[Blast] and [Transmute]

[Sepulchrave II]

An aspect of [destroy] which we haven't explored is its ability to utterly destroy a 10-ft. cube of matter; perhaps we can expand on this. It is unique to the seed; can it be widened to destroy a 20-ft cube, or 2 x 10-ft. cubes? Could a sufficiently large [destroy] erase a city, for example? It would be nice to make this (S), either internally, or by subsequent factor applied.

 

[Cheiromancer]

I posted a question about Shapeable Spells, btw. Not a lot of interest in it, but frankthedm doesn't think that 20-ft. cubes can be sub-divided. He's not Hypersmurf, but I weight his rules-savvy as equivalent to KarinsDad, which is pretty darn good.

The volume destroying ability of disintegrate is pretty good. Compare with stone to flesh, which can restore a petrified creature of any size, or affect a 3 ft. diameter cylinder that's 10 ft. long. Relatively insignificant.

Mind you, a sufficiently powerful [blast] would vaporize a 10-ft. cube of matter too, wouldn't it? I don't recall, off hand, how many hit points a 10-ft. cube of stone has. I think it is somewhere in UK's opus, however. I'll see if I can track it down.

Erasing cities sounds like fun.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

Re: Shapeable Spells

I hadn't considered earthquake or control water, which complicates things. I'd always assumed that the (S) quality allowed considerable finesse in sculpting spells; mirage arcana and hallucinatory terrain could achieve high precision, this way.
The rules seem kind of opaque, though.

Perhaps a more germaine question would be 'how much is fully shapeble worth?' I.e. if you could break up your 100-ft. cubes into 1000 x 10-ft. cubes (regardless of the ambiguity of (S) itself), is +6 reasonable?

 

[Cheiromancer]

You mean turning a shapeable (S) spell to a fully shapeable (FS) spell for +6? I think that is reasonable.

It would make widen into a geometrical factor, though: with +3 and +6 for full shapeability you get 8 times as many cubes for +9 SP. With two widens you get 27 times as many cubes for a total of +12. Etc.. (1 + number of widens)^3 times the original number of cubes for a cost of 6 + 3 x number of widens.

If you are dealing with a flat area you can cover a lot of ground that way. And the math gets funny. You'd need to take cube roots and such to figure out how to cover a given area.

In other news, a 10-ft. block of stone apparently has about 80 hp. According to UK's rules, anyway- in the Dungeons section of the URL, a 10-ft. x 10-ft. section of unworked stone has 900 hp for a 5 ft. thick wall. I suppose that would be 1800 hp for a 10-ft. section. Quite a discrepancy!

Wall of stone says that a 5-ft. section has 15 hp per inch of thickness; those are the hit points of a 10-ft. section of ordinary stone according to the section on dungeons. A 5-ft. section should be less, wouldn't you think? Although it seems like it shouldn't just depend linearly on thickness. If you break through a 4-inch thick wall, you don't have to deal with the resistance of as much stone as if the wall is 4-ft. thick.

I dunno.

Anyway, the difference is dramatic. Using UK's rules you'd have [blast] spells leaving craters- but not with the official rules. Perhaps a feature of [destroy] is that it toggles the rule set?