| From: | NeoJudas neojudas@******************.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Buildings, doors, maglocks, and magic |
| Date: | Mon, 12 Jun 2000 04:45:23 -0500 |
Subject: Buildings, doors, maglocks, and magic
> Here's something that came up in a game recently, and caused a bit of an
> argument between the GM (me) and one of the other players: can you target
> a door or a lock, that's part of a building, with magic?
Yes... but there are catches/requirements....
> This was brought up by the player's character, a houngan, having learned
> an SR3 version of the SR1 spell Turn To Goo with the specific intention of
> turning doors or locks to goo to gain easy entrance to buildings or rooms.
> I said no, explaining that, because you also can't target parts of a
> vehicle with magic, components of a building follow that rule too. IOW,
> either you turn the whole house to goo, or you don't turn anything to goo
> (which posed another problem, more about which in a moment).
>
> The player's argument was mainly that I had allowed spells like Ram Touch
> to blast holes in walls or destroy doors without having to target (and
> collapse) the whole house, so Turn To Goo should be able to do something
> similar. Thinking about it quickly during the session, I decided that I
> had probably been wrong in the past to let Ram Touch do that in the first
> place. Was I?
By letting him target a "Turn to Goo" spell??? No, you were not wrong...
however...
> The second problem, refered to above, is that if you make a building a
> single target, BTB it becomes too easy to destroy one if you use the rules
> for barrier ratings. Buildings should have a barrier rating that's higher
> than that of their walls, as it's a "whole is greater than the sum of the
> parts" type of deal, but how would you represent this in SR?
Ah, yet another part of stuff. Actually, most buildings that I know of are
at least Barrier-6 to Barrier-8 material. If you were to use the vehicle
rules, as you were using as your basis earlier, then the target would be 8 +
Barrier Rating + Half Armor rating (please note this last part).
However, you probably have a target number equal to the Object Resistance
rating, and for some reason I seem to recall a threshold being equal to the
barrier being used in many transformation type spells. You could arguably
use the "threshold" type rules for "damaging manipulations" as well.
Now as for the "Turn to Goo" targetted at a door, NO, you cannot use that
spell to do so. Remind the player that "Ram Touch" is specifically designed
against it's targets while a "Turn *DOOR* to Goo" spell would be required to
only nail/target a door and turn it to goo. The *ONLY* other exception to
this that I can even come close to thinking of is very crafty usage of
mana-barrier/spell-barrier type spells, two or more of them perhaps and
creating a "partitioned space" that a given spell will not exceed. We did
this to perform a "Fix" spell upon a singular component for a shuttle the
group was trying to obtain the records from. What technically happened was
that the spell created a temporary "boundary of seperation" between the
parts of the console that was the actual target. Within the wedge created
by the mana/spell barriers, the Fix worked okay ... which allowed for the
computer component to become accessible (they supplied the battery power to
it externally themselves) for their further manipulations.
I can't really think of other restrictions with regards to the magic that
actually exist or could be readily innovated at this point. BUT, I do know
they are there.
You were close Gurth, you just missed the obvious here by the
comparison/example you gave.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
NeoJudas ("K" to Friends)
"Children of the Kernel: Reborn"
(neojudas@******************.com)
Hoosier Hacker House (http://www.hoosierhackerhouse.com/)
