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Message: <blockquote data-quote="monboesen" data-source="post: 2970760" data-attributes="member: 4647">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 has been rolled into the Modify memory spell.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.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. 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.  QFT</blockquote>

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