# Forum > Gaming > Roleplaying Games > D&D 3e/3.5e/d20 >  Touch of adamantine and permanency

## ciopo

Greetings, I have a moment of confusion about touch of adamantine.

It says in it's description that it cannot be made permanent with a permanency. Which is fair enough, as it would bypass the cost of an actual adamantine weapon.

But... as far as I know permanency operates under "whitelist" rules, only spells that specifically says can be made permanent can be made permanent, and everything else defaults to "can't be permanency'ed" , so why do there exists spells that specifically calls out "this can't be made permanent with permanency", are there some other rules that define "spells with these parameters" can be permanency'ed? 

It's somewhat confusing

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## Biggus

I don't know the answer to that specifically, but I have noticed similar things elsewhere. For example, the default is that you can't take feats multiple times unless they specifically say you can, but there are several feats out there which specify that you can't anyway (Greater Resiliency from CW is one example).

I think that sometimes the devs think "this would be ripe for abuse if made permanent/taken multiple times etc" or "this looks like the sort of thing you'd expect to be able to make permanent/take multiple times etc" so they include a note to remove any doubt about it.

Edit: a more direct example is Greater Arcane Sight, which includes a note saying "Unlike arcane sight, this spell cannot be made permanent with a permanency spell".

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## ciopo

To me it's funny, because it introduces the failure state of "this spell doesn't say it can't be made permanent, unlike XYZ" in this regard it's a lucky thing permanency itself says what spells and only those spells can be permed.

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## Tzardok

Permanency mentions that a player may research applying permanency to other spells in a similiar way to researching completely new spells (always at the GM's discretion). I would say that such a rider would by a hint to the GM to not allow this for that specific spell.

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## Rebel7284

> Permanency mentions that a player may research applying permanency to other spells in a similiar way to researching completely new spells (always at the GM's discretion). I would say that such a rider would by a hint to the GM to not allow this for that specific spell.


It's almost certainly this.  It looks like the SRD is missing this note, but in the 3.5 PHB it says this:




> The DM may allow other selected spells to be made permanent. Researching this possible application of a spell costs as much time and money as independently researching the selected spell (see the Dungeon Masters Guide for details). If the DM has already determined that the application is not possible, the research automatically fails. Note that you never learn what is possible except by the success or failure of your research.

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## ciopo

Oh, cool

I've never seen spell research actually done/used

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## Zanos

> a more direct example is Greater Arcane Sight, which includes a note saying "Unlike arcane sight, this spell cannot be made permanent with a permanency spell".


That spell needs that ruling, because it inherits from Arcane Sight which can be made permanent. "This spell functions like arcane sight..."

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