Suggested Combat Spell Houserule, Leveling the playing field Options

[Seerow]

-Direct Combat Spells are no longer fully resisted when resist successes equal or exceed casting successes. Instead, all resistance successes reduce all damage from a Direct Combat spells by 2. For example, a Force 6 Stunbolt with 3 successes would normally deal 9 stun damage. If the target gets 3 successes, it deals 0, if the target gets 2 successes, it deals 7. This change would make that same spell resisted with 3 successes, it still deals 3 stun damage, and at 2 successes deal 5 stun damage. The goal of this is to make direct spells less binary, while making counterspelling more effective against them than indirect spells.

-Counterspelling against Indirect Combat Spells now applies to the damage resistance test, rather than to the dodge test. This makes Indirect Combat spells more akin to gunshots, reducing the effectiveness of counterspelling against them. The goal of this is to make direct combat spells a bit better, currently they're too easy to dodge given that most characters in combat are going to have a much higher reaction than Will or Body, because of how much easier it is to boost reaction. The idea is to make a indirect combat spell less susceptible to counterspelling, since they have to deal with armor as well.


-A new manatech armor enhancement is introduced, giving effective counterspelling on the person wearing it equal to the rating. Each rating costs 2 armor upgrade slots. Cost is 2000xrating and the Availability is 4R per rating. This counts as counterspelling rather than magic resist so that if you have an actual instance of counterspelling, it uses the assisting rules (ie roll the counterspelling dice, add successes to the counterspelling pool), rather than stacking directly. This makes the enhancement far weaker if you actually have counterspelling available, though still helpful, but allows mundanes to resist without a mage backup. Particularly useful for NPC security forces.