Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Dark Dragon" data-source="post: 6242929" data-attributes="member: 1115">I agree, it depends very often on the style of play. If gentleman's agreement work, good! But for this special group with the banned spells, most earlier efforts to reduce the power of spell casters to potentially ruin a plot from mid- to high-levels failed more or less... In fact, the second group I'm DMing is working at epic levels without big spell restrictions, but the style of play is completely different and more relaxing because these players don't push the powers of their characters to the limit (unless forced by me to do so).It was a hard discussion until we have agreed to deny access of most of the spells that gather information in different ways to the PCs.Some classes like the warlock or paladin are prone to abuse or over-use of some spells, and it happened quite often that the players used all the options at their disposal, completely ignoring the DM's work to flesh out a situation (looked sometimes like game of DM vs. PCs). And this effect was magnified when we adopted our spell point system... I forgot to mention that Find the Path and Find Traps were kicked out as well for obvious reasons.Modifying debatable spells was an option (i.e. by introducing a costly component), but that would have been quite a lot of work...We decided instead to introduce a new NPC class that works like an &quot;Oracle of Delphi&quot;. This class has access to all Divination spells. But it is up to the DM to give the party an information about the nearest location of an oracle. In this way, the DM can built up a quest to find an oracle that may have the answer to an important question.When I am DMing, I focus more on the skills of the PCs. This supports role-playing in a better way than simply casting a spell that instantly resolves a problem, IMHO.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dark Dragon, post: 6242929, member: 1115"] I agree, it depends very often on the style of play. If gentleman's agreement work, good! But for this special group with the banned spells, most earlier efforts to reduce the power of spell casters to potentially ruin a plot from mid- to high-levels failed more or less... In fact, the second group I'm DMing is working at epic levels without big spell restrictions, but the style of play is completely different and more relaxing because these players don't push the powers of their characters to the limit (unless forced by me to do so). It was a hard discussion until we have agreed to deny access of most of the spells that gather information in different ways to the PCs. Some classes like the warlock or paladin are prone to abuse or over-use of some spells, and it happened quite often that the players used all the options at their disposal, completely ignoring the DM's work to flesh out a situation (looked sometimes like game of DM vs. PCs). And this effect was magnified when we adopted our spell point system... I forgot to mention that Find the Path and Find Traps were kicked out as well for obvious reasons. Modifying debatable spells was an option (i.e. by introducing a costly component), but that would have been quite a lot of work... We decided instead to introduce a new NPC class that works like an "Oracle of Delphi". This class has access to all Divination spells. But it is up to the DM to give the party an information about the nearest location of an oracle. In this way, the DM can built up a quest to find an oracle that may have the answer to an important question. When I am DMing, I focus more on the skills of the PCs. This supports role-playing in a better way than simply casting a spell that instantly resolves a problem, IMHO. [/QUOTE]

Verification