Gansk said:
Thank you, thank you. Here, want an autograph?
Lorehead
If you like Lawful Good, you may want to volunteer to run them in the Tournament of Champions.
Perhaps, if time permits. Or Lawful Evil: it's also within one step of the True Lawful spirit of the game, and if I'm going to make mistakes and learn on the job, it might as well be while I'm serving up cannon fodder for Chaos to mow through like chaff.
You forgot one thing about the antimagic field that I forgot as well - supernatural abilities like breath weapon don't work there.
Good point; antimagic creates so many corner-case headaches (
q.v. "
Design & Development") that it turned into a nuclear weapon (
q.v. "
Design & Development") in our groups. I've hardly ever played with it.
But we can go with Infiniti's idea for now - a greater dispel magic at 20th level is cast inside the zone area when any opponent is defeated. That may mean you will still lose buffs, but it is your choice now. Win by the zone or win by beating the other guy up (which should still be the most popular way to win).
I'd advise against this. First, this wouldn't even remove some of the barrier spells people are likely to use (such as
wall of force). Second, it would again encourage some enemies to seek chicken draws against opponents who buff themselves. Our goal here, if I understand correctly, is to make the players
want to run interesting battles.
Possible alternatives:
- The battle takes place on a plane with an unusual morphic trait.
- There are actually a number of different arenas, and the winner of each round teleports to a new one, while the groundskeepers clear out the original with Mordenkainen's disjunction or the like.
- The arena is alive and it heals itself, filling in pits, regrowing walls and ceilings, and absorbing barriers. This takes five rounds or so.
- New opponents can choose to teleport on either side of the barrier.
- Whoever cast the barrier is teleported to the other side at the same time as the next opponent teleports in. The normal saving throw applies.
All the arenas have names that indicate the planes, but all of them are on the Prime Material to even out any potential planar advantages.
That's very confusing; there aren't any World Cup venues in Germany named Ghana or Brazil.
I would like some freedom for monsters to use their barrier spells, and I don't like the idea of arbitrarily deciding when a barrier spell is used unfairly. The mods have to make enough judgement calls as it is. I would like something mechanical like the dispel magic suggestion mentioned above.
If anyone's suggested otherwise, I must have missed it.
Sorry, but the rosters are set in stone at this point. We have already played with 90% of the roster, so there's no turning back now. I already spent major hours working on them, but I will take suggestions on how to modify the rosters for the Battle of All Alignments II.
I was also thinking in terms of the next battle, although the new arenas could host the upcoming semifinals.
I'm going to Las Vegas and will be back on Tuesday, but I need help with solving the following dilemma - monster A enters the arena, dives into the water, and holds his breath.
Monster B responds by moving to the victory zone. Five rounds later, a draw occurs barely before the victory condition occurs.
Any of your ideas could work, but I'd suggest being more radical. With the new victory condition, do we even need automatic draws? If a monster can't or won't fight, it should lose. If two monsters find it almost impossible to damage each other, we can go into time compression. If two monsters are actually immune to each other's attacks and can't force any of the other victory conditions, both sides should be willing to accept the draw.
