Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="InkTide" data-source="post: 9551724" data-attributes="member: 7048463">It's always just looked like a possession spell to me, which I think is fine as a niche, especially in the Necromancy school. It's where Magic Jar juggles PC abilities with the abilities that the body has that it gets nonsensical. 2024 has made it much worse than I've ever seen, though (fairy possessing a goliath can fly and is still small, dragonborn possessing a merfolk retains breath weapon and must hold breath or drown), hence it being little more than a stupidly risky Disguise Self.Nah, I'm a bit too late to have done that. The wizard creating a consciousness/spirit is just a part of the spell already - the creature is not a magical construct, nor is it a summon. Preventing wizards from creating a consciousness magically is a ship that sailed and sank the moment they gave True Polymorph an "Object to Creature" mode that releases the creature after the concentration duration ends. It is something they can just do, even RAW, unless you rework or remove that mode entirely.If you don't believe me, consider this: you can True Polymorph a medium-sized chair into a ghost, which in the 2014 MM at least is literally, explicitly... a soul. It is a CR 4 creature made of its own soul-stuff. It crossed the line into messy territory quite a while ago.To be fair, if said creature isn't now its own being, creating a small army of Gray Slaads following the caster's instructions is now just a few days and medium-sized crates away. It is somewhat necessary for balance with the permanence of the spell.RAW is actually explicit about this: the elf has no memory of the experience. This means they are effectively in "consciousness stasis" while polymorphed into a ball bearing. What "consciousness stasis" entails exactly is the kind of question that deals psychic damage.To clarify, I'm trying to balance the duration of that risk, because many of these creatures can live for a long time - I agree it's a completely reasonable risk for a while, I just don't think it being permanent for the lifetime of the resulting creature is reasonable. And I'd probably lean towards the idea that the higher mental stats the creature has, the faster it 'becomes itself,' so to speak. And thinking on it further, I'd probably have Dispel Magic become less of a risk as that time passed. Possibly a +1 to the DC per long rest, until the risk went away altogether at, say, DC 50 minus the creature's highest mental stat.Remember, the new creature isn't the caster and isn't just a lackey for the caster - a risk to the creature itself doesn't really feel like much of a risk to the spell unless the players are attached to the character, in which case I'd rather have the solution be "keep Mittens (who has since decided her real name is Miirthriinsaryx) - the silver dragon wyrmling who semi-reluctantly (but voluntarily) follows the party and used to be a wooden wardrobe - away from Dispel Magic for the next [reasonable duration]" than "keep Mittens away from Dispel Magic for the rest of the campaign and/or her 1200+ year natural life."Lots of things one can do to balance that pose a risk to the party, rather than a very specific and unchanging existential risk to a resulting NPC. If the party is making too many NPCs... just have the NPCs leave. They can choose to do that, RAW. You can even make them hostile when the hour is up. Maybe the party got super lucky with Mittens.(We may have gotten a little off topic here.)</blockquote>

Verification