Matakishi's Tea House

Love the new expansions for Crom!

I am curious what bench marks or rules of thumb you use when creating magical effects.

-Eli

My only cosiderations are 'is it useful?' and 'will it get used?' So the effects are fairly generic.

My Serpent Men have a ranged spell that poisons rather than flames but this is just for flavour, the effect, damaging an opponent, is the same. The poison does less damage than fire but is harder to remove so it all balances out.

I'll add more as I go along that may have other effects on the game. When I've finished the city that surrounds the Dark Citadel I'll have a wizard that can destroy the stone walkways which will be in abundance. This will force opponents to choose between jumping gaps or going round another way thus giving a situational advantage to the caster.

My Ancient Fishmen 'cloud minds' and essentially use up opponents' unused dice, this can be worse than taking actual damage, especially in time critical scenarios.

If it sounds fun I put it in

Thank you.

That was useful, but I was more looking for any rules or bench marks you use to determine how many dice a particular effect costs.

-Eli

The cost is determined by how much you need to spend to overcome your opponent's defence which is the same as any attack but of course with magic the dice take much longer to return to you and a magician can wear themselves out very quickly if they're not careful.

The payoff for this is that although a magic attack will initialy have the same effect as a physical attack, 1 or 2 dice, it often has a lasting effect and it can be carried out at range freeing the magician from retaliation.

Magic using is really a support role, protecting the fighters and finishing off weakend enemies or summoning eldritch muscle to pound things for you. A wizard who goes toe-to-toe with a fighter will die quite quickly which is as it should be