"You will never understand how it feels to live your life / with no meaning or control and nowhere left to go."
This is more of an editorial. I feel like I got stuck in this rut where I thought I always have to help someone with my posts, and anything else was pointless or goofing off. Today I'm cutting myself a little slack and talking about something I've noticed in modern gaming source books and why I've turned around on the idea that you ought to make custom spells or equipment tough to get.
This started some years ago when I made a character named Seras Heartstring. I thought I'd challenge myself again so he was a warpriest of a god whose influence was love and fertility. He'd be a little different mechanically if I built him today (Don't try to do TWF with a 3/4ths AB class without stacking hitroll) but his personality was really fun. He was an Aasimar who could easily be mistaken for a woman, since I wanted to associate thematically with the fact that the Archangel Gabriel was described as being androgynous. Archangel, Aasimar, et cetera. He was kind of a promiscuous dumb blonde stereotype, but he'd wander around the countryside helping people out with spellcasting. He had a sincere love of people.
I started to wonder what kind of spells he'd be casting for common folk, and I came to the realization that a lot of the shit you'd ask a cleric of love and fertility for, they'd just have no spell for. Stuff like 'bless our marriage' or 'help me win that girl's heart' doesn't necessarily need a related spell and is just fluff(or social rolls), but 'help us conceive a child', 'make me more attractive' or 'bless this season's harvest' are all things that you'd go straight to a cleric of love and fertility for, and only one of those three has a real answer: the spell Plant Growth for harvesting food. In a world with real magic, I think you'd have to be real careful with doing non-magical blessings because you'd start to look like a con artist. Average Joe Farmer KNOWS spells exist even if he's never seen one, and if he pays you to perform a harvest blessing and he doesn't get much more food than last year, he's not going to be happy.
So a lot of different priesthoods simply lack the spells they'd realistically be asked to perform the most. Clerics of earth and stone reinforcing walls or building things. Clerics of the weather influencing seasons, priests of the community holding a magic fueled festival. All of these things are KIND OF possible using mid to high level magic. It's all high level, I want to add, because of the combat implications of casting them. Mages see this a lot too: Think of what you'd ask a Transmuter for. Immediately, I hope your mind went to stuff like plastic surgery. Now, it's POSSIBLE sure, by casting wish, polymorph any object, or permanency. Some ridiculous high level magic that's restricted because of what ELSE it does. If you wanted say, a version of disguise self or alter self that was permanent, you'd have to invent it. Even though it's the kind of thing people go into transmutation to learn.
It's got to be that the average pen and paper game's source is viewed through the lens of what an adventurer needs. Shadowrun makes this really obvious, with the lore even discussing cyberware or equipment that there aren't stats for. I remember mention of sexually-themed cyberware in lore, but... that could have been an Internet source book. My memory is swiss cheese. Regardless, it REALLY helps that Shadowrun's firearms and vehicle creation rules directly say that you're not necessarily creating something from scratch. The example vehicle created is even supposed to be a limited run vehicle, like a Delorean or Tesla Roadster. Even though the player "made it" from scratch.
I've even seen shades of this in other places of the rules. Survival in D20 lets you provide food for X number of people, and that's really all it says. It doesn't mention food preservation, even though that's what the average person is going to be doing when he rolls survival: trapping game, butchering it, cooking then saving the rest. Hell, it doesn't even mention what you're providing. It's got to be because they know this just ain't gonna come up in most games: most people are just going to roll and go "Okay, that's enough" then roll again tomorrow. Shadowrun has shades of this too, since there's no way in hell the future has abolished credit. 1st through 3rd edition don't mention it at all, while later editions just have some smart catch-all rules for taking out loans. I'm sure those are included for the theme of owing a huge amount of money to the mafia more than mortgages or car loans, though.
I mean, I'm not angry. I get it, there's only so many pages and including things that would realistically exist but don't have a lot of value to a basic adventurer is pretty pointless. Maybe magically giving the Orcish Chieftan's daughter huge knockers would get the player characters out of a really tough situation, but I just don't see the boob job spell REALLY coming up that much.
So what am I saying? Nothing really, this is an editorial. HA, I've wasted your time! But seriously, that was kind of the turning point for me on allowing custom source for fluff. I generally don't like homebrew source, and there's always an impulse to make people work to use even Shadowrun's various custom generation rules. Even though I've proven pretty strongly that none of SR's gen rules are anything but a load of fun, you still have this unmistakable feeling that they're important. Weighty.
But if it's harmless on the broad scale, I don't think I see a problem. Still keep balance in mind: I don't think even an inconsequential permanent effect would be lower than level two in 3.X or PF. Luckily for us, even PF has jumped on the guidelines bandwagon somewhere. Have them make a few checks, diplomacy to find the guy who casts it or Knowledge Arcana to create the spell or something. It could be a fun diversion. I just don't think allowing people to learn some fluff spells or buying some fluff magic items is the end of the world. Or, the guy who wants to blow 0.2 Essence on the Mr. Stud implant because he's a former porn star? Try not to bust his balls. I mean, busting his balls IS going to be a little harder seeing as how he's cybernetically enhanced them, but you get my point.
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