Re: Wind Words

From: Paolo Guccione <teigupa_at_tss.tei.ericsson.se>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 18:15:59 +0100


Erik Sieurin replies to Simon Phipp that PCs have trouble recovering POW after sacrificing for divine magic, so even though a spell such as Wind Words has many uses few if any of them would pay the cost for it.

I agree with Simon and MOB that Wind Words is a useful spell. It has been used more than once in my campaigns, and always with important effects on the plot (and please note: on the overall campaign plot, not just the current encounter). However, in defense of Erik's opinion, all the castings of Wind Words used in my campaigns were taken from looted truestones or bound spirits supplied by Orlanth (i.e. the GM). No one of my PCs would lower his magic defenses by losing POW to acquire this spell, not to mention the reduction in spirit magic casting rolls. I agree that a PC may easily take one game year to recover the lost POW, so the disadvantages are not balanced by the spell's usefulness, especially if the PC is not a Wind Lord and the spell is one-use.

The problem, I think, is that POW has a lot of uses, including casting battle magic, creating enchantments and gaining Heroquest powers for powerful adventurers. Players often tend to avoid sacrificing POW for anything else than permanent effects.

Runepower is a limited solution to this, IMO. Imagine an Orlanthi with two Runepower points left who has the opportunity to use them to listen to what his opponents are saying. Many players would simply have the character forfeit this opportunity and save the two points to cast Shield in the next battle. After all, in the fifteen minutes he is spying on them the enemies could be talking about trivial subjects, while having Shield is _always _ useful to a PC.

Now, the spontaneous usage of Runepower suggested by David Cheng and Nick Brooke seems to me a much better idea, but it was defined as blasphemous by DC himself.

And, Erik, what is the POW-less system you are currently using? I have my own rune-based Divine magic system to bypass the problems you pointed out (available at my web site or through Delecti's Tower of magics), but I would be very interested in seeing _your_ solution. Is it available on the web?

			http://www.geco.it/~guccione

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