactly! The size difference affect the created fire, which is...how big? You can follow the RAW, but the RAW on a T:Ind, Size +3 isn't affect 100 recipients the size of a normal person.
Just how do you think a T:Group, Size +1 group of BoAFs look? 10 BoAfs, each 10 times the size of the base? How many people does that hurt, because it's not 100, IMO. Do they all affect one? As you keep saying the rules for Creo are different, but I don't believe anything in RAW actually lets you target the 10 items created independently. You have options of 10 BoAFs, 10 times bigger than normal hitting one person or 10 people, or 100 BoAFs hitting 100 different people. But if you think that you're ability to perceive the fireballs is what needs to happen, that tends to violate the limit of perception, since you can normally only target (small t) what you can perceive (The Limit of Arcane Connections, page 80). The Limit of Arcane Connection suggests that T:Group, when applied to Creo spells that deliver direct damage that the group of (small t) targets must also be sensed. If you can't sense a valid group, your spell should fizzle.
Was he dealing with the Empire's contact directly? That would certainly have been foolhardy. Usually, Verditius magi use a mundane agent of their own as an intermediary. I believe HoH:MC calls them Venditores.
So Vulcan was accused of interfering with mundanes, and decided to stop doing so. The Empire didn't like it and came to seize him, with the soldiers planning on looting the covenant. And you decided to simply hand him over to the Empire to avoid having to defend yourself (and kill those soldiers as a result).
As a result, you have now broken the Code by depriving a sodalis of his magical power. Sure, you wanted to avoid breaking the Code by interfering with mundanes (who had already been interfered with) by killing the soldiers. But from your initial post it seems that you did not consider other ways to deal with the situation. You may have, I just don't know.
But chances are that this won't matter. You broke the Code. You took it upon yourself to decide guilt and sentence for a fellow magus and covenant member. BTW, does your covenant charter have a clause saying that members should support each other?
Here are a few excerpts from the standard covenant charter (emphasis mine):
You violated Vulcan's rights as a member of your covenant by denying him the protection of the covenant.
Vulcan had not been convicted of an offense against the Order of Hermes, as he was only accused at the time, so you did not have this excuse for handing him over.
Of course, everything will depend on your Storyguide wants to do with this. But you are in trouble.
Paabo, I absolutely follow you, I had this view for a while after coming to 5th Edition. But my experience is that if it looks like something is a path to ultimate power, then I've read it wrong, and I need to read it nine different ways to see how it should be, what's reasonable, and what's thematic to Mythic Europe and the Order of Hermes
Let's face it, in an Order of 1200 current magi, Artorias is one of the newest. Do you really believe that someone hasn't done this before? Heck, even enchanted it into a device to make it bigger than it could otherwise be (items can break the level 50 limit). It either has been done, or it hasn't been done because it's too difficult, or it creates too many problems.
Say we stipulate to certain things, that Artorias could perceive five columns of 100 each, and he could target any two with his multicast spell. That leaves 3 other columns free to act, and they would not be hindered. Yes, this presumes my understanding of Group, and applying the perception of T:Group to be on the recipients of the spell as indirectly suggested by the Limit of Arcane Connection. If you can't perceive the group then you cannot target (small t) the group. You can create 100 fireballs that go whizzing over head, but they don't hit what you intended. But if all you need, in your view, is that the letter of RAW says you need to only perceive your group of fireballs, then you're right. But, I think you'll find that the saga will have a high entropy factor, and if there is a player similar to me at the table, I wouldn't enjoy that your magus can so easily wipe out 100s of people indiscriminately and easily.
I think if you create 100 basketballs of flame to lob into a group, it may not hit 100 people, it may only hit about 20 people, but someone is going to have to make a leadership roll to keep those 500 people together, unless they have trained to fight mages...
Vulcan was dealing with the guy face-to-face. He was a bad magi, making poor choices which affected his friends and got him taken out of the story in the end. Yeah, we're in trouble. I think we've mitigated the trouble we're in, but it's going to take some doing to get out from under this one. Also our covenant hasn't even been recognized yet, so I don't know that we're bound by those rules just yet. I don't know if the rules state that we should have been recognized yet, but the SG states that we haven't, so that's how I'm operating.
JLinks: no, a Group+1 fireball is a giant fireball. I'm not sure why you're having such a hard time conceptualizing it. But it still comes down to a cosmetic affect. The area affected is roughly the size of 10 individuals * 10. The simplest way of imagining it is if you were to accept an individual as filling a space of one pace across and two paces vertically (for the sake of simplicity. I don't want to hear 12 paragraphs about why it's actually 3.2244 feet etc. etc.), my very powerful fire spell is setting fire to a space of volume 10x10x2 (10 paces by 10 paces, 2 paces up) momentarily, and doing 30 damage to anyone contained within this volume.
I'm not attacking 10 men, I'm creating fire in the same space as them. I would need to be able to see the space that I'm targeting, yes. But to have to send out 10 fireballs is inane, and since it's all cosmetic, I'm just sending one fireball that does the same thing. I'm imagining it affecting a space in a circular fashion, the diameter being 10 paces across. In your example with your 5 columns of 100 each, he would probably take out 50 from the middle column, and 25 from the columns on either side, leaving the other two columns perfectly intact. That's just with 1 fireball. Using both, I could probably take out 50 men from the second from the left column and 25 from either side, and the same starting from the right. Probably a few less men on the second fireball, as the area affected (read: area of effect ) overlaps a bit with the first. I'm not saying I would kill exactly 200 men, but probably ~150-175 per turn, depending on the spacing.
It's also worth noting that yes, while Artorias is one of the newest magi in the Order, he's also nearly as talented with CrIg as Flambeau the founder was (Cr 30, Ig 36 if I'm not mistaken, for a total of 66- whereas Artorias, 5 years out of Gauntlet, is using CrIg at 52 when applying my major magical focus). That's less than 3 magnitudes difference between a new magi and one of the greatest CrIg specialists the order has ever known. Artorias is very powerful. Sorry if your lame magus makes you sad when compared to my sweet-ass fire-flinging magus, but you're the one who created them
Because it's not? And if it is, it's not as large a fireball as you think it is, certainly not large enough to inflict +30 damage on 100 people. The item created, if we take your statement, is 10 individuals of Ignem that can do +30 damage. That's not 10 people.
And it isn't setting fire to something nearly so large, as I said, it's implicit that the base individual of Ignem is a large camp fire (which does +10 damage) and we know that PoF and BoAF do +15 and +30 damage, respectively and do it to only one (small t) target. It's conceivable that I could create a large camp fire around a person, but it would only do +10 damage.
Your understanding, your assumptions and mine don't agree. At best, RAW is ambiguous.
So you've got a powerful character, that's supposed to impress me? The ability to throw fire is the only thing that characterizes an awesome or "sweet-ass" magus is the ability to fling fire? How utterly boring. You have much to learn.
Oh boy. You guys are in deep if it is a canonical Rhine covenant.
You guys should be in covenant with each other, a formal agreement with rights and responsibilities agreed upon, and it has nothing to do with recognition of your covenant by the Tribunal, and in fact, if you had no such agreement, I can see the Tribunal rejecting your request to be a covenant for that alone, even having all the other requirements met.
Technically you need to have received permission of all the other covenants to be recognized as a legit covenant. And as such, your covenant has no legal resource (with the Tribunal) of depredations of other covenants within the Tribunal. Even more at risk, based on the location previously mentioned, with The Tribunal of the Greater Alps, and perhaps even some covenants in Normandy who enjoy raiding, but can't take magical equipment due to that Tribunal's Peripheral code. Covenants from other Tribunals raiding you would be almost impossible to defend against, from a legal standpoint, without going to the offending party's Tribunal. And good luck there.
That may actually puts you in a worse space. If you are not a recognized covenant, then you had no ground to turn Vulcan in "to protect your covenant" because it has no existence. So you simply deprived a magus of his magical power, period. The fact that he was under investigation is not excuse for you breaking the Code. He was not convicted of a crime at the time, so he was still a magus, with the full protection of the Code.
BTW, and this is very much IMHO, I don't think you made bad things better. You made them worse by turning in a magus to mundane authorities. Your Storyguide may be laughing in private, or he may be at a loss as to how to have you all survive the consequences of your actions. In my experience, players always find new and unforeseen ways to get in more trouble than the storyguide expected.
Eh I don't see it as 'protecting the covenant', I see it as '3 magi protecting themselves and their property against the foolishness of another magi'. He endangered my life, I returned the favor. Either way, I think the SG is going to be fairly lenient about it for the sake of the story. I think he really wants to bring Vulcan back later as a plot hook, so he's probably not going to make much of a stink about it.
JLinks: No, I suspect nothing I could ever say would impress you, you'd just try and find a reason why I can't do said thing. I was just rebuffing the below snippet from your previous post. Yes, he's new, but he's also very powerful. You don't gotta get all butt-hurt about it :mrgreen:
Fact: fire magic is the coolest magic. Fact: your magus is lame compared to mine 8) (Please refer to Fig. 1A)I never said that all cool magi must throw fire, I simply inferred from how sad me having fun was making you that you must be stuck with a lame magus that you don't enjoy playing. I was just teasing; sorry, it's hard to get sarcasm across on the internet. You've played more than 20 seasons of one saga, right? I haven't. I'm not bored. This is fun for me. I haven't worn out the novelty of throwing fireballs yet, and if you're trying to take away the enjoyment I get from blowing things up, I think that's pretty lame Mr. Links.
One day, 40 years from now, I'll be a crotchety old man too.. and I'll maybe enjoy playing the librarian who sits on his veranda sipping tea and trading stories with weary travelers. I wouldn't bet on it though
My magus? I only have one? I have 4 active magi, well 3 and one maga. I've also had the powerful fire magus who created lots of trouble (20 years ago, IRL), and I've had the powerful fire magus who defended his sodales to the full extent his power (more of an NPC since I was the SG in a saga without a lot of artillery), both temporal and magical. But the types of stories I find interesting aren't the ones where I can lord it over the other characters that I'm the best. I mean, all my character secretly know they're the best. There's no reason to be rude about it, though.
You made your covenant's situation quite a bit worse, as Arthur indicated. The emperor wanted Vulcan. And you gave Vulcan to him. He's now a well protect court magus. Congratulations! Now he can make some more of those sweet-ass gadgets for the empire and be kept in the lap of luxury, which is all he really wanted, and like I said before, the emperor now believes he can bully covenants into giving him stuff when he wants it. So you have interfered with mundanes and brought ruin upon your sodales, probably in an even more spectacular fashion that Vulcan ever did.
Speaking of Vulcan, he's probably going to get setup by the emperor. His lab is probably in a lacuna on the palace grounds, some mystical place that gives him a pretty nice bonus, maybe even into a regio, but you have to find it, and deal with the divine aura that is in the town, figure out how to navigate the regio, which he has booby trapped for your weakest form, because he probably knows that, right? He might even acquire the resources to fashion his own Aegis (depends on whether the Aegis needs to penetrate in your saga) by the time you come for him.
I'm not crotchety, but I do have a vastly different aesthetic as to what makes an enjoyable game. If all you want to be is a baller who wins every battle, well, like I said that is utterly boring to me. Sounds too much like D&D/Pathfinder...
A base Individual for fire is a large campfire, which I can certainly see as a pace across. A Group+1 spell allows one to create 100 such fires in any configuration, including one big fireball. (You'd be better off with an T:Individual+1 size for that, but whatever). How many opponents that fire will hit in the given circumstances is up to the storyguide, but surely given a dense group of soldiers he could hit dozens with a fireball and even more if he splits the fire up (which he can, since it's a Group). The damage done to those with the misfortune to be in the fire depends on the base level of the spell, not on the fact that it's Group or whatever, nor does a bigger damage imply a smaller-sized fire.
If you can add in a few protective spells (such as a ward against arrows, and a ward against metal or a circular ward against people), or invisibility plus flying, or so on - the magus can decimate and route essentially any mundane army with ease. If all you have is Creo Ignem, without any protective spells, then over many rounds the mundanes may manage to get close enough to kill or injure the magus but he'll still have a good chance of routing a 500-men strong force, especially if they're not too disciplined soldiers expecting a tough magical fight.
Says who? I don't think there are any stats for Flambeau, and his power level isn't known. He may very well have had mythic Ignem levels, exceeding 40, for all we know. Then again, he could have had a mere 20 in Ignem, which was simply a lot in his time.
Which brings us to the question of what are the score for the greatest CrIg specialists the Order has ever known, to which again we have no answer. Philipus Niger (GotF p. 59), the senior member of the lineage of Apromor, has a PeVi total of 58 without a focus, or 78 with his Mythic-Blood-granted focus. And he's somewhat of a generalist. I'd expect the Order's top CrIg to have a higher total still. The core book does imply a score of 40 as the limit, so a CrIg total of 80. A Magical Focus seems very likely, as it's explicitly stated that Mythic Blood isn't uncommon in the Order and others will simply take a Magical Focus, so this rises to 120. Perhaps more. And that isn't even counting immortal magi, weird Mysteries, and so on. The bottom line is - there is no real guideline on just how powerful Hermetic specialists are, but they can much more powerful than 66. Whether they do is up to your storyguide.
I think David Chart said in one of his recent Sub Rosa columns that "Ars Magica's setting doesn't work". This is an example of that. Yes, a magus but a few decades out of gauntlet can lay waste to entire armies. I don't think it's too difficult. And I don't think it has been done, not on a massive scale, in the canonical setting. How this two facts fit together is a mystery.
I favor keeping the setting and lowering magi's power level, but that's not a popular choice. Keeping to the RAW, I don't agree with your arguments that burning up 100+ men in a round is such a problem. It isn't. Paabo's calculations are correct - he should be able to toast and route this force.
I'm not saying he can't. I'm saying that the group needs to be discrete and I don't subscribe that all he has to do is perceive his own created fireballs. Also, as far as RAW goes, it's not clear that T:Group+1 attack 100 people or one person. Surely you need to perceive the 100 people. Army killers are not hard, I stipulate to that. But they aren't quite as easy as people make them out to be, either. This is an example of a case where it shouldn't be quite as easy as portrayed. The base size for Ignem is a large campfire and it does a damage of +5, it seems pretty clear from PoF and BoAF that as damage goes up size goes down. You may not believe that, and it's not explicit, but it is reasonable. A Group+1 version of a spell doesn't create 100 M.I.R.V's to be independently targeted. If we revert to the large fireball, there's a case to be made that it could cover dozens, sure. But, I don't think they're especially large. Are you suggesting that you can create a large campfire sized PoF, and scale it up as the base size? Keep in mind scaling up the damage while decreasing the size is very thematic and approaches how Terram works with regards to dirt to stone to metal to noble metals to gems...
Never in a million years would I think for a second that you of all people only have one magus. You're extremely caught up in being literal, except when it comes to the rules. You like to take a lot of liberties, assuming your judgement is the only one with any merit. This is especially confusing when the nature of Ars is to be flexible enough to work how you want it to, depending on the story you're trying to tell. Artorias is ambitious and overconfident (actual flaws, not just extrapolation). I'm just playing the character. He would want to show off, and he would want to be the best, and to be recognized for it. My covenmates are extremely skilled at what they do as well, I'm not lording anything over anyone. In a straight fight between Grandius and I, Grandius would probably win using Vim. For now. Maybe in your 100-year-long career playing this 27-year old game you've seen Artorias in various forms. I haven't. Quit trying to piss on my parade, jeeze!
Betraying a covenmate who later comes back to bite us in the ass makes for a good story, with a lot of different factors adding to the difficulty. I can't understand why you get so upset when people don't follow the letter of Hermetic law.. it seems to me you're playing with too much meta knowledge informing your characters' decisions (which I find quite boring.. not that you'd ever for a even a moment care ).
As a last thought: The elitism on these boards concerning Ars as compared to other tabletops is ridiculous. You're not better than anyone else because you only play Ars, you're limiting yourself and your fun.. and if you're trashing other games in the process, you end up looking like a jerk doing it. Not that one man's opinion will change everyone's stance on this, I just wanted to toss my hat into that ring.
Nope, you keep repeating that and I still say it's just as wrong as the first time. Creo spells work differently. You pay lip service to this small but extremely important bit of information, but then you keep going on and on in the other direction.
Ahh I can't remember where I saw it, I think it was in ArM 4? I'm nearly positive that Flambeau had Cr 30 Ig 36, as I've been using him as a benchmark for my abilities. I will cede, however, that I could just have read about some other magi and accidentally labeled it "Flambeau" in my head. These past couple of months have seen me read far too many (and yet not nearly enough!) Ars books. I know specialists at 120 are possible (hell, 180 is possible, isn't it?), but I haven't seen any in the books. If the SG makes one up, that's one thing, but going by what's in the books I'd say I'm on the other side of the bell-curve for combat magi already. Not SO far, but definitely to the right of the middle
I see now that you said "the book implies 40 is the limit", but I was pretty sure it was 60. Again, I'm so not confident in my working knowledge of the rules yet.
I do subscribe to that. He needs to perceive his own created fireballs, in their created locations.
I'd say you need to perceive the locations. Regardless, it's certainly not clear how many people you can attack with such a spell. I could certainly see splitting the fireball to two, or even three, with no problem; but splitting it to hit 100 different people seems to be quite a feat of Perception and Finesse, in my opinion. So I would personally require a (Perception + Finesse) roll and judge based on that how many people the magus was able to hit, in the given circumstances in-game.
But this point is rather moot as the intention here is to create a single large fireball.
That's often the case, yes. They're still easy enough
I think both BoAF and Pilum of Fire hit one target, which is assumed to be what's standing within a campfire-sized space in normal circumstances. The smaller size of the Pilum or BoaF is cosmetic. So yes, you can create a campfire-sized PoF and further increase its size with additional magnitudes. I see nothing in RAW that says otherwise. This is how spell design is supposed to work, with size being determined by the base Individual and damage by the guideline. The CrIg guidelines note no exception to this.
You can of course rule that larger damage corresponds to smaller size. I'd consider that a house rule, however, rather than a reasonable extrapolation of the rules - which as I read them don't include anything to that effect.
Bear in mind the immersion rules (page 181 of the main book) if you're comparing to damage from a campfire. The base damages given are for only a small part of a person being engulfed in the source of heat. This is doubled for an entire limb, tripled for half-immersion, and quadrupled for full immersion. So being immersed in a +10 fire would actually do +40 damage.
Spell damage guidelines already include a modifier for the amount of exposure.
Ah yes, but that's assuming a "sensible" path as outlined for creating a magus X years out of apprenticeship, where the maximum art should be roughly 10+ 1 for every 4 years out of gauntlet. Obviously it would be easy to blow past this limit with dedicated study, and I think the sky's the limit as far as that goes. Since we began immediately out of apprenticeship, I could ostensibly reach beyond 40, I think.
) overlaps a bit with the first. I'm not saying I would kill exactly 200 men, but probably ~150-175 per turn, depending on the spacing.
I have 4 active magi, well 3 and one maga. I've also had the powerful fire magus who created lots of trouble (20 years ago, IRL), and I've had the powerful fire magus who defended his sodales to the full extent his power (more of an NPC since I was the SG in a saga without a lot of artillery), both temporal and magical. But the types of stories I find interesting aren't the ones where I can lord it over the other characters that I'm the best. I mean, all my character secretly know they're the best. There's no reason to be rude about it, though.
).