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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pielorinho" data-source="post: 5213914" data-attributes="member: 259">Hi, folks!  Long time no see.  All right, enough with the pleasantries.I'm getting ready to start a new campaign, using the Mage:Sorcerer's Crusade rules but set in 1670s Caribbean.  With pirates.  Natch.Someone elsewhere strongly criticized my choice of rules systems, and mocked me for saying that in ship-to-ship combat I wanted mages to be each roughly equivalent to a big old cannon; he said they were more equivalent to God and would get away with anything.  That really got up my nose, since the rules make it pretty clear that it's not a "get away with anything" system and that the GM is free to disregard rules at any point.(Side note:  if you are a stickler for rules and find such an approach irritating, fair enough--you probably want to stop reading this thread now.  Like right now.  Go ahead, I'll wait.)I'm not about to let people get away with anything, but I can sort of see the point.  Couldn't a mage go belowdecks and use a low-level effect to peer through a porthole and set a spark to any barrel of gunpowder in sight?  If none is in sight, wouldn't a simple correspondence/connection 2 effect put one in sight?  This would probably be forces2/connection 2, and with a single success end just about any battle.  At worst we're probably talking forces3/connection2/prime2, a nasty combination, but manageable.  Or imagine other things:  use of matter2/connection1 to warp a mast, or bring down a sail, or cause a cannon to warp.  Entropy2/connection1 could cause a misfire in a cannon.  And so on.I freely admit I may be worrying too much:  the rules, light though they are, might prevent such abuses through such things as familiarity requirements with connections, or the durability of certain items.But just in case I'm not worrying too much, I'd like to have some things in place to keep a single mid-level spell from ending a ship-to-ship battle.  Battle-enders are boring, especially ones that will work reliably in any battle.Some ideas I've come up with:-Casting magic from a moving vehicle incurs a +1 or +2 penalty; casting onto a moving target incurs a similar penalty.  Max penalties on dice rolls are +3; if I impose both of these for ship-to-ship combat, that's a +3 penalty, making even a casual/coincidental effect with a single level-2 sphere have a base difficulty of 8--and that starts to get into the very difficult range.  (Advantage:  really easy to explain; disadvantage:  may make mages useless in ship-to-ship combat).  This is still my favorite option, as it favors more subtle magic.-Just as you can't target someone's jugular vein in hopes that a single wound will kill them, you can't target a ship's gunpowder in hopes that a single success will destroy the ship.  You can certainly try the spell, but in game terms you're targeting the ship, and your successes reflect the overall damage you do to the ship.  If you don't do enough to cause a massive explosion, maybe you missed the barrel and instead set the deck nearby on fire.-The smaller your target, the smaller your effect.  If you're wanting to light a whole bonfire up, you might need one success to create a giant fire; if you're trying to light a candle, you might need one success to light a tiny flame.  Similarly, if you're targeting a single rope on a ship, you'll still need several successes to damage it, even though you could do much more damage to the entire ship with the same number of successes.Any thoughts, folks?</blockquote>

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