I'd allow an exception to exclude specified items at casting time for Regular spells analogous to the one for Area spells, even though it's not actually mentioned in the rules for Regular spells, oriented as they are to single subjects.
You might even squeeze this into the existing "named subject" targeting if you wiggle hard enough ("I target George and all George's stuff except his torches"), but it's hard to avoid the wording in Resist Fire which distinguishes the "subject" and the things the subject carries if you're being literal enough. Of course, if we're being that literal, George could just put the torch on the ground when you cast the spell and then pick it up. He wasn't carrying it when the spell was cast, so no problem. (Yes, that would mean that all the loot you pick up later wouldn't resist fire, either. That's what you deserve for being so literal...)
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Originally Posted by Plane
Is there a way to modify regular spells into area spells like say if you want to buff an entire party with Resist Fire?
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I don't think so, but that's not what you'd want anyway. An Area spell affects an area, not everyone in an area, except indirectly*. That is, the spell effect won't move with the party (absent Displace Spell). Your party members would only resist fire while they were standing in hexes that were designated as fire-resisting when the spell was cast (as long as those hexes weren't hadn't been dropped during some later maintenance interval). In this case, "carried" just means "in the hex".
(Similarly, I'd say spells like Mass Daze, Sleep, etc., which are Area spells with durations, affect anyone who later wanders into affected hexes after the cast while the spell is being maintained, not just those who were in the area when the spell was cast. This makes them more useful for area denial.)
You could invent a Multiple Subject spell type if you wanted, as a variant of Regular. You might take the worst range penalty of any subject as the range penalty for the spell, or even the sum of range penalties to all subjects to make it harder to affect multiple subjects. Multiply the base cost by the number of subjects. If you're generous, just allow any Regular spell to be cast as Multiple Subject rather than requiring individual variants to be learned.
If you want to start with Area instead, it seems like you'd need a split Duration, to distinguish between the Area itself not remaining affected (duration 0 for the area), but that everything that was in it as cast time does have a persistent effect, as well as defining the maintenance cycle. You'll also need to decide if all the subjects have to mutually remain within the defined radius of the original Area, and if so, how to know where that is if the subjects wander off in different directions. (Probably simpler to not remember that fact, but counting subjects by Area radius rather than individually allows a bit of cheese by always packing the party tightly when the spell is cast, preferably all in a Close Combat dogpile** so the cost is the same as for just one person.)
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* As with, say, Create Fire. It doesn't set fire to individual people in an Area, continually damaging them for a full minute as they run around as if they'd been doused in napalm. It sets their hex on fire, which causes damage to people which stops if they run out of the hex.
** "Any number of people may participate in close combat in the same hex.", B391. Okay, you 30,000 spectators in the stadium, everybody stand on home plate while we finish the ritual for a base cost of 2 x1 hex radius...