Quote:
Originally Posted by VIVIT
One the sillier spells in GURPS Magic is Tickle—a Magery-0 Body Control spell with a prerequisite count of 2 that lets you afflict the subject with a seizure (!?) for its duration of one minute. This is surprisingly potent for such a low-level spell, but it's balanced by the fact that it requires continual concentration—the idea presumably being that the caster must actively exert some sort of telekinesis-like force to do the tickling.
There's one problem, though: spells that require active concentration don't terminate when you stop concentrating. You can resume them at any time. This seems to mean that with a single casting of this spell, you can inflict several seizures by concentrating intermittently. Since a seizure inflicts 1d fatigue when it ends, you could, in theory, use this spell to very quickly drain someone of all FP.
Incapacitating conditions are pretty severe in the first place, so this may not be quite as unbalancing as it seems, but it still feels kind of abusive. And while it's trivial to say, "No, it doesn't work that way," it's not so trivial say how it's supposed to work instead. How long does a seizure have to be before it fatigues you? Do shorter seizures inflict less fatigue? Do longer seizures inflict more fatigue? The seizure condition as described in Basic Set doesn't seem to be intended for a maintainable, variable-length effect like this.
Have you ever seen this spell if in any of your campaigns, and if, how did it work out? Has anyone tried anything weird like this with it before?
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That's one interpretation. Here's another.
According to Afflictions: Incapacitating Conditions: Seizures (B429), you lose 1d6 FP at the end of your seizure. That's regardless of how long the seizure lasts, you only lose 1d6 FP per seizure, and that's for an actual seizure, not something that mimics its effect, like Tickle.
Tickle is a Body Control spell with a 1 minute duration which can be maintained. Nothing in the text of the spell or the text for Regular spells suggests that the seizure ends when the initial casting ends and you pay your maintenance to continue the spell for another minute. Instead, the seizure-like incapacitation of the tickling continues uninterrupted. It is only when the duration ends and you don't further maintain the spell that the seizure ends and the 1d6 FP is assessed against the subject.
Finally, the closest thing I could find the idea that you could not concentrate without terminating the spell is Duration of Spells and Maintaining Spells: Concentration and Maintenance (Magic, p. 10) which states that to be the case for spells which require
constant concentration and change [italics mine], specifically using the example of maneuvering a levitating object. In that case, if you are distracted, the object continues to levitate and its course remains as it was before your distraction. Until you resume Concentration, you can't change the subject's course. However, that isn't the case with Tickle. There is nothing in Tickle that explicitly can be changed, and therefore no ability to break Concentration other than the usual being attacked or injured which impose a penalty to continuing to Concentrate.
Perhaps, you could hold that implicitly, you are changing where the subject is being tickled, moving from under the armpits to the throat and then the soles of the feet, for example. However, it's just as likely that the subject is receiving an all-out tickle targeting every point on his body that is vulnerable to such an attack and thus there is no location to change to.