What is too easy to do with Hermetic magic, for your taste? How should the spell guidelines, or other rules, be changed to make some things harder?
I'll start:
Invisibility
Veil of Invisibility is PeVi 20, a R:Personal version is only level 15. And invisibility is amazingly powerful, both in battle and in subterfuge. Any magus that suspects he might get into combat or will need to sneak about should realistically learn this spell.
And that's not fun. Invisibility should be this rare thing, only rare magi do. Not something common. It should be level 45, maybe 50.
It should also have a Rego requisite. If you just Perdo, the spell will create a dark sillhoute.
In fact, I think the whole PeIm guidelines should be changed. I suggest,
Level 4: dull taste or touch.
Level 5: Destroy taste or touch.
Level 10: Destroy smell.
Level 15: Destroy hearing.
Level 20: Destroy sight.
+1 destroy moving images
Veil of Invisibility will thus be Pe(Re)Im 45 [B20 +1 touch +2 sun +1 moving images, +1 requisite]. As it should be.
I hate might stripping. It causes enemies to be less dangerous over-time in a fight, and that can kill tension and drama.
I'm not saying it can't be done. But it should not be the go-to solution for dealing with supernatural beings. It should be a unique, special thing you choose to do for whatever-reason.
I think Might Stripping should be Base 15 to strip 5 points (+5 per extra magnitude), and a Ritual.
It also doesn't really destroy spirits - it just banishes them to hell / magic realm / arcadia / heaven (why are you attacking angels?!), where they will slowly heal and from which they may come back. For vengeance. Better to imprison that demon in a Ring forever – that will definitely not backfire on us later. :heh:
For a non-Ritual version, Base 15 can reduce Might Pool points instead.
A magi could crush the heart of an entire room of people by touching the wall at level 45. You think invisibility should be harder than that?
I find it interesting that healing is so challenging.It makes sense within the paradigm, but it is interesting. Similar regarding permanent transformation. Easy in a lot of fiction. Very hard in Ars Majica.
Regarding the OP and too easy. Scale can get extreme quite quickly. Upgrading touch of midas to level 30 gives 100 times as much gold. 6 vis has solved any mundane money problems. Maybe choose silk, saffron, whatever, but yes, the spells can get very large very quickly.
I find that manufacturing flying items is too easy.
And the issue is not about how easy it is to make a flying carpet (ReAn15), but more the impact on the background:
it makes Redcap more a ceremonial role than a necessity, each covenant should have a flying carpet (or better), a grog decently trained in Finesse, making Redcap core role of delivering message obsolete
with easy delivery, scarcity of goods within the Order (vis/rare component/book) becomes less credible, some specificity of Tribunals should fade.
As a House rule, I implemented that unsupported fast travel has an extra +2 modifier on top of the existing modifiers. I want to let magi able to float easily, but I want to restrict to higher level the ability to cross Europe within a few days, making any ground encounter irrelevant, and to some extend, making the specificity of each Tribunal moot, since any magi can hop wherever it suits him.
I think you may be conflating two different problems; fast travel, and overcoming challenges by being above someones reach. ‘Instantly move’ effects should perhaps add scaling amounts of difficulty; equal to (or less than) the distance a person can walk in a round +0; equal to (or less than) the distance a person can walk in a diameter +1; equal to (or less than) the distance a person can walk in an hour +2; equal to (or less than) the distance a person can walk in a day +3, etc.
But flying also puts a mage up out of harms way; flying just inches above the ground (impressive and hygienic, good for crossing puddles, moats, and rivers) +0; flying higher than the head of a man (still need to watch out for buildings) +1; flying higher than the reach of a held spear or pike +2; flying higher than a thrown stone or vegetable of dubious freshness +3; flying higher than an arrow, bolt, or sling-stone +4.
Both of these are pulled out of the air; I am not committed to the specific numbers or examples – but I like the idea that scaling up (to avoid more challenges) is more difficult.
Messages sent through the Redcap network are not carried vast distances by hand. They have a whole expanded web of portals that let them instantly transport not just messages and vis, but actual good across ME. The house makes vast amounts of silver as merchants, not just in the Order but throughout the major cities of ME.
And what makes you think that individual Redcap do not have fast travel items? In multiple editions the example Redcap has had things like Boots of Seven League Stride. Sure they might walk up on foot the last few hundred paces, but up until then you can be sure that they often use magical assistance. Also there is a capacity limit, where if you have to deliver a message to more than one place your single flying messager is totally outclassed.
All of which is ignoring the single most important aspect of RedCaps. They are a trusted “neutral” party. Many Covenants will not always well receive a random visitor. And even more will dislike an agent of a foreign Covenant buzzing through their area on a “scouting” expedition. How would you even find many Covenants, lots are hidden in ways that limited people even know.
Every Covenant having a flying carpet would have little to no effect on the need for Redcaps.
_
Flying is actually relatively slow for fast travel, when you compare it to options such as teleportation and portals. And it actually has lots of story potential: Weather both natural and unnatural, encounters in the sky, locations in the sky (Birds of Nephelococcygia, RoP:M p.68; solid clouds with things on top), spying strange locations on the ground, reaching mountain tops. Granted something that can carry many people like a ship or tower is better at interacting with story seeds.
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On Veil of Invisibility as a level 45 spell, that is on power with ‘Conjure the Mystic City’. That is 800 cottages with full indoor plumping, streets containing the pipes for that plumbing, and the ability to trade out groups of 8 cottages for something the size of a CtMT.
Every Redcap, instantly teleporting to every destination, carrying arbitrarily large amounts of goods, does serious violence to the idea that ‘Mythic Europe is exactly like Medieval Europe, except that there are sometimes Wizards hidden away from Mundanes’. The Order would entirely eliminate the great trading houses of Venice which dominated trade by controlling trade routes – and the changes to the world would not stop there. Making the great trading houses into puppets of the Order is almost as drastic a change.
If such changes are to be made, they seem like they ought to be made by Players by succeeding at Stories – and large changes ought to require large Stories. Which would seem to indicate that some (maybe ‘a few’ or ‘many’, but not ‘all’) Redcaps have access to fast travel for some (maybe ‘a few’ or ‘many’, but not ‘all’) trips, and that fast-moving large quantities of stuff is not casually done.
Did you just intentionally warp what I said? Everything I said is in published material, you just took the exact worse form of my words.
I never said the Redcaps teleport instantly to every destination. I said they have a vast network of portals, which they have had for multiple versions of the setting and you can find maps showing exactly were the major connections are.
From those portals, the Redcaps transport individual mail. And many of them do have enchanted devices that help them move (as shown in example characters and their chapter), that is a given because otherwise they would never be able to cover the vast amounts of distance in reasonable time frames. Visits which they are legally obligated to do. But those individual means are not instant anywhere in ME. Even the 7 league stride boots in the example are sight limited, acting as a speed multiplier rather than instant over long distances.
And in published material the Redcaps do engage in mundane trade, it is how they earn much of their silver. But they are not attempting to dominate markets or crush the trading houses of Venice. They are going to be in small specialist markets, things they could carry though portals and make enough money to keep their house funded. They are not some trading company.
So yes you are completely off-base and take your straw man arguments to someone else.
Dunno, but it seems like you are playing the ‘House Mecere has plentiful access to instant-travel basically everywhere, give up’ card. Sure, there is a network of Mercere portals; that network has (not millions, not thousands, not hundreds … maybe ‘scores’) dozens of gates scattered throughout pre-Schism Europe. Many have been destroyed, or damaged, or the method for activating them has been lost, or they no longer lead anywhere useful (or safe).
My point was that instant-travel is not a daily fact of life in Mythic Europe – nor should it be. I agree that instant-travel is a powerful tool, and that the Ars rules tend to make it pretty easy; perhaps too easy. If a group of Players want to do stuff with instant-travel, it should require extensive challenges and stories – and they should get the rewards of putting effort into stories instead of being trumped by NPCs no matter how ‘pre-existing’ or ‘canon’ those entities are.
It’s cool that you run your games like you want; please feel free. I just wanted to contribute what I thought was constructive input to the topic of the thread.
It’s gone sideways to the OP, but I consider What is so easy that it would change Mythic Europe is close enough, to post something. The default game world decides the order has not modified the world much. The game designers accept this is somewhat peculiar. Transforming Mythic Europe gives options.
Regarding travel and trade. Magic to make travel fast and safe, arguably destroys trade monopolies, and has “weird” resources sooner. Luxury items, rare spices, silk, etc, magi travel to their place of origin, acquire the trade goods and the means to produce them, then produce them locally. Luxury item trade is what magi destroy. Large scale mundane trade has some issues. Venetian trading houses putting together a pirate fleet under no fixed flag to take out magi operated ships, is unwanted attention.
Magi would logically also make “luxuries” and discoveries. Magi tend to be smart and unusual. They are the kind of person to try to make a better tasting orange/lemon. Doing Gregor Mengel’s experiments, etc. The order has a bunch of smart people with resources. Think of hundreds of people like Davinci with funding. The order arguably accelerates the start of the Renaissance.
The fact is that Ars Magica has a lot of factors that would have destroyed Medieval Europe, and comes up with plenty of “huh?” reasons they didn’t. Mercere don’t abuse their gate network and magical traffic and only engage in small scale trade, passing on massive opportunities that any Venitian trading house would kill for. Mentem masters of Tremere and Tytalus do not dominate politics over vast regions but only manipulate the handful of nobles they need to stabilize their covenants. Supposedly a lot of these things are done to not provoke the Mundanes into coming after wizards in a war that Mundanes would clearly lose, because before wizards got organized they were hunted by mundanes and have kept the culture of fear alive.
Either you go with it or you don’t. You can have a game where the conceit of Medieval European history being unaltered either has broken or is breaking, you can play a game where everything looks normal.
I was, at 1st, of the same thought but making it higher level makes it worse as it becomes even harder to detect. I prefer to add a concentration roll for when stressed and/or make it concentration duration in order to keep its effectiveness while moving. I'd even remove the extra levels for movement and make it even lower level and easier to detect.
Fair point, but perhaps not far off from that. So... level 40? As difficult as killing a single person at Voice.
I do think it needs to be hard, yes. A magus that kills all the people at the room, because he's just that powerful, is more fun to me to have in the game than a magus that fights things invisibily. (I'm not talking about what's fun to play - I'm talking about what's fun to have in the game in general.)
Well, instant healing is hard, but basically-assured recovery is easy.
Yeah, frankly I think being able to do all of that at level 45 is ... not appropriate. This should be an epic level spell - and regardless should definitely count as a Ritual.
Vim spells don’t care about sizes, so a CrVi “give warping” spell can give the earth warping. Of course, no sane magus would want to warp the earth and most troupes are uninterested in exploring this… but on a purely mechanical level it bothers me.
More relevant for some troupes- vis exploits to generate vis. A magus could- with a level 65 spell(base 50, +1 touch, +2 size)- create a 1000 Might 5 ants which would each give a pawn of vis. Similiary, a Perdo Room target spell can kill airy spirits within a chamber- which within a magical aura they are chockfull of- and be able with a ReVi room target spell redirect them to other objects.
Phew. Using vis rituals to create vis is an oldie but a goodie as far as exploits go. It is an exploit, though, so I would say it’s a bit more ‘abuse of the rules’ than ‘this is too easy in paradigm’. Personal opinion I suppose.
In the ‘too easy’ category, I would say…. Circle-target spells, and Circle/Ring in particular. With a bit of preparation - and ‘a bit’ is rather minimal, creating iron or stone circles to avoid them being broken - you effectively have vis-less permanent spells... Light, heat, muto transforms, sustaining spells… The most extreme version of this is spells already permanent: Like the popular Circle of Perfection of Body (Increase the Stamina of every human inside the circle permanently, up to +3 - Base 45, +1 Touch, +0 Circle). I’ve seen this cast using the outer edge of a Mystic Tower as an unbroken circle, giving over 50 people bonuses to stamina.
Similarly, I think it’s a too easy to reduce ritual botch dice to zero. The biggest risk of rituals is the botch risk, and the rules IIRC lets that drop to zero with one season/one level of spell mastery.