White Fire is a spell with Area of Effect: Natural Effect with a particular spreading rule. It states that after you hit a target with it, you roll a DoF and the spell jumps to another target on a 1, and you reapeat this proccess until it fails. However, Natural Effect spells also have a rule for spreading its effect, that you hit your target then reroll a DoF for each other target within the area.
Do these two work together for this spell? Meaning not only the lightning jumps from your target others, but also that the original casting can hit multiple targets at once? Also, can the spell jump back and forth between the same targets and hit a creature multiple times (whether by the Natural Effect jump or the particular effect of this spell)?
Lastly, would you advise picking this spell as a player? I fear it would be an unfun move to randomly kill the characters of the other players, specially considering how hard this spell hits.
I think white fire is supposed to, like, a lightning bolt. With that in mind, it wouldn’t bounce back and forth, and I’d forgo the usual Natural Effect and go with just use the one within White Fire. If it doesn’t bounce, then it’s gone to ground through your victim’s feet.
As to should a player pick it? Yes. White Fire is spectacularly useful, but, like a bazooka, don’t fire it off in small spaces or near anything you don’t want to kill. It’s wizard artillery.
I read it like Chain Lighting, bouncing back and forth, hungry for blood.
The tension around the wizard being double-edged sword can be fun in my opinion. Same for the tension of maybe I’ll get killed in the crossfire of this spell. It’s cool stuff.
My only comment on White Fire on the PCs is that I would be a tiny bit generous with allowing Complications when one of the party members is friend to death by the sorcerer.
Not that they shouldn’t be Severely, perhaps even Traumatically, wounded, but just a gentle suggestion. In my first BWG campaign, the sorcerer cast White Fire twice, and the second time it would have obliterated a mild-mannered engineer. I think that, instead, she spent a persona and I ruled that she had absorbed the energy: she was constantly discharging jolts in a spooky and ominious manner, but the game that was set to have a climax and finish 4 sessions afterwards was able to continue and conclude. It also taught them to be more careful with White Fire, it didn’t see another use.
This is fine, and I’d say with the more magical stuff there’s a lot of room for DM discretion. The main thing is to stop the players abusing something, so having some fairly severe consequences. Which is sounds like you achieved.
D’oh! I just got that you meant back and forth between targets already hit. For some reason, I read your comment as referring directionality. I imagine a given person only gets hit once. Like Chain Lightning.
I would usually go with what makes sense to me as well, but some aspects of BW seem so carefully engineered, specially when numbers are concerned, that I had to ask this one.