[RPM] Blasting with RPM--something that works better than you'd think?

[Michael Thayne]

Last night, I ran session #2 of a Monster Hunters campaign. I had one (new) player playing a witch who really wanted to go the "blaster" route, even though this is supposed to be inadvisable with RPM. But I decided to roll with it, and had her move around some points on her character sheet so she could get a relevant Grimoire as Signature Gear.

I told her to pick a range she wanted the spell to have, she picked 20 yards. As she gathered energy, everything in excess of the minimum needed for the spell would be put into increasing the damage. The effects we used were Greater Create Energy and Lesser Control Magic (since we were making charms). The minimum cost to do that and hit 20 yards away is (5 + 5 + 6) = 48 energy, which seemed like a lot for an effect that only did 3d damage (since this was going to be a "blatant" effect). But we found that six gather energy rolls would typically bring the energy up to around 81 points, enough for an 11d+1 attack.

Since no one in the group was packing one of those .50 cal rifles you see in High Tech, this was the most powerful attack anyone had. And our witch was able to prepare a half dozen charms like this while only accumulating 1 quirk. We didn't even do it the most terribly optimal way. She wanted to shoot lightning rather than fire (which a lot of things are vulnerable to), and we didn't even use the Ritual Mastery perk or grimoire "collections." Also, she was cautious about how many gather energy rolls she would make for one spell.

Now that I'm getting a better feel for how the system works, it's easy to see a good Ritual Path mage doing some really impressive blasting. Yes, Dodge is an issue, but that mostly goes away below 1/3 HP, meaning that at the very least blasting has great "finishing move" potential once other party members have weakened an enemy. Has anyone tried that?