I can't find anything about elemental spells attacks and their RI and point blank modifiers.
HARP doesn't have Range Increments or Point Blank modifiers for spells. Spells can affect any target within their Range, and many spells have scaling options to increase the range - each PP of scaling incurs a -5 penalty to the casting roll.
I don't think it's worth changing that, but it wouldn't be too hard to make
house rules for Range Increments, PB ranges and modifiers if you wanted.
For example:
Range Increments:Increase Scaling by 50' is a +1 PP scaling option, so it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a 50' RI for spells, so PB would be 25'. Alternatively, make the RI of a spell equal to its base range - most directed attack spells have a base range of 100', so PB would be 50' - which is huge, better than even a Heavy Crossbow (70' RI, 35' PB).
Note that either of these would penalise spell casters twice for range: once for the scaling penalty, and once for the RI. Worse, if you set RI to 50', it would penalise directed spell attacks by -30 for casting them at their 100' base range....which seems wrong when the spells were designed and costed to be effective at that range.
I don't like "double jeopardy", so if I used RIs for spells I would just use scaling penalties and ignore RI penalties. RI would only be used for calculating the PB range.
Point Blank:Looking at the Missile Weapon Ranges table, it looks as if most PB ranges are
half the RI, and PB bonuses vary from +5 for weaker attacks (e.g. boomerangs and thrown pole arms) to +35 for stronger attacks (e.g. Heavy Crossbow, which does a Large Puncture).
(i'm not sure i agree that boomerangs are a "weaker" attack - they're a very effective hunting weapon, capable of taking down fully-grown kangaroos and being hit in the head by one would really mess up anyone's day - but that's what the rules say).
So, maybe base the PB bonus on the size of the attack with, say, Medium PB being +20 (same as a Long Bow, Medium Pu) or +25 (Composite Bow, also Medium Pu) and plus or minus 5 or 10 for larger or smaller attacks:
+/- 5 per size, with Medium = +20:
| Tiny | +10 |
| Small | +15 |
| Medium | +20 |
| Large | +25 |
| Huge | +30 |
or +/- 10 per size, with Medium = +25:
| Tiny | +5 |
| Small | +15 |
| Medium | +25 |
| Large | +35 |
| Huge | +45 |
This would affect only elemental and other directed attack type spells. For non-directed attacks (i.e. those resolved with an RR rather than an OB - DB and a table lookup), you could either ignore PB or treat it as Medium size....there are reasonable arguments for both. Personally, I'd ignore PB for non-directed spells.
The overall effect would be to offset some of the scaling penalties when attacking targets within PB, e.g. scaling up an attack size two steps from Tiny to Medium is +8 PP, which incurs a -40 penalty. If the target is within PB range, that penalty would be reduced to -15 or -20. For a Tiny spell, it just slightly increases the chance of getting the maximum Tiny critical result of 80....which is already very easy to do.
All of this is probably why spells don't have RI or PB rules in HARP - it's not worth the bother, and scaling penalties already affect spells. It just adds complication for little or no benefit.
but feel free to play around with the ideas above if you want RI and PB for spells.
