Fighters didn't matter after 11th level?

[ProfessorPain]

No, I wanted an example of an encounter that would deplete caster resources more significantly than a "normal" encounter without overpowering the non-casters.

This depends on what spells the spellcaster relies on and uses. I always tailor encounters to my player characters. But if I know the wizard has access to things like fireball, I may throw something at them that will be weakened by things like fire. Anytime you throw a flying creature into the mix, wizards are prone to unleash a bunch of spells. A large number of really weak opponents also is good. Most wizards can't resist an opportnity to use their area of effect spells. Its more about anticipating what spells your players will throw at what creatures. With any player, you learn what spells they rely on; and you adapt.

 

[insanogeddon]

Casters/Cash

If the wealth per level is stuck too, nevermind elementary adventure design and cause and effect I cannot fathom how casters manage all they are claimed to be able to do. As a wizard you have to find spells, roll to learn them, then scribe them into your book at 100 gp per page, 1 page per spell level, in a book with 100 pages and each spell takes 24 hours to scribe. Then to memorise "The wizard’s surroundings need not be luxurious, but they must be free from overt distractions. Exposure to inclement weather prevents the necessary concentration, as does any injury or failed saving throw the character might experience while studying."

The cost adds up, the time adds up (I won't waste on the ones I don't need to expressly traumatise the DM). Really heroic campaigns have time limits. Opponents aint silly... how often are PCs in a 'private sanctum' they can be scryed, or if in a complex of anothers evil design opponents can burrow/port in to disrupt never mind the ever useful 'nightmare' spell.

Nightmare is pretty standard, pcs sell of their possesions at a alarming rate as they level and get/make better so its pretty obvious for the ancient intelegent inspired big bad to get possesions and make dang sure the mighty mages and warriors comming for it are assaulted when they ARE NOT READY.

Spells are a 2 way street. If your in a campaign were its skewed to where you have all the spells, magic items and bright ideas of course the casters (or anything else skewed/biased) reigns suppreme.

As a fighter you also are not in the slightest effected by a dip or 3 as they have HP and attack bonus to spare so you can probly cover your own healing between combats with the cheapest healings available (wands of cure light and lesser vigour), not that you need a dip if your a ranger or pally. Warriors can dip legitamately without needing a mollycoddling system that provides prestige classes with bunches o bonuses and no penalties to compensate for simplicity.

Granted it takes real tactical skill to play a warrior well.

 

[Victim]

A wizard can greatly reduce his cost of scribing spells by paying upfront by crafting a Blessed Book.

High level casters tended to run around with Mind Blank much of the time, negating scrying, Nightmare, and many other attacks.

At the levels we're talking about, a wizard pretty much can live out of a Rope Trick or Magnificent Mansion.

Clerics and Druids get all their spells for free and don't strictly need rest, IIRC.

 

[Cadfan]

In my experiene 3E parties don't function well if clerics don't use healing slots.

There's a game in my area, a 3.5 game, where the party's tactics boil down to this: The fighter charges into battle. The cleric buffs himself and stays out of battle. After a round or two, the fighter is almost dead. The cleric walks in, casts Heal on the fighter, and then beats the monsters to death.

I have to give major credit to the player of the cleric. He's used some incredible real life social skills to convince the fighter's player that the fighter's contribution is incredibly important. If someone didn't protect the cleric while he hulked up, their best weapon (the cleric) wouldn't work.

Righteous Might + Divine Power =
+6 enhancement bonus to strength
+4 size bonus to strength
A fighter's base attack bonus and iterative attacks
Temporary hit points equal to your level
+2 size bonus to constitution and resulting hit points
+2 enhancement bonus to natural armor
Damage reduction versus evil, scales with level
Large size (may be a disadvantage, should be negated by the above bonuses though)
Reach
Your weapon becomes large and increases in die size

This is the sort of thing that people are talking about when they mention that the party is usually better off with two clerics instead of one fighter and one cleric. Any disadvantages created by having to cast buff spells before entering battle are made up for by the advantages of a full suite of clerical spells. After all, if the party takes a beating while the casters hulk up, the casters can just heal the party.

 

[ProfessorPain]

There's a game in my area, a 3.5 game, where the party's tactics boil down to this: The fighter charges into battle. The cleric buffs himself and stays out of battle. After a round or two, the fighter is almost dead. The cleric walks in, casts Heal on the fighter, and then beats the monsters to death.

I have to give major credit to the player of the cleric. He's used some incredible real life social skills to convince the fighter's player that the fighter's contribution is incredibly important. If someone didn't protect the cleric while he hulked up, their best weapon (the cleric) wouldn't work.

Righteous Might + Divine Power =
+6 enhancement bonus to strength
+4 size bonus to strength
A fighter's base attack bonus and iterative attacks
Temporary hit points equal to your level
+2 size bonus to constitution and resulting hit points
+2 enhancement bonus to natural armor
Damage reduction versus evil, scales with level
Large size (may be a disadvantage, should be negated by the above bonuses though)
Reach
Your weapon becomes large and increases in die size

This is the sort of thing that people are talking about when they mention that the party is usually better off with two clerics instead of one fighter and one cleric. Any disadvantages created by having to cast buff spells before entering battle are made up for by the advantages of a full suite of clerical spells. After all, if the party takes a beating while the casters hulk up, the casters can just heal the party.

But they can do this to themselves and buff the fighter too. It isn't always an either or. In my groups the cleric and fighter usually confer before hand. You are also talking about two spells here. That means the cleric is doing nothing but casting for two rounds while he buffs. In my group, the fighters wouldn't let a cleric get away with doing nothing for two rounds, so he can take all the glory.

The problem with the two cleric approach is it takes time to buff. Unless they know combat is around the corner, they can't cast the buffs till combat begins. You don't want two members of the party casting buffs for two rounds in high level combat. Not to mention, the fewer fighter types you have to protect the clerics, the greater the chance they get interupted while casting.

Again, this comes down to DM management. I had a player doing stuff like this in one of my campaigns. Basically he let the other party do a bunch of work while he cast 2-3 buff spells on himself. There are a few ways to handle it. One, if it bothers the other players, they can just bring it up themselves. Buffing yourself to get all the glory, and not casting spells on the other characters is kind of an jerk thing to do. Another is to make it harder for the cleric to pull his buffs off. If he insists on spending two to three rounds buffing up, make him pay for it. Have the enemy attack him. Or another is to have them go up against casters that can effectively undo the buffs with reduction spells.

 

[insanogeddon]

PHB 1 and 2

Figter prob has a beginning strength 6 points higher (2 at first level then level), Fighter gets first dibbs on str items so prob has +4 or +6 to str that is an enhancement bonus just like divine power.

Fighter gets wpn foc, spec, greater foc, greater spec, wpn mastery, improved crit and a martial wpn etc

Fighter has power attack and then probably some extra damage rort: leap attack/2 weapon etc

Fighter got 2 extra rounds of attacks.


Cleric buffs just equate things. Further to equate to a fighter the cleric needs to be designed in a way that make him inferior to most other clerics.

The group with a high caster level cleric: fighter buffing, group healling, greater dispelling cleric will take down the group with melle clerics quick smart. As in our campaigns the DM occasionally has pointed out thru NPCs. Why clerics buff and go into melle is beyond me as frankly harm equals a buffed clerics damage output pretty well, and heal or mass heal heals more than they can damage so its just diminished returns of a paper tiger living in a glass house throwing lava till a real group (i mean a standard role oriented group) that never suffers from all the deaths that plague some come and eat tham.

 

[Victim]

My group always found cleric buffs like Recitation to be amazing. Everyone gets +2 AC, saves, and attack (the cleric and maybe some other people get +3). It helps the fighter. It helps the cleric fight. It means people generally need fewer heals (saves and AC reducing damage), so there's less need for emergency heals that cost the cleric combat actions.

Casting Divine Power and Righteous Might without some form of quick casting or Persistent is incredibly slow. That's two rounds down (3 in Cadfan's example since the cleric needs to cast Heal) without really having any offensive payout from the those rounds. If we have a 5 round fight, the cleric buffing himself has only 60% of the time for attack actions. So Divine Power+Righteous Might has to add 66% to the cleric's melee damage just to break even with expending no spells.

A mass buff like Recitation or Righteous Wrath can start paying for itself right away via your teammate's actions.

Sure, Divine Power (which does become somewhat less important as the cleric gets his own good STR items) and Righteous Might are a good combo. But it's not exactly an easy call for most fights when you look at setup time (and with rounds durations, it's not all that easy to bring them up outside of combat).

And note that damage early is better than damage later.

 

[Ydars]

It does indeed come down to DM style because there are loads of annoying things that can really stuff casters: like anyone who casts in combat drawing immediate attacks. Or how about feats like Mage Slayer, that mean that spell-casters always fail concentration checks when adjacent to you, and so cannot cast spells. What can you do if even low level monsters with the Mage Slayer feat get close to your casters: they are in serious trouble and only the mundane characters can dig them out of it.

Surprise attacks are deadly to most casters because they don't have time to react. I think wizards are incredibly vulnerable to being taken out in one hit. And if you think scry/buff/teleport is bad when the PCs do it, watch what happens when my monsters do..........

Then the PC casters have to waste spells every day preventing this sort of stuff, by having anticipate teleport or detect scrying up at all times: it really depletes them and makes them cranky. And when you know your enemies will also use force-cage, it gets annoying having to keep your disintegrate spells ready and unused for this.

It is actually my experience that the mage is the first character to go down in a high level fight very often, because they are an attack magnet. The same goes for the cleric/druid. As a DM, I just focus fire for a round or two and they usually go down and once they are down, the rest of the party start to sweat. Obviously, you don't always target the same characters but there are ways of causing mayhem if you think creatively. I seem to remember that casters in my games are VERY nervous about openly casting in combat for this reason.

There is also the problem of missing spell books: these are very vulnerable to lots of mishaps and without a book, the caster is stuffed.

And as for casters being able to do everyone else's job, who said that all traps over CR 25 have to be magical? I routinely include mundane traps that are well hidden and don't register to detect magic. Since ONLY Rogues can use search to find mundane traps over DC 21, not having a Rogue about is tantamount to suicide. Find traps is all very well, but who walks around with that up all the time, and if they do, more spells are wasted on this kind of preventative activity. If something is not magic, then the casters have virtually no way to tell if it is there and so no reason to cast a spell. By the time they find out they are wrong, they are dead......................

Magic item creation is also problematic if you maintain a strict campaign chronology so that 5 days of crafting means no adventuring at all for your character. This can be a very bad idea if world shaping events are happening, and one serious attack on your home base and all your time is wasted.

AS a DM, I just love PCs who create undead minions. Command Undead is a very low level spell and allows anyone, even a 3rd level wizard, to take command of your new minion automatically (no save) and turn it back on you. It doesn't look so clever when your Hydra Skeleton turns around and starts battering you with all your protection out in front. Indeed, a wizard can go down in one round from this sort of tactic. I love including a few low level casters in any set of monsters for just this sort of thing. If the party have been really "clever" they will have a number of undead minions with them for me to play with . Oddly, my PCs don't do this anymore............................

 

[Runestar]

I am not sure if the cleric has sufficient slots to consistently buff both the fighter and himself. So you may need to settle for buffed cleric + fighter instead, rather than buffed fighter + healing cleric. If you can support buffed cleric + buffed fighter, all the better.

Typically, the party will rely on wands of vigor/CLW in between fights to heal, with touch of healing feat/belt of healing/SNA: unicorn to supplement as need be.

Though you are right in that heal is pretty much the only healing spell I would consider casting. Plus it combos nicely with amulet of retributive healing.

 

[Wolfwood2]

Again, this comes down to DM management. I had a player doing stuff like this in one of my campaigns. Basically he let the other party do a bunch of work while he cast 2-3 buff spells on himself. There are a few ways to handle it. One, if it bothers the other players, they can just bring it up themselves. Buffing yourself to get all the glory, and not casting spells on the other characters is kind of an jerk thing to do. Another is to make it harder for the cleric to pull his buffs off. If he insists on spending two to three rounds buffing up, make him pay for it. Have the enemy attack him. Or another is to have them go up against casters that can effectively undo the buffs with reduction spells.

There was a really awesome phrase used earlier in this thread. "A lot of effort in pursuit of a dubious goal". That's what I think of every time I read one of your posts.

The DM can manage all of this, sure. The DM can drive the game reality so that there's a lot of baddies and the PCs can't pause to rest (while making sure all these baddies aren't bunched in one place and just straight-out kill the unrested party). THe DM can make it harder to pull buffs off. The DM can work the game so that non-caster can shine.

But you know what? A lot of DMs don't have the time or inclination to think about this stuff. And frankly, I'd prefer that my DM be able to spend his limited planning time on stuff like the unique culture of the fantasy kingdom, the internal politics of the organization the PCs belong to, and fluff stuff like that. I'd rather not have them putting in a lot of effort in pursuit of the dubious goal of making sure that magic feels 'special', yet non-casters still have interesting things to do.

4E starts out with the premise that everybody should have interesting things to do and builds the entire system around that. Making magic feel special is regulated to the secondary goal rather than a primary precept. If a DM puts the same effort into making magic feel special that he did into making sure that magic didn't overpower encounters in 3E, it ought to feel pretty darn special.

It goes back into something said in the article. Third edition was/is such an awesome system that many players and DMs accepted the more troublesome parts of it as "just the way things are'. Magic gets to break the rules of the game system because that's just the way things are because magic is special, and we use the excellent tools that third edition provides to get around that problem. But why should we have to?