Why Take Snatcher?

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by transmetahuman

It would never have occurred to me to let Snatcher work for most of those. If nothing else... parallel worlds, different histories, difficulty of distinguishing winning ticket from thousands of losing ones while poking around, nothing to distinguish mole's portrait from the other councilmen's portraits, "oh, those were battle plans from a timeline where he was invading Fnordia instead", etc. etc. Maybe I'm influenced too much by Merlin of Amber/Chaos and that whole "visualize" thing in the description.

Anyone else play it the way Jeff does?

For the most part, no, it had not occured to me to play Jeff's way (though it's ingenious). I too wonder about whether the Advantage should support that level of specificity, but IDHMBWM.

One point on the lottery win -- you don't need to get the numbers in advance, all you need to do is get the winning ticket after the draw (provided it has not been signed or marked distinctively by the purchaser).

[tanniynim]

Originally Posted by nanoboy

Sure, there are those, too. I made up a Summon Steed spell on that ground. It's not so good for summoning a lockpick, though.

No, but with modular abilities, you can summon a gremlin that HAS a lockpick and happens to have 20 in lockpicking pretty easily.

Or, as a GM, I might just let you summon a lockpick if you had this kind of ability to avoid the above workarounds.

[tanniynim]

And for a low power conjurer that only needs to be able to summon little things (that happen to fall under the Accessory Perk) like lockpicks, flashlights, etc, I'd allow the following build:

Cosmic Modular Ability 1 (Physical Only +50%, Accessory Perk Only -80%) [7]

You can break that down further with Preparation Required and Limited Use or Costs Fatigue. I'd probably require enough to get it down to 5 points. These kind of little things will give the appearance of a Conjurer when added to other abilities.

[RedMattis]

Originally Posted by tanniynim

Cosmic Modular Ability 1 (Physical Only +50%, Accessory Perk Only -80%) [7]

a -20% limitation at most. Accessory perks are probably among the most numerous, and can replace most other perks.
Only being able to buy perks with a 1-point Modular Pool is NOT a limitation. This is so for the same reasons that you can't buy "Energy Reserves: Only for one Power" if you only have one power.

[Figleaf23]

Gizmos, anyone?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by nanoboy

I've been working on advantage-based magical spells for a setting, and I was trying to get initial costs for the introductory version of the spells down. For some, this is easy, but for my conjurers, it seemed hard. I mean, a conjurer's core spell would be based on Snather, right? And Snatcher costs 80 points, so when you manage to tack on -80% in limitations, you get a 16-point advantage. I think that's a little steep for a spell that's supposed to be part of a repertoire.

Then, I realized, why not take Modular Abilities (Cosmic Power; Physical Only, +50%; Accessories Only, -50%.)? That's a 10-point base that can easily be limited down to 2 points for a starting ability. Yes, you're limited to no weapons, but there are other spells based on Innate Attack that would be more interesting anyway. (I've made a couple for the conjurers-- Summon Shortsword and Shoot Arrow.)

Core spell? For advantage-based magic that's a problematic way of approaching things anyway. And no, that MA can't be easily limited down to 2 points. It's already got a -50% limitation on it. Also, Modular Abilities reproduces Advantages. Accessory is a Perk. I personally would not allow Modular Abilities to do Perks. Way too cheap.

[nanoboy]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Core spell? For advantage-based magic that's a problematic way of approaching things anyway. And no, that MA can't be easily limited down to 2 points. It's already got a -50% limitation on it. Also, Modular Abilities reproduces Advantages. Accessory is a Perk. I personally would not allow Modular Abilities to do Perks. Way too cheap.

Well, the system I'm working out allows mages to research any spell, but when they do, they suffer -X to their Thaumatology roll to do so, where X is the number of points spent acquiring the spell. Likewise, they may use the same process to improve a spell by removing Limitations or adding Enhancements.

Thus, when I am making the spell list, I make what would be a reasonable spell to try to learn from scratch. A 20-point spell would be very hard to learn, as the mage would have to find as many ways as possible to mitigate that penalty.

[nanoboy]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Core spell? For advantage-based magic that's a problematic way of approaching things anyway. And no, that MA can't be easily limited down to 2 points. It's already got a -50% limitation on it. Also, Modular Abilities reproduces Advantages. Accessory is a Perk. I personally would not allow Modular Abilities to do Perks. Way too cheap.

Oh, and it can be limited to 2 points. The -80%, as I understand it, is the total summation of all Modifiers. And if it isn't canon, I certainly have a setting rule for that case.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

Snatcher is better for divination and scrying because a lot of information can be put into a tiny amount of mass. Saturday's winning lottery numbers? The secret password to be let into the sultan's vault? Enemy's battle plans? How about his quartermaster's ledger? The missing pages from the Blue Grimoire? A portrait of the mole on the guild council? Treasure maps? Recipe for the Elixir Viti? The proof (or dis-proof) of Fermat's Last Theorem? No problem!

That's an argument for why Snatcher should be able to take a Limitation of a magnitude much greater than -80%.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by nanoboy

Oh, and it can be limited to 2 points. The -80%, as I understand it, is the total summation of all Modifiers. And if it isn't canon, I certainly have a setting rule for that case.

You're right. But I still wouldn't let someone use Modular Abilities for Quirks. What I would suggest for your system is to use multiplicative modifiers so there would be no limit to how low you can take their point total. Alternately you could simply just get the base spell unmodified and then need to roll at a penalty for increases in functionality.