[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by RMS

You lost me in your logic above, but I'll try to answer what I understand. Severe Spirit is the spell you're looking for and it's hard to imagine anything much more powerful. A single POW vs. POW roll leads to automatic death for someone at a range outside of any physical attack. Even if the caster fails to overcome POW, the target takes 1d6 damage, enough to drop human sized creatures.

Easy. Have a spell that does the same thing but removes objects (such as D&D Disintegrate) or does it in an area. That's more power than some people want in their game, but its still a higher level and what some people expect.

Sunspear and Thunderbolt have tremendous power. You don't even get a Saving Throw in RQ. A Thunderbolt can be stacked, there's no armor

I'm pretty sure you're confusing Thunderbolt and the Lightning spell here.

protection, no magical protection that works against it. It can be use on one target or split between multiple targets. There's no upper limit on it. I don't recall if Sunspear has the same ability.

Nope. Both it and Thunderbolt are small area single value 3 point spells. I'm now sure you're confusing the latter with Lightning, which is a stackable spell (which I specifically was not talking about). Stackable spells can gust a bit more in power than 3 point fixed spells, but, then, they also typically end up tying up a _lot_ of PC resource by the time you're done.

If you want large area effect, there are Earthquake spells, Cloud Call, etc. They're hard to build to enough power to have large scale effects, but it can be done.

I'm not talking about strategic spells, but large scale tactical ones. And as you note, those take a long time (and in the case of Cloudcall aren't that meaningful by themselves, as they're unpredictable and not very precise).

I understand how someone can mistake those as lacking in power, but I don't buy that they actually are lacking power. In many ways they're more

Then we frankly, just disagree. Its not like I haven't run a lot of RQ over the years, but its magic system is clearly _not_ up to handling the upper range of power that a game system like D&D or some others do. That doesn't mean you couldn't make a magic system that would, but the extent one used in RQ isn't it.

powerful than most D&D spells because there's no ability for the target to resist the spell at all in many cases. In D&D you always get some sort of Saving Throw and it's not reduced by the caster's power.

That's not true of most of them, however, which either make power rolls or are effected by armor, and in most cases you're only talking about the top end effects; even those are narrower in scope and cost more character resource to have them available.

I think the biggest problem is just that the divine magic is spread out and is a very different take on magic than learning a bunch of discrete spells ala D&D. Also, I don't necessarily expect everyone to prefer to RQ take on magic either, but I don't buy that it's less powerful, especially in regard to the physical power level of PCs and NPCs in the game.

Then again, we just disagree. I'm still not seeing much that really even compares to a D&D Fireball (which isn't particularly any less likely to kill someone when first acquired than a Thunderbolt, which wouldn't expect to kill a typical RQ3 PC either (though it'd probably set him up for someone to finish him off)), let alone to things like Chain Lightning, Disintegrate, Meteor Storm and so on. To be honest, I'm a little baffled at your position on it.

Edit: Went back and looked, and you're part right: Thunderbolt can be stacked to hit multiple targets (it in fact appears to be essentially unique in that regard for 3 point spells). However, at that point you're still tying up an _enormous_ amount of Divine Magic points to be able to effect more than 2-3 targets.