RPing with curses

[Dae]

The forum ate my post and I'm sad but now I'm rewriting it so yay and stuff.

But yeah, curses. Not profanity, but those negative magical effects. I think they have a lot of RP potential. From a race against time for your life, to seeing the world from a new perspective, to simply being a minor inconvenience in a war of attrition. Of course, the idea of any unusual magics could fairly easily be abused; therefore I've come up with some criteria to help making curses lore- and server-friendly.

1. The curse has to have an undesirable effect that makes the affected want to get rid of it. It can be a clearly negative effect, like magic muting, something that's bad to that specific character, like a blood elf would be a lot less happy about being, say, turned into a bear than a night elf. (Typically) Or, it could be something nice that turns out to have negative consequences. Like, say, a night elf cursed with antlers that don't stop growing. The point is, the character has to want to get rid of it and seek the cure or removal of the curse. Not being bad makes it not really much of a curse, and that can easily go into special snowflake territory.

2. Second, the curse has to be a part of a plot or event, with an explanation of why and how it occurred, and a way to stop or cure it. There must be a finite ending. A long lasting curse is a character aspect that you probably should talk to the mods about in character creation, and is not what I'm discussing here.

3. The scope, cause, use, cure, and everything else about the curse has to not go against lore or be too significant to not be world news. If its a notable curse, there has to be a reason no one's talking about it in Cataclysm.

[Harmonic]

This is an interesting idea.

I would indeed like to have some curse. I mean, Rensin -already- has a few undesirable rashes, so this might put the cherry on top.

[Marilyn]

I think it would be interesting, as long as both parties agree to it and it isn't a super overpowered curse like Jedi mind tricks that make you do whatever the person says.

[Kira13]

That'd work too. See: Zalazane. And yes, I do have a witch doctor.

On the other hand, I agree that curses would best work if both the participants agree. I've always done it like that, and always shall, whether it is in a DM'ed event or not, or simple fight-RP.

[Rowgen]

A good tip is to mark the difference between say, Witch Doctor-curses and Warlock-curses. In fact, I'd be hesitant to call the Warlock spells curses in the typical sense, as they rarely last long and they rarely cause any major inconvenience beyond pain/weakness/exhaustion. So, keep that in mind. Warlocks won't be cursing you if you remove gold from a chest or anything.

[Marilyn]

I usually think of Witch Doctor curses, voodoo, etc.