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="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7061251" data-attributes="member: 996">So, if they can trivialize a challenge? That's a much more familiar issue and one that happens a lot in a lot of games.  It's usually a matter of the GM deciding how to present things taking into account that some things are going to be trivial.   If a character can teleport anywhere in the world at-will, then, "How do I get there" is never 'action' nor a 'provocative question.'  OTOH, it's never an impediment to 'going where the action is,' either.  Isn't giving the players an ability like that (or not) part of a larger sort of framing?  Perhaps at the system or campaign level.  For instance, in M:tA, having the basic 1 dot in a sphere gave you some pretty crazy ability to perceive related things.  With matter 1 life 1 you could see how thick a wall was, what it was made of, and whether anyone was hiding behind it (or anything living inside it).  You can't make a big deal out of searching for secret doors.  You can, OTOH, pull the PCs into a scene based on that ability to notice things 'sleepers' cannot.  For another, D&D is full of spells or magic items that will trivialize certain things.  Those things stop being important, but they might make other things more important, or draw them into challenges they couldn't have had anything to do with before. Well, divination about the future (like time travel) can get pretty problematic.  But divination can also (as as I found running M:tA for years) move stories along, generate plot hooks, and suck players into challenges they didn't know existed.  And you don't need the backstory authored.  You can make it up on the spot, filling in the world ahead of them, which can be surprising and fun for the DM, too. "X weeks later..." Typically, in D&D, you recover about half your non-magical arrows after each encounter, so running out isn't a common event.  A PC could always use survival to make arrows from available materials.  It shouldn't take much table time. Or the divination can just give a benefit that the PC evokes later "I knew that was going to happen!" Nod.  And, by the same tokens, it prevents large bonuses from trivializing a challenge.</blockquote>

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