Ritual Path Magic - Basic vs Effect-Shaping

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Scriptorian

There's a bit of weirdness with Effect Shaping spell design, where you might find that, after you've worked in all the parameters you want, you're still several "energy" points away from the next penalty threshold. Which can result in spells with a longer duration, more damage, etc than the concept actually called for, at no mechanical penalty.

That isn't entirely unique to Effect Shaping. Using the Quick-and-Dirty guidelines for Charms and Conditional Rituals can do this, as the modifier is based on multiples of your nominal Safe Threshold. Even when actually going through the full process, you can have a case where you're 1 energy away from fulfilling the needs of the spell, and then your next gathering roll has MoS 5 and you wind up with an extra 4 energy to invest in it. It's just the nature of using integer values.

Of course, if you want to change things up a bit, bringing a d10 to the table will allow for that. The penalty is equal to -(Energy/10) with rounding (I believe it's Round Down, so that 1-9 energy spells are at +0). You could leave out the rounding, and then if you fail by less than 1, roll a d10 against the decimal value, with success meaning you succeeded after all (treat a 0 as as a 10, and thus an autofail). So if you were casting a 33 energy spell (IIRC this is the cost of the base Fireball spell in RPM), that would be -3.3 to skill. If you have skill 16, that drops to skill 12.7. If you roll a 13, you could then roll a d10, and if you roll 7 or lower (so anything but 8, 9, or 10), you wind up succeeding after all. Now there's no longer a perverse incentive to add an extra 6 energy to the spell, as skill 12.7 has a higher probability of success than 12.1.