Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4089625" data-attributes="member: 58197">Actually, I'd say 3E spells are the natural consequence of trying to impose balance after the fact on the BECMI/AD&D spell list, rather than scrapping the whole durn thing and starting over with a better sense of what belongs where.Case in point: Animate dead.  In BECMI, and even through 2E, you could raise literally armies of skeletons and zombies with this spell.  That was Cool, and was in fact the whole point of the spell; it was what evil clerics used to create their shambling hordes of doom.  In 3E, somebody noticed that armies of undead were just a wee bit powerful for a 5th-level cleric in a dungeon-crawling scenario, and so they slapped a Hit Die cap on it and added a costly material component.  Now animate dead was balanced (sorta), but much of its Cool was lost.What I'd prefer would be to kick animate dead upstairs to the level 7-8 range (spell level, that is--character level 13 to 15), and make sure it could only raise fairly weak undead.  That wouldn't unbalance dungeon crawling, since regular human-type skeletons and zombies die if a CR 15 monster so much as walks by on the other side of the street.  Add a smallish material component so you have to work at least a little bit for your undead horde, and there you go.Part of the issue is that 3E focussed so obsessively on dungeon crawling that it sort of lost sight of the larger picture.  A spell like the one I just described isn't much good in the dungeon, but kicks ass in a political/military campaign.  Since BECMI explicitly shifts to political/military stuff as you head into the Companion levels, it was natural for it to incorporate such magic.  (See also massmorph, the BECMI spell that lets you disguise an army as a bunch of trees.  What does that do for you in the dungeon?  Virtually nothing.  When you're leading an army?  It rocks.)We don't yet know if 4E will have that same broadening of focus at later levels; though it seems a natural consequence of the Heroic/Paragon/Epic tiers.  On the other hand, if I recall correctly, one of the designers said PCs at high levels would be doing fundamentally the same things as PCs at low levels.  Ah well, here's hoping.Yeah, well, no one said we had to revert completely.  Besides, I was making up most of the dungeon on the fly, so mapping would have been fairly pointless.Me neither... I think.  But that doesn't mean we can't look to BECMI for ideas on how to improve the experience of later editions.Perhaps I should clarify.  I wasn't saying everybody should go back to Classic and run a whole campaign.  I was just suggesting that it's worth taking an evening to run a BECMI adventure and re-connect with what I found to be a cleaner, faster game--even if that game may not be suitable for long-term play.</blockquote>

Verification