| From: | korishinzo@*****.com (Ice Heart) |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Lightning Ball vs Vehicle. Uber Spell or How Does It Work? |
| Date: | Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:12:35 -0700 (PDT) |
> read the paragraph it is in, it is talking specifically about
> *visual* cover, not actual cover. And the previous paragraph
> specifically says to use the firing through barriers rules. What I
> think they mean by targets hidden behind a wall is the following
[SNIP ASCII pic]
> I think your interpretation of the rules on this point is highly
> questionable. In fact it seems to go against the very nature of
> magic in Shadowrun. One of the basic tennants of spellcasting in
> Shadowrun is that you must have a visual link with a target to
> affect it. This is true regardless of what the target your trying
> to affect is, and certainly not limited to combat spells.
> Elemental manipulations target a point, which the caster must be
> able to see, and then explode outwards 'in the same way as a
> physical explosion or grenade' (SR3 pg 182). They can then affect
> things the caster can't see because the magic part was actually
> creating the explosion in the first place. From then on the
> explosion is following the laws of physics.
I agree. The example in the rules differs from our current example
(car and ball lightning) in a couple of critical ways. One, the
example is of a person who is hidden from the caster's line of sight,
but not hidden from the "blast wave" of the spell. By that I mean
that the conjured effect has an unimpeded path to the secondary,
unseen target. Second, fire behaves very much like a fluid when it
is carried outward by an explosion. Thus a person behind a low wall
could still get badly burned as the blast passed over the wall and
dumped fire all over them. Now, in most explosions, the burns are
moot, because the shock wave pulverized a person. "I have some
blisters" becomes irrelvant compared to "My lungs are flat and my rib
cage is fragments". :>
If there is a physical barrier of any sort between the target point
for the manipulation spell and indirect targets of the spell, the
barrier is going to stop some or all of the "blast wave" from
reaching the person. I put "blast wave" in quotes, because sometimes
the spell pulses out to fill an area of effect in a decidedly
non-'blast' sort of way. Light creating spells, for example. A
flash spell would blind people, even through windows, but not through
a wall (usually - a high enough force could represent light/radiation
in non-visible wavelengths that could cook retinas through a wall).
In our example, the secondary targets are enclosed by the barrier in
question, a car. So the initial damaging wave of the spell would be
ameliorated by the barrier rating/armor of the car. At which point I
start looking at secondary elemental effects to see if the car might
be effected in any way beyond the obvious "take an S wound" kind of
way. Like getting welded to a man hole cover and having its tires
melted to the rims.
======Korishinzo
--not to mention the damage that spell might have done to the road
under the car
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