It seems unbalanced that rolling a ‘1’ when casting magic causes Backlash. If the player then fails a Spirit check, they takes 1d10 damage, which ignores armor. Most powers don’t do that much damage. Roll a ‘1’ while casting Mage Sight, fail your Spirit check, and you’ve dropped Hellfire on yourself. Congrats!
Greetings:
Backlash is the primary balancing element for powers. There is no limit (spell slots, spell points, etc.) on how much a caster can use their powers. Using magic as an example, anytime a character opens themselves to the aether there is a risk represented by being Shaken (minor consequence) on a failure or backlash (major consequence) on a Critical Failure.
Secondly, unless you roll Critical Failure on your Spirit check, you have a good chance of being able to use Fate to avoid the backlash. As a result, a mage with Elementalism d6 only has a 2.8% of being unable to avoid the backlash. Yes, if you roll two Critical Failures in a row using magic, something bad happens. If a caster thinks twice about using their powers frivilously, backlash has done it's job.
Magical attack powers do more damage because they add the caster's Spirit, usually to a d10. Elemental Strike is Spirit +d10 plus the elemental effect for example. Even if a mage suffers backlash the average roll on a d10 is 5.5. So, with a Toughness d4, their passive is a 3 and they take 2 Wounds. The real damage lies in a max, but the odds of that are only 10%, when combined with the odds of two Critical Failures the net likelihood of that occurring is 0.2%.
Scribe of the Adventure System
