Kamikaze Midget said:
It does? Naaah, just that the DM is ready to be a rat bastard to actually get his plot done. You want the myth, I give you the Odyssey, By the Rules.
No, you are breaking the rules.
As I said before, DM Fiat is not a satisfactory solution to high magic gaming. Trumping the players' ingenuity with "higher magic" is the same thing as taking that magic away.
Dude, PLANE SHIFT?! The spell is wildly inaccurate as a 'teleport substitute,'
I'm beginning to suspect that your high magic game works because either you don't know the rules, or your players don't know them well enough to exploit them, or both.
Plane shift is wildly inaccurate, yes. But it is never more than 500 miles off target-- well within range of teleport. You plane shift out, you plane shift back, you teleport home. Piece of cake for a high level, high magic game.
and there's no garuntee that in the bit of time you're on the planes you won't be harassed by some might outsider.
So you threaten clever PCs with random attacks. Never mind that the outer planes are near infinite and the odds of running into something at random are slim, nor that the PCs can plane shift to a friendly plane, or a friendly demi-plane of their own creation.
and a portable hole doesn't contain enough air(one creature for ten minutes divided by thousands of creatures.....the math don't seem to favor that, even for 6 seconds).
[sigh] They HOLD THEIR BREATH. It doesn't matter how much air the hole holds. I think that veterans of the Trojan war can manage to hold their breath for 6 seconds or so.
So plane shift does not work. Even on the odd chance they decided to do exactly as you posit, and the DM overlooked the 'breathable air inside a portable hole' thing, they risk a TPK at TWO points in the quest, when they are in Olympus, and when they land again (Perhaps directly in the ocean, where some sea creature can swallow them up without so much as a ceremony)....
Plane shift works fine. You just don't WANT it to work. You don't want it to work so badly that you concoct ridiculous threats (such as a sea creature just happening to be in the right place at the right time, within one round's movement and attack, to swallow the party before they teleport home.
Well, there's a few reasons she wouldn't or can't.
She should have done this ages ago. But ok, we'll let it go. We have more DM fiat to get to!
So now not only are you suffocating the crew in a hole, you're killing them....what kind of mook would agree to this?! It's disrespectful and decietful, and all too wicked.....
Why is it wicked or traumatic? Off they go to Mt. Olympus. They've earned some shore leave, I would think. And they get a true ressurrection to come back safe and whole and none the worse for wear. That's how the spell works-- unless you want to arbitrarily stomp on this tactic, too.
So no, Resurrection-transportation doesn't work, for moral quandries and logistical ones.
Works just fine according to the rules. But again, you don't want it to work, and what the DM says, goes.
Gate: Possiedon (who has control in Olympus nearing Zeus's) puts the kibash on it, since opening a gate into a deity's realm can be forbidden by the deity there.
Ok, so Zeus, who's on the PCs side, allows Poseidon to take dominion long enough to put the kibosh on Gate. Well, ok, that doesn't seem arbitrary at all, but we'll throw you another one.
Teleportation Circle: It's a 5-ft radius, not a large enough area to get a ship by any means. And Greater Teleport has many of the same problems as Regular Teleport (no distance limit, but then there are problems transporting the entire army, and the bringing of the trouble of the gods home with them).
Feel like doing a little math? The teleport circle is live for 170 minutes, minimum. How many greek veterans can Odysseus hustle across a path in the nearly 3 hours the circle is live? A human hustle is 90 feet of movement every 6 seconds, which means every 6 seconds you can move 18 men, running single file, across the teleportation circle. That's over 30,000 men, give or take.
Any other ideas you want me to defeat, or will you rest with that and accept the fact that high-level, high-magic adventures can have all the elements of a classic mythical story?
I suggested that high level games are not mythic because of the existence of teleport and ressurrection, among others, and you proceed to show me how you go about nerfing the use of those spells in order to prove a point.
Unfortunately, you proved MY point.
If you want to impress me, show me how a high magic game can work WITHOUT arbitrarily curbing the abilities of the PCs. You were all over the abilities of the players like a cheap suit.
Taking away their abilities only proves the low magic argument.
In Other News: I'm not sure it takes a potentially great DM to do this (though I'm flattered you think me in the realms of P-Kitty!). It just takes someone who's reading along, who knows the capabilities of the players, and who makes sure they know that no matter how powerful they are, there is *always* something more powerful out there,
So you need to know how plane shift works, for starters, and how long a human can hold his breath, and you need to be able to do math, and when all else fails, you need to be able to threaten, cajole, or browbeat the players into forgoing the use of their most potent abilities.
I guess that sums it up.
Wulf