Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5884181" data-attributes="member: 42582">I have experienced the phenomenon more in Rolemaster than in D&D, simply due to a greater amount of high level play in one system than the other, but the systems are similar enough that I believe those who say it is an issue in D&D.The high-level spell user in either game has two basic techniques. One is to bombard enemies with save-or-suck/die, taking advantage of abilities (feats in D&D, utility spells in RM) that boost the attack roll/save DC. The other is to dominate the broader fictional situation, via spells like teleport, passwall, phasing/etherealness, divination, etc.Abilities of the first sort tend to dominate over the combat abilities of non-spell-users. Abilities of the second sort tend to give the players of the spell users much greater influence over the pacing of the game - compounding the pre-existing tendency for spell-users to exert greater influence over pacing because of their reliance on daily resources.In one high level RM game, the solution was that everyone played some form of spellcaster. But the game still broke down eventually - play ground to a halt, as the players used their abilities in a way that was rational from the point of view of their PCs, but led to the game itself utterly bogging down - nothing could be done without using divination first to see if it would work well or poorly, every combat was scry/buff/teleport, they developed ever-more obscure strategies for maximising their ability to deploy all their spells in the first round or two, and then retreat and rest up before they could be caught without spells, etc.In the subsequent game, we agreed to take out a lot of the problematic spells - especially teleport and divination. We also took some steps to tone down - both through adjustments and through gentlemen's agreements about what classes to play - the scope of attack magic, and of attack-magic-enhancing utility magic. (This is probably easier to do in RM than D&D, because RM has much more narrowly defined spell using classes, and makes it much harder to learn a wide range of spells, than does D&D. So once players have chosen their classes, you don't have to keep thinking about and vetting new spell/feat after new spell/feat.)These changes, plus some changes by me in the way I set up the ingame situation (an Oriental Adventures/samurai campaign in which the fighter were the default leaders of the party, while the spell-users were in social status more like advisors or guids), led to a game that was more balanced even at high levels.</blockquote>

Verification