How common are Amulet vs Demons?

[hcobb]

Social stability seems to require that everybody making $200/week or more wears an amulet vs demons with these spread out to dependents and household staff at higher income levels. Otherwise it's way too easy for third year wizards to simply abduct everybody.

Even then a greater demon has a 9.5% chance of grabbing your queen who is wearing five amulets.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Social stability seems to require that everybody making $200/week or more wears an amulet vs demons with these spread out to dependents and household staff at higher income levels. Otherwise it's way too easy for third year wizards to simply abduct everybody.

Even then a greater demon has a 9.5% chance of grabbing your queen who is wearing five amulets.

If wizards who can summon greater demons are all that common, and demons can that easily find specific people to abduct in the minute they'll serve you, you could just find another third year wizard and have him summon a demon to abduct her back. Buy a second casting to have the demon bring you the detached head of the wizard who summoned the demon that abducted her the first time.

But sure, it's a common feature of RPG spells that the social or economic system of the setting probably should fall apart if they actually worked the way the rules say they do. This is largely because the spells are mostly written to be cool things done by the PCs, and having your cool special abilities fail all the time is not much fun, so most games are quite short of useful defenses against magic.

[hcobb]

I get the feeling that the Wizard's Guild has a black ops division that goes around snuffing out munchkins.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by hcobb

I get the feeling that the Wizard's Guild has a black ops division that goes around snuffing out munchkins.

If the munchkins are messing with greater demons, the problem may be self correcting before long anyway. It's not possible for command wordings to be airtight, giving orders to demons safely always depends on the *demons* not being munchkins looking too hard for loopholes.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Social stability seems to require that everybody making $200/week or more wears an amulet vs demons with these spread out to dependents and household staff at higher income levels. Otherwise it's way too easy for third year wizards to simply abduct everybody.

Even then a greater demon has a 9.5% chance of grabbing your queen who is wearing five amulets.

What's a "third year wizard"?

One side-effect of assuming 500 XP / year for everyone is that you quickly get a world full of 38+ point characters - i.e. every wizard becomes a very powerful wizard. Good luck figuring out all the implications of that.

In our campaigns, there were/are not a whole lot of wizards capable of summoning demons. And, our GMs were/are probably going to house rule demon magic a bit so it's as dangerous as the descriptions imply, and not as controllable as the exactly RAW rules details can be. So (and also for the reasons lalloyd mentioned, as well as others) wizards only rarely chose to summon demons for any purpose.

Amulets vs. Demons are expensive, require enchanters to make, and are not particularly good protection anyway, even from the dumber demons in new ITL, because they are resisted by 3/IQ, and only work within 3 hexes, and demons can use all weapons so you can hand a demon a crossbow to use.

Nonetheless, RAW demons are ridiculously powerful as assassins. So are wizards using Astral Projection, and that does warrant serious consideration, both the GM choosing what version of what magic he wants to be present and known and used by whom in his game worlds, and by security officers and other powerful people in the game situations.

[JohnPaulB]

Hmmm. I'm sure that 'The Church' (that we are not giving an psychic Power to) probably doesn't like demons. They probably may have enough social clout to get lynching parties and the Inquisition onto any hint of Demon Summoning. Social pressure and having to do this underground my be enough to limit this rampant activity.