[Magic] Critique my Death Spell

[ajardoor]

Hey guys, I've been working on a concept for a Death Spell, and I've been meaning to test it out on this forum to see if it's good - please critique it.
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Plenty of magicians believe that the key to a good death curse is hate.
They think that feeling immense hatred towards a person allows one to channel the proper magical energies into the shape of a killing force and direct it accurately.
That is stupid. Partly because it's actually pretty hard to get hateful enough to sincerely wish death upon someone in the first place. Not to mention the fact that casting this supposed death curse multiple times in a row in timely succession is flatly impossible - can you imagine hating someone enough that you'd not only want to stab them to death, BUT THEN you'd want to slit their throat too, AND THEN you'd still want to smash their skull in, AND THEN...!
You get the picture. Frankly, you don't have it in you to hate someone to death over and over again - you would get bored.
And besides, hatred implies respect, which interferes with the killer instinct. You care about someone enough to want them dead. That's not good enough.
To cast a truly effective Killing Curse, you require the real opposite of love and life - which isn't hate. You require APATHY. Indifference!
You have to completely and utterly not care about the life of your opponent. You're not killing them. You're just not bothering to allow them to live any more.



Live and Let Die (VH)
Regular; Resisted by the better of HT or Will

If the target fails to resist this spell, it dies after a number of minutes equal to its HT and Will scores combined (for instance, a subject with HT 12 and Will 13 would take 25 minutes to die). Until then, the subject can act completely normally, as if nothing is wrong (and may not even know if the spell worked or was even cast). The spell, within this timeframe, can be stopped in the same way as a normal on-going magical effect, such as with Dispel Magic or Remove Curse. As a side effect of the spell, the caster reacts to the subject with complete apathy until the spell either kills the subject ( or the subject dies, period) or is dispelled - in game terms, the caster ignores any and all Reaction modifiers (including those from appropriate Intolerances, Appearance, past history and so on) and treats the subject as if their Reaction was Neutral. Even if locked in a life-or-death struggle, the caster would only regard the subject the same as an environmental hazard, rabid animal or faceless mook - scary or dangerous, perhaps, but hardly a personal affront. The GM may decide that this apathy has certain effects - like preventing a caster's Higher Purpose (Kill Hated Enemy) from activating, or the caster will prefer attacking other enemies over the subject. Self-Imposed Mental Disadvantages may be effectively disabled for the case of the subject ("He called you a coward!" "Meh.").

Time to Cast: 1 second.
Cost to Cast: 8.
Prerequisites: Magery 3, Curse or Delay, and Deathtouch or Insignificance.

[Dwarf99]

As an NPC spell, it's alright. As a PC spell, anything that forces a reaction is generally bad.