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Old 05-30-2012, 09:26 AM   #4
PseudoFenton
 
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Land of the Britons
Default Re: Different critical spell failure tables

Quote:
Originally Posted by Refplace View Post
Fair amount of work and the players didn't really get much out of it.
This is the real crux of the design issue here. Crit fails are pretty rare, rarer still for those with Luck.

It'd be a lot of work to produce a number of results that actually feel different from one another, especially if you have to make each result meaningful due to the potential rarity of their occurrence. The rarity is made even worse if limited to locations, as some locations might harder ever be visited!

An alternative is to have only a handful of results produce "special" outcomes, perhaps all the extreme crit fails are the same due to the nature of magic, but minor failures are a lot more stylised. This would both cut down on the work required in making full lists of outcomes, and allow some harmony in outcome which would make magic more predictable and leave no nasty shocks in failing somewhere as yet unvisited.

As for different fails for different traditions of mages, then yeah Thaumatology has a number of tables with different themes which fit more for differently styled/college focused mages.
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