Hold Person.....now opponents get one save every round. So your third level spell, which takes an action to cast, might hold your opponent for one round.....because it's "no fun" for a player to have to wait through multiple rounds with his character helpless. Sure, that sucks....but that's one reason that clerics and mages in the party would have to justify memorizing Freedom, Dispel Magic, etc.
Are you serious?. Hold person was a 2nd level Cleric spell that essentially was a Save or Die spell. At the level it entered the game there was no counter against it, 3rd level casters can't cast Freedom or Dispel magic. And in a chaotic shifting melee it is not even sure your friendly spellcaster will even notice someone being held. That is one reason to change it (and characters with low will saves are likely to stay held for several rounds anyway).
The other reason to change it is the exactly the fun factor. In our games combat takes time to play out. To be hit by a Hold person used to mean you might as well go stare at the wall for an hour or so, hoping something did not Coup de Grace you in the meantime. If you have shown up to an evenings (about 4 hours) of play, spending 1 of those hours doing nothing is really really unfun.
The third reason is that actions are the second most valuable currency in combat (the most valuable being HP). A low level spell stripping you of many rounds of action is exceedingly powerful.
The "Forget" spell....great spell, very flavourful, and useful...but it doesn't involve blowing things up, or tactical advantage on a battlefield, and as a result, we no longer have it.
The Forget spell has been rolled into the Modify memory spell.
I think level loss was so feared partly because it was permenent, and partly because restoration was a 7th-level spell - nigh unto inaccessible to the average party, or, if it was, it cost a fortune to get an NPC to cast it. Now that you can restore levels with a L4 spell, they should keep the "permanent level drain" thing - instead of nerfing just one part of that problem, they nerfed two, and made it so no one fears level drain anymore.
Again I'm compelled to ask if you are serious? Level drain is frigging deadly. Get hit by a Spectre, bam you take 10 hp damage (in addition to whatever damage the attack caused) and a -2 penalty to all important rolls (and incidently the Spectre gains 10 hp) at level 7 (where it is a standard challenge) your dead if it touches you 4 times. There is no save and few ways of getting resistance to level drain. All they did was changing focus from level drain being dangerous on the longer time scale and keeping it deadly on a short time scale.
As for it being less flavorful, in my game I decided that the save to determine whether the levels where lost permanently (you do realise you roll fortitude saves later to check that) happened exactly at midnight the following the day when the God of Death powers where the strongest. This lead players to desperately seek out churches , praying fervently to the God of Life and taking any possible measure to increase Fortitude saves. That was plenty flavorful to me.
And comes back again with new minions, and in a different guise...again...and again...until the adventurers reach a point where they can stop him...at which point he says, "Before you kill me, remember the maguffin you've been searching for? I know where it is...."
This is simply good dm'ing and has nothing to do with the monster or it's CR. I don't think anyone here has suggested you shouldn't use such tactics, all we are saying is that the former OM CR is to high, because it was forced to flee due to it's inability to actually challenge the characters in combat (which is what CR is a measure of).
I fail to see how changing a few powers and making it a better meleer (I actually think Mearl underestimated the revised OM CR) changes the way you run it. It can still do ecxactly what you described and if played like an intelligent (and maybe a bit cowardly foe) it would be it's natural way of operating.
What I don't understand is where you think all these allies and minions of the OM come from. The monster has (or had) no social skills at all, a single use of charm person and the ability to change shape (but very little abiity to impersonate anyone).
Let's assume for a second that it somehow had the ability to repeatedly gain minions and use the to weaken the party. Would that change the CR. Yes for each ENCOUNTER, it would not change the OM CR at all. But as you calculate the CR of an encounter by including all the creatures opposed to the characters in that encounter, the total CR would be higher.
Exactly. This is my big gripe with the new design philosophy - it's become too PC-friendly. We can't endanger the PCs too much, or the players won't have fun. While I agree - somewhat (getting rid of save or die poisons was a good move) - you can't get rid of every threat to the PCs, or the game becomes little more than the players mowing over everything and moving on to the next challenge.
If you have a problem with challenging player (or even killing them) you are doing something wrong. D&D is plenty deadly still. It is just less random deadly, less chance of freak bad rolls killing you outright (until you hit high levels and high level spells). D&D today is more about winning by good tactics and team coorporation than it used to be.
That is of course a direction you may or may not agree with. If you don't I think you will be better of with another game system.
If I'm running a group that deviates significantly from the baseline, the baseline information is still useful. It gives me a starting point that I can use to determine how I need to modify the creature or the encounter. If I don't know what the baseline is, then the information tells me nothing. Saying that a creature is a good challenge for a group of four random character classes that the designer happened to be thinking about (but probably won't tell me) is worse than useless.
QFT
