Well that's technically true. But I certainly saw it as an oversight on the part of David and the playtesters and I'm sure I'm not unusual in that respect. There was much discussion on the subject when the edition first came out and all that came of it was a sort of "play how you want" post. But a better solution (in my opinion I suppose but you'd have difficulty convincing me that there are any advantages to doing it differently) would have been to include errata for the spell saying that Notatus's great unrepeatable discovery was how to make the Aegis spell act like an aura and not need to penetrate.
The Aegis is a questionable choice for eating vim or rego vis even if it doesn't need to penetrate. In my games spells cast from outside of an aegis at targets protected by magic resistance need to beat the combined magic resistance of the aegis and the MR of the target to penetrate rather than just the beating them both individually.
"It is not an everyday's job, but it is feasible."
"have to put forward a Might 150 creature if I want it to be a combat challenge"
At least on the surface, that looks like a contradiction.
Putting together a plan to defeat a might 100 creature, spending years to develop the spells and items necessary to do the job and then putting it into action is the stuff of great stories.
Might 100 creatures have enough resources tat you can justify having them take precautions before they walk into a 25 waiting spelled high penetration level 5 critter's eternal oblivion ambush. Have you honestly had a bad experience with your players knocking off might 100 archangels in play?
I certainly saw the spirit of the forest to be more powerful than pagan gods. Were talking about remains of a single spirit that encompassed the combined forests from the Baltic sea to the headwaters of the Danube and the Rhine. It's a step or two below an Archangel and that's just fine. Magic gets more powerful with age other realms don't.
Only if the Aegis needs to penetrate which it doesn't unless you're a stickler for rules as written over rules as intended.
Actually the Aegis is the exception otherwise even a spring covenant would need casting total of 30 to 40 to have a level 20 aegis do anything for them.
Aegis doesn't need to penetrate to ward creatures out but it is also breakthrough discovery which makes it an exception to most wards and protections rules. There is a reaon that the Aegis rules specifically say it wards creatures out based on might. ("Creatures with a Might score cannot enter the area protected by the Aegis unless they have a higher might than the Aegis level") This is like the ex misc house with its special wards or summoning that just needs to match might of creature to summon (not meet level might + penetration).
If you're looking for anomalously high might scores, there's a ghost in Calebais with magic might 60. That strikes me as more improbable than powerful forest spirits.
No. They just killed the drake of the pyrenees for sport. And I mean sport. It was not even a plot in the saga. No archangels roaming europe IMS.
The 150 might creature is a challenge that they cannot simply browbeat with WC and multicasting+penetration spells. A lewvel 40 creature is just a minor minion. Those used to be forest princes in 3rd edition. 4th had more or less the same problem, but for some reason the power of the magi IMS did not skyrocket like in 5th, so we had not noticed this before 5th came out.
Really? It was even easier to skyrocket in 4th ed, what with adding Concentration to study totals and all.
But yes, magi can become hideously powerful in the current edition - penetration is only really an issue without multipliers.
IIRC David Chart made a post on Berklist to the effect of "It was an oversight, but it works well-enough with penetration-required and that's the RAW, so we aren't gonna change it". However, yes, I stand corrected - by the RAW it needs to penetrate. Which, as noted above, does make erecting a high-level one much more difficult.
Yep. As I said, it seems to have been a quirk to my saga at the time that we did not skyrocket. Mostly because we were still using quite a few study options from 3rd edition, I would say. But that is not a normal feature of anybody's saga. We only noticed the increase in power with 5th, but it existed in 4th for sure as well. Penetration in 5th is a fantastic idea, but it is stilñl too easy to surpass that issue for a dedicated magus for me to be fully comfortable with the current system.
Xavi: How vis rich is your saga? And how many magi tend to be active on a single story? Not to mention, how easily accessible are books?
In my saga there is usually 1-2 magi active (the rest being grogs/companions), and vis is allways in demand - we tend to be forced to use vis-extraction in order to get an Aegis. This reduces time to study, and means that using might-killing spells is a defensive weapon, used when there is no alternative, not the first thing you go for. Books are reasonably accessable, but few high quality tractii.
Quite more vis rich than yours for sure. Vis extraction to cast the aegis has never been an issue. Vis tends to be stockpiled anyway, and used for the big bang stuff, when the reserves are depleted really fast (I have seen 60 pawns go in a gaming session).
That might certainly be an issue. We used to play in quite vis-poor sagas until 5th edition. Casting the aegis was never a problem, but you tended to have to go out and get vis somewhere to enchant your talisman.
However, I think that the amount of books that the magi get easy access to is more important here. In ArM4 getting books was rather hard for our covenant. Now it seems that you buy tractatus of Q9-10 in cartloads. this is what raised the power level for us: arts are just higher than before around here
In the current saga we have LOTS of vis, but we returned to ArM3 books, and dropped 5 points from the quality of tractatuses. We will see if that curbs the power level a little bit
There are instances in the Bible where angels (or an angel) are destroyed (albeit by saints). It is feasible for Hermetic magi to want to take an an archangel (for example, the one in the core rule book).
In Mythic Europe, St. Michael is active and present. He personally guards holy springs in Greece and the Holy Land. He personally stands astride the Nile River. He personally holds vigil in mountain sanctuaries across Mythic Europe.
With a Divine Might of 100, I can't see how a conflict with Michael wouldn't end up with "he just wins". He has 50 Confidence points and can spend 7 in a single turn. He can heal any number and level of wounds (such as his own). He can invoke the Celestial Immunity miracle making him invulnerable to all Hermetic magic. There could be an unlimited number of ever increasing Michaels (and other archangels) who instantly appear and disappear at will to fight.
Having the stats for a storyguide means that when the players DO try to go after Michael (for whatever reason), he or she can be more descriptive about the lightning bolts and fiery spears and whatnot that Michael uses to open up a can of whoop-arse.
Cheers
Alex
(Disclosure, I wrote a lot of the angel chapter of RoP:tD.)
Our mileages vary a great deal then I am still unconvinced. Michael might be a bad example (haven't read it in thetail since it was released), but there is plenty of "too big to be there" stuff that the magi can beat with smallish preparations (less than a year to prepare). For my tastes magi are too powerful when compared with supernatural beings. The game tried to address this in ArM5. I just think that it did not go far enough, and that magi would need to be smashed quite heavily to restore the balance of the setting as written. If you exploit it, that is. We do not do that in most cases (we tend to find it dull after a very short time), except when we want to break the system. The thing is that when we want to do that, we play by the RAW and raze cities and hunt dragons for lunch fairly easily as per the RAW. Ars Mafgica setting is just amazing. The power levels of the magi are a little bit too high for it to be really balanced as the background info suggests. At least for us.
What could be done easily is to use a 2 stage approach. Let there be one effect always active and then another one also starts working if it penetrates.
I'd agree, except to stress that the problem isn't just with the supernatural beings. It's also with handling mundane threats like armies, cities, or (for the most part) even the Church. It's also with throwing off huge magic spells (like "bringing back the dead" big) and magic items (as in "flying castle") a scant few years past apprenticeship. The problem is with the overall power-level of magi, not just with MR. And that's why I advocate cutting down Arts, and miraculously changing Arts into Difficult Arts pretty much solves all these problems in one fell swoop.
I loved them too. Edit: The key difference is that the Heretic suggested cutting down the difficulty of spells too, to preserve the power-level. I'm advocating keeping the spell-guidelines as-is, hence lowering the power-level.
If I remember right, the Heretic's suggestion was to make Arts cost the same as Abilities. I don't quite understand what you mean by cutting Arts in half, because I can't remember what a Difficult Art is, but your plan sounds more moderate and reasonable. I've thought about just doubling the xp cost for Arts myself.
A difficult Art is an art that uses the XP evolution tables for abilities. So it is an Ability, only that tyou use it in pairs to cast stuff around. It is the same suggestion as the Heretic Corner did, only that Yair is not cutting the level of the spells as well, only the level of the Arts.
The difference between Arts and Abilities gets more and more blurred, since we also have "accelerated abilities", that are abilities that use the Arts XP table for evolution.
