Midnight metamagic

[Illven]

One of my players came to me with this combo. I'm just wondering if their interpretation is RAW, Questionable, or wrong.


Midnight metamagiac allows you to reduce metamagic effect on spells, 1spell level/essentia, and once it's cast, the essentia stops being invested. Psycarnum Infusion allows you to treat 1 incarnum receptacle(feat, souldmeld, whatever) as if you had invested maximum essentia in it for one round.

Since you're never actually investing essentia, the 1/d limitation on investing essentia in that particular feat wouldn't apply.

Someone with more experience in Incarnum then me. HALP

[Troacctid]

This trick has been talked about before, of course. The main problem with it is that, while you may be able to invest essentia into the feat multiple times a day via Psycarnum Infusion or similar abilities, the part of the feat that allows you to choose a spell to affect with it still only functions once per day, and only affects your next casting of the spell. Adding more essentia to the feat later won't actually do anything.

That said, Psycarnum Infusion is just generally a confusing, poorly thought-out feat with a lot of dysfunctional interactions. If you try too hard to interpret the RAW around it, you'll be pulling your hair out at all the things that don't work intuitively, or don't work at all. I recommend applying a healthy dose of common sense and intuition when adjudicating it. In this case, I believe it makes more sense for the trick to work.

[Godskook]

That looks RAW, but I'll check books. Yep, that's RAW. Its also pretty broken by RAW. Well, depends on how you interpret the wording on Psycarnum Infusion. My thoughts on what your ruling should be:

1.Read hard into the phrase "until the end of your next turn". In other words, the player gets to do this only once per spell unless he does some extreme optimization, and typically only once per combat.

2.Use my metamagic houserule: "You can only reduce metamagic costs for combinations you can cast without reduction.". My houserule curbs 95% of the cheese around metamagic reductions by pushing the problem into the levels that are equipped to deal with it. For example, Maximize is a +3 metamagic. By my rule, a 7th level wizard could only maximize 1st level spells. He wouldn't be able to cast a maximized 2nd level spell without using a reducer, so he just can't do it, even if he gets reducers for it. Metamagic rods(1 per spell) and Sudden Feats are the only way around this limitation, atm.