So any suggestion of limitation and how the bonus should be calculated would help me to create a form to ask how the limitation should be calculated.
For magic skills, the rule of thumb is that anything which makes a spell twice as difficult or half as powerful gets +10, and anything that makes it half has difficult or twice as powerful gets -10. For anything that has less than a doubling/halving affect, the bonus or penalty is done by percentage rounded to the nearest ten percent for +/-1. For anything that more than halves or doubles, each halving or doubling creates a base for the next, that is, if we start with ten minutes one doubling is 20 minutes for +10, and the next doubling for +20 is 40 minutes, and the next doubling for +30 is 80 minutes, and the same fractional differences are used based on the percent to which the value is doubled or halved again.
That obviously means that a lot of such decisions are very subjective. I can easily say that if a magic skill takes twice as long to cast before it does anything, that doubles the difficulty. If, however, I say that the magic skill once cast cannot be cast again for as long as it took to cast it the first time, that is a considerably weaker limitation--it did not really make the skill twice as difficult or half as powerful, but it did put some limitation on it. To make it more difficult, if that limitation says that I cannot cast any other magic for that period, that is a considerably more potent limitation than one which says I cannot cast this spell again for that period--particularly if I have five other practiced spells that do the same thing that are not prevented by this limitation.
As far as thinking of all the possible limitations, I think one thing Eric's thread demonstrates is that we're never going to have them all. There is certainly some benefit to having a database which we can check to determine how other referees have rated various limitations (and power boosts), but if I'm sitting at the table at Ubercon or Days of Knights or even in my own kitchen, I'm going to check the cheat sheets I have with me and if it's not there I'm going to make a decision on the fly.
As a footnote, I think it would be a mistake to put such a list in the hands of players. I have no problem with any of these scenarios:
- Character lands in a world in which magic is sung, and learns magic from that world, discovering that the fact that it is sung increases its chance of success.
- Character meets someone who sings some of his magic, and decides to try singing magic, and so learns that singing will increase the chance of success of his magic.
- Character discusses magic with another character and learns that some mages bonus their magic by singing it, so incorporates this into some of his spells.
- Character wonders whether singing might help his magic, and so tries it, by which he gets bonuses.
The one scenario to which I vehemently object is:
- Player reads on a list somewhere that singing will get him a +5 sit-mod bonus on his magic under the heading "loudly or forcefully" and so has his character sing spells to get that bonus.
Characters are not allowed to manipulate game mechanics. Players are, but only to the degree that they can do so without disrupting their characters' in-character actions and to the degree that these manipulations are based on that aspect of the player/character relationship which gives the player pertinent information about his character.
This is not always easy, by any means. I know--it is particularly difficult for me. For example, I devised the bias level scale assignments (the 0@0 to 15@10 scale was devised by E. R. Jones, and the negative side also by him, but I filled in all the blanks with what went where). That means that the concept of what psionic skills are easy and which ones are difficult is my own vision of that field (and the same with magic, technology, and body skills). That means that it makes perfect sense for my character to believe that mind reading and telepathy are easy, telekinetics more difficult, force generatives much more difficult, and so on. He's right, because he thinks the way I think. I have to avoid using my knowledge of the game's bias system in selecting which skills I want to learn next; but I also have to use my own "knowledge" of what skills are easier to learn and which ones harder in selecting which skills my character will attempt to learn next.
In something of the same way, if I'm designing magic skills I am certainly allowed to build bonuses into the skills based on what my character believes would make a difference to the power of the skill, and that's going to match to some degree what the rules say will make a difference; but I also have to keep that within the bounds of what my character would do. So for example with the Architect, nearly all of his earliest spells were bonused by virtue that he recited scripture directly from the Greek New Testament--in essence a quirk that he knew worked. He learned that it worked because he thought it likely that it would and he tried it in a world where that was a very good approach to magic (fighting vampires). My on-board character doesn't do magic that way. He sings most of his magic, because in the first world he entered all of the many magic-using characters performed magic by song, and I happen to be a professional level singer/musician who not only knows a lot of songs (many original) but has the ability to write a song to the purpose pretty much at the drop of a hat. He has used other forms of magic since, but has never quoted from the Greek New Testament, despite having it with him. That's because he has never thought of it. And that in turn is because I will not allow myself to do that which I oppose in the actions of other players: using knowledge of game mechanics to create bonuses in spells that the character has no particular reason to know would make any difference.
I will also admit to a certain prejudice in individual circumstances in this. Were Scott or Graeme to post a spell ritual and then after it post a listing and calculation of the bonuses and penalties he believed it would receive to get a final sit-mod, I would happily thank him for saving me the work--because I am confident that in their cases they designed the ritual with an eye to what it is that their characters would do in that situation, and subsequently did the legwork for me, the ritual not at all influenced by the numbers beyond that degree to which the character's past experience would lead him to believe that doing things this way works better. Were certain other players to post the ritual followed by the math, I would probably be a bit angry, because I know that they're playing the numbers, designing the skill to get those numbers because as players they are aware of the numbers of which their characters are completely unfamiliar. I don't mind when Adam does it, because his character has had some horrific failures and some brilliant successes, and it's reasonable for anyone with the amount of experience in magic his character has had to have learned a lot of things that work and to include them. So it isn't so much playing the numbers that irks me but using player knowledge of the math of the system to boost character chance of success in ways that are clearly out of character for the character.
In short, its good to kick around ideas like that list to get a feel for the possibilities, and even to make stabs at numbers for specific limitations. What I don't want to see is players pulling items from that list and expecting to get specific bonuses for using specific tricks.
One of the things that makes Multiverser magic interesting is precisely that the players and their characters don't know the "tricks". It results in individual characters stylizing their magic in particular patterns. A lot of the Architect's magic has that Greek Scriptures base, while my other character's is mostly music. Graeme's has a lot of engineering influence, Harry involves a lot of references to Norse deities, and Adam couches his in the styles of Hackmaster and Dungeons & Dragons. It results in a lot of great color in the game, because the characters look for things which work for them by trial and error, not for things on the list somewhere that provide prepackaged bonuses.
--M. J. Young
