Numerological Evocation

[Lilith Knight]

I can see at least two ways of reading the spell:

If you are 6th level and you cast it you roll 3d6.
Say you roll a 2 a 3 and a 4.

One is the energy so I choose 2: electricity.
Then I use the second die to target 3 creatures.
Finally I use my third die to make the range 40 ft. and no die are left so the damage is 0.

At the beginning it says that I can allocate as many dice as I want to the first part to pick damage types as long as I have enough to dice left to complete the spell so does that mean I have to use no dice and the spell deals 4 ??? damage?
None of this makes any sense at all especially when a wizard can gain this spell when he could only have 2 dice.

That means it must be like this:

I roll a 2 a 3 and a 4 so my dice pool is 9 dice.
I know that these dice are d8s because that matches the number of options on the table.
So I use one to make the spell do water damage by rolling a 6 on it.
I then roll another die (d8?) to see how many target I can affect. Say this comes up a 2. so I gt 2 targets.
I have 7 dice left so I use one of them to gain a range of 80 feet because I rolled an 8 on it. Finally the spell does 6d8 (ref for half)to the first target and half of that to the second one (ref negates).

The numbers here make a lot more sense, especially for a 3rd lvl spell, but it seems like a little bit of a stretch to get them.

So how does the spell actually work?

[kestral287]

No. This would certainly not be the first spell that's useless at a low caster level. Below 8th caster level, it's useless. So let's assume you're CL8.

You roll your four dice. 2, 3, 3, 4. You decide to use the 2 to have the spell deal electricity damage, the first 3 to have the spell affect three targets, the second 3 to give it a range of 30', and apply the rest of your dice-- the 4-- to damage. 4 damage to the primary target, Ref for half, 2 damage to two additional targets, Ref to negate.

Alternately, let's say you're CL20. You roll: 1,6,3,2,3,3,4,6,4,4.

You want the spell to deal Sonic damage, so you use a 4 on that. You decide you really only care about hitting one target, and he's already close, so you spend your 1 on a single target and your 2 on a range of 20'. The rest of your dice are allocated to damage--29 damage, Ref for half. While that seems low, keep in mind a Fireball at this level would only be doing 35 damage and it's the same spell level-- and can't be sonic damage. The flexibility is really what you're paying for, which is sad because it's really, really overpriced.

It's not a very good spell on the whole. Most of the stuff in that book isn't honestly, though this spell's counterpart (Numerological Resistance) is kind of cool.

[Lilith Knight]

That's a shame, it also means that there are two damage types you can't do because you match the number you rolled with the damage type, so it can do multiple types of damage but not cold or earth damage, which again just doesn't make sense.

[kestral287]

Really, Cold and Water should have their positions swapped on the chart. Not doing Earth damage makes perfect sense because Earth damage... does not exist. The same for Water damage.