Ok, imagine a hermetic mage with a magic rating of 12, an initiation grade of 6, with geomancy and centering metamagic, a summoning focus rating 12, a centering focus rating 12 and 3 sustaining focus rating 9. I know that's a lot of karma, but i just want to create the biggest spell ever. He also has a summoning skill (spirit of man) skill rating of 7 (+2) and a Dark King mentor spirit (+2 to spirit of man)


A mage first boosts his willpower, logic and body to 9, his racial maximum through augment attributes spells and sustain them with his sustaining focus.

This mage find a rating 6 domain and change it to fit his tradition with his geomancy metamagic.

Now, this mage summons a spirit of man rating 24 (twice his magic) in a domain aspected towards his tradition. The spirit rolls 24 dice and get, on average, 8 hits. The spellcaster rolls 41 dice and gets, on average, 13 hits. That's enough for 5 services.

He resist a drain value of 16. With his augmented attributes and his centering metamagic, he rolls 36 dice, and gets, on average, 12 hits. He only suffers 4 boxes of damage.

The spirit of man knows at least one of the mage's spell. In this case, let's say he knows Fireball (Stunball would also bo good, but i like flashy spells). He then casts the fireball with at the maximum rating, which is twice the spirit's magic, or 48. He rolls a total of 48 dice for his spellcasting check, but since he trully wants to make the spell powerful, he uses a point of edge, increasing his dice pool to 60. He gets, on average, 20 hits. Half of them are sixes, thus are rerolled, and one third of the reroll are a success, or 3, for a great total of 23 hits. Since it is not impressive enough, the spirit burns one edge point and reroll all the non-successes. He rolls 40 dice and gets, on average, 13 hits. Half of them are sixes, thus rerolled, and one third of the rerolled are sucesses, thus two additional sucesses. 15 new successes are thus added to the first 23, for a great total of 38 successes.

The spell now has a final DV of 86. Soak that!

PS: The spirit now has to resist the drain of the spell, which is 29. He rolls 48 dice, and just to be sure spends one point of edge, for a great total of 60 dice. Using the same logic as above, the final result is 23 hits. He suffered 6 boxes of damage, but since his physical damage track has 20 boxes, he can cast again...

Been done. All the math. Several times.

No matter what you do, you will glitch sometime though.

I thought Force limited the damage value of the spell? i.e. he'd get a maximum of 24 hits on his roll, casting at 2x times his Magic attribute.

He used edge, so the limit of force # of hits is gone.

And even then, the maximum number of hits would be 48(the force of the spell)

p 172

I think edge can only be used once on a roll, don't have a book though.

If you use edge before you roll, you get to re-roll all the sixes again, etc.. until no more sixes rolled.

Given that you can add 1 to his initiate rating and then 1 to his magic, it's not the biggest spell ever. Still pretty big, but after having spent 500,000 karma (or whatever it actually is) he's better be able to toss a big nuke.

1) EDGE DICE Aren't limited by force of spell. (but the rest are)

So the most successes he could have is 48 +12 (presuming all 12 edge dice are sucesses)

2) Does anyting in the rules say a spirit will use EDGE on command. To me 'edge' is free will, pushing the 'extra' etc... No way to compel something to use it. While you can 'order' the spirit to cast the most powerfull firewall it can... you cant 'order' it to spend edge.


3) Rest assured if the spirit can use edge ONCE summoned it most certainly can use edge to RESIST the summons.

If you're gonna go to all that trouble, blow all that karma...

Then why not just get yourself a "wimpy" teenage-level ally? It'd be a lot cheaper than all the foci...

Heck of a lot more useful, and if you save the karma for all the skills and spells you want so you don't have to do it again, you can afford to burn a point or two of edge in a single really nasty binding.

As someone (Frank?) pointed out, when you get more powerful than a tank but less powerful than a nuke, the numbers become less relevant.

Edge Dice get the rule of 6, there's literally no limit to how many times you could keep rolling 6s and getting extra dice that will also give you more dice when you roll 6s.

With just a Force 1 spell and a single Edge die getting added on you could theoretically simply roll a 6 over and over again forever. It's uncapped at that point and while stupidly unlikely to exceed the numbers you've outlined, it's theoretically possible. A Force 1 spirit of man could theoretically throw a spell larger than what you've outlined.

It isn't going to happen, but theoretically it could.

-Frank

Whether the spirit uses edge or not, it's up to the GM. My point was that, theorically, under the current ruling, the highest possible spell DV (if you keep the 1 hit per 3 dice ratio) is 84. If anybody can find a way to get more, please prove me wrong.

Like I said earlier, just initiate again and then increase your magic again. Every time you do it you'll add 2 force to your max.

You can't initiate past grade 6. Unless I'm mistaken.

Your initiate grade cannot be higher than your magic rating. Since you can increase your magic rating by initiating, you can increase your grade cap as well. It's really freaking expensive in terms of karma cost, but theoretically initiate grade is uncapped, as is magic rating.

I thought you could only use 1 edge point per test.

That would mean you either re-roll failures or you add your edge in dice and get rule of six, not both.

Am I wrong here?

You're right. You can only spend edge once per roll.

You can't spend two points of edge on a single roll but you can spend one point and then burn one point on a single roll. The difference is that burnt edge doesn't regenerate. You have to buy it back with karma. However, burning edge doesn't allow you to reroll. It can allow you to get an automatic critical success (if such a success is possible) or survive certain death.

What he should do is burn edge to get a critical success, which would give him 4 net hits over the dragon's resistance test regardless of how many successes the dragon rolled (assuming that he has [dragon's hits]+4 dice).

Please don't start the Critical success does not equal 4 net hits debate again. It's no fun without Synner and Cain.

I'm shocked than anyone agreed with Cain. For shame, Hyzie.