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Old 08-26-2020, 11:39 AM   #1
Plane
 
Join Date: Aug 2018
Default partial versions of Drain Mana

M127 outcomes are pretty all-or-nothing. Ie no matter whether something began as Low/Normal/High/Wild it becomes a 'No Mana' dead zone when you use Drain Mana on it...

What are thoughts regarding one of these two approaches for more complex outcomes:

1) scaling penalty based on how much mana there was to begin with compared to what you're trying to lower it to. This could match the 'Continuous Mana' rules in Thaumatology, for example.

2) partial lowering (ie High becomes Normal, Normal becomes Low) dependent on margin of the roll

3) maybe the chance of losing magery on a critical failure could be lower if you weren't trying to completely wipe out the mana, just lower it a tad
A similar approach could apply to Restore Mana on same page, except it can't go higher than "surrounding" mana. Meaning if you ever lost a High Mana zone you'd need to find some hidden High Mana zone elsewhere to "reseed" it, or perhaps find someone with Mana Enhancer to help out with the reseeding.

RM can only work on No Mana dead zones but could boost them to High Mana if surrounding was high. I'm thinking rename "Boost Mana" or "Balance Mana" and you could allow it to boost Low Mana to High Mana more easily than boosting No Mana to High Mana.

To boost something HIGHER than surrounding mana MIGHT be possibly by considering it a +300% enhancement on the spell? Or maybe a scaling +% enhancement based on how far beyond surrounding you want to go?

- - -

Also had idea that "Aspect Mana" variants (based on Fantasy's aspected mana ideas) might also exist for these. Like if there was a +1 mana everywhere, you could "Drain Mana for all except fire" to effectively make it +1 for fire ONLY. "All except fire" could maybe deserve an "all but one college" limitation to reduce energy cost by -10% or however that is valued in Thaumatology (depends on how many colleges exist in the game)

Reducing mana JUST for fire (or JUST for water) would be easier: could take a -60% "one college" modifier.

Boosting normal (+0 all) mana to +1 fire would be more difficult though: you'd either need need adjacent mana that was +1 (or at least +1 to fire only) or else need to take the cosmic +300% to boost mana beyond surrounding levels. I could see allowing a -60% "one college" discount (limited enhancement) though, so it would only be +180% for -36 to skill and 10+36=46 energy per hex instead of -60 to skill and 10+60=70 energy per hex.

M130 Suspend/Drain Magery having aspected/college variants might follow similar approaches. Like if you wanted to drain "all except fire-aspected magery" so someone could still cast fire spells, or "only fire spells" so they couldn't cast fire but could still cast other colleges.
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aspected mana, drain mana, magery, one college only, restore mana

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