Area covered by wards depends on the caster's Magic rating, but what about their shape? If they can be made infinitely thin and made to follow a single wall rather than a conventional 3-d shape, doesn't it follow that a single ward, even cast at a very low Magic rating, could theoretically extend, well, a very long way?

In other words, what's to stop a person with Magic rating 1 from creating a separate thin ward on each side of the enclosure to be warded ... and thus avoiding any practical size limitation at all?

My take: A ward is a two-dimensional barrier that (normally) encloses a three-dimensinal space (otherwise you could just go around it).

This concept easily and logically prevents size abuse such as you are suggesting.

Agreed. Personally as a GM, I'd rule that if you want to make a thin ward with a force of 1, it would cover 50 square meters instead of 50 cubic meters. There's still nothing to say that you couldn't ward every room in a house or building seperately if you need to protect a large area though.

Well, the spirit of the rule is to allow warding to protect a certain area. It obviously covers the mage doing something like writing inscriptions on each wall, so in effect warding each wall in turn. So making 5 wards (4 walls+ceiling) would in my opinion be abusing the rules, and so I'd disallow it.

You might also consider warding the floor with your "flat ward" rules. All kinds of nasty things come up through the drains.

Well, wards by the book are intrinsically volumetric, and they need to match the contours of the room. You would need to house rule it to ward in strips, as they would not be volumetric.

Volumetric sets no intrinsic limits on any one of three dimensions.

All right, so trying to keep it as much in canon as possible, with a character (not mine) with a 7 Magic rating, who wants to do this with a Luxury space: what's the solution? My initial and instinctive reaction when I first heard this was to go ick, no, wrong, and tabletop I'd just houserule it that way -- but since this isn't tabletop and we are working within canon, and since I don't want to accidentally screw the player over, I'm looking for how other GMs would interpret BBB/MitS in this context ...?

This just gets at the rather wonky rules for warding, which have been discussed before. The fact is, even a mage with a magic rating of 6 could only ward a penthouse of about 100 m^2 of floor space (assuming 10 foot luxury cielings), which is a 30'x30' space (not exactly luxury).

This gets at the mystical flavor of the rules-- whole compounds aren't warded. Rather, ultra-secret rooms, dark lodges, and cells for containing magical threats are warded.

The thing is, if you start allowing players to build large warded areas out of smaller wards, things get out of hand pretty quickly. For example, if this could be done, there's no stopping a mage from creating a ward on several sheets of aluminum and then fitting them together in an emergency to produce an instant "magical bomb-shelter," circumventing the time constraint on ward making. Likewise, modular wards would allow entire office buildings to be entirely warded at a fraction of the cost (just hide a thin sheet of warded material in every bit of drywall in the building). If that's the kind of magical fortresses you want, then I'd let it fly. Otherwise, the PC should just ward his bedroom so the evils of the astral plane don't eat him while he sleeps.

The wording for warding suggests that you need to choose physical boundaries--and you ward a non living thing, specifically--be it a room (with walls as the boundaries), a vehicle (again, the "hull" provides the boundaries), or what not. The area enclosed by these boundaries shouldn't be larger than M * 50m^3. So I wouldn't allow the thin strips idea just because it would require you to do the ward without the suggested boundaries, and seems to be against the spirit of the rules.

I say that strip wards are possible but have two weaknesses: one is the time required to create them and two is there is a possible weakness in the corners were the wards meet (goes all the way back to the myths doesn't it). Warded doorways is a great way to hurt invisible intruders. I'd illustrate the weakness by halving the effective rating of the ward at such corners.

Ward sizes can be increases by having conjured spirits or hired ward makers (at only 100¥ per hour) aid in the creation.

I would deal with it this way.

When you create the ward you are marking the boundaries. So they set up their thin ward that takes up little volume and lies flat against a wall. Great, it works like a wall. When they go to add another ward for the next wall (need 4 plus floor and ceiling) they can't have the wards touch or they would go into astral combat and one of them gets destroyed. (Might have this happen in character if you don't want to tell him what is going on out of character since he thinks he's so smart. Just roll for ward 1 vs ward 2 and tell him one disappeared. If he assenses the remaining one, tell him its current force if he gets enough successes.)

Anyway, eventually he gets a second ward up, but there is at least a tiny gap between it and the other ward. Same thing happens for each of the walls.

When he goes for the fourth wall, he has even more problems aligning them because he has two edges to worry about getting close but not touching and he can only be in one place at a time. When doing the top and bottom, he has four edges to try to align properly and can only be in one place at a time.

So he gets 6 sides done, but the wards will not keep astral travelers from permeating the cracks between the wards. Wards that cross in front of doors will not have the effect of battling an astral entity twice, because either the entity will be destroyed or the "second layer" of the ward will be destroyed when the ward fails. It should prompt 2 masking tests though.

I'm seeing two different versions of "twinked" rules here.

The first is the fully modular option: divide the area up into many "rooms", ward each "room" separately, the sum total amounts to the entire building being warded.

The second is the "wall" option: each wall to be treated as a separate and independent ward, the whole to be thus enclosed within however many separate and independent (virtually two-dimensional) wards are needed to cover the whole.

Both options involve some manner of intersection/interaction of separately conjured wards. Besides my gut perception that wards should be holistic and tied to a perception of "area", I too was thinking that such a combination has got to be weak at the corners, maybe not because of actual astral conflict (although on a sheer gut basis, I'm really having a problem seeing separately conjured wards able to touch), but because astral intersection is not the same as astral integration. I'm thinking that while a common caster/astral signature might allow the first, it's the second that's crucial to the arrangement being stable.

But I'm still looking for a more solid solution, such as it might be ...?

I have seen the "room" version done often enough.

The "wall" version that creates in effect two astral barriers is a new one for me. I dislike that it makes the ward twice as hard to see or perform magic through. Also that it requires two tests to bypass the "front" then the "back" when using masking.

Also, on rereading, if one of the wards had been destroyed the mage would immediately know. So them being ignorant of the mishap is an error if you decide to house rule they can not intersect. But this house rule goes against the mage being able to allow anything he wishes to pass through the ward unhindered.

Possible house rules - maybe the constant state of the wards intersecting weakens them? Or they degrade more quickly? Or the Mage can only allow 2*Magic Attribute Force of things to pass through a ward, kind of tying it to a focus addiction limit? The intersections cause a background count because they are no longer as passive as they were? The idea is to keep them from intersecting and thereby keeping the "weak" corners and edges, which hardly reduces their bonus's.

Now that the old forums are up for searching and browsing, I was able to find an old post of mine that detailed warding each square meter of a sensitive area separately which I think qualifies as another "thinking outside the box" application for wards.

Resources wise, it'd be horribly prohibitive, using the standard warding process, but it's an effective way to shutdown magic.

Thanks for linking in the old thread, RunnerPaul.

The irony, here, is that I'm the GM, not the PC trying to do it -- but before I say "no" or "yes" to a PC (guess which one I'm leaning toward), I always try to devil's advocate my instincts, which often means arguing the PC's pov.

Here, I'm looking for something a bit more solid than what's already been tossed out: absolute reasons why "no" or why "yes" (or at least as absolute as they get), along with whether the option should come with complications or built-in weaknesses and what they might be likely to be.

Oh, and I've got to try to avoid house rules as much as humanly possible in how I decide on this. Again ironic, me being the generally anti-rigidly canon person -- but this time I've got to stick to it.

Be sure to make them spend the time to create and maintain them. Compare it to warding the entire volume with one ward. They get "double" thickness wards. They also have to spend 6 times as much time because they need to do all six sides seperately.

snip.

forget it. sorry.

The weakest point of any structure, whether it is a magical construciton like a ward or a building, is where 2 things come together. Water leaks in at the joints in a roof, not at the middle of a deck. Air sneaks in around the windows, not through the wall.

If you decide to let the PC ward an area with thin wards, then the edges are exploitable.

As a houserule you could have anything trying to break through the ward perform some form of perception test to notice a seam along an edge and allow them to sneak a peek, or listen in on anything going on inside the warded area with appropriate modifiers. That way they don't have to attack the ward and anounce their presence.

Really now, if the PC gets to twink out his wards there must be a way for the GM to un-twink it...

Yes, the player brought up the idea. Me, I was uncomfortable with it from the word go, but I didn't want to penalise him out of hand, especially for something that apparently is legit: so I tried to bring it up here, initially from (what I hope! is) his pov. I've also sent him the link to this thread, in case he wants to state his own argument.

What about non-sentient effects such as magical surges and/or area effect spells? What would/should be the "corner effect" for these?

Caution: Idea pulled out of poster's nether regions. Wash hands before and after reading.

Astral constructs can't penetrate each other, right? (Oversimplifying)
ie - Spells and foci etc all either get through a barrier/ward, or they don't.

If the wards can't interpenetrate each other (as a pair of concrete walls do), then there has to be a gap of some kind at the corner of the warded area. If there's a gap, my ruling would be to treat mana surges, background counts, and most kinds of area effect stuff as being able to penetrate the ward easily at the gap.

Obstruction of what a spellcaster can see would still be a factor, but the ward would (for example) have damn all effect on damaging manipulations, things like Strain III ( ) and so on.

In terms of numbers, I'd suggest that for anything opposing the ward that can usefully exploit the weakness at the corners, you treat its Force as halved. That way you don't have to do the silly mental dance of working out how big a gap between non-physical barriers is...

E.G -> Bob the mage can try to whack the barrier at the corner, where it's weaker, to get through on the astral. The upside of that is that he is attacking its weakpoint (1/2 force, if you follow my suggestion). The downside is that all sides of the barrier that meet at that corner may be able to whack him back (though only at half force...).

I never thought I'd find a use for giving astral barriers bonuses for 'Friends in Melee'...

YMMV

I'd rather see an astral perception test performed to get any benefit from attacking the corners - say, target = ward caster's Magic attribute (as a measure of the skill used to put up the ward), with 2 successes = -1 target number/effective force of the ward at that point.

This would simulate 'finding the weak spot'

I'd say rather than allowing section wards, allow them to increase the size of the ward for a reduction in the force of the ward. Maybe 2X size for -1 force, or 2x for .5X. But that way, some one can make a huge ward, but it wouldn't be as strong overall. Heck, if you wanted to you could find the force per cubic meter, and multiply that by the new cubic meters of the size you do want to ward.

Either way, it would allow warding of a larger area, with out relying on rule inconsistancies. Though technically it is a house rule, which you had said you want to avoid. But I wanted to throw it out on to the pile anyway, since it didn't look like any one had tried this tack before.

Or you could take higher drain and more time to create a bigger ward.

What I would suggest is that the spirit of the rules is such that the cubic meter limitation is with respect to the size of the area protected.

If you completely "enclose" an area, then you must be able to protect the whole thing within the limits of the area your magic (or combined magic) can create. If you try to do a thin sheet, then you can do that, but you must necessarily leave some kind of gap that can be penetrated. It need not be obvious, and it need not be trivial (ie, you could have the "gap" be the earth... and travel through earth is obviously non-trivial), but it needs to be there.

If no such gap exists, then you have essentially "closed" the ward, and you are now warding the entire area -- and if you don't have the magic to do it, then the ward fails.

It's not canon, but that would be my interpretation. :/

(Hopefully, you can parse what I'm saying here, it might not make a lot of sense, because my wife is prattling in the background making it very hard to concentrate.)

tell her to get back in the kitchen where she belongs.

i would rule that a ward cannot be placed on a single wall of a room. if you stretch the RAW, you could say that since wards enclose three-dimensional areas, and must be placed on physical objects, that warding only a single surface (say, one wall of your apartment) won't work because that would leave at least part of the ward hanging in open space.