Blood Sorcery

Saulot

You're right @Alzie. I was thinking of Mage (and its pool of 3 stats with a Rote).

@darksabrz, it got house ruled when the conversion was being done or a little bit after it. Good Time Management and Patient only work on mundane rolls.

Ganymede

@Alzie said:

So basically, the point of this is:

Telenuking with blood sorcery is stupid and takes a lot of successes

Only stupid STs let it happen

It requires a huge investment

Only stupid STs let it happen

For the love of all that is holy limit potency in some way
Edit: 6) Actually, limit all the factors in some way for sanity, even mage has some limits on their rituals

You're right on all of this. And some players will invest their points in this. My frozen PC could easily be re-spec'd to be able to do this, and she has a Relic that gives her 8-again on her pool of 15 dice.

You could limit this by employing the system originally introduced in V:tR. Those rituals required line of sight, and time. That gimps the ability to obliterate at a distance substantially.

darksabrz

@Ganymede Most of them did, yes. Wrathful Judgment is probably the only one I recall offhand that didn't require LOS, but you did have to have something of personal significance to the target (like a lock of hair, for instance -- can't remember if a photograph was kosher for it as well) -- then, you could do it pretty much anywhere. Of course, Wrathful Judgment was limited by the fact that, for every level of agg damage you were able to deal, the caster had to spend a Willpower point, so even base 5 successes, the caster is down 5 Willpower.

Alzie

@darksabrz thankfully, it was also noted as being anathema in blood sorcery.

Cobalt

@Ganymede said:

and she has a Relic that gives her 8-again on her pool of 15 dice.

I was skimming past this post to get to the most recent one and misread this as: "And she has a relic magic 8-ball".

I was like wait- what? Awesome!

And was sorely disappointed.

Groth

@Alzie said:

I would just like to address something. Specifically, the idea of 'telenuking' with blood sorcery. Allow me, if you will, to regale you with how this actually works based on the rules in the Blood Sorcery book. Let us define our situation.

So basically, the point of this is:

Telenuking with blood sorcery is stupid and takes a lot of successes

Only stupid STs let it happen

It requires a huge investment

Only stupid STs let it happen

For the love of all that is holy limit potency in some way
Edit: 6) Actually, limit all the factors in some way for sanity, even mage has some limits on their rituals

Well, what you've managed to show is why Destruction as written in Blood Sorcery is largely useless. However when we're talking about telenuking, why use Destruction when Transmutation exists? Transmutation 5 reads
"The fifth dot of Transmutation allows the ritualist to transform any object or creature into any other, transferring and changing characteristics as she sees fit"

So now I decide I want to turn you from a Vampire to a pig or whatever. Since that's not a scaling effect, it's potency 0 so you need 9 less successes then with the Aggravated nuke. And oh look, because it's a binary effect it's Contested rather then Resisted so you get to roll more dice. Contested is always better then resisted for a strong Ritualist since whenever they roll a non-trivial amount of successes, they will practically never fail.

Then we have the die pool, it's not 13 dice. Without stacking specialities or accounting for Blood Sympathy, you can do Attribute 5 + Skill 5 + Speciality 1 + Elaborate Sacrifice 3 + (Meditation/Extra Vitae) 3 + Library 3 = 20 dice for Theban while Cruac can do teamwork with their Altar.

Basically the ST really needs to be on the ball to not let people do things with Blood Sorcery just because the Blood Sorcery book claims it's possible because that way lies madness.

Ganymede

Transmutation already exists for the Sanctified. It's a Level 5 Ritual. It requires line of sight. If the system allows this to occur at a greater distance, you can bet there will be awful mischief.

Darinelle

I imagine all you'd need to do is find someone with enough Divination to find you wherever you are, mix that in. Remember that Blood Sorcery rites can include multiple themes, and with the ridiculous amount of available experience on TR, this can get bananas fast.

ThatOneDude

Is this with or without the HR'ed stuff in TR?

Darinelle

@ThatOneDude - If you're asking me, it's without anything HR'd.

Alzie

@Groth Contested presents its own problem, mainly that your target gets to roll against you each turn and if you get less successes you don't accrue any towards the TN. Additionally, increasing your time for each roll means they have that much time in between to find you, another problem with contested If they know they're being targeted.

@ThatOneDude You can combine themes to create rituals by base rules.

Groth

@Alzie said:

@Groth Contested presents its own problem, mainly that your target gets to roll against you each turn and if you get less successes you don't accrue any towards the TN. Additionally, increasing your time for each roll means they have that much time in between to find you, another problem with contested If they know they're being targeted.

@ThatOneDude You can combine themes to create rituals by base rules.

The thing about Contested Blood Sorcery is that if you're both maxed out, the sorcerer will be throwing 20 dice to the victims 10. (There are very few ways to boost the Resolve+Blood Potency pool).

I'm way to lazy to do the exact math, but in any contested roll there are 4 basic scenarios.
Ritualist rolls low, Victim rolls low: Ritualist gains successes and it's as if the roll wasn't contested at all.
Ritualist rolls low, Victim rolls high: Ritualist doesn't gain successes but because he rolled low in the first place, it doesn't really hurt her compared to not being contested at all.
Ritialist rolls high, Victims rolls low: Ritualist gains successes and it's as if the roll wasn't contested at all.
Ritualist rolls high, Victim rolls high: Ritualist gains successes and it's as if the roll wasn't contested at all.

When the die pools are this skewed, the only scenario where the Ritualist is actually hurt is those rare cases where the Victim rolls extraordinarily high and the Ritualist makes a mediocre to high roll however even those cases just forces the Ritualist to make one more roll.

Knowing that you are targeted is not a feature of Contested Blood Sorcery, it's a feature of all Blood Sorcery Resisted or Contested. This makes it a terrible idea to target the combat monsters with Blood Sorcery in general unless they're asleep (Nothing prevents you from staying awake during the day in order to use your Blood Sorcery).

Alzie

@Groth Actually, if you notice, that was something I brought up on Requiem for Kingsmouth. On one hand, the book seems indicate that it only requires a single success, but that doesn't match how contested rolls usually work. However, as you stated, if it's a normal contested roll, then that's a joke because the ritualist will basically always have more dice. I mean, the ritualist is starting with a base pool of 2 attributes and a spec while the contestant is starting with only 2 attributes.