As the discussion developed in "How big is a lightening bolt" I suddenly wondered about using a size modifier to change not a quantity of a lightening bolt, but literally the very size of the bolt itself. Does this look odd? I considered making it very unnatural because of the size, but it would be striking from the sky so I only went with +2 for unnatural.
Zeus' Legendary Thunderbolt Lvl 45 Cr/Au
At no time in his life did the quiet Timbersmith impress his sodales or pater with astounding magics. That is until he brought down a bolt of lightening over 25 paces across, leaving a crater where once the covenant of a bully magus that always challenged Timbersmith to certamen and the occasional Wizards War, resided. It was one Wizards War too many; unfortunately Timbersmith was consumed by his own magic and could not be Marched or more importantly questioned about the creation of the spell.
base 5 (create severe weather phenom), R: Voice +2, D: Mom, T: Ind, +2 for unnatural (seemed only fair), +4 size mod
So the standard lightening bolt is between half a inch and two inches, so I went with a one inch bolt. With a +4 size it makes it either 1,000 inches or 10,000 inches across. I chose 1,000 inches to be on the safe side of the fury that is to come when this is read. A thousand inches is more than seventy-five feet across but I went with the round number twenty-five paces for the poetry.
I actually think you want to do a volume calculation here. So if we're assuming that the lightning bolt keeps the same length. Then a bolt 1000 times bigger would only be about 31.6 inches wide.
Electrons essentially have no volume. The one inch is basically a pathway of probable locations of energy. I would say the spell fails more in that it probably did no more damage than a normal lightening bolt spell, only that it does the +30 damage over 25 paces.
Actually you may be right... but somehow making the spell with 31.5 inches would not have been worth posting.
But I still hold since electrons have no volume at all then by what measure do we increase size? (I understand finding for volume but how to you find a volume for a volume-less thing that could not exist?)
Mythic Europe does not know, or care, about electrons. What they might know is how big a footprint a lightning bolt has (just examine a spot where lightning hit, assuming it did not go up in flames; in the right material the size should be clear).
Then for your calculations, you are not trying to increase the height of the lightning bolt (it does not fall from higher), so it is only a surface calculation. Using your inch as the starting point, +4 Size is x 10,000, which translate as a x100 diameter. 100 inches across is 2.5 meters, quite impressive if you drop it on someone. Admittedly not quite as impressive as that 1,000 inches you were dreaming about.
Or you could try this: make it a Group target, +2 Size, so you have a number of lightning bolts equivalent in total size to 1,000 basic bolts; have them hit everything within an area; then claim as a purely visual effect that they appear as one big lightning bolt (which they probably do to the naked eye anyway, blinded to the flash as it is going to be).
Disagree. You´re changing it from "regular lightningbolt" into " lightningbolt that will ALWAYS cause extreme damage".
To make it simple, raise the damage by 5 per size modifier and have it apply as an area effect spell once it hits the ground. And not to forget that the thunder this will cause when striking will be of EPIC proportions.
As a comparison, NORMAL lightning bolts includes a huge range of degrees of effect. There are people who have taken a direct strike and simply walked away fine, if a bit dazed. While other times lightning strikes have turned small houses to splinters or caused craters where up to 50 cubic meters of dirt literally exploded away.
So, if you simply make this spell always cause damage on the very highest end or even beyond the high end of that scale, its not going to be useless for sure!
Oh and BTW, if you want to play around some more with lightning, dont forget that you´ve got ball lightning as well.
And they can range from tiny and innocuous to big and VERY noisy. And since noone has managed to explain exactly what they are yet(or even if its one phenomenon causing different effects or several phenomena with similar appearance), you can pretty much let them act in whatever way you want.
Of course we are running into a lot of the how big is a lightning bolt issues from the other thread. We are actually doing something that doesn't seem have a lot of examples in the book.
With this spell we are creating something that is larger than it occurs in nature with straight Creo magic. I'm not sure thats actually possible with Creo. Also (and I know people who don't understand the rules are going to argue this.) but your potentially creating something smaller than the base individual for Auram magic. As in ArM page 125
So I'm not sure that size modifiers are the way to go here. You may just need a really large unnatural modifier and or a muto prereq. Scaling up a lightning bolt's with added levels of effect ala ignem also seems reasonable. But not what this spell is going for.
So you can create lightning in the form you want w/o a Muto requisite.
It is just +01 Unnatural. (you should probably increase this , the more unnatural you make it)
As the duration is momentary , you don't need to worry about sustaining it.
