Re role failures.
Multiple targets

I was just thinking about using karmic rerolls in concert with ball spells.

Hear is the scenario
I cast stun ball at 4 targets there wills are 2, 3, 4, 7

My casting test returns 1,1,2,3,4,5,5,7,8

I spend a point of karma pool to reroll failures. Witch dice to I re roll.

Edward

I guess the answer would be "any and all failures," which means if there was a person with Wil 9, you'd have to re-roll everything.

But, as it stands...

Uh...

The 1s, it looks like.

Edit: Just talked with one of my many GMs.

He says...

I would do four separate rerolls, one for each target.

Another alternative to is reroll all the total failures (the ones) and give the player the choice on what 'partial success' dice to reroll, with the re-rolled result standing.

So beaten you we have all the possibilities I could think of.

Only ones
All but the 7 and 8
Whichever ones the player wants but the reroles stand
Rerole separately for each target

I should have known better than to expect a strait answer, I will be going with 3 when I start running games.

Edward

I'd go with #3 also. I would definitely not allow a reroll for each target, as that goes against the basics of how area effect spellcasing works.

For any Area Effect spell, the caster rolls once, and then either compares the results to the TN (in the case of Combat spells), or records the results of the roll (in the case of Detection and Illusion spells) for comparison to the opposed roll of a valid target.

He can choose to reroll any dice from his spellcasting test by using Karma, but can't just reroll for each different target. Especially not by expending only one Karma Pool point.

If you make a subtle change to the text for "rerolling failures," this problem is evaded entirely and provides certain other options. Simply change it from a reroll of all "failures" in any test with a TN to a reroll of whatever dice the player wants in any test with a reroll.
There are times when PCs would want to get less successes than they actually rolled (like punching someone too hard who they needed alive) and this change would provide that option as well.

Fortune: Theoretically, one could also argue that any alternatives to rerolling for each different target would go against how karma pool works. The book says explicitly that you reroll any dice that come up a failure, and what constitutes a failure varies with each individual target. Not to mention that the use of karma pool should never actually hurt your results in an opposed test unless you took the Cursed Karma flaw, which is something that could easily happen if the player is allowed to select the dice he wants to reroll.

Then again, you could just use Herald's house rule and do away with this entire mess, since it's pretty obvious that neither of these rules takes the other into account.

True. I was merely refering to this situation.

Overall it isn't a bad idea at all, but in my opinion it'll come up rather rarely outside of situations like this.

Edward's option #3 did that as well ...

The advantage of herald’s is that it extends to tests with only a single target. EG when I am casting stun bolt against a target I want alive selecting base serious and accidentally roll 12 successes I could spend a point of karma and reroll 10 of those successeshopfuly not getting enough to kill the target again.

Edward

Yes, as I freely admitted almost 5 hours ago.

I thought that might have been the problem.

I just figured Ed had reworded it on purpose, and I liked his idea better. Of course, as I said, Herald's is even better as it covers more situations.