While we're talking about rules questions from Arcaniscon, I had a question come up about Mental Scream. As most of us know it's primarily a damaging spell that ignores AR and has a range of 0' (5' radius). It also has a number of adaptations. Two are of note for me here:
A:RPG pg 407 wrote: Adaptation: Increase the CTN by 6 and Speed by 1 to change the range to 30’ (1 Target).
This is pretty straight forward. It's somewhat "expensive", but good for nuking someone "over there" instead of next to you. I have always assumed you need to use this adaptation to get range out of the spell. But another adaptation says...
A:RPG pg 408 wrote: Adaptation: Increase the CTN by 2 to increase the spell’s range by 30’. This Adaptation may be applied multiple times.
This is the standard wording that gets applied to some ranged spells that allow a caster to increase their range.
So in a mod I was running, I had one player insist is that you can use the second adaptation directly on the base spell. This gives you 30' range at +2 CTN to inflict a 5' radius effect. I let it fly at the time because it wasn't that big a deal at the table. But I also feel sure that this is wrong, and that the second adaptation only works if you first turn MS into a ranged spell with the first adaptation. Am I crazy? I would love second opinions from other GMs.
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That said it would look to me that the intention would be to apply the first adaptation to get the range out to 30 feet then the second to get it to range 60 feet and so on. Personnaly I would want an adaptation that increased the radius more, but I imagine that's covered by the talent Adaptation: Extended Range, which I would definitely take for this particular spell (although I wouldn't want to be around this person in combat 