Game Breaker Spells - What are they?

[MarkB]

What if they are a problem for the tens of thousands of people who play RPGA Living campaigns?

The people who design RPGA Living campaigns have full knowledge of the range of available spells in the campaign world. They of all people should be designing their modules to account for such things.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I'll echo the complaints about the fly spell.

Fundamentally, that spell is just too good. It is Superman/Peter Pan level flight, as a fairly low level spell, and can be cast on anything. It completely changes the game in strange ways. All of those are big problems.

Also, the fly spell works to seriously negate some cool things in campaigns, namely flying mounts or other cool flying gadgets. Why try to tame a pegasus or griffon in D&D when you can just cast a fly spell on the party fighter instead? Why get a flying carpet when you can cast Overland Flight instead?

I would be happier if they got rid of the Fly spell completely, and kept flight in the hands of special creatures and magic items, but barring that, some of the suggestions made here about enchanting items temporarily and lowering maneuverability sound good.

 

[frankthedm]

Also, the fly spell works to seriously negate some cool things in campaigns, namely flying mounts or other cool flying gadgets. Why try to tame a pegasus or griffon in D&D when you can just cast a fly spell on the party fighter instead? Why get a flying carpet when you can cast Overland Flight instead?

I would be happier if they got rid of the Fly spell completely, and kept flight in the hands of special creatures and magic items, but barring that, some of the suggestions made here about enchanting items temporarily and lowering maneuverability sound good.

Yep!

 

[A'koss]

Very good thread, lots of problematic areas I agree with here.

The high level death & resurrection merry-go-round is probably my biggest pet peeve from a DM/campaign POV. When death merely becomes... inconvenient, something important is lost IMO. Remove the Save or Die spells and in general make it harder to die but in turn make it harder, much harder, to come back. Or perhaps resurrection spells only grant you a certain amount of time on the mortal plane (you are now running on divine energy) a la Babylon 5.

Fly most definitely has been a problem in my games. Particularly when coupled with improved invisibility, night battles and scry. In wars wizards could be all but untouchable so long as they cast spells which did not originate from their positions. Give them a little room to breathe and they could strike with utter impunity so long as they stayed out of range of the usual detection spells.

Teleport to/from static, prepared sites I'm fine with but it makes adventure design so much harder if PCs can easily bypass anything they don't like. I'd rather leave the overland travel as something the DM can handwave away if he wished rather than something the players can avoid entirely with 6 second spell.

 

[Victim]

I'll echo the complaints about the fly spell.

Fundamentally, that spell is just too good. It is Superman/Peter Pan level flight, as a fairly low level spell, and can be cast on anything. It completely changes the game in strange ways. All of those are big problems.

Also, the fly spell works to seriously negate some cool things in campaigns, namely flying mounts or other cool flying gadgets. Why try to tame a pegasus or griffon in D&D when you can just cast a fly spell on the party fighter instead? Why get a flying carpet when you can cast Overland Flight instead?

I would be happier if they got rid of the Fly spell completely, and kept flight in the hands of special creatures and magic items, but barring that, some of the suggestions made here about enchanting items temporarily and lowering maneuverability sound good.

Duration. A flying mount can remain in the air longer than the duration of Fly. Overland Flight is self only; a flying carpet can carry other creatures.

 

[hong]

Overland flight is kinda crappy for its intended purpose. Now wind walk, now we're talking.

 

[Stalker0]

I think the common thread here is that most of the spells that people consider "game-breaking" completely bypass certain things.

Knock - bypasses any mundane lock, also bypasses the need for open lock skill.
Teleport - Bypasses wilderness adventures completely, can bypass many of the BBEG's defenses in combination with scry.
Fly - Bypasses terrain and obstacles, bypasses land creatures without ranged attacks.
Mind Blank - creates tons of immunities to effects.
Save or Die - bypasses the survival mechanic of hitpoints.

1) Negating of Skills - To me this is fairly big problem in dnd currently, and one of the reasons wizard rule the high level world. I don't mind spell augmenting skills, but they shouldn't be able to bypass skills UNLESS!!! there is a certain amount of headache that goes through them.

For example, I don't mind knock working as if the wizard has to go through a week long ritual or something. The rogue can feel good that he could have bypassed that lock in seconds, and while the wizard gains the power to push through locks when absolutedly needed, he can't do it on an adventuring timetable.

2) Immunities. I don't like magics that make you immune to things. Personally, I think these should be left with races, class abilities, and high level feats. Magic can give you big bonuses, but not flat out perfect immunity.

3) Needing Magic to fight Magic. Another reason high level wizards rule is that everything requires magic to do anything. We need to get into that BBEG's lair? Well its underneath 1000 feet of lava, so we need teleport. Forcecaged? You need d door to get out. We need to find out where the BBEg is located and he's well shieled, we need divinations to find him.

Currently, certain spells require other spells to meet or beat them, which forces non magical characters to acquire gear to compete. There's a reason fighter's rely on their gear, its not just the +X sword, its the boots of flying that become required just to compete in regular adventuring.

 

[jasin]

Overland flight is kinda crappy for its intended purpose. Now wind walk, now we're talking.

Right. It's a bit faster and more impressive than walking, but overland flight isn't that useful overland.

But I like the spell very much; my current character is a wizard and has it up every day. I tend to think of it as "mage flight": it's the thing that lets the angered wizard soar up in the air and rain down destruction, but he won't just float around everywhere he goes rather than walking, because of the maneuverability issues.

I'd be content if the short-range/duration flight powers mentioned in the full attack thread ended up with a similar feel: you can fly, but it's a display of power, not your normal mode of movement.

 

[hong]

I'd be content if the short-range/duration flight powers mentioned in the full attack thread ended up with a similar feel: you can fly, but it's a display of power, not your normal mode of movement.

The twink archer I played back in 2002 got always-on boots of air walk for a ridiculously inflated price, for basically that reason.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Many of the spells described as "world changing" tecnically arent. At least not automatically. because they've already existed in the world, and the world has most likely compensated. Teleport, other travel spells etc.

That's true. Basically, they change the world from what we _expect_ the world to be. And they do it more so than the mere existence of magic does already.
A Fireball is just a grenade, or a portable catapult that fires burning oil or something like that.
If you have Teleport "Pads", they are basically just like fast air planes (a bit harder to come up with a medieval equivalent for it. A well-guarded, paved road might be similar). If you have just Teleport, there was and is and might never be a real-world equivalent for it.

They can still mess with a DMs plots, but part of the proccess becomes figuring out which possible foils/countermeasures are in place

The problem with most counter measures is that they are not available to everyone, even if they are on the same or even higher power level as the PCs.
You don't need a Pilot to fire a surface to air missile. But you need a mage to protect you from scry/buff/teleport. Sure, you can give every BBEG that is not a mage himself a mage ally that provides these defenses. But then I wonder: if everything has a direct counter measure to it, and it will always be there where the system without it might break, why don't limit the original magic itself so that the "break point" is never reached?


All that said, I like a lot of the "game breaker" and "world-changer" spells. That's why I prefer solutions that limit their abilities so that they are still useful, fun and flavorful, but don't automatically break certain assumptions of the game or the world.