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Help me swing my players away from clerics
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<blockquote data-quote="Hardhead" data-source="post: 1443267" data-attributes="member: 2844"><p>By the way, to all the "what's the problem?" people, I've been in his situation before, and it <em>can</em> be a problem.</p><p></p><p>It's the eternal paradox of building an efficient character that a player with that mindset, while trying his best to make his character as powerful as possible, gets bored if combat is too easy. </p><p></p><p>If that's happening to your group, you have a choice between four options:</p><p></p><ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Use higher CR critters. This will cause them to level faster, and faster, and faster as they get further ahead of the "monster CR curve". Pretty soon, you're running an epic level campaign after six months of play.<br /> <br /> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Cook your monsters. Give them strategic class levels, designed to twink them out as much as the PCs, making them harder than their CR would state (but on par for the characters power level). This is fine, if you don't mind spending hours and hours building super-efficient monsters that rival the super-efficient PCs that the players have been building for months, and have probably mapped out extensively. But it's a ton of extra work for the DM, that he may not have time for.<br /> <br /> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Engineer types of encounters that your players can't handle as well. Are they a group of buffers? Surprise them. A lot. Or spread the encounters out as far as you can. But some of these are often impossible and/or transparent. Surprising them constantly will get annoying. And once they get Teleport, they'll hop back to base every time they run out of spells (unless you introduce some sort of "timer" that requires they finish the adventure in X amount of time). But pull these tricks every game, and you get annoyed players. And, of course, this, too, causes lots of extra DM planning, that an average player may not have (A) the time to do because of Real Life, or (B) he just doesn't want to deal with the hassle of doing that constantly, when he can nip the whole problem in the bud by nerfing the underlying problem.<br /> <br /> </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Finally, even if they're not saying anything, the non-clerics may feel like their character sucks in comparison (but doesn't want to be seen as a whiner). After much debate in the group, I nerfed Polymorph Other and Self back in 3.0 due to some abuses. I asked what the group thought, and the two "abusers" were of course against it, one was severely pissed. I did it anyway. Later, one guy that had never said anything about it in our group "debates" came up to me privately and thanked me, because his character had been getting outshone so much, but he didn't want to come of as a whiner about it. I'd done it mainly for me (because the old 3.0 Polymorph Other was just such a headache to DM around), but I was glad it improved his play experience too.</li> </ul><p></p><p>Clerics are abusable. Plain and simple. If he has that many players causing these problems (by which I mean, power imbalances) with them, then he needs to fix it. But the answer isn't to design every encoutner around the weakness of the cleric. If you had a car that was leaking oil like the Exxon Valdez, would you carry a case of oil in your car, and put another quart in every fifty miles, or would you fix the underling problem - the actual leak?</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Hardhead, post: 1443267, member: 2844"] By the way, to all the "what's the problem?" people, I've been in his situation before, and it [i]can[/i] be a problem. It's the eternal paradox of building an efficient character that a player with that mindset, while trying his best to make his character as powerful as possible, gets bored if combat is too easy. If that's happening to your group, you have a choice between four options: [list] [*]Use higher CR critters. This will cause them to level faster, and faster, and faster as they get further ahead of the "monster CR curve". Pretty soon, you're running an epic level campaign after six months of play. [*]Cook your monsters. Give them strategic class levels, designed to twink them out as much as the PCs, making them harder than their CR would state (but on par for the characters power level). This is fine, if you don't mind spending hours and hours building super-efficient monsters that rival the super-efficient PCs that the players have been building for months, and have probably mapped out extensively. But it's a ton of extra work for the DM, that he may not have time for. [*]Engineer types of encounters that your players can't handle as well. Are they a group of buffers? Surprise them. A lot. Or spread the encounters out as far as you can. But some of these are often impossible and/or transparent. Surprising them constantly will get annoying. And once they get Teleport, they'll hop back to base every time they run out of spells (unless you introduce some sort of "timer" that requires they finish the adventure in X amount of time). But pull these tricks every game, and you get annoyed players. And, of course, this, too, causes lots of extra DM planning, that an average player may not have (A) the time to do because of Real Life, or (B) he just doesn't want to deal with the hassle of doing that constantly, when he can nip the whole problem in the bud by nerfing the underlying problem. [*]Finally, even if they're not saying anything, the non-clerics may feel like their character sucks in comparison (but doesn't want to be seen as a whiner). After much debate in the group, I nerfed Polymorph Other and Self back in 3.0 due to some abuses. I asked what the group thought, and the two "abusers" were of course against it, one was severely pissed. I did it anyway. Later, one guy that had never said anything about it in our group "debates" came up to me privately and thanked me, because his character had been getting outshone so much, but he didn't want to come of as a whiner about it. I'd done it mainly for me (because the old 3.0 Polymorph Other was just such a headache to DM around), but I was glad it improved his play experience too.[/list] Clerics are abusable. Plain and simple. If he has that many players causing these problems (by which I mean, power imbalances) with them, then he needs to fix it. But the answer isn't to design every encoutner around the weakness of the cleric. If you had a car that was leaking oil like the Exxon Valdez, would you carry a case of oil in your car, and put another quart in every fifty miles, or would you fix the underling problem - the actual leak? [/QUOTE]
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