Topic: Cure/dispel the evil mentalism spell lost experience

[Hubbaman]

How do you guys handle this spell? Is it possible to reverse the effect?

[rdanhenry]

You undo it by earning the experience again. I recommend starting by killing an Evil Mentalist.

[Marc R]

The Restoration Spell restores experience lost due to death, I tend to use it as the cure for all the various memory destruction spells.

[markc]

You undo it by earning the experience again. I recommend starting by killing an Evil Mentalist.

A house rule might be kill the caster and all or a % of your memories return. Or maybe some magic item might allow you to also recover a % if you kill the caster.
 
MDC

[Elton Robb]

The Restoration Spell restores experience lost due to death, I tend to use it as the cure for all the various memory destruction spells.

Lord Miller is correct.  However, in the event that are in such a situation without a restoration spell, you should kill said evil mentalist to gain your experience back.

[Hubbaman]

Hmm, I would have loved to kill that mentalist, but the spell came from a rune on the door of an old crypt. So I think he/she is long dead.

But thanks for the tip concerning the restoration spell! I was really hoping there was some other cure than earning the experience.

[Marc R]

Hmm, seems it's not a house rule of mine, Mind Erosions is referred to in the "Of Channeling" version of the list.

The only drawback of that fix is that it's a rather high level spell at 19th, so it may not be easy to find a caster and the sooner it's cast the better, as you fail to recover 1% per day of delay between the loss and the Restoration.

Finding someone to cast the "no time limit - perfect fix" version will be even harder, since Restoration True is a 30th level spell.

Heh, the GM of the game in which this first came up made a joke about how your soul acts like a tape backup of your mind. . .one of the players questioned the logic, and he said "Your soul contains a record of everything you've ever done or thought, so that after you die, your soul can be judged, even for the stuff you may have forgotten about.". . .which only applies as a rule in that GMs game world, but seemed like a good explanation to me.

[rdanhenry]

Well, it ought to hard to undo by magic, considering that it's only a threat because of its permanent effect. If a low-level spell could restore the experience lost, it would hardly be worth removing it in the first place.

[Marc R]

true, but breaking someone's leg is worth it, even if they get better, if you need to stop them right in this moment.

Even if you can get the EXP back later, in the moment, you are degraded, and if a good roleplayer, playing your character as if they were the person from a year ago, who in the blink of an eye found themself in the future. . . .I'd think that often that would be enough to toss a giant monkey wrench into the middle of a situation.

On the flip side, I have seen interesting angles come up. . .in brief version:

Hero A goes to work for Mentalist B

They get along fine, but at some point A realizes B is evil and they fight. . .B deletes A to back before they turned using various Mind Erosion spells.

This happens a number of times over a span of many years. . .then A has a "Restoration True" cast on them, and recovers all of the lost segments of their life, goes up a level from the combined lost memories and experience returning, and is really, REALLY pissed off.

If playing with a group of good roleplayers, the ability to delete memories, even worse selectively delete them or change them, can have wide ranging and dramatic effects. . .and even if it does take 19/30th level magic to fix it, when it gets fixed it's usually quite good story watching the results of that unfold.

[rdanhenry]

true, but breaking someone's leg is worth it, even if they get better, if you need to stop them right in this moment.

Even if you can get the EXP back later, in the moment, you are degraded, and if a good roleplayer, playing your character as if they were the person from a year ago, who in the blink of an eye found themself in the future. . . .I'd think that often that would be enough to toss a giant monkey wrench into the middle of a situation.

On the flip side, I have seen interesting angles come up. . .in brief version:

Hero A goes to work for Mentalist B

They get along fine, but at some point A realizes B is evil and they fight. . .B deletes A to back before they turned using various Mind Erosion spells.

This happens a number of times over a span of many years. . .then A has a "Restoration True" cast on them, and recovers all of the lost segments of their life, goes up a level from the combined lost memories and experience returning, and is really, REALLY pissed off.

If playing with a group of good roleplayers, the ability to delete memories, even worse selectively delete them or change them, can have wide ranging and dramatic effects. . .and even if it does take 19/30th level magic to fix it, when it gets fixed it's usually quite good story watching the results of that unfold.

The Evil Mentalist does have spells that can hamper a person, similar to a leg-breaking spell. The Evil Mentalist does have spells that can delete memories to produce amnesia. But the question was about Lost Experience, which is explicitly noted as meaning only that you need more experience points to make the next level. The target's abilities are not impaired, nor are they forgetful. Unless you allow leveling-up in the middle of a fight, it has no tactical value whatsoever.

[Marc R]

"Target looses 5% of his collected experience (usually experience points)." then 10% and 15%.

Considering the context of that list, I'd consider that to be memories. . .though I guess you could infer that to be a general loss of detail, rather than loss of all of a chunk of time.

Amusingly, considering what I thought was our house rule turned out to be the book rule on restoration, I see the "Lost Experience" is the actual house rule in this case. . .we'd always played that if you lost 5% of your total EXP and that put you below level you reverted back to the previous level. . .i.e. you'd been "rewound" or "Erased" back to that version of you. (Likely using the RM2 version that didn't have the note about not losing levels due to that spell that was added in RMSS).

[GoingNegative]

I agree it's hard to argue that it's not memories that are affected when experience is lost. After all, what else could experience be referring to, besides the experience points?

Now, the loss of certain memories is not incompatible with having intact skills and knowledge. I can ride my bike, I know the function of a chair and I know that Paris is the capital of France, even though the memories (or experience) of learning this is long gone. Similarly an expert thief can easily pick a lock or do a lock lore maneuver without recalling how or where he learnt it.

I'd argue that what is meant with experience here is information that is potentially retrievable from conscious memory (what in cognitive science is termed episodic memory). Note, btw, that this is a considerable smaller memory store than what the Tape Recorder Theory of the Soul mentioned earlier would entail. But a 5 percent chunk from this smaller pie of conscious memory is still a pretty big part of a PC's life.

[Marc R]

An interesting point, consider this:

Experience loss is not actually mentioned in the Forget spells, so I guess if you just barely leveled up and spent X time period between levels learning how to ride a horse (purchasing your first ever rank), then I cast Forget on you and deleted the memory of the time spent learning to ride, you would have no memory of how you learned, but it would have no effect on your ability to ride. You would forget learning it, but not forget the skill.

The Lost Experience spell in RM2 terms, cast on you per above, would drop your XP below your level, and you would actually forget how to ride the horse (the DP spent on the gained level would revert and become unspent). . .yet there's no actual loss of memory specified if one were a "Spell as Written" type. . .so you would remember learning to ride, but have no ranks in the skill and not actually be able to.

In RMSS terms, as Rdan said, that wouldn't happen, and you'd just need that much more experience to gain the next level. . .in the RMSS version it's become so meta I'm not actually sure what you are losing, it seems more like a drag on forward development than an actual affect on your current self. . .it's like casting a learning handicap on someone.

[GoingNegative]

So in your opinion no memory is lost following the spell (episodic or other), the character simply gets a temporary learning disability?

That makes sense, as long as in this spell description "experience" equals "experience points and only experience points". But I think any definition broader than that should affect past memory or learning history in some sense, like a partial loss of episodic/conscious memory.

[Marc R]

"Target looses 5% of his collected experience (usually experience points)." is about as vague as you can get . . . .you could choose to say it's memories, in context with the other spells on the list, and that it means "Experience" in that sense, metered in XP, but it's not really clear.

Back with RM2 it seemed fairly clear it deleted you backward to that XP point, so If 5% of your XP took you back from level 20 to level 19, that might be a loss of years of memories, while loss of 1/2 your level up since level 10 might be a loss of the last few months or some such. . .but the way it works in RMSS seems totally meta.

[GoingNegative]

Yes, it would have been better had it simply said "Target looses 5% of his collected experience points".

One major implication of the "XP-loss only" interpretation is that the GM does not have to decide which experiences are lost, since none are, and the players do not have to roleplay semi-amnesiacs - though they could perhaps play slightly dimwitted for a few sessions... So i guess the outcome of the decision depends partly on whether more complex roleplaying is a goal or not.

[rdanhenry]

Yes, it would have been better had it simply said "Target looses 5% of his collected experience points".

I'm 95% certain that it doesn't because someone might be using Spell Law with a system that doesn't use experience points.

[Marc R]

But it doesn't seem to indicate any memories are lost, it's not like you forget the things that happened that caused those XP, since you loose nothing on your character sheet. . .like if I reduced you to 20th level, 0 XP with repeated applications you'd have no malus to any actions or abilities, just take you a real real long time to reach 21st if you can't get a restoration cast on you. . . .the effect is more to make you learning impaired than anything else. . .it's effectively a penalty against future, as yet ungained experience, than anything past.

[pastaav]

An alternate way to run the the forget spells is that player keep their earned skills, but they need more exp before they level up next time. If this is suiting or not depend on the campaign.