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Vorstallen Magic Preparatory - The Third-Best School for Young Mages in the Nation! Enrol Today!

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[x] Yes! You're no Alchemist anyway!
-[x] The Fear Capacitor.

Yeah I'll just go with this rather than keep the amulet given it was stolen, and while learning alchemy would be nice, next semester runes is probably locked in already given the investment that's been put into it and given you get more points out of it.

As I've previously argued too, The Fear Capacitor is just overall better in a school environment.
 
With the Hammer and Capacitor tied, I thought I'd go into a little more depth, and also talk up the 'keep the amulet' option.

The Fear Capacitor is really good right now. As soon as your peers learn the basics of mind-magic defense, it'll fall down hard, but at the moment it's basically an unrivalled offensive tool versus other first-years. It doesn't miss if pointed in the right direction, can't be blocked by physical barriers, and is incapacitating once used. It's the closest thing to a trump card you'll get early on, especially because you can use it without major repercussions compared to hurting someone badly. If you broke Thomas's arm, you'd be screwed, but you can reasonably hit him with mind magic if it comes to confrontation. It also uses comparatively little magic, storing 20 attacks for 100 magic.

The Capacitor is essentially the 'get power right now' option. It's biggest weakness is that it provides something you could learn and do with mind magic (a low-mana school of thought). You could take another option, train mind magic, and have similar combat power.

The Rainbow Hammer is versatile, but ultimately less usable in combat. The big advantages is that cutting and smashing are useful things to be able to do regardless of whether you use them on your enemies, but having that sort of offensive power means that if you're in a bad situation and have to use it, you could wind up murdering someone. Or worse, expelled! It's also a huge magic sink, which is a resource you won't always have access to. 30 mana points for the blunt power usage is huge (and also why they don't teach the blunt force spells to the low-magic kids, incidentally), and unless you have someone charging it for you, it's basically a paperweight. You can attack 6 times nonlethally with the Fear Capacitor for every time you can with the Hammer.

The Hammer is the high-cost, high-versatility option. It can do a lot of stuff (break down doors, cut through wood and undergrowth, create major distractions...). Thinking of it as solely a weapon is probably the wrong approach. If you need to break into something or somewhere, it offers that. If you need to deflect a boulder, cut through a door, or create a major distraction, the Hammer can do it. It remains pretty useful in the long term - you can't personally store power for those big kinetic actions, but the Hammer can. Ulos will never be able to smash things open with his magic unless he unlocks his Curse, but the Hammer enables him to borrow magic from his friends to accomplish things he could never do otherwise.

Lastly, the Amulet might be undervalued. Sure, it costs Magic Points to activate, but you can gain +1 on Training Rolls (the average Training Roll result is 3, so that's essentially 1/3rd of an Action) by using it. If you end up getting 3 Alchemy Training Rolls a week (quite plausible), you could be looking at essentially a free Action every week. It also offers complete and perfect defense against liquid and airborne poisons, both of which are really strong attack vectors - laxatives for one.

You can also go trade it away some other time as well. It'd cost an Action to do so, but Edward is happy to pull this trade (Amulet for Hammer/Capacitor), but almost certainly not the other way around. You give up a lot of future flexibility when you trade away the amulet. It also has a really long cooldown (a month!) on recharging, meaning that it's actually very cheap to maintain once charged, simply because it very rarely needs recharging.
 
The versatility of the hammer is what convinces me but there's no bad choice here, I'll be glad no matter what we end up with.
 
SilverRune said:
How easy would it be for our rival to prove we stole the amulet and we didn't just buy the same amulet?
It would be a high risk to wear proof of our theft around our neck, but if it's not unique then wearing the amulet becomes a much better idea.
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Reasonably possible. Proof and punishment are more fluid concepts here than they are in a real-world university. I mean, you could put it in your sock or wrap it around your upper arm or something, but being caught with it wouldn't be ideal, to say the very least.

That being said, it's also not the sort of artifact that is easy to detect. It's a subtle effect, and it's very tough to spot.
 
SilverRune said:
How easy would it be for our rival to prove we stole the amulet and we didn't just buy the same amulet?
It would be a high risk to wear proof of our theft around our neck, but if it's not unique then wearing the amulet becomes a much better idea.
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It really comes down to what we study next term, if we want to start alchemy it's a good idea but with Runes already being a thing I don't think we'll have the time.
 
occipitallobe said:
With the Hammer and Capacitor tied, I thought I'd go into a little more depth, and also talk up the 'keep the amulet' option.

The Fear Capacitor is really good right now. As soon as your peers learn the basics of mind-magic defense, it'll fall down hard, but at the moment it's basically an unrivalled offensive tool versus other first-years. It doesn't miss if pointed in the right direction, can't be blocked by physical barriers, and is incapacitating once used. It's the closest thing to a trump card you'll get early on, especially because you can use it without major repercussions compared to hurting someone badly. If you broke Thomas's arm, you'd be screwed, but you can reasonably hit him with mind magic if it comes to confrontation. It also uses comparatively little magic, storing 20 attacks for 100 magic.

The Capacitor is essentially the 'get power right now' option. It's biggest weakness is that it provides something you could learn and do with mind magic (a low-mana school of thought). You could take another option, train mind magic, and have similar combat power.

The Rainbow Hammer is versatile, but ultimately less usable in combat. The big advantages is that cutting and smashing are useful things to be able to do regardless of whether you use them on your enemies, but having that sort of offensive power means that if you're in a bad situation and have to use it, you could wind up murdering someone. Or worse, expelled! It's also a huge magic sink, which is a resource you won't always have access to. 30 mana points for the blunt power usage is huge (and also why they don't teach the blunt force spells to the low-magic kids, incidentally), and unless you have someone charging it for you, it's basically a paperweight. You can attack 6 times nonlethally with the Fear Capacitor for every time you can with the Hammer.

The Hammer is the high-cost, high-versatility option. It can do a lot of stuff (break down doors, cut through wood and undergrowth, create major distractions...). Thinking of it as solely a weapon is probably the wrong approach. If you need to break into something or somewhere, it offers that. If you need to deflect a boulder, cut through a door, or create a major distraction, the Hammer can do it. It remains pretty useful in the long term - you can't personally store power for those big kinetic actions, but the Hammer can. Ulos will never be able to smash things open with his magic unless he unlocks his Curse, but the Hammer enables him to borrow magic from his friends to accomplish things he could never do otherwise.

Lastly, the Amulet might be undervalued. Sure, it costs Magic Points to activate, but you can gain +1 on Training Rolls (the average Training Roll result is 3, so that's essentially 1/3rd of an Action) by using it. If you end up getting 3 Alchemy Training Rolls a week (quite plausible), you could be looking at essentially a free Action every week. It also offers complete and perfect defense against liquid and airborne poisons, both of which are really strong attack vectors - laxatives for one.

You can also go trade it away some other time as well. It'd cost an Action to do so, but Edward is happy to pull this trade (Amulet for Hammer/Capacitor), but almost certainly not the other way around. You give up a lot of future flexibility when you trade away the amulet. It also has a really long cooldown (a month!) on recharging, meaning that it's actually very cheap to maintain once charged, simply because it very rarely needs recharging.
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In regard to the Amulet, does it purify poisons that have already been imbibed? If so, it becomes a lot more useful, because the point of poison is to be undetected, and if we have to activate it first then it's only really useful for Alchemy or direct attacks that we can anticipate.
 
I don't doubt the amulet is the best of the three. It gives +1 to Training and if it was almost any other school I wouldn't think about trading it. The problem is that it's in Alchemy, the school with less synergies over all and I feel like we already made a build choice to ignore it and go for Runes.

Now it's not impossible to change, especially with the bonus the amulet gives. If we keep the Amulet would giving it to a friend be an option in the future? Because if Abraham pursues Alchemy or we get another friend who does this could be huge to fast tracking their success and ultimately our resources.
 
[X] Keep the Amulet of Purification.
-[x] The Rainbow Hammer.

(If we must trade out our amulet of We Don't Actually Need A Magic Pool To Be An Alchemist, I'd rather we got a useful tool instead of a mind magic attack that will lose value quickly.)
 
Sickul said:
We don't have any classes with him anymore. And I think using magic in front of a teacher is a real danger, especially mind magic.
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Yeah, detection from teachers is a big worry if we do anything in class. Stick to sabotaging him elsewhere!

Also: is it worth us learning some mind magic, or just sticking with what we know? Or joining Edward on his quest for new magic? :D
 
will408914 said:
In regard to the Amulet, does it purify poisons that have already been imbibed? If so, it becomes a lot more useful, because the point of poison is to be undetected, and if we have to activate it first then it's only really useful for Alchemy or direct attacks that we can anticipate.
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Yeah, that description was a little lacking. Defensive items activate on detection, they tend to lack manual activations. The Amulet will activate on detecting a poison, and remain active until it loses charge, converting all inbound poisons to a safe form, usually pure water or air.

BunnyLord said:
Yeah, detection from teachers is a big worry if we do anything in class. Stick to sabotaging him elsewhere!

Also: is it worth us learning some mind magic, or just sticking with what we know? Or joining Edward on his quest for new magic? :D
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Most magic starts off very weak, and becomes exceptional with study and practice.

Mind magic starts off very strong within a short period of time (emotional overloading spells are the simplest of the mind magic spells, even moreso than illusions), but loses potency against mages rapidly. It's still useful for interrogating non-mages, but it's probably the easiest school of magic to defend against.
 
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