These do seem rather absurd
jgsugden said:
In a good game, yes.Run completely out of spells? No. Run out of their high level spells? Yes. Those are the spells that make most of the impact. The other stuff gives them something to do, but it is rarely important in a combat.
Spellcasters start off strong and then wane in power. The melee classes tend to be balanced in power (as long as they're not helpless) throughout the adventure. If the DM runs games where the PCs never fight when low on resources, the spellcasters are relatively more powerful than the fighters. *It is up to the DM to manage this aspect of the game*. The DM needs to change the pace every once in a while if the spellcasters are dominating every combat and then resting before continuing on in the adventure.
If you're finding that your spellcasters are too powerful on a regular basis, here are a few adventure ideas that can help:
* The PCs must venture onto the demi-plane of nightmares to retrieve a lost artifact needed to stop an ancient threat that will arrive in two days. The plane may only be entered at midnight (though you can leave it anytime). The PCs will need to go to the plane and get as far as possible in their adventure before resting - once - and returning the following night. Spellcasters will need to ration their spells. Fighter types will need to pack extra healing materials. It creates a whole new dynamic adventure.
* The PCs are being hunted by a group of assassins that *knows* that resting will allow the spellcasters to regain spells. Not only will the spellcasters be low on spells by the end of the day, the assassins will pick a time when they're low on spells to launch their attack (perhaps after the PCs investigate a small dungeon that the assassins reveal to them so that the PCs will retrieve an item that they can not obtain). The assassins will hound them until either the PCs or the assassins are destroyed, making rest hard, if not impossible. A DM will have to be careful to keep this adventure fun for the spellcasters.
* A clever DM of mine had an adventure where the PCs had to collect 13 items from 13 spots across the world within 24 hours. That required almost all of our higher level spells for transporation and relocation, so we had to resort to lower level spells and relying upon the fighter types to best the guardians of the items.
* Similar to an idea above, a demon once assaulted the party with an artifact that stole their ability to sleep. Without it, they'd become, tired, then exhausted and then eventually go insane. The PCs had to track down the great monster and defeat it before they were destroyed by lack of sleep.
Sorry about the large quote. I have to agree with a previous poster on this one: these examples are interesting, sound fun, are creative, and are extremeley unusual. They are tailor-made to restrain the spell casters. That's fine. Just be aware that they are tailor made; the campaign-style as it were is "keep the spell casters off guard, don't let them shoot their spell-wad in 1-2 combats a day." That's great too.
However, it's not supported by the DMG.
The DMG does not say "if you canonical party is heavy in spell casters, make sure to run more random encounters/stop them from sleeping/do more time-constraint things. Vary the ways you do this so it does not get stale, etc."
Put it this way. D&D should be "balanced" so that a newbie GM, with dewbie players, can throw together a party and have an adventure / campaign where spell-lobbers don't dominiate.
We EN-Worlders can do this easily, we are generally more sophisticated than the run-of-the-mill player/GM. But, what about these run-of-the-mill players, who don't have this "meta" game information that mid-high level spellcasters need to be constrained by time factors, sleep, rushing, etc. etc. etc.?
Often spell-casters dominate. It's that simple. In a similar way Monks CAN shine, but require a campaign where they can do it. So this is what we have:
To create a "fair and balanced" campaign, a new GM should remember to:
1) Don't let spellcasters dominate by blowing all their high level spells at one time. Think of various clever ways to do this, without making the players get annoyed by all the wandering monsters. Sorry, there are no good examples in the core books. But I'm sure you can figure it out.
2) Cook up a way so that the monk's strengths (mobility, saves, grappling, etc.) are played up.
Now, do this EVERY adventure, for as long as you have a Monk/Druid/high-level caster in your group. And have fun! This will insure the players have fun too.
We can do this. I can do this. Most people can't, or don't, probably because they don't see the problem. According to the books, a Fighter18=Wizard18=Monk18. Swap and play. Done.
