Is it too easy to cast powerful spells with RPM?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by qchap

With such a skill it is relatively easy to cast about 300 energy spell. So, if the said caster would choose Paths of Magic and Energy, then, with a mere day of preparations, he could make a Wand of Destruction... Which is scary!

Is it? It's a short-range one-shot single-target weapon that needs to overcome resistance (with rule of 16). It's also stopped by wards, which are significantly easier to cast than destruction and it's reasonable to assume any prepared foe would have them if they were worried about weapons like this.

It does 20d damage. A character with a similar expenditure of character points (in Patron for example) could get, for example, an RPG-7 for slightly less than the cost of that +4 grimoire. It does 6dx5(10) cr ex plus 7dx2 cr ex (so 24d more, at 66x the range, and it can hit multiple targets). It also could be reasonably acquired within a day, and it only takes four seconds to reload.

I'd be more worried about rituals with large scope global effects, than I would be about magical heavy weapons. Even then, most settings would reasonably have a prohibitively large number of wards and other countermeasures that could be assumed to exist, that would render most such castings effectively impossible.