PHB II - the new kinds of spell

[Nellisir]

I would not describe the things summoned with a conjuration spell as mundane; a summoned celestial hawk or fiendish viper is magical. But SR doesn't offer protection from their attacks. Why? Because they're not spells, right? They're magical creatures summoned by a conjuration spell.

Likewise, the acid of a melf's acid arrow may be magical acid conjured from the plane of elemental earth, and the fire from a blast of flame may be magical fire summoned from the plane of elemental fire.

Its' existence may be magical, but its' substance is mundane, in a sense.

Mundane force.

 

[Kerrick]

Force is kind of a nebulous thing in D&D. When it's a wall or shield it's invisibile, when it's fired at someone it's suddenlty colorful (can't go letting wizards fire invisible missiles at people, now can we?). A cage or wall of force can't be dispelled even though one would think it's a sustained magical effect, but it can be disintegrated as easily as a slab of stone.

Yeah, force is odd, but I can kinda understand the reasoning here. A wall or forcecage is a constructed "object" like a wall of ice or a wall of iron - just because it's temporary doesn't make it any "real". Personally, I would rule that you couldn't dispel any other wall effect either (course, most of them are instantaneous anyway) simply because it would subvert the purpose of the wall to do otherwise. A wall of ice or thorns is easy enough to get through without spells - hack it down or melt/burn it with fire spells. You can get around a wall of force with dimension door or one of the new teleportation spells.

I always wondered why 3e did away with multi-schooled spells in the first place. Some spells just scream more than one school to me.

Because it simplifies the system. It cuts down on the number of times the spell appears in the spell lists (which saves space), and if it's in one school, there's no arguments about whether or not a specialist can take it. Yeah, I know, the new spells have that clause, but... I'm another one that thinks the idea of dual-school spells is absurd.

Let's look at Kelgore's grave mist as an example. The spell "conjures" a thin mist that doesn't hamper vision; all living creatures in the cloud become fatigued and take 1d6 cold damage/rd. There is no save to avoid either effect, but if you have SR and you make the check, you can avoid the fatigue. And this is a L2 spell. IMO, it would have been fine as a straight necromancy spell with a Fort save; if you fail the save, you avoid the fatigue.

Or Kelgore's fire bolt. This is a really wonky spell - you "conjure" a rock and sheathe it in fire (the Evocation part), then throw it at the target. It deals 1d6 fire damage/level (max 5d6) and allows a Ref save for half, but if you fail to overcome the SR, it still deals 1d6 fire damage "from the heat and force of the conjured orb's impact". WTF? Why can't this be a straight Evocation spell where you pick a rock up off the ground, make it burst into flame, and throw it at someone?

I think 4e is already here. It's right under our noses. New stat block formats, swift and immediate actions, the polymorph subschool...

My DM said the same thing when I told him about the new stuff that was featured in the previews - that they're just testing a whole bunch of new stuff to see what works and what doesn't, and the stuff that works (or at least, what players like, which is not necessarily the same thing) will go into the new edition. I have to hand it to them, though - this is pretty slick: they're combining playtesting and market analysis in fell swoop. By handing it off to the general populace, they can see if the new rules work in Joe Gamer's game, and they also see what we think of them. "Well, dual-school spells didn't really go over well, so they're out for 4E, but swift and immediate actions are a hit - they're in."

But maybe I'm just reading too much into this.

 

[I'm A Banana]

To be honest, I thought you were one of those people, KM

It's been a long time since I've delved into any 4e threads, but if I did say that, I was totally WRONG.

I'm still not entirely comfortable with it. Like, 25% of the PHBII is useless to those without the Complete series, and I'm reluctant to feed the hungry monster that creates more books than the core as nessecary for a D&D game. I also don't like how they kind of just decided on the classes they were going to support from their other series...I'm sure they did research, but why exclude the Spirit Shaman, or the Healer? Why largely ignore psionics (which is an increasing player in many campaigns, as far as I can see)? Why ignore the Tome of Magic classes?

I got lucky because the one class from a book I don't have (the Marshall from the MinisHB) exists in a web preview form, so I can still use it.

On the one hand, these classes do deserve to be supplemented. On the other hand, this means that the PHBII can't be fully used with just the core. Reminds me of the 2e "The PC's can go to this town, which is detailed in some FR book, and the fight this monster, which is in one of the Greyhawk compendiums, all for this magic item which is in the Tome of Magic" ever so slightly. Which isn't cool.

 

[Ciaran]

I got lucky because the one class from a book I don't have (the Marshall from the MinisHB) exists in a web preview form, so I can still use it.

Where?

 

[DMH]

Firstly, I love the three channelled spells, and I'd love to see more of them. Basically they are spells where you an choose the casting time (swift, 1 action, 1 full round, 2 full rounds) and the effects improve with the higher casting time (as more energy is 'channelled' into the spell). Plus you choose your casting time AT casting time. Excellent flexibility.

I thought it was a good idea as well when the Sigil came up with a similar version 2 years ago in Buildup Spells.

Secondly, I love the spells that work over a period of time like Call of Stone: a 4th level spell, it slowly turns the target into stone. It lasts for level/2 rounds, and you have to make a Fortitude save every round. Any time you fail the Fort save you get -2 Dex and a 10ft penalty to movement. If you fail four or more saves you turn to stone. So much more flavourful than 'save or die', but still keeping the element of risk (and the opportunity to take some dramatic action to attempt to offset the effect).

Now this is interesting and I haven't read something similar before.

 

[Thanee]

There are two kinds of spell which I've seen for the first time in PHBII which I think break new ground in brilliant spell design, and I don't say that often.

Yep, that sounds like a really good idea. Especially the gradual effect is so much better than save-or-die.

Good to see, that the designers can actually come up with some positive designs (not only a mess like Troll-/Dragonform ).

Bye
Thanee

 

[ThirdWizard]

Now this is interesting and I haven't read something similar before.

Final Fantasy has had a slowly petrifying spell for over a decade.

 

[Felon]

In the 3e PHB it was a reasonable design - the designers of that day were pretty clear that conjuration spells didn't do damage that scaled with the caster level, but could do smaller amounts of damage that continued over time (acid arrow, acid cloud, incendiary cloud).

Subsequent designers in subsequent books either didn't know this or couldn't be bothered, leading to all manner of abominations (such as orb spells) where big blasty spells were put into conjuration to give them the 'no SR' tag, without any due consideration to why the conjuration spells had the 'no SR' tag in the first place. The idea was OK originally, but current implementation is just silly.

I think the subsequent design alterations were not a matter of ignorance or apathy, I rather believe they just noticed that in practice there was a scalability problem with the likes of acid arrow, acid fog, and incendiary cloud. The only attribute that improves with caster level is duration, but one of the counter-intuitive elements of D&D is that, by and large, combats don't last any longer at higher levels than they do at lower levels--in fact, they're probably shorter overall. This not only means that improvements in spell duration don't provide that big a help in killing off the bad guys, but the caster (and his allies) can even wind up with big blobs of acid and fire that hang around longer than he probably needs them too (big mistake not to make all area-affecting conjuration spells dismissable).

SR (or the original magic resistance, which was more powerful) was what made certain foes especially terrifying enemies. Nowadays any DM that allows all the spellbook supplements will see wizards walking all over his golems and mind flayers with tons of spells that just ignore spell resistance. Sillyness.

I remembered playing previous editions, and encountering magic resistance was a short drive from terrifying to aggrivating. There's only so much novelty in scratching off spell slots that accomplished nothing and knowing that, most likely, I might as well be armed with spitballs against this foe...and many more foes to come. The higher level a mage got, the higher MR got. It was a case of diminishing returns.

Having said that, I do think there are some areas where the designers went overboard. Originally, the orb spells scaled by having extra orbs appear, which each required their own attack roll. This limited their preeminence in a number of ways but remained a viable offense against high-SR foes. I don't know why they were condensed into a single orb, although I suspect that it may have had something to do with the change to how energy resistances worked.

Personally, I can live with SR-bypassing damage spells. What I don't like about the conjuration school is the flat-out nastness of its "tar-pit" spells like grease, web, and black tentacles. As both a player and DM, I find their mechanics much more unsatisfying.

 

[MarkB]

Final Fantasy has had a slowly petrifying spell for over a decade.

I think that's probably a slightly longer spell duration than most players are looking for.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think the subsequent design alterations were not a matter of ignorance or apathy, I rather believe they just noticed that in practice there was a scalability problem with the likes of acid arrow, acid fog, and incendiary cloud.

I think you are far more generous than I in this case!

I don't think the damage scalability of those spells was a problem at all - it was a feature. big instant damage belonged to evocation, slow, SR-bypassing damage belonged to conjuration. Then designers started upsetting the applecart.

Ultimately, although 3e attempted to regularise many things, it didn't really grasp the nettle in terms of coming up with a standardised way of handling all spells (e.g. making all fire spells set things alight, making all cold spells have another side effect, so on. Psionics was a step in the right direction here). I'm looking forward to seeing something that maintains it's link with the sacred cows but becomes more extensible and logically put together.

Cheers