Harmful Harmless Spells


Rules Questions


After reading through the metamagic entries I came across "Toxic Spell", which unlike most of the other crowd control metamagic feats, doesn't require a damage roll to activate.

This got me thinking, if I apply metamagic to a harmless spell, is there any indication that an NCP would have to refuse the buff (assuming they are already friendly).


Even if an NPC allowed you to cast the buff on them they would still get their save against the Poison as they are two separate saves. You would also have to find harmless spells that offer a Fortitude save for this to work, and even then there is the potential for a GM to rule that by adding the Toxic metamagic to a spell that it loses the harmless tag meaning the NPC would need to make a save against the spell before you even got to attempt to inflict the poison on them.

Basically it is rather difficult to trick someone into giving up their save as basically every beneficial spell has the harmless descriptor which means you have to choose to save against it, while spells without it you have to choose to not save against it. There is even a specific subset of spells designed around tricking people into thinking they are harmless spells so that unless they are ID'd the person treats them as harmless.

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