From: gharris@Jade.Tufts.EDU
Date: Tue 15 Jun 1993 - 23:33:20 EEST
Well, I thought it was finally time to put together my
thoughts on the direction sorcery will take, so I'm taking some
time to put my thoughts down on magnetic media.
First of all, I think that sorcery as delineated in RQIII
is broken. THe example Paul Reilly gives of an apprentice
sorceror casting oodles and oodles of Damage Boost 6 spells with
long duration illustrates what I think is wrong with the system.
However, that isn't the same as what Paul Reilly thinks; he
points to Duration as a problem. Me, I think it's Free INT
that's the big offender here. The main problem with frre int is
that, even with no matrices or enchantments of any kind, the
degree of your skill isn't the limiting factor, so an apprentice
can cast as powerful a spell as a magus.
Moreover, I don't think Range is a problem either. Paul
Reilly mentions the problem of casting trnscontinental
assassination spells via Sight Projection. Well, first of all
you have to get the Sight Projection there. You can only cast it
line of sight, which is maybe 10km max. Then you have to move it
at 1 meter per SR (which translates to 3kph). If you want to
cast a spell at someone 1000km away, you're going to have to
concentrate on your sight projection for weeks, during which time
you won't be able to see anything around you. Furthermore, if
your Projected Sight has to pass over any magical barriers, or if
your target has any companions who have some form of magical
sight, then you won't be able to sneak up on them and will be
vulnerable to many forms of magical attack. So Range doesn't
really present an imbalance wrt Sense Projection. For any other
spell except for Teleportation, range is restricted by line-of -
sight, so you aren't going to get people casting Palsy at 16
kilometers. Thus, leaving Range as is won't cause any
difficulties.
We still have a problem with Duration, although it is
fairly minor if we restrict manipulation to 1/10 skill (you'd
need an 85% Duration to cast a week-long spell using the old
table, and Duration is a hard skill. Moreover, the number of
people who can even learn Duration is going to be restricted in
most sorcery-using societies, so the number of people who can
cast such spells will be very few; probably fewer than 1 in
10,000.) It is still possible for a sufficiently poweerful magus
to keep hundreds of long-duration spells up all the time. This
is clearly undesireable. The question is, what to do about it?
The solution presented in the proposed draft of sorcery
rules is even worse than the problem it means to cure. If you
require a magus to sacrifice a point of power to get a long
duration, but nevertheless temporary, spell, the net effect is
that sorcerors will not cast these spells. In fact, with the
restrictions placed on sorcery in the draft, it's difficult to
see how any primarily-sorcery-using society is going to resist
conquest by eight trollkin and a war beetle. (well, perhaps I
exagerrate). The way I, and even many of the more theisticly
biased on the list, see it, a permanent sacrifice of power should
result in a permanent gain.
Carl Fink correctly points out that there do exist other
examples where permanent power is sacrificed for temporary
effects, namely divine intervention and the blessings of Hrestoli
saints. While this is true, it is something that bears closer
examination. First, consider Divine Intervention: this is
something that is very rarely done, except when the alternative
is almost certain death. This is hardly an attractive route to
power. Giving sorcerors the ability to do something that
initiates only do when severely threatened hardly seems like much
of an ability. Second, there are the blessings of the Hrestoli
saints. Well, these haven't actually been published, so using
them in an example is a bit dicey, but I'll let that pass, as
I've got a copy of the material. In fact, for well over a year
I've been playing in a Fronelan campaign were a majority of the
PCs are Hrestoli. Some PCs have actually invoked the blessings
of saints. Of course, the two most attractive blessings,
Gerlant's and Paslac's, are the ones that give a *permanent*
effect. The only non-permanent blessing that has been invoked is
Talor's, by my character, and believe me, it won't happen again.
There was even one character who maintained a personal POW of 19,
because there was no good reason to gain a patron saint and
invoke his/her blessing.
So, when I say that sacrificing permanent power fro
temporary effect is a hose job, divine intervention and saints'
blessings don't refute this; they are hose jobs as well.
So, what other means can we use to limit the number of
long-duration spells that a magus can have up at one time? One
suggestion that has been made is that the magic points used to
cast a long duration spell do not regenerate while the spell is
up, or that such spells require some sort of magic point
maintainence cost. I dislike these ideas for a couple of
reasons. First, it would be a bookkeeping nightmare. This alone
would be enough to disqualify it. Second, it is counter to the
way pretty much all other magic works in RQ. Generally, you fuel
a spell with magic points, cast it, and it is done. Except for
active spells, a cast spell is a separate entity from the caster
(much to the consternation of those who want others to cast a
healing spell on them, but have countermagic up). There doesn't
seem any good rationalization for changing this for sorcery.
Another thought was that the magic points used to
manipulate a spell must be a magus' personal magic points.
Again, there is no good rationalization for this. Magic points
act as fuel in spirit (and divine, where applicable) magic.
Sorcery is much more mechanical in nature, so this certainly
shouldn't change. A magic point is a magic point is a magic
point. Similarly, all the various suggections that sorcerors be
restricted from using various magic point batteries and storage
devices are equally difficult to justify, and are unnecessarily
crippling for sorcerors (some theistic bias is showing through
on the part of many members of the list). So, we have to look
elsewhere.
The first really good suggestion I saw fro this was to
make exponential duration a ritual, requiring an hour per point
of magic in the spell. To me, this seems an excellent and
justifiable mechanic. It doesn't really go counter to anything
we know about sorcery-users, and it prevents a magus from casting
the oodles and oodles of spells, since even an intensity-1, week-
long spell will take a full day to cast. Most powerful sorcerors
have better things to do with their time than keeping the local
constabulary supplied with Damage Boost 6s, and that's *all* he'd
be able to do, if that. Since to really be able to cast many
long duration spells, a magus would need a Duration well over
100%, as well as similarly high levels in the skills involved, we
won't have that problem too often. This is the mechanic I would
prefer.
Secondly, there is Paul Reilly's suggestion of a
sorceror's Twin, that is, a fetch-like "being" to which the magus
can give permanent Pow, and this Pow somehow limits the number or
power of long-duration spells a magus can keep up. This is a
good mechanic in a number of ways: it gives sorcerors a gradual
means of increasing in power by allowing them to devote their
personal energies to their magic; it doesn't have a threshold
where the magus suddenly is able to do something much much more
than before; and it is consistent with the ways in which priests
and shamans increase in strength, that is, by the sacrifice of
permanent power for a permanent increase in ability. The
question is, how will a Twin work?
A number of suggestions have been made in this area, and
I'll try to address them separately.
First, how will a Twin allow a sorceror to maintain
spells and how will doing so restrict him otherwise? There are
two basic options I see here: you can have a magus maintain a
number of spells up to the amount of pow in his Twin, or you can
have a magus maintain spells with total intensity up to the
amount of pow in his Twin. Clearly, the first is much more
powerful. I think if the first option is taken, one might
restrict a magus to total manipulation of a spell based on his
pow plus the unused pow of the Twin. However, this is unlikely
to be much of a restriction, since the limit of skill in spell
divided by ten is much more likely to be the bottleneck. You
could have the limit be personal pow plus Twin's pow divided by
some number, but I think that's an ugly mechanic. However, I
would say that the magus must maintain sufficient magic points in
his Twin to equal the spells (or intensity of spells) maintained,
similarly to how a shaman must maintain magic points in his fetch
to keep spirits bound. Overall, I think I would lean toward the
latter option, that is, limit the sorceror to a total intensity
of constant spells no greater than the pow of his Twin.
How would this affect other skills? I would think that
spells maintained by the twin would last indefinitely, and would
have whatever range and intensity (and multispell, which becomes
very useful under these rules [but that's okay, it's now a Very
Hard and Rare skill]) it had when cast. Duration would now only
have linear effect, and any number of spells can be cast that do
not need to be maintained by the Twin; these spells would have
normal range, duration and effect. I would say that if a spell
maintained by the Twin is cast on an object, and that object
moves out of the range of the spell from the twin, the spell is
broken.
So, what would the other effects of a Twin be? I don't
think very many limitations should be placed on a magus' Twin.
It is already much less powerful that a fetch, as it cannot act
for the magus and cannot move about. The idea of requiring the
magus to follow vows or geasa, or to meditate to maintain the
Twin is not very much in keeping with the philosophy of sorcery,
that is, it is the manipulation of natural energies and the Twin
is the magus' natural energies harnessed and controlled. If
anything, a magus would have less need to modify his behaviour
than would a shaman to maintain a fetch. This is not to say that
some *cultures* wouldn't necessarily requires vows of their
sorcerors who serve priestly functions; but these restrictions
should be societal, rather than magical in nature.
Furthermore, I don't think it's reasonable that
possession of a Twin would be at all discernable to mundanes. A
normal person cannot tell be looking that a shaman has a 60-point
fetch, or that a Storm Voice knows Cloud Call 20. Why should
they be able to tell that a magus has a twin? The presence of a
Twin would of course be readily apparent to anyone with any sort
of magical vision (including a limited form of Mystic Vision [say
intensity 1] that would go along with having a Twin).
I also strongly dislike the idea that a Twin bound into
an object or creature could be lost or destroyed. It may be
unusable until it can be bound into another creature, or another
object enchanted, but it shouldn't result in anything more than
an inconvenience for the magus in question.
Well, that's pretty much it for my thoughts on the
direction sorcery should go. Overall, I feel there are a couple
of good ideas out there, neither of which unfortunately is
currently in the rules, but that we need to be careful of a
couple of things: one, there is a *strong* theistic bias among
the members of the list, probably because of the strong theistic
bias of much of the published material, so people seem to be very
enthusiastic about placing limitations and disadvantages on
sorcery, far more so than is desirable; two (and this is in some
way related), people are tending to give sorcery attributes that
should remain cultural. Sorcery itself is a very mechanistic
system, and shouldn't require a lot of mystical mumbo-jumbo like
vows and geasa and such to work. In fact, many of these should
have *no effect* on sorcery. Think about it: what are you making
a vow too? The power of sorcery doesn't come from some god or
spirit.
-- gharris@jade.tufts.edu George W. Harris "He'd kill us if he had the chance." Dept. of Mathematics Tufts University The Conversation 0,,
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