So, in our gaming session last night, we came across a scenario that seemed unusual.

The character was using the Runes skill to do a Curse with the Paralyze effect. He succeeded. Now, according to the Concentration rule all it takes is a maneuver to maintain the spell. No mention of a strain cost. So, with casting one spell, he has successfully taken the enemy out of combat. Because staggered deprives the victim of an action.

That just seemed a bit OP. Were we missing something?

Well it's 5 purple dice as a base Difficulty, so it isn't like it's easy. Unless he's got the appropriate shard, which would be a really powerful item to let a PC have depending.

In addition you have to be within Short Range, I'd make that the range it needs to be to maintain it as well because it is really powerful, so the victim using two maneuvers could potentially break it by moving away, as the caster won't be able to maintain it and keep up movement.

The caster's also deprived of that 2nd maneuver for aiming, moving etc. which depending on the flow of the rest of the flow/nature of the battle could be pretty unhealthy.

All it takes is 1 measly to break concentration (page 104: " The active character loses the benefits of a prior maneuver (such as from taking cover or assuming a guarded stance) until they perform the maneuver again. "

But all the things that 2P51 said also are important: their manoeuvre is taken up by the spell and they have to make a pretty dang hard check to do it in the first place.

OK. Yeah, as a GM I don't want to cut players off when they come up with a really cool idea or whatnot. I like the idea of having them maintain short distance. He/we did kind of goof the difficulty, as the sheet he was looking at showed it to be one less difficulty for paralyze. So, he was at medium since he added a purple for medium range. So, then I just ruled that he can maintain the other curse effect he got and couldn't maintain the staggered. No biggie.

So, concentrate really doesn't require any additional strain?

Ya know - I honestly thought I had submitted the above words yesterday. HA!

Anyway, so @c__beck maybe I'm not connecting something in my head, but what do you mean by all it takes is one failure?

That’s the symbol for Threat, not Failure. What c_beck is saying is that whilst a character is using Concentrate every single turn to maintain a single spell m any Threat they roll on a skill check can be used to cancel the concentrate, therefore ending the spell.

Also remember that they need to perform a separate concentrate manoeuvre for each spell, and they only ever get two manoeuvres each round. So even if they are only maintaining a single spell they will be suffering 2 Strain if they want to perform an action and a second manoeuvre.

Because they use one manoeuvre every round to concentrate it becomes trivial for enemies to either run away, or run up to them and attack the pc.

6 hours ago, Mogloth said:

OK. Yeah, as a GM I don't want to cut players off when they come up with a really cool idea or whatnot. I like the idea of having them maintain short distance. He/we did kind of goof the difficulty, as the sheet he was looking at showed it to be one less difficulty for paralyze. So, he was at medium since he added a purple for medium range. So, then I just ruled that he can maintain the other curse effect he got and couldn't maintain the staggered. No biggie.

So, concentrate really doesn't require any additional strain?

Ya know - I honestly thought I had submitted the above words yesterday. HA!

Anyway, so @c__beck maybe I'm not connecting something in my head, but what do you mean by all it takes is one failure?

Giving up a Maneuver in the middle of a fight is a pretty big deal. It limits how far you can move, anything else you do costs Strain for the 2nd Maneuver. There are a number of critical injuries that can also complicate the **** out of things for a caster. My guy in my campaign is constantly stressing over Strain and is always burning through most of his. Granted I made spell trees and some have steep Strain costs, but he can still do basic attacks and such for 2.