The DM rolls 0 dice in an Easy Uncontested action. This means that all of the player's dice will be successes. Therefore, a character with a Cerebrality of 4 and a Cast Spells ability of 4 can gather 8 spell dice! Consequently allowing her to burn an entire city block! That seems a bit crazy; I think I'll roll 1 or 2 dice against Gather Magic Power.
It seems that EUAs can result in all sorts of craziness. Someone could just climb a fence and get 4 bonus attack dice, or state 4 facts.
I think your missing the dice for the level your on. Table 4-2 says:
QuoteThe GM always adds the Donjon Level (Chapter 7: Running Donjon) to
the number of dice listed above.
(p24 of screen pdf).
-Jason
Ah, you're right. Sorry about that. What a silly mistake!
Even so, I had beginning characters routinely casting spells with 16 dice! I decided quite quickly to up the resistance to gathering magic power!
Wulf
Another fix for magic is: while you roll Cerebr. + Ability to gather power, you can only use Spell Dice + Ability to cast the actual spell. Plus, players have to pay dice depending on the scope of the intended effect.
Upping resistance also works; perhaps increasing the resistance based on how often their drawing up power.
In Donjon, you also roll at least one die for every test, even when you have a 0. You just let both people in the test roll an extra die. So in the 8 vs 0 case, you'd roll 9 vs 1.
That's still a lot of successes, though (an average of four or so). If you search back through old posts, I know we discussed a solution at one point.