Darkness+Devil's Sight is killing my campaign

[-=Xar=-]

The Warlock's invocation Devil's sight allows him to see through all natural and magical darkness. He can take it at 1st level, and use it continuosly. Combine this with a Darkness spell (or better yet, Darkness invocation for unlimited use), some levels in fighter and you have a nice Sphere of Annihilation-look alike. Simply roll over the enemies with your Darkness spehere, and they will leave it in tiny bits. Enemies get disoriented within the sphere and attack an empty space, their allies, or simply suffer the 50% miss chance. They can only use area-attack spells. While the PC's merrily hack them into pieces or nuke them with spells and Eldritch Blasts from within their protection. Soon every PC takes a level in Warlock, and suddenly the party calls itself "The Blackballs".

It seems that there are but a few way to counter this cheesy tactic, like monsters with scent and blindsight. But I don't really want to center my campaign around girallons and dragons. Daylight and Dispel Magic would work, but there aren't always enemy spellcasters around, and even then they wouldn't prepare a lot Daylights. And when dispelled the party can simply put up another Darkness.

Any other groups with the same problem? Is there any way to counter this abusive combo? Tactics the enemies could use to even things out, without relying to "every enemy spellcaster has now a daylight spell prepared" thing? Or should I simply disallow this?

 

[Li Shenron]

Or should I simply disallow this?

I think it's easiest way. Or can you try NPC Warlocks with a Daylight invocation?

 

[Shin Okada]

First of all, Darkness spell (and other related spells) does not create complete darkness anymore. It creates dim (or shadowy) illumination and gives concealment, not the total concealment. So the miss-chance is only 20%. And opponents do not need to use listen check to pinpoint the location of him.

It seems to be a good combo. But many spellcasters can get the same miss-chance just by casting blur spell. And in this case, it does not bother his allies who don't have devil's sight. His rogue friend will also hate that warlock, as he cannot make a sneak attack within the area of darkness (unless he also has devil's sight). So darkness + devils sight is, while not bad, not that much a big deal.

Regarding counter tactics,

Creatures and characters will Blindfight feat will not have much trouble against him. Also, spellcasters have no trouble casting spells on him, unless the caster uses spells with attack rolls.

And, darkness is just a 2nd level spell and thus Daylight spell can dispel or counter it. Also, if the area of those two spells overlap, now natural lightsources dominate that area.

Anyway, if I were you, I will let him just do it (with 20% miss-chance, of course). He is a fighter type and spending 1 (or 2 if he takes both Devil's sight and Darkness) levels in non-combat class.

 

[Li Shenron]

First of all, Darkness spell (and other related spells) does not create complete darkness anymore.

Heh, I just recalled this from reading the other thread, and came back here to correct my post

Incredibly, the 3.5 changes to Darkness DID have a good point... to balance the Warlock

 

[Fieari]

I just disallow warlocks, personally. As I disallow many things from Complete Arcane.

 

[RigaMortus]

Funny thing is, my DM has house ruled the 3.5 version of Darkness so it works like the 3.0 version. Knowing expressly well that 2 of us in the group are playing Warlocks...

Then again, this DM is known for his TPKs so I guess any help he can give us is good. Which is why he also gives us automatic max hit points every level. I mean really, the whole point of a class having a higher hit die is that they have more physical standing power than the lower hit die classes. The random factor throws this out of wack, when a Wizard can roll lucky and get a 4 on hit hp roll and a Barbarian can get unlucky with his and roll a 1. What sense does that make?

Sorry for the rant and tangent (rangent?).

 

[Perun]

Thread hijack! :weeep::

I mean really, the whole point of a class having a higher hit die is that they have more physical standing power than the lower hit die classes. The random factor throws this out of wack, when a Wizard can roll lucky and get a 4 on hit hp roll and a Barbarian can get unlucky with his and roll a 1. What sense does that make?

As a quick thread hijack, when one of our group DMs, characters get to re-roll their hp, based on the HD.

d4: no re-rolls
d6: re-roll if the result is 1
d8, d10: re-roll if the result is 1 or 2
d12: re-roll if the result is 1, 2, or 3

That way you get the random results of die-rolling, but you still have some assurance that your d12-HD barbarian will have more hps than other characters.

 

[CapnZapp]

Don't do that - you're making one character class better but not another.

Better then to let your players roll, but to have the average roll as a minimum result. (This is detailed in the DMG).

Sure it creates stronger PCs, but at least all classes get the same treatment.

By the same token, letting everybody reroll "1"s is also a mistake - this time you favor the wizard much more than the barbarian. Unless everybody rolls a d12 for hit points and then looks up the result on the following table (I only include the Wizard's d4 here):

D12 --> D4
12 -> 4
11 -> 4
10 -> 4
9 -> 3
8 -> 3
7 -> 3
6 -> 2
5 -> 2
4 -> 2
3 -> 1
2 -> 1
1 re-roll!

 

[Thanee]

This darkness abuse isn't new, it was a much-used tactic in 3.0, using Darkness or Deeper Darkness and Blindsight. That was probably the primary reason for the change in 3.5, at least I suppose so.

There is even a spell that does both, create darkness and let's you see through it, at the same time... Blacklight.

But as Shin Okada said, you just do darkness wrong. Using it according to the rules solves your problem in a heart-beat.

Bye
Thanee

 

[atom crash]

I hate to perpetuate the thread-jack, but what I've found works well for rolling HP is whenever a player rolls for HP, I (the DM) also roll and the player takes the higher of the two rolls. In the case of both rolling a "1", I reroll. If it comes up a third "1", it stands because it was meant to be. Otherwise, they take that roll.

This method serves several purposes: Their HP doesn't hang on one roll, and they see me as being fair and helping them out. In the case of them rolling a low score and me rolling even lower, they also see that their roll could have been worse.