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The Other Problem Spells - what magic is too weak?


davecake

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1 minute ago, g33k said:

I believe it creates an "illusion" that only you can see; but Gloranthan illusions are temporary reality.  So you can ride a hallucinatory High Llama, walk across a hallucinatory bridge, climb a hallucinatory ladder (or rope), open a hallucinatory doorway into a building, etc etc etc.

Nobody else can avail themselves of this; and AFAIK you can "wield" a hallucinatory sword but not HURT (or in any way affect) anyone with it.

But (in the cases above) people will see you moving swiftly across the landscape at Llama-back height, "walk on air" across a crevasse, casually scale a sheer wall, walk into a building where no doorway exists, etc etc etc.

It's sort of the ultimate "personal utility magic" spell.

I agree and it could easily explain why eurmali are not really welcome. If people are able to do so powerfull things based on "nothing" you cannot trust them

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10 minutes ago, g33k said:

I believe it creates an "illusion" that only you can see; but Gloranthan illusions are temporary reality.  So you can ride a hallucinatory High Llama, walk across a hallucinatory bridge, climb a hallucinatory ladder (or rope), open a hallucinatory doorway into a building, etc etc etc.

Nobody else can avail themselves of this; and AFAIK you can "wield" a hallucinatory sword but not HURT (or in any way affect) anyone with it.

But (in the cases above) people will see you moving swiftly across the landscape at Llama-back height, "walk on air" across a crevasse, casually scale a sheer wall, walk into a building where no doorway exists, etc etc etc.

Yep. There was a post some time in the past year where someone noted that and it was one of those lightbulb  💡moments when I realized "Oh! That's what it let's you do!" (Only 30 years after first seeing and largely dismissing the spell.)  The "doorway out/in" that no one else can see/use is a great use, but as you note there are plenty of others.

Now we just want the rest of our Illusion magic to work as readily!

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3 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

... The "doorway out/in" that no one else can see/use is a great use, but as you note there are plenty of others.,,

I'm fond of "leveraging" the Eurmali.

YOU may not be able to walk across his hallucinatory bridge... but you can ride piggy-back on the Eurmali as he crosses!

So can the party Storm-Bull (which IS a sight to behold)...

 

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7 minutes ago, g33k said:

YOU may not be able to walk across his hallucinatory bridge... but you can ride piggy-back on the Eurmali as he crosses!

That's cool! Will definitely carry that idea along. (Now we just need the 101 Practical Uses of Hallucinate scroll to hit the Jonstown market)

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9 hours ago, Thaz said:

I've seen illusion used well by our groups Eurmal type...but it IS really pricey. Which seems counter intuitive. It seems easier to do physical effects using Rune Magic than giving the illusion of them. 

Illusion is physical, though.  You're creating stuff.

That said, it's expensive compared to other things.  But a Swiss Army Knife/Multitool is expensive.

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5 minutes ago, Diana Probst said:

Glue.

As written, it's not clear that it does anything other than hold something temporarily for 2 minutes, once you, the caster, have held those things together.

Standing on the top a tower, chased by guards. Glue a rope to the wall, ecape via the rope. The rope will fall down after the spell has expired. 

Your hand was broken in fight. Glue your sword to your glove and keep fighting even if you can´t hold your sword any more. 

You are chased by people that might fire missiles in your way. Glue your shield to your back and run!

Edited by AndreJarosch
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6 minutes ago, AndreJarosch said:

Standing on the top a tower, chased by guards. Glue a rope to the wall, ecape via the rope. The rope will fall down after the spell has expired. 

Your hand was broken in fight. Glue your sword to your glove and keep fighting even if you can´t hold your sword any more. 

You are chased by people that might fire missiles in your way. Glue your shield to your back and run!

I like the rope version.  I'd laugh as a GM if you tried the glove-fighting, but I could see someone gluing a shield to their arm in extremis.  Shields glued onto backs ... nah.  Arms have to swing.

But still, the rope is very good indeed.  And jamming locks, and gluing reins to saddles...

But it's very limited IMO, even with that.

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2 hours ago, jajagappa said:

And it's also not obvious that Hallucinate actually does anything for you (beyond creating an hallucination that only you can see).

That's why I love the spell! That "Ohhhh.... wow, ok that is pretty amazing" reaction when people realise what a self-only illusion can be used for.

6 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Also, if the Rune Magic is supposed to be how shapechanging is handled, in most creatures and peoples it doesn't work.

(Doubly so if most of them don't even get to be initiates...)

I don't think that most people in "shapechanging" cultures are actually supposed to be able to shapechange regularly. I think it's supposed to be rare, like the Beornings in Middle Earth. And if they need a whole bunch of them to go wolfy? That's what a wyter is for. 10 POW, 15 full-on werewolves. Rawr!

Edited by PhilHibbs
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6 hours ago, French Desperate WindChild said:

I agree and it could easily explain why eurmali are not really welcome. If people are able to do so powerfull things based on "nothing" you cannot trust them

People do not trust Eurmali because they are not trustworthy. Because they steal, betray, cause trouble and act selfishly. 

Its certainly possible to be a trustworthy and good person with Illusion magic, entertainers worshipping Donandar can be, for example. But Tricksters be Tricksters. 

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8 hours ago, davecake said:

As for making an invisible fire that attacks people  - well, it needs Illusory Motion if its going to move, a few points if it is going to move at any speed, and it only hits on DEX x 3, and only if you GM decides a reasonable fire is ok (I personally would not - being invisible isn't supposed to be a bonus for not buying the sight component), so all in all, with a cooperative GM, you can make it sort of mildly ok. 

I think the whole thing just shows it is badly designed as a system. If Illusory Substance being used to attack people with invisible fires is the main reason to make Illusion spells so expensive as to make most Illusions prohibitively expensive, then Illusory Substance is egregiously misdesigned. 

The point of the fire is that it doesn't need to move, and it doesn't need to attack (no DEX x3). If the opponent moves into the spot where the invisible fire exists, they take damage from the fire, or acid.

Yeah, the Substance Talosi is a bit questionable. But the fire/acid works okay. but only does 2d6. The acid is probably the best, because it really eats through armor for 15 minutes. Making the opponent easier for other attacks. The Fire can be resisted for half damage, and is likely to be successfully resisted. As Illusory Acid, it also can only be damaged by those things that can damage acids, so the 4 HPs are not such a detriment. (Don't cast it near the guy with Fireblade.)

I agree with you that Illusory X is pretty expensive for its power in combat even when in the best circumstance. It is, however, potentially useful in creative situations like pretending to be a specific enemy. Or stealing the crown jewels under an Illusory Sight making them look like something else. Picking up something across the room, via Illusory Motion, when you don't have access to Flight.

Note that Trickster has other spells which have no combat applicability. Remove [Body Part] is a good example. Not sure when you ever cast that, especially at 2 RP/part. Though there was a RQ3 scenario where a Trickster Priest had separated himself many times over, and the usurping Priest trapped the parts all over the 'temple'. Maybe remove an ear and slip it into a pocket of someone going to the big meeting? Really hope it isn't detected... Not like an ear or eye could move by themselves.  Illusory Substance may be more useful than that spell.

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4 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

I don't think that most people in "shapechanging" cultures are actually supposed to be able to shapechange regularly.

I think people in shapechanging cultures are supposed to shapechange about as often as, say, Orlanthi fly. As it is, the rules say they do it a LOT less (except those pesky Telmori)

 

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4 hours ago, Diana Probst said:

I like the rope version.  I'd laugh as a GM if you tried the glove-fighting, but I could see someone gluing a shield to their arm in extremis.  Shields glued onto backs ... nah.  Arms have to swing.

But still, the rope is very good indeed.  And jamming locks, and gluing reins to saddles...

But it's very limited IMO, even with that.

Glue is really useful in attacking walls during a siege. Once the ladder hits the wall, Glue it in place and the guys on top cannot push it away without dispelling it. (Used in The Cradle repeatedly). Glue someone's boot to the floor (they could untie their boot and get free if they cannot overcome the STR).

Limited, but sometimes useful. Not all spirit spells are as useful as Protection, Bladesharp, and Heal. 

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1 minute ago, Dragon said:

The point of the fire is that it doesn't need to move, and it doesn't need to attack (no DEX x3). If the opponent moves into the spot where the invisible fire exists, they take damage from the fire, or acid.

RIght - so if the GM allows basically to use Illusory Substance as just a damage spell almost entirely disconnected from the idea of an 'Illusion', it becomes a moderately effective damage spell. Note that it entirely relies on the idea that you can use the idea that Illusory Substance is a different spell to Illusory Sight as an advantage - which I would find quite dubious. 

 

6 minutes ago, Dragon said:

The acid is probably the best,

.. because it relies on you deciding Illusory Substance can get you a whole bunch of stuff for free. Its a puddle that anyone can walk out of that you treat as an automatically hitting targetted attack spell, and give powerful attack abilities that I don't think are implicit in the spell. 

Saying that 'wow, if you make a lot of assumptions about how it works and can make it fly past a very forgiving GM, Illusory Substance can be used as a fairly overpriced invisible attack spell' doesn't convince me that Illusory spells are balanced appropriately, or even useful in the general case. It just tells me that Illusory Substance is poorly designed individually as well as being part of a poorly designed system. 

 

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There are a lot of spells in RuneQuest that are not immediately useful for everyone, but are definitely useful for someone - and I think Glue is one of those. For certain users, its pretty handy, and as a 1-2 pt spell I think gives reasonable utility for the resources. Its a great spell for thief types, for example. Handy for tricksters. You can do things like Glue weapons into their scabbards before confronting the guards (or their boots to the floor if they are resting unaware), Glue doors shut to foil pursuit. Steal an item by dangling a rope down, then Glueing it to the rope, or use the same technique to retrieve something from a hard to get place. 

Its a handy utility spell, that will be great for some characters, and not useful for others. 

In this thread I'm really not trying to single out spells that are not obviously useful, and especially not things that aren't useful at all in a pragmatic way but represent cultural truth (things like Food Song or Peaceful Cut are obvious - they are minor spells whose only reason to exist is social/religious, basically a minor cultural difference). I'm thinking of things that are so poor that they break the game a bit - they make the things they are supposed to enable, and so create a bit of whole either in the game generally, or a gap in the representation of Glorantha. 

 

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IMHO Substance is where the problem starts. Throw away Substance and you can make them actual illusions - that is, not the quasi-real hybrid that they currently are. Actual illusions that can be spotted with an appropriate Perception roll could be made a fair bit cheaper.

But once you throw in Substance you're really not dealing with what I would traditionally call "illusions" any more, you're treading on to the domain of conjuring/summoning at that point. And while I would certainly agree that if it works out cheaper to actually summon and control (e.g.) a fire elemental than to make an illusion of one with similar powers then something has gone wrong, I can appreciate that it tricky to write balanced "quasi-summoning" spells and that it's usually safer to err on the side of "too weak" than "too powerful". Which is not to say it can't be done - just that what we ended up with was essentially just copy/pasted from RQ3 (as @davecake noted in the OP): it's the older edition that introduced the problem, RQG just failed to fix it.

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There are a few spells that appear too weak until you have a bit of an insight. Xiola Umbars Healing Trance spell, for example - it appears much weaker than other Rune magic healing that happens instantly, while Healing Trance still takes days to weeks - but once you think about the Zorak Zoran Seal Wound spell (likely to be quite common in the same communities) and how all those instant rune magic spells do nothing, and Healing Trance seems quite handy to have around. 

 

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10 minutes ago, GAZZA said:

IMHO Substance is where the problem starts. Throw away Substance and you can make them actual illusions - that is, not the quasi-real hybrid that they currently are. Actual illusions that can be spotted with an appropriate Perception roll could be made a fair bit cheaper.

I think rules that make it clear that abuse of the Substance spell to turn it into a 'damage blast' are not supposed to be enabled would be easy to add, but kind of miss the point. It would be easy to make it clear that it requires to hit rolls for any offensive use, that damage must be appropriate (so yeah, you want to make an Illusory Substance greatsword and hit someone with it? sure but... ) and so on. And I think the whole 'using Substance as a weapon is so dangerous we need to limit all general illusion magic' argument is not just a bad argument, but starts from a false premise.

But I also think that clearly, if you took away Substance, all other general purpose Illusion magic is still just far too weak for what they do. Even compared to other Illusion magic - Become <other shape> is pretty balanced for 3 points, but a 3 point Illusory Smell just to make a bad smell seems crazy! If the was a 1pt Trickster spirit magic spell that create a bad smell no one would think it was over powered! And when compared to, say, Heal Body or 

Its the whole basic approach - splitting spells into multiple senses for a start makes everything effectively cost 5 times as much, and then they are heaped with other disadvantages on top of that, none of which ever gets really playtested because they are so underpowered they barely get used. 

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Some ideas for better Illusory spells:

- replace Illusory Motion with a requirement that if you want it to move independently (or least move beyond repeating an obvious sequence?) it becomes an active spell requiring concentration. If you want to use it as an attack spell, sure, but thats what you use your actions for. Basically, make it work like the sorcery illusion spells. 

- put limits on fine control of the illusion - the Dex x3%/Dex x1% if invisible of the sorcery spells is fine, basic but simple and servicable. It might be OK to offer an alternative option for skilled sorcerers - like Dex x3% or some skill, whichever is higher? A special magic skill maybe? 

- make it explicit that the spell can't create effects like Acid (i tend to think given how crazily better Acid is that terrestrial acid that its actually a low level magic effect, either alchemical or otherwise), fire damage, other elemental damage - or just rig it so it is always worse than just casting the appropriate elemental spell, which the fine control to attack requirement probably mostly manages. 

- don't make failing to add a sense as being like getting Invisibility for free,  make it a disadvantage. Make an Illusory Substance without an Illusory Sight spell on it visible but in not a useful way - eg as a visible distortion or glow. 

- make it explicit (both for sorcery and Rune magic) that you need skills to make convincing Illusions, and that a good illusionist has appropriate skills. It then becomes a bit of a specialist thing with many role playing opportunities - make the skills Act and Art useful to an illusionst, make appropriate Lore skills to make a convincing Illusion relevant, etc. - and changes the focus to all the interesting deceptive uses of Illusion spells. 

- make the spells 1 Rune Point spells that you stack with magic points (like Sword Trance) - that still might be a bit high cost for Illusory Substance, but seems roughly workable for the others? It still makes Illusion spells an unusually expensive form of magic in terms of resources, but doable. Possibly even just a single Cast Illusion spell (lets call it 2 points) that you can stack with lots of points that covers all the different current Illusory <sense> spells, you pay the cost for more sense in magic points not Rune points? 

OK, thats off the top of my head. Any terrible flaws in that? 

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1 hour ago, davecake said:

But I also think that clearly, if you took away Substance, all other general purpose Illusion magic is still just far too weak for what they do. Even compared to other Illusion magic - Become <other shape> is pretty balanced for 3 points, but a 3 point Illusory Smell just to make a bad smell seems crazy! If the was a 1pt Trickster spirit magic spell that create a bad smell no one would think it was over powered!

I wasn't very clear there, obviously. My point was that if you ditch the idea of Substance and quasi-reality, you could then make a couple of illusion spells that were a lot cheaper. To copy from that-game-that-must-not-be-named, you could have "Spectral Force" for 1 point that included sight, smell, and sound up to say 100 SIZ per point (so a single point could create the illusion of a few Uz), "Programmed Illusion" for 2 points that included motion on a pre-programmed path, and "Mirage Arcana" for 2 points that also allowed motion but was Active (both a benefit and a drawback - you need to concentrate, but you can make it move anywhere/however you like within range). Permit Perception rolls to see through it or something.

Or if you want finer granularity, replace the lot with a 1 or 2 point Illusion spell that requires you to spend MP to activate the various sensory parts (and boosting them so you don't need to be a Rune level to make a convincing illusion of a Great Troll, so maybe 1 mp per 10 SIZ or something).

Essentially though once you have illusions that are quasi real, I think it's a lot harder to decide what a reasonable cost is. You could of course have some sort of table that says how much damage it can do, how big an area of effect it can cover, whether or not it can have special effects (fire, acid, poison), and so forth... but by the time you figure all that out, you've put in a fair bit of effort to create something that does arbitrary damage and, frankly, doesn't fit any common definition of the word "illusion" anyway. I would prefer that if illusions are able to do damage at all, then it should be of the "your mind makes it real" sort of effect, and best handled with similar mechanics to fear shock.

Edited by GAZZA
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5 hours ago, Dragon said:

Glue is really useful in attacking walls during a siege. Once the ladder hits the wall, Glue it in place and the guys on top cannot push it away without dispelling it. (Used in The Cradle repeatedly). Glue someone's boot to the floor (they could untie their boot and get free if they cannot overcome the STR).

Limited, but sometimes useful. Not all spirit spells are as useful as Protection, Bladesharp, and Heal. 

But it is a touch spell.  The boot part doesn't work.

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Quote

For an illusion with substance to do damage the target
must either strike themselves with the illusion (such as walking
into an illusionary fire), or motion must be combined
with the substance to give the caster fine control.

So fire is explicitly allowed. I can see how that could be extrapolated to acid, it would be limited to the 1=1D3, 2=1D6, 4=2D6 scale, but that's still pretty good if 2 points of illusory acid can melt 1D6 HP of armour. It would have to have enough SIZ to envelop the location, 2 points should be enough to cover someone's head.

Can Illusory Substance make acid? Not sure. Acid is usually associated with chaos, so it's dangerous stuff to mess with.

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10 hours ago, davecake said:

There are a few spells that appear too weak until you have a bit of an insight. Xiola Umbars Healing Trance spell, for example - it appears much weaker than other Rune magic healing that happens instantly, while Healing Trance still takes days to weeks - but once you think about the Zorak Zoran Seal Wound spell (likely to be quite common in the same communities) and how all those instant rune magic spells do nothing, and Healing Trance seems quite handy to have around. 

 

Indeed. Another good use of Healing Trance is to recover from Mindblast. Other than recovering from those two spells, I don't see much use of Healing Trance.

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8 minutes ago, Dragon said:

Indeed. Another good use of Healing Trance is to recover from Mindblast. Other than recovering from those two spells, I don't see much use of Healing Trance.

If you live near Trolls or Tusk Riders however that may be good enough. I suspect it would be a common spell in various healers choice. 

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