Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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From the perspective of the post I was arguing with yes, since it was taking to duty route, we can already do more than several battle mages. From the perspective of personal safety and not dying horribly or worse non-mist battle magic does not help IMO.
The Norse Dwarfs I think, they have a schism though no fault of their own since the rest of the Karaz Ankor gave them up for dead.
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I really really don't think both of them are comparable in terms of investment. Learning BM is 1 AP + College Favor for one instructor.
Becoming a grandmaster shooter? Well it had taken us 5 APs for the sword.
- Location
- Aotearoa
I always imagined it was whatever led the isolated Norse Dwarfs to go off and become isolated Norse Dwarfs. Borek may even have hinted at the trigger, IIRC.
Emphasis on screw-up. Mathilde has a great many way of reducing that risk: using favours so that she get the best teacher, use the runic rooms she commissioned in the college to train in that battle magic, etc …
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
If we were underpowered for our rank we wouldn't hold it.
We didn't expend any Great Deeds to speed our promotion along, and experience & ability are two of the qualifications.
Do you expect to learn all the spells in one go? People have been talking about filling up the spell-list. What about if we have a non-fatal miscast while learning and need to heal or recover? What if we just have mediocre rolls (those happen too) and need to start over? What if we get arcane marks that need to be handled ASAP and not 'whenever we have the time' like the ones Mathilde was lucky enough to get so far. I do not expect the median value to be 5AP, but it is also not impossible. Death during training is also a possibility which is not with the gun so I would call them about even.
We were promoted a few years early because we decided to go in an expedition to the chaos wastes.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
That's just because they don't want to promote too young.
If we weren't capable of our rank, we would not hold our rank. Flat out.
To put this into perspective, the best teacher we can get for something like Penumbral Pendulum is probably Melkoth who also does not have an affinity for the spell and thus has a small but non-zero chance of exploding into daemons as he is teaching it to us. Color me not sold.
Edit: To put this to rest, sorry to bother you @Boney but is there any expectation on the part of the Grey College due to her rank or otherwise that Mathilde ever learn Battle Magic?
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Here is the thing. If we were talking about a generic chaos attack number 284, sure, that would have been enough. But we are talking specifically about an Everchosen. An existential threat. The time where every available resource is mustered and higher up start eyeballing their "in case of Godzilla break glass" boxes as an opening move. The Empire as a whole would be calling upon Karaz Ankor and, yes, Mathilde is going to be involved in that. But that would not remove her obligation to join the Emperor's armies on the field of battle. And once we get there, it's BM time.That does not really follow, Magnus founded the Colleges to help the Empire in war. In case of Everchosen Mathilde can do vastly more than most battle mages without casting a single spell, technically without moving from her seat (though she will of course also go into battle). It is called 'trade in on dwarf rep to make sure the Empire gets dwarf help this time'. The last time the Everchosen marched the only dwarfs who marched to fight them were the Norse Dwarfs, of whom the empire did not even know, the High King and his guard. I think we can swing a bit more than that no?
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Not of Battle Magic spells they haven't. The discussion about Battle Magic has all been about getting a single serious offensive spell (well, and the separate apparition-binding discussion). Filling out the lower end spellbook has been mentioned, but that's an entirely separate plan. Nobody is arguing for learning every Battle Magic spell there is, that's wildly unnecessary.
For him to explode, he would have to: fail the casting roll, fail the reroll, failing the grounding roll, fail the miscast roll and then on the critical miscast table and obtain that result…To put this into perspective, the best teacher we can get for something like Penumbral Pendulum is probably Melkoth who also does not have an affinity for the spell and thus has a small but non-zero chance of exploding into daemons as he is teaching it to us. Color me not sold.
You have a small but non zero chance of dying each time you take your car/the bus/ a plane. I don't think you go everywhere by walking.
Maybe I am misunderstanding something, but the people I have seen arguing about learning BM has always been about learning one spell (mainly Pit of Shades) or two, not learning all of them.
Besides this I have to say I am not really getting your point against learning BM (not in the quoted post but in your previous ones)
Without trying to offend, but for me your entire argument is sounding like this: "We should not learn BM because if we did then when Mathilde uses it she might miscast and die".
However unless you mean Mathilde dying while learning BM, you seem to be ignoring the fact that Mathilde would only choose to cast BM if she thinks it is the best course of action she can take.
To put this into perspective, the best teacher we can get for something like Penumbral Pendulum is probably Melkoth who also does not have an affinity for the spell and has a small but non-zero chance of exploding into daemons as he is teaching it to us. Color me not sold.
I meak with Melkoth our bonus for learning a BM spell will be around ~+100 (74 from ourselves+artifacts and room) and ~+20 from Melkoth. If that is not enough then I am not sure what it would be enough. Even if Teclis himself appeared to teach us Penumbral Pendulum the bonus wouldn't be much higher than that.
Besides Melkoth is the leader of BM I assume he has experience teaching young BM.
- Location
- Brazil
No it doesn't, you ignored the point that unless you consider the duty fulfilled and go home drink tea, you are still on the same situation.
Also do you remenber people survive casting battle magic ? Knowing battle magic won't make us objectively worse at surviving.
Not objectively undepowered but relatively underpowered, as in if you would rank LM we would be in the bottom tier, you just expect more that just the signature spell at this rank.
And he still around even after decadess over decades of teaching people, at this point you almost advocating we shouldn't go outside lest we be hit be lightning.To put this into perspective, the best teacher we can get for something like Penumbral Pendulum is probably Melkoth who also does not have an affinity for the spell and thus has a small but non-zero chance of exploding into daemons as he is teaching it to us. Color me not sold.
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Mathilde's ability to cast Battle magic is guaranteed to be worse than her ability to stab enemy heroes or even just dispell enemy battle mages because she does not have the trait for it. It does not matter how scary the everchosen is that is still true
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
We can do things without traits. That is, in fact, how traits tend to be acquired, if I recall correctly.
When I post about not relying on crutches that's what I mean. Pigeonholing ourselves into only doing things that we've already done results in a very unhappy incentive system.
When I post about not relying on crutches that's what I mean. Pigeonholing ourselves into only doing things that we've already done results in a very unhappy incentive system.
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We do also have Rite of Way which is BM level. But two BM spells is still not top tier, it's true.
And so if those are better options she'll use them. But sometimes, they won't be better options even with the risks. Like, the risks of getting into melee with a Greater Daemon of Nurgle are likely a lot worse than those of casting Pit of Shades on it. By a lot. Even for Mathilde.
It is getting late for me so this will be my last point on the matter. To summarize as best I can.
- Barring an expenditure of AP comparable to the Sword training Mathilde will always be worse at battle magic than at other means of dealing death
- A death by miscast runs against Mathilde's reputation with the dwarfs and her present relationship with magic winch prizes reliability
- The dangers of battle magic are statistically significant not just casting but training, which you cannot say for any other form of training (apparitions do not count, journeymen deal with those regularly)
Maybe. But
a. We may not have a choice as part of an army, be it because of orders or the lack of other BM casters
b. There is nothing that indicates that casting and fighting are mutually exclusive. Both for Mathilde and for spellcasters in whfb in general.
Between the belt and the cleansing candle I would not say so.
- Do you mean someone would order us to cast battle magic, the battle magic we do not have not MMM or Rite of Way
- Making yourself blatantly by casting high level battle magic spells is probably not conductive to then sneaking up on an enemy to stab them. WFB would not model this due to not modeling sub BM spells like invisibility
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I don't even mean the plague itself, I mean it killing us with its daemonic strength. If you are capable of Battle Magic, fighting Greater Daemons in melee is never gonna be safer than casting a single Battle Magic spell no matter how good in melee you are.
The greater daemon is also a spellcaster which can dispel and has vastly more experience than us with our... 0 Battle magic traits.
Yes, yes she does.
I doubt that we can get a good enough gun.
A good enough sword (or other melee weapon) is something that has developed over literally millennia and we got it straight from the absolute best Runelord in the entirety of the Karaz Ankor. There's no craftsman that can get close enough with guns: elves don't use them; top tier Dawi Runelords don't work with them and there's no humans that are that good. There may be a couple Chaos Dwarfs and vampires that could provide but they're out for political reasons.
So the barrier with guns is that Mathilde would have to develop superguns or get some of the brightest minds in the Old World to develop superguns which would take an inordinately long time and lots of resources without certainty of success.
With Battle Magic? It takes one AP and a small amount of CF for a result that has been tested in thousands of battles not just by men but also by elves. If Battle Magic wasn't worth it or could be easily substituted by something better then it wouldn't be used by multiple civilizations.
Being slightly underpowered in direct confrontations is probably not a huge obstacle if you're very good in other stuff. Mathilde had in the previous three years before being promoted:
- defeated a Waaagh and then conducted a lecture on it
- deciphered Queekish and wrote a bunch of papers on skaven tech, magic and tactics
- commissioned Thorek to build the Rooms of Calamity
- easily learned MMM and started developing RoW
That shows a lot of potential in a sufficiently varied number of disciplines that being slightly lacking in an area isn't a particularly big deal.
Tasoli
Life is for Living
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- Behind the Keyboard.
I would. Mathilde might survive but how many allies will she lose while she slowly chops down the fat off of Greater Deamon of Nurgle?
I mean Panaromia might be right besides us in that fight, so if it is a choice between casting BM or letting Panaromia die what would you choose?
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