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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5305095" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Issue 199: November 1993part 5/8Romancing the stoneskin: Here we go. The floodgates are well and truly opened on the Stoneskin topic, to the point where they've given it it's own special, in addition to the usual forum. Quite a substantial one too. This is going to take some pretty serious work to get through. Erin D. Smale has a ton of suggestions, many which don't require changing the rules. Anything with 3-4 attacks per round will burn through stoneskin like a hot knife through butter. Sahuguin, bears, even carrion crawlers (oh yes, gotta love the carrion crawlers in this situation) If that fails, reduce the number of attacks it protects against or the duration. If they can't precast it miles in the future, it merely becomes a nuisance like Haste. Scott Isaacs points out the many things stoneskin does sod-all against. Energy, disease, acid, poison, mass attacks. Many of these are entirely accessible to most humanoid attackers. They will adapt. Jason Papadopoulos suggests going back to the 1e version of stoneskin, which doesn't protect against as many attacks. Simple as that. Daniel Harms is another person who thinks making the duration nonpermanent is the primary fix needed here. Nerf durations in general! Let's lay that groundwork for later editions! Mae Tanner suggests that rocks fall, everybody dies. Lots of little hits are once again the way to go. The Baron suggests implementing the diseases in the Complete Wizards Handbook that stem from overuse of a particular school. Mean. Granite dust can also be surprisingly expensive and hard to obtain too. Jason A. Goode shows us all the ways a Dragon can really mess a stoneskinned character's day up. Breath weapons and spells really ruin your day. Thomas B. Knoedler wonder where all the money is coming from. Well, maybe it's because they are mowing through their enemies so easily at the moment. Treasure does normally come in the thousands in D&D. Mark Macedo suggests lassos and contact poison. Have them wake up later with their gear gone. It'll take quite a bit of work to make back the money to refresh your spells after that. Michael Tresca also suggests rocks fall. Or people keep bags of gravel just to throw in your face. Exactly what swashbucklers would do, anyway. Rick Hood stepped up the number of monsters after his players discovered Stoneskin. It's all about keeping the challenges appropriate to the party. John Gartner III reminds you to screw them over by having any attempt to cast other touch based spells on them fail and use up a charge. This is particularly mean if they've been taking damage from spells and really need healing pronto. Peter B Sears suggests wild magic zones. Watch where you rest to buff yourself up. Soren Thustrup goes back to the basics and reminds you not to roll, just to subtract a charge every time someone attacks them. Quick and easy. Timothy J. Pudoff mitigates the problem by not letting them rest after every battle. You have 24 hours to save the princess before she gets sacrificed to the volcano god! J. R. Katzman uses lots of little spikes, whether thrown darts, or in a pit trap. Every single one counts separately. They'll soon add up. Scott Brownlee just wants to change the rules. Do you need too, when they're as easy to twist as this. Nathaniel Deily also wants you to full on degrade the spell to reinforce your authoritah. Don't let the same trick keep on working. Lev Osherovich suggests making stoneskin self only. That'll cut the abuses by a big fraction too, then you can charge them a premium by making stoneskin other a higher level spell. The crappiest kind of nerf. I hate it when they do that. Alfredo M. Cunha suggests that you shouldn't be able to maintain the same spell twice simultaneously. There are certainly some systems where that is the case. Roger Rhodes also cuts the duration, although not as drastically. You can't give them free extra resources because they saved carefully earlier. Just like real governments then <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Alan Lauderdale suggests that the enemy corner the market on diamond dust. Then you can make a whole adventure out of trying to get stoneskin back. Jay Knioum reminds us that dispel magic is useful against any kind of persistent buff. Spamming your enemy with it just before going into battle could well become a standard tactic in a magic-heavy world. S. Morgan also goes the magic heavy route. Zap them with magic missiles and the like. Remember how even a single fireball devastates an entire party. Sean Milner goes psionic. We know by now how good that is at bypassing the normal resistances and messing with your mind. Stone skin won't keep their brain from exploding from the inside out. Paul Wrider recommends keeping exactly how much protection they have left secret. That'll keep complacency at bay a bit. Wade Hoover suggests selective bookworms. Just take out the problematic spell and have done with it. William S. Hickey suggests magical items that are designed specifically to penetrate stoneskin. Everything has it's counter, especially if it's pretty common. Aaron R. Smith wants to give stoneskin a visible manifestation, and make having active stuff like that socially unpopular. Not that this'll stop people who sleep in full plate and carry 50 pounds of gear, including half a dozen weapons. Anonymous tells you to simply not give any xp for any encounter that was no challenge at all. I think that's virtually an official rule anyway. David Goodwin has the rather silly suggestion that as granite is radioactive, they'll start suffering from that eventually. Trace radiation like that is unlikely to affect anyone. And finally, Michael T. Scott suggests switching worlds if all else fails. Different laws of physics can justify any changes you like, including complete removal of problem powers. Presto chango. So once again, any problem is solvable by an attentive DM.</blockquote>

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