Sense Nature

This allows the magic user to see into the nature of things, even things completely alien to his own aura. Magicians who take this metamagic subtract their initiate grade from any artificial object's object resistance threshold.

that's way too much.

a grade 4 initiate would be ignoring object resistance, pretty much... meaning that on a single success, their spells automatically are a total success against any object. cameras, drones, ultrasound sensors... you name it.

perhaps a better idea would be to allow them one additional die per initiate grade against objects. it's still pretty danged nice, just not quite so horrifyingly powerful.

[edit] on a somewhat related note, i have often considered the possibility of a metamagic technique that lets you reduce (briefly considered allowing increase, but rejected it as being too good) the area of an AOE spell you cast by 1 per initiate grade at no penalty. not sure if it would be worth it or not... [/edit]

I'm not meaning successes against cameras and technological superiority; I'm just saying that after a while, things like artificiality arbitrarily affecting Shape Object spells and a spirit's Movemnent power won't happen. A camera won't be affected for the purposes of seeing through Physical Mask, but it will be affected by fireballs and lightning a lot more easily. A car will be Moved as easily as a puppy. That sort of thing.

it may not be what you meant, but it is what you said.

and incidentally, the only reason a lightning bolt spell works better on a puppy than on a car is because:

1) the car has a much higher body than the puppy, most likely
2) the car has a much higher armor than the puppy also
3) the car is immune to stun damage. according to some people, lightning bolt spells do stun damage. whether it does or not, the car's armor is certainly more likely to turn any physical damage into stun damage than the puppy's armor, so even if LB does physical damage (which i personally feel it does) immunity to stun damage still helps the car out.

IOW, lightning bolt is unaffected by object resistance.

as far as it goes, i don't think there's anything arbitrary about object resistance affecting shape object spells. that is directly affecting the object. why wouldn't the object's inherent resistance to magic apply?

and as far as the movement power is concerned... object resistance only references spells being affected, AFAICT.

The rating of an object accounts for things like resolution and spectrums seen. This metamagic won't hurt that. What it will hurt is the inherent magical resistance. So you'll have less/no trouble shaping a car because you'll start seeing matter as matter and not natural vs. unnatural. This doesn't mean that a 5 bajillion dollar security camera won't be able to see a dude with this metamagic using a force 1 invisibility spell. This is what I mean by reducing object resistance. This way, a drone won't get an inherent ability to find magically invisible dudes; they'll need to upgrade their cameras instead of merely being artificial.

Since there was already a thread for it, I was thinking of another new metamagic today. Something like "unveiling"

Basically, trying to break masking is frickin' hard on an initiate with more than a couple of grades. They get to roll their grade + their magic + intuition (IIRC the attributes right) where the assense only rolls intuition +assenssing. With unveiling, specifically for breaking false signatures or aura masking, the magician doing the assensing would add their initiate grade in dice to the assensing test. Still not quite as good as +magic, but it still gives someone a chance. Thoughts?

They should get that bonus for assensing in general; maybe you could modify it so they replace their intuition stat for assensing with magic.