Breath Weapon questions

[Haru]

I wouldn't say strength should be applied generally, but most of the time it will be applicable, especially if it's some kind of physical, bodily thing, breathing fire, shooting lasers from your eyes, shooting shards of bone from your body, and so forth.

But I personally like to use breath weapon, for example, to model a combat wizard who learned how to focus his energy so he can pretty much fire low powered fireballs without getting tired. Strength doesn't really apply here, but maybe focus items and specializations would. I'd judge that on a case by case basis.

If you've got a power where nothing really applies, or strength in general just wouldn't fit the character, you could always take a "+2 weapon rating" stunt to upgrade your breath weapon without taking the rest of the strength stuff.

[Sanctaphrax]

It depends on the type of bow. If you're using a hunting bow that requires more strength to shoot, then the strength of the person matters and the arrow would do more damage ONLY because the bow can store more potential energy before being fired.

Sure. But assuming everyone's using a bow that suits them, stronger people shoot farther and harder. Maybe you need the right gear to take advantage of your strength bonus with bows, but DFRPG doesn't track equipment very closely so that's not hugely important.

But I personally like to use breath weapon, for example, to model a combat wizard who learned how to focus his energy so he can pretty much fire low powered fireballs without getting tired.

Taking Breath Weapon, Evocation, and Inhuman Strength is already so suboptimal that I'm really loath to make it any worse. Can't you say he gets a +2 stress bonus which mechanically comes from his Strength, but flavourfully comes from his fireballs just being powerful?

[Haru]

Taking Breath Weapon, Evocation, and Inhuman Strength is already so suboptimal that I'm really loath to make it any worse. Can't you say he gets a +2 stress bonus which mechanically comes from his Strength, but flavourfully comes from his fireballs just being powerful?

That was mainly said, because, like you say, it's probably not a combination that's going to be taken all that often. My motivation was not so much to limit the use of strength but to suggest that there might be other sources of bonuses that might fit any given breath weapon better than strength. Sorry, I should have made that more clear.

[wyvern]

Oh, right.  One possibly-important addendum: While I would, in games I was running, allow strength powers to add to breath weapon damage, I would never assume that was going to work in a game run by someone else.  Ask about it, sure, but I wouldn't be bothered if they decided to rule differently.  (Though I would, in that case, avoid taking both breath weapon and strength powers, no matter how thematically appropriate the combination might be.  Theme's nice, but so's mechanical effectiveness, and it's easy enough to justify, say, channeling, or maybe even an outright sponsored magic instead of breath weapon.)