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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6153403" data-attributes="member: 5143">Not precisely the same.  But similar.  If the Wizard can retreat from a combat with a Teleport without Error(or Teleport, Greater or whatever) as long as they prepare it in advance then maybe a fighter could have a lesser power that does a similar thing.  Maybe he can intimate enemies into ignoring him when he runs away.  Not as powerful, but similar.  The Wizard can appear across the planet in an instant.  Maybe the Fighter can move at 3 times normal overland travel rate and can avoid random encounters if he's by himself.  Or maybe he's just famous enough that he's almost always offered a ride by roaming caravans or gets offered a teleport by traveling Wizards.  He just has to walk to wherever they are so it isn't immediate like an actual Wizard.I know this is a contentious point and some people really hate playing D&D like this.  But for me, I'll say that the DM gets to frame the scene, the players get to decide the content of it.It's similar to Improv acting games.  The moderator says "Here's the scene, you are a traveling salesman who is attempting to sell XBox Ones door to door.  The other guy is a walrus who already has a PS4.  Oh, keep in mind that walrus's don't have hands.  Right now you just like to look at your PS4."The actors then proceed to decide on the actual dialog, the strategy they'll use to convince the Walrus and how the Walrus responds.  However, it's against the spirit of improv to just give up on selling the XBox One and have a scene with you sitting in a bar drinking while completely ignoring the other actor on stage.Similarly, I believe it is against the spirit of D&D to take what the DM gives you as a scene and say "I don't want to do that.  I'm doing this instead".No, but teleporting PAST them into the room with the kidnapped prisoners and teleporting out with them before anyone notices is.  Either way, teleport isn't really the point of the discussion, but rather "Narrative Options" of which the Wizard has many.  Teleporting is just one tool amongst many.Although teleport SHOULDN'T disrupt adventures, it often does.  Many DMs do not consider the ability to teleport when designing an adventure.  Mainly because they steal ideas from movies, tv, novels, comic books.  Many of which don't have teleporting protagonists.  Especially if you've been running the game since the PCs were low level.  You grow to expect that they can't do that until the level that they can.Our DMs have always ruled that any sort of contact counted as touching.  So, you just put the back of your hand holding a sword against someone.  And each person just has to be touching someone else, so in a 5 ft wide hallway, we just all touched the person in front of us, creating a chain and teleported.It isn't the end of success.  But the Wizard always escaped while the rest of us died.  It's just an advantage he had over everyone else.It might be.  But I really dislike playing games where dumb creatures have an exhaustive knowledge of spells and how to disrupt them.  When I play orcs, it's often: "That guy just did some magic stuff that hurt a lot!  Let's smash his head in until he stops casting that magic at us."The idea that most orcs would be "That over there, good man, is what we call a Wizard.  When they cast spells they need absolute concentration.  So if you wait to hit them just as they open their mouth, it's possible you can distract him enough so he can't finish his spell."  It's just too much strategy and patience for brutal orcs.Even if I was to use those tactics, however.  We always make sure there is one of our allies in a straight line between the orcs and our wizard to prevent charges.  Or the Wizard is invisible, has mirror image up, or any number of other protections.  Even if he is hit, most concentration checks can be made on a natural 1 for the average damage of enemies.If those rules are useful, we'll use them.  However, when you are fighting an encounter against a bunch of Oozes, they will not use any of those rules.  They are require intelligent, strategic enemies to even attempt them.  Over half of them require the enemy to be a spellcaster.No, there were a lot of variation.  But on this point everyone agreed.  Disrupting spellcasters was close to useless and a waste of your action.Yeah, this was a point of some contention amongst DMs.  What happens when a silence appears in a point of space(where there's no save), putting a Wizard in silence AS he is casting the spell.Some people pointed out that a readied action happens before the action that triggered it so maybe the Wizard hadn't started casting his spell yet when the silence goes up, allowing him to cast the spell later in the combat when he wasn't in silence(though we ruled it still used up their standard action).This was argued for mainly because many people felt that Silence was way too powerful if it was considered to disrupt the spell and make the caster lose it.  Mainly because amongst the options of disrupting spellcasters it appeared to be easily the most powerful: Using Dispel Magic required a caster level check to succeed at a counter spell and it was specifically designed to stop magic.  Doing damage allowed a concentration check, using the exact same spell to counter required having the same exact spell prepared.  All of the options had a chance to fail except casting silence on a point nearby an enemy caster as he was casting.We jointly agreed that the other options might as well not exist if we were going to allow that.  So, everyone agreed that stopping someone from casting the spell but leaving it in their memory was at least reasonable.Still, no one really used it however, because it was better to have the enemy dead than have them silenced.The problem is, it NEVER had a useful purpose.  Which mainly has to do with the math in 3.5e.  Most relatively powergamed groups of PCs can easily do enough damage to kill one monster of CR=their level(and probably 1 or 2 levels higher) without blinking.  Although, if one of the party members wasted their action NOT doing damage then the monster would survive long enough to attack.The characters never decided this, the players did.  They hated the hour or two of real time it took to play out these combats.I just gave an example of hitpoints.  The point is that most enemies have low hitpoints for their CR.  If you follow the EL guidelines when crafting encounters, it almost always involves the enemies dying in no time at all.  At least, when the PCs attack and do damage instead of delaying the battle with non-damaging actions like Sunder, Grapple, Counterspelling, etc.My monsters don't have 30 hps on their foreheads either.  That's precisely the problem.  As the DM, I'm keeping track of them and thinking "Wow...if they had just attacked instead of grappling, this battle would be over already with one or two good hits from the fighter.  But he's the one grappling."  We discussed it one day, since nearly all my players were also Living Greyhawk DMs and we all felt it was kind of an issue since we spent so much time resolving grapples that didn't help the players at all.  That conversation bled over to us as players where we'd pretty much complain at anyone who attempted a grapple to stop and just kill the monster already so we didn't have to wait as long to resolve the battle.  The real problem with grapple is that the monster with LOTS of hitpoints are the Huge or larger creatures.  Those are the ones that are going to survive a couple of rounds of attacks and therefore would be the most beneficial to grapple.  Those are precisely the same creatures that were impossible to succeed at grappling.I remember one battle in particular where a Wizard thought he was so awesome.  He cast a spell which had a huge area of effect which did something like 1d6 points of damage to enemies while in it.  Then cast another spell which caused people to trip and fall if they moved more than 10 feet during their turn and had to roll balance checks to get up.  But since it had that effect on everyone, he asked none of the other PCs to enter it.  We fought a couple of more enemies while we waiting for them to leave the AOE, but eventually, they were the only ones left and he insisted we don't engage them and just let them die.The DM was getting super frustrated because each round he was accomplishing nothing.  He rolled to see which ones got up that turn, most of which failed and marked down 3 points of damage amongst 50 or so hitpoints.  The problem is, he couldn't just skip to the end of the encounter because it was obvious that they were going to eventually reach the edge of the AOE with enough health to at least get one or two good hits in before they died.  It was just a matter of how fast they got there, which order they arrived in, etc.I'm not sure what your point is.  Sure, the fighter will likely hit him a bunch and do a lot of damage.  He likely won't kill him in one hit however.  Though, in 3.5e everything had so few hitpoints that nobody used a polymorph spell anyways.  It was either hit someone with a Force Orb for nearly half their health in damage or attempt a polymorph spell and see if it worked.All I can say is that the average Wizard holds a dagger/staff in one hand and nothing in the other in our games.  If they needed a wand, they'd draw one as a minor action.  No big deal.  You keep the weapon in your hand just in case you need to make AOOs.  You may not have the best chance to hit but if you only have a 50% chance of stopping a grapple, it's better than nothing as one grapple pretty much removes your character from the game.Glad to hear it.  I find "There are more orcs" perfectly acceptable compared to "The orcs are a well trained swat team for taking down Wizards and when a Wizard shows up, they all know precisely the way to take him down and their primary goal becomes ignoring everyone except the Wizard to make sure he doesn't cast spells."Sure.  Though that's not likely the point.  It's likely that one of them either runs faster than one of the PCs or one of them has a bow or casts spells to shoot at the PCs.  Then the retreat doesn't last until civilization.  It lasts until 200 feet away from the cave entrance when the last of the PCs dies to bow fire.Ugh, this is why I stopped playing 3.5e.  Because I hate building NPCs.  When I build 7th level PCs, I don't even choose half their feats.  Or at least I'll just pick the absolute most obvious ones.  These are fighters.  I likely took Weapon Focus, Weapon Spec, Combat Reflexes, Dodge for the Orcs.I don't often pay any attention to what spells and feats my players have.  My opinion is that monsters don't change simply because the PCs took a particular feat or spell.  I don't build monsters to defeat them.  Could I build monsters specifically for defeating Wizards?  Sure.  Do I want to?  No.  Do I think it should be necessary to target one class above all others?  Nope.I'm not pulling out specific spell examples.  The specifics simply don't matter.  It's the concept that does.  I can tell you that not one wizard in our games at level 7 has less than 23 Int.  Starting with 20 Int, putting the point for 4 in and having a +2 int item(or even a +4 int item by that point) is likely.  They also likely have spell focus.  Anyone who started at only an 18 Int is laughed at for being underpowered.Keep in mind the Wizard has many, many tools in their toolbox.  I just assume that any enemy I use, the Wizard will have at least one spell that works just fine against them.  Orb of Force goes right through all spell resistance, doesn't require a save and does huge amounts of damage.  In battles where Wizards are forced to resort to it, they are ONLY equal in power to the rest of the group.  And this only happens in about 1 in 20 battles.As for considering the strengths of the PCs.  Yep, I spent most of my DMing during those years running Living Greyhawk where the adventures are written by someone else and were designed to be played by any group of PCs.  We weren't allowed to change the monsters....so I ran what I had.Yep, stoneskin cost money.  Some of our DMs enforced it.  Either way, it was 10 gp or something and in most of our campaigns, that's what we picked up from the chump change of the average encounter.As for casting times, the casting time of a spell was equal to its level.  If I remember correctly, a Longsword had a speed factor of 4 or 5.  Basically, every spell that was less than 4th level was faster than the average weapon.  And that required that the enemy be close enough to swing their weapon on you during their turn.  If I remember correctly, moving added to your initiative.Yeah.  Though pinned characters were not helpless and therefore couldn't be tied up.  Pinned only lasted a round.  It wasn't really fair to the enemies to allow one pin to defeat them.  Though, if their grapple check was bad enough, it's certainly possible they'll never escape.It doesn't.  Kill might be the wrong word.  "Fight a combat" might be a better one.  The point is that it's a battle scene and Polymorph is less a battle spell and more an interesting utility spell.  I'd like spells like this to be changed to longer casting times so that the idea of Wizards turning people into other things remains but it being used as the answer to a combat situation goes away.Diplomacy shouldn't work against people who don't want to talk to you.  It isn't magic.  No matter what you say, orcs aren't going to stop hurting you because you yell out some words.I understand the rules explicitly allowed changing attitudes in combat.  It was the butt of many a joke because of it.  I once played a character explicitly to show how stupid this was.  When you can make a DC 40 on a 1 on the die you can make the DC 25 to turn a hostile creature indifferent without rolling.  If you roll high enough, you can make them friendly.Though, that didn't stop nearly EVERY DM I played under with that character from saying "What?  Show me where in the rules it says that!  Really?  It says that...that's stupid.  I didn't think you could force creatures who are valiantly trying to kill you to stop simply because you said 'Stop!  Please!'  Wait, I'm allowed to apply circumstance modifiers to your roll, right?  They aren't just hostile, they are extremely hostile.  You get -20 to your roll." I was in agreement with them really, I shouldn't be able to force an NPC to do what I want, no matter what I roll.  I can influence them as long as it's reasonable and in the right setting.  But yelling out something in 6 seconds that makes enemies stop attacking you is unlikely at best.I'm not surprised.  I understand that people want the quickest, most efficient way to win as possible.  I want to do that when I play.  Well, mostly.  I normally play blaster mages who use fireballs and magic missiles, despite them being "bad" choices since it is more satisfying to me to blow enemies up rather than turn them into bunnies.However, the point is that the game should feel satisfying for everyone.  Part of the DM and the systems job is to make sure that happens.  Players would love the ability to snap their fingers and have all the enemies on the battlefield drop dead.  It would be so much easier.  However, the system should be designed to make sure that doesn't happen and there is some risk involved in fighting a combat.  When the system fails, the DM should also be attempting that goal.I want a system that runs combat fast but doesn't end in one round so that combat feels like something happened during it but doesn't use up very much real life time.  So far 5e is doing that for me.  Battles go 3-4 rounds on a regular basis instead of the 1-2 that 3.5e combats lasted.  Because of this they feel most substantive in terms of story while still taking 20 minutes instead of 60 minutes.It does that mainly by removing options like sunder, grapple, counterspelling, concentration checks, AOOs and the like which were bogging down the rules.  Grappling still exists, but it's something you only want to do in very specific circumstances.</blockquote>

Verification