HARP Scalable Spell Penalties

[Sunwolf]

I have been playing some HARP with my son and we finally got some characters to the point where we can do some scaling up of spells for greater affect.  In this process I've noticed that the casting penalty for scaling up a spell in HARP seems to be too steep when you consider that you also have higher ranks giving less increase to skill.  Anyone else ever run into this issue?  I brought this up on the HARP forums on ICE and thought everyone was a little too much in tune with the party line and not willing to consider there might be a flaw in the game design.

[imported_Rasyr]

There are a number of flaws in the design of HARP (all of which are my fault as I was inexperienced in game design when I first wrote HARP). This was one, and so was the fact that spell design system was too abstract for its own good, as well as the fact that DBs are all about 50 points too low across the board (the RM attack tables have a built in DB of roughly 50 points versus each AT, and in the very first iteration of HARP we used some attack/critical tables similar to those from RMX, but then later removed them for just critical tables. Unfortunately, when we removed the attack tables, we didn't adjust the DBs accordingly, thus HARP actually ended up a lot deadlier than originally intended.

[Sunwolf]

DBs are all about 50 points too low across the board (the RM attack tables have a built in DB of roughly 50 points versus each AT, and in the very first iteration of HARP we used some attack/critical tables similar to those from RMX, but then later removed them for just critical tables. Unfortunately, when we removed the attack tables, we didn't adjust the DBs accordingly, thus HARP actually ended up a lot deadlier than originally intended.

That actually explains a lot, I always felt things were a little on the deadly side.

[imported_Rasyr]

Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until Mjolnir did RMX and released that (there was something nagging me, I knew there was a problem, but I could never put my finger on it until then).

[Sunwolf]

I've come up with my own fix for the spells.  -1 per PP spent over base seems to be working OK.  As for the lethality we are more cautious and use Fate points occassionally.  Oh, and I stole your rule for a Nova roll giving a Fate point and applied it to a natural 66 roll