Overcasting in WFRP 4e is a tricky subject. It’s great for wizards and other arcane casters, but it’s a bit hit and miss. Sure, magic in Warhammer has its roots in Chaos, but that doesn’t mean wizards are or should be chaotic too.
What am I getting at? Well, lets look at an example. Say your wizard is facing two opponents. One of them is 50 yards away, the other is 100 yards away. Handily, your wizard’s Willpower is 50.
Now, you want to cast Bolt at your enemies. Bolt’s range is your Willpower in yards, so the nearest opponent is in range. You cannot at this point target the opponent that is 100 yards away.
Bolt’s Casting Number (CN) is 4, so to successfully cast the spell and hit the nearest opponent you need 4 Success Levels (SLs). That’s all well and good, but what if you manage to roll 6 SLs? You can use those extra +2 SLs and Overcast the range for another Willpower yards, so that the opponent that is 100 yards away is suddenly a potential target instead.
Let’s alter that example to make it a bit more clear what I am trying to point out. Let’s say there is only one opponent and that opponent is 100 yards away. You cannot target the opponent unless they are in range, but to be in range you need to Overcast your spell, but if you can’t target them in the first place, who are you going to start casting at?
Well, there’s an easy solution to all of this and that is to declare what Overcasts and how many you want BEFORE casting. By doing so you are increasing the CN of the spell by the Overcast SLs you need.
Let’s go back to that example one last time. Your wizard is facing an opponent that is 100 yards away. Normally their Bolt’s range is only 50 yards, but you want to increase that by another 50 yards. Your wizard puts a little thought into the spell, casting a slightly more intricate version with a CN of 6 and a range of 100. If your wizard gets 6 SLs, the 100 yard Bolt is successfully cast and your opponent is in trouble. If your wizard only gets 5 SLs, it’s a failure. The spell fizzles and does nothing. If your wizard gets 8 SLs? Doesn’t matter. It’ll hurt the target more, but as you didn’t declare any additional Overcasts the range is still only going to be 100 yards. No ifs and no buts.
I think this will help players and GMs make sense of things a little more, plus it’s a built in incentive to Channel for those big Overcasts! Also, it’ll partially stop that damned Petty Spell called Dart being abused so much, because by increasing the CN of the spell you’re making it harder to cast and increasing the chance of it doing nothing at all.
I like the idea that the caster needs to declare what level of power they are going for in advance, for exactly this reason. A missile weapon user can aim and try to fire at long/extreme range so why not Wizards? (granted wizards always hit, which is a huge advantage) Question: should there be a cap on this? e.g. I’d love to be able to target somebody at WPBx6 yards, but feel it should have a limit. … perhaps if the caster doesn’t succeed in the roll they need to do a minor miscast?
Yeah, a cap might be in order, but there are some limitations built in already.
If we’re talking about the core rulebook, you’ll need 2 SLs for every Overcast. So to increase your range to x6 you’ll need 5 Overcasts which is 10 extra SLs. That’s a lot and if you’re talking about Bolt that’ll turn it into a CN 14 spell. Unless you have an insanely high Language (Magick) or an equally high Advantage pool, or lots of bonus SLs from Talents, you’re not going to be able to cast it without channelling.
Channelling of course, does not benefit from Advantage, so you’re going to have to do things the hard way and if it’s during a fight your chances of Channelling going wrong due to interruptions make your prospects… interesting.
If you’ve got the the Winds of Magic book, there’s a rewrite of Overcasts in there that puts a cap on the number of Overcasts you can use.
Anyway, I ‘d like to get some play testing in to see how things work out in practice.