does the maintenance penalty (-1 per spell) alter effective skill for maintain costs?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Luck does not work for ceremonial magic critical failures, it works fine for normal magic critical failures.

To try and stop a critical failure, yes. To adjust the result of the critical failure, no.

[AlexanderHowl]

True, but I think that stopping the critical failure is almost always going to have more utility than changing the nature of the critical failure. At skill 7-15, Luck will allow you to reduce the probability of a critical failure to ~1:125,000 rolls. At skill 16+, Luck will allow you to reduce the probability of a critical failures to ~1:8 million rolls. In either case, a mage with Luck will almost never experience a critical failure.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

True, but I think that stopping the critical failure is almost always going to have more utility than changing the nature of the critical failure. At skill 7-15, Luck will allow you to reduce the probability of a critical failure to ~1:125,000 rolls. At skill 16+, Luck will allow you to reduce the probability of a critical failures to ~1:8 million rolls. In either case, a mage with Luck will almost never experience a critical failure.

For the things that have been talked about, it's not that good, because you'll probably be rolling more than once an hour. Of course, you can buy Luck up, though for many mages buying Magery or skill levels up will seem a better investment, even if there is an in-game idea on how you'd become more lucky. If Luck is something you are or are not born with, unless it's common, most mages won't have it, and every so often the iron foundry will blow up or become infested with gremlins, etc.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Dalin

According to Magic, p. 8, the cost reductions come from your base skill rather than effective skill. The only modifier that affects this is the mana level (-5 for low mana).

Nice catch. I frequently forget this... so no matter how many spells you have on, this never increases the energy costs (by lieu of losing bonuses for high skill) or increases the casting time (by lieu of losing time-halving) ?

I guess if it never has these problems in the first place (when initiating a spell) then there would be no reason for it to create the problems for maintenance...

I guess the only question then (since spells-on penalty, like range penalties, just doesn't matter) is how the -5 to skill penalty for Low Mana (which DOES affect the ritual discounts) is applied in terms of maintenance.

"Mana-at-time-of-casting" is obviously what matters for the initial spellcasting, but for maintenance, is that cost also determined by MATOC or is it determined by "mana-at-time-of-maintenance" (MATOM) ?

Another thing relevant to non-mages is whether or not you can maintain a spell at all once you exit High Mana and go to Normal Mana where you can't cast spells. Is that restricting just for starting them, or also for continuing them?

M126:

a spell requiring no Magery and no special advantages or attributes could be loaned to anybody

I guess this might be similar to M19 Using Enchanted Items where you presumably don't need to be a mage to maintain the spell your item casts in Normal Mana either.

Originally Posted by Dalin

I hadn't thought of the exploit you mentioned though. Changing the cost reduction rule would certainly prevent that, but would be a fairly serious nerf for starting wizards.

Having the rituals changes to energy/time dependent on effective (rather than base+mana alone) skill is a lot more appealing to me but I guess it'd be a lot more book-keeping too.

I guess the +1 bonus to skill for taking x2 time (option) or penalties for omitting ritual elements (-2) also wouldn't influence energy costs?

Nerfing wizards doesn't seem like a bad idea as it adds a lot of options compared to muggles with just mundane traits, it only seems like a problem when we compare it to the relatively low cost of competing exotic/supernatural traits.

Originally Posted by WingedKagouti

Demons aren't the worst things to happen on a critical failure. For these types of operations the 17 roll on the default critical failure table is even worse: Forgetting the spell for at least a week and requiring an unmodified IQ roll once per week to regain it.

It's a really nasty roll for the Compartmentalized Mind scenario, as the maintenance compartment will also forget the spell and thus be unable to maintain all the ongoing instances.

Depends on the strength of the demon?

Forgetting the spell wouldn't be so bad if you used spell defaults. Guess that'd be one good reason for mages to get that perk from Magical Styles as a backup for if they forget spells.

Not sure what "Ritual Magery" guys would do though... like how exactly do you "forget" a technique which defaults from a Path of X skill? Do you just lose any points you've put in the technique? Or maybe treat it like it's "incompetent" and be an extra -4 to the default? Or just "can never do it" ?

In terms of Compartmentalized Mind if you lacked the default skill (assuming Magical Styles perk) to have it at 15 to get the -1 then all of a sudden all your maintenances will be 1 energy / duration and drain you dry until your skills got back up to snuff.

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

a mage with Luck will almost never experience a critical failure.

Especially if they ALSO have stable magery.

In a world where those lacking it could use "temporary enhancements" rules from Powers to access it, I could see those w/ luck getting lazy and not getting the TE to save on Energy, even though that is safest.

What would be super fun is all mages having "Unstable Casting" and giving the option for 2 tiers of temporary enhancements (the 1st to remove Unstable Casting as a "reverse limitation" enhancement, the 2nd to add Stable Casting) to avoid risk.