NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ThatGuyThere" data-source="post: 3410303" data-attributes="member: 36764">Hello!My players and I enjoy a high-powered, high-fantasy, spell-slingin' style of game.  We engage in heavy roleplaying and fantastical combats, generally with high-point-buys and Gestalted characters.  We've played from levels one to twenty-eight, and ironed out the kinks we've found for ourselves, and had a ton of fun doing it.  We've overcome CoDzilla, the "uselessness" of high-level Rogues, and the dominance of high-level casters, in our own ways.We've solved all the troubles, in ways that work for us...  'cept for one.We find Dispel Magic - and the caster level checks it requires - the most tedious mechanic in the entire D&D system.  The players - and their oppoenents (slash me) - often spend up to an hour (out of game) preparing their list of "buff" spells.And then the first action of any reasonable opponent (or even worse, any reasonable opponent's intelligent minions) is a volley of Dispel Magic effects.It's not uncommon for it to require 15-20 minutes to resolve the Dispel checks against one character.  Times five characters in the party - plus any "goons" that are with them - and it's an immensely time-consuming affair.  Plus, it's unfun - they see their "hard-earned" buffing spells slipping away, and are (essentially) forced to sit and watch as I roll dice.I've wracked my brain trying to come up with an alternative, but the truth is, Dispel being level-plus-luck based is a solid mechanical choice; the trouble is how dang long it takes to resolve.  I've though about it just automatically dispelling a certain number of effects - either a number per caster level (more likely, one per several caster levels), or a random number affected by caster level ("1d4 per 3 caster levels", or such) - but how would you decide what's affected and what's not?  And wouldn't that simply encourage "overcasting" - stacking multiple version(s) of a spell-or-effect from several sources, ultimately leading to *more* Dispel Magics, not less?  Of course, each one would resolve faster, I suppose...So I was wondering if anyone had come up with an alternative version of the "targeted Dispel" effect, that perhaps was faster to resolve?</blockquote>

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