AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

Trying to figure out what is acceptable use of Permanency here. Spells I've thought would be useful to made permanent on the caster for roleplay reasons:

Detect magic
True Vision
Legend Lore
Clairaudience/Clairvoyance
Protection From Evil
Protection From Good
Protection From Law (best lawyer ever. lol)
Protection From Chaotic

Then on the offensive side, there's:

Dominate Person/Monster
Create Undead
Hold Monster/Person
Gate

I am imagining having a bunch of dominated slaves at your command would involve.... some issues, but Permanency on Hold Monster/Person could be interesting, and useful, to role-play, on an NPC of course... or maybe a PC that was really bad in game or something.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, objections?

Permanency can only be used with DM oversight and costs the caster a chunk of xp.

That likely is the reason why there arent hordes of permanently dominated monsters around.

I am fairly sure quite a few spells which can be made permanent in pnp won't be acceptable as such on Amia due to balancing reasons. I can't give a list or anything as I am not certain how other DM's feel about it though.

Hudson wrote:

Permanency can only be used with DM oversight and costs the caster a chunk of xp.

Just out of curiosity, how does it work when the caster is level 30 and therefore the lost of XP is not a real... "payment", so to say?

I heard you get 1 xp/ kill when 30 (I wouldnt know as I dont have a lv 30 toon) so at the rate at which permanency eats xp you'd run out of excess xp very soon.

But if you have enough excess xp to avoid level loss then good for the player involved I'd say!

Check out the details of the spell itself. The spells it lists are not mere suggestions, they are traditionally "the only" spells that can be Permanencied. Any exceptions to those lists must be approved by a DM, and even then DMs are encouraged to consider how some spells, when permanencied, make magicians far too powerful. But I have in the past had tabletop GMs who are willing to allow certain kinds of spells within reason.

The XP cost is paid, and the spell works, per the description. As an aside, I've seen Permanency cast by level 30's delevel them. As for Permanency being used to make spells lasting on yourself, NWN mechanical limitations and PnP permissions make it rather difficult to do, with balance concerns notwithstanding.

In pnp, a spell with an xp component fails if burning that xp would delevel you.
Also it'd be stupidly powerful and open up some doors that would be hard to shut if everyone could use permanency whenever they decided to rather than the case by case dm approval situation we have now.

A high level caster offering permanent buff services for cash and burning DC's to cover the XP loss is just one thing off the top of my mind. And 1 week later, we have a server full of enlarged/reduced people with +1 to all saves and telepathic bonds to sneak in tells as IC rp.

Yoss just threw a heck of a wrench in my beautifully worked out concept, that apparently does not work as the necessary spell aint on the list. Nice going, lore-nerd. Next time keep your facts to yourself. :wink:

Pony wrote:

Yoss just threw a heck of a wrench in my beautifully worked out concept, that apparently does not work as the necessary spell aint on the list. Nice going, lore-nerd. Next time keep your facts to yourself. :wink:

lol. So the list Yoss left is the typical standard used here? I don't mean standard in the hard sense with no exceptions, I mean standard as in the useful tool sense.

Regrettably, yes.

This does explain at least how necromancer NPC's raise those legions of undead, yet our master level 30 PC's can only have a familiar, a summon and a dominated critter.

Also remember, a permanency can be dispelled just like any other spell. It's why it could be annoying for a character to run around with a permanencied tongues, get dispelled or morded in battle and welp, bye bye all that XP.

555444333 wrote:

This does explain at least how necromancer NPC's raise those legions of undead, yet our master level 30 PC's can only have a familiar, a summon and a dominated critter.

The whole "armies of the undead" by a necromancer thing is actually a bit overplayed. Even in the NPC world, it is the rare necromancer who has total control over an army of the undead, since there is an HD limit on the number of non-sentient undead that a caster can handle (modified by various feats like Undead Master or certain magical items like, oh, the Crown of Horns, for example). And sentient undead created with Greater Undead spells have to be micromanaged either with Control Undead spells OR through other more social arrangments with them, if they are grateful for being brought back.

In my experience, most of your "overlord necromancer types" just create an army of zombies/skeletons and then usually employ a "Hide from Undead" spell to keep the army from turning on the caster and targeting them, at which point the necromancer would have to employ rebuking/turning undead or various spells that control undead (all limited by HD, again). Thus Necromancer Overlords are always at risk of being hoisted by their own pitard and have to be careful.

Actually Yossarin there are quite a few ways to control a bunch of undead.

Creating an Undead Lieutenant for one is a good way. Basically you create an undead commander that is capable of taking a certain HD of undead under its control. Basic chain of command applies. You command it, it commands the squad.

That's cool, too.

555444333 wrote:

This does explain at least how necromancer NPC's raise those legions of undead, yet our master level 30 PC's can only have a familiar, a summon and a dominated critter.

Actually it's possible to have more than just the three <.< Here's proof :3

I'm sure you could squeeze in a Bottled Companion, too

joe15552 wrote:

Trying to figure out what is acceptable use of Permanency here. Spells I've thought would be useful to made permanent on the caster for roleplay reasons

you have a nice list of not so pure rp reason spells there, permanency can be used for other rp things aswell, think about a "mage private sanctum" (basically anti scry zone your faction base) or a "alarm" (good luck sneaking upon your house now you sneakers).

they wil still eat your xp rather bad, but its pure rp pnp spells that for rp I rather spend my xp on then a permanent Resistance.

Naivatkal wrote:

I'm sure you could squeeze in a Bottled Companion, too

Don't forget taking a level of ranger and investing into animal handling.

Some of you lot are drifting away from the topic there.

Stay on target topic...

So... if someone is claiming IC that they have perma spells on.... and they are not on that list, would characters know enough to know they are full of it? Just asking because I witnessed it yesterday.

They probably won't.

Most characters would perhaps know the spell and what it can do but they certainly won't know the exact limitations.

Even a learned character that studied the spell and experimented with it may well assume a claim may well be possible if he knows about the spell and its possibilities.
In theory almost everything can be possible with magic so it'd be fiendishly hard to determine if something is possible or not for a character ingame.

By contrast, I would also say that a character who has invested into spellcraft would know the list of acceptable permanency spells as those most commonly and easily made permanent. As spellcraft is knowing how spells work. What works. And what does not, traditionally.

Grey areas do exist. And in that realm lies research and requests to the DM team.

My point is... these things need cooperation on both parties like PNP spells right? If they are claiming permanency on something that they actually can't do.... how is that handled? The example is a partial divine caster using arcane permanency spells. Kinda silly I thought, but... I'm not the RP police.

PNP spells require consent from all involved parties. Which is why spells made permanent with Permanency are tricky, and why I've avoided doing so with my PC wizard.

I did it once so far, and under the supervision of a dm.
In my opinion permanency cant be done without a dm confirming it happened and nommed the XP
And besides without a dm you cant do the spell becaus you cant remove your own XP any way.

I've used Permanency a few times legitimately ICly, maintaing some DM dialog is a must. If you can't get oversight, screenie the heck out of things, but I really only find the spell useful if you intend to use it on say, the environment, the static one, such as before one requests an Area Update, otherwise, it's kind of far fetched to request a permanency on an item or your person or another person. It's hard to RP as a constant. Not hard, I should say, but really really tedious.

In the stock NWN, you can see what spells are currently on the caster, and I would say if that was applicable again, then your case on Permanency on the characters themselves may hold some water. Spellcraft could be means to 'see' the list of spells on your character, but I think the tradeoff of people being able to metagame enchantments or falsely recognizing a PvP spell instead of the mechanical handicap on a character overbears the benefit, in this case. Maybe such a permanency would be like needing to request a visualizer that expresses whatever spell is consistent on your person.

The1Kobra wrote:

Also remember, a permanency can be dispelled just like any other spell. It's why it could be annoying for a character to run around with a permanencied tongues, get dispelled or morded in battle and welp, bye bye all that XP.

Well, to be fair the d20 XP cost is based on -normal- XP gain to which which Amia is faaar below. Dropping 1k XP is not intended to be a hardship to any character of level tossing perm'd spells as they're collecting far more than that per adventure. Any actual cost would have to be relatively scaled to Amia's reality. Not to mention in D&D there's ways to make it hard/impossible to dispel through the use of feats/items that raise CL since only casters -of higher level- can succeed.

Any mage worth their salt would just summon/bind one of several creatures that could cast it for them who had a higher level CL on their behalf.

If a DM were going to charge actual XP for it, than it better be upholdable ingame.

MightNMagic wrote:

If a DM were going to charge actual XP for it, than it better be upholdable ingame.

I don't see why. I am quite hesistant to give mages another powerful tool such as a cost free permanancy or a non dispelleble permanency to which others classes have no acess.

You can play the game perfectly fine without the spell. If you want those extra goodies it will cost you some xp and there is a risk it is dispelled, especially if you put it on a location that is often dispelled (yourself) as opposed to a location that rarely is (Your well guarded faction base.)

Last edited by Krin on Thu, May 01 2014, 23:23 PM, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think it's safe to assume that permanency will only be restricted to casters if this is all available. With spell scrolls being so easy to access on the server, I don't think it's far-fetched for an amian barbarian to find a mage willing to sell the spell for some pocket change.

EDIT: If I'm understanding the spell description correctly... A permanency spell that a level 30 caster casts on him/herself would be almost impossible to dispel on Amia because it can only be dispelled by a caster of a higher level than he/she was when they cast the spell.

Or an assassin with perminency true sight xD

Permanency... and other spells

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