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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Badapple" data-source="post: 4545807" data-attributes="member: 71811">**Warning Thunderspire Labyrinth spoliers********   The magic circle situation occurred in the "guantlet" section of TL, where a maze like series of traps activate as a green dragon flies out of a pit in the center.  The party has to survive 10 rounds (and beat the dragon) to pass through the door to the next area. The party succeeded enough at a prior skill challenge to learn that a dragon would emerge from the pit, so prior to activating the guantlet encounter, the wizard put a magic circle on each of the two openings from the pit room to the rest of the complex. The magic circles were set to affect "natural" creature types.  The wizard is trained in arcana, 6th level, 18 int, and has skill focus arcana.  Her arcana mods for the skill are +5+3+4+3-10 for a total of +5.  Since the dragon was a level 5 solo, it was impossible for her to fail the roll to hedge out the dragon.  Even rolling a one on the check will have the circle effective versus level 6 natural creatures or less. Additionally, someone in the party had the bright idea to throw a gnoll prisoner inside one of the magic circles, since he was "natural" and it would serve as an effective prison. Needless to say the guantlet encounter, which is one of the centerpiece encounters of TL, was trivialized, as the party simply bypassed the traps and went to the open door.  The dragon was stuck on the other ends of the circle totally unable to affect the party.  As DM, I didn't mind as the party put the information they gained to good use and came up with a clever way of bypassing the encounter.  They were awarded full experience points. The interesting hitch was later on after clearing out the Well of Demons, the party wanted to rest up and kill the dragon, and move along with the gnoll prisoner, when they realized that because they were all humans/halflings/dragonborn PCs they were all the "natural" type and they could not affect their own circle!  The wizard pc was very upset, she thought she could disable her own circle any time she wanted to. We scoured the PHB and DMG but no where did we find generic rules that a ritual could be dismissed by the creator.  So I ruled that the circle was there on the ground and could only be defeated by a non natural creature using a standard action or a natural creature of level sufficient to beat the arcana check.  (She rolled a 17 and an 18 on her checks so unless a level 22 natural creature decided to slum it in Thunderspire and bulled through the circle option B wouldn't happen) The party wizard was very upset because the gnoll prisoner was stuck in the circle and there was zero chance to release him, and she didn't want him to starve to death in there. Anyways, at a cost of 100gp and being level 5, we found out that magic circle is a VERY potent ritual.  Way more powerful than "magic circle vs. evil" and equivalent wards in 3.5.  In fact I see some seriously abusive tricks that can be done with it in the hands of a nasty arcanist...</blockquote>

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