Quote:
Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless
On the other hand. If being immortal is as simple as casting a 37 energy spell every six months than anyone with a decent path of body skill is likely to be very long lived and your world will have a very high number of powerful wizards and witchs running around.
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Yeah, this is where things in RPM get a bit dicey. A person not aging for 6 months means practically nothing. A person not aging for 6 years might cause some minor comments, but is easily excused away. A person not aging for 60 years results in pitchforks and torches or offerings of worship.
Similarly, healing 2d in a few seconds (an 11 energy spell) at TL 8 is noticeable but not world-shattering - you'll on average manage to negate a Major Wound. Healing 20d in a few minutes (by casting that 11 energy spell 10 times in succession) is a different story - you'll take someone from death's doorstep to fully healed.
In either case,
if the GM has a problem, some sort of diminishing returns is needed. In the former, you can say, sure, a spell to not age for a given amount of time works as advertised for that time period, but if you keep recasting the same spell everything beyond the first duration is a
temporary effect - a character who has maintained this spell for 20 years will instantly age 19 years and 6 months if it is dispelled or runs out without renewing it. If you want it to actually stop aging outright, you have to keep increasing the Duration cost - so you need to pay for a year's worth for the second 6-month period, 1.5 year's for the third, 2 years for the fourth, and so on. If you later let the spell expire (or it's dispelled) and want to recast it again, the actual duration of the new spell is equal to the Duration you pay for minus however long you've spent Unaging.
For example, we've got a witch who decides to cast the 37 energy spell to halt aging for 6 months. When the Duration is up, maintaining it for another 6 months costs 22 energy (1 year) instead of 16. The next two castings are 23 energy (2 years), the next two are 24 (3 years), and so on. Let's say she maintains it for 5 years, then it gets dispelled. She's still 5 years younger than she should be, but she'd rather like to go back to not aging, so she needs to recast. She decides to cast a version that lasts for a decade, costing 52 energy. As she's already spent 5 years Unaging, however, she only gets 5 years out of the spell, and needs to recast, at ever-increasing cost, every 10 years. If she had instead opted to not increase cost each time the duration ran out but just spend 16 energy each time, then when her spell was dispelled at the 5 year mark she would have instantly aged 4.5 years.
Quote:
Originally Posted by oneofmanynameless
Maintain's Immortality:
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Probably just a Quirk - "Always tries to have one particular spell activated." A [-5] Obsession might also fit, but that's probably the limit of it.