Fixation Metamagic, The New Anchoring, But Practically Useless? Options

[Umidori]

Okay, so when an Alchemist makes an alchemical preparation, it has a shelf life of Potency x2 hours, after which point it begins to lose 1 Potency per full hour. Losing Potency is annoying, as it weakens the effects of the preparation, but I understand the idea behind the shelf life - it prevents someone from stocking up on an arsenal of Strain-prepaid spells and just tossing fireballs left and right.

It would be at this point that I'd think to myself, "Well if I want to have a special ace-in-the-hole preparation that doesn't decay, so I can save it for use in a particularly tight spot, I can always Anchor a preparation, right?"

Except that Anchoring isn't an available metamagic in SR5 (hopefully it will be with a later splatbook!). Instead, we get Fixation.

With Anchoring, you spend 1 Karma per point of spell Force to make the spell self-sustain until it gets triggered or destroyed via dispelling. You can then stick the anchored spell in a box, bury it for 100 years, dig it up, and then fire it off via the appropriate trigger and it works just as well as the moment it was first created.

Fixation works similarly. You spend a minimum of 1 Karma, but you can spend more, up to the preparation's Force. Whether you spend 1 or 100 karma on the preparation, the only affect this has on the shelf life is that instead of losing Potency at a rate of 1 Potency per full hour, you lose it at the rate of 1 Potency per full day. The only affect spending more Karma has is that the preparation gains +1 die to resist Dispelling per Karma spent. (How often do you expect people to be trying to Dispell your preparations anyways?)

Am I missing something, or is Fixation not worth the cost? Sure, you can spend only 1 Karma to prolong a spell instead of Anchoring's (Force) Karma, but the extension is utterly trivial. If a preparation is going to decay that quickly, why spend Karma to make it last a little longer when you could just make a new preparation? Sure, you have to resist Drain again, but I'd say that's worth a point of Karma in all but the rarest cases.

This seems like it'd only ever be useful when you're banking your entire plan on a single ultra powerful preparation that you prepared too early to be able to use, and now you need to buy yourself those extra couple days of lasting Potency because you won't have the time to simply redo the preparation before you need it (which, if it's a powerful and high Potency preparation to begin with, the time you gain Fixating it should be plenty of time to recover from even heavy Drain incurred in creating a new preparation anyway!)

I just don't get it, and I seriously hope Anchoring comes back in SR5's equivalent of Street Magic.

~Umi

[DoomFrog]

Yes Fixation is pretty useless. But personally I always felt that Quickening wasn't that useful, so I am not that upset.

My guess is that there will be a form of Anchoring. Probably an advanced metamagic that is an upgraded version of Fixation that allows you to spend additional karma to add a day to the preparation before the potency starts falling.

[Sendaz]

Anchoring might be back, but I suspect not.

It seems to me Fixation is the reworked model that we get to live with.

Before Anchoring just meant double drain, fixation means having to spend reagents, time and Karma for better durations.

I can't see them bringing back a better version for the mere cost of one more initiation.

But I could be wrong (and hope I am) and maybe Anchoring will be the advanced metamagic form of Fixation, extending the shelf life of the items or removing some of the reagents required.

[Thanee]

Well, one thing is certain... there will be advanced metamagics for Enchanting. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Bye
Thanee

[Umidori]

I just don't see why Anchoring would be deserving of being scaled back. So long as you can't make tons of anchored spells or preparations to hoard up, why shouldn't you be able to enchant an object to hold a single use "spell" indefinitely, for a cost? Why does it have to decay over a very short period of time?

I've never heard of anyone abusing anchoring. Hell, for that matter I've actually never even heard of anyone even just using it. The cost of an Advanced Metamagic plus the karma expenditure made it a very rare sort of thing. Even when I had powerful mages in my group of players, I personally only ever had Anchored spells crop up as NPC related items.

We had a run where the players unearthed an airtight coffin containing a vampire that had been in an Induced Dormancy for 20 years, and because he knew he'd be weak when he woke up, he had a few anchored spells created for him and stuffed in the coffin with him before he took his little nap. One of the runners picked up the Bible laid across the vampire's chest and triggered a Net spell, entangling the entire group.

As a GM, I liked having that sort of unusual mechanism available as a storytelling tool. And as a player, now that we have SR5's Alchemy and whatnot making Enchanters a viable sort of character design, I'd love to be able to make one or two Trump Card preparations that I keep in case of extreme emergencies, without having to worry about them losing Potency. I'd gladly pay 12 karma to anchor a Force 12 spell that lasts forever compared to paying 1 Karma for 12 different spells that fizzle if they don't get cast soon enough.

~Umi

[phlapjack77]

You're not alone - Fixation as written is pretty craptacular. For a whole metamagic, I'd expect either the karma requirement to go away, or the preparation lasts years instead of days.

[Tashiro]

IIRC, the trick to Anchoring was you could also Anchor quickened spells, allowing them to be used more than once. The wording under Anchoring is very... dense... but I got the idea you could pay both the anchoring cost and the quickening cost, and have the spell do 'every time it triggers, pull off effect X'.

I'm sure we'll get anchoring in the magic book.

[Makki]

Fixation
Instead of one per hour your preparations now loose one point of potency every (initiate grade) days.

fixed.
I never understood, why I need to pay karma to get a Metamagic and then some more karma to use that metamagic. I hated all the metamagics under this category...

[Tzeentch]

Aye, Fixation is pretty terrible. In the errata thread I suggested:


Page 325 Fixation
This is a very underwhelming metamagic ability since you have to expend Karma to do anything (on consumables, no less). When Quickening of all things is FAR cheaper on Karma you have an issue.

Suggest at the very least making the Potency degradation be a base ability that doesn't require Karma consumption. As follows:

Fixation: Your alchemical preparations (p. 304) have an extended shelf life. When your preparation’s Potency starts to decay, instead of losing 1 Potency every hour it loses 1 every day.

For the rest I suggest:

In addition, you can spend Edge (up to the Force of the preparation) at creation that is used as a dice pool bonus against Disjoining (p. 307).

Then just change Karma to Edge in the parens comment on p. 307.

[phlapjack77]

Fixation
Instead of one per hour your preparations now loose one point of potency every (initiate grade) days.

fixed.
I never understood, why I need to pay karma to get a Metamagic and then some more karma to use that metamagic. I hated all the metamagics under this category...

Agreed. If a metamagic requires additional karma to use, the effect should be bleepin' mind blowing. Or maybe have the metamagic give the PC the option to spend karma for additional cool effects over and above the base functionality of the metamagic.

[Bigity]

IIRC, the trick to Anchoring was you could also Anchor quickened spells, allowing them to be used more than once. The wording under Anchoring is very... dense... but I got the idea you could pay both the anchoring cost and the quickening cost, and have the spell do 'every time it triggers, pull off effect X'.

I'm sure we'll get anchoring in the magic book.

I've never seen it interpreted that way. But, never really played 4E.

IMO, this would make it overpowered.

[Tymeaus Jalynsfe...]

I've never seen it interpreted that way. But, never really played 4E.

IMO, this would make it overpowered.

BUT, It WOULD make it useful. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Bigity]

Yea it would (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Be like a rod/wand in AD&D. I use charge 1 of my 50 wand of fireballs in pass 1. In pass 2 I pop my ring of cloudkill.

Then I collect my monies.

[Tashiro]

This was a discussion I had on Dumpshock a little over a year ago, perhaps longer.
Anchoring, if it were 'pay karma, trigger, lose karma', makes it weaker than Quickening, but it is an advanced metamagic technique. But if you use Quickening on the spell (and the tortured wording for the metamagic technique of Anchoring suggests it is possible), then it makes sense for it to be an advanced form of Quickening.

"If a bullet is fired at me, create a shield spell" makes sense. The shield flickers off and on as you're being shot. It's still expensive, since you're paying for quickening AND anchoring, but at least that's something.

[Mäx]

Yeah fixation for sure needs a fix for it to be worth even getting.
Both of the suggested fixes seems quite good and make it worth the metamagic slot.
Ofcource the worse part is that the piece of crap is currently the only metamagic for enchanting.

Actually can one use centering to help with alchemy drain?