Mage Daily Rituals

If you have some sort of daily ritual your character goes about, we have a particular way we’re going to handle that here. There are several goals we’re trying to achieve. I’ll start with those.

Goals:

1. Do not require system paperwork or staff load for a dozen or more active mages each doing a ritual each and every day.
2. Don’t require a player to remember to do rolls daily, particularly when they aren’t OOCly logging in.
3. Don’t alert everyone and their dog that magical shenanigans (and how much of them) are afoot, because they OOCly saw the rolls.
4. Have success/failure/botch chances that reflect daily use.

So here’s how I’m going to handle dailies.

Step #1: You give me a PAT for your daily effect. This is not a ‘rote’ - it does not cost XP. Typically these will be rituals. You need to include all the typical PAT stuff, but in your ‘A’ - the part that usually holds all the system details - you need to include things like how much time you’re taking, how many rolls you envision doing, how many successes you’re shooting for and how they’re allocated to various aspects of the spell (effect strength, duration, subtlety, et cetera).

Step #2: I review the PAT and approve it much as I would any off the cuff PAT. I determine the appropriate difficulty and, on average, how many rolls it will take to reach your desired successes (or if you gave me how many rolls you’re willing to do daily, I’ll tell you on average how many successes that gets you on a good day). We shake hands on that.

Step #3: In the background, I calculate the likelihood of success, failure, and botch on any given day. (RE and I collaborated on tools to let me do a pretty good job of approximating this with arbitrary/reasonable combinations of dice and difficulty.) On successful days, you’ll get the average successes for a good day as agreed to in step #2. Most of the stuff mages like to do daily is fairly simple, and it’s pretty likely that if they fail, they’ll roll up their sleeves, put a little extra spit in it, and muscle through; however, if what you’re doing has a sufficiently high difficulty, I may assign ‘failure day’ conditions (including how often you should be RPing as if your character has failed, and any side effects of simple failure). I’ll also calculate a frequency for botches, and we’ll be having a chat at that frequency.

There are a few edge cases for daily rituals that may simplify things (like very simple effects cast by high-Arete mages) or complicate them (like very complex effects cast by low-Arete Mages), but this is generally I’ll handle daily effects going forward.