Then you make an RPG that does its best not to create situations that will mar the friendship of these bright-eyed teens.
(Then note that these 13-year-olds are not very different from adults, or else their problems wouldn't frequently happen to adults.)
Methods of reading a Charm that doesn't apply to bright-eyed teenagers, then, is not an effective solution to the problems posed because, in short, it won't work.
Ideally? 13 year olds should not be playing White-Wolf/OPP games, given that it presumes a much heavier subject matter by default.
All sarcasm aside, this is essentially the issue, Deations. You're taking the, hm, most acceptable possible reading of the Charm, let's charitably say. This shouldn't be necessary, is my point. When I point out how you are inventing restrictions and limitations that don't exist in the Charm itself, this is what I mean. You don't have to read that, say, the Meteor attack doesn't come in instantly, because the Charm's duration is instant, but instead hangs in the sky for however much time it is necessary for the victims to find a way to deal with it.
Initiating something instantly does
not mean the charm is over in a flash, only that the magic is there for a single action,
however long that action may last. Wyld Shaping Technique is Instant Charm, it still takes multiple die rolls and potential random encounters raksha, behemoths, or whatever else takes issue with you Wyld Shaping, and whatever you shaped out of the Wyld remains. Chaos Resistance Preparation is an instant charm that still takes a minimum of one hour of work, and results in a permanent immunity to the Wyld. Prophet of Seventeen Cycles is also an Instant Charm, yet it lasts for about as long as the players and the GM agree to it, going into effect whenever somebody violates the predictions.
I can accept that perhaps the Charm would get the ball rolling, but I firmly maintain that having the dead pour
out of Shadowlands to attack a city, going by the precise description of the Charm, means they still have to cover the intervening distance between Shadowland and city.
Unless they built the City in the Shadowland, but the poor fuckers wouldn't need a Solar to do prediction magic to fuck them over then.
That is certainly something I can do, but it is not present in the Charm's rules. The Charm itself specifies no such mercy, and it is a reasonable reading of the rules text to go "okay, the Charm has resolved, the effect is to drop a meteor which annihilates the region, so a meteor has dropped and annihilated the region, anyone in the AoE radius pop your perfect defenses in order to not die, everything without a perfect defense gets to experience an extinction event".
Disagree. The charm neither specifies neither mercy nor lack of mercy. I realize I'm being very stubborn about this, but there is sufficient precedent that my interpretation is valid and the rules don't come out and say it one way or another. So as far as I know, it's left up to the GM rather than being an instakill.
To reiterate again, the issue is that this situation should be flat impossible. The GM should not have to insert the mercy clause. The game should not require him to do it.
Every game presumes the GM is working under a mercy clause. The GM has endless capacity to fuck over the players, whatever the system. But it's not an issue where a GM is killing the players by accident. This isn't a 'whoopsie, my monster rolled way too many damage successes, let me take a few away.' This is the GM making a conscious effort, to decide what's a challenge and what is a slaughter within the bounds of a specific scenario.
The reading I am using should not be possible to make, get it? If it is possible to make such a reading, if it is possible to have this capability at all, we have a system problem, and a blanket "if the rules make weird shit happen feel free to ignore them" disclaimer does not solve the problem.
I agree! If the rules outright said 'this is a meteor strike, everyone is dead gg no re'
I would not be bitching so hard about this. The thing is the Charm doesn't come out and say it one way or another, leaving it entirely up to GM discretion as to whether this is a TPK or something else entirely. Just like every time she thinks of a challenge for the players.
Yeah, this falls somewhat flat when they've made Essence automatically rise with experience, and we are thus expected to believe that over the course of literally thousands of years, most First Age Solars never amassed more than about 300xp or so.
One could, ah, almost presume that PCs and NPCs operate under different rules.
