Spellcasting One-Shots, Numbercrunching for the mojoslingers. Options

[Azralon]

I was curious the other day about what it'd take to be an unequipped spellcaster with the capacity to, under average dice rolls, one-shot pretty much anyone with a single Stunbolt.

I chose Stunbolt because A) Generally Stun tracks are shorter than Physical tracks, so it'll likely be more globally effective and B) if this is going to be a caster's primary and signature spell, it should have a low drain code so it can be cast more often.

So my target of choice is a Dwarf with Exceptional Attribute: Willpower. You're looking at a Willpower of 8, which gives a Stun track of 12 boxes.

Working backwards, we can assume that a Willpower of 8 will generate about 2.66 hits per roll. I'm going to bump that up to an even 3 to give us a mild safety margin and keep the math simple.

This means our target will likely negate 3 boxes of incoming Stun per spell. Since we're looking to drop him from fresh to a net of 12 boxes, that means our casting needs to do an average of 15S. A tall order.

Let's construct our mage with the Qualities of Magician (15), Aptitude: Sorcery (10), and Mentor Spirit (5). The Mentor will be someone/something that gives +2 to Combat spells, of course. We'll max out our Spellcasting at 7, then Specialize in Combat spells (2). That leaves our mage throwing an impressive 11 dice on Combat spells.

So now the question becomes: At what Force should the Stunbolt be cast to insure that bullheaded dwarf drops?

To answer that, we need to decide one more thing first: What the caster's Magic attribute is. Let's assume that the caster doesn't like the idea of taking Physical drain, so the maximum Force of the Stunbolt will equal the caster's Magic. That, too, makes the math easy to chew on.