Side Effect and Recipient

[Ninja-Bear]

Hello Heroites,

 

I got a good question for the collective wisdom here. I'm helping my brother adapt Air Spells from Fantasy Hero 4th. The lightning Spell has Side Effect. No question there on how it acts. In the spell description though, it states that if the caster doesn't have any metal on him, then the bolt goes randomly to another which is wearing metal. So no issue here. the point of contention is, does the poor fellow that gets struck (non-caster) gets his defense against the bolt? (I say he does) or he doesn't cause he being hit by a Side Effect. I put Recipient in the Title because in the Side Effect table, Recipient is listed as being also affected by the bolt but in the Table itself, recipient seems to be clarified as only someone who was supposed to gain a beneficial power (say Healing). My brother thinks that any unfortunate soul that gets hit by the random bolt is the recipient.

 

So clarification would be nice. (Especially if i'm right : )

 

TIA

[Duke Bushido]

I'm almost-always the odd man out on this, but - and let me preface this clearly-- if it were _my_ game, I would rule that the poor fellow gets struck by lightning, and he gets his defenses.  It is not _his_ side-effect; it is the caster's side-effect, and that side-effect is "someone gets hit by lightning."  The way I tend to interpret it that is that lightning: plain old normal lightning, is created.  There is nothing about plain old normal lightning that robs you of your resistant ED (and I say resistant because I have a hard time wrapping my head around _lighting_ not being powerful enough to be best simulated with RKA, but you mileage may vary.) 

 

Also, I never really liked that particular write-up and it's use of side-effect.  The reason being that the lightning does not come from _within_ the caster.  If it did, I could justify the "you are denied your defenses" edict.  The lightning is external to the caster: it will strike him (if he has metal on), not swell up inside him.

 

That write up prompted me to alter the Side effects value table and include a 1/4 lower value if your defenses could be applied against the side effect.    That had to be tweaked as well, because that one got abused _fast_!  It became :1/4 reduction in value if your defenses can be applied to damage done by side effects and could reasonably be expected to negate half or less of the damage on an average roll; - 1/2 value if your defenses would reasonably negate more than half of an average roll.

 

There are some case-by-case tweaks for certain players and builds, but those are my curent guideline tweaks, all of which stemmed from precisely the write-up I think you're working on right now.   

 

 

Duke

[Ninja-Bear]

Well Duke is you agree with me, i obviously like your answer! 😁