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Old 03-16-2012, 10:09 AM   #41
Kromm
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

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Originally Posted by Snaps View Post

Good point. (I don't know crap about how actual Medieval Battles went down).

But this would only stop the 2 point Create Fire Mage. Mages with Throw Spell can get around this pretty easily, and with Delay, the Mage doesn't even have to be near the Battlefield.
The issues with Throw Spell are anemic range (Max 80) and low accuracy (Acc 1). The wizard still can't strike from the safety of the back lines, and operating near Max gives him -10 to hit, which with the low Acc means good odds of a miss scattering onto friendly forces and scoring an own-goal. The trick with Delay is in guessing when and where the battle will happen. Battles are as much maneuver and surprise as fighting, and you sure don't want a linking spell to be triggered by a surging enemy that falls back and draws your army into the spell area, or to be mis-timed and go off when your troops occupy that ground. Telecast is best – although given its prerequisites, it approaches "strategic weapons" level stuff not likely to be used in smaller battles.

Incidentally, I looked up a few battles from Hellenic times through the Middle Ages. It seems that battlefields ranged from 1,000 to 2,000 yards deep, from camp to camp. So the ranges at which your wizards need to operate are on the order of 500 to 1,000 yards. Smaller distances certainly weren't unknown, but these were typically hasty encounter battles (where wizards with 100 assistants can't easily pitch camp and work magic) and/or small, local skirmishes (meaning that 100 assistants might be the whole of the force, and needed for fighting, and that there may be no budget to hire a wizard). That doesn't shut down the possibility, but it does suggest that wizards would fill a role more like specialist siege engines in huge pitched battles involving wealthy states.

Frankly, the real challeges of battlefield magic reside in predicting where and when things will happen; in communicating what will happen to your own men without giving Frank the Weak-Willed Spear Carrier intelligence that any enemy wizard can mind-read from him; and in keeping your own men from charging or retreating onto your carefully prepared spell areas (you'll need a legendary commander to convince troops to hold that still!). Magic needs a level of spatial and temporal precision that battle tends to deny. Using divinations to achieve this is a double-edged sword, given how divinations interfere with other divinations. And conditional linking spells can backfire badly, as broad wording can result in friendly fire accidents, while conditions circumscribed with lawyer-like precision risk never being met.

Also, I'm with Apache on critical failures: The unpleasantness of these things goes up with the energy involved. I'm not sure I want the wizardly equivalent of Oppenheimer and Teller back there behind me, doing their thaumatology project and promising me that everything should be fine, but warning that there is a slight risk. Or worse yet, being all snobby and technical, and not warning that there's a risk. You just know that smart enemies will be looking for mundane ways to mess up the casting at the last instant, giving big skill penalties that make critical failure very likely.

None of which utterly militates against using ceremonial magic on the battlefield, but all of which might explain why it isn't as easy as it sounds.
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Old 03-16-2012, 12:33 PM   #42
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

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The issues with Throw Spell are anemic range (Max 80) and low accuracy (Acc 1).
Yeah, I've never been enamored with throw spell. The easiest way to do ritual casting area spells is by working out moving the spell, either because the spell is naturally mobile (e.g. Windstorm), attaches to an object (e.g. Wind) or by casting a second spell to move the first spell (e.g. Shape Fire). Windstorm is an excellent choice in general, a 25 yard radius strong windstorm picks up objects weighing up to 750 lb and moves at 50 yards per second.
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Old 03-16-2012, 12:50 PM   #43
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

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Yeah, I've never been enamored with throw spell.
Throw spell is excellent for Deathtouch...

-----
Even assuming that you could manage ritual magic castings from 3 ranks deep in the line (which I don't think is practical, though might be at the edge of possible), finding wizards with the skill necessary (15) is going to be tough when combined with the bowels of iron and sense of patriotism/adventure/what-have-you to enable them to make it. Unless high magery is common in a game world, the old standby IQ-14 Magery-3 characters WILL be rare. Which means that there will be several prerequisites (at 1 point) followed by the main spell(s) at several more points. That represents quite a bit of training for a very specialized activity. It may be justified, but I don't think that it will be easily obtained in quantity. (This is along the line of finding someone with an M.D. and a Ph.D. in something like Physics who is also willing and able to function on the battlefield. I'm sure there are people out there like this -- heck, I actually know someone like this -- but they're VERY rare.)
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Old 03-16-2012, 01:14 PM   #44
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

Ceremonial Magic would probably work best in a siege situation, where you have two large groups camped out and not moving much. Endless amounts of clean food, water and healing and easy fortification repairs. Plus plenty of cover to keep those mages safe.
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Old 03-16-2012, 02:48 PM   #45
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

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Ceremonial Magic would probably work best in a siege situation, where you have two large groups camped out and not moving much. Endless amounts of clean food, water and healing and easy fortification repairs. Plus plenty of cover to keep those mages safe.
That's actually a good point. Besieging a fotress suddenly becomes a much lengthier project if those bottled up inside have an indefinite supply of magically-provided sustenance and envigoration. The trick would be using your own mages to blast through all at once, or find a way to "poison the well" - Drain Mana for example, or summoning up a swarm of Mana-eating spirits.
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Old 03-16-2012, 03:06 PM   #46
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

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That's actually a good point. Besieging a fotress suddenly becomes a much lengthier project if those bottled up inside have an indefinite supply of magically-provided sustenance and envigoration. The trick would be using your own mages to blast through all at once, or find a way to "poison the well" - Drain Mana for example, or summoning up a swarm of Mana-eating spirits.
Generally, sieges don't make sense in a setting with reasonably high magic, there's just too many ways for magic to make the defender able to last far beyond any reasonable siege. However, magic does offer a wide variety of ways to do attacks and defenses. It is typically necessary to use either Pentagram or Drain/Suspend Mana to make a wall that can't just be trivially blown through via magic, and there are methods around both of those.
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Old 03-16-2012, 03:43 PM   #47
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

Magic overwhelmingly privileges the defender in a siege. Any sensible magic-using defender will situate his fortress on a mana spring or similar resource; is very likely to have a site that has received years to millennia of permanent and enchanted magical defenses; can count on the support of everyone inside his walls, including frail technical experts who could never travel with an army; can safeguard a stockpile of magic items (if only Powerstones) that would be serious targets for brigandry and supply-chain pilferage in a traveling army; will have the bonuses for familiarity with the area in the case of spells that assess them; and can very likely look down over his walls at his foes to establish line of sight in a way that the enemy must risk an overflight to accomplish. If using Magical Styles, perks like Sanctum and Super-Sympathy amplify this.
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Old 03-16-2012, 03:58 PM   #48
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

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Magic overwhelmingly privileges the defender in a siege. Any sensible magic-using defender will situate his fortress on a mana spring or similar resource; is very likely to have a site that has received years to millennia of permanent and enchanted magical defenses; can count on the support of everyone inside his walls, including frail technical experts who could never travel with an army; can safeguard a stockpile of magic items (if only Powerstones) that would be serious targets for brigandry and supply-chain pilferage in a traveling army; will have the bonuses for familiarity with the area in the case of spells that assess them; and can very likely look down over his walls at his foes to establish line of sight in a way that the enemy must risk an overflight to accomplish. If using Magical Styles, perks like Sanctum and Super-Sympathy amplify this.
Yet another reason for mage towers!

The Wizard's Tower watches from above the town
Unseen eyes never blinking sun up or sun down
Witnessing all for good or for ill, unassailable upon the hill.
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Old 03-16-2012, 08:26 PM   #49
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

As to the original question: "How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?"

In my world: It has destroyed, even if not the whole physical world, the whole base of civilization several times plunging the world into dark ages.

So far it is known to have happened a minimum of five times, each time killing 90%+ of world population and all the major cities and similar.
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Old 03-16-2012, 09:17 PM   #50
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Default Re: How has Ceremonial Magic not destroyed your game world?

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Magic overwhelmingly privileges the defender in a siege. Any sensible magic-using defender will situate his fortress on a mana spring or similar resource; is very likely to have a site that has received years to millennia of permanent and enchanted magical defenses; can count on the support of everyone inside his walls, including frail technical experts who could never travel with an army; can safeguard a stockpile of magic items (if only Powerstones) that would be serious targets for brigandry and supply-chain pilferage in a traveling army; will have the bonuses for familiarity with the area in the case of spells that assess them; and can very likely look down over his walls at his foes to establish line of sight in a way that the enemy must risk an overflight to accomplish. If using Magical Styles, perks like Sanctum and Super-Sympathy amplify this.
The whole idea of warfare gets harder to explain when any polity can be virtually impervious and capable of providing every need for itself with only miniscule material requirements.
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