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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6063390" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 302: December 2002part 2/10Zogonia takes the pragmatic approach to dealing with niche protection. Up on a soapbox: Gary reminds us why enforcing encumbrance is important. It's so when the players come across hauls of thousands of coins, the adventure doesn't end smoothly there. Instead, they have to figure out how much they can carry, and how much they should leave, for while they're weighed down, they're vulnerable to further attacks and not able to run away as easily. Dragon hoards filled with copper and silver? Often not worth the hassle, especially at higher level. And if they leave them unguarded, chances are someone else'll come along and snag the leftovers. The whole thing was built so there would always be more challenges to throw at the players and make sure they didn't get complacent. And the good thing is that until they get high enough in level to teleport without error and manufacture their own bags of holding, you can always reintroduce problems like this, even if you've glossed over it in the past. They might not be ready for the tomb of horrors to be a fair challenge, but you're never too weak to not be inconvenienced by encumbrance. This is the kind of advice you won't be seeing from Robin or Johnn, and the different perspective remains very valuable. What's new moves even further forward in the magazine. And refuses to acknowledge their past. Well, it wasn't pretty, was it. The summoners circle: Ah yes, summoning. Now there's one of those powers that's a real headache for those who want a strictly balanced system. If you can summon any creature you like within a certain power level, then the conjurer winds up a ridiculously flexible swiss army knife, even if individual creatures are considerably lower level CR than their summoner. Older editions often balanced that by making maintaining control a risky business, with fatal consequences if disrupted, but that's been made less common in 3e. Here's another variant system that attempts to further increase balance in the summoning system by making individual spellcasters less flexible, but spellcasters as a whole more, by giving them each small customisable selections for their Summon Monster * spells that they can expand a bit with research. So you can give your spellcaster a themed selection, or more likely, a deliberately contrasting selection of monsters for maximum flexibility, with characters in the same party avoiding taking the same options, if I know my charop at all. So like the bard masterworks last issue, this is a system experiment I find interesting, but I'm also ambivalent about, because you can see them trying to gradually reduce the number of options each character has, which is one of my least favourite parts of 4e. Oh well, it's only a magazine article, which means it's easily ignored if you want to stick to the conventional selection of celestial dire badgers and whatnot.</blockquote>

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