NWO query

[kingandy]

On a note entirely unrelated to my previous post, I have been wondering this about NWO: Was there at any point in the system a single offensive^[1] Imaginem spell? It's just that I went through two events as hammad with an Iron Parma vs Imaginem and couldn't for the life of me think of a good reason.

[1] 'Offensive' is a word that is here used to mean cast on another with undesirable results, ie, which one would choose to resist with one's Parma Magica.

Comments

[kneeshooter]

That was pretty much it - there are so many "god-mages" in the game with superhuman stats that any offensive spell you're going to be hit by is such a silly power-level that a mortal stands no chance.

[kingandy]

Yeah, in the normal course of things it probably doesn't make much odds.

But if my Iron Parma had been in my strongest art - Mentem - I would totally have been able to resist Xavier's forgetfulness attack...

[jfs.livejournal.com]

From a mechanics point of view, Iron Parma is largely seen as something that you 'have', rather than you 'learned', if that makes sense? Your parens teaches you Parma and finds out that it's particularly good against one thing, rather than teaching you to be good against one thing.

It exposes part of the character, to those who know how to look.

Jarane had Iron Parma: Corpus (which would have been useful in game, if anyone had cast an offensive Corpus spell against him in 5 events, which they didn't.)

But it was more important thematically :-)

[jfs.livejournal.com]

The reason Parma was important was actually more to do with Andy's second point - that it put in a level of uncertainty to the game. If you'd known that there was no way for someone to resist your spell, then more spells would have gone off. Knowing that your target did have a parma, and not knowing what the level was, you had to either be confident of being one of the 'god-mages' or you had to plan things properly.

Without parma, there would have been a lot more certainty.

[kneeshooter]

Yes. I didn't agree with Matt.