DF Whiterock has a nice post on Seek Earth.
Find it here.
In DF Felltower, I do the following:
- Even a single coin is a "significant" amount. This means that small hoards, and even single coins layed out, can distract a Seek Earth spell.
- I don't allow specific gemstones. Casting on gold, silver, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, etc. one after the other - trivial with high skill - just doesn't work out. I basically just shut this down to avoid the annoyance of needing to know the direction to everything in my dungeon from every point in my dungeon, in three dimensions.
- I give relative directions but not "lead" people to anything. Directions are rough - I tried being very specific, but people believe their maps and measures, so if I said 40 yards northwest and they go what on their map is 45 yards NW and find loot, they think there is more 5 yards closer as well and keep looking. Insisting on vague has actually made for more clear communication.
- I always choose to lie on critical failures. Lie, lie, lie. Oh, and roll on the table for what else happens. Information spells are great, but when they're wrong, they're really wrong.
Optional rule ideas:
- Give a -1 for each source you ignore in the casting. Make everyone pool their gold together or move away from them so you can treat them as one "hoard" of gold. This fits the DF -1 per adjective approach to obstacles, makes for a challenge to find a "big" hoard in a mess of little ones you're carrying, and rewards the 20+ skill of better casters. It also explains why skill-12 pikers out in the world have troubles and your IQ 16, Magery 6 guy does not.
- Make it akin to an divination spell - give a direction, but not a distance. Let people triangulate . . . it'll be easier for you, the GM, as they do the trig to determine how far to go.
- limit the castings to once per period of time - says, once per hour, or once per substance per day. Don't allow spamming it out.
I haven't tried, these, but I love the second one and like the first one . . . and that first one is an easy implementation.
I also always lie on critical failures on information spells, unless a different critical failure result would be more fun. I like your optional rules, but I'm trying to use as few optional rules as possible in my current game, so I won't be using them this time. I'm actually writing a program to find the nearest room with gold from any other room in the dungeon, and will do a blog post on that when it's done, but this is clearly overkill.
ReplyDeleteI'll agree with all of that - lying, using few optional rules, and overkill. :)
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