Quote:
Originally Posted by Humabout
I think we are on the same page here. If a player creates a boulder and then has to invest effort to make it inflict damage, that's no different than conjuring a sword that he has to then swing. But if the net effect of the only use of a spell is to insta-gib someone/something, it's time to pony up some energy for the damage modifier.
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Note in the case of a flying mage (or one standing at the edge of a cliff and creating a boulder where ground isn't), I would still allow the character to create the boulder without issue, even though there is no further effort (aside from aiming, which may not matter with a sufficiently-large boulder) required to allow it to fall and strike something. Similarly, I wouldn't force the character to pay a surcharge if he created a boulder on a hill and let it roll down to crush whatever as at the base.
Now, I'm not saying that using the Damage modifier and treating the spell effect as fluff is Hurting Wrong Fun - I just personally think it would be more internally consistent to allow a character to use rituals like this in nonstandard ways, and once you have someone who can make a boulder 50 yards away from himself horizontally (perfectly fine with just the Range modifier added in), it makes sense to be able to do so vertically.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Humabout
My main point was that going down the rabbit hole of trying to calculate potential energy and kinetic energy eventually leads deeper to contact times, looking up Young's moduluses (modulae?) and shear moduluses for various materials, solving for internal bending moments, and all other sorts of mathy things that make RPGs generally less fun when they become necessary to resolve in-game actions.
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Hey, now, leave the Armor and Wounding Overhaul I'm working on out of this. :P
More seriously, it seemed appropriate to me to account for the potential energy of such a thing (or stored energy, for explosives), and when I looked up the math I found it was actually something that should be doable at the table, at least assuming you've got a calculator handy (which I'd expect most groups using RPM would as a matter of course). "Multiply weight by height, divide by 4000, look up on the Spell Modifiers Table" isn't that complicated (the worst part is "divide by 4000," but even without a calculator that's just "divide by 4, move the decimal 3 places to the left;" heck, if it's too much of a problem, get rid of the 1000 part - doing so just makes the base cost 4 energy higher than it "should" be). Explosives are even easier - "Multiply the TNT weight-equivalence by 20." Things get even simpler if I opt to instead go with Anthony's table, since that uses values you have to calculate anyway (collision/explosive damage), and with a slight adjustment follows the easily-memorized (and thus commonly used) Size and Speed/Range table (it even defaults to 2d being +0).
The point here is that the basic damage modifier in RPM is good for simple "I kill you in the
face" spells, while allowing for a variant (that will ultimately result in a discount) for doing things in a more roundabout fashion - reconfiguring a "summon boulder" ritual to make a boulder up in the air, using personal skills to create explosives rather than just causing an explosion of energy, and so forth.