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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5335844" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I still hate it. There are multiple reasons why this is a lousy design decision.It forces players to choose between useful combat powers and genuine utilities. Nobody is going to burn rare utility power slots on powers with marginal or niche uses when they can have vital things like Shield and Expeditious Retreat. They MAY put them in their spell books, but basically this means they'll be used even less often than rituals are now, it actually kicks these kinds of things even MORE to the curb.It means specific classes MUST be played in order to get specific vital capabilities. No longer can a party exist that doesn't have to have someone play a cleric just to get specific vital class feature based "ritualoids" like Raise Dead. Then there are specific issues with this particular power. Charm Person was ALWAYS a Plot Buster(tm). It is a lazy player's way of solving social problems basically. Now, maybe this isn't so bad in some styles of play. If your DM would just let you get away with rolling a Diplomacy check and getting the NPC to do your bidding then really big deal it is more of the same. OTOH for a lot of DMs they're just going to nerf this kind of thing into the ground because either it easy buttons their scenarios or they have to go through all sorts of unnatural gymnastics to make things work anyway. There is actually a reason these things were demoted to rituals or removed entirely.There IS a ritual version of this BTW, Call of Friendship. 10 minute casting time and only works on a single "non-hostile" target. Presumably as one of the bard instrument focused rituals it can probably be cast relatively unobtrusively. The target has to stay within 10 squares during the casting, so there is a decent amount of challenge involved in pulling it off. Given the restriction to non-hostile the advantages are moderately limited. The target may "act as a friend" of the caster for up to 24 hours. Overall it is unlikely to be plot breaking or abusable. It could still be quite useful but it isn't likely to get the party around a problem without any other work. BTW this is a level 4 ritual. It only works on natural humanoids at least 2 levels below that of the caster too.Honestly, I think rituals were a great addition to the game. They allow non-casting classes to have a certain degree of magical power and very handily both allow and restrict problematic or inappropriate abilities. I'm not AT ALL inclined to go back to the old days and seriously don't like this. Well, I guess someone will inevitably take the power, but they are going to be sorely disappointed at what they can do with it because it is going to be locked down pretty hard.</blockquote>

Verification