Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9621237">Well I do think that the latter seems harder for the GM to undermine. At the same time, I haven't really experienced the issue of a GM undermining Alarm in this way, so I don't know how much of an existing problem it solves. That said, I don't have any issue with the torchbearer spell. It seems like a perfectly fine spell. I don't know the rules to that game though so there may be lots of nuances I am missing Just going to touch on some points you made in the post here:To be clear I probably wouldn't consider this stuff Fiat (another poster mentioned the GM doing their job in the game and this seems more in the realm of a GM doing things GMs are supposed to do, like decide what actions an NPC is taking, what woodland creatures show up, etc. But any of these could be exploited by a GM who was bent on making sure the spell didn't work I think interrupting the PC is a place where they could keep pestering the party with stuff so the spell was impossible to cast, but I also think this would be super obvious. There is a fine line here too because one of the reasons stuff like this matters is circumstances are sometimes meant to be a balancing factor with spell casting. So there may be times when it would be appropriate for alarm to be hard to cast, but that shouldn't be because the GM wants to stop a particular encounter or wants a particular encounter to happen a specific way. One thing I learned about GMing a long time ago is it is often a mistake to conceptuatlize of an encounter before it happens. The game is more engaging if you let things play out and see where they go. Maybe the Assassin gets around the alarm and surprises the party, but more likely the assassin sets it off and he is the one who is surprised and starts the fight out on uneven footing. I think this is less of a concern as the players themselves would know the spell ends at this point and be a lot more on guard anyways. But this is why I do things like track NPC movement. If there were a question about when they arrive, I might leave it to some kind of roll. But a GM having having the NPC show up five minutes after in order to stage the encounter the way he wants, is bad GMing IMO. I could maybe see an argument for the assassin knowing the spell has been cast somehow and waiting, but like I said in my post about the precision here, I think there are a lot of Ifs in that scenario so if the GM wants to play the Assassin smart or give him a sporting chance, he should really set some ground rules and procedures and follow them. I think if the assassin has a ranged attack and that is how they would launch their assault anyways (and it can be made from outside the range of the spell) fair enough. And if they know the spell has been cast so are being appropriately cautious fair enough. But if the GM is manipulating NPC tactics using his own knowledge of the spell and not the NPCs to get around the spell, that is an issue. I would think that the ranged attack itself though would set off the alarm right as it was striking The spell is kind of pointless if they can't at least roll initiative and not be surprised by the assassin. I would think they should be able to do whatever a character can do once combat begins because this seems like it has triggered a combat to me. But I would play it by ear if the assassin freezes and they try to engage or feel each other out</blockquote>

Verification