Shattered Kingdoms

Because, why not?

Dulrik, please look at the save for this spell. It's completely broken. It's the most devastating offensive spell in the game to land, and of spells with saves, it is the hardest one to resist. Thanks.

If anything it's save could just be lowered to where at 25 charisma it's the same save as all other spells normally.

In other words, instead of a charisma -bonus- being added to charm person, make it a charisma penalty.

I still maintain, however, that sorcs are not OP anymore at end-game, and letting them have powerful spells make more people play them, which is good because everyone needs enchanters anyway.

Okay, I would support the change so that there's a charisma penalty instead of a charisma bonus. I would prefer a change where it pretty much was impossible to land this spell on a GM character wearing 15 willpower.

I think that if charm person were no longer viable against PCs, sorcs would not be OP in the endgame. I know you don't think it's a big deal in terms of game balance, even though apparently Pilnor got murdered by a CP wand. I don't want this to turn into one of our arguments over how strong sorcs are. It would quickly devolve into a discussion about tigers.

p.s. I looked at my log of testing Rorey's willpower with Antiira, and am as convinced as ever that CP is completely broken. I was amused that the log included an OOC argument between us over how powerful CP and sorcs are, though.

I remember our testing with Rorey, and I thought that Rorey saved against charm person a lot, which I found pretty impressive considering he was a giant and wasn't furied during our testing, if I recall. I think he was almost unsleepable, and charm person only landed maybe 10-20% of the time in our brief tests, which was as often as sleep landed when I self-cast it: And Antiira had 14 art trains and max charisma for a delf during the charm castings.

15 willpower is not enough to save against spells cast by anyone with a large amount of art trains, that's going to get you less than 50% save rate. And Pilnor got charmed with that wand, sure, but hey, crap happens. If anything those wands should be removed since they're underpowered and as such are only useful for dive-charm attempts on PCs, given that they only last 3 minutes on NPCs.

It'd be cool if 15 saves were enough to reliably resist almost any spell including charm, against a 0 art caster.

Upping cast times on particularly vicious spells (which has been done) would mean that the quicker spells that aren't always game ending would probably get used more (blindness, what have you). All in all would make for more fun fights!

You see, the reason that I don't mind charm person as it stands, is that A) it's not the best spell to use against 90% of the people in the front row unless they have a crap will save and you are almost guaranteed to get them, and B) it can be used against people in the back ranks and give them a chance to die just as easily as front rank players, albeit at over twice the cast time and concentration cost than sleep.

People in back ranks need to have more risk in PvP anyway, and dispel/acid blast/cabal spell/zap wand/order bash is a much better way for a sorc to spend their time against someone who is already front row.

The only thing I'd change about charm now is that your charms should not recall with you. I'm fine with scout pets and elementals recalling, and even undead, but letting charmees recall with you just makes it possible to c charm xxx;quaff recall and have a decent shot at screwing someone over with almost no risk. At least casting charm requires you to still win whatever fight you're in if it's a group battle and/or still get everything from the charmees corpse afterwards, and risk screwing over your own formation by a guard NPC attacking your own group or your own group members attacking your group or something.

I dunno - it's still an insta win spell on the lines of FoD and petrify, and I think it's probably always the best choice in a 1v1 situation. Perhaps in a group fight it isn't any more, you're right. I know if I was playing a sorc, though, that I'd just get into a trib, max art, and cast charm on everybody.

You could, but then you'd be bad.

I was going to write a whole long response but the heart of the matter is that allowing for the charming of PCs is more trouble than it's worth. There are a lot of drawbacks to having this insta-kill, insta-loot, avoid the law spell in place and it rarely creates interesting roleplay opportunities (opportunities which generally could just as easily be re-created by consenting players anyway without a coded spell). Just look at the amount of policing and tweaks that have been necessary over the years to deal with this one spell.

First it was people not roleplaying being charmed and trying to get away. Solution: make them drooling idiots that have no control of their character whatsoever.

Then it was charmers killing their charmees (sometimes by dropping them over cities). Solution: eliminate one of thirty ways to kill a charmee by having charm drop when you go over an air area.

Then somewhere in there we increased the cast time of charm in attempt to balance it.

... and now we have the rule that people have to "RP more" as a charmer. Which still baffles me. I think most people have taken that to mean you need to type in more emotes and says, but if I am a BAMF and I just took control of your mind, you can bet I'm going to get right to finishing you off. I may or may not have much to say to you during that process.

You could theoretically balance charm person on PCs by allowing for saves at important intervals but I just don't think it's worth the headache. And I don't think just reducing the saving throw will do it - people will still have lots of tries (especially against tribunal members or in certain nations) to charm you and once it lands, you're SOL.

I honestly am starting to be won over by the arguments that you just shouldn't be able to charm PCs. The spell's application against PCs is more trouble than it is worth. I would be satisified if this spell was just border-line impossible to use against anyone with a bit of willpower.

I will check what the success rate of charm was on Rorey, but I'm pretty sure it was high enough to make me not want to mess with any sorcs.