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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5020016" data-attributes="member: 4937">Why other part?  The head?  The kidney?  The groin?  The abdomen?  Don't these count as vulnerable parts of the body?Better payoff... in the form of lesser but damage tangible damage (???) to the head, groin, eyes, etc.  That's really weak rationalization.Frankly, I consider that response to be a manifestation of "When my opponent's argument makes me uncomfortable, I'll divert the argument to a question of the opponent's integrity or intelligence[sup]TM[/sup] in order to shut down debate."You don't know very much about my position at all.  My position is more like, "The designers of 3.0 were very experienced with 1e AD&D and tended to overcompensate for its failings.  As a result, they tended to nerf spellcaster direct damage and generally gave far too little thought to caster's inflicting conditions (ei 'Save or Suck').  Worse yet, the team that was given the job of fixing the problem in 3.5 sucked at their job and produced a product that by and large made the situation much much worse."  Unless you've got a copy of my house rules document, I'd suggest refraining from drawing broad conclusions about my general philosophy of play or design.Would be a case in point.  In 3.0, it had Fortitude negates.  For some unknown reason, they changed it so that it bypassed fortitude and became almost an instant win button against melee based attackers (the very sort that could be counted on to mostly make fortitude saves).  That's like example #542 why 3.5 on the whole sucked more than 3.0.  They made like 2 or 3 needed fixes, and then just screwed up in hundreds of other places.  Based on the fact that you think this is a valid comparison and apparantly a balanced ability, your philosophy seems to be, "Well, that's ok, just so long as everyone can do it."  It's not ok.  It's dumb.It's worth pointing out additionally, that comparing magic to attacks is generally invalid to begin with because compared to a straight up attack, there are far more defenses built into the game against spells.  The target might have spell immunity, minor sphere of invulnerability, high saving throws, or spell resistance.  Which points to one of the big problems with your next comparison:Poison is another attack form that the game builds alot of defenses against into the game.  So for poison to work, you've got to get passed possible magical immunities/resistances, then possible poison immunities/resistances, and then possible ability damage immunities/resistances as well as the saving throw and the touch attack.  But the hypothetical Con damaging attack has pretty much one hurdle after the hit, and it doesn't do 'half now, half maybe later'.  'No save' is just not something that should be in the game for any significant sort of effect - no matter whether it is a caster or a non-caster attacking.As for the rest, I hate attempts to 'fix' mundane/non-spellcaster characters by turning them into spell-casters.  If it doesn't make sense that it can only be used 'once per day' (as if it was a spell), don't try to balance it that way.I've been playing D&D since about 1981, which is nearly 30 years now.  I know all about the problems (and benefits) stemming from hit point abstraction, but what I don't understand is why if something can be a problem it is based on that to just go ahead and make the problem worse.  That doesn't make sense to me.  Just because something is occassionally bad doesn't mean that highlighting the problem is a great idea.</blockquote>

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