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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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cheesyme said:
I mean sure we're individually more killy than the apparation, but that doesn't mean that adding the apparations killiness to Mathilde's won't either let her kill, or even survive things she otherwise wouldn't, nor does it mean that she won't kill her targets faster for anything more than chaff she can steamroll.

As such I'm still gonna call Bodyguard damn useful in any fight that actually, you know, matters.
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... As is charge, because we generally don't waste resources on fights that don't matter...
 
I was thinking on the eventual Orb of Sorcery option (how many college favour are we from being able to buy the rest, by the way?) and how magic works.

Dwarf Runes presumably draw magic from somewhere to power themselves, so does this mean they can draw power from normal Power Stones? Like is there a way for Dwarves to haness power stones to recharge their important runes faster?

Because it seems like providing the Dwarves with a reusable resource (Orbs of Sorcery) is massively more useful that just giving them limited supplies of snake juice.

(Speaking of snake juice, is our original method of entrapment replicable now we are developing control magics for apparitions?)
 
Boney said:
I don't know what options I would have given if a different option had won previously.
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I suppose it was pretty silly of me to think you would have all the forms' potential behaviors already mapped out. My apologies.

ChronOblivion said:
We've failed many rolls in combat, those rolls didn't kill us, they made our situation worse but recoverable. Failing a magic roll, especially a Battle Magic roll, puts us in Instant Danger Zone all by itself. Maybe we'll nail the recovery and zip the magic somewhere else, maybe we'll injure ourself to some unknown degree of fatality, or we roll on the Mark of Ulgu table.

It does kill me to only have 1, but it's still a good tool to put in the hands of both Mathilde and the other Magic 7's that may learn it in the future. If the situation is bad enough for Battle Magics then there are much more useful ones.
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I will note that as an apparition spell the miscast will probably just be the apparition breaking free. And then usually trying to stab us, but Mathilde is kind of unique in how little she uses destructive magic, and this thing seems weirdly comfortable Air BNBing alongside our soul, so it might just run off to stab the Celestial Wizard and the Warlock having a lightning duel further down the battlefield.
 
Tobtorp said:
... As is charge, because we generally don't waste resources on fights that don't matter...
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You tried to say it wouldn't be a help in fights Mathilde is picking, I explained why it would very much be a help in any fight that matters, my post is still perfectly fair. Furthermore, I'm still gonna call Bodyguard more useful than Charge in the fights that matter, because generally fights that matter involve Mathilde engaging with her sword of Fuck Off and Die. Charge's advantage over Bodyguard is that she can say "Go fight that guy," assuming she doesn't miscast, assuming she isn't being targeted by anyone at the moment and can cast freely, and assuming that after casting she's gonna go do other more important things.

Except, you know, that more important thing is probably headhunting whoever she's picked as her biggest priority at the moment, where in the bodyguards would be about as useful, and in an oh shit situation like we've had repeatedly where Mathilde can't freely cast the Bodyguards would just pop out and start trying to fix things.
 
ChronOblivion said:
We've failed many rolls in combat, those rolls didn't kill us, they made our situation worse but recoverable. Failing a magic roll, especially a Battle Magic roll, puts us in Instant Danger Zone all by itself. Maybe we'll nail the recovery and zip the magic somewhere else, maybe we'll injure ourself to some unknown degree of fatality, or we roll on the Mark of Ulgu table. And we are hella running out of the good marks. Having a FC spell means we have another tool in our Standard Operating Procedure because it is safe and consistent, it's just really useful to throw a minion at someone, and we can do that consistently to decrease the pressure put on us before we are pushed into the corner. If it's Battle Magic, it instantly becomes the riskiest tool in our arsenal, and I'd question the necessity of taking that risk compared to our other options. I just generally strongly approve of Mathilde being minimal about the Battle Magic she learns, she only learns the ones she can cast safely after she gets it down. Again, only reason we learned Melkoth's was because our staff made it safe.

It does kill me to only have 1, but it's still a good tool to put in the hands of both Mathilde and the other Magic 7's that may learn it in the future. If the situation is bad enough for Battle Magics then there are much more useful ones.
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This line of thinking is the sort of thing that makes me genuinely worried that should 1 Rider turn out to still be Battle Magic, which for the record it might, people will just outright refuse to use it and all this effort will have been for nothing

I get it, Battlemagic is inherently risky
But Battle Wizards still exist
People like Goendul throw this kind of stuff around as her day job on the regular, and we didn't act like she was a walking time bomb when we went spelunking in Drakenhof with her

Every other Battle Wizard likewise tosses this kind of stuff around when they accompany armies of friendlies who'd make terrible collateral damage when they do it
And we hold it to be wrong to treat them as walking Warp Rifts that'll deposit Daemons into the armies rear end

There are ways to mitigate the risk, probably traits and the like
But Mathilde isn't going to ever find them if she refuses to push boundaries
 
Tobtorp said:
I would not word it like that. A rider that we use for bodyguard will not charge anything, it will only attack what either attacks us or what we attack, which makes it much more limited then the charge option which we can send off on its own.
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I would view it as a tradeoff. The Charge and Duel options let the Rider focus on one thing while we can do another, but the Bodyguard lets us pre-cast it before a fight that we know is going to happen, and lasts longer.

Both would be extremely useful, which is why people are talking of later binding another Rider and training it differently.

The Phoenixian said:
One thing that struck me with the duration of Bodyguard is that "Tens of Minutes" to isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but in an active and ongoing fight it's a long, long time. More pointedly though, I can't help but notice it's about the time each turn took back during the final, chaotic battle of Karak Eight Peaks.

In other words, after accounting for fuzziness, the spell duration is almost exactly the length of the shortest turn length we're ever likely to experience in quest.
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Yeah, in the Kul Encampment fight, the melee lasted long enough that the narrative noted Mathilde had several opportunities to recast her passive buff spells (Cloud of Confusion, Dread Aspect, Shroud of Invisibility). Even just a bodyguard lasting several tens of minutes would have been amazing there.

Ragnar said:
I was thinking on the eventual Orb of Sorcery option (how many college favour are we from being able to buy the rest, by the way?) and how magic works.

Dwarf Runes presumably draw magic from somewhere to power themselves, so does this mean they can draw power from normal Power Stones? Like is there a way for Dwarves to haness power stones to recharge their important runes faster?

Because it seems like providing the Dwarves with a reusable resource (Orbs of Sorcery) is massively more useful that just giving them limited supplies of snake juice.

(Speaking of snake juice, is our original method of entrapment replicable now we are developing control magics for apparitions?)
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In order: We have enough Favor for getting power stones to make the Orbs, we're just waiting till next turn when the Room of Calamity is safe to use again.

Dwarves cannot use power stones or Orbs in a way that is helpful for them, just having raw AV to recharge their Anvil Runes is of massive help.

And unfortunately our Box is irreproducible, a complete fluke. Boney has been clear on these matters.
 
I took another look at the other Apparitions we can bind and how they would fit in to the behaviors that have been listed for the Rider.

I think I would rather have Handmaidens for Duel or Ambush because they can only be seen with Magesight and ambushing is already kind of their thing. I also think binding Dark Hounds as Great Cats would make a pretty good option for something like Duel.

For Bodyguard, I see the appeal of a big tanky Rider backup or three, but I am interested in the possibility of using the Black Essence for the role. It likes to get in face holes, which if we covered it in Ulgu, seems like it could be useful in blinding and suffocating anyone that attacks us, and then we can just hit the attackers with a sword ourselves. We might also be able to use it's ability to sense Dark Magic and Necromancy as a sort of bloodhound. It seems like the kind of Apparition where there is much less advantage to having more than one.
 
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CrimsonOddball said:
This line of thinking is the sort of thing that makes me genuinely worried that should 1 Rider turn out to still be Battle Magic, which for the record it might, people will just outright refuse to use it and all this effort will have been for nothing

I get it, Battlemagic is inherently risky
But Battle Wizards still exist
People like Goendul throw this kind of stuff around as her day job on the regular, and we didn't act like she was a walking time bomb when we went spelunking in Drakenhof with her

Every other Battle Wizard likewise tosses this kind of stuff around when they accompany armies of friendlies who'd make terrible collateral damage when they do it
And we hold it to be wrong to treat them as walking Warp Rifts that'll deposit Daemons into the armies rear end

There are ways to mitigate the risk, probably traits and the like
But Mathilde isn't going to ever find them if she refuses to push boundaries
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Honestly I would much rather push the boundaries of magic elsewhere, like Windherding. The prospects of discovery there is so much more interesting and comparatively less dangerous.

Also, AP Hell.
 
It's impossible to know for sure how hard the spell will end up being but I still want to get some idea of what kind of risk we're taking by binding more riders. Melkoth's is IIRC at the low-end of Battlemagic (literally the lowest level Battlemagic discounting Smoke and Mirrors?) and though we don't usually roll for it because of the staff we did roll for our very first cast, which gives us some idea of how hard it is to cast:
Boney said:
[Casting the Miasma: Req 50, Learning, 6+28=34.]
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A required roll of 50 means we fail on a roll of 20 or less, since our current learning is 29. That's a 20% chance of failure, or a 1 in 5 chance for a single cast. Over 10 castings of a spell that requires us to roll 50, our odds of miscasting at least once are ~90%. If we cast in difficult conditions, such as when Mathilde is tired or injured, our odds will be worse. If we bind more than a trio our spell will be harder and so the odds of miscasting will be worse, and even if we bind 'just' a trio there's a chance that our spell will be harder than Melkoth's.

To some extent we have miscast management rolls to bail us out, so the risks might end up being slightly lower. On the other hand it's important to remember that the more Riders we have, the worse our micasts will we when they happen, because we will have 3 or 6 or 10 loose monsters trying to eat us in addition to whatever it was we were fighting rather than just 1.
 
LawsOfRobotics said:
I think I would rather have Handmaidens for Duel or Ambush because they can only be seen with Magesight and ambushing is already kind of their thing.
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I'm given to understand that most Apparitions are already only visible via Magesight, but you're definitely right in a Handmaiden possibly being the best at Ambush. That's their thing.
 
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