Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4668208" data-attributes="member: 710">The spells are entirely made up. They do not relate to real world experience. It is just &quot;spell vs counterspell&quot;. People worry about the game all being about pushing minis around? How about people canceling each other spell cards?I can relate to finding clues, talking with other people, and trying to make sense of the information I got. And yes, I often have mysteries like murder mysteries in my homebrew games. I like the PCs doing legwork between killing people and taking their stuff, and I also like to play this kind of legwork between killing people and taking their stuff. Anything that reduces it to &quot;cast the right spells&quot; removes from the game.Speak with Dead or other Divinations are just as terrible to me as Save or Die spells. They don't involve thinking or smartly using your abilities (without just abusing them). They are just pick the ability that is designed to solve the problem and go on. And that's also what makes Magic Missile different from something like Speak with the Dead. Magic Missile is just a tiny thing I can do in combat, it is like rolling a Gather Information or Streetwise check during an investigation. It is not a &quot;Win&quot;-Button. It is something that can lead you to succeed. There is more to do then merely use Magic Missile once. But Finger of Death is a &quot;Win&quot;-Button. But with one provision - there is a larger context in which this might work, e.g. if you have to decide whether you use Finger of Death now or later. Unless you have only one Speak with Dead in your entire investigations available and half a dozen of bodies to speak with, this is not the same. You could run every of your mystery scenarios like that, but it would provide a limitations to how these scenarioes can look like. And if you run a scenario in this way, you are actually running an investigation of &quot;Who is the victim that will tell me what I need to know?&quot;, and Speak with Dead is just a kind of plot device. If you now add Augury or Divination to the mix, you have once again a way to cut all this short...</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mustrum_Ridcully, post: 4668208, member: 710"] The spells are entirely made up. They do not relate to real world experience. It is just "spell vs counterspell". People worry about the game all being about pushing minis around? How about people canceling each other spell cards? I can relate to finding clues, talking with other people, and trying to make sense of the information I got. And yes, I often have mysteries like murder mysteries in my homebrew games. I like the PCs doing legwork between killing people and taking their stuff, and I also like to play this kind of legwork between killing people and taking their stuff. Anything that reduces it to "cast the right spells" removes from the game. Speak with Dead or other Divinations are just as terrible to me as Save or Die spells. They don't involve thinking or smartly using your abilities (without just abusing them). They are just pick the ability that is designed to solve the problem and go on. And that's also what makes Magic Missile different from something like Speak with the Dead. Magic Missile is just a tiny thing I can do in combat, it is like rolling a Gather Information or Streetwise check during an investigation. It is not a "Win"-Button. It is something that can lead you to succeed. There is more to do then merely use Magic Missile once. But Finger of Death is a "Win"-Button. But with one provision - there is a larger context in which this might work, e.g. if you have to decide whether you use Finger of Death now or later. Unless you have only one Speak with Dead in your entire investigations available and half a dozen of bodies to speak with, this is not the same. You could run every of your mystery scenarios like that, but it would provide a limitations to how these scenarioes can look like. And if you run a scenario in this way, you are actually running an investigation of "Who is the victim that will tell me what I need to know?", and Speak with Dead is just a kind of plot device. If you now add Augury or Divination to the mix, you have once again a way to cut all this short... [/QUOTE]

Verification