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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JustinA" data-source="post: 3732369" data-attributes="member: 51618">Council of Wyrms for the win.And I guess I don't see why you would ban a cone-effect just because it originates from the mouth. What's so inherently unbalanced about a cone-effect that you could never countenance one being used by your players?So you don't allow a cloak of the bat in your campaign? And so forth.In the absence of any meaningful explanation of why you feel these abilities should never be duplicated by any spell, magic item, class, or race it's difficult to actually have a discussion on it.I think it's more useful to say, "...[they] have strange, frightening and/or potent abilites that the heroes do not and cannot have AT THIS PARTICULAR MOMENT."But saying that, because Conan couldn't cast a magical spell, Gandalf shouldn't be allowed to do it doesn't make any sense to me.I have a fairly open-ended taste when it comes to RPGs. My reasoning is simple: It's always easier for me to say "no" and ban something which is inappropriate for a particular campaign or game world than it is for me to rewrite the entire rule system to allow for something that the designers thought should be inappropriate for ALL campaigns.For example, my current campaign world severely curtails teleport. This has little to do with game balance, and a lot to do with the fact that my players wanted a campaign that "felt like Lord of the Rings". Well, you can't have LOTR if you can just teleport to Mount Doom, so for that first campaign curtailed teleport.But it would be foolish for me to say, "Gandalf was never able to teleport, so it shouldn't be in the rules."This doesn't mean that every ability is appropriate for every level, campaign, character, world, or whatever. But I've played campaigns in which the PCs literally became gods. So, for me, it's rarely a question of, "Is ability X appropriate?" It's a question of, 'WHEN is ability X appropriate?"Justin Alexander<a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net" target="_blank">http://www.thealexandrian.net</a></blockquote>

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