The size stat changes are their own issue already, but I will say the RoPF rules make more sense to me than the default. Still, I like consistancy.
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This can easily be solved (and solved better) assigning the mosquito a Soak of ... -40? I mean, even a mouse should easily crush a mosquito with one slap.
Some effects are easier on super-tiny animals, not quite all.
As for PeAn, it's already easier to kill a million mosquitos than a million (or even a hundred) ponies.
And it's not obvious that it should be easier to blind a single mosquito than to blind a single pony.
If one wants for PeAn to make it easier to kill a mosquito than a pony, one just has to add, for example, a Gen guideline that inflicts +Level damage (as with other TeFo combinations); that's much easier, consistent, and contained than reworking wound levels.
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Oh, I forgot a big one: I think it's really ridiculous to rule that a PeAn base-20 effect could take out a pony and yet a mosquito would be immune to any damage from it.
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But... it wouldn't? A base 30 effect will kill both.
As for a base 20 effect (inflict an incapacitating wound), it wouldn't be immune either. Going by the rules in the corebook, the mosquito is as much incapacitated as the pony.
It's RoP:F who introduces uncertainty by having certain sizes without a couple of wound categories.
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Sorry, meant base 20.
The mouse saga is a great idea, but I'm not sure why you didn't just set Size 0 at mouse size, so your characters could use the rules in the middle of their designed range, rather than at the very edge.
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If we errata RoP:F and rebase it Core, I would shift the 1 2 3 4 5+ into negative soak. You always use the Size -4 line from the Damage Table on p171, but Size -10 would have -6 Soak. Excessively simple result.
Size -10: -5=Light, -4=Medium, -3=Heavy, -2=Incapacitating, -1=Dead
For Wound spells, negative Soak could be some Magnitude reduction. Maybe just Base, maybe also make T:Room easier.
PeAn 15 Kill The Noisy Fly
Any Animal with Soak -5 is killed. Soak -5 empowers Base 5 as a Base 30.
{only Base reduction, simple rule}
(Base 5, T:Ind, R:Voice +2)
PeAn 20 Silence the Room
Any Animal with Soak -6 is killed. Soak -2 negates the Target magnitudes, Soak -4 empowers Base 10 as a Base 30.
{Base and Target reduction, complex rule}
(Base 10, T:Room +2/-2, R:Voice +2)
Not sure if it's possible to build something like that though.
Massive size differences are a problem for any system. I've never seen a good solution — which doesn't mean that one doesn't exist.
I'm not interested in errata'ing PeAn over this. It can be metaphysically justified: a mosquito is just as much a living thing as a pony, and there is a minimum level of magical power needed to snuff out a single life. (Of course, that justification runs into trouble with Groups… But we are not going there.)
I'll wait to gather a few more opinions on this, since there is no clear consensus yet.
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When you do decide, please note that animals in the Animals of Mythic Europe have been built using the RoP:F table when it comes to their Wound levels.
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I would suggest keeping the wound levels from core, and modify Damage when the Size differential is greater than 4. So a Size 0 human hitting a Size -10 mouse adds 6 to his damage, while the mouse biting the human reduces its damage by 6.
It has the advantage of also applying to huge creatures attacking human-sized ones.
Of course, it doesn't solve the magically-induced wounds issue, but I understand that the line editor doesn't want to tackle the spell guidelines. Those could easily become a House Rule for some sagas.
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I agree that it can be justified, and I do not mind your keeping it. However, if you make the RoP:F table universal, an erratum/clarification is required no matter your stance. What does it mean to suffer a light wound when you are a tiny creature that knows only healthy and squashed?
In my saga, a lab accident created a group of intelligent mice. One of them developed the Gift, and we ruled that their magic would scale the Hermetic individuals down to mouse size. It worked pretty well, in that the magi found them adorably non-threatening.
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Thinking about it, the earlier proposed soak-mod is kind of a decent fix for a lot of the problem. Either having your size applied to your soak (but not stamina) or having a soak penalty when your size overflows the normal size categories (ie. a soak penalty when your size is below -4)
Doesn't fix PeAn of course.
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I have an idea for a 'fix' that retains some of the beauty of the table from RoP:F, while giving smaller creatures a bit more life.
Instead of petering off so fast, the wound levels below -4 disappear at a rate of 1 Wound level per two Sizes.
| Size | Comparison | Wound Penalties |
|---|---|---|
| –15 | butterfly | Dead (1+) |
| –10 | mouse | Incapacitated (1), Dead (2+) |
| –9 | bat, frog | Incapacitated (1), Dead (2+) |
| –8 | mole, toad | –5 (1), Incapacitated (2), Dead (3+) |
| –7 | rat | –5 (1), Incapacitated (2), Dead (3+) |
| –6 | lizard | –3 (1), –5 (2), Incapacitated (3), Dead (4+) |
| –5 | rabbit | –3 (1), –5 (2), Incapacitated (3), Dead (4+) |
| –4 | adder | –1 (1), –3 (2), –5 (3), Incapacitated (4), Dead (5+) |
I don't think the proposal of any alternative rule to "fix the problem with sizes" is within the scope of the discussion. "The size problem" is far reaching, and has implications both when going down and when going up. A quick fix, even if seemingly reasonable at first glance, is likely to break more things than it fixes. Ensuring it doesn't would require a sizeable amount of playtest. And then, a lot of errata.
It can always be adopted as a houserule, however.
An alternative table to the one from RoP:F only shifts the problem from one size to another, it doesn't fundamentally solve it. We would still be having this discussion if that was the table originally presented in that book.
I stand behind what I said earlier:
- outside of a ±5 range the size rules are already reaching their limits. A quick fix won't solve it.
- there's little practical use to changing wound penalties below size -4 to anything different from corebook. A Pillum, or environmental damage, will equally kill an adder, a rat and a butterfly. A good hit from a sword (one with a positive attack advantage), same. For edge cases when an animal really needs to soak more damage than another, a bonus (or malus) to soak will suffice. Creature design in Ars Magica isn't science anyway, it's an art. The corebook is clear on that.
- the table from RoP:F introduces uncertainty to the outcome of certain spells. The easiest (and in my opinion the best, but that's just me) way to solve that uncertainty is to replace that table with the one from the corebook. Otherwise, one needs to decide what happens when you use a Pe[Fo] spell to inflict an "Impossible Wound" to a creature. I don't think there's a default answer to that. It could very reasonably go either way (immunity or instant death) depending on the particular case or particular saga, and if the table from RoP:F is kept, this might be better left for each storyguide to adjudicate according to their needs.
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Would an explicit note that the table is optional resolve the contradiction? As Timothy notes:
This is clearly not something that is causing major problems in play for anyone, and making the RoP:F table officially optional means that nothing else needs to be errata'd based on this change.
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«This table is optional, and the troupe will have to decide what happens when a creature suffers a wound it cannot take, say from a Perdo Animàl spell.»
It works for me.
Of course, before you add that, you will have to also make a note that small creatures actually cannot take certain wounds. As it is there is nothing saying an ant can't take a Heavy Wound from, for example, a spell inflicting such a wound.
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«This table is optional, and the troupe will have to decide what happens when a creature suffers an undefined wound level, say from a Perdo Animàl spell.»
You are right that the table [RoP:F] does not actually say that tiny creatures cannot take an XXX wound, but it defines the set of available wound levels, and if a wound level is not defined, assuming that it can still be suffered is not the most obvious interpretation.
Anyway, no, (as far as I read the above thread) we did not want to make a rule but the need for the troupe to make one.
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It doesn't define anything about available wound levels, it only says what kind of wound is taken for a given (Damage Total - Soak Total). Assuming that the wound levels not show on the table can still be suffered if inflicted directly is by far the most obvious interpretation as I see it.
(Which just goes to show that just because one person thinks something is blindingly obvious, it doesn't mean it actually is.)
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