Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - Power-Ups for RPM?

Kalzazz · 10-16-2013, 01:21 PM

I am thinking of allowing Super Symbol Drawer perk

Super Symbol Drawer gives +1 to suitable casting rolls and thaumatology knowledge checks when the caster follows the following restrictions
1. Uses symbol drawing for 1 minute (modified by time spent rules)
2. Grandly draws symbols, either in the air (-4 penalty) or on a suitable surface (such as the ground with a stick, or on the wall with a marker), the symbols must be suitably grand as in some ways they are a prop much like a grimoire, no smaller than (the smaller of caster SM or SM 0, so a pixie could get away with say a normal sheet of paper sized set of symbols, but a human or a dragon would need to cover a human sized area)
3. Makes their symbol drawing check. +1 on success, -1 on failure, +2 on crit success, -2 and an automatic quirk (if the spell succeeds at all) on crit failure. On a knowledge check, a crit fail is still -2, but adds a bit of misinformation as well
4. It must be done right then right now before casting/pondering something, cannot be done ahead of time

Inspired heavily by this thread (I thought Worminghall Symbol Drawing was awesome and wanted to use it for RPM back then)

http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=98862

Symbol Drawing just doesn't get the RPM love, its only real use is preparing for -1 casting for non adepts, and they can just use Thaumatology instead (and considering they need the Thaumatology to cast the spells in the first place its hard to see why they really want Symbol Drawing to)

I think that it being time consuming, obvious, limited in application, requiring an otherwise dubious skill and allowing observers to figure out what your doing makes this perk category (note, as for allowing it to influence thaumatology knowledge checks also, in movies we always see people trying to figure out knotty problems at the blackboard, so I think symbol drawing makes sense there to)

10-16-2013, 01:21 PM	#44
Kalzazz Join Date: Feb 2009	Re: Power-Ups for RPM? I am thinking of allowing Super Symbol Drawer perk Super Symbol Drawer gives +1 to suitable casting rolls and thaumatology knowledge checks when the caster follows the following restrictions 1. Uses symbol drawing for 1 minute (modified by time spent rules) 2. Grandly draws symbols, either in the air (-4 penalty) or on a suitable surface (such as the ground with a stick, or on the wall with a marker), the symbols must be suitably grand as in some ways they are a prop much like a grimoire, no smaller than (the smaller of caster SM or SM 0, so a pixie could get away with say a normal sheet of paper sized set of symbols, but a human or a dragon would need to cover a human sized area) 3. Makes their symbol drawing check. +1 on success, -1 on failure, +2 on crit success, -2 and an automatic quirk (if the spell succeeds at all) on crit failure. On a knowledge check, a crit fail is still -2, but adds a bit of misinformation as well 4. It must be done right then right now before casting/pondering something, cannot be done ahead of time Inspired heavily by this thread (I thought Worminghall Symbol Drawing was awesome and wanted to use it for RPM back then) http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=98862 Symbol Drawing just doesn't get the RPM love, its only real use is preparing for -1 casting for non adepts, and they can just use Thaumatology instead (and considering they need the Thaumatology to cast the spells in the first place its hard to see why they really want Symbol Drawing to) I think that it being time consuming, obvious, limited in application, requiring an otherwise dubious skill and allowing observers to figure out what your doing makes this perk category (note, as for allowing it to influence thaumatology knowledge checks also, in movies we always see people trying to figure out knotty problems at the blackboard, so I think symbol drawing makes sense there to)