Creating Magical Effects

What do you want to do and how?

• What Effect are you attempting to do and how?
• What is your character doing, within his or her paradigm, to make it happen?
• How does your Effect appear?
• How long does it take?

Do you know how to do it?

• Does your mage have the appropriate Sphere knowledge?
• Does your mage need any mundane Abilities to help?
• Does your mage's paradigm support the form of the Effect?

Did you succeed?

• Base difficulty:
  • Coincidental: Highest Sphere +3
  • Vulgar without Witnesses: Highest Sphere +4
  • Vulgar with Witnesses: Highest Sphere +5
• Spend Quintessence and/or Willpower, if desired
  • These need to be spent before rolling; spending Willpower after the roll is limited to canceling a botch, see below for details
• Add and subtract any other modifiers
• Roll your character's Arete versus adjusted difficulty
  • Minimum 3 or (base difficulty -3), whichever is higher
  • Maximum 9 or (base difficulty +3), whichever is lower
  • Thresholds: If the adjusted difficulty would be 9+N in the absence of this maximum, then roll at diff 9 and cancel N successes. If this cancels all successes, it's only a botch if the mage rolled a 1. For extended effects, apply this rule to each roll individually.
• Check the number of your successes
• Repeat for extended Effects

What Happened

• How much effect did your magic have?
• Did the target resist your Effect? Remove their successes, and check your remaining success.
• Did you succeed? Assign the Effect, and take any appropriate Paradox (one per highest sphere for vulgar Effects, plus one if their are witnesses).
• Did you fail? If you didn't botch, take any appropriate Paradox, watch the effect fizzle.
• Did you botch? If so, assign the Paradox appropriate to a Botch instead of normal amount.
  • Coincidental Botch: Gain one point of Paradox per dot in highest Sphere used.
  • Vulgar without Witnesses Botch: Gain one point of Paradox for botching + one per dot in highest Sphere used.
  • Vulgar with Witnesses Botch: Gain two point of Paradox for botching + two per dot in highest Sphere used.
  • You can spend a Willpower after the roll to cancel a botch, but you lose one success that was previously accumulated. A second botch within the same ritual cannot be canceled.
• Did you get more than five points of Paradox? If so, the Storyteller might roll for Backlash.