Realism vs Fantasy vs Then Anime

[Aduu Avagnar]

I read a lot about swordplay and armors and weaponry in an effort to better understand how these conflicts go.  My biggest issue is getting a feel for what sort of punch goes into various spells.  Does Ruin pierce armor? Does Bio make you sick?  Melt your face?  Its a bit of a crapshoot, and magic is the only defense my character has.

 

More importantly, just how powerful can a magician get if they are not legendary, just competent?  How much is skill and how much comes down to winning the Aether lottery?  I am spoiled by tabletop manuals explaining such things to levels that exceed the pedantic.

 

Ok I am in front of my PC now,  so can try and go over what I have put together, and my general opinion of things. first off, from the spell animations themselves, we have two different types, those that are projectiles and those that manifest around the target. I for one feel that the ones that manifest around the target, attack the target directly, bypassing armour. However, the projectiles I believe would encounter some resistance.

 

The ammount of protection provided by armour however is dependent on what it is made/coated with. This piece of information was gained through looking at the description of the Gilded Magitek Armor in the Mount Guide.

 

 

it only took a few heated skirmishes with the allied city-states for Grlemald to realize that the magicks wielded by the realm's mages were too much for even the thickest of magitek armor plating. Alloyed gilding has since been discovered to dampen the effects of elemental charges and is now standard issue.

 

 

So, Although armour may provide /some/ defence against magic, it isn't much. unless it is gilded (and with the new gold dyes available, it can even be represented ICly).

 

Now, with Bio and the like, I would say thats down to your personal take on the spell. Those that rp with me know that I don't like to use the actual spells provided, so Nako will never cast Fire I, he will throw a fireball, he won't cast Aero, he will attack them with Air.

 

Secondly, for how powerful you can be, it depends on the style of magic that you wish to cast. Thaumaturgy is the only one that states categorically that it comes from your internal aether, so for thaumaturgy, winning the aetheric lottery is king. That being said, I have alway played Nako as not having the largest internal aether, but being able to get maximum results from minimal effort. Arcanima comes down to smarts and tactical thinking from the looks of things, and Conjury seems to depend on how strong of a connection you have with the elementals.

 

Magic, unfortunately for us is one huge grey area of lore.

[Chillsmack]

It'd be more like

!

What could have been, if Jana had become a PLD instead...

8qMhRONmAT8

 

Your henshin

I can't believe I just spent 40 minutes watching people turn into Fruit Cyborg Samurai...but I did

[K'nahli]

An unnecessarily long magical girl transformation sequence filled with friendship and rainbows while everyone else is shot and destroyed is in order, methinks.

 

 

Example;

sinjEsTa6do

 

 

That's how I like to envision my male hyur as he enters the climax of an epic battle (...that has yet to happen) ;w;

 

 

 

I read a lot about swordplay and armors and weaponry in an effort to better understand how these conflicts go.  My biggest issue is getting a feel for what sort of punch goes into various spells.  Does Ruin pierce armor? Does Bio make you sick?  Melt your face?  Its a bit of a crapshoot, and magic is the only defense my character has.

 

More importantly, just how powerful can a magician get if they are not legendary, just competent?  How much is skill and how much comes down to winning the Aether lottery?  I am spoiled by tabletop manuals explaining such things to levels that exceed the pedantic.

 

To be honest (and this is just me), I would never use in-game skills in my RP. Rather I would just reference them and decide on my own how powerful or effective they were going to be. I highly doubt that you're supposed to assume that the in-game skills are actual and very, specific things with names. In Ruin's case, you could have many, many, many variants of it and it's strength and piercing power - as per your example - would be entirely up to your character's ability and the circumstances(eg. cast time, diminished focus, etc).

 

The thought of people actually being limited to a very, specific, offensive spell to the point that it actually has a name just seems both amusing and restricting to me. It reminded me of this actually, haha

 

 

uU_h8ksmXUg

 

 

Although, perhaps I misunderstood (^^)   Sorry for the unnecessary post if so!

 

 

Anyways, If you frequent battle RP then you might want to try and design your own statistics(or however you call it) or ask for help with it. It might be a fun thing to do and help be a generally, consistent guide for you.

 

 

 

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To answer the OP, I like my realism when it comes to RP. I am typically thrown off by RP where the person is practically superhuman and bends the laws of physics as well as downplays the significant threat of even the lesser beasts(beast tribes aren't a threat only because they have numbers. They are competent fighters just like any soldier). Although this is largely because I and many other people don't play our characters to that level so I fear the compatibility issues it could cause.

 

 

On that note, I have a related topic that I'd be curious to hear feedback on, though I am not convinced that it deserves a whole topic of its own. If anyone'd like me to remove the question then by all means let me know! I don't mean to derail or anything.

 

 

~~~~~~~~~~

Anyways, what I am curious about is.... how would or do you people who play/play with strong characters deal with the skill gap that exists between extraordinary and average warriors? How do you keep it so that the super-skilled fighter isn't tearing down the enemies and minimalizing the effect that the scene has upon normal players? I was always uncertain of the idea of someone awesome destroying twenty enemies with several swings of their axe or blowing a group asunder with powerful black magic while another two or three players are struggling against an even number of equally-skilled foes.

~~~~~~~~~~

[FreelanceWizard]

Anyways, what I am curious about is.... how would or do you people who play/play with strong characters deal with the skill gap that exists between extraordinary and average warriors? How do you keep it so that the super-skilled fighter isn't tearing down the enemies and minimalizing the effect that the scene has upon normal players? I was always uncertain of the idea of someone awesome destroying twenty enemies with several swings of their axe or blowing a group asunder with powerful black magic while another two or three players are struggling against an even number of equally-skilled foes.

 

When this situation happens to me as ST, what I do is split the groups up so that people are being challenged by things appropriate and relevant to their power level. So, if you have a group of low power people and a group of high octane spellcasters, the bad guys will have some powerful casters too that the high powered people have to duel lest the entire battle be lost. Meanwhile, the low power people have to sneak in or fight past their adversaries to achieve some other key goal (turning off an anti-magic generator, disabling a ceruleum bomb, etc.). This way, everyone has a critical, important goal that they have to achieve that's relevant to their power level, and the structure of the fight necessitates little crossover.

 

Another approach is to simply say, "Everyone gets to take out 1-2 bad guys," and be done with it. That way, even if someone is a Black Mage extraordinaire, they're still fighting and winning against the exact same number of people as everyone else. They just get to narrate it differently.

 

Usually, though, I try to avoid these sorts of situations in the first place. If character power levels are highly disparate, I try to remove situations where they come up.

[Aldotsk]

It'd be more like

!

What could have been, if Jana had become a PLD instead...

8qMhRONmAT8

 

Your henshin

I can't believe I just spent 40 minutes watching people turn into Fruit Cyborg Samurai...but I did

 

It's so good!