Afflict Vow - consequences when broken

[Anders]

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?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Anders

Maybe afflict the punishment with a limitation "only if gesa is 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.

[Anders]

Well, that was easy.

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

[DavidSev]

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.

[Genesis]

Originally Posted by DavidSev

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.

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.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Genesis

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.

Yeah, seems that way, doesn't it.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Genesis

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.

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.

[Genesis]

Originally Posted by malloyd

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.

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.

[Flyndaran]

Perhaps Dependency: Not breaking geas?

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

[Anders]

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