Game Breaker Spells - What are they?

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

What do you see as possible "game-breaker" spells? What does game-breaking mean at all? What can we do against them, without losing interesting spell ideas and flavor?

I am putting this up as D&D 4 thread, but it might also fit into the General Rules forum.

I'd like to present a few examples, but maybe others can come up with more and even more interesting ones:

Spells that "break" the rules:
Discern Lies/Zone of Truth:
The game breaker aspect is that suddenly, all the ranks invested in Bluff or Sense Motive are useless. Just use the spell to make the first one unimportant and the second one not required.
Possible Fix: Just let the spells aid the skills (Discern Lies improves Sense Motive, Zone of Truth causes penalties to Bluff). It might also be useful to delay when these spells become available. (In D&D 4 terms, this might be reserved for the Paragon and Epic tier of spells and abilities)**)

Teleport:
Suddenly, the group doesn't have to travel to a place (no more wilderness encounters for you - which might not be that bad). But the most important game breaking element is the combination with "Scry" - suddenly you can get to your enemy anytime you want.
Possible Fix: You can't teleport into a building or home of someone unwilling (think uninvited vampires). So you can still get out, if necessary, and you can still get to the front gate of the enemy fortress, but you don't get in.

Speak with Dead:
Just ask the victim who it was. Solves most murder mysteries, unless you always have a story that ensures that the murderer wasn't seen by the victim, or the murderer was disguised or controlled by someone else. (Meaning the case is a bit more contrived than usual.)
Possible Fix: Not really one. Might in fact be okay, if you stick to the above limitations. The same as for Zone of Truth and Discern Lies might also apply here.

Save or Die spells*:
Suddenly, all the hit points you might have had become meaningless. The classical safety net is gone. A single roll decides whether you get to live or die, and you don't really have a way to defend yourself against it.
Possible Fix: See Disintegrate and Harm (deal massive damage), or Power Word spells (only targets with X HPs or less are affected)
*) There is also the category of Save or "Suck" - depending on the degree of "suckness", you can put them in this group, too. Save or -4 to an ability, Save or 50% miss chance are fine, in my view, but Save or become a frog or Save or be paralyzed for the rest of the encounter are not.

Dominate Person/Monster:
Even better than Save or Die spells: Save or get the enemy of your friends. Instead of taking just out one enemy, the caster just also "summoned" an ally.
On the other hand, the spell has great flavour element and is a typical fantasy trope:
Possible Fix: See Save or Die Spells, and also make it harder to use within combat (either the "ally" will have a very easy time to resist commands, or it just takes longer.)

Magic Circle vs Evil:
The +2 to AC and saves is fine. The immunity to charm and compulsion effects not so much. Essentially, you completely negate the ability of many characters and monsters.
Possible Fix: Reduce the benefit (and in turn ensure that compulsions and charms aren't getting to strong, see Dominate Person/Monster)

**)
Maybe this is also a goal of the 3 "tiers": Each tier will focus on different adventure types. You get your share of murder mysteries as a heroic character, but once a paragon or epic level character, you focus on different things (high level political intrigue, dealing with kings and kingdoms, invading armies and such...)

 

[hong]

A decent, strong fate/hero point system would actually go a long way to dealing with some of these issues. By "strong" I mean not just +2 or +4 to a roll, like Eberron's action points; I mean automatically succeeding on a save, or surviving an attack that takes you to negative hp, etc. Naturally this isn't something that should happen every encounter,* but it would go a long way to mitigating the randomness of save-or-lose effects.

* Or maybe it is?

 

[Fobok]

What do you see as possible "game-breaker" spells? What does game-breaking mean at all? What can we do against them, without losing interesting spell ideas and flavor?

I am putting this up as D&D 4 thread, but it might also fit into the General Rules forum.

I'd like to present a few examples, but maybe others can come up with more and even more interesting ones:

Spells that "break" the rules:
Discern Lies/Zone of Truth:
The game breaker aspect is that suddenly, all the ranks invested in Bluff or Sense Motive are useless. Just use the spell to make the first one unimportant and the second one not required.
Possible Fix: Just let the spells aid the skills (Discern Lies improves Sense Motive, Zone of Truth causes penalties to Bluff). It might also be useful to delay when these spells become available. (In D&D 4 terms, this might be reserved for the Paragon and Epic tier of spells and abilities)**)

I don't know, on this one. With Zone of Truth, it's a simple matter to have the subjects affected simply not lie. "Were you in the house at the time of the murder?" "How dare you accuse me of such a thing! Do you know who I am?" Or, "How long have you been here?" "My feet aren't tired yet." Discern Lies is trickier, and might need some adjusting, yeah.

Teleport:
Suddenly, the group doesn't have to travel to a place (no more wilderness encounters for you - which might not be that bad). But the most important game breaking element is the combination with "Scry" - suddenly you can get to your enemy anytime you want.
Possible Fix: You can't teleport into a building or home of someone unwilling (think uninvited vampires). So you can still get out, if necessary, and you can still get to the front gate of the enemy fortress, but you don't get in.

This definitely has some problems. But then, by the time it really becomes an issue, it could easily be said that most (though not all, to keep it balanced and enjoyable for the players) of such private sanctums and such are shielded aginst scrying.

Speak with Dead:
Just ask the victim who it was. Solves most murder mysteries, unless you always have a story that ensures that the murderer wasn't seen by the victim, or the murderer was disguised or controlled by someone else. (Meaning the case is a bit more contrived than usual.)
Possible Fix: Not really one. Might in fact be okay, if you stick to the above limitations. The same as for Zone of Truth and Discern Lies might also apply here.

If you're doing murder mysteries often enough that it becomes an issue, may I suggest brainstorming other plots or switch systems. Murder mysteries are fun, but this game is not a murder mystery game. It's a high fantasy adventure game. There's lots of other plotlines to do that will keep players guessing. White Wolf's World of Darkness? Now *that*'s a good game for murder mysteries.

Save or Die spells*:
Suddenly, all the hit points you might have had become meaningless. The classical safety net is gone. A single roll decides whether you get to live or die, and you don't really have a way to defend yourself against it.
Possible Fix: See Disintegrate and Harm (deal massive damage), or Power Word spells (only targets with X HPs or less are affected)
*) There is also the category of Save or "Suck" - depending on the degree of "suckness", you can put them in this group, too. Save or -4 to an ability, Save or 50% miss chance are fine, in my view, but Save or become a frog or Save or be paralyzed for the rest of the encounter are not.

Totally agreed here.

Dominate Person/Monster:
Even better than Save or Die spells: Save or get the enemy of your friends. Instead of taking just out one enemy, the caster just also "summoned" an ally.
On the other hand, the spell has great flavour element and is a typical fantasy trope:
Possible Fix: See Save or Die Spells, and also make it harder to use within combat (either the "ally" will have a very easy time to resist commands, or it just takes longer.)

Magic Circle vs Evil:
The +2 to AC and saves is fine. The immunity to charm and compulsion effects not so much. Essentially, you completely negate the ability of many characters and monsters.
Possible Fix: Reduce the benefit (and in turn ensure that compulsions and charms aren't getting to strong, see Dominate Person/Monster)

These two seem to cancel each other out pretty well.

 

[ptolemy18]

I dunno. Basically, all the fun and flavorful spells are potentially "game breakers." For instance, I was so pissed when they changed "Polymorph Other" into "Baneful Polymorph" in 3.5. What if a wizard doesn't *want* to change somebody into a harmless little animal? What if they want to change somebody into a giant lizard or a bugbear of the opposite gender? Feh! It would have been one thing if they just made the original version of the spell higher-level, but instead they weakened the whole spell just to make the effects easier to adjudicate. (Grumble gripe... sorry, I'm just complaining because it made one of my characters obsolete when we switched, and I had to ask the DM if I could continue to use 3.0 spellcasting rules for that character. )

Discern Lies/Zone of Truth:

I don't think this is a game breaker. After all, if you can save, you can lie all you want, right?

Teleport:

Like Fly, this isn't really a game breaker as much as it means your PCs have moved up to a "higher level" of play, a level where they're epic heroes who zip back and forth easily between locations. It can be annoying if you, the GM, prefer a more low-power game, but it really just means that you have to design encounters so that the PCs can't just teleport in and out easily. This isn't impossible; firstly, there's a whole bunch of "anti-teleport" and "anti-scry" spells in 3.0/3.5 which were obviously designed just to counteract Teleport and Scry and give the GM a way to say "Oh, you can't teleport in there." Also, good game design can outwit these spells... I once played in a game where we couldn't Teleport because we had to follow a trail through the jungle to various locations, for instance. We didn't know where we had to Teleport to, so we had to go on the ground.

Speak with Dead:

Also not a game breaker; just a new level of power. Yes, it means that murder mysteries become harder to do (unless the body is dissolved in acid or ground into powder or Soul Bound or whatever). But this is a game where dead people can be brought back to life with Raise Dead, so that should also put a damper on murder mysteries, since theoretically anyone with enough money can get brought back to life. :/ It's a high-fantasy game, and if it's gonna be high-fantasy, that's just the way it is. (Actually, I definitely understand the appeal of a more low-fantasy game setting... I enjoy playing in them myself... but if you're trying to play low-fantasy in the later editions of D&D, then that requires big changes across the board.)

Save or Die spells*:

*shrugs* Just a standard D&D mechanic. Maybe I'm a fatalist, but it never bothered me that much. (Well, of course, if it actually HAPPENS to my character, it bothers me. But this is a setting where Raise Dead exists, so being able to die in one blast isn't *that* unfair.)

Dominate Person/Monster:

I agree that this could be made harder to use within combat.

Magic Circle vs Evil:

In 8 years of playing D&D3.x, I've never seen a single PC think to use this spell to resist charm & compulsion, so I don't think it's that much of a gamebreaker. It's more like having the proper tool for the situation. Yes, that tool exists, and it's called Magic Circle vs. Evil. It's actually not so common for the PCs to remember to use the correct tool, though. Or if it is, then the PCs deserve to be rewarded for their smartness.

I think the D&D3.x spell list is pretty balanced. And if it's not... well, in my experience the number of D&D players who want to play spellcasters is relatively few. I think it may be because it takes more time to figure out how to use spells than it does to figure out how to be a fighter or a barbarian or whatnot. But if people think that playing a spellcaster is hard, then I actually don't think it's a bad idea if the people who *do* bother to do it, get rewarded by being slightly buffer than a non-spellcasting character of corresponding level. (Yes, I am an elitist spellcaster! Fie on muggles! Just kidding.)

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think I've seen hints that more 'save or lose' spells will be converted to stuff which varies with hp ablation.

A current example is disintegrate, which does hp damage but when you get to 0 you are disintegrated.

Possible examples might be polymorph or flesh to stone which do hp damage but if you get to 0 (or whatever is an appropriate threshold) you are turned into a bunny/turned to stone/etc.

One effect is that these become good 'finishing moves' against tough foes, you lose the 'save or die' aspect.

That could make for a very interesting spell system.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Speak with Dead:
Just ask the victim who it was. Solves most murder mysteries, unless you always have a story that ensures that the murderer wasn't seen by the victim, or the murderer was disguised or controlled by someone else. (Meaning the case is a bit more contrived than usual.)
Possible Fix: Not really one. Might in fact be okay, if you stick to the above limitations. The same as for Zone of Truth and Discern Lies might also apply here.

Perhaps the most obvious thing would be for murderers who are seen by their targets to routinely break the jaw or in some other way make it impossible for the corpse to speak.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think Fly is a worse game breaker than teleport for many reasons - not least the ease at which it first becomes available. Fly eliminates all kinds of obstacles (cliffs, chasms, tricky rope bridges) and lets you become pretty much immune to a whole class of creatures too (anything that can't fly and doesn't have ranged weapons).

I think they probably ought to do something serious about that one!

 

[hong]

Yep. No point putting in all that work on dynamic or varied terrain, if everyone flies over it....

 

[ptolemy18]

I think Fly is a worse game breaker than teleport for many reasons - not least the ease at which it first becomes available....I think they probably ought to do something serious about that one!

I'm torn, because on the one hand Fly is definitely a real game-breaker, but on the other hand it's just so frickin' awesome that it would suck if it was taken out of players' hands until super-high levels. They already nerfed it a lot in 3.5 by dividing it into "Fly" and "Overland Flight", and to me that seems about right.

 

[ptolemy18]

I think I've seen hints that more 'save or lose' spells will be converted to stuff which varies with hp ablation....Possible examples might be polymorph or flesh to stone which do hp damage but if you get to 0 (or whatever is an appropriate threshold) you are turned into a bunny/turned to stone/etc.

There's a problem with that though: you lose the ability to play a character who has high Fortitude, say, but low Hit Points. A character with a Fortitude save of +14 is going to be resistant to that spell or poison no matter how beaten up in combat they are. I regularly played wizard-types with low HPs and high saves. Save-or-die is aggravating, true, but if a failed Save doesn't cause some kind of major effect, what is the point of Saves?