Awaken Humanoid (spell)

[rferries]

I think that's fine if that is the metaphysic for your setting. However, the default D&D setting seems to set all 4 alignments as equally powerful options. Evil can exist even if Good does not, and there's not necessarily any logical reason to prefer one over the other. (Plenty of aesthetic reasons, such as preferring Good, wanting a pleasant afterlife instead of being a semi-sentient demon/devil slug, etc.)

This is a very salient point - D&D definitely sets all the alignments up as equal, so I'm very much injecting my own goody-two-shoes philosophy into this when I brew only a Good version. However the spell can be refluffed to allow any alignment change.

As for the skill stuff... I can see not letting them retrain. It's what they have practiced in and gotten good at. A skilled con artist can renounce their cons, but that doesn't mean they're a bad liar now. Likewise for someone under this spell. The potential extra skill points could be put into new skills, of course.

Yes this makes sense. I've deleted the relevant portion.

One minor cool thing about this spell is that it's a nice buff for martials. Dump your mental stats, and get this cast on you to boost them. Cheesey, for sure, but akin to (though probably weaker than) some shapeshifting shenanigans that wizards can do.

Yes, virtue has its own (minor) rewards. :D

They're also not [Good].

Forcible brainwashing is not a good thing, I don't care if you slap the [Good] descriptor on it.

Meh, deathwatch doesn't do anything bad but it's [Evil], blade barrier doesn't do anything good but it's in the Good domain, and so on. What's a little mind control between friends? :D

Plus, it's not true brainwashing in that you can still become evil again through your own actions; it's more like a "reset button". And finally, since the Outer Planes exist in D&D, you're literally saving villains from being tortured for the rest of eternity through this spell.

The good descriptor isn't the issue for me (you get silly things like Animate with the Spirit which forces a dead guy to be good by animating their body with the soul of an angel anyway): the issue is that it gives someone +0/+0/+0/+4/+4/+4, or a permanent +2 to the big dumb barbarian's will saves and skill points/level and a bunch of their skills, for practically nothing (you need to cast one spell, once, and you lose some XP, but if it even puts you down a level you'll get more XP in the next combat anyway).

The XP cost was just copied from awaken, can definitely be bumped up. However that barbarian still has to play up through level 5 with his low scores before he can benefit from this spell, so he's served his time. And if the campaign starts at higher levels, just ban the spell the same as you would the venerable dragonwrought kobold trick.

And while rferries seems to focus his balance point on "be a fullcaster or go home", one of the key traits of fullcasters is that they're MAD. The cleric might "only" get +4 to two stats instead of three, but that's not enough of a boost to the barbarian to be meaningful.

It's not intended to be a meaningful boost to anyone, really, but it does tend to help noncasters a bit more.

Me, I'm just sitting here wondering how being smart is correlated with morality. Wisdom, maybe, except that what the Wis stat does in practice is different from the more regular use. But evil geniuses and demagogues are up there with mad clerics are genre tropes, as well as having precedent in the real world.

I had been thinking, if (under a Rousseau philosophy) a sociopath is amoral because they lack empathy (Wis/Cha), or someone votes for politician with war-mongering or authoritarian tendencies because they don't understand the relevant history & dangers (Wis/Int), could a spell be fluffed as making someone Good by increasing their mental ability scores? And voila!

Obviously it breaks down when you consider pit fiends, red dragons, etc. and their formidable mental ability scores but the idea appealed to me. You can again rule it as being a reset button - the spell gives the evil genius an epiphany where she questions "What am I doing with my life? Is raising an army of genocidal cyborgs REALLY making me happy?", things that she might not have thought about before in spite of her brilliance.

Add in the bits where this spell could just as often be cast by good characters to bolster their dim companions (which again undermines the smart = good argument), the ickiness of keeping someone chained up in the basement for 24 hours while you magically alter their minds, and the fact that the non-cheesy and non-mindrapey functions of this spell are functionally identical to a good cleric casting an Atonement spell, I don't see much point.

Fair point about casting it on dim companions (especially if those companions are already good). I had considered making the spell fizzle on creatures that were already good, but then figured players would just quickly roleplay as non-good so they could benefit. For such humanoids you could fluff the spell as "enhancing" their preexisting empathy and compassion.

As for the ickiness - the spell will obviously be used by PCs on each other, but there's a definite use for converting defeated enemies as well. Killing an evil cleric and thereby condemning him to eternal torture seems much more icky to me than giving him another chance at the Upper Planes.

If this is intended as humor, then I suggest augmenting the target humanoid with the [Woke] descriptor.

Ha, I kind of wish I had planned that. Missed opportunity! I'm fond of awaken spells in general though so maybe a new descriptor is in order.

If this is intended seriously, then I dislike the idea that redemption (or damnation) is just a spell, rather than a character arc.

Fair enough, and yet we have atonement .