Some more rulings from recent Felltower games:
- For DF Felltower, Knife and Main-Gauche (not that we use Main-Gauche, but for the sake of completeness) count as Swashbuckler weapons for purposes of calculating points for purchasing perks (see DFD:S, p. 21). I understand why you might leave them off (they're not swords, and you don't want to encourage knife-masters) but leaving them off was leaving one of our players trying to find a better way to distribute points just to make them all count for perks while letting him be better with knife. He ended up doing so, but still . . . I think Knife should count in our games.*
- My ruling is that Silvering on a Meteoric weapon is possible . . . but effectively negates the value of meteoric. Defensive spells cannot stop a meteoric weapon, but they can stop that silver coating (even if it's "just on the edge"), so don't waste money making your weapon less effective. You're just making it so you can't enchant your own weapon, or put temporary spells on it (you can't affect only part of an item, for either). It's like putting a meteoric arrowhead on a wooden shaft - magic can affect the shaft and thus move the head, but the head doesn't create a "bow wave" or "hole" in the magical defenses for the wood to pass.
- I'm not sure why, but my players still think meteoric is anti-magic. They want mages to be able to sense meteoric, meteoric to dispel things, etc. No, it's just mana-dead. So it's non-magical (and thus looks like any other non-magical item) and won't respond to Detect Magic (it's not magical.) It's not magical anti-matter or a "hole" in the mana-space in the universe. It's just unaffected by it. I get why people want to expand it, and make it more effective, but it's just a simple thing at heart.
These posts seem to be still accurate:
Meteoric in my DF Game
What Good is Meteoric Armor?
DF Felltower Gear: Meteoric Iron Bullets
* For reference, see this post. We did end up splitting Armoury and Connoisseur (Weapons) again, though, and split out Phys/Psych because people do actually use them in play in differentiated ways. Things changed in the 6+ years since I posted that.
What prompted you to split out Phys/Psych from Hidden Lore?
ReplyDeleteIt made more sense as we played that knowing about beings and being able to fight them better seemed best kept apart.
DeleteI treat it as nondetectable by any magic, and it feels dead to those with magery. As faerie creatures are mana deoendent and fall on the natural end of the bunny/squid axis, and some have weakness or vulnerability to meteoric iron, I have ruled that it is from the Void, home of elder things, and meteoric iton items can become elder infused power items for cultists and mentalists.
DeleteI think that's more of what my players expect. It doesn't match what's gone before but it's clearly the kind of thing they're thinking of.
DeleteHeh, it was me that asked that question on the forum back in 2013.
ReplyDeleteDFRPG perhaps benefits from coming out afterwards, and does a better job of making the distinction.
In the end I have gone with the DFRPG descriptions as written, both for simplicity and because I wanted to enforce templates. And also for that same reason we started with the DFRPG pregens.
The clear and effective game-utility split in DFRPG is a good chunk of why we split them again.
DeleteI see your reasoning for magic defenses blocking the silver of a silvered meteoric weapon, but it sounds to me like you've just tried to have your cake and eat it too. In the very next sentence after saying defensive spells can stop that silver coating, you say you can't affect only part of an item (when putting spells on a weapon). These two seem to be opposite interpretations and thus inconsistent in game-universe logic.
ReplyDeleteI don't think they are. You can't put, say, Flaming Weapon on part of a weapon - the subject of the spell is the whole weapon. You can't enchant only part of a weapon. But it's certainly possible that a magical effect can only have an effect on part of a subject. So I don't think there is an inconsistency there.
DeleteOn the Meteoric front, made me think about plating something with Meteoric metal (a 100% complete solid covering).
ReplyDeleteI could see 2 possible rulings:
1 - based on Meteoric 'blocking' the magical field, it would make the inside a 'no magic' area (aka a faraday cage with radio signals)
2 - no impact on the inside at all (Meteoric is non-existent to magic, similar various phase though x abilities were stuff goes 'out of phase')
it sounds like your rulings fall very much in the #2 category
It's a mix, I think. They feel consistent to me, but saying meteoric won't be affected by magic but also won't let magic pass seems workable. My armor rulings imply #1 strongly, though.
Delete