Before I start, I'd like to make a couple of things clear: Firstly, I don't think the system is imbalanced or broken, I just think it's needlessly confusing. Secondly, ref hat off.
Ok. I believe we have quite a lot of different kinds of negation going around. We have Alchemical negation potions, Alchemical immunity potions, Blessings, the black spells "Shield of negation" and "infusion", and a bunch of grey spells. Oh, and DAC.
And they ALL WORK IN DIFFERENT WAYS. The alchemical negates don't work on calls with damage in them. The alchemical immunities and the Blessing miracles do, but they don't negate the damage, just the status effect (also, the level three blessing lets you ignore te damage but not the status effects, and the level four blessing negates all status effects except disarm with no obvious reason for this omission). The black spells negate the whole call, and don't even get me started on the grey spells which all seem to do ever so slightly different things. EMW/ESW/Momentum? potion don't actually say whether you should negate the whole call or not. DAC lets you negate the whole call so long as it was by weapon blow and wasn't Through or Venom.
Also, while these work reasonably well for damage calls and status effects, there's a lot of confusion over whether you can (or whether you have to) negate Cure, Detect, Recognise, Inflict and Purge.
I would very much like it if all the different ways of not taking calls worked in exactly the same way and all used the exact same description. I propose the following. The wording can and should be changed to something more legible:
If a spell, ability, miracle, potion or otherwise allows you to ignore a particular effect, what it means is this: If you take a call with that effect and only that effect, you may ignore the call (and respond with "taken" if you wish). If you take a call with that effect and other effects, you may take only the other effects (and respond with "taken" if you wish). Under no circumstances may you ignore Drop or Slay.
The call "taken" means "yes, I heard that, and there's a reason why I haven't reacted to it as you might expect".
If a spell, ability, miracle, potion or otherwise allows you to negate a call, what it means is this: In response to that call, reply with "NEGATE" and ignore the entire call. Under no circumustances may you negate Drop or Slay.
The call "negate" means "oh no you don't" and it protects everyone else from the effects of that call as well.
Immunity to a call means "you may ignore all instances of that call for $duration".
Therefore, alchemical immunity and blessings are "ignore". Magic is mostly "negate" but comes in at higher levels and has more restrictions on it, such as not being able to negate any call with SPIRIT in it. I'd like dispels to vanish entirely but I understand that other people want to keep them around for flavour reasons.
So, what do people think?
For ease of reference, all the different kinds of negation are listed down here.
We have the alchemical negates, worded as follows:
will let you call NEGATE against a limited number of non-damaging calls in the next 5 minutes. May not be used on DROP or SLAY.
And alchemical immunities:
will make you immune to specific status effects for 5 minutes. You take other parts of the call as normal.
Then, we have the Blessing miracles, worded as follows:
When using a Blessing, you can only ignore those parts of a call which the Blessing specifically states you can ignore.
Then, we have many different spells which grant negates of some form or another. Shield of Negation and Infusion, from the Dark syllabus:
You may call "NEGATE" to any one call you would otherwise take unless it is DROP or SLAY.
Repel Magic:
You may call "Negate" to the next Magic or Colour damage call that you take, unless it is delivered by weapon.
Dissipate Magic:
The next time you would be affected by a call not in the following list, you must call NEGATE: A weapon blow, a call containing 'Spirit', SLAY, DROP, or a potion.
Dispel Damage:
You may call "Target! Negate that (damage call)!" as you knock the oncoming magic or weapon out of the way on behalf of another person, as long as the damage is not Spirit damage.
Dispel Magic:
You may call "Target! Negate that (call)!" as you knock the oncoming effect out of the way on behalf of another person; this cannot be used if the call includes the words "Spirit", "DROP" or "SLAY".
Finally, Empower Magic/Spirit? weapon grant dispel immunity with the following wording (and the Momentum potion is similar):
The weapon is unaffected by any DISARM, DISARM [item] or DISARM N call.
The rules for DAC are lengthy, but I'll summarise them here:
A character with one point of DAC ignores OOC (ie takes no effect from) the first blow that hits them in any combat. You may not use DAC on weapon blows containing the calls VENOM or THROUGH. If you use DAC on a blow, you should call NEGATE to indicate that you heard the call.
I dislike Dissipate etc Magic, and (to a much lesser extent) Blessing of Righteous Spirit, because I could never remember the exception lists in a hurry (one of the reasons Sir George got killed was that I had a vague feeling that Dissipate Magic didn't work against damage, only effects). I would like to see them replaced by slightly higher-priced abilities which can be used on absolutely anything, or at least on any ranged effect. --Jacob
When adding the effects for alchemy, the only thing in my mind worse than adding more effects would have been reusing one of the existing effects. The worst (Blessing) has now been changed, and I note it now parallels alchemical immunity. We've discussed this a few times, and never gotton down to fewer than four sorts of resistance. Given how many ways of doing damage there are, this strikes me as workable. Also, the onus is always on the resisting person to understand how their resistance works, which means that approximately nobody needs to know all of the above at once. --I