Uhhh........ Are you kidding me Tom lol. I think everyone except you thought effect one was instant. I mean effect two's description was seconds to a minute. If you wanted to use the medieval idea, I think you should had descriptions like that as well. I mean this makes things quite different. You were playing on a totally different league...
Ok, maybe we need to get this straight. By "instant" I do
not mean a point in time, because by pure physics alone, using that interpretation any instant effect would create infinite forces. It has to be long enough to be physically possible, even if it is magic. Breaking a bone in someone else's body is an "instant" effect in the game in so far as it has no duration worth mentioning - for all everyone cares, it
practically happens in an instant. Of course, it does not
physically happen in an instant, i.e. zero or even almost-zero time, because the hydrostatic shock alone from such an event would kill you.
It
is an interesting thought to require spells like Fireball to have a duration longer than 1, though. Absolutely, a fraction of a second of exposure to even a very, very hot flame would not do much damage to you at all. I can totally see the point, and it would solve a part of the problem of harm spells being so extremely powerful compared to other spells.
So, can we agree on duration 1 meaning "less than a second" ? If you look at the other duration descriptions, it should be obvious. Here they are, so you don't have to look them up:
1 => 'an instant',
2 => 'a short while, about a minute',
3 => 'about an hour',
4 => 'a whole day',
5 => 'several weeks, maybe a month',
As you can see, every step up is one order of magnitude higher (minute, hour, day...) so it follows that 1 is one order of magnitude down, i.e. seconds or something.
But, again, even if we were to allow up to a second for duration 1, some harm spells wouldn't do much harm. A second of being engulfed in flames is probably not exactly pleasant, but unless something catches on fire (and even many perfectly flamable things need a longer exposure than that), the damage is likely to be minimal.
I think this is a good thought and we should re-think quite a few spells based on that. I was orginally afraid of balance (lightning being more powerful than fire, at the same SP cost), but as I don't plan to write a full-blown Certamen anymore but would rather rely on roleplaying, that's not a problem. And fire has other advantages that balance things out.
