Why is Cursed so expensive?

[starslayer]

Another time cursed can be interesting is if it has a mitigator(which can often be explained as a deity of some kind literally holding you hostage for whatever the mitigator is)

OR if you use it as a side effect for an applicable power, like say 'super luck; limiting disadvantage cursed' will only cost 25 points, but if you use your super luck your cursed for the rest of the session.

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

could a character take Affliction: Destiny as an attack form, or is that illegal and/or abusive?

I don't think it would be abusive, as long as you scale the Destiny's effects to the duration of the effect. If someone gives you a -15 point Destiny, but only for 5 minutes, your whole life doesn't proceed to crash down around your ears in those five minutes. Basically, the rule of thumb I'd use for afflicted Destinies is that any activity that can't be completed within the duration of the effect won't be affected. So, for example, if you zap someone with a 5-minute Destiny, any fights they get into in the next five minutes will probably go really badly for them, but they're probably safe if they announce they're running for President in six month's time.
Of course, this does mean that if an important activity is about to be completed (the target is putting the finishing touches on the multi-billion-dollar deal that will make them Corporate Overlord of Earth, for example), then that's a good time to slap them with a bad-but-short Destiny, but I think that's a reasonable reward for good tactics and so forth on the person doing the cursing.

And, of course, once you start stacking on the modifiers, the Affliction is going to get very expensive fairly quickly, so the point-balance shouldn't be an issue either. Even the most short-term negative-Destiny Affliction is going to want Malediction, at the least, to work like magic. That means even a basic level 1 Affliction with no duration modifiers costs 22 points. If you want to bump it to Permanent with dispelling conditions, it goes up to 37, and 52 if there's no dispelling conditions. And that's just for something that takes a -1 penalty per yard of range, and is resisted by unpenalized HT.

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

That's only counting on the things he did to himself on purpose. If you add in every misfortune that just landed on his head, plus the very bad die rolls that killed Saeros and Beleg and led to the incest, it's a lot more than three.

Actually, I was sort of counting several of those as parts of one Destiny cycle. Hmm. Going over Turin's life, I'd actually count four distinct times I would have let him buy off the Destiny.
The first time was killing Saeros, and fleeing Doriath, losing his status as an honored prince in one of the last safe places in Beleriand. The fact that he didn't actually have to flee, because Thingol thought he was in the right, is actually part of the whole thing, because it makes it more tragic. If his player had bought off the Destiny after that, I would have said that Thingol decided against him, and he could never go back to Doriath.
The second time was the destruction of the outlaw band, culminating in the accidental slaying of Beleg.
The third was the fall of Nargothrond.
The fourth, of course, was the time in Brethil. Clearly, this is the point when his GM said "Fine, you want to keep the Destiny? Got better things to do with the points? You've earned this one, my friend." :-)