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Anaraxes · 02-12-2018, 09:10 AM

Not so much a way to replace spellcasting, though they could certainly be seen as magical powers. They might be chi, or divine paladin smiting, or whatever other flavor you might want to give them. You seem to pretty much have the general idea right.

Imbuements were invented as a way to address the problem of building (out of Advantages, Limitations, and Enhancements) a good way to build an ability that let you buff an ordinary melee attack -- say, a character that could make any sword he picked up burst into flame. That's not a property of the weapon, but of the character. And while you can build attacks easily enough, it's harder than you might think to build an ability that behaves exactly like the regular weapon rules, scaling with ST and so on.

The mechanics are somewhat similar to the Basic magic system in that you sink a fair number of points into a fundamental Advantage ("Imbue", rather than IQ and Magery), and then buy some number of individual skills that let you create particular effects ("Homing Weapon", "Chilling Strike", etc). The skills are mostly DX/VH so your ninjas or kung-fu fighters or paladins or elven spell-archers or whatever don't have to go too far out of their way to get good at them. But it wil cost a lot of points. (Imbue is 10/20/40 points, plus a bunch for those skills. So players will have to choose whether they want that flaming sword, or +2 DX to be more generally amazing.)

Using an Imbuement skill requires holding the weapon at ready, but it doesn't take an extra turn of Concentration. They're also not an enchantment in the sense that you can't make someone else's sword burst into flame, or make yours burst into flame and hand it to someone else to use. It's just a thing you, yourself, can do.

02-12-2018, 09:10 AM	#2
Anaraxes Join Date: Sep 2007	Re: Please explain Imbuements to me? Not so much a way to replace spellcasting, though they could certainly be seen as magical powers. They might be chi, or divine paladin smiting, or whatever other flavor you might want to give them. You seem to pretty much have the general idea right. Imbuements were invented as a way to address the problem of building (out of Advantages, Limitations, and Enhancements) a good way to build an ability that let you buff an ordinary melee attack -- say, a character that could make any sword he picked up burst into flame. That's not a property of the weapon, but of the character. And while you can build attacks easily enough, it's harder than you might think to build an ability that behaves exactly like the regular weapon rules, scaling with ST and so on. The mechanics are somewhat similar to the Basic magic system in that you sink a fair number of points into a fundamental Advantage ("Imbue", rather than IQ and Magery), and then buy some number of individual skills that let you create particular effects ("Homing Weapon", "Chilling Strike", etc). The skills are mostly DX/VH so your ninjas or kung-fu fighters or paladins or elven spell-archers or whatever don't have to go too far out of their way to get good at them. But it wil cost a lot of points. (Imbue is 10/20/40 points, plus a bunch for those skills. So players will have to choose whether they want that flaming sword, or +2 DX to be more generally amazing.) Using an Imbuement skill requires holding the weapon at ready, but it doesn't take an extra turn of Concentration. They're also not an enchantment in the sense that you can't make someone else's sword burst into flame, or make yours burst into flame and hand it to someone else to use. It's just a thing you, yourself, can do.