[corwyn]

Originally Posted by Plane

Range penalties might be different: Berserk has to be cast on the person you are berserking, but Counterspell can either be cast on the victim of Berserk OR the caster of the Berserk spell.

No it won't. We aren't casting Berserk. We are specifically talking about the order of calculating of Counterspell.

In the latter case I'm not sure how you figure out who that is though... is there a spell to analyze an active spell to figure out who it's caster was?

If his skill is 20+ you probably can't without a spell. Below that, you might get a Thaumatology roll when it is cast.

In this case wouldn't this time/cost reduction explain why someone might pump it incredibly higher than any other spell they know?

Nope, because your chance of countering that lower spell is practically 0. If you have a base skill of Berserk of 9 (requiring IQ 10 and Magery 1 at most, which was pointed out to you in the other thread) you'll almost never succeed in countering it, even at no range penalties. Remember, it's also resisted. Good luck.

What is better:
20, cost 0, 3 turns, capped at 9, or
spending those 40 points on Magery and getting
16, cost 1, 5 turns, capped at 13?

Range penalties are applied to final skill, for example, whereas since skills are based on IQ, I'm not sure if that works like lowering base skill or not...

I'm actually wondering if no because of how B250 describes Foolishness as "to his IQ and IQ-based skills".

Unless that is meant to imply double-dipping (-2 per energy total: one from lowering the IQ, one from lowering the IQ-based skill .. unlikely) the necessity of a separate mention seems to imply that IQ penalties actually don't lower IQ-based skills...

Otherwise it would just say "to his IQ" then instead of "and skills" you'd expect to see it worded as a reminder like "remember this reduces your IQ-based skills"

You're reading way too much into that. It's a redundant reminder that it affects skills as well.

In the top of my post I mentioned one might perceive range penalty calculation as different for counterspell (since it can have 2 targets).

Another is that Counterspell is Regular but you might be targeting a non-Regular ongoing spell, such as an Information Spell which uses (M14) Long-Distance Modifiers.

It's hard to find an example since most information spells are instant (not maintained) but there are a couple like Mage Sense (M102) and Summon Shade (M103)

In that case the penalties to Counterspell based on range to the target of the spell would be much higher than the penalties you'd have for casting that information spell on the target.

So basically it would heavily matter if you first reduced Counterspell to a lower Information Spell prior to adding the Counterspell's -1/yard penalties to it, or if you could apply the -1/yard penalties first, and then only lower the final effective skill of Counterspell if the other spell is lower than the reduced-Counterspell.

No it wouldn't. Again, because you apply range penalties in both calculations.