Breathe Fire / Lightning Stare / etc. in 4e

[Bruno]

They're essentially <X> Jet spells that come out of your face, take two seconds to cast, and cannot be maintained. Their sole real advantage over Jet is that they require no free hands - Flame Jet et al can of course be cast gesture free by highly skilled wizards (like most DF wizards), but still come out of your hand - meaning that if you're hanging off a cliff/rope/ladder/etc, or tied up, you can't direct your attack and you may set yourself on fire.

They're not "bread-and-butter" combat spells, they're "AHA you thought I was HELPLESS did you!?" spells.

On the plus side, they benefit normally from casting time reductions.

So: For comparison, the normal sequence for Flame Jet (As I understand it) is

Your Turn 1) Concentrate, roll Flame Jet. You now hold a Flame Jet, but you can't attack with it this turn unless you've got Accelerated Time Rate from somewhere. You are ready to defend with it if your GM lets you parry with Flame Jet (I'd let you parry another energy Jet spell or a light saber with one, for reference). Importantly, at this point you can no longer have your Concentration disrupted.

Your Turn 2) Attack! Maintain!

Your Turn 3) Attack! Maintain!

etc.

For Breathe Fire (without casting time reductions), the sequence (As I understand it) is:

Your Turn 1) Concentrate. Hope nobody interrupts you.

Your Turn 2) Concentrate, roll Breathe Fire. FOOOOSH! You now have a jet of flame coming out of your mouth. Importantly, at this point you can no longer have your Concentration disrupted.

Your Turn 3) Attack! aaand you are done because there's no maintenance, only 1s duration, and you now have to start over.



I have two alternating suggestions for a DF game:
1) Leave these spells as they are, but remind players they're sort of emergencies-only as written.

2) Allow them to be maintained like Flame Jet.

#1 will probably result in seeing less use of them unless someone's really desperate to punch through defenses. As one of the "cooler" types of spells, this would make me sort of sad as a GM, but I can cope. If you want to encourage their use because you like the flashy look, this may not be the solution for you.

#2 has the issue that you're getting a damage increase for the same energy cost as the regular <X> Jet form; if you allow regular <X> Jet to parry things (Even just energy weapons) I would suggest disallowing this for the <X> Breath/Stare spells or only at a penalty. Considering the "start up time", I'd say they're otherwise basically fair for the damage bonus.

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by Bruno

For Breathe Fire (without casting time reductions), the sequence (As I understand it) is:

Your Turn 1) Concentrate. Hope nobody interrupts you.

Your Turn 2) Concentrate, roll Breathe Fire. FOOOOSH! You now have a jet of flame coming out of your mouth. Importantly, at this point you can no longer have your Concentration disrupted.

Your Turn 3) Attack! aaand you are done because there's no maintenance, only 1s duration, and you now have to start over.

Yeah, which makes them very expensive and kind of lame. You don't really want to spend a lot of effort getting good at them, because they aren't cheap and don't work that well. Which isn't a major issue, but . . .

Originally Posted by Bruno

I have two alternating suggestions for a DF game:
1) Leave these spells as they are, but remind players they're sort of emergencies-only as written.

I'll probably do that, but I'm still mulling over treating them as Melee spells. If you can't cast other spells while they are ready, they make good surprise attack spells and they aren't exactly cheap. But I might just stick with the RAW and have them suck. I don't particularly care; mages get a lot of bang for the buck in the basic magic system so I'm not going to cry too much if they lose a little on these spells.

I'm not thinking adding more house rules than that. I'd like to minimize my house rules in this game, for a lot of reasons, and shifting them from an existing spell type to another existing spell type is an easy fix where adding advantages, etc. for them is a much deeper fix.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Toadkiller_Dog

I'll probably do that, but I'm still mulling over treating them as Melee spells. If you can't cast other spells while they are ready, they make good surprise attack spells and they aren't exactly cheap. But I might just stick with the RAW and have them suck. I don't particularly care; mages get a lot of bang for the buck in the basic magic system so I'm not going to cry too much if they lose a little on these spells.

I think it's reasonable to allow the spell to be held until used, it seems consistent with Melee spells and it doesn't seem broken. It might be fun to say that a Breathe spell thus held prevents the caster from talking, though.

I'm not thinking adding more house rules than that. I'd like to minimize my house rules in this game, for a lot of reasons, and shifting them from an existing spell type to another existing spell type is an easy fix where adding advantages, etc. for them is a much deeper fix.

It's GURPS Magic, so don't think of it as a house rule; think of it as an errata fix for a deeply flawed book. :)