
VoodooMike |

As someone who really enjoys the Words of Power rules from Ultimate Magic, I really wish more work would be done to widen and refine them. I'm planning to suggest the following addition to the "Selected" target word:
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Boost: Instead of one target, the wordspell affects up to one target per caster level, no two of which can be more than 30 feet apart. The wordspell may not cause or cure damage, nor may it give any numeric bonuses or penalties, and selected targets must all be willing or the spell fails to affect them. The casting time of the wordspell is increased to 1 minute.
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The reason for this addition is that certain party utility spells simply fail to manifest as wordspells, such as Plane Shift, or are ridiculously overpriced, level wise, under wordspell rules, like party-wide Teleport. As a wordspell, Plane Shift can only be created using the Dimensional Shift effect word (level 7) but affects only one selected target.. boosting Selected to affect multiple targets, under base wordspell rules, ups the effect level by 3, making multiperson plane shift a level 10 (impossible) spell. I don't think the Words of Power rules are meant to make magic less useful overall, just to trade some level of per-spell power for improved versatility.
The minute-long casting time prevents the cheap (no level change) boost from being of any real use during combat, and the limitation on damage/healing prevents cheap mass cure spells and the like.
Does anyone see any issue with this addition? I'm mainly looking for potential wordspells where this additional boost option would create a significantly overpowerful effect.