Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9351438" data-attributes="member: 6877472">The issue with magic to remove conditions is that it's really the only method the game gives you to actually do it.  Sure, you could shove that stuff to higher level, but D&D is a strange beast where you can already run into things at low levels that require higher level magic to undo.  A CR 1/2 Cockatrice can petrify you, and that needs a Greater Restoration, which isn't available until level 9.This pushes the problem onto the DM to fix, either by having a 9th level NPC caster laying around (which can sometimes lead to narrative plot holes, like "say, if this guy can cast 5th level spells, why is [insert problem PC's are dealing with] an issue again?"*) or having to insert a magic item or workaround like a magic herb which can de-petrify someone.So because you need a way to deal with curses and diseases and petrification and what have you, you can't remove the magic needed to undo them easily, but that means if the party has access to the right magic, then these things stop being major threats.  It's a paradox, and it actually undermines something a lot of people say is a foundational aspect of the current iteration of D&D- that you shouldn't need someone to play a specific character class to successfully play the game.But the game gets a lot harder if you don't have access to the Cleric spell list- while other classes can have a few spells to deal with problems, the Cleric pretty much gets all of them.Being a healer is a lot more important than being able to cure hit point damage- I had to educate some of my friends in this when we played Pathfinder 1e.  They would say "Oh man, the Life Oracle is way cooler than the Cleric, we'll just play one of those and not have a Cleric!".Then a few sessions down the road, the inability to just pray for a spell like remove paralysis as needed really hit home (the Oracle could learn it, but it eats up one of their precious "spells known".I've played with DM's who want to make ongoing conditions matter more, and think to ban or adjust spells that remove them, only to find out to their horror how bad such conditions really are, and then have to deal with how that impacted their games.  There's a fine line between "suffering from and debilitating penalty" and "now you're dead".*I call this The Elminster Problem.  The DM decides to have an archmage NPC in an area, then presents the party with a problem that the archmage could deal with without batting an eye.  Sure, maybe the archmage is lazy, too busy, has other concerns, wants too much money, what have you, but their existence still has an impact- it's hard to build tension that a town is about to be overrun by a tribe of goblins that the PC's have to struggle with, when there's an obvious solution right there.Ed Greenwood presented the reason this doesn't happen as the consequence of a "magical cold war", where all the major spellcasters maintain an uneasy peace due to the threat of mutually ensured destruction- though it could have been solved by not having so many high level NPC's running around.For example, getting back to the point of this thread, the main reason Ravenloft Domains are the way they are is that high level NPC's who aren't Darklords are pretty rare.  Barovia doesn't have a 20th level Paladin holding Strahd at bay, and even if it did, they'd either die trying to kill Strahd or succeed...only for the Dark Powers to revive him once said Paladin is no longer around to be a problem (such as what happens when Jander Sunstar defeats Strahd).</blockquote>

Verification