ARandomGod
First Post
Lord Pendragon said:
Me too, actually. I agree that the DM is there to tell a story for them. On the other hand, a story can only be interactive to some degree and remain interesting. I'm sure that Trainz has plenty of taverns and towns and forest and desert wastelands to go to if the party wants to sit around and drink ale, get a job as a baker or a blacksmith, wander around hunting bear, etc. In reality there's only so much story you can build interesting. There's likely not much else going down in that world at this time. But they're welcome to roll survival and see how many fish they can catch.
Lord Pendragon said:
Definitely. At least with the wands part. (Switching main enemies thought? That can be tantamount to saying "I'll just write up an entire different campaign world, we'll play it in six months. For now, go fish). In fact I'd likely go farther than just wands. Wait... wands? You still need someone to use them. Are you suggesting he railroad the poor thief into UMD as a skill? What if that's not in his concept? ^_~
But, humorous (meaning) point aside, there are some simple rules in the DMG for making making custom items, and spellstones of cure light wounds is an option, and relatively inexpensive. I've been in a campaign where noone played a cleric, and we got by fine with this type item. It didn't unbalance the game at all.
Lord Pendragon said:
They might live. We could have died with our spellstones of cure light wounds. So everyone had five charges of CLW per day. That means nothing in a fight. After you've won (or lost and lived), it's very nice. But during the fight? And it didn't help us when we got poisoned, nor would it have been useful versus level drain... And god help the person who catches a fatal disease (my character has. I'm not complaining. It's an interesting magical fatal disease. All I we have to do is complete the quest before I die. Meanwhile I'm playing a combat centric fighter type, who's soon going to lose the ability to fight at all, but it's a great campaign).
Trainz said:
Personally, I recommend you give them as loot somewhere early an ancient tome. A long lost grimoire on necromancy. This book describes certain healing and restoration spells. Let the mage learn them. Look up all the clerical spells that you think are most important, like all the cures and the restorations, and presto... a mage who can heal. There's really no reason other than custom not to allow mages these type of spells. But wait, there's more.
After the mage has learned these spells... It also describes a method of converting spell energy that a mage has used to memorize different spells to power some of these spells. Indeed, the mage soon learns how to convert his "spellfire" into all the cure spells. Presto!! Instant spontanious healing.
Bitch about being a walking bandage NOW, mage.
And the beauty is, you aren't punishing anyone, you're only granting additional power to the mage. He's still a mage. He can NOT use this new knowledge if he wants. It's all about roleplaying.
They'll still wish they had a cleric, as the mage can't "turn or rebuke undead", even with this grimoire.
Personally, I think that's better in many ways. Turning and destroying undead in that manner has seemed a little cheesy to me lately in 3.x
(If you really don't want to give mages identical spells, I've come up with a number of very good mage variations on healing spells. My personal favorite is the "mend" spell, which converts an amount of lethal damage equal to it's counterpart clerical spell into twice that amount of subdual damage. Follow this with a less powerful actual cure spell, for a net effect of two spells which are individually not as good as clerical healing, but together are comperable.)
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You're saying basically the same thing. "You guys have three choices. Play the party I want, die a lot, or go catch fish because there's nothing else going on in my world." 
