RE: (TFT) Slow Magic

[Marc Gacy <marcgacy@earthlink.net>]

> How about this (POMA-style) house rule?
>> The roll to succeed is made upfront . . .

>Marc
>   This is a major departure from the sprit of TFT.  Particularly 
since a word
> of command cast with this method will require eighteen turns, one and 
a half
> whole minutes, to complete.  Looking at a failed roll I see zero 
motive for
> the character to not just break off casting and starting over till 
they have a
> success.

Really? If you fail, you fail in one turn and you spend one fatigue in 
doing so.
It seems exactly the same as regular TFT, unless I've misinterpreted 
the rules all these years.
The missile rule similarly mimics the fact that failure still results 
in the full fatigue cost since it fails once it "left the dock" so to 
speak.

There is of course no motive to continue to cast a spell you know is 
going to fail, but you still pay the one point fatigue cost.
So to use your example, I see two rounds of failure before successfully 
casting Word of Command taking 20 rounds and three fatigue still pretty 
reasonable. 60 rounds, too much.

If it still seems too steep, maybe just make it fatigue cost = number 
of rounds. I originally came up with the IQ part when I was thinking of 
no fatigue cost, but then I changed my mind.

The gist of the rule was just an exercise in a simple time/fatigue 
tradeoff, but as I said, I haven't tried it yet, so I don't really know 
how well it would work. Clearly, its strength would be in prepared 
battles where there would be time to set up a spell and still be able 
to go in there swinging!

Finally, I must admit that the idea for this was based on the 
spellcasting rules in the Solomon Kane RPG from Pinnacle. I left out 
shortening the casting time by imposing a negative modifier, but that 
could easily be put back in (i.e. a spell could take less time, but 
there would be a penalty on the roll of -1/round shortened).

- Marc Gacy
marcgacy@earthlink.net
=====
Post to the entire list by writing to tft@brainiac.com.
Unsubscribe by mailing to majordomo@brainiac.com with the message body
"unsubscribe tft"