From:	Spike spike1@*******.co.uk
Subject:	Magic Question
Date:	Mon, 26 Jun 2000 15:25:25 +0100 (BST)

And verily, didst Josh Harrison babble thusly...
[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> Please forgive the funky formatting... I sent this to the wrong list address
> the first time, and it came back to me...
>
> > While handling downtime after the adventuer conlcuded this past weekend a
> > question came up that had me kind of stumped. I know that the force of
> most
> > spells limits the degree of effect you can get out of them -- for
> instance,
> > a force 4 Heal can only at most heal 4 boxes of damage, regardless of the
> > number of successes actually generated.
> >
> > The shaman in my group (who follows the Dragonslayer totem/idol) wanted
> > to learn the "Increase Reflexes" spell -- the one that adds dice to
> > initiative. He couldn't see any reason to take the spell at higher than
> > Force 1, because there is no degree of success for it; the spell either
> > works or it doesn't. So the spell was easy to find, buy, and learn.

Well... The main reason to increase spell force on spells that have a fixed
effect is simply to make them resistant to attack...

Say your shaman casts the spell before going into combat, and the enemy have
a couple of elementals floating around in the astral...

One of them assenses the party and spots all the spells... Increase
attributes spells give the party a big combat advantage, so they send one of
their force 3 elementals to deal with it...

The spell doesn't really stand a chance. The only thing the shaman can do is
assign magic pool to help defend the spell, but with a target number of 2 to
kill it, it only having one dice to defend itself, and the possibility of
magical combat (and the need to use his magic pool for other things), it's
dead, Jim...

If he'd cast it at force 4, it would've had a fair chance of defending
itself.

A force 1 spell has no better defence than a spell lock.

--
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