Flaw Surfing: Inquiry

[Draven]

Question:

How does one flaw surf? Is this by using Casting Insight? Because, from my understanding, the way this works is that:

Marshal rolls once to determine success. If Marshal rolls Fail, Marshal rolls Flawed. If Marshal rolls success, Marshal rolls on Flaw Chart. If Marshal rolls Fail, Marshal rolls on Backlash chart.

Does Insight let you actually see what the Marshal rolls on the Flaw chart?

Additionally, is the player aware of whether or not the ritual succeeds on the Flaw chart prior to the conclusion of the ritual, whether or not using Insight? Because Terminate Ritual. And I'm a formalist. Kinda important.

Relevant text for Insight:

Casting Insight: This ability allows the caster to roll twice to determine the success chance of their ritual. The caster can then choose whichever die roll result they prefer of the two. These results are taken before any other Manipulations or High Magic abilities are used. This ability may only be purchased once per ritual.

 

[Alavatar]

Per the Ritual Casting process, Step 7 (ARB v1.2 Page 132) specifies the caster is aware of the results of the initial roll. The next two rolls are not conducted until the end of the ritual. Therefore, the caster does not know what flaw or backlash they will get.

Flaw surfing is an old term that doesn't apply anymore. It changed shortly after I started playing so I do not know the context of the original term.

Now, Backlash Surfing is more applicable since you can have Foresight allowing the caster to re-roll a backlash.

 

[jpariury]

In the long-long-ago, the rules used to allow for one of four possibilities on your roll: success, flawed success, failure (with no result), or backlash. It was, at that time, possible to increase the odds of flawed successes in the hopes of getting something super-beneficial out of it ("All times ever charges in the circle becomes times per day" was a particularly prized result - I once had a 3xday Skill Store Dodge, for example). The flaw and backlash charts were identical across all scrolls and not printed on the scrolls (nor were the rules part of the rulebook); they were accessible only by marshals and formal casters.

This is no longer a thing. "Unsuccessful, no other results" is now a flaw (and a pretty rare one, afaict), the rules are part of the rulebook, you can't intentionally treat successes as flaws, flaws are standardized and randomized per-scroll, etc.

 

[Gandian Ravenscroft]

Ritual casters can make it more likely for them to flaw the ritual by not using their full amount of formal for the ritual if they want (ARB, pg. 130), as long as they "dumb down" their formal levels enough to still have the requisite 1/10 chance of succeeding (for example: Mage Jim has 30 formal and a difficulty 9 scroll with some snazzy flaws that he wants to try to get, so for that ritual, he casts the ritual as if he only had 1 formal and thus has a much higher chance to flaw it than his usual 10% chance of flawing).

But even still, that doesn't get a caster any closer to "choosing" a particular flaw on the scroll; it just gets them a better chance of flawing. They still just have to randomly roll for which flaw and hope for the best, as well as hope it doesn't backlash, which is just as likely as getting a particular flaw they want.

 

[Avaran]

This is no longer a thing. "Unsuccessful, no other results" is now a flaw (and a pretty rare one, afaict), the rules are part of the rulebook, you can't intentionally treat successes as flaws, flaws are standardized and randomized per-scroll, etc.

Pretty sure JP is correct, especially since the way things are structured now (mostly how the rolls are conducted; the Choose Flaw ritual manipulation, I think, is the closest you're going to get). I don't think that was ever an intended behavior for the players to engage in.

On an OOG level, it takes a ritual marshal either out-of-game if they are a PC, or it takes a valuable NPC ritual marshal away from monster camp for what I feel is a waste of time if you're a player (unless ridiculously bored) and a colossal waste of time for an NPC-ritual marshal if that is all you're doing. I would hope players are more thoughtful when it comes to other player's time, or an NPC rit marshal's time.