I already conceded your point and endured you essentially saying I was gaming the system like some kind of power gamer. I realized you were right about how to use zone blocks and I said so. So please quit telling me that my spell idea would wreck a game. I proposed it as a interesting point of flavor for a character who deals in spirits. Maybe I am just being a bit cranky and misreading your posts but I would really appreciate it if you would stop acting as if you are the only one who is right in these discussions and telling me how I can't do things without ruining the game and maybe instead give me an idea or two on how I can go about making this work.
I am saying it heavily favors power gamers -- which either leads to power gamers being too powerful or the rules being kind of up to GM whim depending on how often you use them. I never said you were a power gamer (not that there's anything wrong with that, don't confuse "power gamer" and munchkin, and I didn't accuse you of the latter either). I am also saying you were misunderstanding the veil rules.
And I've already said how to make it work. Just use the standard block rules. There ya go. People highly trained in weapons, for instance, can have their training overcome the fear (though it would still reduce their effectiveness). It does make sense when you think about it.
And another thing; you seem to be morally opposed to idea of using an "arbitrary skill" as you call it to resist a spell. Yet Earth Stomp on page 293 specifies it is resisted by Might. On the same page Entanglement states it is opposed by a target's Athletics. In fact most of the spells listed on page 293 on have an "Opposed By:" listing in their write up. Admittedly most of them are resisted by Athletics but this suggests that a caster may indeed specify what skill is used to resist a spell based on its context. If this was not true then why would they have that listing in the spell write ups?
Yeah, I don't think Earth Stomp would be very balanced as written, unless you could also dodge it. Frankly, I don't understand how it wouldn't be dodgeable. The problem with a spell like that is that if you let such a thing in, then a player is can just make bunch of things with odd things to resist. Might for guys without strength powers, Discipline for people without strong minds, etc, etc. At that point they are hit their enemies no matter what. It also means that any big bad the GM creates is going to have to be ridiculously designed to avoid this stuff (and probably they'll all have to be wizards or practitioners of some sort for blocking spells). It also isn't good for the players if the GM uses a lot of stuff like this since pure mortals and non-casters get unfairly hampered.
Frankly, spells and other attacks should pretty much always be opposable by standard methods (athletics) and if the player can justify something thematically appropriate then that too. That's how the rules are written, Earth Stomp seems to be the odd duck out in this regard (and again, not being able to dodge it doesn't make a lot of sense). To be fair, there are other things in the spell and magic item section that are a bit questionable in their balance, especially if you generalize their non-standard mechanics.
To be pedantic, the rules on evocation attacks:
The Discipline roll to control an attack spell also counts as the attack roll; to avoid the spell, the target can roll a defense roll as per the usual options from Playing the Game (page 200).
Now, page 200 doesn't go into a lot of detail, but it does say Athletics is the catch-all defense.
I mean, if this was Eldritch Ass-kicking, I don't think it would matter, but since there are people that aren't wizards then this sort of thing matters a lot.
