Is "harmless" a game term, or a descriptive word?
I was reading the description of the Fool's Gold spell, which contains this little nugget:
if it fails a saving throw against a magic ability of yours that is not harmless and has a duration, the duration is doubled for that creature
That seems a pretty cheap way to increase the duration of all sorts of friendly magical abilities, like maybe a Bard's Performances (provided they have a save). However, most of those are harmless in effect even though they're not spelled out as such.
So: is a magical effect "Harmless" when it's effectively harmless, or merely when it is spelled out to be such?
Harmless is a game term, technically.
I have no idea what the designers had in mind when they wrote "not harmless" but RAW something is only harmless when specifically labeled as such
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Harmless is a quality of certain beneficial spells (such as bless) found under their Spell Resistance entry.
And your idea wouldn't work anyway since it says the doubling is for abilities that are NOT harmless.
Harmless is a game term. If there is no (harmless) behind the save entry of the spell/effect, it is not considered harmless as per the rules.
Be adwised though that, were I to GM for you, I would houserule it to not work for any beneficial spells.
Harmless is as others mentioned 100% a game term. Some spells specifically have in noted in the line for their save descriptor/spell resistance.
It means generally speaking the spell is beneficial and you wouldn't want to save against it.
Also, the way that spell reads is you have to target it will a spell or ability and the creature has to fail its save before any of those features of the spell kick in.
Most beneficial spells don't have saves, but some of them do.