From: "Eric Funk"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
It's more like the partial yard rounds up. There has to be a penalty
for not touching for the rule to make any sense, and otherwise no
casters
will bother to risk touching subjects.
But as captainjoy points out, you CANNOT touch in combat with a Regular
spell.
(unless the target is bound).
This is largely a consequence of realistic combat, but if the -1 for not
being able to physically touch the victim is a real problem, and your
effective skill for ritual purposes is 10+, you can attempt to Pin the
target with a Staff or Grapple them with your free hand on your turn,
then if they fail to break free you can Concentrate and zap them while
still touching them on your next or however many turns it takes to to
casy the spell.
I do see your point; however, I do think the rules as written indicate
that both touching or being within a yard are non-penalized uses of a
Regular Spell.
Only in that you usually need to be within a yard to touch someone, due
to the average length of adult human arms.
In any case, the careful wording of the Magic Staffs box has the staff "one
yard wand shaves -1 off distance penalties". Thus if the penalty was only
"-1" for a yard or less (or even half a yard, say), the penalty is now zero,
according to that text. A two-yard staff eliminates -2 in penalties.
No, it says "Pointing with a staff reduces the range to a distant
subject by the length of the staff." The use of range instead of reach
and the word distant indicate this is talking about victims outside of
melee.
The
text says that it both reduces distance and removes penalties.
As for removing penalties, that is again dependent on physical contact.
"Touching a subject with your staff lets you cast spells on that
subject at no penalty." Ya still gotta touch 'em with your Staff.
Speaking as someone present at the Creation- er, playtest of 4/e, there
was no discussion of changing the way touching and distance penalties
were to be calculated other than 1) indirectly as a consequence of the
change in timing of spell casting within the turn sequence and 2) Long
Distance penalties were made logarithmic.
--
Jeff Wilson - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >
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