Magical Abilities in Phantasia
The gist is this: magic does the same shit as your Attributes, as described in the previous section. In some ways it's just another way to interact with the base system. Throwing a Fire Flower is just using magic to generate an Attack value. Levitating a boulder is just using magic to generate a Strength value. Divination is just using magic to generate an Intelligence value. That's a pretty good conceit, but I don't have a lot of faith in the execution. We also get a reiteration of the untruth that all PCs have access to all magical forms. A lot of those classes still have '–' ratings, guys.
We also get some terminology, that reuses earlier terms in an inconsistent way, and those terms get definitions which are contradicted almost immediately. It's a fucking mess that needed an actual technical writer. It's not hard to puzzle out what the meaning is, but the actual text is just a pile-up.
Equally bad is the
formatting for spell procedure. It's actually hard to describe. It begins with a simple and comprehensible list of the five steps. Then it promises to go through each step in detail. Then...
Okay, the title of step 1 (Determine the Attributes of the spell) is reprinted in 12-point italic font, and what follows is 20 pages of describing all the ways to do that in all the schools of magic, with multiple headings in 12-point all caps and sub-lists which are also in the same 12-point italic font... and then the original list picks up again at Step 2, again in 12-point italic font, such that it looks like a previous list just went from step 4 to step 2. I feel like I'm still not doing justice to how confusing this layout is. Look under the spoiler for another attempt.
1. Determine the Attributes of the spell you are casting.
FIRE: ATTACK & DEFENSE
Example:
ATTACK
DEFENSE
MAGICAL ATTRIBUTES USING FORCE AND RESISTANCE
AIR: MOVEMENT
Strength
STRENGTH
Dexterity
DEXTERITY
Movement
MOVEMENT
WATER: HEALING AND LIVING CHANGE
Healing
HEALING
Living Change
A: Determine Specific Attributes that the PC wants changed
Maximum number of Attributes changed
Example
B: Determine the Positive and Negative numbers of changes to make
Maximum number change in score
Example
C: Determine the spell's total value
Example
EARTH: STANDARD CHANGE
STANDARD CHANGE
TIME: INTELLIGENCE & FARSIGHT
Standard Intelligence
STANDARD INTELLIGENCE
Senses
SENSES
SPIRIT: TELEPATHY & EMPATHY
Telepathic Intelligence
TELEPATHIC INTELLIGENCE
Intuition Spells
INTUITION
Persuasion spells
PERSUASION
SHADOW: ILLUSION
The Five Levels of Shape
1. Attributes and Lycanthropy
2. Sex
3. Species
4. Genus
5. Kingdom
LIFE: LIFE TRANSFER
CORRIDORS
CONDUITS
1. Open the Source Conduit
2. Open the Output Conduit
3. Adjust Catalyst's Strength
4. Close all Conduits
Too much power
2. Calculate the spell's Force and Lifecost
3. Expend Magic for the spell
4. Determine the success of the spell
5. Determine the result of the spell
So the style is atrocious, how's the substance? Well, let's go through the actual spell procedure for a simple attack spell. The caster will be one of the sample characters, who is pretty okay at battle magic but not actually a Warlock, and the target will be a
n orc dugrun:
1. Determine Attribute: The determine attribute and determine cost steps seem like they could go in either order. Sometimes you look at a rock, figure how much strength gives you an acceptable chance to move it, and then let it cost whatever it costs. But sometimes you look at a dugrun and just want to hit it
as hard as you can. In this case I'm going to do the latter and let the cost determine the attribute.
2. Determine Cost: Our caster has a Capacity score of 360, which is how much magical energy he can spend on a spell 'without being damaged by its use.' I can't actually find any consequences for exceeding capacity, so I'm just going to treat it as a hard cap. The big chart tells me that Attack is conjured at 2 magic energy per point, so a blast that costs 360 energy generates an attack value of 180. That's
a lot. The base damage for an attack score of 180 is 15,000, and even a glancing blow will deal 1500 damage, enough to kill the target Dugrun 40 times over.
3. Spend the Cost: Simple subtraction. The sample character has 1000 energy in his pool, so he could throw out another blast like this, and a third that's almost as big, before being tapped out.
4. Determine the success of the spell: This is a roll of Relevant Magic Skill vs Target's Resistance, and the success determines how much of the spell's intended Attribute actually manifests. Dugruns have a decent resistance and our boy isn't a pro, so the probability breaks down to 1/10: 100% (180), 2/10: 75% (135), 3/10: 50% (90), 3/10: 25% (45), and 1/10: 0%.
5. Determine the result of the spell: Now there's a second roll, which is an attack roll between the Attack that the spell wound up having and the Defense of the dugrun. The big swing is whether the spell was knocked down to 25% or less. At 25% (45 Attack), the blast is less effective than an average person's punch, likely to do about 2 damage. At even 50% (90 Attack), the blast is 90% likely to kill the dugrun and 10% likely to badly hurt it. At 75-100%, that Dugrun is DNS toast. Even factoring in some reasonable ranged penalties on the blast, there's still a 70% chance of OHKO.
So high-commitment magic combat is very much rocket-launcher tag, and the most important defense is having a high Resistance relative to the attacker's Battle skill. Which you probably will have most of the time, unless you're fighting Warlocks. Our sample character has battle magic skill 13 and Resistance 20, for instance, while a warlock of similar rank would have skill in the 26-35 range. Which makes in-setting sense, because they're supposed to be the monopoly of force.
Now, while you can use battle magic to create a large Defense attribute in the form of a force field or something, it's actually a very poor counter to magic attacks. First of all, you can't raise such a defense as a reaction. If someone declares they're going to blast you and you try to raise a shield in response, that's your action for the round and it's only going have any effect if you win initiative. Second, Defense doesn't reduce the base damage of an attack, and it's very possible that a full-strength attack is going to have a minimum damage that will still finish you off. Third, putting
any duration on a Defense spell will at minimum double its cost (or put another way, halve its effectiveness), and then there's an
extra effectiveness penalty on top of that for no apparent reason.
The only upside is that the target for a Defense spell usually isn't resisting, which makes it way more likely that they'll have the full effect of a spell.
Let's say that our dude sees that a fight has broken out and takes a round to put up a defense before he joins in. Well, he probably wants the shield to last at least 1 Turn (which is 5 Rounds). This increases the cost by x5 and also gives it a -10 effect penalty. So 360 magic energy divided by 5 becomes 72. A point of Defense is 2 magic energy, so that generates 36 Defense, which is then penalized by 10 for a Defense of 26. Even though he's very likely to get the full effect by rolling his skill vs 0 Resistance... 26 Defense is substantially lower than the average naked human's defense of 50.
Wow, defensive magic is actually
completely useless, even if you're a Warlock. You'd think that even with literally three playtesters someone would have noticed this.
As a last note: There are no effect modifiers for attack spells, to make them AOE or DOT or anything. You're encouraged to put whatever special effect you want on your magic, so your attack spells could be fire bolts or ice spears or whatever. But they literally only do instantaneous single-target damage. I get that you might not want to go into a big pile of modifiers like Champions did, but the source material obviously does have multi-target bursts and they would be pretty easy to implement.
More detailed analyses of the non-battle magics will have to wait for future posts.
Next Up: Movement magic, possibly also the healing/life-shaping stuff.