The Dangers of “Pre Buffing”

My main only has 1 buff spell, and it is a Speed 1(2). It only adds 1 to his AR. I have basically written this bonus into his AR as if the GM permits the pre-buff, it is there. Alternatively, I just add 1 to my initiative. So for pre buffing, it may come down to the buff in general.

When I consider pre-buffing, there better be good role playing for it. Alternatively, your caster starts with either the full cumulative strain from all the buffs cast or the remaining strain and stamina damage, not permitting cooldown time between casts.

Though it’s not mechanical constant, there is the threat of being Harvested.
It’s plausible that a character wouldn’t refresh an augmentation every 10 minutes or so because the odds that they do it in view of someone who’d notice and sell the info to a Harvester could be very high. At least in cities, anyway. Out on the trail, not so much -although the idea of halting travel every 10 minutes is a recipe for insanity.

I do worry about the harvesting idea, since I do want to use alter appearance regularly, but I thought the risk of a psionicist being harvested was pretty low. Is that correct?

Also, I would like an official idea or rule of thumb for the time buffs were meant to last. Technically you could call everything you do after you leave your house to go shopping in the bazaar one scene and thus all your buffs would last the entire time. But it seems odd that the moment you’re attacked in the bazaar, suddenly your disguise falls away, no matter how recently you refreshed the spell.

yeah and that’s why this is an issue.

you want to have a buff up all of the time for story reasons.

the balance of the mechanics demands(my words) that you recast your buffs when combat starts (thats when the scene starts usually)

Largely this is true, though there is a talent now to fix the issue with Alter Appearance that I hope to take some day. But it is true for a lot of other spells too, like “Heighten Senses” that I like to keep up to help detect an ambush or trap (or just in general in the dark), and thus need to be in effect before the scene starts. So how often am I recasting them? If “scene” spells are have to be recast every 5 minutes than having “scene” spells running on a regular basis becomes pretty silly from a character perspective. But if it is hourly, they become very doable. But that than raises the question why they immediately fail anytime anything interesting happens…

Just a note from a related thread:

there is no hard definition of Scene, you need to think of them as scene’s in a movie or book.

generally the end of a scene is end of an event, for example..

lets say you have been contacted by a local Coryani ex-legionnaire about a murder of a good friend..

If the party is ambushed in the way to talk to the ex-legionnaire that would be a scene…

reaching the ex-legionnaire’s home to find him dead… that would be a scene (including looking for clues and searching the house)

done with your investigation (pause in the story) you leave and are confronted with members of the inquisition who are also been investigating a chain of murders… that would be its own scene.

scenes are abstract and uneventful story pauses (traveling between one place and another for example) would be their own scene

there is a reason why I designed so many spells with duration scene.. I want the casters to use up ticks casting those spells in the midst of the scene.. not before.

And I think what i said meshes with pedro’s examples beautifully

I suspect you are correct, and I haven’t had a problem yet in my very limited experiance, but I do worry about a scenario where as we approach a building I cast some buffs, but as we step through the front door to discover a room full of bad guys, the gamemaster calls “New Scene!” and all the buffs my character threw 200 feet ago are gone since we’ve stepped from the “travel” scene to the “encounter” scene.

yeah I started this thread to kinda head something off at the pass that has becoming more and more prominent. and really my character is the kind of guy that has to balance casting 2-4 buffs at the beginning of each combat, and i was noticing how ridiculous it was to let me pre cast things

My buffs are virtually irrelevant to combat. Even “Body of the Warrior” just helps me a little with the NAR because I try really hard to not be in combat, as I am way too squishy. But changing back to my natural appearance everytime I start to sweat is annoying. And it seems like in any negotiation/diplomatic type scene it might have a negative effect to say, “Hi! Before we talk about whether you are going to eat me, let me go in the corner and cast some spells!” So that I can get a bonus on the negotiations. If I didn’t come into the encounter with that up, it sort of makes it a lost cause to try to cast it then. (“No, No, No! I wasn’t casting an attack spell, Honest! Just one that would help me lie my ass of to you! Why are you still drawing your weapons?”)

dammit pedro, where is the like button already!

The Harvesters are not interested in Psions, at least as far as anyone knows, at this time.