StormPatriarch wrote:
Questions arose around the spell Conjure Swarm. Here is the text:
"This spell conjures a hoard of large stinging insects. Each insect has Potential-Harm of 1, with no more than a single hit point each, and zero resilience. The creatures’ initiative rank is as one group, equal to the caster’s Specialization in the spell’s power source, or Mastery in the related Summoner school (whether Mystic, Supernatural, Primordial, or Psychogenic), whichever is higher. Controlling a summoned host requires no additional ability checks, but maintaining the spell requires a maintenance cost of ½ initial casting each round."
Problems were: Its a conjure spell that summons creatures that do damage. How much does it do per round? How many insects in a "swarm"? If its a swarm then it should be what 50 to 100 insects at least? But if you do that it has the potential to do 50 to 100 Po-Harm. If you allow armor and they all attack individually then they will never penetrate. If you use the casting roll for the number of insects then a low roll casting could end up w/2 to 3 insects in your "swarm"? Ruled that the casting roll would be the amount of Po-Harm per round (As per a harm spell)and that the PCs could use Dodge(Area spell), then armor, then resilience (Poison from stings) and then toughness. It worked pretty well. Maybe should have dropped resilience though since technically the harm was the insects not the magic. Any thoughts?
I would go with what you did--the number of bites/round = value of casting roll (there could be hundreds of actual insects, but only some of them actually bite in a given round). Because it is an area spell, Dodge would apply. But I would not let armor reduce the Harm damage (the swarm can get underneath the armor). The bites are Po-Harm, so they would affect Resilience, then Toughness. Now if these were especially nasty insects, and had a poison bite, then you could say that they cause Harm AND are poisonous. But that would be a multi-effect spell (with a multi-effect spell cost).