Unsuitable spells for Dungeon Fantasy

[Harald387]

So I've been tinkering with DF magery for a while now, and I've been finding a few other spells that need modification or removal to avoid imbalance.

Inspired Creation (M115): This spell pretty much begs for abuse in any game; an assistant with Major Healing, or just enough skill to do it on yourself, makes the HP cost trivial, and means that with a pretty minimal investment in skill you can turn out a Very Fine blade every day. It's a spell I happen to like very much, but it has the potential to easily shift Dungeon Fantasy's focus from 'We kill things, take their stuff, and sell it' to 'I make stuff and sell it', which isn't the goal. This is probably best left in the hands of the same kinds of NPC sages who enchant items.

Flesh to Stone (M53): While Dungeon Fantasy already covers Create spells, Flesh to Stone and a few other spells have the same potential to unbalance the economy. While I feel Flesh to Stone should retain its permanent nature, I would remove the ability of this spell to turn a subject to metal at double cost; otherwise a player is liable to start up an Iron Rabbit factory. While permanent Flesh to Stone has some chilling implications for the 'cutesy stone garden animal' industry, that's enough of a niche market that the economy shouldn't break.

Earth to Stone (M51): As with Flesh to Stone, I would remove the ability of this spell to create metal, or restrict metal created with the spell to the same one-day duration imposed on Create spells.

Essential <foo> (various): Many of the "Essential" spells can be used to transmute existing objects into much more powerful forms; like Create spells and Earth to Stone above, these transmutations should be restricted to a one-day duration to avoid economic impact. Casting Essential Wood on his shield could be a daily ritual for a Druid!

That's all I can think of off the top of my head; anyone else found spells that don't work well in the Dungeon Fantasy genre?

Edit: Fixed spell name in Flesh to Stone. Seriously, how could I screw that up that many times and not catch it?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Harald387

Stone to Flesh (M53)

I think you mean Flesh to Stone here. :D

[Harald387]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I think you mean Flesh to Stone here. :D

I have no recollection of these events, Senator.

[Atreyu_Hibiki]

Originally Posted by Harald387

So I've been tinkering with DF magery for a while now, and I've been finding a few other spells that need modification or removal to avoid imbalance.

Inspired Creation (M115):

Flesh to Stone (M53):

Earth to Stone (M51):

Essential <foo> (various):

That's all I can think of off the top of my head; anyone else found spells that don't work well in the Dungeon Fantasy genre?

Edit: Fixed spell name in Flesh to Stone. Seriously, how could I screw that up that many times and not catch it?

This is an easy fix: count them as if they were Enchantment spells, i.e. they're available to NPC enchanters only. This would allow you to buy a steel bokken enchanted as a staff, but you couldn't make them yourself. There, case solved!

[ArmoredSaint]

I ban Rive.

[Bruno]

I'm inclined to ban the entire Technology college, or at least reserve it for specialized techno-mages rather than general mages.

Either way, Rebuild is either entirely banned, or restricted so you can only rebuild ONE example of the smashed item, and possibly the rest of the fragments are disintegrated as well to stop creative PCs from cutting the hand off a gold idol to clone it.

Alternately, I might require the raw materials for Rebuild to be present to be encorporated into the final object, so if you have a 500 lb gold idol, and you have 1 lb of finger, you need 499 lbs of gold on hand to Rebuild it.

[Taliesin]

OP. Seriously if these spells are a problem in you game then you are doing it wrong.

IF somebody's trying to set up a company to mass produce and sell iron rabbits you should have a ravening horde of 11,346 orcs attack.

[Kromm]

I deliberately left some vagueness in because that's in keeping with the kind of old-school game I'm aping . . . but I think that only a dummy of a GM would let the presence or absence of the word "Create" in the spell name determine whether a spell is subject to the one-day limit for "Create" spells. :) The relevant feature is permanent goods coming out of magic. Magic can't do that in dungeon fantasy.

All the rest, I don't see as a big deal.

[Gudiomen]

If my PCs started trailing of to become magical entrepeneurs instead of dungeon hackers, I'd pretty much let them.

In 3e, one of my mage characters and his coleage (another player character) discovered that they could turn Animations, Golems and such into essential stone ones. This was before the event of "adamant" and "orichalcum" in GURPS... we pretty much invented it on our own.
The campaing was heavely magical, and the characters had lots of fun figuring out how to best use their inventions...
Soul Golem's main limitation is it's unhealing nautre... but triple DR and HP made the characters into demigods, but getting enough resources and stuff to actually do the enchantment was a big challenge. We also had a "headless essential stone turtle" created through Animation that served as a sort of tank/dwelling.
This was a big revolution in the mages guild, and the campaing followed more or less on the "arms race" and "research" vein for a while. But it was lots of fun.

I guess what I'm saying is... sure, limit the spells, but if the characters are going a different direction than traditional DF... let them. Don't force a certain concept on them just for the heck of it.

[Kromm]

Note also that shameless spell abuse is standard dungeon fantasy. I distinctly remember schemes to get stupidly rich using only second-level spells in AD&D.