Blessings, wishes, etc and Spell Backfires

[hal]

Originally Posted by malloyd

One possible out to the rule that Bless doesn't modify magic (or critical failures, that's explicit in the description) is that averting demons isn't actually mitigating the negative effects of the magic (or the critical failure) as long as something equally bad happens. Averting a specific threat by shifting it into another equally unpleasant one seems marginally within the technical meaning of the rules.

Anyway, it seems likely that if accidentally summoned demons were a common issue, there would be spells or spell variants or enchantments developed specifically to deal with that. Hm, if casters always worked standing a rug permanently enchanted with Teleport Shield, which is actually pretty cheap, do the demons summoned by a critical failure suffer a skill penalty trying to port in?

That would be an interesting question regards to the Teleport shield. But then the question would be "are they teleporting, or gating?".

As for Critical Success and/or Failures - that is also an "interesting question". The rolls themselves are called "Criticals" and those can't be changed. So, for example, if I had a +1 blessing cast on my character, and you as the GM roll a crit success while attacking my character with an NPC, the expectation would be that the ROLL itself can not be changed. But then comes the next roll to determine what the actual "crit success" is. That is a separate roll, and the Critical Failure or Successes themselves are what...

A) secondary processes that result FROM the critical die roll

or

B) A continuation of the roll PROCESS, and the PROCESS itself is the critical failure or success?

What to my mind supports the aspect of A over B above, is that once you roll the critical result for the Die roll, you still have to roll "Damage" rolls if the crit is a result of an attack. This process is done regardless of whether you rolled a normal success, or a critical success. So, the damage roll, does it suddently become "shielded" by the Process and becomes part of the process on a critical success - or is it separate from the critical success as it is in normal successes?

You can argue it both ways and I suspect that it would be a KROMM issue (something he gained his reputation for on GURPSNET long before he became a line editor).

So - the issue of now becomes one of "category". Clearly, taking 1 point less of damage is beneficial to the holder of the Bless spell. So claiming that a mage must take an "equal" damaging effect for the Summoning of the Demon aspect on the crit table roll seems to lack logical standing.

If a Bless can modify the DAMAGE of a critical hit for sword fighting for example, then it can modify the damage for any spell that requires a die roll to inflict damage (such as lightning). If it can modify the roll on the Crit Hit results by +1 in favor of the bless holder, then it can do the same in a spell table (as the process is the same for both mundane and magical).

Ultimately? I suspect that if you're unconvinced by my "logic" or arguments in support of my logic, then you simply say "I don't agree, and this is how I will run my campaigns". The only way to get a "rules as written or intended" judgment, well, that is going to require an Intervention from the Line editor I'm afraid.