Any ideas for scaling on Magnitude of magical effects?
Last night, our Whisper (in an act of desperation) summoned a huge rainstorm in the middle of a Leviathan-hunter-captain’s ballroom to destroy some paintings displayed there.
I kind of plucked ‘4’ out of the air and narrated this torrential horizontal rainstorm in the room, with some people cut by the glass blown out of the large windows. Several paintings were destroyed.
Does that sound reasonable?
The Whisper took harm in the process: some as a Devil’s Bargain, feedback from the wards that they knew to be there; some as secondary drowning as he couldn’t quite get the summoning of water quite right.
(This gave the Slide an opportunity to get the rest, but the pair of them were captured. The other two PCs on that part of the job had already buggered off for their own reasons. But they did the job, so the crew now have a powerful demon serving them for a week and a day, which might be useful when it comes to rescuing the two captured ones.)
This must be using the “Tempest” special ability for the Whisper. Taking 4 stress is already pretty rough, so I think it’s good to have the effect be dramatic.
As for scaling supernatural effects, that ties deeply and strongly into the table’s vision of how haunted Duskwall is, and how dangerous Whispers are.
At one end of the spectrum, they are more like a medium, able to interact with the unseen and somehow, impossibly, move things without touching them! On the other end, they are the tormented conduit for the flickering etheric tides of the Ghost Field, rare and profoundly dangerous.
At the weaker end of the spectrum, I’d charge the 4 stress and have the paintings start raining inside the picture, with water oozing out of the oils and ruining the painting. Spooky!
At the other end of the spectrum, the storm tears that damn house down, crushing it with the fist of a howling maelstrom of the dead sluicing through the atmosphere and venting their senseless rage on the material world.
Anyway, I think it is totally legit to offer a complication as if rolling a 4-5 as a devil’s bargain, to stack with whatever other outcome. (Especially for something like this power that does not seem to require a roll. Even if it does, another complication is fair game.)
I think you raise an even more interesting point, though. What about taking a condition instead of stress? With a resist roll you have the option of taking a condition, or taking stress. What if you could do that for the Tempest ability too, as it is built on the same mechanic? Instead of taking the 4 stress, you take a level 2 condition for chilly drowning on dry land doing some damage.
The “rules as written” position is weakest around the hand-wavey magic of the whispers, in my opinion; it is the single most customizing point in Duskwall. So really, how you want to inflict consequences and what resources you want to charge, and what should even be possible, is all really flexible as long as your game table is on the same page. =)
Yes, it was the Whisper’s Tempest power.
I like the idea of the rain starting inside the pictures: that hadn’t occurred to me. Though to be fair, the player was narrating the creation of a storm inside the room.
To clarify, the “drowning on dry land” was a result of a 4-5 action roll result. I gave the Whisper an Attune roll to see how effective the storm was at destroying the paintings.
I like the idea of trading stress for injuries. That could be interesting. 2 Stress per level of injury? For those times when you just can’t afford to flip out due to overstressing.
I think 1 level of injury per 2 stress is just right, since you can have up to 6 magnitude and up to 3 (survivable) injury level. =)
Andrew Shields yea, sounds good. cause then there is Ritual, a few lines down from Tempest, lets you perform a 3, 6, or 9 magnitude power. a whisper could only take that if they took harm And stress in some combination
I assumed that the “magnitude” became the dice used for any Fortune rolls to see how effective the power was. So a 1-stress rainstorm rolls 1d to melt paintings; a 4-stress rainstorm rolls 4d to melt paintings; etc.
That’s considerable bang for your buck, compared to options like pushing yourself, so an Attune roll to see how much control you have over the channelling seems fair. (Failure might mean you create the effect but it is out of your control, unless you resist that consequence.)