Increase Reflexes: How does it work? Options

[ZorbaTHut]

One of my players has picked up the Increase Reflexes spell.

I have to admit that I'm having trouble figuring out how it isn't hideously, hideously broken.

First off, it seems to imply that it wants the caster to roll a spellcasting test, which is Spellcasting+Magic. With a mildly twinked character this can be 12 dice without even much of a stretch. 12 dice gives an average of 4 successes . . . and 4 successes is the maximum threshold you can get on that spell, giving a whopping 4 IP and a less interesting initiative bonus. Plus Force doesn't seem to factor in in any way, so that's a Force 1 spell meaning the mage has to resist drain 2s.

Obviously this is broken. So what I decided to do, and I don't know if this is correct because I couldn't find it in the book, is to make Force be the number of dice you roll for the Threshold test. Any successes on Spellcasting+Magic get added to the Force. That seems better.

Or it did until we actually tried it out. Our mage rolled 9 spellcasting dice, got 3 successes, added that to his force for 8 dice - already we're looking at 2 or 3 successes likely - and then added Edge to it. Whee! Lots of successes, easily more than 4.

The worst part is that it wasn't even on him. It was on our ninja with a monofilament whip. Which he then cast Improved Invisibility on as well (with edge), and then managed to squeeze a Improved Invisibility on himself on top of things (again, with edge). And the mage proceeded to hide in a corner while the ninja diced things happily.

Note that Improved Invisibility, like Increase Reflexes, appears to ignore Force. Again, maybe I'm missing something. We used the same technique that I did for Increase Reflexes.

If I can't find another solution, I'm just going to say that, for situations like this, you roll Magic+Spellcasting+Edge-if-desired. Zero hits means a failure. Any other hits are added to the Force, and those dice are rolled without edge allowed, and hits on those are actual successes for the sake of the spell. Anything past that just seems overpowered to me. But I'd love to hear other people's comments on this.