Sorcery Magnitude question

[weasel_fierce]

No forget the 0 mp issue.

Manipulation(magnitude) I quote:

"It costs one Magic Point to apply this effect to a Sorcery spell, whether or not the final spell is successful and regardless of the final Magnitude of the spell"

So a very beginning adventurer with no previous experience, POW 15 and 30% in Smother, Manipulation(magnitude), and manipulation(targets) can strangle three people from 15 meters away.

He can indeed. The starting character with a 60 percent skill in bow can potentially kill someone every action (2D8 damage is nothing to be trifled with), and he doesnt need to concentrate to do that.

Hence, he gets two shots in the time it takes to attempt one casting of Smother, which, at 30%, is likely to fail.
When our sorceror tries again, our archer has fired another two shots.
Once the spell goes off, while our sorceror is concentrating each round..well, our archer can still move, fire arrows etc, ultimately dealing more damage faster and to more potential targets.

 

[Rurik]

Point well taken, but I'm pretty sure a bow archer gets to fire every other action. The load time for a bow is 1, which means it takes 1 action to ready an arrow - firing is a second action.

 

[weasel_fierce]

ah, thats correct. So its one shot per spell cast. A bit faster while the sorceror is concentrating

 

[kintire]

So a very beginning adventurer with no previous experience, POW 15 and 30% in Smother, Manipulation(magnitude), and manipulation(targets) can strangle three people from 15 meters away.

This is while everyone else in the party at about 30% in everything is having trouble tying their shoelace

Oh nonsense. The sorcerer is only at 30% in his skills because he has so many to buy. A fighter can get by with two or three, and will start around 50 -60% in them. He will butcher the starting sorcerer, and his three starting sorcerer friends.

Spells of this nature ought to require *some* manipulation (probably in terms of Magnitude) so that a lethal effect can never be had "for free".

There is no 0 magnitude effect that is half as lethal as an axe to the face. If there is, you can houserule the spell, but I've yet to spot one.

Healing should not be able to be cast over and over, limited to something like 1 point a day per wound or location (I'm partial to by location as that prevents having to track individual wounds - though by wound is a bit more realistic). If you want to heal 5 points you should have to cast a 5 point heal spell, not cast a 1 point spell five times.

Why? One of my problems with RQ is that the enemy only has to be slightly lucky to take a PC down or out in one blow. If they also have to take eight to ten days to recover from that, the game will slow to a crawl.

The one point healing spells work well to recover from a fight, but they are far to slow to have any effect in it. The Heal 5s actually have a chance of recovering from an enemy attack mid battle. That's enough of a difference for me.

 

[Rurik]

There is no 0 magnitude effect that is half as lethal as an axe to the face. If there is, you can houserule the spell, but I've yet to spot one.

Dominate being the one discussed upthread.

Healing should not be able to be cast over and over, limited to something like 1 point a day per wound or location (I'm partial to by location as that prevents having to track individual wounds - though by wound is a bit more realistic). If you want to heal 5 points you should have to cast a 5 point heal spell, not cast a 1 point spell five times.

Why? One of my problems with RQ is that the enemy only has to be slightly lucky to take a PC down or out in one blow. If they also have to take eight to ten days to recover from that, the game will slow to a crawl.

The one point healing spells work well to recover from a fight, but they are far to slow to have any effect in it. The Heal 5s actually have a chance of recovering from an enemy attack mid battle. That's enough of a difference for me.

A matter of preference I guess. Being able to fully heal after every fight (for no MP) is just not to my liking. A cost of 1 MP per point of healing would limit this.

Fights in MRQ are much less lethal. Weaponsy generally do less damage than previous version, there is no total HP, HP/Location are a bit higher, and wound effects are generally less severe, and criticals do not ignore armor and only do max damage. In my experience disabling wounds are less common and killing blows are much rarer.

I like there being a risk involved with combat. Knowing you will be fully healed in the minutes following a fight encourages charging into combat without consideration. Being wounded for a few days at least gives reason for pause. Given that the healing rate is a pretty generous 1 per day (though also requiring a resilience roll if the location is at -1 or less) it is not like a character will be held up for months after taking a 10 point wound to the gut. But again, it depends on your game style preferences.

 

[Deleriad]

In the thread on sorcery magnitude one thing that has started to come through is the potential problems with casting 0MP cost sorcery. Basically, if you cast a sorcery spell it costs you no MPs. This means that there is no downside to failure so someone with a standard base chance in a sorcery spell (e.g. 23%) can keep casting until success. What would be useful. For example, an average person with 2 CAs and 23% in a spell would, on average cast a spell successfully within 4 attempts (10 seconds).

What would be useful to know is a list of spells where this is deeply problematic. Two have turned up so far.
Dominate - for 0 MPs you can order someone to commit suicide.
Treat Wounds - for 0 MPs you can fully heal each member of the party over a matter of minutes.

Are there any others out there?

 

[Mongoose Pete]

Dominate - for 0 MPs you can order someone to commit suicide.
Treat Wounds - for 0 MPs you can fully heal each member of the party over a matter of minutes.

Are there any others out there?

Other than the first two I already pointed out above, the following spells are potentially nasty at 0 MP...

Form/Set (substance) can be an unbalancing spell when it is cast at will with impunity. If using it with wood, you could break opponent's bows who are within your POW in meters, be able to warp/break open any wooden door or chest, chop down half a copse, etc. Using it with stone you could (eventually) mine your way out of any cave, open a hole in the defenses of a city wall, or even collapse buildings atop inhabitants, all at range of course. Metal has obvious applications with breaking opponents melee weapons, prison bars, chains, locks, etc again at range.

Animate (substance) could be used with something like water or sand, which the caster could send crawling under doors or through windows and then cause it to flow into the lungs of a sleeping enemy. Directed of course by his 0 MP (sense) Projection! Or how about Animate Cyanide instead?

Phantom (Touch) isn't a game breaker, but in the right situation its a continual auto 1d2 damage spell for 0 MP. No need to roll an attack and no method of resisting (save magical protection).

Fly cast on the right tool can be nasty - say a poisoned dagger for example (like the hunter-seeker in Dune) or a fire brand, jar of acid, glob of lava, poisonous animal, etc and it can be used remotely with the same 0 MP (sense) Projection trick above. However, its greatest asset is that the sorcerer can lift an ENC or SIZ up to 1 less than his POW for free. Thus he could repeatedly drop a small boulder on opponents, or (with a resist save) send an opponent vertically up a number of meters equal to his POW and drop them... Repeatedly!!! Of course, if he simply wanted to sequentially fly the entire party over the city walls one at a time he could do that for 0 MP too!

Sense Projection has already been mentioned in its capability to direct attacks remotely. In its other application it means that any door, wall, chest, box, etc can been seen/heard/etc through at will, at no cost.

Shapechange with say the species... flea into hellishly venomous scorpion? I should think that would be a nasty (and guaranteed) shock for 98% of the population in a pre-modern world. :twisted:

Smother is a big killer spell... and effectively free! You can even use it to kill dinosaurs or giants since there is no size limitation.

Spirit Projection allows a sorcerer to effectively scout through any solid object at will.

Tap... The bad old nasty spell comes into its own with sorcerers who carry around lots of little white mice. For a 0 MP spell they can regain 1 MP tapped from SIZ or STR. A perfect way of keeping your MP's constantly at twice their level... if the sorcerer was even bothering to spend any anyway - what with 0 MP Smother, Treat Wounds and Fly spells... :wink:

So those are the ones from the core rules. I'm sure that new spells introduced in the cult and magic books can be abused similarly. All it takes is a sorcerer with a little imagination!

 

[Deleriad]

Fly ... However, its greatest asset is that the sorcerer can lift an ENC or SIZ up to 1 less than his POW for free. Thus he could repeatedly drop a small boulder on opponents, or (with a resist save) send an opponent vertically up a number of meters equal to his POW and drop them... Repeatedly!!!

Tap... The bad old nasty spell comes into its own with sorcerers who carry around lots of little white mice. For a 0 MP spell they can regain 1 MP tapped from SIZ or STR. A perfect way of keeping your MP's constantly at twice their level.

Yup, Fly is a real problem. Heck you can totally immobilise someone without missile weapons by simply flying them up 2m and then hanging them upside down and having a friend stone them to death. That's rather awful.

Tap is not quite as bad because it's concentration only and the MPs drain at one per minute. Assuming 3CAs and no training in tap (i.e. a base chance of 25% for argument's sake) then it would take an average 4 rounds for each successful tap so you would be gaining 3MPs and losing 1 MP per minute. Still that takes just 6 minutes for a relatively agile peasant with 12 POW to double their MPs.

I am particularly concerned about the implications of a peasant sorceror with just base chance in a spell. Because there is no penalty for failure then any sorceror can always cast an unmanipulated spell for 0MPs given a few extra seconds for trial and error. The more I look at this, the more fundamentally wrong it is.

There's a spell in the spellbook (I cracked and got the PDF) called amputate which would allow a peasant to remove all the limbs of a sleeping victim for 0 MP cost. You really don't want to annoy a farmer who learned the Amputate spell. Assail's rather "funny" too at 0MPs and aura of lightning is horribly broken - for 0 MPs everything in melee combat with you takes 1d4 damage per round (metal armour ignore and no "saving throw") and it lasts for your POW in minutes.

I've only just started on the A's and I'm losing the will to live. Ah well, I was wrong. Mongoose have fubarred sorcery as well. Just read the first 15 sorcery spells in the SpellBook and several of them actually make no sense.

 

[Sinisalo]

So a very beginning adventurer with no previous experience, POW 15 and 30% in Smother, Manipulation(magnitude), and manipulation(targets) can strangle three people from 15 meters away.

This is while everyone else in the party at about 30% in everything is having trouble tying their shoelace

Oh nonsense. The sorcerer is only at 30% in his skills because he has so many to buy. A fighter can get by with two or three, and will start around 50 -60% in them. He will butcher the starting sorcerer, and his three starting sorcerer friends.

Nonsense, yourself. The sorceror above is only at 30% because he has an int and dex of 15 and sorcery base chances for spells are int+dex. This is before any other mods.

What I am saying is a beginning sorceror is drastically out of balance. Your axe blow or long bow attack may be more effective individually but I defy you to attack three people at once with them, which is something the sorceror can do.

 

[Sinisalo]

So a very beginning adventurer with no previous experience, POW 15 and 30% in Smother, Manipulation(magnitude), and manipulation(targets) can strangle three people from 15 meters away.

This is while everyone else in the party at about 30% in everything is having trouble tying their shoelace

Oh nonsense. The sorcerer is only at 30% in his skills because he has so many to buy. A fighter can get by with two or three, and will start around 50 -60% in them. He will butcher the starting sorcerer, and his three starting sorcerer friends.

Nonsense, yourself. The sorceror above is only at 30% because he has an int and pow of 15 and sorcery base chances for spells are int+pow. This is before any other mods.

What I am saying is a beginning sorceror is drastically out of balance. Your axe blow or long bow attack may be more effective individually but I defy you to attack three people at once with them, which is something the sorceror can do.

My GM head says, like the poor lad who started this thread, make it 1mp per magnitude, make such things as smother and flight be magnitude vs POW or SIZ and Bob's your uncle. Quite frankly I can't be bothered fighting this corner cos I've had enough of the cock-ups.

 

[Rurik]

As much as I like the idea of unlimited little Glows for free as minor effects for sorcerers I'm thinking 1 MP as a base cost is probably in order.

That being said many of the effects in Pete's list are still pretty potent as 1 MP spells too. Spells like Smother and Fly probably should have a Magnitude to SIZ Ratio (1:3 seems a good ration used other places, like Skin of Life, the opposite of Smother).

Another problem with 0 Mag spells in enhancements, such as Enhance (Characteristic) and Haste, etc. These basically can be on all the time as long as the caster pauses to cast them every POW minutes.

 

[Mongoose Pete]

I've only just started on the A's and I'm losing the will to live. Ah well, I was wrong. Mongoose have fubarred sorcery as well. Just read the first 15 sorcery spells in the SpellBook and several of them actually make no sense.

and

That being said many of the effects in Pete's list are still pretty potent as 1 MP spells too. Spells like Smother and Fly probably should have a Magnitude to SIZ Ratio (1:3 seems a good ration used other places, like Skin of Life, the opposite of Smother).

<sigh> This particular case with Sorcery appears quite serious, since I imagine that there are a stack of sorcery spells which will each independently need a major revision... not just a simple raising of the base casting cost to 1.

 

[Rurik]

Many of the problems seem to be with sorcery spells that don't require any magnitude for full effect, such as smother and dominate. As a general rule sorcery spells should all have their effect ties to Magnitude somehow. I'm sure there are some exceptions, but full effect spells for no (or 1) magnitude seem unbalanced.

I'll have to take a closer look at the sorcery spells for spellbook (the other books).

 

[Deleriad]

I'll have to take a closer look at the sorcery spells for spellbook (the other books).

I have started to do this in another thread. A fair few problems are trivial (lacking instant trait though mentioned in text) but some are pretty major. In my opinion there are three issues:
ability to repeatedly cast base spells for 0 Magic Points.
lack of tying in powerful effects to required magnitude (Summon Creature is the poster child for this)
Specific spell problems where spells are ambiguous or appear problematic.

I had sworn off further MRQ products but this had enough good reviews and appeared to have had enough useful stuff and development time to avoid the usual problems. I regret spending the money now.

 

[Mugen]

A solution that might work in some universes is the following :

1) Revert Manipulation (Intensity) to RQ3's defintion : 1 MP for 1 Intensity. Maximum Intensity : Skill/10.

2) Add a 'Manipulation : Environment" skill. This skill allows the sorcerer to add to a spell's Intensity by tapping environment's "mana" (see table below). Maximum Intensity is still set to Manipulation (Intensity)/10.
Costs 1 MP.

Mana Level of the place => Intensity drained

Very High => Skill/10
High => Skill/15
Medium => Skill/20
Low => Skill/30
Very Low => Skill/50

For instance, a Sorcerer in a medium environment with Manipulation (Intensity) 75 and Manipulation (Environment) at 60 will be able to cast a 7 Intensity spell by spending 5 MP :

*Manipulation (Environment) provides 60/20 = 3 Intensity for 1 MP.
*He must spend 4 MPs to reach 7.

 

[RosenMcStern]

The problem of repeated attempts is easily houseruled as "A failed Sorcery casting always costs at least one Magic Points". You can still do weird things like dominating people with 0-mp spells, but only a very skilled sorcerer can do this for free. On the contrary, the idea of a 0-MP cost for successful casting of small spells is a good idea: if you are skilled you can do things with no effort. And it eliminates the equation Sorcerer = person with a lot of MP matrices, which I always hated.

It also appearst that the removal of the Resistance Table was not a Good Move. As I suspected.

 

[Deleriad]

And it eliminates the equation Sorcerer = person with a lot of MP matrices, which I always hated.

I agree. I think the basic principle behind MRQ sorcery is good. It seems to be suffering from a mixture of bad translations from RQ3.

It also appearst that the removal of the Resistance Table was not a Good Move. As I suspected.

The problem is not that, it's lack of quality control. For example, in RQ3, the Fly Spell was just about useless as a it needed about 15 Intensity (and therefore 15MPs) to move anyone. So, when they did Fly for MRQ they over-corrected. A lot of mistakes seem similar. For example, when they did the illusions for MRQ they plain forgot to change illusion descriptions - so for example, to make an opaque illusion in RQ3 took 20 Intensity whereas in MRQ it takes 200% skill. It is easier to get 20 Intensity in RQ3 than it is to get 200% in the spell and manipulation skill in MRQ.

 

[kintire]

The thing a lot of people seem to be doing is trying to balance the sorcerery system with the other magic systems in terms of absolute power, and I'm not convinced that's at all the right way to go. The thing about sorcery is that it is a big big investment. A divine caster needs one skill for all their spells. A runecaster needs maybe four or five, but can get some perfectly acceptable effects with just two, or even one. This means that a divine or rune caster will be able to have magic, and still be a powerful and effective character in other fields.

Not so the Sorcerer. With all the manipulation skills and each spell being a seperate skill, a sorcerer is going to be a sorcerer and nothing else. Even dabbling in sorcery is a big investment. This means that while other casters will have their skillsets as well, a sorcerer generally won't.

That is why to 0mp repeated casting spells are a benefit, not a problem. Yes, the sorcerer can do them a lot. yes, the sorcerer gets some useful effects out of them, and that's all to the good because that's all the sorcerer can do. The 0 MP utility spells are the sorcerer's bread and butter. Flying someone painfully slowly up a wall is handy, but not more so than the utility skills that other players will have.

As for the attack spells, well meh. In a world where one whack with a two handed sword can kill you instantly, and again, and again, I'm just not bothered by attack spells that even the most trivial anti magic defence will stop cold not costing any MP. Heck, you could probably get a folk magic ward against evil magic that would stop a 0 Magnitude spell, and no serious opponent is going to blink. And its not as if they don't get resistances to it.

 

[Deleriad]

Not so the Sorcerer. With all the manipulation skills and each spell being a seperate skill, a sorcerer is going to be a sorcerer and nothing else. Even dabbling in sorcery is a big investment. This means that while other casters will have their skillsets as well, a sorcerer generally won't.

Although I agree with some of what you say, there are other considerations.

The 0MP cost means that you can learn a spell at no more than base cost and always cast it successfully without ever needing to learn any more. For example, a warrior from a socererous background has learned Damage Boost at base score (cost him 2 Improvement Rolls) and he now has Damage Boost (25%). Before he goes into battle he spends some time casting DB and on average it'll take him 4 attempts, about 10 seconds. For the next 10-12 minutes his sword does +1 damage and it has cost him nothing. Now this is not game-breaking but it certainly doesn't feel right.

The related issue is that many of the write-ups for sorcery spells don't seem to pay attention to what happens if you use the spell without manipulation. For example, an average peasant who was taught the Fly spell last week could fly 300 fully-loaded dwarves over a 20m castle wall in an afternoon for no MP cost.

Most of the 0MP cost abuse is stupid rather than broken though there are some specific spells which give you far too much bang for your 0MPs. Sure, it doesn't cost any MPs to fire a Crossbow but as an example from the RQ Spellbook the spell Fiendish Chains when cast without manipulation for 0MPs lets you hold a person in place with a STR of 30, does 1 point of unpreventable damage to the same 1d3 locations every round and lasts for your POW in minutes. While you wait for your enemy to fry you can sit down and smoke a pipe or start chaining up more enemies. If someone gave me 25% skill in a crossbow or 25% in Fiendish Chains, I would choose the chains. I actually doubt that the author of the SpellBook considered this a possibility.

Ironically, as you say, if you want to play a proper sorcerer the system is horribly restrictive as you need to improve too many skills at the same time. You could try to argue that the 0MP cost is a feature not a bug that allows a sorcerer to know lots of spells at low skill levels but I don't buy that.

If Cults of Glorantha (2) the author fixes the inflexibility problem by giving sorcerous orders "grimoires" which contain the knowledge of a selection of spells all cast using the same grimoire skill. Thus the sorcerer needs to know his grimoire skill, his manipulation skills and the supporting skills such as language, persistence and so on. This is procedure I would adopt in any world I ran where sorcery existed.

It's not really about balancing against other systems but about balancing the system internally. A peasant who has just learned a Fly Spell should not be able to Fly all day for no MP cost. Sure he has to land every 10 minutes or so but it's still not a common fantasy trope to have peasants flying themselves and their goats up a mountain-side without breaking a sweat and with only 25% in Flying...

 

[RosenMcStern]

It is becoming amusing, here

Well, I haven't got the spellbook yet, but in Rurik's pbem I am playing a sorcerer, and one of the other players happens to be the author of most sorcerous spells usable in Glorantha. I had to face the choice between an attack spell and a crossbow when I created my character, and went with the spell. I must say that the spell I currently use is somehow balanced because I must apply at least Intensity 2, but it certainly allows me to deal the same amount of damage as a XBow for just one magic point, and I can fire it every combat action, whereas a bow or crossbow can be fired every other action at best. The ratio of effectiveness here is in favour of the spell, but it is not so unbalancing, because I need a lot of skills to be able to use it effectively at the same range I could use a missile weapon, and this is a problem we have already encountered in the few combats we have run so far.

The point is that some spells are effective at Magnitude 1, so with no manipulation an MP cost. Which means peasants can use them effectively. Some alternate rules that could solve this one:

a) a non manipulated Sorcery spell is cast at Magnitude 0, not 1

b) a failed casting always costs 1 Magic Point

c) Fly's description is clearly wong and must be corrected. 5 SIZ per Magnitude, and the number of targets determined by Manipulation(Targets) could be adequate.

d) Dominate is wrong and must be corrected. A minimum of 1 Magnitude per 5 Characteristic points in the target's highest characteristic could be a good idea.