RFC: Greater Malison

[grodrigues]

RFC: Greater Malison

Currently, Greater Malison has this bit in the description: "Those under the influence of this spell make all their saving throws at a penalty of -2, and take an extra point of spell damage for each die rolled." The latter is implemented has a malus of -1 to luck, which is then counteracted by a bonus of +1 to thac0. The problem is that the luck opcode does much more than a malus to spell damage and thac0, so there are two options here: either add opcodes to counteract the other luck effects (this is bound to be iffy, because the luck opcode is weird) or simply do away with counteracting altogether and just impose the luck penalty. If the latter, the description must be changed by replacing the second part of the sentence with some blurb like being affected by bad luck or whatever (any help with this bit appreciated, as I am not a native English speaker).

Subtledoctor expressed preference for the second option, and that is also my preference, so if you favor the first one state your case.

A second issue with Greater Malison is that currently the spell does not bypass mr. My gut feeling tells me that it should; that is the second issue to be solved in this RFC.

I also note, and as food for thought when rebalancing is revisited latter in a more extensive and systematic way, that one of the great problems with the current spell system is that save-or-else spells lose much of their usefulness in the later parts of the BG saga (roughly SoA onwards) because everyone and his dog has such low saves. So general, mid-high level spells to drop saves are welcomed.

Edited August 2, 2021 by grodrigues
bypass mr addition

[Bartimaeus]

In favor of it simply being a -1 luck penalty and it ignoring magic resistance. Greater Malison was already nerfed from vanilla (which used to be a -4 penalty). Potential description rewrite:

"The spell allows the caster to adversely affect the dice rolls of their enemies. The effect is applied to all hostile creatures within the area of effect. Those under the influence of this spell make all their saving throws at a penalty of -2 and also suffer a -1 penalty to luck. Magic resistance does not affect this spell, and multiple castings of this spell are not cumulative."

I wasn't initially sure whether or not "dice roll" would be accepted verbiage in an SR spell description, but the term is also used in Chaos Shield and Nahal's Reckless Dweomer, so screw it.

[grodrigues]

PR is up.