It was 400 because she scored above 16 on the creation roll which reduces the cost by half thereby multiplying the resulting effect by two. You can't do that every turn, she was lucky in that she happened to find a place with concentrated living things that she could kill and thus took advantage of it. Meat was left over because... well fluff and she wanted to leave a steak. You may also have noticed that it resulted in a huge blinding flash of light which means that there are potentially people who witnessed what happened...
That means Maya's more over the top approach may draw attention which hopefully balances out the gain with some risk. Your approach however is almost guaranteed not to draw attention making you much safer in the long run.
Also, there aren't any more cows in the field. There might be more in the buildings I mentioned but no guarantees and they might be guarded.
I keep writing stuff that's misleading and for that I apologize. By +1 for skill gain, I meant going from something like 4 (1/8) to 4 (2/8). So yeah you could theoretically sacrifice 10 people at 20ish health each to get 200 health and then jump up 2 skill gain fractions or maybe even get a lucky roll like Maya and gain 4 skill gain fractions but doing something like that is almost guaranteed to draw attention if you don't do it carefully.
LordBucket, you could save up corpses and in just a few turns have as much energy as Maya available for use but without the risks she had from not acting more discreetly. You could also work towards recruiting or creating more followers and sending them out to gain more people as well. Although still, the more metaphorical waves you make, the more likely the government will come investigating. Not to mention the risk of attracting attention from Void Beings which you will find to be much more challenging enemies later on.
Enchanting is also more expensive and requires 10 times the HP as casting a similar spell would cost
Enchanted items run out of charge (CP) but automatically recharge 10% CP every turn or can be recharged with a sacrifice, 1HP for 1CP
Example: If a lightning shock costs 2 HP then an enchanted orb capable of casting a lightning shock once would require 20 HP of sacrifice
In order to have an orb capable of casting that spell 5 times, 100 HP would need to be sacrificed
Hmm my rules for enchanting need some serious work. Anyway, I gave him really good weapons because he's going to be fighting something really strong. I kind of hinted at that with the whole ritual thing going on in his turn. That's really the only reason he has overpowered stuff compared to you guys, he's going to need it. It's also government property, so there's a good chance it'll be taken back when his current mission is complete (along with that assassin droid).
Um let's see with the current rules it would be 3 energy to cast a 30 damage spell. Enchanting is 10x cost so 30 energy for a weapon capable of casting a 30 damage spell once and five charges is 150... yeah a bit overpowered. On the other hand, the scenario you brought up wouldn't actually apply because the damage doesn't get factored in until after they've successfully hit you and because it's a Manipulation based weapon, you get to add your Manipulation modifier to the dodge roll to avoid it in addition to agility. There's a pretty good chance the weapon wouldn't hit you but yeah...
Some of these game mechanics sound good at first but have problems as things go along. Better suggestions are welcome of course and I appreciate you all putting up with the funks this thing has. Hopefully somewhere down the line, this game will transform from the hard lumpy coal it is now into a beautiful diamond.
Edit: Heheh, I was just thinking LordBucket would probably be better at running this than me.
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Topic: Masters of Manipulation OOC and Player Application Thread (Read 3488 times)