Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen
It's just odd that everybody always talks about the threshold value of 15. Clearly saving the energy is very worthwhile, but it seems to me that hitting 16 is even more worthwhile because you redudce your miscast probability by 75%.
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Depends on the style of campaign (and the style of character). Someone who casts relatively infrequently - perhaps because of a tight energy budget - just won't see many critical failures, even at the 2% level. And the large majority of critical failure effects, by the standard table, are mildly embarrassing or inconvenient, rather than deadly. (I've
never seen the fabled Accidental Demon Summoning effect that I recall). On the other hand, dropping the cost to maintain a spell to zero allows some useful protracted effects, and getting a lot of minor spells off at no energy cost is much preferable to having them chew through a finite energy budget.
Oh, and skill 15 also allows silent casting or casting while tied up. That's going to be a killer advantage in some situtations.
In a dungeon fantasy, action movie, or flashy high-magic sort of game, where wizards are letting off spells every second in important scenes, and have large external energy supplies, a greater degree of twitchiness about critical failures might come to be considered normal.
On t'other hand again, going up to 16 might well be considered worthwhile for the greater chance of critical
success in many campaigns.