Food is for the Weak!, Combining Fast and Nutrition Options

[JaronK]

So... as far as I can tell, a spell caster with Force 2 Fast and Force 2 Nutrition can cast each spell once every 144 hours or so (assuming they cast with 12 dice), and never need to eat, without any penalty.

If a spellcaster was doing this, should their lifestyle costs go down?

Is there something preventing this?

JaronK

[DocMortand]

Heh, Lina's already done this in my game. It's a potent combo...except that it's not really game breaking. I don't reduce the price of the lodgings tho...in my mind the price of lodging is more for security and location than the food.

[lorthazar]

Yeah the yardstick the GM uses to whack players

[DocMortand]

[lorthazar]

That was meant to imply there is nothing really to stop it unless the GM decides it isn't going to work.

[DocMortand]

Heh. Gotcha.

[Edward]

It is a non issue for most characters remember if you maintain 4 lifestyles you don’t get a discount because you only eat food for one person so I wouldn’t give any discount.

The combination would have 2 significant effects.

The more common is that you can live a street lifestyle and your GM can’t say that the rotten pizza you fished out of the doomster gave you cramps resist 4M with unaugmented body (bad food poisoning)

The les conmen but somewhat more significant implication is the geasa abstinence from food. You may get the occasional sidewards glance when you always refuse to eat (our Johnson’s almost always feed us at the meet, often expensive meals) but in most circumstances those 2 spells will render the geasa about as restrictive as setting a item of cyber wear as your talisman. Although the monk with geasa abstinence alcohol, abstinence sex and abstinence food (likely taken in that order) is a much better concept than a character with 3 cyber wear talismans. I may actually play that monk one day, after starry night witch probably wouldn’t notice geasas of indulgence alcohol, indulgence sex and indulgence food.

Edward

[Capt. Dave]

[Shockwave_IIc]

[DrJest]

Purely from a roleplaying point of view, I would (as GM) start to introduce elements of strangeness to such a "manavore" character. Long-term substitution of magic for normal sustenance could have interesting side effects. I'm not saying I would exactly penalise a character for doing it, but I would certainly spice their life up a little.

[Cray74]

[Aes]

With absolutely no renewal of the fat deposits, I imagine he'd look exceedingly gaunt after a while - possibly freakishly so. On the plus side, having no digestion means no stomach gas.

[DrJest]

Wouldn't it be interesting if subsisting almost entirely on pure mana made the runner more... sensitive to the general weirdness of the world? Maybe catching a glimpse of a spirit out of the corner of their eye that's gone when they turn round... feeling background count as a physical sensation like nausea or stomach ache... nothing TN-worthy (necessarily - maybe it would be if you kept on going) but colour like that.

[Cray74]

[DrJest]

I meant to address something like this in the book I'm writing (a modern fantasy) but I never really got the opening. The main character makes a passing comment about how most decently talented wizards could do without food, drink or even sleep by pure magic but don't because of the side effects. I'd intended to explain that removing oneself from the normal functions of humanity caused a slow but inevitable degeneration in their own inner humanity, eventually leading to sociopathy as they no longer identify with other humans - and a sociopathic wizard is A Bad Thing.

Whether this could be applied to SR is another matter, of course.

[RangerJoe]

This sounds like a great combination of spells, particularly for SR groups that find themselves eating the paint off the walls in the Arcology, or deep in the forests of the Yucatan (but then again, there I suppose it's less about what you eat and more about what eats you).

My concerns:

Both spells are permanent. How do permanent spells show up in the astral after their casting time has passed? If the spell lasts 144 hours, surely there is some residual magical signature associated with it? Obviously, permanent spells don't function like actively sustained spells, but for such a long duration, I would imagine some kind of effect.

If my players did this, I could never coerce them to hit a Stuffer Shack before a run for munchables. Since so many of my plots revolve around Stuffer Shacks, this would be a game-breaker for me.

[LinaInverse]

I mainly got these 2 combo for the primary reason so that I could travel to remote locations with minimal support (it's my char's long-term plans to make foci, and mineral/herbal from "remote locales" is a fairly common rare material). I don't use it as a substitute for real food and my char's lifestyles are high enough such that I'm not digging stuff out of garbage bins to begin with.

[Herald of Verjig...]

I made a sorcerer for a (short lived) game who had this trick. Then I rolled for SURGE, and got a dozen effects.

[kackling kactuar]

Er, why take two different spells when you can just snag a Force 2 Create Food?

[Fortune]

[Da9iel]

@k.k. Because 2M is significantly easier to resist than 2S. Also, some (many?) GMs allow those 2 spells to be taken free - force 2 exclusive for cost.

This post has been edited by Da9iel: Apr 4 2005, 10:37 PM

[kackling kactuar]

[DocMortand]

[Herald of Verjig...]

[Da9iel]

@DocM Who says you can't cast nutrition and fast on others?