Now that I’m finally on the verge of starting a campaign, one thing I was wondering, concerning magic, is how casting times function in the more abstract versions of combat (ie Versus and Bloody Versus). I think it’s spelled out pretty clearly for the Fight! mechanics, in that a player gets a number of actions equal to his speed, spread across three rounds, and spells take a certain number of actions to cast.
How, then, does one deal with casting times in, say, Bloody Versus where things aren’t really tracked in actions? Over the course of a round of Bloody Versus, do we just assume that everyone involved employed a number of actions equal to their speed? With simple Versus, I assume casting time isn’t such a big deal and so you should go with whatever seems appropriate to the situation. But that still leaves the question of what to do about Bloody Versus.
So am I going about this in the correct (or at least a reasonable) way? Or is there some more appropriate way of dealing with this that I just missed? I’ll take any advice on this, or any casting time-related advice you guys can provide as I’m sure it’ll come up eventually - bloody wizards and their meddling!
I’d say you can cast any magic you want, but if it’s longer than 2 or 3 actions your opponent gets an advantage dice to reflect how much time you’re taking.
James’ idea sounds good, but I’d add that longer spells are simply inappropriate - how long is too long is up to you. Most attack spells are fast, like 1-5 actions. Some like Storm of Lightning (20 actions) are too long. Rain of Fire is 7 actions, but I’d still allow it with the opponent getting an advantage die.
That looks most helpful actually. I think somehow I started reading the book from the beginning then, at some point, starting reading the Rim sections backwards from the end. And, of course, it seems due to this unorthodox manner of reading the book, that this chapter got skipped.
Sir, I commend you on your uncanny knack of knowing what you wrote in your own book.
So in the case of Bloody Versus with Sorcery, does the spellcaster divide his Sorcery pool into attack and defence, as for a weapon skill? And then have the spell go off if the attack pool gets enough successes to meet the spell obstacle?
I may be stating the obvious here, but I couldn’t find anywhere in the book addressing this.