Buffing up your low point ally

[Captain-Captain]

Giving an ally a temporary or otherwise no point cost to a character boost. Your knight gives his squire an elixir that gives him 3 extra DR or a boost in an attribute.

The effect is temporary, and generally lasts for a combat.

But there are longer forms of temporary, which border on permanent.

Your knight has an alchemsit on retainer type ally and takes some of his hard won adventuring loot $1000 an pays to have Bless 3 cast on the Alchemist and the remaining $10 going for a fine cigar.

Duration: Indefinite.

the spell has two effects, the 'minor' one being the more desireable for the most part.

The main effect is to protect the subject from a harmful or lethal event. The 3 point version's example has fatal damage not just missing the subject but hitting an enemy in his place. For the alchemist, this is a one shot immunity to Critfailed explosions. Given the brewing times for elixirs, that number likely won't come up for a couple of years! (Of course a GM can fiat a disaster to trigger the spell and end it but for this discussion, that is a cheat and we do not cheat in this discussion.)

The alchemist gets a +3 bonus to every single die roll he makes (unless a lower result is required then it's a -3) until that spell discharge occurs. This means he can make four doses of an elixir at a time for the same mathematical risk he'd normally make for one elixir. So he can afford to tip his patron the Knight elixirs.

Not a problem so far, but...

When he is not brewing an elixir, the alchemist has +3 to all rolls and thus would see his Streetwise of 11 jump to 14-. He's just become a much more useful Ally to the knight and we aren't looking at his other boosted skill rolls!

In effect this 25% of character's value Ally is up to 50% perhaps 75% in value. And given the likelihood this bonus will last for years, it may outlast the rest of the campaign?

Would making the Player pay more for the ally be advisable or is this a legal workaround?

[Anaraxes]

Bless doesn't trigger on a prespecified event. As you say, it triggers on any "harmful or lethal" event. So as soon as that alchemist starts wandering around and trying his buffed Streetwise, or otherwise adventuring, it's much more likely that he'll need a "harmful" event averted, even without any GM fiat.

There's also all sorts of non-adventuring hazards you normally ignore in a game, but which you'll have to take into consideration if you're planning on years of non-adventuring life for the character. You know the cliche: most accidents occur at home. Bless 3 is an expensive way to avoid cutting your finger while chopping an onion or dropping a brick on your toe, but those are "harmful" events.

And if it really gets to be a problem, just slap a max duration on the spell. "A year and a day" is pretty traditional even if you want a long term spell. After all, those hedge-wizards and witches doing all the Blessing want the spell to end soon to keep the customers coming back.

[Sam Baughn]

Eh, for the same price, he could have had Bless cast on himself or one of his PC friends. I can't see any reason you should have restrictions on buffing your Allies if you don't have any on buffing yourself.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Captain-Captain

Your knight has an alchemsit on retainer type ally and takes some of his hard won adventuring loot $1000 an pays to have Bless 3 cast on the Alchemist and the remaining $10 going for a fine cigar.
...
When he is not brewing an elixir, the alchemist has +3 to all rolls and thus would see his Streetwise of 11 jump to 14-. He's just become a much more useful Ally to the knight and we aren't looking at his other boosted skill rolls!
...
Would making the Player pay more for the ally be advisable or is this a legal workaround?

Allies are expected to spend money on each other from time to time. It's no big deal. And if the campaign has $1000 spell treatments that make people 4x as effective at their adventure-gear making jobs, that's a setting issue more than an Ally issue. However, the alchemist is still paying 4x as much for materials, and Bless doesn't reduce crit fail chances, so the alchemist risks consuming the Blessing with every batch he makes for Sir Potion Chugger, who may not have the funds to keep all four washtubs full of elixir boullion.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Bless doesn't trigger on a prespecified event. As you say, it triggers on any "harmful or lethal" event. So as soon as that alchemist starts wandering around and trying his buffed Streetwise, or otherwise adventuring, it's much more likely that he'll need a "harmful" event averted, even without any GM fiat.

There's also all sorts of non-adventuring hazards you normally ignore in a game, but which you'll have to take into consideration if you're planning on years of non-adventuring life for the character. You know the cliche: most accidents occur at home. Bless 3 is an expensive way to avoid cutting your finger while chopping an onion or dropping a brick on your toe, but those are "harmful" events.

And if it really gets to be a problem, just slap a max duration on the spell. "A year and a day" is pretty traditional even if you want a long term spell. After all, those hedge-wizards and witches doing all the Blessing want the spell to end soon to keep the customers coming back.

If you normally ignore these chances... they're ignorable and ignored. To quote from the first post:

(Of course a GM can fiat a disaster to trigger the spell and end it but for this discussion, that is a cheat and we do not cheat in this discussion.)

If you weren't going to roll the chance of his being hit by a meteor before the PC paid for the bless spell, you shouldn't roll or declare the meteor to be a hit.

In context, is this the case where the PC is really getting an improved Ally for 0 CP or charge the PC the points because the duration is likely to exceed the campaign?

[Kromm]

Suppose your Ally, originally worth 25% of your value, is worth 75% of your value because he has Bless +3. Okay, his base cost just went from 1 point to 3 points. At 15 or less, cost went from 3 points to 9 points. At "constantly," if allowed because he lives in your stomach like Kuato, it went from 4 to 12 points. And with every listed special enhancement for Ally – Minion, Special Abilities, Summonable – Kuato's cost went from 12 to 36 points. So we're talking about 24 points of "free" power.

Or . . . get that Bless on you. Just +3 to all skills and attribute rolls is worth around 180 points. This totally discounts damage rolls, reaction rolls, and all the other rolls you may make.

At 24 vs. at least 180 – a factor of 7.5 at the minimum – the question becomes: "Why would any munchkin worth the title ever cast Bless +3 on an Ally?"

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Kromm

At 24 vs. at least 180 – a factor of 7.5 at the minimum – the question becomes: "Why would any munchkin worth the title ever cast Bless +3 on an Ally?"

Presumably they cast it on themselves first...

Alternately, as in the original post, they don't expect the ally to be endangered often, and thus are using a cheesy way to extend the spell's duration.

One one hand, this is just another example of stuff for money rather than stuff for points. Big deal.

On the other, I've always thought 'Bless' was a rather hoss spell.

[Kromm]

Bless is either cheesy or harmless depending on how the GM treats it. Me, I make it fragile. Any attack could kill you – bleeding, infection, etc. – so Bless averts nicks as well as ogre halberds. Any critical failure could hose you, so there's that, too. Generally, it's "+X right up until you might've decided to use Luck."

But I've known GM's who make Bless so durable that they wait for a bad event to result in rolls that kill the character, destroy him socially, ruin him financially, etc., and then say that Bless retcons it all and saves the subject. That keeps the bonus around for a lot longer.

A less-arbitrary way to handle it would be to have Bless add its bonus to rolls but expire on any critical failure. Morever, whenever it makes the difference between success and failure, roll against its original casting level. Any failure on that roll also kills it.

[mlangsdorf]

Do Critical Failures averted by Luck or spent character points destroy the Blessing? I think I tended toward the "durable bless" camp, which I think was a bad idea.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Or . . . get that Bless on you. Just +3 to all skills and attribute rolls is worth around 180 points. This totally discounts damage rolls, reaction rolls, and all the other rolls you may make.

Who's to say I don't put another on me? $990 isn't THAT great an expense to an adventurer. However, the key value here is duration. I'll cite the character I was running over on the apparently defunct Heroes of Aldor PBP game over on the PBP forum. He's a melee guy, specializes in sneaking up and destroying a throat before the guy knows he's dead.

Melee pretty much assures me that Ernst will take a hit and if the spell hasn't discharged by that time (it might very well go off to prevent a failed stealth check first) it's gone. i'd expect the benefit of +3 to all rolls to be gone in no more than 2 days of game time. I expect the Alchemist to get those benefits for a good year, year and a half, and much longer if the Ally isn't one who works in a relatively dangerous profession. Ernst may well get a dozen bonus aided rolls in that time.

The alchemist? Assuming an average of 2 weeks per elixir and a 78 week window before the spell discharges, that's 34 elixir rolls aided by a +3, not to mention all the merchant rolls, streetwise rolls etc made in those 78 weeks.

Now the Alchemist can use those bonuses to more safely brew more batches of the elixirs, many of which oh 75% of them he sells for profit. Not counting any elixirs commisioned by someone else which my character has no use for.

Since you brought up the word Munchkin, let's put it in Munchkin Card terminology. The virtually unlimited +3s are the main treasure. Getting a miraculous save from death or disaster? Technically that's the BAD STUFF, because it shuts down the roll bonus.