NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4314214" data-attributes="member: 47776">*coughs politely*Look, pick a paradigm.  Either throw on arbitrary restrictions hither and yon in the name of balance, fun, or whatever, or run the rules straight.  But don't try to claim that engineering a fight to gain a "when you defeat an enemy" effect doesn't make sense, and inspiring someone totally unaware of your presence does.Hell, I'm still waiting for an answer of how a player-engineered scenario is different from a DM-engineered scenario, with regards to captive minions.  "They aren't; this rule does not serve the DMs desires in such a scenario so it is perfunctorily ignored." is a valid answer.  If you're going to make an argument about rules, discuss what's written.  If you're going to make an argument about common sense, explain the obvious difference between two identical scenarios, posited above.I think that a hard-and-fast guideline concerning valid targets for a warlock's ability are a good thing.  I think that once these guidelines are established, the possibility should exist of a warlock getting together a large number of captives, slaying them all, and gaining a massive pact bonus, and that the hard limit on doing this repeatedly should be expressed in the original guideline.  I think that the various classes and races are cool, not because of their abilities to shuffle numbers and status conditions around, but because those numbers and conditions represent cool things, and rules that interfere with the representation of said cool things are bad rules.  I think that doing this in the small scale with a single creature is also cool, and that "That doesn't work because it's dumb." is a non-argument.Mostly, I really hate "At the DM's askance"-type abilities.  When I play, I like to know that my character can absolutely do certain things, and that said effects happening aren't simply the universe happening to bend in a particular way (but possibly bending the other way tomorrow).   The trick is not to throw gotchas into the rules set, but to construct the original abilities such that even when they are used in scenarios not originally anticipated, the game does not explode messily.But the bound giant rat (freed before its slaughter) is cool, and does work according to the rules, because whoever wrote the Credible Threat rule fundamentally misunderstood how to write rules that resist scrutiny.</blockquote>

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