COMING SOON! -- Spells of the Ages: Archmagic For D&D 5th Edition on Kickstarter! Rules for upcasting a range of 5th Edition spells, along with nearly 40 new spells, and a new wizard school.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aelryinth" data-source="post: 8096779" data-attributes="member: 10515">They can't do the same thing because a) a huge portion of your foes are not intelligent, they are literally monsters...  b) a huge portion of your foes don't have access to alchemy labs...c) a huge portion of your foes don't have the alchemy skill...d) they may or may not have the money to acquire the gunpowder...e) if they don't know how to deal with gunpowder, and a lot of them won't, the PC's certainly do, so all those 'faults' of the gunpowder are stuff they know they can use against the enemy...f) the power in gunpowder isn't how you can throw six kegs at an enemy, really. It's about how you can have the kegs in place to drop down on or blow apart enemies...g) spending one fifth level spell to take out an entire encounter is a WONDERFUL use of a fifth level spell, not a waste of it. You think casting cone of cold or summon monster V is better?...This is not like cyberpunk, where you are basically fighting clones of yourselves. D&D is full of monsters and beings that have no business with gunpowder/blackpowder/smoke powder/whatever Ovinomancer wants to call it. They are not the same games!If your D&D is all PC against NPC, sure, gunpowder potentially goes both ways. What about barbaric orcs and goblins, with no alchemy skills or labs? What about dragons? Giants? Hydras? the vast majority of undead? Do fiends ever bother with it? What about magical beasts, plants, most monstrous humanoids, aberrations, oozes? Are they all suddenly going to be equipped with gunpowder kegs, too? Toss three kegs at a treant, it's dead, never gets to learn how to counteract the kegs, how's it going to learn to do so? Same goes for the majority of monsters.It's not the same game as Cyberpunk whatsoever. While some NPC's are a significant fraction of what you fight, they aren't ALL your enemies.As for the production time, there are tools and stuff for making alchemical stuff faster, and you can just have multiple alchemists/PC's working on the stuff during downtime. It's just a skill check, nothing else, and production can be accelerated or scaled up by hiring a few more alchemists happy for the steady job.</blockquote>

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