On discussion with friend the thought came up what do you think about giving indirect combat spells the choice of a wide burst.

At present a mage has some control over how powerful a spell is. Wouldn't it be feasible for a mage to have a bit of control on the spread of a spell. I'm not talking about AOE spells as they are different I was thinking this would be a cone of effect catching only one person although you could argue two people next to ech other could be targeted and get their own reaction rolls. But at the moment I'm only thinking of it against one person.

The idea we had was if the mage declares they were going for a burst with say flamethrower then for every two points of force reduced for the effects of damage make a one die reduction to the reaction roll.

It would lower the damage of a spell but make it harder to dodge.

For example a force 5 flamethrower would either be Damage of 5 as normal or damage of 3 but with a -1 to the opposing roll. This should also work with the net hits as well especially as they add to drain now.


I know its not a well explained idea but what do you think?

I don't think I'd use this rule in my game, but I can see where you are coming from. If your goal is to make it work more like a wide burst shot (aka be harder to dodge) then you should look at using a similar mechanic as the gun shots with wide bursts.

First of all, this would only be usable on Indirect combat spells as you have to roll to hit with them. With that in mind, a gun doing a burst fire is at -2 dice for the shot due to recoil (this is before things like gas vents and what not reduce this penalty). This -2 dice on the attack roll then translates to a -2 to the defenders pool.

Looking at that, if you want to come up with a rule that allows for something akin to a wide burst with indirect combat spells I'd suggest that you'd take a hit on your casting pool and not a hit to the spell level. Furthermore, remember that the drain going up by success is for direct combat spells, not indirect.

Instead, another way to handle this is to create a new spell. Per Street Magic (and the spells already out there) LOS has a base drain modifier of +0 with AoE being +2, so perhaps a 'wide burst' type of range would be a spell with a +1 drain value. In other words, a flamethrower like spell with this ability would be (f/2)+4 (as opposed to +3 for flamethrower or +5 for fireball).

Again, I've not thought about how these would fully affect game play since I wouldn't really use them, but those are my $0.02 on how I'd approach the subject.