Indentifying Spells (while they are being cast)

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

Practically speaking it's difficult. Many spells have a 1 second casting time and at typical skill levels professional wizards have you only need to whisper and wiggle a couple of fingers and for the well advanced 20+ skill level characters, yoyu merely think a spell into existence.

This effectively makes Counterspell fairly useless.

I'd suggest the following modifiers: ! turn spell -1. Skill 15-19 -3 Skill 20+: Convince the GM why your character is entitled to make that roll at all.

Which was one of my issues in my current campaign when one of the PC's simply asked of me "What is Mage X casting?" I like your approach, thanks, might alter and modify it for my purposes :)

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

A skilled Thaumotologist should be able to figure out what spell someone is casting by reading the changes in the local magical environment. He doesn't look at the rituals that the caster is using.

I'd probably give a substantial penalty (-8 or more) to identify magic if no rituals are used, but I'd allow it.

Ditto. So Magery 0 is a definite prerequisite for the Technique. Has this ever come up in your DF game btw?

Originally Posted by benz72

GIven that magery adds to thaumatology I'd agree with mlangsdorf above with the caveat that the prospective perceptor MUST have at least magery 0. Anything less is a purely theoretical understanding without being able to observe the fluctuations occurring in the first place.
For comparison, one does not recieve a penalty to defend against an attacker with ATR (not the first one at least) no matter how fast he is (that I know of).

I agree (other than the whole moving to fast for your opponent to fire a ranged weapon at you though; since they do take a penalty for your speed)

Has this ever come up any of your games? If so how did you deal with it then?

Also, as Cap brought up, if you don't know what spell your opponent is using how the heck is Counterspell even remotely useful? You wouldn't just cast the spell every time and hope you knew the spell that was being cast against you. Your FP would go bye-bye in no time.

Ghostdancer