Manbearcat
Legend
That makes 2 (assuming pemerton is still up for it).
Fighters vs. Spellcasters (a case for fighters.)
- Thread starter cross ofth carpenter
- Start date
That makes 2 (assuming pemerton is still up for it).
LostSoul
Adventurer
I wouldn't mind taking part - though you might want to take others.
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
At least one more.
Manbearcat
Legend
Campbell
Relaxed Intensity
Just cleared it out.
Hussar
Legend
Really? Imagine we play using the random dungeon generator in the back of the AD&D DMG. Now, we're in a situation where everything is being made up as you go along. But, the entire group, not just the players, but the DM too, is now exploring the dungeon.
Add on another layer where you might be exploring what another player is establishing. Remember, it's not just two groups who can establish facts - the DM and the players, it's everyone at the table. Bob might establish that the King is a diabolist just as easily as the DM does. If he sells the idea well enough, everyone else at the table gloms on and explores that concept.
Hussar
Legend
Just going to beat the dead Glabrezu for a second. 
This little back and forth with N'raac pretty much highlights everything I loathe in a DM. This is the kind of thing that drives me straight up the wall and the primary reason why I started DMing the way that I do.
For me, I look at it like this. The player has done everything right. He's in character (evil wizard trying to summon a demon to gain a wish), he's in genre (again, evil wizard summoning a demon for nefarious ends), and he's followed both the letter of the rules and the intent. He's spent significant character resources (Magic Circle, various protection spells, possibly done a bit of research with a sage, found a place where he can actually cast the Planar Binding etc) and, more importantly to me, he's spent time on this. Both in game and out of game in all likelihood. You don't drop Planar Binding spells on a whim after all.
And the biggest thing of all. He succeeded. Had he failed, then fine. The Glabrezu pulls his arms off, eats his head and trots off back to the Abyss. No problems. But, that didn't happen. He succeeded. He summoned the demon.
He did everything right.
And the DM still screws him over. "Sorry, yes, I know that you just spent several levels, significant amounts of time and energy trying to do this, but, the demon tells you that he's already granted a wish recently and he just can't help you. No amount of torture will change this. It's actually the truth."
People can talk about playstyles all they like. To me this is the absolute nadir of DMing. DM's who do this deserve to have player revolts.
Actually, as a gaming story, that's exactly what happened in the first player revolt I ever saw (not led, and not the last). Playing a 2e D&D game in the Keep on the Borderlands, the group decided to rob the jewel merchant in the keep. One of the players spent a ton of time on this. Several sessions of learning the jewel merchant's schedule, lots of planning, whole Ocean's Eleven type thing going on. Fantastic. He got the entire group on board and we were all ready to go.
The DM announces, "The morning before your heist, the Merchant packed up his entire inventory and left. He left before dawn and no, you have no idea where he went and no way you can catch him".
The entire group, as one, finished the session, thanked the DM, and walked out, never to return.
Look, as a DM, if you don't like something, just tell me. The whole Astral Projection thing is the result of a poorly worded spell and anyone can see that. Allowing infinite wishes isn't due to a generous interpretation, it's because the spell is badly written. Any DM who just said, "Hey, look, y'know what? Infinite wishes are a bad thing for the game. Let's not do that" can very reasonably expect the players to agree.
But, instead, the players operate on the assumption that the mechanics are in play, only to have the rug yanked out of them by the DM in a very passive/agreesive way. Instead of just being honest and saying no, the DM instead manipulates the setting so that now every court the PC's visit has 3 court wizards to block any magical shenanigans, every Noble Genie is bestest friends with the rulers of the elemental planes and can never be summoned.
And Glabrezu appear having already cast their Wish recently.
What baffles me beyond imagination is why players put up with this. I honestly cannot see the appeal.
This little back and forth with N'raac pretty much highlights everything I loathe in a DM. This is the kind of thing that drives me straight up the wall and the primary reason why I started DMing the way that I do.
For me, I look at it like this. The player has done everything right. He's in character (evil wizard trying to summon a demon to gain a wish), he's in genre (again, evil wizard summoning a demon for nefarious ends), and he's followed both the letter of the rules and the intent. He's spent significant character resources (Magic Circle, various protection spells, possibly done a bit of research with a sage, found a place where he can actually cast the Planar Binding etc) and, more importantly to me, he's spent time on this. Both in game and out of game in all likelihood. You don't drop Planar Binding spells on a whim after all.
And the biggest thing of all. He succeeded. Had he failed, then fine. The Glabrezu pulls his arms off, eats his head and trots off back to the Abyss. No problems. But, that didn't happen. He succeeded. He summoned the demon.
He did everything right.
And the DM still screws him over. "Sorry, yes, I know that you just spent several levels, significant amounts of time and energy trying to do this, but, the demon tells you that he's already granted a wish recently and he just can't help you. No amount of torture will change this. It's actually the truth."
People can talk about playstyles all they like. To me this is the absolute nadir of DMing. DM's who do this deserve to have player revolts.
Actually, as a gaming story, that's exactly what happened in the first player revolt I ever saw (not led, and not the last). Playing a 2e D&D game in the Keep on the Borderlands, the group decided to rob the jewel merchant in the keep. One of the players spent a ton of time on this. Several sessions of learning the jewel merchant's schedule, lots of planning, whole Ocean's Eleven type thing going on. Fantastic. He got the entire group on board and we were all ready to go.
The DM announces, "The morning before your heist, the Merchant packed up his entire inventory and left. He left before dawn and no, you have no idea where he went and no way you can catch him".
The entire group, as one, finished the session, thanked the DM, and walked out, never to return.
Look, as a DM, if you don't like something, just tell me. The whole Astral Projection thing is the result of a poorly worded spell and anyone can see that. Allowing infinite wishes isn't due to a generous interpretation, it's because the spell is badly written. Any DM who just said, "Hey, look, y'know what? Infinite wishes are a bad thing for the game. Let's not do that" can very reasonably expect the players to agree.
But, instead, the players operate on the assumption that the mechanics are in play, only to have the rug yanked out of them by the DM in a very passive/agreesive way. Instead of just being honest and saying no, the DM instead manipulates the setting so that now every court the PC's visit has 3 court wizards to block any magical shenanigans, every Noble Genie is bestest friends with the rulers of the elemental planes and can never be summoned.
And Glabrezu appear having already cast their Wish recently.
What baffles me beyond imagination is why players put up with this. I honestly cannot see the appeal.
In most games like this, wizard players tend to focus on blasting, since blasting spells don't contain narrative baggage that can be manipulated on the narrative level. Fireball doesn't require a negotiation (99% of the time anyway). The non-blasting spells that are selected tend to be ones that don't effect the narrative in significant ways.
Personally, I'd love a good set of narrative rules for both skills and spells. If there's going to be abilities that can impact the setting, plot, story, etc, then there should be ways in which the dice can decide, and since most of the rest of the game is balanced with a universal mechanic, these should be as well.
What type of universal mechanic can replace both the knowledge of location and mis-chance of teleport and the negotiation and cha-check of planar binding? It seems to be that spells are more widely across the board on what to roll, how, when, where, and then after all that, more DM fiat than you can shake a cat at.
Spells have
- Attack rolls
- Saving throws
- Skill Checks
- Ability Score Checks
- Percentage chances
- Clever wording requirements of the player/character
- XP costs (3x not pf)
- GP requirements
- Bat Guano
- Talking requirements
- Waving hand requirements
- Math requirements
- Getting interrupted
- Attacks of Opportunity
- Time requirements
- Spell level
- Character level
- Class level
- Caster level checks
- Memorization
- Spontaneous
- Spell-like
- Supernatural
- Spell books
- Spells per a day
- Spells known
And all that is balanced by the DM saying yes or no. I certainly can't blame any DM for having issues with spells. It's entirely a gut reaction to "how the F**k are these spells balanced? I have to do something about it or I'm going to be overwhelmed and lose control." It's amazing that any of us are able to understand what is going on with spell casting. But it works. And tons of game are played just fine, that are fun and enjoyable, and last for years and years.
Ahnehnois
First Post
Probably because they like the outcome, and don't care too much how they got there.
Frankly, randomly rolling those corridors and rooms, and whether there is a monster within, and if so what monster it is, and what treasure it might have, as a pretty dull ongoing concept. It’s tempting to liken it to a board game, but the board games that randomly generate the dungeon typically have more parameters, as well as victory conditions, and they are still far from being an RPG experience.
He doesn’t have to sell the idea. He needs a high skill roll and/or lucky dice. Bob has that Chaladin diplomacy roll, takes advantage of one or more other abilities that provide bonuses and voila – whether anyone else likes it or not, the King turns from staunch defender of the realm to sinister diabolist, any prior apparent religious convictions being revealed as a sham to keep the people from guessing his true nature.
Just going to beat the dead Glabrezu for a second.
I think this is a very real issue, and I have no problem with further discussion. If there were easy, right answers, we wouldn’t be well past the 157th page of this thread.
Clearly agreed.
In genre, I see very few evil, demon summoning wizards set as the protagonist. The only one who comes to mind is Elric, and this wasn’t his style either. But let’s assume we have decided to play an Evil campaign.
Has he? You have been arguing Glabrezu absolutely love granting wishes to mortals. Following the letter of the rules means compliance with all TWO sentences in the description of a Glabrezu’s wish granting abilities, being, once more,:
In other words, either your wish must be used to create pain and suffering, or you must bargain with sufficiently terrible evil acts, or a sacrifice great enough, to persuade the Glabrezu to grant the wish.
OK, this seems a 180 to the “it is trivially easy to use these spells to get a Wish at will” meme that has been followed to date. What resources have actually been spent? He has the Magic Circle in his spellbook (L3 spell), likely Dimensional Anchor (L4 spell), and Planar Binding itself (L6 spell). Where is this huge cost you are now alluding to when a wizard filling his spellbook with a complete listing has been cited as trivially easy to date?
Now we need research with a sage, but before we were following the rules as written – which seems like Knowledge-Planes and the standard rules for buying scrolls and adding spells to a spellbook.
Here, once again, we are alluding to a substantial risk of failure when, until now, this has been presented as an easy, no brainer way to get a Wish spell. If there is significant risk and significant cost then, to me, that makes it markedly less likely that the Glabrezu has already used his Wish in the past 30 days.
If, however, it is trivially easy, then it seems like there should be plenty of aspiring summoners out there eager to get one of these wishes that Glabrezu toss out like candy.
Once again, the theory has changed wildly from “it is a trivially simple task to summon a Glabrezu and get a wish from him (I want to say “extort”, but they way it’s been presented, he’s eager as a little puppy dog to hand out that Wish).
In a post not that long ago, it seemed like you were suggesting the GM who failed to be inclusive of all the players, and their characters’ unique skills, was a terrible GM. How long, then, should he be spending dealing with a single player, and his PC, working on this demon summoning? Last I looked, Planar Binding was not a group activity.
Well, if I return to the random dungeon generator, presumably there should be a random chance for merchants to move on (and, of course, that you cut yourself shaving – consult limb loss subtable). Outside that, I’m not seeing this as a great moment in gaming either. Now, that said, presumably a jewel merchant should have a considerable level of protection over his inventory, so it would not be an easy task to rob him blind, but (for a group wanting a pretty non-heroic style game), robbing the jewel merchant seems like a potentially great adventure.
Here, I come back to “for a group wanting a pretty non-heroic style game”. If the GM was expecting great heroes to arise and battle the Forces of Darkness to defend the innocent and advance the cause of Justice and Righteousness, and he instead got a team of jewel thieves, there was clearly a disconnect in the game. He wanted one game and the players wanted another.
While my first inclination is to suggest a discussion of the game tone was in order when the planning started, it should really have been during character creation – does the group want a team of altruistic save-the-world boy scouts? a squad of hard-bitten, cynical, ruthless mercenaries? a loose knit bunch of sneak thieves and cat burglars? a few vile, evil future despots tossed together and working to gain as much personal power through the efforts of these others as possible, only to discard them when they become inconvenient? It seems like the players in this case wanted something very different than the GM did. And, while I don’t want to underplay the relevance of what the players want, it also has to be a game the GM will enjoy running.
And it's not just the GM who can point out that it looks like this Astral Projection trick would allow for infinite wishes, a structure which should not work in game. A player can also suggest a solution, rather than seeking to squeeze as much character power as possible from a possible gap in a spell description. Players can choose not to carry around a sack of mice when the fighter takes Whirlwind Attack, and they can choose to suggest such things be disallowed. Or they can pore over the rules seeking every possible hole in the phrasing to exploit in a manner clearly contrary to the intent of the rules, and the game. If you take the latter approach, you should not be surprised if the GM adopts a similarly adversarial approach to running the game.
Often, "rocks fall and everybody dies" because the players cast "randomly screw over the game" and rolled the "avalanche from the heavens" result.
