Jiggy wrote:
What's all this about "a binding" protecting against summons and how "magic circles" work? What are you talking about?
D&D magic is full of things based on some combination of fantasy literature and things people have specifically believed about magic in the past. There's a reason clerics could turn a staff into a snake, and part water, for instance.
And a lot of things sort of conflate the categories of "ward against evil" and "ward against magical influences". So that's why 1e's protection from evil protects you against evil spells or any summoned creature regardless of alignment, and inverting it to protect against good doesn't change the protection against summons. Because that's "how magic works". It's the idiom of the genre. You make a magic circle to keep out Summoned Creatures, and it keeps them out regardless of their moral qualities.
That this also implies benefits in defense against specifically-evil creatures (and can be altered to defend against specifically-good creatures) is arguably sort of secondary.
I think that's also why 2E added the suppression of charm-type effects. Which, interestingly, didn't prevent new ones from being applied, it only suppressed them.
Huh. This is actually really interesting to compare with:
2E wrote:
First, all attacks made by evil or evilly enchanted creatures against the protected creature receive a penalty of -2 to each attack roll, and any saving throws caused by such attacks are made by the protected creature with a +2 bonus.
Second, any attempt to exercise mental control over the protected creature (if, for example, it has been charmed by a vampire) or to invade and take over its mind (as by a ghost's magic jar attack) is blocked by this spell. Note that the protection does not prevent a vampire's charm itself, nor end it, but it does prevent the vampire from exercising mental control through the barrier. Likewise, an outside life force is merely kept out, and would not be expelled if in place before the protection was cast.
Third, the spell prevents bodily contact by creatures of an extraplanar or conjured nature (such as aerial servants, elementals, imps, invisible stalkers, salamanders, water weirds, xorn, and others). This causes the natural (body) weapon attacks of such creatures to fail and the creature to recoil if such attacks require touching the protected creature. Animals or monsters summoned or conjured by spells or similar magic are likewise hedged from the character. This protection ends if the protected character makes a melee attack against or tries to force the barrier against the blocked creature.
...
This spell can be reversed to become protection from good, with the second and third benefits remaining unchanged.
Note the interesting qualifier, "evil or evilly enchanted". And it was total immunity to new possessions, but only suppression of charms. And it's not obvious that it would do anything about a possession that was already in place, or keep the possessor from exercising control.
Also worth noting, 3E kept a lot of the sense of that intact. It's not until Pathfinder that Protection from Evil provides total immunity to incoming charm abilities; in 3E/3.5E, it didn't prevent you from being targeted, it merely suppressed their effects.
And this gets us to a problem with your "it needed to be nerfed" narrative: Paizo has made the spell more powerful. Neither 2E nor 3E provided total immunity to new charms or possessions, and neither of them had the spell prevent an already-present possessing spirit from exercising control during the duration of protection from evil.
