> On Thu, 10 May 2001 ian_hammond_cooper_at_y... wrote:
>
> description or another. I'd go with figures that account for about
10%-20%
> of shipping lost each year through the ritual failing. In my
campaign,
> that would mean a simple test against a 14 resistance - yours may
vary.
>
But isn't it a _ritual_, not a simple spell? If so, you typically
get a bunch of bonusses. Probably at least +5 to +10 for having the
right equipment (statue of Dormal sounds like it is an important item
if it is the one common link, unless that qualifies as a shrine,
giving its own bonus), plus you presumably get support from the crew,
and presumably that support would be extraordinary (their lives are
at stake too). Even an 8 person fishing boat could generate an extra
+6 that way, most ships would be more around +10 or better. I always
assumed that the ritual would have auspicious times and days (which
probably happen to coincide with the tides), which could be worth
another few bonusses.
Even if the actual openning is a spell, I would imagine that there is
an associated ritual boosting the caster, so the bonusses work out
much the same. Hmm, this could help explain why things are so
different between cultures. They all have the same spell of
openning, but they all have developed different rituals to boost the
spell's caster ahead of time.
So you are probably looking at close to a mastery worth of boosts in
most cases. On top of that, even journeyman level people are
expected to have 1W in the relevant skills, and I would think that
ships captains would tend to be higher than that in such an important
skill--maybe 10W would be typical at the less skilled end. So you
are rolling using something like 10W2. I guess the appropriate
resistance then depends on the level of success needed, but 14 sounds
low to me, off the cuff.
--Bryan