Magical combat confusion

[dbrowne1974]

Hello all, I searched the forums and didn't find anything that explained it to me very easily(either I'm dumb or reading it wrong).  In the example in the book on page 251, it says:

 "The vampire rolls to defend against Harry’s roll of Legendary and gets a Great (+4), which means the blast strikes home and inflicts a12-stress hit on him (4 for the attack, 8 for the weapon value)."

I understand where the 8 for the weapon value comes from, but where does the 4 come from??  I looked at the example of combat in the resources area, but that didn't help much either.  I'm just plain confused.

[MyNinjaH8sU]

The attack was 4 shifts over the defense roll, so you add 4 stress to the damage. Same as any other attack/defense exchange. think of it as how accurately they were shot with the blast.

[sinker]

Yeah, Harry rolled Legendary (+8) minus the great (+4) defense equals a 4-shift attack.

[MijRai]

What they said. Every shift over the defense adds another stress to the attack. That is how Fist attacks do damage, since a fist is a weapon 0.

[dbrowne1974]

Oh, now that makes sense.  I must have missed that somewhere.  One more thing, it's about rote spells.  Under Harry's Fuego spell its says "fire attack, four shifts".  Now do rote spells have to have a set number of shifts, and if so, when the PC wants to increase the damage does he have roll for control??  thanks for all the help.  These were some of issues we were dealing with last night, it was the first session and it could have gone much better.  My first DMing experience since high school, so it's been a LONG time, almost 10 yrs since I DMed, always been a PC.

[MijRai]

Oh, now that makes sense.  I must have missed that somewhere.  One more thing, it's about rote spells.  Under Harry's Fuego spell its says "fire attack, four shifts".  Now do rote spells have to have a set number of shifts, and if so, when the PC wants to increase the damage does he have roll for control??  thanks for all the help.  These were some of issues we were dealing with last night, it was the first session and it could have gone much better.  My first DMing experience since high school, so it's been a LONG time, almost 10 yrs since I DMed, always been a PC.

If you want to increase the damage, then it is no longer your Rote, and you have to start a spell from scratch, with the roll for power control, and the roll for aiming. Yes, a Rote has a set number of shifts. You can't change it to a zone attack either.

[luminos]

The number of shifts assigned to a spell determine details of what the spell does.  In the case of attacks, the shifts is mostly the weapon value.  You still have to roll discipline to target the spell, and beating the opponents defense roll will still get you extra shifts of damage.

[dbrowne1974]

Ok that's what I thought.  Again thanks for assistance

[zerogain]

All the conditions of a rote spell have to be the same, all the time. If you change any elements of the spell then it's no longer "rote". Of note however, that roll for control is the same die roll as to target the spell, if targeting is required.  Previously I'd been running that as two rolls.

If I may, it may use things significantly if you have a few ideas already in place to handle backlash and fallout for when your spellcaster inevitably fails that control roll.