Damage Over Time Spells ($*&% Obius)

[InFerrumVeritas]

I've got a couple of scenarios coming up where I'd like the BBEG BCV that I've set up to be able to significantly hinder the entire party.  One of the ways I was thinking of doing it would be to use zone wide DoT spells.  His minions (ghouls and Reinfields) would keep the party from simply targeting him with everything they've got by providing dangerous distractions.

I was thinking of a couple ways of doing this.  (Yes, I know its been discussed before under Prolonging Attacks, etc, but I haven't found these specific solutions).

Option 1: Treat them as spray attacks, over multiple rounds rather than multiple targets.  Thus, you'd split the spell's power and targeting (control) over multiple rounds.
How it compares to a standard attack:  This allows for multitasking and playing with the action economy.  It can, essentially, for a character to defend multiple times per round.  However, it is significantly less effective against an equal opponent because the attack roll has to be split.  It’s an interesting option, but a sub-optimal one is most cases.

Option 2: You set the power as an attack roll.  So the spell wouldn't have a weapon rating, simply a number to defend against.  This could then be prolonged by putting extra shifts into duration. 
How it compares to a standard attack:  This allows for a much stronger attack over multiple rounds.  The worry here is that it is mitigating the stress limits Wizards have.  However, while it would hit reliably, I don’t know that it would actually deal a great deal of stress.

Comments?  Suggestions?  Things I'm likely missing?

EDIT:  Did some math.  Let's say we have a character with Control 8, Power 6 attacking a character with Superb Athletics. 

Option 1 wouldn't be effective.
Option 2.  Wizard casts 8 shift spell.  Legendary Weapon 0 attack.  Athlete takes 3 stress.  Wizard extends for 6 rounds.  Athlete takes 3 stress per round (on average). 

Standard: Wizard casts 8 shift spell.  Legendary Weapon 8 attack.  Athlete takes 11 stress.  Wizard casts 6 shift spell.  Legendary Weapon 6 attack.  Athlete takes 9 stress.

With option 2, you're gaining one extra stress over a very long time. 

[Haru]

You could go at it with the skill replacement option from thaumaturgy + some type of sponsored magic (even self sponsored, but you'd need thaumaturgy at evocation speed). Then it would just be a might replacement spell, and the rest would be using the usual grappling rules. Maybe adding a number of shifts if you want to emulate strength powers for additional stress.

So you could make a 4 shift might replacement spell and add 2 for "inhuman strength", so your target would have to go against a strength of 5 and you could inflict 2 shifts of damage per exchange. Though that might be a bit much, a high level wizard should easily be able to muster up +6 shifts to emulate mystic strength, and that will get deadly real quick.
If you keep to the simple might replacement, you will still get to slow them down quite a bit. And you can use high numbers to split them into multiple grapples, that should be ok. Though your wizard will need to repeat that spell every exchange, so he might run out of mental stress boxes real quick.

Edit:
One other idea, that might be a bit strange, but bare with me:
You could do a thaum-evo spell that replaces a resources roll to "hire some goons". Those goons can take the form of tentacles, clouds of smoke, whatever, that grapple the characters. And they should be able to keep up a grapple longer, without the sorcerer having to spend more power.

Edit2:
You could also create zone borders, that need various skills to cross, and if the threshold is not met, the character in question will have to take the remaining shifts as physical stress. The zone borders represent the various minions running around, trying to stop the PCs. The Players could try to eliminate some of the borders from afar. Imagine the final scene being split into something like a chess board, and you have your zones. They don't have to be quite that straight lines, but you get the idea. You might want to create some markers to indicate where everything is, depending on the size you chose for the scene.

Since large numbers of mooks can become pretty tedious to roll, you could have the players dodge against a fixed number if they are standing in a zone that has a "minion border". Increase that value by 2 for each border that is covered in minions.

[Orladdin]

The system is simply not suited to DoT-like effects. 

[Mr. Death]

There's been discussions about things like this before. I came up with what I think is a decent proposal for this sort of thing (albeit somewhat untested) here:

http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,25872.msg1311911.html#msg1311911

[JDK002]

I don't know if iwould agree that it doesn't work at all.  I think it just needs to be kept very simple.  Balancing aside, I would probably just work an aoe dot that works similar to the venom/poison upgrade the the claws power.

[InFerrumVeritas]

I've actually found that I really like my option 2 after testing it a bit.

It's simple mechanically.  It only results in one extra roll per round, and that's on the part of the defender.  It allow for extra milage out of spellcasting without being more potent. 

Tactically, it wears down an enemy's resources (defense enchanted items, fate points, etc).  However, it's a sacrifice of potency.  I like that it makes the characters make a choice between taking the stress and being slowly worn down and sacrificing their defensive resources.

It is more like thaumaturgy than evocation, but that doesn't seem to hurt anything.

[Tedronai]

One thing that needs to be taken into account in these evaluations:
Many instances of small amounts of stress is actually far more dangerous to a character capable of taking consequences than is a small number of instances of large amounts of stress.

It only takes eleven instances of one point of stress to guarantee a taken-out result against a character without 'tanky' powers built on any skill tree capped at Superb.  Most such characters will be taken-out significantly before that.

[Becq]

It seems to me that if you modify Orbius by requiring that the Wizard use his action ("concentrating") to inflict the stress (otherwise it's just a normal block), then it ought to be reasonably fair.  I think the major problem was that it allowed for fire-and-forget grapples that quickly wore foes into the ground for a single action commitment, which this tweak solves.

[KOFFEYKID]

I had an idea while reading on how to fix spells like these.

Lets say somebody does a Damage over Time spell on a 4 stress track guy.

In round 1 he does 1 stress, marking XOOO on the track.
In round 2 he does 1 stress, and doesn't mark anything down on the track yet.
In round 3 he does 1 stress, marking XXOO on the track.
In round 4 he does 1 stress, and in round 5 he does 1 stress and in round 6 he does 1 more stress.

Finally he marks down XXXO on the track.

This change (that dot spells dont effect stress until it has filled that box's capacity) would make it much more reasonable. You'd need a relatively powerful Dot with a long duration to do anything more than hold somebody still.

[Orladdin]

I had an idea while reading on how to fix spells like these.

Lets say somebody does a Damage over Time spell on a 4 stress track guy.

In round 1 he does 1 stress, marking XOOO on the track.
In round 2 he does 1 stress, and doesn't mark anything down on the track yet.
In round 3 he does 1 stress, marking XXOO on the track.
In round 4 he does 1 stress, and in round 5 he does 1 stress and in round 6 he does 1 more stress.

Finally he marks down XXXO on the track.

This change (that dot spells dont effect stress until it has filled that box's capacity) would make it much more reasonable. You'd need a relatively powerful Dot with a long duration to do anything more than hold somebody still.

This adds a lot of unnecessary bookeeping of a "secondary" stress track for each DoT you have active on you, then, and generally means DoTs will stop being useful after three turns, since the next amount of exchanges before you take damage again is generally outside of the typical duration of DFRPG combat..

[Radecliffe]

Personally I would stick with thaumaturgy for this type of spell.  I'd model it after something like the mind fog spell only instead of disorienting the victims it causes them a certain amount of harm while they are in it.  None of that fill in one box every X rounds either.  That is waaaay too complicated and annoying.   

A thaumaturgy spell that effects a relatively small area and has a simple effect would not take long to cast for a competent spell caster.  Especially if said caster has ghouls, zombies and such to run interference for him. 

The spell would just make a Weapon:X attack at the end of each turn against all creatures in the zone(s) affected. 

[admiralducksauce]

There's been discussions about things like this before. I came up with what I think is a decent proposal for this sort of thing (albeit somewhat untested) here:

http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php/topic,25872.msg1311911.html#msg1311911

If I had to GM something like DoT, I think I'd probably use this approach. Use the spell attack roll sans Weapon value. Mr. Death, have you used this approach in a game since you posted that? How did it go?

[Mr. Death]

If I had to GM something like DoT, I think I'd probably use this approach. Use the spell attack roll sans Weapon value. Mr. Death, have you used this approach in a game since you posted that? How did it go?

While I've told my players this house-rule would be in effect, none of them have taken advantage of it as yet. At least, not enough to really get a good feel for it, anyway. For the most part, they pretty much always go with single-round spells.

[Sanctaphrax]

On paper, option 2 sounds good.

[InFerrumVeritas]

After playing with it a bit more, I've decided that I need to have the effect end if its beaten by a defense roll.  The character can always re-allocate the energy (even into another attack), but the defender has to have some way to end the effect.