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Plus the circle itself has to be a perfect circle. You can't make it square, or have it go up and down walls, or anything like that. It's rarely good for boxing in existing threats simply because existing threats tend to move around at least once in that hour.
The point that is being missed by the OP is that if you have an hour of preparation, with sufficient imagination -any- encounter can be trivialized in almost any rpg ever.
In a cyberpunk game:
'In one hour, assassins will come here to kill you!'
'Oh. Suppose we should grab a taxi then, and call the cops.'
In a space game:
'Oh noes! Space Pirates will be here in one hour!'
'Hyperspace warp field GO!'
In Paranoia!:
'Bully! Traitors will be here within the hour and are going to bring communist propaganda to insite the clones to riot!'
'Pshaw! How would you know what communist propaganda would look like unless you've been crafting it with loving precision! *lasers down the questgiver*'
Magic Circle requires a lot more prep than these things, that's for sure.
The Ritual is very poorly written, and probably should be errata'd or clarification given on the intent. Every DM is going to have to make some rullings about this.
Now Magic Circles in past editions have had 2 main effects, that are often seperate...to keep things out, and to keep something in.
Obviously an clear use of this spell is to make a safe haven for a group while in a dungeon, except for the problem that you theoretically can not get out. Many other Rituals allow the caster to designate people to be able to pass through other defensive Rituals....so not hard to add that house rule.
As to the trapping part...that becomes a little more complicated.
Teleportation I believe clearly works to get in or out of the Ritual, as you do not need line of Effect to Teleport and one can make a cogent arguement that Teleportation does not have you pass thru anything (eg you do not take damage when teleporting to the other side of a damage dealing zone etc).
The other question is how far does the Magic Circle's protection extend?
Does it extend infinitely upwards or downwards? Would a sufficently powerful Magic Circle prevent birds from flying overhead, animals from grazing, or Dwarves mining underneath the Magic Circle?
I think on the surface of it you can rule out a Magic Circle interfering with Extra Planar travel. If a creature has a personal plane shift they can utilize the power to escape. Likewise the same for Teleportation, so this spell has some clear limits to the type of enemies in can hinder and the levels of which it will be trivial for enemies to bypass.
The trickier question for me is how far does the Magic Circle effect extend to?
Would it extend up through the roof of a building? if for example, a King has a Magic Circle protecting a sacred chalice in the basement would the castle be inaccesable above the Magic Circle no matter how high the Castle goes up? I think that strains credulty.
Thus I think you can reasonably fly out of, (if you destroy a roof over you, outdoors a DM will have to decide how far up the Magic Circle extends or if the Magic Circle domes over), and dig out of a Magic Circle.
This seems in line with a 5th level Ritual....creatures that can Fly, that can Burrow, or that can Teleport will be only slightly inconveinced. Other creatures will be blocked dependent upon the power level of the Magic Circle.
Last edited by satori01; 13th June 2009 at 07:36 PM..
Magic Circle = useless against flying creatures?
and things with burrow
and teleport
and anything that can jump 5'
Wow that makes most things just slightly annoyed by this spell.
LOL....this honestly gave me a good laugh...thank you.
First the ritual was too powerful, because you cited a 5th level character, that was an Eladrin or Gnome, that took Skill Focus Arcana, a Familiar, and had four friends to help could keep the bowling team of Orcus, Vecna, and the Tarrasque away.
(as an aside, I play in a group of 9 people, and beside my Wizard, only 3 other people are trained in Arcana. There is a Warlord w/ 14 Int, who could probably make the assist roll, so my Wizard could do this. Under point buy almost everyone else has 10-8 Int because lets face it...Int is a dump stat(even for the Sorcerer in my group, Int a dump stat)....Rogues do not need it, Fighters do not need it, Rangers do not need it, and the rest of my group is Fighter, Rogues and Rangers....so 4 people assistng not that easy to come by for your average 5 person group.)
Now after people have dissected the rules, and determined that Teleportation, Flight, and Burrowing can bypass the erstwhile too powerful 5th level ritual.....it is too weak?
There is no pleasing you...is there
As you mentioned before, a clear use for this Ritual is to be able to take an extended rest on say level 2 of the Temple of Elemental Evil w/o having to treck back to Hommlet.
Now by RAW not being able to get out of your own Magic Circle is a clear oversight, but easily corrected by the DM, simply allowing the caster to designate people to be able to pass in and out of the Magic Circle ala many of the other perimeter defense Rituals in the game.
Last edited by satori01; 13th June 2009 at 07:43 PM..
I love all your ideas. The only thing I wanted to express in this thread is that none of that is stated and therefore you have to houserule it either way.
EDIT: And that raw, yes it is both too powerful and too weak based upon interpretation. This is the kinda stuff I could see groups getting in huge arguments about and I think there should be errata or a generally accepted houserule.
Last edited by Flipguarder; 13th June 2009 at 07:35 PM..
Plus the circle itself has to be a perfect circle. You can't make it square, or have it go up and down walls, or anything like that. It's rarely good for boxing in existing threats simply because existing threats tend to move around at least once in that hour.
When I started this thread, I wasn't thinking about situations where a group is trying to handle an upcoming situation in the span of a few hours, I was thinking about a scenario where a villian has plenty of time to plan.
Take this one for a example. An eladrin wizard has created his dungeon as his headquarters. In the main entrance way, he creates a magic circle against natural, and with this host of elven and eladrin minions, easily gets a check that blocks creature his level or more than likely much higher level.
Sure he spends money for teh ritual, but it saves him a boatload of trap costs.
The party is trying to beat this wizard and heads to his dungeon, some of the party is natural. How do they get through?
When I started this thread, I wasn't thinking about situations where a group is trying to handle an upcoming situation in the span of a few hours, I was thinking about a scenario where a villian has plenty of time to plan.
Take this one for a example. An eladrin wizard has created his dungeon as his headquarters. In the main entrance way, he creates a magic circle against natural, and with this host of elven and eladrin minions, easily gets a check that blocks creature his level or more than likely much higher level.
Sure he spends money for teh ritual, but it saves him a boatload of trap costs.
The party is trying to beat this wizard and heads to his dungeon, some of the party is natural. How do they get through?
They don't, of course. They just drop another magic circle (or ring of magic circles, if you make them only ward against entry) around the defensive one.
Could make for a comic campaign: a large fraction of the world's surface is taken up by inpenetrable magic circles, and the best portion of the world to boot! The problem has become catastrophic and the goal of the campaign is to find a way to break the circles AND survive what is trapped inside.
The party is trying to beat this wizard and heads to his dungeon, some of the party is natural. How do they get through?
Honestly Stalker, that gets to one of the core disagreements people have about D&D. Is the world created for the players to overcome challenges? Or is the world created and let evolve naturally. I am personally an advocate for the middle way.
Is the Eladrin there to be defeated by the PCs in his layer? If yes, then there should be some way around the protection, a back door of some type. If the Eladrin is not meant to be challenged by the PCs in his layer then there should be no way around it.
If I was DMing that, I would expect my players to want to attack him in some manor, but I would not provide them with an obvious counter to the protection. But if they came up with a reasonable plan… it would work.
As to the size and shape of the circle, I would not make it a dome; I would make it a column (because diagonal movements count the same, but that is another thread). If the circle is 30’ across it would extend up 30’ or until it hit an obstacle. As the ground is an obstacle I would not extend it down. That being said I would not break out burrowing monsters on my PCs unless they starting abusing it, then my Ki11er nature comes out.
Could the spell be worded better so Rules Lawyers would have a hard time abusing it? Sure, but I don’t want ever spell and power taking up 5 pages of text.
First the ritual was too powerful, because you cited a 5th level character, that was an Eladrin or Gnome, that took Skill Focus Arcana, a Familiar, and had four friends to help could keep the bowling team of Orcus, Vecna, and the Tarrasque away.
One hand, no depth perception. Vecna's a terrible bowler.
No, it won't break the circle, but note that while the berbalang can't affect anything outside the circle you have to be careful not to disrupt the circle yourselves. If any other monster happened to come along it could do so unless it had the same type the circle works against.
As for summoning doubles outside the circle, personally I wouldn't say it could do that. It seems against the intent of the way Magic Circle works. No power can manifest its effect across the boundary of the circle. Teleport seems to be taken to be an exception, but I honestly don't think it should be as there is nothing unique about it and as soon as you allow one effect then why exclude others? So really I play it as an absolute barrier. I guess in some DM's minds it just isn't worth much.
The wording of Magic Circle doesn't seem to prevent line of effect in any way. So it seems that it can create duplicates on the other side.
I don't see any wording of 'no power can manifest its effect across the boundary' or an exception for teleport. Just no restriction against teleport, either.
Don't see any reason using a reach weapon would break the circle, but could also see it as reasonable for a readied action to deflect a reach weapon resulting in the circle being struck, and thereby broken.
Same for bouncing arrows and such. Be a good use for p42 by a circled subject, PC or monster, really.
Last edited by keterys; 16th October 2009 at 02:34 AM..
The wording of Magic Circle doesn't seem to prevent line of effect in any way. So it seems that it can create duplicates on the other side.
I don't see any wording of 'no power can manifest its effect across the boundary' or an exception for teleport. Just no restriction against teleport, either.
Don't see any reason using a reach weapon would break the circle, but could also see it as reasonable for a readied action to deflect a reach weapon resulting in the circle being struck, and thereby broken.
Same for bouncing arrows and such. Be a good use for p42 by a circled subject, PC or monster, really.
Because it states that the affected creature cannot pass through the circle, effect creatures through the circle's boundary, or effect the boundary in any way perhaps? It's pretty cut and dried.
Sure, and they didn't do any of those things. The duplicate did. Or the paladin's polearm. Or whatever.
Pretty standard trope for such things.
Unless you want to argue that, for example, it can't ask someone to break the circle for it, since that's affecting the behavior of someone on the other side of the circle in a way that affects the boundary.
- A higher tier adversary would always have some way to eventually get past the circle, perhaps with some inconvenience. It could be raw physical power (like the Tarrasque vs. heroic magic circle), a spell or some other way. I would inform the players that it is not "foolproof".
- There needs to be some kind of dispelling ritual. Perhaps it is more costly than the thing you are dispelling, and perhaps takes even more time, also I'd require some kind of contest of arcana skills (perhaps add a bonus for more ingredient cost, so that a super-high arcana skill is not 100% guaranteed to stand up to dispels).
1. Monsters can do Rituals:
there is surely a break magic circle ritual for about the same cost and time
2. Yes, you trap yourself indefinitely. IMHO the ward against all creatures should not only be harder, but also not permanent, otherwise it is really a trap.
3. Runes on the ground need to be scribed in a way that it is not easily removed by natural forces. A warding circle in the open was never a goo idea, because a single leaf will blown there by a gust of wind, can break the circle. (You should rule out that you can´t blow it there yourself... but you can maybe pile some leaves up on the right direction.
So if you want a circle outside your town be worthwhile, you need some rocks or the city wall to make it work for more than some days.
Rain would destroy circles which are drawn hastily into sand in minutes.
4. An earthquake most surely destroys the circle.
5. Did I mention the destroy magic circle ritual?
6. A tarrasque is such a force of destruction, I bet it can break the circle by accident (I really expect the ground to be shattered by its steps or trees flying around and also birds falling from the sky within its aura, so it also will not last very long
7. enter or pass seems to allow you to do 2 kinds of circles: a oneway or a two way circle: so the circle against everything could be viable but you decide if it breaks if someone leaves or is there forever
8. The main question is: is it possible to obscure the runes indirectly... like undermining them etc.
Rituals in 4e seem to fulfill many of the same functions as toolbox spells in 3e. Perhaps some of the ideas from that edition would be useful here...
Particularly, many high level spells referred to each other. For example, an antimagic field might be negated by a mordenkainen's disjunction; a prismatic sphere holds up against such a field, and so on. Many of these effects were potentially problematic in the sense that they might dramatically affect creatures of wildly different levels, just like 4e rituals. However, they still represented a fun cat-and-mouse puzzel. The few time they'd come up, the challenge would be to think up just the right combination of effects to break through the BBEG's defenses - or to think up just the right combination of effects to become invulnerable to the unwitting BBEG's uber-attack.
In short, if you want inspiration as to how to play with such magic circles from a plot device perspective, I'd just peek back at 3e at look at the various options there. Many of those options can be converted to 4e with a bit of creativity, and they're worked out in much greater detail.
Fundamentally though, anything using skill checks can be grossly optimized via numerous techniques - and so you'll need another balancing factor when these become the measuring stick for power.
__________________
4e balanced random loot system
- Think item wishlists are devilspawn?
- Dislike the impact of a few bad item picks by the DM on the party?
- Or find it ludicrous that PC's constantly just "happen" to find magic items tailored to their needs?
Try: A simpler treasure system for (mostly) random loot.
3.5 death&dying variant
- Tired of players that won't cure their mortally wounded allies 'cause "he's only at -2"?
- Tired of a dying mechanic which uses anachronistic d10's?
- Tired of a dying mechanic which never kicks into action for high level characters, which tend to go from alive and kicking to instant death before anyone can intervene?
- Tired of horribly complex house rules?
Try: Death & Dying - a better (and simple!) system
Or just consider that sort of Warding/Binding ritual as Conjuring a Zone.
Oh look, Dispel Magic works now.
I'd possibly make it so the PC had to do an Arcana check, taking maybe an hour of study to correctly identify the Conjuration/Zone effect before being able to target it properly with Dispel Magic if I didn't want it dropped instantly by a good roll.
TBH all magic should have a dispel/curcumvent method. As WotC haven't made an "Undo Ritual" ritual I'd use Dispel Magic as a means for stopping long standing rituals in an area (as they sound like a Zone to me). Could also handwave it as short term dispelling as it isn't truely a Zone you are targetting (so you have 5-10 minutes to play with then you are going to need to deal with it again).
IMO rituals are cool. They don't break the game - as they take a long time, burn a lot of cash, and can only be powergamed if your DM is being stupid (Tarrasque in a Lvl 10 game = stupid, or intended to be bypassed like this, at which point it isn't powergaming).*
They are a good way of giving characters some nice "think about it and we might have a way around this" options. Some are a bit vague, but common sense and care generally fix this (and who wants rituals that take 20 minutes to read?)
*As someone said, a Lvl 30 Minion in a Lvl 5 game is just as abusable, as a party of players may well be able to prep, buff, ambush and kill it for insane XP if given the hour or so a ritual needs. In fact, Stinking Cloud + go first = win. Minion starts its turn in the effect = dies. It's the DM's job to stop this stupidity not the PC's, or WotC's.
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