So I have a player who has initiated to sustain spells. So dice penalty from that.

He over cast Levitate at 12 and is asking about the damage certain objects would do.

The plan is to fly up in the air and hurl orbiting spheres at enemies.

It seems in the rules he can send objects at enemies using the fling spell rules. So in this case it would be 12 kilograms.

Then the debate about velocity, weight and damage started.

I figured I would ask to see what everyone else had done because this can't be the first time this has come up.

Thanks for any help.

I'd say velocity is factored in by giving the spell a str rating.

As for a 12kg object, I'd say (str/2)+ 1 or 2S

Since weapons spesificly designed to cause injury (throwing knives) only do (str/2)+1P I can't imagine something is going to do much more, even if it is rather heavy.

*edit* Oh, and he plans on taking 7P damage each time he does this? Seems like a really effort inifective method of injuring someone. You could maybe change the damage to P since it -is- so heavy.

Throwing something, I would agree with Karaden.

Dropping something heavy on them - use the fall rules for that one.

Levitate's a great spell as it is without being any closer to doing what Magic Fingers and Fling can do as well, so make sure it takes an action or two before you can really get the Levitated objects in position to be dropped, and even then people should have a shot at trying to stay out from under the objects in the first place. Throwing should probably come with some sort of dice pool penalty in excess of that seen with Magic Fingers. While you can do just about anything with magic, sooner or later it does hit a point where what you're doing would be easier with a formula more fine tuned to the task at hand. Unless, of course, you're just fine with letting Levitate be uber and think the drain differences are enough to warrant the existance of multiple variations of telekinetic trickery. Your call.

Yeah, I don't have my book with me; it sounds alright then, since that's more or less just a more specific version of what I was suggesting anyway.

If it was a weapon, like a knife or a sword, I'd probably resolve it like the Force of the spell was the STR.

If it was a big, blocky object (like a desk), I'd probably resolve it like a Vehicle Ram, with the "Body" being per 100kg of the object. So if he is levitating a 600kg object (Threshold 3 on the Levitate spell to pick it up), and he's moving it 30mpt, he would be doing DV 6. But that's an extreme example , most of the time people are going to be getting hit by lighter things going a lot slower, probably around DV 3. (A desk would be a "Body 1" thing, so he's have to get it up past 60mpt to do DV 2 with it.) This makes it not that efficient as an attack spell, but then its a pretty useful spell anyway, so it doesn't have to be.

If he was casting a F12 Levitate on a 1200kg item (Threshold 6 to lift), and had six more net hits to put into speed, he's be moving it 72 mpt. That would be a BOD 12 item with a Ram of DV BOD x2. If you really wanted to nerf this aspect of the spell, make it a BOD per 200kg (the weight the threshold requires, which is easier to remember anyway). That would be a 1200kg with a BOD 6, with 6 net successes to make it DV BOD x2, which would be 12. I'm leaning more towards that one, simply because Levitate is already an awesome spell before you start Darth Vadering stuff at people.

This was the first spell I cast waaaaay back in 1st edition, the old Food Fight. Except instead of levitating cans and throwing them at the bad guys, I levitated one of the bad guys and played pinball with him and the shelves. Knocked him out good after slamming into a few shelves.

If you are going for horribly flashy magic, levitate enemy A over enemy Bs head. Shapechange enemy A into a blue whale, stop levitating enemy A. Try to to get any splattered whale blubber on you.

Is it sad that I've apparently lost all sense of humor and become a total rules lawyer? Because the first thing I thought when I read about the blue whale idea was "Nuh-uh! The size of the creature you can shapechange something to is limited by the Body attributes of the creatures in question."

Simultaneous nit-picky posts ftw.

well obviously you first shapechange him into several other intermediate stages (and actually, i think that would really work... mind you, you'd need a lot of hits on that levitate spell to hold up all the intermediate stages...)

Hmm... I wonder if it really would work... You'd have to keep maintaining each spell link in the chain though.

Go go ally spirit helper, I guess. That is alot of work for the "style" of dropping a whale on someone.

Chris

Lets calculate.

As mercer said you can be rather inventive with levitate. but what if you had a small object? lets say a ball bearing made of steel, or a flipper ball.

At force 12 with 6 successes that ball would hit you at 68 meters per combat turn, that's for every 3 seconds.

so, 68 meters per 3 seconds becomes 81 km per hour (roughly).

Don't know about you but would pretty much hurt after getting that in the chest.

The thing is, Levitated weapons are more like melee weapons than projectile weapons. Aside from being able to make course corrections, you can also "keep pushing" once you make contact.

Your player is trying to trick you by asking to hurl bowling balls at the enemy. Once precedent is established, they'll swap in some horror-movie contraption of wielded together buzz-saw blades, probably with a Hell Hound glued to the bottom to it.

I also don't recall anything in the spell description about acceleration. That may mean that you can just go from 0 to the maximum allowed speed straight away unless you come up with your own rules for it. Okay, 0 to 81km per hour in zero time is infinite force and obviously can't be allowed without breaking the Universe, but you're going to need to come up with something. Otherwise, not only does that levitating knife fly straight into the enemy samurai, but it then keeps driving itself in like a car with the pedal straight down.

A different but related idea, has anyone ever made a melee mage who uses magic fingers to fight with? You get a -2 dice pool penalty, but so what? You can't be hurt. I also think you could come up with some interesting melee weapons. Who needs a handle on the knife when it's only wielded telekinetically? Just have one double-edged, double-ended blade. Try grabbing that out of the air and pinning it!

We haven't even started with technology, yet. I'm picturing some sort of tiny ball with a few strands of monowhip spinning about it on both axis. It would be the flying paper cut of death.

*knasser goes away to create new villainous henchman*

-K.

EDIT: I bought myself a scanner last week, seeing as everyone else was getting Christmas presents.

The real trap of the levitated melee weapon is that the rules leave what sort of action it takes to direct a levitating mass. I'd assume it is a free action. Thus, you get 3 attacks per IP.

Moving a sustained spell is a complex action so yeah you could make stuff whiz around 1-4 times per turn.

I'd go with a handful of bb's and mess stuff up magneto style hehe.

Incidentally, by that method, you'd need to get that pinball up to about 53 m/s to be solidly in the 1P range, or 38 m/s if your GM is willing to round up.

How much force would be needed to break a paintball (or other capsule-type ball) against an object or person?

Holy hell, us dumpshockers really CAN derail anything into a gun thread. I'm really impressed this time mostly because all of the effort that went into derailing it into a whale launching thread was swept aside so easily.

I'm wary of Levitate being strong enough to hurl slugs (or any other inert projectile) hard enough to do damage comparable with Powerbolt.

I'm intrigued by a mage using Levitate to deliver something that's dangerous in other ways, such as monowire, Stick&Shock, tranquilizer patches, poison darts, or hellhounds strapped to buzz-saw blades. Or, going with the classics, grenades; the ability to hurl a grenade around a corner could be quite useful in certain circumstances. With enough fine control, Levitate replaces Airburst Link - when the grenade gets to the desired point, activate it for instant detonation. Scale up to a satchel charge, say 12+ kilos of industrial explosive, as Force and your budget allow.

My preferred use of Magic Fingers on grenades, though, is to sneakily obtain LOS on enemies, and pull the pins of *their* grenades. Effectively like firing a grenade launcher at them from ambush, but arguably less revealing of the attacker's position, and costs Drain instead of using ammo.

I remember one merc-style run where the group was reduced to making football-sized bombs of C4 or C12, and Levitating them across an empty field to blow holes in a building. It went okay.

It has not happened in our game, but it seems to be a pretty good combat spell.

I´m not wary of the damage potential, but more of the ability to work around any kind of defense roll by attacking enemies that are facing the mage from behind. This could be fixed somewhat by making the spell touch-range. Plus I´d use object resistance as threshold for the attack in order to encourage learning Fling (changed to Touch all the same).

There could be a high-drain LOS-version of Levitate, but for a +1 mod it does too much right now.

People who actually carry grenades (who are not idiots, or allow idiots to work for them) keep the spoon taped down and the grenade in a pouch that covers the pin and spoon completely. This requires the grenade to be removed from the pouch to have enough space for the spoon to move one the tape is off, and the tape can't be removed until the grenade is removed from the pouch.

And that's why it takes a compex action to ready a grenade... or it would in that case.

Yup. It's the easiest weapon with which an infantryman can accidentally kill himself and his fire team. People try to avoid this. It's also, from the one time I actually threw a live frag grenade, rather difficult to casually pull the pin. It takes a pretty darn hard pull and twist to straighten it and remove it. Again, by design.

How else are you going to "activate" a grenade if you don't have a pin or some other physical mechanism? I wouldn't really feel comfortable trading "Mages can kill me with Magic Fingers" for "Hackers can set off the ordnance I'm carrying from the comfort of their living room". I guess maybe grenades could be compatible with skinlinks or something, but it's still starting to hit me as needlessly ornate. I still prefer kzt's method of simply having your grenades buttoned down in your kit.

Bah, make the grenade have a thumb print scanner that is preloaded by the local armory tech with acceptable fingerprints (read: on duty security personnel). No wireless, and can't be changed in the field. Then neither magic fingers nor hackers are an issue. Of course, control actions on the other hand...

I knew this thread was out there somewhere.

This has been all been done before, albeit in a slightly unusual manner.

OK so the heart of this is the fact that Levitate is a Sustaining spell which he can sustain for free as long as it doesn't get dropped by a ward or whatever.

Because of this he used edge and cast the spell 3 times until he got 11 successes. He was hurt by the drain but since it was downtime, it ended up not being an issue.

Now he has a giant sphere weighing 12 kilo's at the ready. It's dense material so its not that large for the weight. About the size of a softball.

I have ruled that the range he can use it in a turn is a total of 132 meters. It is a complex action and so he end up getting 3 uses per turn. (Again as long as the total distance moved is less then 132 meters).

This comes to 44 m/s.

The rules say it is stun damage unless the GM agree's its otherwise and at this moment I am sticking with Stun.

So how much damage would make sense for a 12 Kilo object (~26 pounds) moving at 44 m/s (98 mph)?

My personal belief is that this should never had been allowed with a Sustained spell. But its in the book so...

I don't know. How much damage would you expect from having a 26 pound object fall onto your head from 300 feet up?