MerricB said:
Warlock
Charisma stat used for Invocations.
Alignment: Any Chaotic, or any evil
Most of the invocations aren't screamingly powerful, replicating(for the most part) spells of levels 1-4. There're a few exceptions, but it seems very balanced. And, looking them over, it seems that quite a few have built in limitations. Sure, a Warlock can use Charm Monster all he wants. But he can only keep one being charmed at once. Very nifty.
Part of me is excited about the class, and part of me is concerned. As the DMG points out, D&D is largely a game of resource management, so creating a character who possesses unlimited uses of abilities certainly has the potential to seriously affect the nature of the game.
I wish I could have faith that the designers took my concerns into account. But in the
designer interview Rich Baker provides the following rationale for why unlimited uses of abilities are no big deal:
"The thinking here is that in most D&D games, your characters are probably going to be in only 15 to 20 rounds of combat between rests and spell recoveries. So after your spellcaster has a total daily spell allocation of 20 spells or more (say, around 5th level), his real limit is the number of actions he gets per day -- the number of specific opportunities he has to cast a spell. So the warlock is still bound to the same ultimate limit that any moderate-level wizard deals with. "
Am I the only who thinks that's bollocks? I can't believe someone with his experience in the industry wouldn't see the various flaws with that rationale. For one thing, the players don't know for an absolute certainty that they're only going to fight 15 or 20 rounds per day, and that uncertainty alone prevents abuse. There's a reason why a ring of inivisibility is an item of a much higher order than a wand of invisibility, despite the latter item's high number of charges. Even the minor possibility that the wand will run out of charges at an inopportune moment gives most PC's pause about using it up frivolously.
A related but even greater flaw with Rich's arguement: a spellcaster is
not merely limited by his number of actions between rest periods. Sure, after 5th-level or so a sorcerer is rarely without a spell to cast, but he is certainly limited by the fact that he only gets a few uses of his primo stuff. Using Merric's quoted example above, an 8th or 9th-level level sorc probably won't go around casting
charm monster with casual abandon for risk of having squandered it when he really needs it. A 6th-level warlock can do just that though, and he likely
will simply because it's his best schtick. So as a DM, you've got to ask yourself how many encounters you're willing to let
charm monster bypass? Is 1 out 5 acceptable? 1 out of 4? Please contrarians (and you know who you are
) please mull it over before you issue your glib response.
Then there's an even bigger problem with the linchpin of Rich's reasoning, the erroneous assertion that the inconvenience of spending resources is inevitably outweighed by the limit of combat rounds that are squeezed into a day. That is by no means a tautology.
Charm monster has plenty of uses (and abuses) outside of an initiative count, as do many of the other warlock invocations.
For instance, the spell
fly was shortened in duration to 1/min level specifically to keep PC's earthbound outside of combat. A mage has to burn a 5th-level spell to fly for long stretches. But again, starting at 6th-level a warlock can choose an invocation that lets him perma-fly. That bypasses any number of obstacles outside of combat rounds, and within combat, he doesn't even spend any of his combat rounds maintaining the flight ability anyway (so the Rich rationale fails on 2 fronts). Let's face it, if the DM initiates an encounter in the outdoors and the opponents are prinicipally earthbound and melee-oriented, as many, many, MANY wilderness monsters are, then that's going to be a cakewalk. Everyone just back off and let the warlock blast it to death. The warlock's certainly never in danger. So again, an ability with unlimited uses will result in players bypassing many common typese of encounters without expending any resources.
The warlock's a pretty neat class, but DM's don't fall for Baker's line: unlimited uses of potent abilities can be lead to extreme abuse, regardless of whether or not there are only 15 or 20 rounds of combat per day.
