Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith
While that's worded "may" I would suggest it as "You must invest at least one energy, and may invest energy up to your Magery level."
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Taking a fresh look at this, I can see where you're coming from, like there would be 2 ways of reading it.
I was thinking...
on a success...
You MAYinvest something (range of options)...
or you may NOT invest at ALL (but then why did you cast the spell bro?)
but maybe it's meant like...
on a success you MUST invest something (not zero!)
the amount of your investment, however, can range from 1 to Magery
This would avoid the weird situation of "I invested 0 energy so it does 0 damage!"
Although... there was a perk in Magical Styles allowing you to do AOA Strong with missile spells to get a damage bonus to them... so that might be one situation where a 0-base-damage missile spell COULD be useful, if you rely on that perk entirely to get damage (0+1=1) on a spell which has no basic energy investment?
Actually a cheaper path than buying missile spells up to high skill (20-25ish?) to get energy cost decreases for throwing 0-energy 1d fireballs around.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith
Of course, if you have high enough skill level the final energy cost is reduced, so the final energy cost may still be zero. But you must always create a missile that is at least 1d, whatever that might cost to cast.
I also dislike the ordering of the choices because, as you mention, it means that on a failure the caster can always decide to make it a 1d missile instead of the larger one he might have chosen had the spell succeeded. I would (and have) required a declaration of how large the missile is going to be before the spell skill is rolled. But, I'll admit that this isn't really supported by the rules as they're written.
Correct. Magic p. 7: "If success would have cost energy, you lose one energy point; otherwise, you lose nothing."
This is based on the final energy cost of the spell, so if high skill reduces the cost to zero then a failure costs no energy as well.
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It seems like "costly failures" are very low risk though, as you know whether or not the skill roll passed on your 1st turn, so pumping in energy on the 2nd and 3rd turns isn't putting that energy at risk. Even though this increases the "full cost" it CAN'T crit fail at that point, since the roll was already passed...
Plus you can even avoid the "1 energy if it had a cost" on the 1st turn if you make a minimal investment (say just 1 energy if you have a -1 to energy cost from high skill) and then pump in the big energy-for-damage in turns 2+3 when you know you passed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith
Yes, it would. And if you're using an option like allowing extra energy to pump skill I would wholly suggest that the caster must declare the intended size of the missile before calculating skill.
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ESPECIALLY if using that Magical Styles perk (mental something?) where instead of rolling against Innate Attack to target the fireball (DX-based) you can reroll the IQ-based spell again for targeting stuff. Boosting your skill with extra energy would be important there.
That'd also be important if pumping in energy for other purposes, like adding enhancements to missile spells like armor divisor / affects insubstantial / area effect / persistent / radiation
Although in that case, I guess that could just increase the cost of enlargening later, it's more important for skill-boosting since you have to pay the FP prior to actually making the skill roll, but need to know the spell's base cost (which can't be 0, 20% of that is free!) to know how much FP is needed to get +1