EOM - Lyceian Arcana requestish thing: Is this broken?

[RangerWickett]

The following is the current draft of the rules for having conditional permanent spells, for things like, "You will be a toad until you can convince a princess to kiss you," or "You shall have a soul until you experience true happiness."

Tell me if you think it's broken, or if you have any better ideas:

Crafting Curses and Conditional Spells
Fantasy and folklore are filled with magic that lasts forever, until broken by a preordained action, often a kiss. When you use the Craft Permanent Spell, you may choose to make the enchantment conditional. You set a condition upon which the spell will end, and if the spell is negated by the fulfillment of that condition, half the XP spent on the permanent spell is returned (to you or whoever donated it). If the permanent spell is negated any other way, no XP is returned.

The game master may decide that all permanent spells require conditions that can end them. Additionally, the game master may decide that particularly ‘fair’ conditions – namely those that you have little or no control over, and that actually are a limitation to the spell’s power – reduce the permanent spell’s cost by 10%.

Alternately, you can have a permanent spell simply have a permanent duration, so that Dispel Magic will end it, rather than suppress it. Creating a permanent spell this way reduces the XP cost by half.

 

[Archus]

The following is the current draft of the rules for having conditional permanent spells, for things like, "You will be a toad until you can convince a princess to kiss you," or "You shall have a soul until you experience true happiness."

Tell me if you think it's broken, or if you have any better ideas:

A few comments:

Having 1/2 the XP return when the spell is finished seems like some tedious book-keeping that only really effects player characters (NPCs have as much XP as the GM cares to give them), but I understand why. By having the xp only return when the spell is ended, you avoid having players slap cheap permanent spells up on themselves. The more I think about it the more I say "nicely done".

Overall I like the curse effect.

Along these lines, it would be nice to have spell limitations reduce the MP cost. Like an illusion that is dispelled by sunlight or whatever. Hard to adjucate what the MP reduction would be.

 

[Marius Delphus]

Not broken. Personally, I'd like to see some kind of "sliding scale" that relates [how easy a condition is to meet] to [how much of a discount it provides], but I do realize that something like that would require even more DM fiat, which tends to amuse powergamers and frustrate DMs.

A particular spell-ending contingency can have more than one dimension, after all... forgive the first draft/stream-of-consciousness way of posting here, but I'm thinking at least the following things could potentially factor in:

- Easier/harder to meet the contingency

- Requires no/low-level/mid-level/high-level spellcasting
- Requires free/cheap/expensive materials
- Requires a very common/common/rare/very rare circumstance
- Requires a third party's cooperation/convincing/etc.
- Requires any one/exactly one interpretation of the contingency's wording​

- Caster cannot prevent the contingency from being met

- Because caster's intervention meets the contingency
- Because victim can meet the contingency​

- Contingency limits the spell's effect

- By making the spell less effective/ineffective in certain circumstances​

If you have access to any Ravenloft materials, the stuff on curse "escape clauses" is also good for plundering on this topic. Having the spell effect meets the "quantified" prerequisite for a good curse.... IIRC, there's also some stuff in Four Color to Fantasy (the "kryptonite" limitation) that might prod thinking along these lines.

With a sliding scale, I think it'd be easier to make the contingency an up-front discount on the XP cost, rather than leaving this open-ended thing hanging around... though I also see a good reason it shouldn't be (letting characters fling permanent spells around cheaply may not be a good idea). But hey; that's what playtesting is for, right?

 

[Verequus]

I can't say, that I find it broken - nearly everything, what I thought, has been already mentioned. Maybe you should let a caster know, which spell has been ended - it would be flavorful and not gamebreaking.