Magical Resources as an Alternative to Drain, Ammo equivalent for spells and summoning Options

[Jizmack]

Greetings All,
This thread is to invoke feedback and constructive criticism from the Dumpshock community regarding the feasibility of the following house rule:

As an alternative to using the Drain effect for mitigating and restraining magicians, Magical Resources could be used instead.
Magical Resources are otherwise known as spell components and could be anything (it’s magic, after all, so let people get creative).

The intent is to imitate the power and effectiveness of magicians with people using firearms and gear. The magician’s “weapon” would be his/her spell formula, along with the appropriate skill (i.e. – spellcasting) to utilize the “weapon”… so far so good… but, the “ammo” to make the “weapon” effective would be the Magical Resources.

For example, a magic user casts a spell with normal Drain value of 4. Instead of resisting the Drain and suffering the Stun Damage, the magic user would instead exhaust/deplete some spell components. In other words, casting the spell would Drain 4 points of Magical Resources.

A few consequences:

1) Access to Magical Resources would define the power and effectiveness of magicians, making key contacts more vital and planning/prepping for runs more intricate.

2) Magical security would be very similar to regular security with regards to preventing individuals with lethal capabilities from entering a specified area (airplane, courthouse, border crossing, etc.). Just as there are devices and skilled people to scan/search for melee weapons and ammunition, there would likewise be devices and magically skilled people to scan/search for any Magical Resources. In turn, Magical Resources could be hidden or concealed in some way, just like normal weapons/ammo.

3) The GM could have more control over how much magic would be employed in a given scenario or the overall campaign by simply varying the availability and cost of Magical Resources. Currently, background counts are the only feasible way to do this, so by using Magical Resources there is an alternative non-magical way of limiting magic.

4) The Enchanting skill, Arcana skill, or both could be used to fabricate Magical Resources from mundane resources; albeit the required mundane resource would still have some cost associated with them. This would be beneficial for Shamans living in the natural environment (i.e. - backwater wilderness).

5) Each spell/spirit formula could require its own specific Magical Resource, which would make looting other magician’s Magical Resources almost worthless. Yet, this would make the access issue (consequence #1) even more difficult, unless it is moderated by allowing magicians to fabricate their own (consequence #4).

I thank you in advance for your comments (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)