Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

I want my witches to be able to inflict gesas - magical obligations. Examples might be "never eat dogmeat," or "never refuse a challenge to combat". It's easiest to treat them as Vows.

However, if the character breaks them, bad things happen. What happens should vary from gesa to gesa, but it could be as a mild case of the runs or as bad as "sickens and dies over three days". Is there a generic case to do this? Maybe afflict the punishment with a limitation "only if gesa is broken"? Or maybe as an alternative ability - if one is active the other one isn't?

Thoughts?

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

That's it. You are afflicting the punishment with a mitigator (avoid doing whatever), and even then I'd give you -0% for it unless you can only inflict a specific mitigator which your target is automatically aware of. If you can pick anything to trigger the curse and your target doesn't know what it is all you have is a short delay based on how well you can guess something the target is going to do soon.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Well, that was easy.

Thanks. Hope I'm not spamming the forums too badly.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Doing a mitigator means you'll have to buy your affliction with a very long duration, and the victim will probably be able to stop the negative effect by stopping whatever bad behaviour triggered it (whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you).

I'd suggest you take affliction or innate attack, and then add delay. The +50% version of delay only covers very simple triggers, but I can easily imagine a +100% version that allows complex triggers, or you could add a +50% cosmic "ignore built-in restrictions" to allow more complex triggers.

Will probably end up costing more, although it seems fair that it should cost a lot more than the basic affliction would.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Maybe it's just me, but I think if you want to permanently curse your target with a geas, you should have to pay for the Permanent modifier. A variably-delayed IA seems like a pretty cheap trick to mimic what is really a permanent curse.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Yeah, seems that way, doesn't it.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Why would you involve Innate Attack? You stat up the curse as a disadvantage, stick the mitigator on it (which makes it a slightly less serious disadvantage) and Afflict your target with that. Whatever duration you select is how long the disadvantage lasts, you probably want permanent. The complication is deciding how much the mitigator is worth, which I suppose largely depends on how long the disadvantage lasts after you miss a "treatment" by breaking the geas, which is something the Mitigator limitation is rather vague about. I'd probably assume a day, which if you wanted you could buy Extended Duration a second time to modify.

Admittedly if you want to do direct damage for each violation it's unclear what disadvantage you would use, since there isn't one for take a bunch of damage right away. If you wanted, I suppose a delayed Innate Attack would work well enough, but of course would only zap you *once*. Doing it that way and adding Cyclic +10%, allowing it to hit you again the first time in any given day you break the geas seems fair enough if you have a reasonable termination condition, which I'd probably say any of traditional fairy tale cure could qualify for in this case.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Yeah, we're in agreement here. I was responding to DavidSev's suggestion of an IA with Delay as being cheaper than paying for the appropriate duration on Affliction. Which I didn't like.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Perhaps Dependency: Not breaking geas?

With time interval being how often you take damage from continuous breaking?

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Hmm... I also want it to be able to inflict things like blindness and sterility

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Do so, then. Anything not involving damage -- Blindness, Terminally Ill, etc. -- is a simple case of using Affliction (Disadvantage) to force consequences+Mitigator upon the target for the duration of the geas. Sterility is a special case, since it's a feature and thus not normally available for Affliction. In this particular case, I'd say that throwing a custom +10% enhancement on Affliction would be balanced for "if you break the geas you become sterile."

(And anything involving damage is most easily modeled as Innate Attack with a supernatural Delay.)

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

The issue of mitigators is something of a pain. Let's say you have the ability to afflict a 100 point disadvantage, which the victim can avoid by taking the equivalent of a 10 point disadvantage, and the victim knows it. This can't possibly be worse than a 10 point disadvantage.

Actually, it seems like some sort of 'alternate disadvantage' scheme would be convenient. Maybe something like:

Alternate Disadvantage: you may choose between one of two disadvantages. Point value is for the lesser disadvantage, whichever it may be, with a limitation for the magnitude of the greater -- perhaps -20% for <2x value, -15% for <4x value, -10% for <8x value, -5% for more.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Cuchulainn had dual gesa of never refuse hospitality and never eat dog meat.

Sounds like minor vows, eh?
Until the villain invites him inside and offers a meal of dog. He ate, and died.
Consequences for breaking vows can be far out of proportion to anything they normally could inflict.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

One thing to keep in mind when using mitigators like this is that that the more mitigators you put on the disad the cheaper it gets and the harder it gets for someone to avoid breaking it.

For example putting a single Vow as a mitigator on a disad gives it a -15% cost, putting two on it gives a -30%, making it both easier to buy whatever it is that inflicts both the disad and the Vows/mitigators and makes it hard for the person to avoid breaking one or both of the Vows

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

If something has two mitigators, you can negate the disad by complying with either mitigator -- you don't need both.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

I'd agree - if you want the AND condition, you should make it a single mitigator with a larger value.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

In general (not counting specific examples like sterility or blindness), I'd probably give the witches the Curse power from Psionic Powers p45 (with the 'Probability Alteration, -10%' limitation swapped out for 'Magic, -10%', if necessary), with the 'Extended Duration: Permanent (+150% or +300%)' enhancement replacing Reduced Duration or Increased Duration, and a Nuisance Effect limitation of something like 'Must declare a mitigator when casting' (functionally, adding a tenth and eleventh level to the psi ability, if you use those rules, with the note that at level ten, the caster must declare both a mitigator and a way to completely break the curse, while at level eleven, only the mitigator need be declared, and you have your classic Celtic Myth ability to inflict Gesa).

If afflicting the geas requires eye contact rather than skin contact, you'd also want to drop the 'Contact Agent, -30%' and 'Melee Attack, C, -30%' limitations, replacing it with 'Vision Based, -20%', or if you're using Power Techniques, have them buy Evil Eye as a technique, which I've statted to Curse -4.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

What genre is the game setting? I presume since you say you have witches involved it's fantasy/magic...

Are you using magic or powers?

There are several spells that do exactly what you want.

lesser geas,greater geas for the geas itself, creates a permanent vow if that's what you impose with the geas..
by the nature of the spell if you break it,it imposes some penalty.

I was looking myself into sacrificial magic the other day and vows can even be made on a person can extend to the afterlife if its unfulfilled.
Think I read that in fantasy.

you can then spirit broker them.

Strike barren will cause sterility. and blindness would be easy to accomplish...

You can still create knacks of these,but you need a similar power/advantage and add a magical limitation to it.

I'm not up on afflictions fully yet,but I'm sure you could link it then to some innate attack.

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

Actually you have to satisfy them all. The sample cybernetic replacement parts from UT have: "Cybernetic replacement parts for specific body locations are bought as a crippling disadvantage with the Mitigator (-70%) limitation. This limitation is assumed to include the effects of the Electrical, Maintenance (1 person, monthly) (p. B143), and Unhealing (p. B160) disadvantages for that
body part."

If I only have to satisfy one of them, I can do that for the Maintenance, which is the cheapest of those Mitigators, or the cheapest part of it, and my cybernetic eyes are no longer destroyed by electricity and they heal normally

Re: Afflict Vow - consequences when broken
 

I didn't follow your second paragraph, but your example (in the first) does not disagree with Anthony nor Genesis. It is not multiple instances of Mitigator, but rather many mitigators rolled into one Limitation.