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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 348878" data-attributes="member: 633">After long years of meditation in a small Tibetan shrine, I've finally identified what I dislike the most about D&D.Let's suppose the characters get to the big climactic final battle with the big climactic final dragon. The dragon says something like "Mwahahahaha, I'm gonna roast you!", the party cleric casts Destruction, and the DM rolls a 1 on the save. Doesn't that suck?Save or die spells. They aren't particularly overpowered, what they are is simply anticlimactic. When used by the PCs, they either immediately put an end to the battle or do nothing/next to nothing - and both of those possibilities are annoying. When used on the PCs, they either kill one off, no ifs no buts, or do nothing/next to nothing. All the target can do is roll and hope.Many rules in D&D - hit points, to name the first - are designed to make the characters (PCs and NPCs) survive through minor foes and make the big combats long and exciting without turning them into a string of "I attack - I miss, I attack - I miss...". Save or die spells do exactly the opposite thing!There are a huge lot of them, and not only at high levels. Hold person can take a character out for long enough that he basically misses the fight, and any evil henchman can CdG him. Either that, or do nothing. Domination is even worse: not only it takes the party fighter out, but he's now beating you! Or, nothing happens.There are ways to counter this, ways that all DMs employ - Death Wards, Free Action, Mind Bar or just piling up save-enhancing items to the point where the enemy will just give up trying to Disintegrate you to fix one side of the problem; Curses to lower the saves, Doom, and Dispels to fix the other. But why should we need to do this?A character can go around knowing that he won't just get killed by a random brigand with a crossbow, though he will get hurt. Against those magics, however, his natural defenses (saves) are inadequate and unreliable. Why this disparity?A prime example of this problem is in computer games. You eventually get a Death spell/ability/materia/whatever, and you will never use it because all tough foes are immune and the foes that aren't immune are so weak that it's faster to just punch them.What do you think?</blockquote>

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