Why is flight considered a game breaker?

[StreamOfTheSky]

1e is a whole different beast than 3e when it comes to magic items. 1e magic items were priced according to the percieved utility of the item, and because Enchant Item and Permenance were so high level (to say nothing of Wish, which was implied to also be a common requirement), they were generally nigh impossible to manufacture. The practice of making magic items freely available for purchase was highly looked down upon, and so if you found something it was usually off a random table or becaues the DM placed it. In either case, it was only there if the DM was willing to accept the results of having a ring of invisibility in his game. Magic items were considered the exclusive territory of the DM, and so much a perusing the DMG when you weren't the one running a campaign was considered bad form.

All 3E changed was making the rules more clear and uniform. Or actually putting rules in place where once an issue was handled solely by DM fiat. If you don't want PCs able to buy a magic item, don't put it in a store! If you don't want them to be able to make the item for themselves, don't give them the lengthy downtime it requires to make said item! If you just plain don't want the item to exist, ban it! You're the DM for crying out loud! No edition changed that.

3e is different in every regard. PC's are empowered to create their own items and can do so easily at low levels using readily available commodities (feats, spells, XP, and gold) rather than an unknown or even unknowable list of random hard to obtain items combined with spells which required major sacrifices to cast and were generally not obtained at the usual levels of play anyway. Many campaigns readily accept the notion that gold is freely tradable for any item of the player's choice, and PC's generally have the equipment that they want when they want it and even plan out what equipment that they plan to have at a given level.

Again, that's a campagin style decision of the DM. I've been in 3E games where the party had NOTHING. Like, we were frantically grabbing at shackles that had previously held us captive just to have some sor of weapon that could deal lethal damage. Seriously nothing. I've been in others where there truly were magic Walmarts for anything you could desire. And I've been in lots of in between those extremes. Either extreme can work, or fail miserably, depending on how well thought out the DM's approach is. In the slave game example, it didn't work out too well, because he was shocked his changes unevenly hurt Fighters (though the Wizard was the most hurt; not even a spell component pouch nor spellbook = "That's why you had to make him as an NPC, none of us wanted to deal with that !") more than casters, and was also surprised that a CR 5 monster was an easy TPK for our level 5 party and thus we wisely ran away almost immediately (he had expected it to be a run of the mill fight). If he had actually given some thought into what his campaign style would do to the game, it could have been a really fun game, as it was aside from his poor expectations on encounter balance. I also had a game where the DM never exerted any control at all and simply let out evil party conquer lands for their own, massively tax the populace with not a single drawback or revolt, and use that money to buy crazy stuff like a Mirror of Opposition. At level 9. Again, not the system's fault, she was just far too much of a hands-off DM. And again, aside from the gross imbalance that led us to actually utterly destroying the level 20 NPC party she sicced on us intending to put a merciful end to the game, it was a fun game. My friend and I have used character background and plot elements from that game in at least half a dozen campaigns since. Don't know how this got so long, but the point is...this isn't the fault of an edition.

There are numerous problems with both models in my opinion, but the biggest single problem with the 3e model is that is 'one size fits all' system for pricing magic items does not in any fashion take into account the actual utility of the item. For a game that prides itself on balance in a way that 1e did not this is an amazing oversight.

The DMG is pretty clear that the table for magic item pricing is a guideline. Not much to say beyond that. Other than that if you look at the specific DMG magic items themselves, it's obvious in many cases that they didn't exactly follow said guidelines themselves.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that the 3e item creation rules are the least balanced and most abusable part of the system, which makes it amazing to me that they escaped as much scrutiny as they did. A 3e ring of invisibility is priced as a relatively minor item. This suggests all sorts of major problems with the system.

By the time you can reasonably be expected to afford a ring of invisibility (keeping in mind that until then, you've been saving up a wad of cash and been significantly weaker than a hypothetical similar PC who spent it as he got it), you could have just been say...a Pixie... and had at will GREATER Invisibility anyway. Probably for a few levels prior to getting the ring. The ring of Invisibility isn't undervalued. You just overvalue it. It's a level 2 spell, and lots of monsters can use it by the time you get the ring. As can the caster use it (or buff with it) for many levels by then. If you want a lower magic setting, limit the levels by playing E6 or E8, severely nerf casters and eliminate most magic items, or do something along those lines. Otherwise, accept that the game is no longer "grim and gritty" after PCs reach level 6 or so and that the game has different tiers of power levels. Also, as a Rogue who eagerly used the Ring of Invisibility in a game as early as he could get it -- level 8-9 in his case -- it's really not THAT amazing. You get one atack off. And then you get the attention of all the enemies and they make you a priority target before you can go invisible again. Fun. Or if they're smart, they toss a homing spell like Spiritual Weapon, or a covering spell like Glitterdust (or even mundane flour, dirt, etc...) something to leave a trail for when you go invisible... You also still have to make the Move Silently checks or they can generally know the square or area you're in.

My general rule (ie, it's just "a guideline," like with item creation tables ) is that for "gamechanger" spells like Invisibility and Fly, they tend to be fairly devastating when first becoming available, but thankfully also typically of limited use. By the time they can be frequently or reliably used, roughly 5 levels after initial availability, EVERY character should have a means to deal with or counter it. And if they don't, it's their fault. A level 10 Fighter can easily afford a potion of Fly, and if he really was concerned, could even have Boots of Flying by then, for example. At the very least, he could bother to have a decent ranged weapon, which is probably his best counter for the tactic around level 5 when it first becomes an issue.

One of the single most abused spells in the games history and one of the most frequent complaints about the 1e system, not only by me but by players generally. The biggest problem here is the 1e version of the spell had unlimited duration. So long as you didn't attack, it was permenent. And as a 2nd level spell, it came up almost immediately in a way that much of the brokenness of the game never did. What made the problem even worse is that 1e didn't have a well thought out system for dealing with invisibility the way 3e does. There was no concept like 3e's 'Scent' ability, and the table for detecting an invisible foe wasn't really easily integrated with 1e's concept of attributeless monsters.

Yes, 3E has a lot of counters for invisibility in the system. And at higher levels, high Hide checks actually are arguably more useful than invisibility, as spells like True Seeing become almost ubiquitous and render magical hiding worthless.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Flight combined with melee is usually a disadvantage unless the melee attacher has perfect manueverability. Flight+melee tends to be very ineffective because manueverability restrictions tend to limit you to attacking only every 3-4 rounds, during which time the foe can pummel you with ranged weapons.

Well, you can hover with Good maneuverability, you don't need perfect.
Quibble aside, one other effect of Flight + Melee is making ranged combat in general less useful. When it becomes easy to reach almost any enemy, nowhere is safe for the ranged attacker to fall back to, and his advantage of targetting almost anyone becomes a mere first round advantage instead. When you combine this with say...splat material to make a 90 degree turn during a charge (so you can now charge up at a 45 degree angle over obstaces and back down 45 degrees to the target) or even better, to gain Pounce (Lion Totem Barbarian FTW), ranged combat becomes litterally worthless.

However, while I agree that the combat problem comes with the absolute advantage of flight + ranged in an open environment, too little focus is given to the utility of magical flight relative to the alternatives like climb, balance, jump, move silently, and even (at times) trap finding. One of the easiest ways to demonstrate this is to run ToH with a party that can't fly and one that can. A flying party renders the problem solving in probably 75% of ToH trivial. You just don't even set off the traps, and the only reason that the flying party is likely to die is the overconfidence such a strategy tends to cultivate. Which incidently is one of my main problems with flight and its ilk - it a crutch and players that depend on it tend to be helpless when its removed because they aren't used to problem solving. Flight is effectively a very large blunt instrument for dealing with problems.

Avoid a lot of traps, maybe, but flight in a dungeon has plenty of other problems. Most of the fighting and exploring time IME has been in dungeon type environments. In all of the games I've been in. Almost always, these dungeons are tight and cramped enough so that, while you may still be able to fly, you're still at risk from enemies with reach weapons and/or good jump mods, and spiders and such climbing the walls and ceilings can easily attack you. Even when the dungeons are larger, it's often to accomodate larger creature sizes living there, so even then, they still can reach you...

Flight's most powerful in open environments. But, just like how on paper, Entangle is one of the best 1st level spells in the game, IME there just isn't enough outdoor combat, or when there is outdoor combat it's typically random encounters or relatively unimportant to the plot "filler" ones, such that it's never actually caused a problem thus far.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Great analysis regarding absolutes, Celebrim, I'd xp you for it if I could but I can't.

 

[Celebrim]

All 3E changed was making the rules more clear and uniform.

I'm not even sure how to respond to a claim like that, since it seems to have totally ignored the evidence I presented and went on to assert a completely unsupported contrary claim. Since you present no evidence to refute and ignored the evidence I presented without attempting to refute it, all I can say is you are just wrong. 3e and 1e are totally different in their handling of magic items.

Or actually putting rules in place where once an issue was handled solely by DM fiat. If you don't want PCs able to buy a magic item, don't put it in a store! If you don't want them to be able to make the item for themselves, don't give them the lengthy downtime it requires to make said item! If you just plain don't want the item to exist, ban it! You're the DM for crying out loud! No edition changed that.

First of all, your first sentence in that is contridicted by everything else you say in that section. On the one hand you want to claim that there are rules for handling issues that were once handled solely by DM fiat, but then all your supporting evidence is that it still should be handled by DM fiat.

Secondly, do you realize how lame a defence, "Well, you are the DM, change things.", actually is? That's not a defence at all. That's an admission.

As for your litany recounting your bad DMing experiences, that sounds more like an admission than a defense as well. While its not the fault of the system per se, the fact that these things take an inexperienced DM by surprise is IMO a fault of, if not the system per se, then the guidelines provided to the DM. It's incredible to me that you would talk about how all of this can be handled easily by departing from the guidelines on one hand, and not note the irony of how easily the game breaks in the hands of anyone but the most experienced GM's when you do. You also seem to fail to totally miss the irony of telling me how this doesn't matter because there are more powerful game breaking effects available soon thereafter. I mean a ring of invisibility isn't undercosted because you could make a pixie PC instead? Seriously???

How can I argue against logic like that?

 

[Doug McCrae]

Flight's most powerful in open environments.

This is true. Most D&D games are largely set indoors, I would imagine. But for those that aren't, as has been the case with many of our campaigns, flight is very good. For example, the last campaign I played in was piratical, with not that many dungeons and a lot of ship-based action. As it happened no one played a caster but if they had flight would've been amazing. A druid's wildshape into a bird, or even a wizard's familiar, would have provided a very useful scouting capability.

This raises an interesting question - whether D&D is a fantasy toolbox or does it, unmodified, only support a fairly limited style of play? I would say the latter. Eschewing dungeons causes all sorts of problems. Vancian casters are really only balanced in dungeons because they are one of the few means to provide many encounters within a short space of time.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

I'm not even sure how to respond to a claim like that, since it seems to have totally ignored the evidence I presented and went on to assert a completely unsupported contrary claim. Since you present no evidence to refute and ignored the evidence I presented without attempting to refute it, all I can say is you are just wrong. 3e and 1e are totally different in their handling of magic items.

3E had feats to create items. 3E had pricing guidelines. While for use-activated spell magic items they weren't particularly solid, for wands, scrolls, weapons, and armor they were. The creation process was coherent and defined.

First of all, your first sentence in that is contridicted by everything else you say in that section. On the one hand you want to claim that there are rules for handling issues that were once handled solely by DM fiat, but then all your supporting evidence is that it still should be handled by DM fiat.

No...I said if you don't like the standard progression of magic items in a campaign, use DM fiat. If you're fine with it, the DM doesn't really have to do much of anything. In older editions of D&D, DM fiat was required no matter what, because the rules for magic item creation, etc... were undefined or poorly defined. Changing things you don't like is different than needing to invent things at all.

Secondly, do you realize how lame a defence, "Well, you are the DM, change things.", actually is? That's not a defence at all. That's an admission.

Like I said, I don't mind flight or invisibility, or any of the other gamechanger spells. The game's set up for the PCs to get access to that stuff after a while, and works fine so long as the DM doesn't delude himself into thinking a standard pit trap is going to be a serious obstacle for a high level party. If you want a standard pit trap (as opposed to one with a column of antimagic field above it, magically enhanced spider webs to ensnare people flying over it, an NPC at the bottom needing rescue from a monster that lurks there, or some other feature to make it a hassle for flying PCs) to be a hassle to be a challenge for a party with access to mid/high level spells and items, then yeah, you need to tweak the game.

As for your litany recounting your bad DMing experiences, that sounds more like an admission than a defense as well. While its not the fault of the system per se, the fact that these things take an inexperienced DM by surprise is IMO a fault of, if not the system per se, then the guidelines provided to the DM. It's incredible to me that you would talk about how all of this can be handled easily by departing from the guidelines on one hand, and not note the irony of how easily the game breaks in the hands of anyone but the most experienced GM's when you do. You also seem to fail to totally miss the irony of telling me how this doesn't matter because there are more powerful game breaking effects available soon thereafter. I mean a ring of invisibility isn't undercosted because you could make a pixie PC instead? Seriously???

How can I argue against logic like that?

An inexperienced DM in any edition can end up with vastly unbalanced PC parties or encounters. Do you think otherwise? How's a 4E party do at level 10 with no magic items at all and no change to the monsters used? How's a 1E party lavished with many times more magic item treasure than the suggested wealth by level (oh wait...did 1E even have any sort of guideline like that? My bad...) says they should have fare?

Okay...if you think playing a pixie PC is overpowered (I don't, one or two good hits and you're dead for most levels, I don't like to be that vulnerable)...how about because a spellcaster can use invisibility from level 3+? Again, if you're using typical wealth and not completely saving up every penny you own for this one item liek a lunatic, AND it's easily obtained from a store when you do have the money...you're getting it at what? Level 8? 9? By which time a spellcaster can cast it many times per day if he wanted to anyway? And you could have had so much other stuff instead of the ring. But hey, now in combat, you can get off one sneak attack every two rounds, awesome! I guess a caster could sit back and buff or summon...but they could do that just by casting Invisibility anyway... Out of combat for sneaking, it still lasts only a few minutes per use and needs a spoken command word to reactivate. There's still plenty of means to at least alert others to your precense if not your exact location. And a dedicated sneak rogue by that level could probably scout just as well as you anyway.

This raises an interesting question - whether D&D is a fantasy toolbox or does it, unmodified, only support a fairly limited style of play? I would say the latter. Eschewing dungeons causes all sorts of problems. Vancian casters are really only balanced in dungeons because they are one of the few means to provide many encounters within a short space of time.

I also think it's the latter. What would class balance be like in a completely urban political intrigue type game with almost no combat, if you made no changes to the rules aside from campaign setting, for example? I don't see warriors and druids being particularly useful.

 

[Votan]

1) Spells are one of the most common ways to gain flight. It should be explicit that if you are flying when the spell is dispelled, you are automatically falling. 3e removed this drawback, much to its loss in my opinion.
2) Flight, and in particular flight with 'Excellent' or better manueverability, is generally underpriced in my opinion. Either reduce the quality of magical flight from spells directly (or make the manuevarability scale with level of caster, with poor manueverability generally available early on), or else increase the level of the spells (or both).

I like the point about maneaverability and falling. One of the balances of flight in more realistic setting is that it is loud (think planes but even birds aren't silent) and it's dangerous to be hit int he air. Fligth would still be a useful ability if it was noisy, could be dispelled and if you could lose control of it after a hit from a ranged weapon.

This would not break most fantasy tropes but would make the decision to fly in battle more of a trade-off.

The same is often true of teleport. If teleport works like the tardis (noisy as it arrives), requires knowledge of the target, can go wrong (see 1E teleport where there was always a 1% risk of death) and takes time to cast (say one minute) then it's a lot harder to abuse.

Alternatively, if you can teleport a maximum of 100 feet it doesn't matter if it is just a move action or not.

The key to these abilities is that they have drawbacks. If you don't want to include drawbacks then the only option is assume that there has been an arms race already and nobody is left who isn't actively countering these abilities (modern soldiers, for example, all assume that opponents have nasty ranged weapons and develop their tactics as needed). It's a different sort of game but might be fun in it's own way . . .

 

[Beginning of the End]

Re: Teleport. I use these house rules, which are designed to eliminate the tactical problems and mitigate the strategic issues without completely nerfing the spell.

 

[billd91]

All 3E changed was making the rules more clear and uniform. Or actually putting rules in place where once an issue was handled solely by DM fiat. If you don't want PCs able to buy a magic item, don't put it in a store! If you don't want them to be able to make the item for themselves, don't give them the lengthy downtime it requires to make said item! If you just plain don't want the item to exist, ban it! You're the DM for crying out loud! No edition changed that.

I think 3e went a little bit farther than just making the rules more clear and uniform. The ability to make scrolls went from, I believe, 7th level to 1st level and the ability to make permanent magic items went from 11th level to 3rd in most cases. Both changes, standard rules and lower level requirements, can significantly increase the ability of PCs to determine the nature of their own magic items. They take obtaining the Big 6 (as people like to talk about) from being a pipe dream to most players to being a reasonable strategy. That's, I think, pretty big.

Of course, play style preferences for both sets of editions (pre/post 3e) could change that. There were plenty of DMs giving PCs whatever they wanted back in 1e/2e and there were plenty of DMs being tighter-fisted with magic in 3e.

I would like to say that the game's default assumptions have a significant impact on player and DM expectations, particularly when not experienced with an alternative. Coming from 1e, I didn't see anything particularly wrong with allowing PCs to commission or sell magic items. The 1e DMG had prices for all of the items so clearly some economy in the items was assumed. Making the shift to 3e wasn't too hard. Contrast that with someone coming out of 2e with its default assumption that magic items were too valuable to be available for sale or purchase (the DMG had no money values on the items). They might have had a little more trouble... or they might have had a lot more pent up demand for it leading to a 3e magic item binge. Then 3e comes along and not only do magic items have a monetary value again, but that value is used to determine how difficult is it to make and is used as a gauge to pace a character's treasure acquisition over his career. It's really no wonder that some people see the wealth by level and magic items as a rudimentary point-buy system for power-ups akin to spending points on powers in Mutants and Masterminds or Champions.

That's an attitude that can flow from the rules that wasn't present in 1e or 2e (though it's not our only possible attitude). And it is different.

 

[Garthanos]

Vancian casters are really only balanced in dungeons because they are one of the few means to provide many encounters within a short space of time.

Change that to dailies or similar time restricted empowerment and you're on. ;p. Hence some of the discussions about changing dailies to 'inspired powers' and tying recharging more to abstractions like milestones (just one example)

I reallly dont like forced pacing ... the above allows it to be somewhat more natural with regards to game world time... but those having non-combat encounters still enter combat encounters more refreshed unless non-combat encounters also drain on dailies (not that many seem to).