Re: Disbelieving a fireball (that is not a phantom fireball)While I like the flavor of what you're saying, ChrisDDickey, I think you're pushing beyond intent. The Fireball spell does not cause more damage to people with lower Mystic Defense (MD) - resolution and damage is only based on highest MD. If you have three people affected - say MD 5, 10, and 15 - and Fireball rolls a 20, then that's 1 extra success, period, not 3 extra successes against the 5 and two against the 10. If that 15 Disbelieves, the group becomes 2, 5, and 10, resulting in two extra successes, not three against the 2 and 5.
Now, all that being said, I'd be totally down with a penalty that's a little less dangerous, just for flavor. Fireball also causes Blindness - maybe the Disbeliever didn't even both to look away as the flames erupted (which would be natural if you were 'defending' against something), so their Blindness last an extra turn or two.
For everyone else talking about using Disbelief in order to lower MD, there's a relevant thread in this subforum right now:
viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2043Summary of my contributions: Disbelief is not "I am lowering my MD because I don't believe this," it is "I don't believe this, so it does not affect me, and if I'm wrong, this is gonna hurt like hell." Lowered MD is a consequence of being wrong, not the intended result. Moreover, there is NO reason a player should be able to Disbelieve something they KNOW to be true.
Re: Attribute IncreasingALL increases are cumulative. A player cannot go from Rank 1 in Basketweaving to Rank 7 by only paying the cost for the 7, they must pay the cost of 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7. If there are any training time and costs associated with this, they are also incurred. There are no exceptions to this that I am aware of. Whether you allow them to go from DEX +0 to DEX+2 by paying LP/Silver/Time for both +1 and +2 in the same Circle is up to your table.
Re: Karma Ritualetherial tackled this. Keep in mind that many/most Karma Rituals have conditions for use: Elementalists need to be able to make mud, Scouts need to be able to get lost, etc. In some cases, this may be impossible or dangerous. Rituals also take Time, so if players do it in the middle of a dungeon crawl, increase the tension by warning them that things could transpire while they're doing this: enemies may stumble upon them, enemies may kill or destroy something the party is looking for, enemies may fortify or escape. Warn them of this even if you have no intention of altering your plan.
But yeah, other than that, there's really no restrictions on WHEN they can do it, and there's no disencentive to do it every night, even if the character is only down one karma. On the plus side, though, it encourages karma use, which I think is good - before, players would often treat Karma like a precious resource, requiring GMs to carefully consider if an enemy that has Karma would burn through it (they're gonna die anyways); now, burn baby burn, it's the player's fault if they don't try to keep up and spend a resource at their disposal.