Ganurath
Literal Enthusiast
- Location
- A Valid Location
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No, that'd still be shoddy wizard. Remember the Light that blew up that village in Sylvania?
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- Tags
- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Earth
This is one of the few statements Boney made about Battle Magic.
Yes, it's a risk.
But so it being on a battle field at all.
It will get used when the risk of failing is less then the danger of not attempting.
Not just for a lark.
Ergo, Battle Magic is worth having and using.
For that to happen we would have to:
1. Miscast
2. Fail to ground the miscast (hi there grounding rod)
3. Roll a bad enough miscast to actualu kill us.
That looks like 3 really low rolls in a row to me. Possibly more. I'd say that rolling that poorly in a major battle (the most likely scenario for us pulling out BM) is very likely to kill us anyway.
- Location
- Brazil
It isn't realy, the martial equivalent is any fumble that leaves you open to the enemy. Stabing yourself is the martial equivalent of exploding, because both are the worst possible result.
- Location
- Hiding in the walls.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I would personally argue that the martial equivalent of miscasting is simply screwing up your fighting. This can have a wide variety of manifestations, ranging from blocking or attacking as you intended to but being off-balance afterwards to stumbling over a loose rock and landing on your sword because engaging in vigorous physical activity while holding a sharp piece of metal is not a safe activity, just as miscasts range from "you got an Arcane Mark that makes you actively better at magic" to, at the very extreme end, "I blew myelf up".
...that being said, though, I suspect that "One feels bad and the other doesn't" is not an issue that arguing is going to produce a lot of movement on from either side of the debate, since that's a lot more subjective than "If we take this we are going to die."
I do remember Jovi Sunscryer, yes, but I honestly don't see the relevance to my saying, effectively, "If miscasting equals dying of being a shoddy wizard, shouldn't messing up in combat and dying equal dying of being a shitty soldier"?
Aliya
Someone I might become
- Location
- Kazakhstan
- Pronouns
- They/She/It
So, anyway, the reason I am pro-BM is because I have a hypothesis that using only BM discounted by SoM is not actually flexing our magic muscles, which is the key for making us better at magic. Settling just for that means we will stagnate, magically. And I don't want to play a quest where we stagnate on magic. That's just sad.
[X] [BEHAVIOUR] Bodyguard
[X] [NUMBER] Trio
Imo the small intimate size of the spell is the key component. There are other spells to go big with and keeping the size to a managable trio should make it a potent personal weapon.
Thread moves too fast for to read everything, will Bodyguard behavior complicate our stealth stuff?
[X] [NUMBER] Trio
Imo the small intimate size of the spell is the key component. There are other spells to go big with and keeping the size to a managable trio should make it a potent personal weapon.
Thread moves too fast for to read everything, will Bodyguard behavior complicate our stealth stuff?
Which is still fewer rolls than it would take us to die in combat normally, because we have rolled badly three times in a row before and Mathilde is not dead.
Well yes I was talking about death by miscast vs death in battle specifically.
My issue with additional BM is that it will be rarely the winning option for a character that is great at dispelling, taking out VIPs, knows MMM and might well have tired herself out already pre-battle with other shenanigans like scouting. We shouldn't learn BM just to check off a box on our character sheet.
The hope for the Rider is that it's nature as a single-use spell that just deploys an autonomous monstrosity means that it can get tacked onto the other option.
The hope for the Rider is that it's nature as a single-use spell that just deploys an autonomous monstrosity means that it can get tacked onto the other option.
[X] [BEHAVIOUR] Charge
[X] [NUMBER] Trio
[X] [BEHAVIOUR] Duel
[X] [NUMBER] Trio
[X] [BEHAVIOUR] Duel
- Location
- Earth
Citation needed.
In a major battle? When?
- Location
- Canada
So my pulling actual numbers that have been shown in the quest, which come from a specific inquiry into whether there have been any problems with the Battlewizards, is deemed "unscientific"
Whereas you are supposing 20% of them blew themselves up based on no evidence in particular?
Not to mention supposing that every single death must have been via miscast as opposed to angry Vampire?
There are from Mathilde's own estimates, which Boney has stated OOC to be his own back of envelope maths, 400 Magisters or above in the Colleges.
That is roughly 50 members of Magister level or higher per College
That's not a whole lot of Wizards
How many of those do we suppose are Battle Wizards? Just 10 would be 20% of each College
Because if the numbers are low and there's only a couple of Battle Wizards then they're a rarity and the numbers don't support them being high turnover, extremely replaceable assets. They can't be dropping like flies if it's going to take 5 years of training to replace one and you've got only 2 or 3 of them
Plus however many years it takes just to find someone with the potential tobecome a Battle Wizard, only one in thirty thousand go on to become Magister level
If Battle Magic is as rare as you make it out to be then an even smaller fraction of that is your recruitment pool
That'd leave significant periods where there's no Battle Wizards in the College period, which is then failing it's obligation to produce relevant war assets
And if it's the other way around and a very significant chunk of Colleges are Battle Wizards then that suggests that the occupation isn't very lethal for entirely different reasons
- Location
- Hiding in the walls.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
If we're being attacked, our stealth is already badly compromised in an immediate sense; if we're attacking, then presumably we either no longer care about stealth or we're in an area where there are no witnesses and we can hide the body. It might be awkward if we want to quickly slit a guard's throat or something, and having to recast it is a bit of a pain there? But presumably the bodyguard, while it can be precast, isn't worse at being cast ordinarily, so if we're concerned about it we could just not do so in that situation and have a spell that's no worse than our other choices.
Orc fuck up in Karegil for one, even more dangerous than a major battle since you at least have some allies in battle. We rolled a lot of low dice on escape and still managed it in the end.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
It boils down to the original wizard sin of the quest, which was an attempt to break down the boundary between Warhammer's existing systems for magic and the playerbase's absolute fear of uncertainty.
The game mechanic that if we stay in our lane we'll never miscast (or just about) was necessary for us to be able to function with the skill set we desired (rather than just hiding in an office forever), but it has had the dual effects of reducing reverence for the magic we've got our hands on and inducing a mortifying lack of willingness to put toes over the line.
I'll post sometimes about how I wish magic got treated with more respect, but I sometimes feel like the way this thread respects magic is like being a cow boy and deciding that the best way to respect a horse is to be on the other side of a nice thick fence.
It's like, if you want to be the horse whispering girl who gets her hands on the wild stallion and tames him when no one else can, you have to be willing to get into the corral with an angry horse, you know? You can't be a cool thing doer without doing the thing.
It's nice to have cool apparitions to tempt us out of that shell.
Handmaidens are physical teleporters who can detect the sort of magic that detects us. I can see the appeal of a Malfean Stealth Enforcer that murders anybody capable of noticing us when we're on the prowl.
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Speaker4thesilen
Superpower: Common Sense
- Location
- Noneya Business
I'm impressed. This isn't a truly modular spell, but it is a significant step in that direction. Once we write a paper on this, anybody in the Gray college with the favor and standing to read it is going to be able to design a customized spell, just for them, that does what they want it to do. For that matter, they can create multiple versions of the spell if they have the time and inclination.
That means that an enemy can never be fully certain what a Gray wizard is going to be able to do. Massively increased unpredictability means that Gray wizards are even harder to factor for in old Fuss and Feathers plans.
Theoretically, it also means that a wizard can train themselves up for battle magic by starting with a singular Rider, mastering that spell, and then moving on to a trio of Riders when they feel that they're ready. More battle wizards surviving the process of becoming battle wizards means a stronger empire, and, well, we know an Everchosen situation is brewing.
That means that an enemy can never be fully certain what a Gray wizard is going to be able to do. Massively increased unpredictability means that Gray wizards are even harder to factor for in old Fuss and Feathers plans.
Theoretically, it also means that a wizard can train themselves up for battle magic by starting with a singular Rider, mastering that spell, and then moving on to a trio of Riders when they feel that they're ready. More battle wizards surviving the process of becoming battle wizards means a stronger empire, and, well, we know an Everchosen situation is brewing.
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My point was not that it is 20% necessarily it is that there is a replacement rate, the average battle mage dies in a matter of years not decades and as long as the Sylvania campaign did not kill more than usual of them to miscasts we would not be informed of it anymore than we would be informed the sky is blue.
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
Actually that back of envelope maths includes Battle Wizards separately.
Roughly thirty Battle Wizards per College.
- Location
- Earth
The estimates also included Battle Wizards:
Magister and Battle Wizard are seperate tracks. Note the difference in attrition between Journeyman --> Magister and Battle Wizard --> Elite Battle Wizard.
I wouldn't say they're easily replaceable, but their normal attrition rate is higher than normal.
Edit: Weber'd.
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- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Mathilde will cast Battle Magic when appropriate if she learns it. If she's in a fight and judges the risk of a miscast is less than the risk of the outcome from not casting the Battle Magic, she'll cast it, and otherwise she won't. At all stages, she'll be taking what she considers to be the least risky outcome.
If the Battle Magic in question is very hard to cast, she'll rarely use it. If it's easy, like Melkoth's Miasma, she'll cast it often.
If Mathilde knows the Battle Magic already, she's not in an inherently more risky position than not knowing it; she's not a fool. Battles always carry a degree of risk.
The reason learning Battle Magic is a "risk" is that some of the risk is front-loaded in the learning process. It's a question of whether that learning process risk is higher than the long-term reduction in risk on battlefields compared to not knowing the Battle Magic.
If the Battle Magic in question is very hard to cast, she'll rarely use it. If it's easy, like Melkoth's Miasma, she'll cast it often.
If Mathilde knows the Battle Magic already, she's not in an inherently more risky position than not knowing it; she's not a fool. Battles always carry a degree of risk.
The reason learning Battle Magic is a "risk" is that some of the risk is front-loaded in the learning process. It's a question of whether that learning process risk is higher than the long-term reduction in risk on battlefields compared to not knowing the Battle Magic.
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- Location
- Earth
We did roll a lot of low dice there, but they were interspersed with several medium and a few high dice too.
We kept failing the extraction rolls, but we also kept winning the fighting rolls enough to force the orcs into morale checks.
We just were behind enemy lines so orcs were essentially numberless.
But we did not roll low dice several times in a row.
Or Mathilde would truly be dead.
- Location
- Canada
[X] [BEHAVIOUR] Charge
[X] [BEHAVIOUR] Duel
[X] [NUMBER] One
I don't like the 'Bodyguard' option, because it explicitly requires that we get involved in the fighting. It'd be nicer if we could summon our Rider as a distraction while we sneak around completing other objectives. That said, One sounds better than more, because it'd be nice to keep the spell in the sub-Battle Magic range.
[X] [BEHAVIOUR] Duel
[X] [NUMBER] One
I don't like the 'Bodyguard' option, because it explicitly requires that we get involved in the fighting. It'd be nicer if we could summon our Rider as a distraction while we sneak around completing other objectives. That said, One sounds better than more, because it'd be nice to keep the spell in the sub-Battle Magic range.