>Talking about Fireblade.......
>Say someone has the abilities cc 15w3 and fire magic 17.
>
>Some people are saying that creating a sword of fire from the fireblade feat
>would mean you attack using your fire ability of 17.
>So this combat monster has now armed himself with a flaming magical sword
>and he becomes rubbish at combat????
Yes, which is why most people wouldn't do it. You're almost always better off augmenting a skill with your magic.
I believe the Close Combat interpretation is not correct, because you are using your magic, not your sword-fighting ability. If you want a justification, your magic is not strong enough to make the created fire move the way your sword moves. It's only a sort of coincidence that it looks like a sword.
Normally you can't augment magic.
Markus
>If every single magical action a theistic hero takes must be a feat
>(possibly not cemented, thus giving improv modifiers), feats are
>concidered loose and bendable. Thus feats lose a lot of their
>importance - because people are using feats for a multitude of
>different things, the exact list of feats a character knows isn't
>really important.
Your premise is correct, but I don't agree with your ultimate conclusion.
A degenerate case is learning a single feat (perhaps from a subcult like one of Orlanth's Four Weapons). It makes a huge difference if you know Sandals of Darkness or Lightning Spear.
Also, many narrators are pretty stingy about improvising feats. Even for those who simply apply the -3 penalty (assuming you're a devotee), -3 is -3. For most people this is important.
>Using an affinity to create an effect ... However, here a character
>*does*not*use* a feat.
Here you contradict your earlier, premise, and I believe you are wrong. It is a feat. A brand new feat (which doesn't really need a name IMO), but a feat nonetheless. It may be a new discovery by the character; more likely it is a new discovery by the player.
>If a hero attempts to reincarnate his god doing something
>well-known, or defining ... no improvisational modifiers are used,
>because the character isn't improvising.
This describes a well-known feat: one of the standard ones, or one the player has cemented and is thus well-known to the character.
Initiates use feats, too, but they are never well-known. (Moderately well known, yes, and I'd give a larger penalty to an initiate who is improvising a non-standard feat.) This is what's meang IMO by them not learning feats.
>Using feats is very demanding - the circumstances must be just
>right. If someone wants to recreate the incredible Orlanth made in
>[insert myth] right at sunset, but the sun isn't setting, the
>mythical energies won't channel.
I disagree -- and your next statement explains why:
>The name of the feat is just the name of the feat - it doesn't
>contain all the information of the feat.
This is perhaps the best sentence yet written on feats.
David Dunham dunham_at_...
Glorantha/HW/RQ page: http://www.pensee.com/dunham/glorantha.html
Imagination is more important than knowledge. -- Albert Einstein
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