I'm using PARMs because I'm going to have a bunch of these and don't want to write a bunch of scripts that are all identical except for a few target names.
I think lassev has hit upon the answer--It's the NPCs PARM it gets because the Affect essentially creates a new script and pushes it off on the NPC. I'll test it as soon as I get home. Good catch, and thanks!
What I'll probably do is grab the value from the scriptrunner and put it in a global variable.