Sunlight spell

[ways and means]

One way you could do an single effect attack with a duration is setting an opponent on fire and giving a duration for how long they will burn, unless they take action like dunking themselves in water this would be an athletics or block based defence followed if the block or athletics roll failed by an endurance defence.

[Sanctaphrax]

I'm sorry, I have no idea what you are trying to say. Could you rephrase that please?

[ways and means]

Duration of attacks can be justified by various means and could use endurance-venomous mechanics to model longer turn damage for a single opponent and area hazards for area attacks. You Incinerate an Opponent and for the duration they roll Endurance vs your power/discipline or you create an area hazard again at your discipline or power. 

[Sanctaphrax]

Well, there's no question about justification. Lots of ways to do that.

Venomous mechanics sound like a good idea. Not sure if it's balanced, but it doesn't raise any red flags.

[Belial666]

It does for me; a continious, relentless attack vs endurance that by the time you get to the antidote will have reduced you to a pile of goo is not good.


Venomous is definitely not just natural poison. It guarantees that you are taken out by a single bite due to unending attacks each exchange and a great deal sooner than most poisons. It works more like an engineered 100% lethal neurotoxin than most anything else.

[ways and means]

I wasn't actually proposing unending attack I was proposing attacks with a certain duration. So you cast incinerate on an enemy for a certain degree of power and duration, they then take an attack of the Power of the spell vs Endurance until the duration runs out they find a lot of water or they counter spell it. I had the same idea about area attacks, the first attack is a normal attack but after the first round it is treated as an enivromental hazard (a sea of fire does seem in my mind to fit an enviromental hazard) at the power off the spell (so a +9 power spell would do a +9 attack on anyone in the zone) until it is countered or runs out of duration.  

[Belial666]

Use conjuration to do that. Environmental effects are actually material so you can use conjuration at the speed of evocation (if you got it) to conjure that much of said material and then have an environmental effect naturally follow simply because what you conjured exists.


Want a wall of magma to stop your adversaries? Use conjuration/geomancy to conjure that much magma inside the ground. The rest of the environmental effect follows naturally as the magma bursts through.
Want an avalanche? Conjure that much snow.
Want a rain of acid or a pit of tar? Conjure that much acid or tar.
Want clouds to fill the sky? Conjure that much vapor.


That kind of magic would be really difficult due to the raw mass you'd need to conjure and the area you'd need to cover. Conjuring enough mass to cover a small park is 6 shifts. Add shifts for the number of zones you want if you want to finely control the area of the spell (rather than have the conjured mass spread as it will) and you very quickly get to pretty big magic. A conjured avalanche or stream of magma would be complexity 10. A controlled avalanche or flow of magma can easily be twice as much.

[sinker]

I would refer you to Fred's previous comments about damage over time effects. In summary he's said they're boring and rarely important to the narrative. The more I think about it the more I like the maneuver. It's easier, requires less fudge work and really works well to create a great story.

As an example let's work out this one situation both ways. With damage over time effects it works like this: You deal the vampires x stress. Next exchange you deal the vampires x stress. Next exchange you deal the vampires x stress. It's not very great from a story standpoint.

On the other hand the maneuver creates a situation that the GM can create something great with. "The lesser vampires ignite, screaming as they try to dive for cover (taken out lethally) . One of them makes it under a car, his blackened and twisted shape shaking and moaning (taken out non-lethally). The stronger ones become a blur as they find the edges of the brilliant light and hide, smoking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to strike (compelled to leave the zone, and/or possibly to deal with an attack of some sort). Some run from the bright light leaving the PCs alone (compelled to concede, accepting consequences, or simply failing at whatever objective they had).

I (and Fred for that matter) simply prefer the story focused method.

[Sanctaphrax]

I disagree, sinker. Damage over time is just as interesting as a single attack to me. There's nothing anti-story about it, as far as I can tell.

By the way, Venomous isn't that horrifying. You can concede to it, and medical attention counteracts it completely.

And conjuring acid/magma/whatever still needs to have some kind of mechanical effect. As-is, the GM is left to ad-lib what that effect might be.

[sinker]

I disagree, sinker. Damage over time is just as interesting as a single attack to me. There's nothing anti-story about it, as far as I can tell.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I prefer a maneuver with all sorts of interesting and different outcomes to damage over time effects or attacks. But to each their own.

[Taran]

By the way, Venomous isn't that horrifying. You can concede to it, and medical attention counteracts it completely.

And conjuring acid/magma/whatever still needs to have some kind of mechanical effect. As-is, the GM is left to ad-lib what that effect might be.

I don't know what Venomous is, but I'll look it up.

As far as conjuring goes, this is kind of the center of the issue for me.  Belial666 had a cool "holy water" spell, but it doesn't mention how much damage Holy water does to things hurt by such things.  I know there are rules for environmental effects and it would be easy enough to say, "hey that Holy sun spell is hot enough that it's like walking through a desert here, let's make a check every 10minutes" (assuming it lasted that long), and maybe you'd use the power of the spell to differentiate between SUPER HOT EQUATOR AT MIDDAY and Sunny Sunshine in the Pleasant Medow Sun; but there's nothing that says how much damage it does to vampires.  And should it?  This is why I thought I might have to a spell that also damages...

So how much damage would the torrent of holy water do to vamps?

EDIT:  Oh yes, it says Weapon 10.  But how?

[sinker]

I believe Belial was going off of the concept that a 12 shift spell will deal 10 stress to a zone, while simultaneously using those 12 shifts in the other method mentioned (4 to make it "holy" and whatever else to conjure the water itself). Not sure about this since you're effectively getting a little bit more bang for your buck in the form of maneuvering and attacking with the same shifts, but since you're using soulfire it should actually be holy all on it's own.

[Belial666]

The spell is conjuration plus a maneuver to conjure the holy water. That's how you use the shifts for justification/flavor. Much like a Might 12 spell in order to throw around a 20-ton large truck or bus. But when you use said spells for damage, you look at the spell's total power, which is 12. It is a zone-wide attack so 2 shifts go there. The remaining is the Weapon Rating.

So how the shifts of power translate to damage is identical in both spells. But how they would translate in the nature of the magic used is different. That is why the rain of holy water is harmless rain against most people but totally melts away vampires (it's holy water) while the falling truck attack would totally pancake all kinds of creatures in the zone but also ignore thresholds or magic immunity. (it's a falling, very real 20-ton truck. You can be immune to magic or behind a threshold all you like but you still get pancaked)


So no, the spell itself does not change. It's 12 shifts of power used in a certain way. You just look at those shifts of power from different points of view. It's why the spells end up having wildly different effects in varying situations.

[devonapple]

On the other hand the maneuver creates a situation that the GM can create something great with. "The lesser vampires ignite, screaming as they try to dive for cover (taken out lethally) . One of them makes it under a car, his blackened and twisted shape shaking and moaning (taken out non-lethally). The stronger ones become a blur as they find the edges of the brilliant light and hide, smoking in the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to strike (compelled to leave the zone, and/or possibly to deal with an attack of some sort). Some run from the bright light leaving the PCs alone (compelled to concede, accepting consequences, or simply failing at whatever objective they had).

I (and Fred for that matter) simply prefer the story focused method.

I prefer the story method as well, but who is paying for all those Compels? My understanding is that you still get one Invoke/Compel for free, but I remain unsure whether or not a Zone-wide Aspect Maneuver allows the player to Invoke/Compel that Aspect for free against each one of the targets in that Zone.

If it is the GM, then sure, the players can probably make an agreement with the GM that in exchange for paying for those Compels, the GM awards Fate Points to the surviving vampires. Which he does with a free Invoke/Compel - what I'm uncertain about is whether the players get to have the benefit of all those extra Compels.

[sinker]

Actually Devonapple, this is another reason why it's important to differentiate between the GMs ability to compel and the players ability to invoke for effect. The player isn't compelling all of those vamps (as the player technically can't compel at all), he's invoking his one aspect for effect once. That invoke however causes the aspect to become narratively important and the GM then decides if he would like to lay down all those compels on the vamps (technically compelling their high concept rather than the scene aspect, as it's usually tough to justify compelling aspects that aren't personal aspects). In my case I would compel the hell out of them because that's a) fun and b) giving the baddies a ton of fate (especially since in this case I'd likely transfer some of it from the mooks to the vamp who lost because his mooks were incinerated).