[Plane]

Originally Posted by corwyn

Order is irrelevant since you will have to apply penalties to both spell levels.

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.

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 not and there isn't some obvious "hey I berserked your friend" villain bragging... then would it be -5 because you're doing an unseen "I'm targeting whoever attacked my friend, wherever they are, hopefully they're in range" sort of thing (one of the benefits to magic over advantages with the Malediction enhancement: with Regular Spells per B239 you don't even need to be able to sense your target)

Originally Posted by corwyn

The actual spell you are casting is Counterspell. Base skill is 20 so half casting time, -2 energy cost.

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

Whereas if cost/time were based on the lesser of two (like with casting) nobody would ever buy Counterspell higher than their highest spell.

Originally Posted by corwyn

B, though it's 2.5 rounded up.

Indeed, I can't remember if that was a brain flub or a typo on my end last night.

Originally Posted by corwyn

Low mana reduction works like low mana; nothing else does. Irrelevant to this example.

Low Mana is basically something I'm using as an example as working different from range penalties on cost/time/ritual (something I'm often prone to forgetting)

The only thing besides Very Low Mana (or Continuous Mana in the negative) which I could see possible working this way is things that would lower the base skill.

[QUOTE=corwyn;2391705]
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"

Originally Posted by corwyn

Range modifiers apply regardless of which skill level you are starting from:

(Lower of 20 or 9) - 5 == Lower of (20 - 5) and (9-5)

Both = 4 and I strongly recommend not casting since your chance of crit failing is much higher than your chance of success.

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.