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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 2106508" data-attributes="member: 8158">Yeah, web is pretty much a "rock without paper", and that makes it pretty poorly designed. Most attack forms have some form of defense you can expect many a monster to have to defend against it--DR, SR, energy resistance/immunity, immune to criticals, immune to mind-affecting effects, etc.--but "snare" spells like entangle and web are largely unaccounted for. As <a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/bs/20050218a" target="_blank">this article on the WotC site</a> points out, this creates an unbalanced situation. In regards to the "simple" solutions previous posters have offered, most monsters don't carry tindertwigs (obviously, many creature types can't use them even if they did), which don't even burn you out quickly enough to matter, and if you take a look through just about any monster book, you'll see how few have ranks in Escape Artist. Considering that general defenses such as SR or good saving throws aren't much help, it's frustrating that specific defenses just aren't there. Indeed, the spell that's most useful in defeating these spells, freedom of movement, is of a significantly higher level than the spells themselves. It's like the designers really didn't want to give you much to do about it.There are a few less direct defenses, such as incorporeality or teleportation, but you don't see a lot of this until long after the PC's have access to web and entangle, so for the most part snares routinely make combat very drawn-out and boring, because groups of enemies are routinely neutralized for long periods of time without actually being killed. Personally as a DM, I'd rather see a fireball outright slay NPC's and move on than just have them sit there squirming. In my world, I found an indirect solution in that I combined Hide and Move Silently into a single skill, Sneak (a la Arcana Unearthed), leaving many monsters with skill points to spare. I converted any ranks of Hide to Sneak, and ranks in Move Silently became Escape Artist. This provides a reasonably common defense against an otherwise unreasonable attack. When players start going nuts with this spell, house rules are your only salvation.Oh, and have you seen plant growth lately?</blockquote>

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