Substituting a spell

[Greenfield]

Well, the spell will affect even high level types, if they don't happen to have Teleport or burrowing capacity, or some form of fast heal/regeneration.

To the point, it would mess with our current party pretty badly. There would, in fact, be a significant body count. To be specific, our Druid could escape by turning into a burrowing animal, presuming he can make the Fort Save(s) to keep from being blown away. The Bard could escape using Cape of the Montebank. The Cleric, the Half Dragon fighter, the Monk, the Rogue/Wizard and the Cleric/Mage/Mystic Theurge would be in deep trouble.

Now, how many Transmute Rock to Mud spells would you need to cast to take out all the buildings in an 880 foot diameter circle? Each casting gets you 22 10x10 squares that have to be contiguous. So you'd need a minimum of 4 just to reach the width one time at the wide point. If you were trying to cover the entire area you'd need 277 castings. Figure about a quarter of that, used tactically, to take out key walls on the structures, call it 67, and that presumes that either every building is built on solid rock or dense gravel (unlikely), or that the spell affects packed earth (which it doesn't).

You're going to be at that a while.

Note that this is all based on an 11th level caster. When done by a Druid, that's the minimum needed. When done by a Sorcerer or Bard, through a dip into Sand Shaper, that minimum goes up to 12 or 13. Which means an ever larger area, expanding based on Pi x R**2, or in simple terms it's expanding on a square while Transmute expands linearly. You'll need proportionally more castings as the levels go up. And since I don't know many people with 70 or so spell slots of that level in a single day, you're either talking about a couple months worth of prep time making Scrolls, a couple of weeks work making a Staff, or a week and a half of casting, resting to recover, then casting again the next day.

Now, can a Fireball start a fire? Yeah, it says so right in the spell description. Can the people of a town put that fire out, or at least keep it from spreading? Even without any use of magic, the answer is clearly yes. You won't raze that type of area with a single Fireball.

 

[Dandu]

Well, the spell will affect even high level types, if they don't happen to have Teleport or burrowing capacity, or some form of fast heal/regeneration.

A large amount of monster manual creatures would have some or all of the above, iirc.

To the point, it would mess with our current party pretty badly. There would, in fact, be a significant body count. To be specific, our Druid could escape by turning into a burrowing animal, presuming he can make the Fort Save(s) to keep from being blown away. The Bard could escape using Cape of the Montebank. The Cleric, the Half Dragon fighter, the Monk, the Rogue/Wizard and the Cleric/Mage/Mystic Theurge would be in deep trouble.

Greenfield, don't take this the wrong, way, but a badly made monk could be killed by Magic Missile. This does not make Magic Missile overpowered.

Also, the monk does get to Dimension Door the next level, which would enable him to escape. Clerics have Freedom of Movement (magical wind sure sounds like a magical impediment to movement), and can also obtain DR through certain spells (Visage of the Deity iirc). The Rogue/Wizard can get teleporation through a wand or learning the spell - the fact that he has not done this says more about his planning abilities than the power level of Sandstorm. The Cleric/Mage/Mystic Theurge is a terrible build power wise, so the fact that he has trouble against Sandstorm really shouldn't surprise anyone because MT builds often don't have the spells of the right level available. As for the fighter, eh. Level adjustment on top of a poor class with no real class features... what do you expect?

So unless you're saying that Sandstorm is too overpowered because badly build characters are devastated by it, I'd advise we drop that line of reasoning.

Now, if we go through the Monster Manual and search for CR 10 monsters, we get this list:

Animated Object, Colossal (Hardness of more than 3 - not going to be damaged by 1d3 damage/round)
Brass Dragon, Young adult (DR 5/Magic)
Couatl (Ethereal Jaunt)
Cryohydra, Nine-Headed (Fast healing 9)
Demon, Bebilith (DR 10/good)
Formian Myrmarch (Fast healing 2, the same damage that Sandstorm inflicts per round)
Giant, Fire (nothing)
Golem, Clay (DR 10/adamantine and bludgeoning)
Hydra, Eleven-Headed (fast healing 21)
Monstrous Scorpion, Gargantuan (nothing)
Naga, Guardian (the default spell list has some healing spells but no teleporation, however, they can cast as 9th level sorcerers with access to the cleric spell list, so it is possible for them to teleport)
Pyrohydra, Nine-Headed (fast healing 9)
Rakshasa (DR 15/good and piercing)
Red Dragon, Juvenile (nothing)
Salamander, Noble (DR 15/magic)
Silver Dragon, Juvenile (nothing)
White Dragon, Adult (Dr 5/magic)

Sandstorm is better than Control Winds on 5 out of 17 monsters at CR 10. That's not a lot. This is, in essence, why I don't consider Sandstorm to be very powerful unless you just want to dick around with a city - and if that's the case, you can just Control Winds and send Dorothy to Oz.

Now, how many Transmute Rock to Mud spells would you need to cast to take out all the buildings in an 880 foot diameter circle? Each casting gets you 22 10x10 squares that have to be contiguous. So you'd need a minimum of 4 just to reach the width one time at the wide point. If you were trying to cover the entire area you'd need 277 castings. Figure about a quarter of that, used tactically, to take out key walls on the structures, call it 67, and that presumes that either every building is built on solid rock or dense gravel (unlikely), or that the spell affects packed earth (which it doesn't).

You're going to be at that a while.

Note that this is all based on an 11th level caster. When done by a Druid, that's the minimum needed. When done by a Sorcerer or Bard, through a dip into Sand Shaper, that minimum goes up to 12 or 13. Which means an ever larger area, expanding based on Pi x R**2, or in simple terms it's expanding on a square while Transmute expands linearly. You'll need proportionally more castings as the levels go up. And since I don't know many people with 70 or so spell slots of that level in a single day, you're either talking about a couple months worth of prep time making Scrolls, a couple of weeks work making a Staff, or a week and a half of casting, resting to recover, then casting again the next day.

I acknowledge that it is very efficient at what it does. However, I consider what it does to be insignificant. I guess this is a legitimate divergence in our point of view. The ability to wreck buildings and slay the citizens in a city district is probably too much for your games. In mine, I don't start worrying until someone uses Planar Binding (6th level Sor/Wiz) to call a genie and gain 3 wishes.

Now, can a Fireball start a fire? Yeah, it says so right in the spell description. Can the people of a town put that fire out, or at least keep it from spreading? Even without any use of magic, the answer is clearly yes. You won't raze that type of area with a single Fireball.

Ever hear of the Great London Fire of 1666? It consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St. Paul's Cathedral and most of the buildings of the City authorities.

Or the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, which killing hundred and destroyed about 3.3 square miles in Chicago?

Wikipedia has quite the list of great fires that were not in fact put out by the citizenry. In the medieval period, which is about when D&D is supposed to take place, London had two Great Fires, both of which devastated a bit more than an 440 radius area.

As an aside, if I was a level 12 Sorcerer and wanted to slay a city block, I think I would be able to do it perfectly well without Sandstorm. Other than the obvious method of using Planar Binding, I would stand by tactical fireballing as a reliable means of making a city burn (historical justifications having been previously mentioned), and casting Enervation on a 1 HD commoner and waiting for him to turn into a wight and then have a wight army expand geometrically from that point on (because that is what happens when you get hit by negative levels and turned into a wight).

 

[Greenfield]

I guess this highlights a major difference between your game worlds and the ones we play in: In our worlds, wars are fought by armies.

A spell like this is obviously aimed at dealing with massed enemies, not individual high level creatures.

You see, the problem with the idea of, say, sending a single Frenzied Berserker into a population center is that the population can run away, they can hide. They have an average intelligence higher than a Lemmings', and aren't compelled to stampede to their deaths.

Spells like Cloud Kill, which you cited, are easy to avoid. Like Creeping Doom, they're easy to simply walk away from, the people don't even need to run.

Now Storm of Vengance? Control Winds and its big brother Sandstorm? Those hit big enough that a massed enemy or target population can't simply walk away from the threat. Their elite members will have a way to escape, certainly, but you've devastated their support infrastructure, wiped out the majority of their support.

Do you know what they call a King who has no surviving subjects? A hermit.

That's what spells like this do. They destroy fleets of warships, level cities and lay waste to entire armies. You call that insignificant, and maybe in your games it is. It isn't in any game I've ever player in.

 

[Dandu]

The ability to drop a tactical nuke is, I suppose, not so much insignificant to me as it is level appropriate in my games.

 

[Sekhmet]

[MENTION=6669384]Greenfield[/MENTION] Not to reduce the argument to absurdities, but if that is the case, why do you allow PC casters over about 10th level anyway? It seems counter productive to that type of campaign setting.

As an aside, regarding wind speeds. Here in Chicago, the average wind speed is around 15mph. Tomorrow it's supposed to hit 40mph.
When I lived in Northern Idaho, in the ten years I lived there, I can count the number of days where the wind hit even 15mph on one hand.

"Location, location, location."

 

[Greenfield]

High level characters can and do exist in game worlds, but those worlds shouldn't revolve around such people.

PHB II includes rules for massed archery fire as an area affect damage, which is how it was actually used by many armies.

There are also rules for swarm attacks, to describe the way a mob might go after a single person. Both do a remarkable job of leveling the playing field between small parties of high level types and armies or angry mobs.

Consider the 15th level Wizard, sitting beside a General during a battle. The Wizard is hell on wheels against the predominantly 3rd level Warriors in the opposing force. For a few minutes.

After that time, he's just another guy on a horse. He used his magic to rain death and destruction down upon his enemies, until he ran out of spells.

When you're looking at even a small battle, by military standards, a 40 foot wide circle of fiery death is a drop in the bucket. Yeah, the 5 or 6 guys you caught in it are really, really, really dead, overkilled by three or more times, but then so are the troops who failed to "form a turtle" when the archers called in mass fire on an area twice as big as your fireball. They only died once from their wounds, but they're just as dead when the dust clears.

And the grunt soldiers can and will continue the battle far longer than most spell casters could even consider maintaining a spell barrage.

There's a difference in scale between a "battle" for an adventuring team, and a "battle" between armies. Adventurers might well be able to force their way into a city or fortified castle and take on the Black Knight who rules it, but they simply can't provide the "boots on the ground" needed to take the place over.

Adventurers get hired to take out the bad guys as an alternative to full scale war, decapitate the enemy leadership rather than fight their entire army. But, like the stories of fires taking out entire cities, these types of things get remembered because they're unusual. 999,999 times out of a million, a cow kicks over a lantern, one barn burns and that's about it. The fire brigade does their job. 999,999 times out of a million, it's the armies of Gondor that face down Sauron's Orc hordes, not a Ranger, a Wizard, a Dwarf fighter, an Elven archer and a couple of Hobbits sneaking in the back way that win the day.

That's why we tell stories like Lord of the Rings.

 

[Sekhmet]

[MENTION=6669384]Greenfield[/MENTION] You'll realize that in all of the fantasy settings in all of the fantasy books that have wizards, that there are very few wizards in any of these worlds, and rarely do they do anything aggressively and offensively. They don't generally throw fireballs, summon hoards of angels, or otherwise attempt to destroy any army at all.
They play the "power behind the throne" role almost exclusively, and when they aren't they play defensively, because fantasy writers realize that if a wizard is unleashed, they make armies and fortifications obsolete.

 

[Greenfield]

Yeah. I also realize that every fantasy book with wizards in it has them limited in the amount of magic they can do. The use of black magic seems to give them more, in general, but whether they use a prepared spell list ala D&D, something that works like Mana points or just plain mental exhaustion, they all run out of magic at some point.

Hence my comment about the Wizard at the battle being just another guy on a horse before very long. Merlin had distinct limits in all the old Hollow Hills tales, Harry Dresden has them in the modern tales, Elric of Melnibone definitely ran out of power after remarkably few spells, the wizard types in Zelazny's Amber tales had a decided limit as well.

Any and all of these are bad-ass guys in a magical duel and serious spit-kickers in general, but when it comes to a war they still rely on armies. Grunt troops can overwhelm them as individuals with relatively small numbers.

And you know what? That's what would happen in most games as well: You'll mop the field with the first several waves of soldiers. After that you have to rely on a very high armor class and a very poor melee ability, or you have to flee the field.

 

[Sekhmet]

No, you'll Gate in a Balor who can wade through the entire army by himself without taking a point of damage, while you Fly with Wind Wall to safety. Case closed, army killed, exp awarded.
No fantasy wizard has ever even bothered to attempt to do that. They sit behind their armies or inspire more mundane heroes because it makes for a better story.

 

[Greenfield]

Wow! Your 15th level Wizard can cast Gate? (15 was the example given) And you can call in a Balor (i.e. beat his SR), and he can slaughter that entire army in 15 rounds? (The duration of forced service specified in the spell.) Damn, that's good!

Either that or you need to bargain for his services, as per Planar Ally. And of course, being a kind hearted Balor, he won't see that you really really need his services to avoid being overrun by an advancing army and demand an excessive payment. No, fiends never go for the throat when they have the upper hand, do they? Will that payment be in sacrificed souls, or will you just be providing them "to go"? (i.e. still living.)

Plus, of course, the 1000 Exp it costs to just cast the spell for that purpose.

It's easy to plan the perfect maneuver when you are your own DM, isn't it?