cross-posted from: https://pathfinder.social/post/57797
Howdy everyone, you might be surprised to hear there’s a 3rd edition of an unofficial TTRPG based on the elder scrolls, or you might not! It’s a classless party-based d100 system where you can do all sorts of wacky stuff like make custom spells and enchant a fork to cast Absorb Health on hit.
I have a question about how you would judge a funky interaction though. The Atronach stone grants the Spell Absorption (5) trait, which does as follows:
“Whenever magic of any kind affects them, roll a d10. If the value is less than or equal to 5 the magic has no effect on them and instead they regain missing MP up to the cost of the magic.”
Nice. It helps offset the Stunted Magicka trait, which prevents natural regeneration of your MP. However, it’s a bit of a double edged sword. Suddenly whenever you need healing, it’s a coin toss as to whether you recover HP or MP, which could be disastrous in certain circumstances. When the party Recalls out of the collapsing mine, you might be left behind!
On the other hand, the Mysticism school offers the Absorb Health and Absorb Magicka effects, which deal X damage to an enemies HP or MP, then restores half as much HP or the entirety of MP damage to the caster. Ordinarily, this is an inefficient conversion of MP to Damage/enemy MP, but with the Spell Absorption, it can completely recoup your spent MP 50% of the time… and it’s trivially easy to make multi-hit weapon enhancement spell to grant you that coin toss on every swing of your axe, or a big pulse or cloak effect to proc a bunch of absorptions at once.
My question to you is, is that too much? Is that a proper “reward” for dealing with a 50% failure chance on critically important effects? At first blush, it seems cracked and definitely not intended, but I’m not convinced the upsides eclipse the downsides.
Feels like it should spells should only trigger Spell Absorption if the person on the receiving end is the person the spell was “shot” at. I get the logic behind saying that the player is the ultimate target of Absorb Magicka but I imagine it’s going against most people’s intuition, and for that I’d say it should be revised.
So you’re talking about a situation where a player with Spell Absorption casts an Absorb Health/Mana spell on an enemy, correct? And the argument is that the MP/HP regain is a spell effect that triggers Spell Absorption?
The answer is, of course not, because otherwise the MP regain from Spell Absorption would also trigger Spell Absorption, ad infinitum, which is both ludicrous and clearly not the intention.
The spell effect from an Absorb Spell is the damage it does to an enemy. This differs from the spell effect from a Restoration spell, which is to cause the targey to regain HP/MP. You can wave you hands and mutter something about, “Magic is intention” if your players argue about it.
