Okay, let's say that Cassandra has Spark +7 and Magic +3 and just bought mastery of the Spark spell. (I kind of like "Spell Mastery" better than "Advanced Magical Techniques"... perhaps I should change the name.)
She decides to see how many spheres of mage-light she can create simultaneously. Each is just difficulty 10. I'll assume she rolls an 11 each time.
Her first one, then, is 10+11 = 21. A 10 would be a partial success, a 15 a success and a 20+ a crit. She crafts a really bright one with an effective Magic rating of 3+2 = 5.
For her second one, she has an effective Magic rating of +2 (because 1 point is tied up in the first spell). Now she rolls a 20 and makes an almost equally bright one (total +2+2 = 4).
The third time she rolls a 19 and makes one with a brightness of +1. It's rather feeble in comparison.
The fourth is at 18 and brightness +0.
The fifth is at 17 and brightness -1.
The sixth is at 16 and brightness -2.
The seventh is at 15 and brightness -3.
The eighth is at 14... and that's only a partial success so her effective Magic rating is reduced from 3-7=-4 to -5... at this point, that's not good enough since at Magic -5 the spell is off the bottom of the scale and automatically fails.
If she retried until she rolled a 15 (not hard, she's got a +10 base and is at -7 so she only has to roll a 12+) she'd be at an effective magic rating of 3-7 = -4.
At this point, she's at -8 to all casting checks and -8 to her effective Magic rating, so only a critical success (which bumps the Magic rating up by +2) could squeeze out another mage-light sphere. At a total adjustment of +2 and needing a 20 to succeed, she could pull it off, but it's not likely.
The absolute best she could ever roll would be a 25+10 = 25 which is a crit*2. That gives her a Magic rating of +7, which means the most she could ever maintain at once would be 11 lights. Only the first four or so would be decently bright. Everything after that would be little wisps of light.
Posted by Kiz at March 1, 2006 05:09 PMCommentsPost a comment