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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rystil Arden" data-source="post: 3458460" data-attributes="member: 29014">The problem is that the others scale.  Paper doesn't always cover rock if the rock is big enough.  Rock can't always crush scissors if the scissors are made of adamantine.  That's because the game naturally scales.  But no-resistance-allowed always does fine against everything (unless you make the damage incredibly low, as I was thinking with hong).  This makes it generally too good for a significant underdog, which is bad for two reasons:1) If players are said underdog, they will be cheated of a fun and challenging fight, but even if they don't care about that and just want to kill stronger stuff, they'll wind up doing one of those "We kill everything in the world because it can't stop us, even if it's stronger" deals, where the players either continue that spree or die when someone else assassinates them, both generally unsatisfying.  It also leads you to have to either reduce treasure/XP/both or else get into an infinite spiral where they grow stronger and stronger by defeating unreasonable opponent after unreasonable opponent.2) More often, the enemy is the underdog.  Players usually win, after all.  If you throw 200 regular orcs at a party of 20th-level adventurers, they will just laugh.  If you throw 200 level 7 orc Fighters at the same party, they will laugh again.  They don't get XP for either of these.  Both of these are not only reasonable fights for that level, they are easy ones!  But if those level 7 orcs all have this new irresistible spell, dealing 7d2 (that's the lowest numbers--some of your voters wanted more!) x200 = 2100 damage, spread between the party (less before the party can go, though, but 2100 is way overkill), then you have a TPK.  If the orcs did something with a save, the PCs would make the save except on a 1 (and I use telescoping die rolls in my games, so even more likely to save in my game), so 10 save failures on average, and that's if the PCs are not immune to what the orcs did (Freedom of Movement and Death Ward pretty much always up at that level, for instance).  If it involved a ranged touch attack and no other resistances (is there anything like that that does good damage?  Why Orb of Force, of course), that's an interesting question, but I think the average party of Wiz, Clr, Ftr, Rog has two characters who would avoid the attacks except on a high roll and two who at least require a middling-low roll, so you probably won't have more than one death, but maybe you will if they target the heavy-armoured guys.  This is because of the Orbs, though, really.  If the PCs get any sort of minimal SR (items, spells, etc will provide this--it's worth it!), they're basically immune to anything the Orcs will do barring very high rolls (except Orb spells and this new proposed spell).  Even an SR 25 (considered fairly abysmal by a level 20 character) will multiply the Orcs' efforts by 3/20 (so an Orc Warlock who hits the Fighter with a 8 or higher goes from a 65% chance--dead Fighter--to a 9.75% chance (alive Fighter), or the saving throw contingent goes from 1/20 to 3/400, meaning they'll get 1 or 2 success for the entire 200 orcs).  Of course, if they have SR 28 or higher (and SR 30 or 31 is competitive for their level--a Monk has this), it means that the Orcs can't touch them with SR: Yes spells, and they're not going to hit with physical attacks except on the 20, so the PCs win the no-XP battle (unless you have those Orbs or this new spell).  The point is that this new spell makes an auto-victory into a death-based-on-initiative-count.  (You don't even need 200 Orcs--you really just need enough to kill the Wizard and the Cleric before they can go.  50 Orcs who go first should be enough to easily do this.  The Fighter and Rogue won't be able to kill enough of those 50 before the Orcs go again to live)</blockquote>

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