Blinding-Light-Of-Virtue
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Blinding light of Virtue
- Circle : Emerald
- Cost : 10+ motes
- Duration : 1 scene
This spell first saw use in the First Age when a great Twighlight sorceress was experimenting with augmenting mortals and DB's to make them more effective in combat. When she began her experiments, she still had most of her morality and ethics and so rather than creating human monsters, able to kill with out shedding a tear, she wanted to make her soldiers more virtuous and this spell was their reward. The higher the warriors virtues the better the protection that this spell provides. Unfortunately, perhaps exacerbated by her magical experiments, the Great Curse dug its claws into her soul and her experiments became more twisted and often fatal. Finally her retinue of DB's and the mortal servants rebelled against her and after a grueling session in her lab, they overpowered her and burried her in her manse high in the mountains on the border of Marukan
Upon casting this spell the target(s) begin to glow with a blinding gold-white light making it extremely painfull for people to look closely at them. Obviously as a side effect of this, stealth is all but impossible while under the effects of this spell.
The initial target of the spell must be the caster, and this is at the base cost, however a number of aditional people can be targeted equal to the casters permenant essence at a cost of 2 motes per person.
The mechanical effect of this is that anyone attacking the caster must reduce their attack successess by a number of successess equal to the casters highest virtue if attacking the caster, or highest virtue - 1 for anyone else protected by the spell. This can reduce an attack to zero successes, but can not result in the attacker botching.
This spell is explicitely stackable with other spells or charms that increase soak or defences, but is otherwise subject to all the normal rules of Sorcery.
Comments:
"Cannot result in the attacker botching". Well, of course it can't. For the mechanical effect of this spell to come into play at all, the attack had to have some successes, and if there's even one success, no matter how many 1s there are, the roll isn't botched. - David.
Well, it doesn't hurt to explicitly state it... After all, some people might infer that since this effect 'reduces successes' rather than 'increases difficulty' that it was done that way specifically to cause people to botch if they rolled 3 successes and a one, and then had that reduced to 0 successes and a one.
Aside from that, again, this charm is rather expensive and short-duration for the protection it grants, and isn't exactly usable on lots of people either. Perhaps if it granted that protection to Essence x 10 people, for 1m per target, and didn't subtract 1 from the highest virtue, it would seem more appropriate.
-- Darloth
- Thanks for your comments, firstly David in response to yours, I wrote this specifically to prevent rules arguements and abuses, I imagine most people have played in a game where one of the players is a 'rules lawyer' who constantly whines "well it doesnt actually say in the description that it doesn't do that .... so why can't I?"
- As Darloth pointed out, potentially you could otherwise argue that it could cause an attacker to botch, If my Twighlight (conviction 4) used this spell and he gets attacked for 3 successes, with the benefit of minus 4 successes the attacker is reduced to a net total of minus 1 success. If there are any 1's in the attackers dice roll then he technically would have botched the roll. So yes it is stating the obvious, purely to prevent arguments and disruptions to a game.
- Also again I agree with the underpowered nature of the spell, it was originaly the highest virtue for all individuals targeted by the spell not just the caster, and also 2 motes per additional target not 5, I think my ST is going to agree to the lower essence cost but not to getting rid of subtracting 1 from the highest Virtue. I doubt very much he will agree to the increased number of targets either. The reason I went with reducing successess rather than increasing difficulties was that I didn't want to step on the toes of the Sidereals, whom I really dont like that much anyways - prob because they are always trying to kill my character off all the time. Still at the moment I am 3 wins for 3 attacks - 2 of which were atempts at ambushes. Usually my dice rolling sucks but sometimes.... there really is a god! Eldmar
- Whose highest Virtue is used at -1 for the additional people protected? The caster's, or the other targets'? (ie, if you cast this on me, would my Virtue protect me or would yours?)
- The term "Difficulty" means "number of successes required" in Exalted. In the original WoD this term meant "the number a die must roll to be successful," but that number is referred to as the "target number" in Sidereal charms which affect it. You are correct though, nobody but Sidereals have charms to affect that latter number. Lots of people affect Difficulty, though.
- IanPrice
