WizarDru
Adventurer
I'm curious if any other games have experienced what I call "Spell Detente'". It was inadvertant, on my part as DM, at first. Over time, it became an overt choice, and to some degree remains. What is it?
I define Spell Detente' as the intentional withholding of the use of certain spells that are available, but are not used, either by overt gentleman's agreement or by anticipation of negative long-term effects on a campaign.
To wit: in my game, my players avoided using Deafness/Blindness early on, to prevent my taking notice of it, and thereby using it against them [i.e. I was aware of it, tangentially, but never really read the spell]. They admitted this when I finally did pull it out of the box in our RtToEE game.
The biggie in this category is Mordankanien's Disjunction, or the Mutually Assured Destruction spell....in that it can result in really angry players. The same can be said of Time Stop, and a few other spells.
Now, this isn't to say that these spells won't be cast, but generally they are avoided, for fear of their use spinning out of control. Their frequency is probably more dramatically reduced due to this. My question, then, is whether or not this is unique to my game or not.
Understand that I'm not asking if the DM has restricted use of the spells, because I'm not. This is whether or nor certain spells are availble, but never or rarely used because of the expectation that their use could come to dominate play, (simlar to the B-S-T theory of play that some groups face).
I define Spell Detente' as the intentional withholding of the use of certain spells that are available, but are not used, either by overt gentleman's agreement or by anticipation of negative long-term effects on a campaign.
To wit: in my game, my players avoided using Deafness/Blindness early on, to prevent my taking notice of it, and thereby using it against them [i.e. I was aware of it, tangentially, but never really read the spell]. They admitted this when I finally did pull it out of the box in our RtToEE game.
The biggie in this category is Mordankanien's Disjunction, or the Mutually Assured Destruction spell....in that it can result in really angry players. The same can be said of Time Stop, and a few other spells.
Now, this isn't to say that these spells won't be cast, but generally they are avoided, for fear of their use spinning out of control. Their frequency is probably more dramatically reduced due to this. My question, then, is whether or not this is unique to my game or not.
Understand that I'm not asking if the DM has restricted use of the spells, because I'm not. This is whether or nor certain spells are availble, but never or rarely used because of the expectation that their use could come to dominate play, (simlar to the B-S-T theory of play that some groups face).
There have been so many side adventures caused by the Diviner who just can't seem to roll a successful teleport roll (usually Thematically Similar or just Off Target), once he rolled a complete miss and ended up scrambling the PCs a bit. I have thus banned Teleport without Error from HIS spell list.
