D&D 3E/3.5 Darkness Spell in 3.5

[Scion]

Making difficult battles easy is the advantage of preparing in advance. Strategy is supposed to reward smart players. It's ultimately always up to the DM to figure out ways to challenge the players, without taking away powers or items that they already have.

There is a big difference between being prepared and taking advantage of something that nerfs everyone in existance who doesnt use the same trick or is already immune.

Being prepared means thinking ahead and useing synergy. Which this could work under, if it wasnt so horribly all incompasing. Something that makes the rest of the players simply sit back and do nothing along with most other people becoming completely ineffective, especially for a low level spell, just isnt right.

There are occasionally broken things in the game. It isnt always just a matter of the dm working around it. Some things simply need to be changed because they are bad as written. Darkness happened to be right up there for a number of reasons.

::shrugs:: some people (maybe even all) thought that harm was overpowered as written. There isnt any need for the dm to modify the whole game simply to make this one spell fit in properly, simply change the spell and everything works much better. Darkness is similar, but worse in some ways (3.0 version). Anything that takes the fun away from all of the other players tends to be bad.

 

[ptolemy18]

There is a big difference between being prepared and taking advantage of something that nerfs everyone in existance who doesnt use the same trick or is already immune...Being prepared means thinking ahead and useing synergy. Which this could work under, if it wasnt so horribly all incompasing. Something that makes the rest of the players simply sit back and do nothing along with most other people becoming completely ineffective, especially for a low level spell, just isnt right....There are occasionally broken things in the game. It isnt always just a matter of the dm working around it. Some things simply need to be changed because they are bad as written..

I dunno... IMHO, Darkness is really only powerful when you're fighting in severely enclosed areas. (Which, admittedly, show up a lot in D&D campaigns... it is called DUNGEONS and Dragons after all, not Wilderness & Dragons... :/ ) But even underground, unless you're trapped in some super-tight spot, "Getting out of the Darkness" would probably only take one or two rounds and incur some attacks of opportunity if anyone on the other side had Blindsight. I played in a 3.0/3.5 D&D campaign for four years and no player ever even cast Darkness, although the DM *did* use it against us once when we were attacked by a bunch of Grimlocks, which was a very dangerous, but ultimately very fun, encounter. (We all got our butts kicked. )

(Random question: since Darkness isn't that useful unless you have Blindsight to use with it, I guess the question is, what's the lowest level that a player can use magic to get the Blindsight ability? Hmm....)

Anyway, a lot of combats end up with some of the players having bigger roles than others. This is inevitable. All character concepts are not useful at all times. People get knocked out and can't do anything, some monsters are immune to some players' attacks, some monsters are flying and can only be hit by ranged weapons or other flying people, etc. etc. Then the DM tailors the next encounter so the other players, who were unconscious or unfitted for the previous combat, get their chance to shine. Relying on the dude who can cast Darkness, or has Blindsight, is no different than relying on the cleric who's the only person in the party who can heal people or turn undead.

More than that, though, it's a matter of Coolness factor. It is Cool (capital C for emphasis) to be able to create darkness in the game. It is not particularly cool to create "shadowy illumination." If they thought it was unbalanced, they should've made it a higher-level spell, like Polymorph Other becoming Baleful Polymorph, instead of eliminating this very cool ability from the game. (Take the White Wolf games, for example.... completely unbalanced to the point of near-unplayability? YES! But everyone got to have really cool powers, so they were popular games despite the terrible system. ) Rules aside, a magic-using universe where no spellcaster can create true darkness is stupid.

The "Geomancer" in "Masters of the Wild" is unbalanced. "Harm" with no saving throw is unbalanced. "Darkness" isn't unbalanced. I think they struck the wrong balance between coolness and game balance on this one.

**AGGHG! I've succumbed to the urge to complain about 3.5! ** (hurls himself off rooftop of tall building)

Jason

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Well, my problem with 3.0 darkness is that it was useless to nearly everyone except those with Blindsight.
The Darkness created by the spell does also work against Darkvision. The poor Drow casting the spell would be as incapable of attacking the characters as the characters themselves...

 

[Scion]

I dunno... IMHO, Darkness is really only powerful when you're fighting in severely enclosed areas.

Negating entire characters all at once. Making yourself effecively invisible (no targetting, hard to shoot at, moving into melee with means that no one can see you and you are not going to be fighting very well). Which way exactly is 'out' of the darkness? one doesnt always know, especially when people are moving around.

It can also be used as a cheap counterspell. Place it on something and when someone is about to cast a spell pull it out of its bag and toss it next to them, or simply be standing near them. Many spells require line of sight, which has just been blocked. If silence is also placed on it then you pretty much have one dead caster.

How much power does a single second level spell need? Not that much!

Once again though, we arent talking about some characters having a 'smaller role', it is more about a couple of characters pretty much taking others out of certain parts of the game completely. I posted a few threads up above which talk about some situations like this. Back when this board was all about 3.0 there were quite a few threads talking about what to do with the spell since it was destroying their campaign and making a few players completely worthless. Which makes it even worse than 3.0 harm in some ways.

 

[Henry]

If they had made Deeper Darkness the "True" Darkness, instead of "Darkness, longer and wider"," I would not have minded leaving Darkness as "Shadowy Illumination. However, the fact that they eliminated Darkness completely is quite grating to me, and I dearly hope some version of it (as a higher level spell, if nothing else) returns, because at those cool imageries of Drow draping the scene in pitch black before they attack is now impossible.

In truth, the darkness spell as written is kinda silly, and I'm pretty sure this has been brought home to the designers a long time by now:

Dril'd'natrath, middling Wizard of Sorcere, sighed as he rose for the day. "Time to prepare my daily spells," he thought to himself. Needing a small amount of light to perform this, he casts Darkness to see by...

 

[Henry]

Back when this board was all about 3.0 there were quite a few threads talking about what to do with the spell since it was destroying their campaign and making a few players completely worthless. Which makes it even worse than 3.0 harm in some ways.

I'm surprised to hear these examples; mostly because they are examples that could be accomplished by existing conventional means, anyway. One has to ready an action anyway to counter a spell via darkness, which can be done even now. Then, figure that since only a small minority of creatures have blindsight, darkness is just as harmful to the user as the opponents. Add in that the 2nd level spell daylight can counter it, and it really doesn't add up to being anything more than a one-round distraction, like a mass daze, almost.

One really easy way to counter its effect would be if they allowed the light cantrip to counter it; that would make it a useful spell to have handy, but a paper tiger in the end.

 

[Scion]

One has to ready an action anyway to counter a spell via darkness, which can be done even now.

Sure, one has to use a readied action. But of course that guy with the readied action can kill a huge amount of spells (especially with silence added in). There is a huge difference between 'cannot' and '20% miss chance which doesnt even apply to targeted spells'.

Toss a darkness on a tanglefoot bag and attatch it to someone, they are in a world of problems now.

::shrugs:: I have already given many examples that have come up and explanations of how it can ruin a given game. Everyone has their own ways around things, but there is no need to have the system itself trying to sabatoge things.

 

[Henry]

::shrugs:: I have already given many examples that have come up and explanations of how it can ruin a given game. Everyone has their own ways around things, but there is no need to have the system itself trying to sabatoge things.

Yeah, but Web can ruin a given game also, if no one's a spellcaster, and the entire party never carries a means to make fire. There's a line between "too much balance" and not enough, and Darkness to me falls somewhere on that line in a gray area - kind of like improved crits.

That's one I'll likely house-rule, if the issue ever comes up.

 

[Scion]

If you dont allow blindsight (from several sources) that will help, but it cuts out interesting options.

Still, once you see the blindfighting/grappling monk with darkness and silence on him taking out every caster/nondarkness immune there is....

 

[Henry]

If you dont allow blindsight (from several sources) that will help, but it cuts out interesting options.

Still, once you see the blindfighting/grappling monk with darkness and silence on him taking out every caster/nondarkness immune there is....

You do raise an interesting question, since I use the core books and this has rarely come up - how many sources of true blindsight are there out there? Not just core rules, but all WotC sources? I was under the impression there were only a few, and most of those were monsters like dragons. If there are a proliferation of them I'm just not seeing, maybe there's a bigger reason for it, but I'm not seeing them currently.