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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5337971" data-attributes="member: 82106">A single daily utility power wins you an encounter? That would be one massively trivial encounter. It surely isn't worth anything like that in any reasonably challenging encounter. More like maybe in a more complex SC it will give you say an auto-success, or maybe you should get a +2 bonus with certain other primary skills. It is equivalent of a fighter poping of RoS in an at-level combat encounter. It sure should make it somewhat easier, but it shouldn't be causing the enemy to just keel over dead.Sure, you can come up with a counter for any possible use. That's exactly part of the point. Being a plot busting type of power it tends to make DMs jump through hoops. The DM should be making the PLAYERS jump through the hoops, not the other way around.Lots of things have appeared in S&S fiction that I probably will not use as low level powers for PCs, lol. As for the example of Phantom Mask there are SEVERAL things to be said about that. 1st it is a level SIXTEEN utility power. It lasts 5 MINUTES. SURE it is useful, but notice that it is much higher level than Instant Friends, much easier to adjudicate, and is far less likely to have far reaching benefits for the players. I don't see any real comparison at all.If I nerf your powers I've taken away a finite resource that you had that you gave up in order to get that power. If I nerf your ritual it is just some thing you paid 125gp for however many levels ago. You could have every single 4th level ritual in the book by 9th level and barely notice the dent in your wallet. That IS a significant difference. It is exactly the kind of difference between a GOOD game design and an not so good game design (multiplied over 100's of similar decisions). Understanding that is exactly the reason that the 4e design was so solid to begin with.Really? All I hear is rituals suck. If they're so good then why are you so big on this being a power? lol. I mean come on!Except you meet people you need to influence CONSTANTLY, in fact that is basically all that social interaction IS. A Charm Person effect is like a magic sword that just lops off enemies heads automatically. It's the Vorpal Weapon of social conflict, there is a HUGE FLAMING DIFFERENCE between Feather Fall and Instant Friends and if you can't see it then I don't know what to say. You're suffering a temporary drastic dearth of imagination. I KNOW as a player I can use it to devastating effect. I know my players can to, we've played together for a LONG time and I'm 100% certain in 5 minutes they'd find a way to do something with it that the DM will NOT like.It is trivially easy to bypass the combat clause. Almost any encounter is going to involve enemies either moving up to each other, where they often don't instantly fight, especially if one side (the PCs) makes like they might talk, surrender, etc? How about surprise, it really isn't that hard to get. Obviously you can find situations where this isn't possible, but in at least 80% of all situations I can get the party within range of that power without rolling initiative.Actually it is quite effective. A wizard with a decent WIS bonus can absolutely charm higher level figures with a high degree of reliability. Given an Orb of Karmic Resonance I can actually make the spell 100% reliable (there are probably other ways too, anything that allows you to cause a target to fail a save will work). Basically a decent orb wizard build will succeed a large amount of the time against any creature he's likely to meet. Besides, we already disposed of the fallacy that making something unreliable stops it from being flawed. This is an almost trivially dismissed error in game design. Granted it crops up often enough, but it has always been wrong and always will be.Well, I'm sorry but some bad DM somewhere isn't an  excuse for anything, lol. YES being able to charm people like that IS kind of a win button. Here's an exercise for you, go out and just wander around and do your normal stuff for a day and imagine what you could get away with if once during the day you could just make any one person be your best buddy. Now think about what someone who's basically rootless and at least marginally amoral (your average adventurer) and who isn't really bound by any social conventions can do with it. Crap, you could probably rule the world with Charm Person.</blockquote>

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