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Message: <blockquote data-quote="N'raac" data-source="post: 6207888" data-attributes="member: 6681948">Frankly, randomly rolling those corridors and rooms, and whether there is a monster within, and if so what monster it is, and what treasure it might have, as a pretty dull ongoing concept.  It’s tempting to liken it to a board game, but the board games that randomly generate the dungeon typically have more parameters, as well as victory conditions, and they are still far from being an RPG experience. He doesn’t have to sell the idea.  He needs a high skill roll and/or lucky dice.  Bob has that Chaladin diplomacy roll, takes advantage of one or more other abilities that provide bonuses and voila – whether anyone else likes it or not, the King turns from staunch defender of the realm to sinister diabolist, any prior apparent religious convictions being revealed as a sham to keep the people from guessing his true nature. I think this is a very real issue, and I have no problem with further discussion.  If there were easy, right answers, we wouldn’t be well past the 157th page of this thread. Clearly agreed.  In genre, I see very few evil, demon summoning wizards set as the protagonist.  The only one who comes to  mind is Elric, and this wasn’t his style either.   But let’s assume we have decided to play an Evil campaign.  Has he?  You have been arguing Glabrezu absolutely love granting wishes to mortals.  Following the letter of the rules means compliance with all TWO sentences in the description of a Glabrezu’s wish granting abilities, being, once more,:  In other words, either your wish must be used to create pain and suffering, or you must bargain with sufficiently terrible evil acts, or a sacrifice great enough, to persuade the Glabrezu to grant the wish.  OK, this seems a 180 to the “it is trivially easy to use these spells to get a Wish at will” meme that has been followed to date.  What resources have actually been spent?  He has the Magic Circle in his spellbook (L3 spell), likely Dimensional Anchor (L4 spell), and Planar Binding itself (L6 spell).  Where is this huge cost you are now alluding to when a wizard filling his spellbook with a complete listing has been cited as trivially easy to date? Now we need research with a sage, but before we were following the rules as written – which seems like Knowledge-Planes and the standard rules for buying scrolls and adding spells to a spellbook. Here, once again, we are alluding to a substantial risk of failure when, until now, this has been presented as an easy,  no brainer way to get a Wish spell.  If there is significant risk and significant cost then, to me, that makes it markedly less likely that the Glabrezu has already used his Wish in the past 30 days.   If, however, it is trivially easy, then it seems like there should be plenty of aspiring summoners out there eager to get one of these wishes that Glabrezu toss out like candy. Once again, the theory has changed wildly from “it is a trivially simple task to summon a Glabrezu and get a wish from him (I want to say “extort”, but they way it’s been presented, he’s eager as a little puppy dog to hand out that Wish).  In a post not that long ago, it seemed like you were suggesting the GM who failed to be inclusive of all the players, and their characters’ unique skills, was a terrible GM.  How long, then, should he be spending dealing with a single player, and his PC, working on this demon summoning?  Last I looked, Planar Binding was not a group activity. Well, if I return to the random dungeon generator, presumably there should be a random chance for  merchants to move on (and, of course, that you cut yourself shaving – consult limb loss subtable).  Outside that, I’m not seeing this as a great moment in gaming either.  Now, that said, presumably a jewel merchant should have a considerable level of protection over his inventory, so it would not be an easy task to rob him blind, but (for a group wanting a pretty non-heroic style game), robbing the jewel merchant seems like a potentially great adventure. Here, I come back to “for a group wanting a pretty non-heroic style game”.  If the GM was expecting great heroes to arise and battle the Forces of Darkness to defend the innocent and advance the cause of Justice and Righteousness, and he instead got a team of jewel thieves, there was clearly a disconnect in the game.  He wanted one game and the players wanted another. While my first inclination is to suggest a discussion of the game tone was in order when the planning started, it should really have been during character creation – does the group want a team of altruistic save-the-world boy scouts? a squad of hard-bitten, cynical, ruthless mercenaries?  a loose knit bunch of sneak thieves and cat burglars?  a few vile, evil future despots tossed together and working to gain as much personal power through the efforts of these others as possible, only to discard them when they become inconvenient?  It seems like the players in this case wanted something very different than the GM did.  And, while I don’t want to underplay the relevance of what the players want, it also has to be a game the GM will enjoy running.And it's  not just the GM who can point out that it looks like this Astral Projection trick would allow for infinite wishes, a structure which should not work in game.  A player can also suggest a solution, rather than seeking to squeeze as much character power as possible from a possible gap in a spell description.  Players can choose not to carry around a sack of mice when the fighter takes Whirlwind Attack, and they can choose to suggest such things be disallowed.  Or they can pore over the rules seeking every possible hole in the phrasing to exploit in a manner clearly contrary to the intent of the rules, and the game.  If you take the latter approach, you should not be surprised if the GM adopts a similarly adversarial approach to running the game.  Often, "rocks fall and everybody dies" because the players cast "randomly screw over the game" and rolled the "avalanche from the heavens" result.</blockquote>

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