I am sympathetic to your cooling problems; your absence from the game has been noticed, but it was genuinely brief, and in any case life happens and I put no pressure on people who come or go.
The people who have come tonight include Kurt, Dave, Harry, and John 2.
What happens if Kurt attempts to maintain his meditation over the long haul? Well, either he succeeds, or he fails, or he botches--but in any case, since it is defined in five minute chunks, we need to roll a skill check; and since he said he would keep it going, we need to roll until he does not succeed or a GE roll says he is interrupted. The first skill check is 71, but given that the skill is defined as providing RS=SM to the next psionic skill used and when chained it is the next psionic skill used, he's got +20 for the previous sit-mod, +11 for his skill ability level, and +20 for his bias, 51% chance of success, but a failure anyway. He loses his concentration. A 16 GE roll means things are in a holding pattern otherwise.
There's no problem with missing time from play, except that I don't always remember everything that is or was happening the last time you played. Dave suffers the consequences of that at the moment, because not knowing whether I'm working from a recent GE roll I'm rolling another, and it falls as 19, not thwarting but generally unfavorable result. But before he can know what's happening he has to go somewhere where he can find out.
I've got to do some number crunching for Harry, for two distinct spells. The first, though, he has cast already--but differently, so I'm going to have to pay attention to the details.
It appears that he wishes to enspell "the deck", by which he means more than just the main deck but also the forecastle and aftcastle. I already did some dimensions of the ship when he was fighting the pirates--no, before that, when he was enspelling the hold. The ship is 150x40, but it's not a rectangle; on the other hand, I suspect that he's now talking three dimensions to some degree, as he would expect it to impact those on the masts and ladders as well as those on the flats of the deck. I'm looking at less than six thousand square feet, plus the various surfaces that make the third dimension contact points.
For consistency, I've pulled up pieces of the original spell calculations:
I am going to bet that a holy ground consecration skill has a base half hour duration...and I would guess that a thousand square feet would be the baseline....and I think I'm giving +7 for Soulmourn as a unique entity.
O.K., let's construct Harry's spell from the ground up. Alliance holy magic for a M1@1 ritual NOS; the magic creates holy ground, that is, it sanctifies a space for holy purposes. We've got a 1000 square foot baseline against what we've estimated as six thousand square feet, doubled once for 2000, again for 4000, and half again for 6000, -25 for area. We're taking a half hour ritual and multiplying it to 8:00:00, doubling it once for each of 1:00:00, 2:00:00, 4:00:00, and 8:00:00, four doublings for +40. We have +5 appropriateness in there somewhere, +3 for loudly (singing) and +2 for sound being vital, and with the combination of walking and kneeling this is a fully involved ritual physically, +15, +7 for the inclusion of the sword, and I've given each emerald a value of +4, doubled because they are destroyed (did I overlook that on the last spell? I'd better check that), and there are six of these. That's +48 for the emeralds. Internal sit-mod is +95, and I can stop crunching numbers and roll: 34 is a successful casting and a 1@1 Sanctify large area of ground M+1@1 walk, kneel at four corners, singing praises and giving thanks to the gods, invoking them (Heimdall the Guardian, Thor who protects travelers, Odin who sees all, and Freya who guides sorcerers), and pacing the entire perimeter of the area. Appropriate words spoken aloud in English so the sound matters, 8 hours casting time, my named-unique sword in hand, walking and kneeling, sacrifice six uncut emeralds, casting the husks of the spent emeralds away ground must be activated to use +95SM.
I'm stopping there, partly because I don't know for certain what Harry is going to do for his next spell and partly because I've put a lot of time into this and need to move to the next player before it gets much later.
I've got to find a price for pizza again for John 2. He paid 20c for a pizza with a lot of toppings, but this will be a couple toppings, so we'll go with 15c.
--M. J. Young
