Durations after a delay

[temnix]

I'm working on an ability to compose poetry. The bard will set out to prepare a poem, and some time after it will be created in the inventory. Success is only 90% of the time, though. The rest of the chances the bard will produce an inferior work. The way this is arranged is that there are effects for making the good poem, at 100-0 probability, on the bottom of the SPL, delayed by so many seconds, but higher up, at delay X-1, is a 100-90 Apply effects the list that points to a second spell, which removes the effects of the first before they resolve, puts a short block just in case and creates the scroll of poor verse. The problem with this is that if the bard has been left out of the party to work on his poem in peace and the band has adventured elsewhere and returned to his area to pick up him and the poem, all of the delayed effects resolve at once and the bard makes both scrolls on that 100-90 roll. The intervening subspell is not quick enough, or the engine does not run the effects in real time when its durations catch up, or not in sequence, I don't know. It makes no difference whether I use a delayed Apply or Cast spell. So, any suggestions?

One thing I could do would be to put the removal in the body of the main spell instead of the subspell. It could be a 100-90 effect 321. I think this would work to stop the effects below, but how would it channel in the poor verse subspell? If I could combine the casting of the subspell and the removal with 321 on the same probability roll, I would have it synced, literally, but they use different rolls. I can remove and not get the subspell or get the subspell and not remove like the first time around. Can somebody think of an alternative to dividing the probability of good and bad subspells from the beginning so that only one will be cast? I have a lot of effects there, and subspells of subspells, and this is not the only type of poetry that can be written. Adding an extra fork in all of them... I feel like I drank a spoon of vinegar just thinking about it. 

[Ardanis]

Why not just set the success range to 89-0 and failure to 100-90?

[temnix]

That would have been a possibility too, I guess. Although here I couldn't have used some of the effects with a Delayed/Permanent timing. Lore bonus doesn't work with that timing, for instance. Either way, it had to be a fork, and I separated the success and failure effects into different spells.

Edited May 17, 2022 by temnix

[Ardanis]

I mean, unless I misunderstand it, your success' prob range was actually overlapping with failure's. Which wasn't a problem if you could use 206/321 to block the success when failure was supposed to trigger, but that didn't work with very long time skips.

So, if they didn't overlap, then you wouldn't need the blocker in the first place, and wouldn't need to worry about the NPC spending weeks out of party.

[temnix]

You are right. It's more or less the same thing as putting the yes and no effects in separate spells and writing the probabilities in a previous spell. That's what I did. Your way would have been a little easier, but also more confusing to look at, with the whole lot of them inside the same spell.