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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bmcdaniel" data-source="post: 6482743" data-attributes="member: 1772">Thanks for the feedback. A few thoughts and responses:* I hadn't considered how powerful bless is. (It hasn't seen any use in my game so far.) I think I'll remove it from the common spell list (although I'll keep it for the fate tradition).* Regarding the power level of the evil eye and the bestow curse/bestow major curse spells. I've tried to balance them by delaying the effect, so that they would rarely (if ever) be useful in combat. They would be very useful to set up a later combat... but (a) the victim knows that they are cursed and should take appropriate precautions, and (b) I'm OK with that because I want to encourage my players to set up advantages for future combats.* Along those lines, I'll insert the following text which appears elsewhere in my campaign guide describing curse magic:Curse MagicCurses loom large in the imagination of [people in this campaign]. Curses are a special type of magic that doesn’t follow the determinative rules of standard magic. Whether or not a spell counts as a curse will be noted in the spell description. Curses are very flexible, but their efficacy depends on the symbolic appropriateness of the curse to the target. Moreover, most powerful curses can be broken if the target meets conditions that are (again) symbolically appropriate. For example, a pickpocket cursed with palsy until he returns everything he’s stolen to its rightful owners; a beautiful princess cursed with eternal sleep until kissed by a prince; a demonologist cursed with fear of fire; a graverobber whose possessions crumbles unless he returns all stolen items to a grave; or a drunken fool who is polymorphed into a boar until he can cross a desert (symbolically overcoming his alcoholism). Finally, most curses have a delayed onset, can have permanent or long-lasting effects, and can’t be dispelled like ordinary spells (although a high-level remove curse spell can end a curse). Because of these elements, curses are not terribly combat-effective, and they are not meant to be. However, curses can be powerful PC (and NPC) motivators outside of combat. * I should add that one of my few disappointments with  D&D 5e is what they did with the bestow curse and remove curse spells. Bestow curse is now simply yet another in-combat spell, and remove curse automatically works. Bestowing a permanent curse requires a 9th-level bestow curse spell (!) which, per RAW, can be dispelled with a 3rd-level remove curse</blockquote>

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