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Old 05-14-2022, 02:02 PM   #1
Ndreare
 
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Default Understanding Missile Spells

Am I understanding this correctly. A wizard who has magery 3 and 12 Fatigue can build-up a fireball in 3 seconds that does 9 dice of damage? Or even toss a 3d6 fireball every round until his fatigue points around run out?
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Old 05-14-2022, 02:19 PM   #2
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

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Originally Posted by Ndreare View Post
Am I understanding this correctly. A wizard who has magery 3 and 12 Fatigue can build-up a fireball in 3 seconds that does 9 dice of damage? Or even toss a 3d6 fireball every round until his fatigue points around run out?
Pretty much, yes.
You are correct.
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Old 05-14-2022, 02:23 PM   #3
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

Every other round. First you take the Concentrate maneuver to cast the spell. The you take either Attack maneuver to toss the missile, or an additional Concentrate to increase the strength of the missile. Or Aim, or Move, or whatever else. When you stop taking consecutive Concentrates and take some other maneuver, you no longer have an option to increase the size of the missile on your following turns.
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Old 05-14-2022, 02:24 PM   #4
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

That is awesome and it makes the mage a lot more powerful then she thought she was.
When she read the spell she thought the same thing as me that it was just 1D6 per second up to 3d6 maximum. But then we started talking about the basic magic rules at the beginning of the magic section made it sound like it was actually it was actually enhanced by her having 3 levels of magery. And I wanted to make sure I was telling her correctly
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Old 05-14-2022, 02:32 PM   #5
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

Given enough time and energy a missile spell may be a big artillery piece, if the mage is powerful enough.

In older edition it was as you originally though it was, 1d per turn up to 3. Happily it was improved in 4th edition.
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Old 05-14-2022, 03:15 PM   #6
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

Missile Spells definitely saw improvement in 4th Edition.

The main limiter for GURPS magic is Fatigue.

Base is 10 so a mage can fire off one or two big spells and thats that.

However there are many ways to work around that.

-Powerstones
-Energy Reserves
-Higher skill to lower cost
-Alchemicals to return fatigue
-Friend or Flunky Mages with Lend Energy

These are but a handful of the ways to enhance a Mage's power.
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Old 05-14-2022, 05:09 PM   #7
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

Another thing to keep in mind with Fireball is that there is still an attack roll and potential defense. It's easy to waste time and FP building up a massive missile only to have the opponent dodge. Explosive Fireball can help in this situation because you can target a spot on the floor (at +4 to hit) in which case the target will almost certainly be caught in the explosion.
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Old 05-15-2022, 12:19 AM   #8
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

Clearly it is a nice ability to be able to "charge up" under cover and then attack with the spell.

I think it is good to go over with the new player what critical failures look like when you have all this "i win" artillery "in-hand".

Also go over the "enlarge" action with the spell to comical levels and then the character is damaged and blows their Will roll.

It's not clear in the RAW, how cancelling a held spell works. It's not a duration spell so the 1 cost doesn't seem really fair to some people. But you are literally summoning / conjuring a fire fire missile in your hand.

It's also useful to understand how the spell works and how a Wand would work and how they are "fired".
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Old 05-15-2022, 01:17 AM   #9
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

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Originally Posted by gmillerd View Post
It's not clear in the RAW, how cancelling a held spell works. It's not a duration spell so the 1 cost doesn't seem really fair to some people. But you are literally summoning / conjuring a fire fire missile in your hand.

It's also useful to understand how the spell works and how a Wand would work and how they are "fired".
If you are using a missile spell (in this example Fireball) it is a two stage process.

1- You are building the spell. You can continue to build next round. At any point you can just stop casting the spell any energy put into it is lost however the spell is ended with no additional cost.

2- The spell is the desired strength, stop building and immediately roll to cast (for a 1-3 pt Missile for a Mage with Magery/3 this would be at the end of first round of casting). Roll the Dice Critical/Non-critical Success/Failure all happens immediately. (Assuming some degree of success) The spell is *cast*, the process is over. You are now holding a Fireball of strength X.

If you no longer have a combat usage for that spell the question on the table appears to be; How to dispose of this missile?

At this point as a GM I would allow a player to spend a point if they wished to just void the spell. However 99.9% of the time it probably makes more sense to just fire it into the ground in 'that hex over there' and save the point. Sure there is a very slim chance the player could critically fail the spell throwing roll (even with the +4 to skill for aiming at a hex)but rather than wasting yet another point of fatigue in most cases shooting the ground is the better option IMHO.
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Old 05-15-2022, 02:56 AM   #10
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Default Re: Understanding Missile Spells

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Originally Posted by Ndreare View Post
Am I understanding this correctly. A wizard who has magery 3 and 12 Fatigue can build-up a fireball in 3 seconds that does 9 dice of damage? Or even toss a 3d6 fireball every round until his fatigue points around run out?
Thanks to how Classic handled missile spell and how 4e Magic was effectively Classic Magic and Grimoire together with little change (even using the old names for spells in some places) I thought Fireballs were still capped at 3 dice of damage:

"Time to prepare a missile spell depends on the energy put into it; each turn gives it 1 point of energy" (3e Magic p 12)

Rereading the 4e text I realized yep it is now per magery each turn. Oops.

As for throwing a fireball every round that might have been possible with snap shot but since that mechanic doesn't exist in 4e then no - it take you a round to throw the spell.
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