[Witchcraft, or other unisystem] Magic sys?

[JeenLeen]

Could someone give me a walkthrough of how casting spells in Witchcraft (or other Unisystem games, like AFMBE or the Buffy/Angel games) works?

To my shame, I've read through the books, but still I don't really get it. Could you go through a couple examples, including explaining why Essence Channeling (or being able to channel more essence each round) is so useful? (I think I got that it takes multiple rounds to cast a high-essence spell otherwise.)

[Dhavaer]

I think it works like this:

You have an essence pool equal to the sum of your abilities, plus any bonuses. Each turn you can summon an amount of essence up to your essence channelling level from this pool. You can hold summoned essence for 10+Willpower minutes, after that you start getting penalties, so if you can't summon enough essence for what you want to do in one turn you can keep summoning essence until you have enough.
Once you have enough essence, roll d10 and add to whatever modifiers your power uses, Willpower + invocation level for most lesser invoctions. If that's at least a 9, it worked.
Successful invoctions are dismissed automatically, if you screw up you have to clean up after yourself or bad things happen. Roll the same as you did to cast with a penalty of -1 per 5 essence used.

Hopefully that was all correct; I'm a little shacky on this too.

[Elana]

Of course Buffy and Angel use the cinemetatic unisystem rules.

So forget essence pools for that.
You just roll Willpower+Occultism.
Then you compare the number of success levels with the power level of the spell.

If you get at least that number of successes everything is fine..if you don't refer to the spell failure table (tables if you use the magic box supplement).

For each spell you cast without resting you get a cumulative -2 penalty on your roll.
If you reuse a spell you already cast before that gets you another -1 penalty.
(Encouraging you to switch spells)