Breathe Fire / Lightning Stare / etc. in 4e

[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.