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Originally Posted by Nightshade
Fireballs are not harmless to compareable characters when you get them; in fact, its not particularly hard for a given arcane spellcaster to be killed by a fireball equivelent to his own. That's true of most of the others, too.
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Old, old anecdote here: I recall back in the mists of time when I still played D&D (very early 80s at the latest). I ran for a high powered (8th -9th level) group that came around a corner of a stereotypical dungeon and found something big and nasty there. It seized the meatshield fighter and the magic user decided he had no choice but let loose a lightning bolt, hoping the fighter had enough hp to absorb it if he made the save and hoping he did. Anyhow, said magic user let go with a big nasty lightning bolt, which bounced off the wall directly behind the big nasty creature and came back through the creature, fighter, and the rest of the party. It then bounced off the wall behind them and went through them from the other side. Rinse and repeat a couple of times. I don't know how it is now, but lightning bolts then bounced off walls and traveled their full distance, which was a function of magic user level. It did kill the the big nasty creature, the fighter did make his saving throws, but took it too many times to survive. TPK, except the thief who was lurking back around the corner. The magic user died on the first time through. (The thief was sorely disappointed that most of the party's valuables failed one of the many saving throws they also had to made.) Memories...!
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I have to conclude our experiences are far too different to have this discussion then, because I don't recall _ever_ seeing an RQ character with more than about 40 points of reusable divine magic. I'm puzzled how it can even occur unless one is running campaigns of _particularly_ long duration, given the manditory minimum POW priests must maintain and the mechanics of power gain. Even with multiple checks, at 25-30% chances per check, the gain isn't particularly speedy.
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In RQ3, there's no mandatory minimum POW for priests. The only requirement is 10 points of stored divine magic, plus skills. In RQ2, priests have to maintain POW 18, but treat their species maximum POW as 25 for determining POW gain. Toss a strategic Eurmal's crumb in and the species maximum for the character can easily gain 4-5 points: a very powerful result, but those things are pretty common to come by.
This campaign ran for about 7 years with two of the characters remaining the same from beginning to end. In the game world, about 20 years went by, so add up yearly automatic gains, seasonal rolls for leading services, and a handful of adventures a year, it's pretty easy to build up POW in a hurry. Add in a bunch of DI's over the years, and POW gains come even faster!
