What would you guys say to voluntarily lowering our saves a few notches?
Wait! Hear me out!
Here's what I was thinking. It seems to me that the parts of the game that involve saving throws will be more interesting if we can be more sure that they'll matter in some way. I think we all look at our respective saves, grimace, and then pick only things that have a significant effect, save or no save. I mean, just look at our four solid spellcasters: we have two summoner-types (Caira, Sigrun), a guy who relies on sneak attack dice to do decent damage (Pilmer), and a buff-himself build (Solarion). If that's all that's feasible, I think we lose a lot of the richness and interest of the spell system, not to mention something like 60% of its depth.
Looking at it another way, say you have a dedicated caster. 18 starting, all level points into the casting stat, +12 item, +5 inherent bonus, all coming out to a 42, giving a +16 bonus. With a 9th-level spell, that's a save DC of 35. Granted, it can go maybe 5 points higher with a full-on caster build, but then again, there's no chance at all that an NPC spellcaster (who has only a bit more than a half-million gold at this level) will even have that +12 item. Realistically, if we have a +35 or better on a save, that makes a whole subsection of spells and spell-like abilities much less interesting. If we have that on all of our saves, it makes the sort of things we can have as challenges, well, crushingly dull in my opinion.
I don't really like that. So, what I would propose is that we all drop some of the luck bonuses, sacred bonuses, and whatnot, and shoot for a set of saves that have at least some resemblance to the DCs we force to begin with. It looks to me like numbers from the low 20s to the mid 30s are pretty reasonable to very good for this level, not counting monsters with so many HD that they have something like an 87 save DC anyway. But that's what preparedness, caution, and full access to the cleric and druid spell lists are for.
Now, I'm not suggesting that we change our saves relative to each other. My Will save will still blow, and Solarion's saves will still be quite good across the board, because that's what he does (Contemplative... :\ ). I just think we should rejigger to make more sense when compared with the rest of the world, those poor slobs who don't have 4.3 million gold and a very lenient DM as far as item creation goes. Isida will be able to use interesting spells that have the downside of actually having saves attached to them, and we'll be able to do likewise as a nice bonus.
Before you start worrying that this will somehow make us all die, I would like to point out that this isn't some kind of pregen adventure. If we have a certain level of saves that we all share, Isida will know and not arbitrarily kill us all. There's no need to squeeze every ounce of blood out of this stone, and I feel that it makes the game less interesting (insofar as saves affect the game) if we do so.
And I already know that someone's going to take issue with changing equipment. Frankly, not only are we doing it already with Su'ryuu on a huge scale, we've never made a save, and probably won't for at least a few days. Changing this is eminently reasonable still, and will only enrich the game from this point (again, insofar as saves affect the game).
Well?
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
