[MH / RPM] Greater and Lesser Effects

[Anaraxes]

What guidelines or examples have you developed for categorizing magical effects as Greater or Lesser?

Originally Posted by MH1

The GM is the arbiter of whether an effect is “believable,” "natural,” “simple,” or “subtle” (and thus a Lesser effect). As a guideline, ask whether a mundane bystander would believe that the effect could have occurred naturally. For example, a lightning bolt striking someone under a stormy sky is believable – but a lightning bolt shooting out of a mage’s fingertips, or striking someone under a clear sky, is not.

The idea reminds me of the similarly ill-defined class of "vulgar magic" in Mage. The idea is to try to avoid the D&D artillery mage, sure -- but that leaves a lot of gray area.

One way to avoid distracting from the game in progress is to work out spell lists in advance ("Rotes", in Mage terms), but the system is supposed to be more free-form. It would be good for casters to share some ground with the GM to avoid debates or in-game negotiations of the "I cast X... oh, that's Greater? Well, let me think of something else... how about Y" sort. So, the more examples the better.

The lightning bolt example is a bit problematic because even under a stormy sky, the chance of someone being hit by a bolt is still tiny -- especially when it conveniently happens just as you need to take him out. We're not quite at the improbability level of having a whale and a bowl of petunias land on his head, but actual probability apparently isn't a factor in "believability".

We have an example of +1 ST being a Lesser Effect. So what happens as the bonus increases? We can probably agree that +100 ST is "unnatural", and would be a Greater Effect. But where's the boundary? The upper limit of natural human ST, say 20 or 25? Does that mean adding +5 ST to the ST 15 guy is Lesser, while adding +5 ST to the ST 18 guy is Greater? Or do we just pick a limit, say anything more than +5 is a Greater effect? Is the limit lower for DX or IQ, as those are more valuable stats?

There's another example of DR 4 being a Greater effect. This seems likely calibrated against the fact that DR 2 "tough skin" is the limit for a normal human (and even that rivals custom-designed leather armor, so that's pretty tough for "normal"). But what if the DR is something more "subtle" than direct transformation of the subject's body into leather or metal? Say, the DR comes from an invisible force field, or "thick air", or lucky-that-the-blow-lands-at-an-angle? How high can DR go before it's no longer "subtle" or "believeable"? And does the level depend on the Path, as in these examples?

What kind of questions have come up in your games, and how do you judge the answers?

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

We have an example of +1 ST being a Lesser Effect. So what happens as the bonus increases? We can probably agree that +100 ST is "unnatural", and would be a Greater Effect. But where's the boundary? The upper limit of natural human ST, say 20 or 25? Does that mean adding +5 ST to the ST 15 guy is Lesser, while adding +5 ST to the ST 18 guy is Greater? Or do we just pick a limit, say anything more than +5 is a Greater effect? Is the limit lower for DX or IQ, as those are more valuable stats?

+30% seems like a useful limit, since that appears elsewhere in variance from (HP and FP, particularly).

[Anaraxes]

That's a nice rule of thumb; +3 for the average character, up to +5 at 18, so it's a fairly small cutoff. And it fits with the "natural" HP/FP limit.