Is it too easy to cast powerful spells with RPM?

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

The easiest solution is probably to limit the maximum skill levels via GM veto - "no, you can't have any Path skills over 19, and you can't have more than 150 total skill across all your Paths" or whatever suits you best.

Something this made me think of that might help would be that a Grimoire, rather than just giving a static bonus, gives its normal bonus up to a certain final skill level, then is reduced beyond that. Perhaps a typical Grimoire gives its full bonus up to skill 15, half bonus up to skill 20, quarter bonus up to skill 25, and so forth. So, if a character with skill 13 grabs a +4 Grimoire, that's good for +2 to get to skill 15, but then the remaining bonus (+2) gets cut in half (to +1), for an end result of skill 16. For our skill 20 character, that +4 Grimoire has its bonus reduced to +1, for only skill 21 (total 24 with Grimoire+Ritual Mastery+workspace). The idea here would be that, the better you are, the less useful a guide is. More expensive Grimoires that don't suffer any reduction until skill 20 might be available - and they probably require some minimum level of skill to actually make use of, as they contain markedly more advanced information.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by qchap

With Talents from Ritual Path Specialists from Pyramid 3-66 one could easily build a mage with two Path skills of 20 (Magery 4, Talant 4) and it wouldn't cost too much - a 200 point character could easily have it.

With Ritual Mastery and, say, +4 Grimoir, which is still not very expensive, that mage would have an effective skill of 26 with some ritual. Adding fine workstation with Signature Gear would give 27 skill.

I can't recall Grimoire from Thaumatology, is this an addition to the Path/Book system from Pyramid 3/66 or a new kind?

[Shostak]

Originally Posted by Plane

I can't recall Grimoire from Thaumatology, is this an addition to the Path/Book system from Pyramid 3/66 or a new kind?

RPM Grimoires are described in Thaumatolgoy: Ritual Path Magic. They give a flat bonus.

[Taneli]

Effect Shaping RPM (Pyramid, ~66 or so, Laws of Magic) limits the casters a bit more, as you get penalized on the casting roll by -1 per 10 points of energy that the spell would cost instead of repeated rolls to gather energy. It also makes the power of the caster a bit more linearly related to their skill level.

[Aldric]

Isn't a caster skill limited by 12+magery anyway ? How would someone get in the high 20s range ? A grimoire for +4 (but doesn't that double the required time ?) and a +2 for a specific ritual with a perk.
That's 10-11 energy per attempt on average, and a basic Fireball costs 18.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Aldric

Isn't a caster skill limited by 12+magery anyway ? How would someone get in the high 20s range ? A grimoire for +4 (but doesn't that double the required time ?) and a +2 for a specific ritual with a perk.
That's 10-11 energy per attempt on average, and a basic Fireball costs 18.

The Talents referenced in the first post give a bonus to two Path skills and a few related mundane skills - and as an Alternative Benefit (see PU3: Talents; the tl;dr of that is you can essentially have a Talent with a leveled Perk alongside it instead of it improving reaction rolls of narrow groups), each level of Talent gives +1 to the cap for the two Path skills involved. For example, going off of memory, the Anatomist Talent includes Path of Body, Path of Undead, and I think Physician, Physiology, and Surgery (maybe something else as well, I think [5] Talents allow up to 6 skills), and also increases the skill cap of Path of Body and Path of Undead. Someone with Magery 4 and Anatomist 4 has a skill cap of 16 for most Path skills, but 20 for Path of Body and Path of Undead. +4 Grimoires aren't cheap, but they aren't (by default) incredibly expensive either, being equal in cost to one month's wages for an average job (a bit over 10% of average starting cash at TL 8, but a full 70% of average starting cash at TL 3, because CoL is weird). Doubling the time is a bit problematic if you're working under severe time restraints, but that's typically not the case. If you're making a Charm, you can get a bonus from using a Good or Fine workspace kit, but those are markedly more expensive (but still rather affordable if you drop some points into Wealth). And, if you have the time to make a Charm (or a Wand, which requires a markedly longer prep time), doubling the time to gather energy typically doesn't make much of an impact (unless you lack Ritual Adept (Time) 2). Places of Power are also a possibility, and you can reduce the amount of energy required further by using Traditional/Decanic Trappings (where it's not too difficult to get a 5-10% reduction, particularly for a ritual you intend to use frequently - like, say, on that you have Ritual Mastery for).

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Shostak

RPM Grimoires are described in Thaumatolgoy: Ritual Path Magic. They give a flat bonus.

They also appear in MH1 (p39).

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by qchap

With such a skill it is relatively easy to cast about 300 energy spell. So, if the said caster would choose Paths of Magic and Energy, then, with a mere day of preparations, he could make a Wand of Destruction... Which is scary!

Is it? It's a short-range one-shot single-target weapon that needs to overcome resistance (with rule of 16). It's also stopped by wards, which are significantly easier to cast than destruction and it's reasonable to assume any prepared foe would have them if they were worried about weapons like this.

It does 20d damage. A character with a similar expenditure of character points (in Patron for example) could get, for example, an RPG-7 for slightly less than the cost of that +4 grimoire. It does 6dx5(10) cr ex plus 7dx2 cr ex (so 24d more, at 66x the range, and it can hit multiple targets). It also could be reasonably acquired within a day, and it only takes four seconds to reload.

I'd be more worried about rituals with large scope global effects, than I would be about magical heavy weapons. Even then, most settings would reasonably have a prohibitively large number of wards and other countermeasures that could be assumed to exist, that would render most such castings effectively impossible.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by qchap

The thread was started because I wasn't sure if it's really so easy to gain such a high skill or I was missing something. Now I know that it is easy, and it is a problem (at least for me). So then I was just discussing how to fix it and now it's kinda solved.

Glad to hear it.

It is SO GOOD to see you posting again, SP! :-)

[qchap]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

It does 20d damage. A character with a similar expenditure of character points (in Patron for example) could get, for example, an RPG-7 for slightly less than the cost of that +4 grimoire. It does 6dx5(10) cr ex plus 7dx2 cr ex (so 24d more, at 66x the range, and it can hit multiple targets). It also could be reasonably acquired within a day, and it only takes four seconds to reload.

In the setting I was thinking about it's not so easy to get to RPG-7 amounts of damage. In an ordinary medieval fantasy it's off limits too.

But I see your point, maybe I was concerned more then I should.