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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4166956" data-attributes="member: 710">I think the 4E tier system is a nice approach to this issue. The "game-breaker" spells still exist, but they belong to a clearly defined tier. If you don't like them, don't go there. I dislike nerfing spells or even banning them. Published adventurers might assume I have them. (If they don't anticipate their (ab)use, bad for the writer). My players might have wanted to use them. They also might have effects I like. It's too arbitrary.If I know that I can find certain spells only at certain tiers, it's a lot easier to work with them. Either I consciously change the way the adventures work (like implied in the excerpts), or I avoid these tiers in the first place. In a way, this was possible in 3E, but the levels range of "game-breaker" or "tier-changing" spells wasn't clearly defined (and in some cases, I'd say they also came to early.) It also wasn't guaranteed that anyone had them, so either you accounted for them and made the scenario impossible (at least very difficult) without them, or you did not, and make the scenario to easy (and possibly boring) with them. For any individual group, you usually might have been able to work this out, but for adventures from other sources, this wasn't so easy.As an example: Fly is available at 5th (character) level, scry at 7th, teleport at 9th. All 3 spells notably change adventure design. With fly, certain kind of obstacles can be totally avoided, even if used in combat. With fly, the obstacle is a "resource drain", without it, it might be unsurmountable. Scry allows you to spy on people you haven't met yet. You could use Scry as a prerequisite for advancing the storyline, but if the PCs don't have it, they have to jump through hoops to get the info. Or you didn't take it into account, and a whole subplot of your adventure can be scrapped. Teleport allows a party to reach a distant location very quickly. The spell could be the only mean to reach the evil cultists in time to stop their ritual. Or it breaks your whole overland-travel part where the PCs would have found allies, foes and information to further the plot. Every element that can be foiled by magic must be used before that point. This gives you sometimes a a very short level frame where you can use this elements. Every element that requires a certain type of magic could also be an element that doesn't work for your particular party at hand. In the end, you have a lot of elements that might no longer work, or don't work with your specific party. With the explicit tier denominations, you don't run into so many problems. At the Heroic tier, you can count on every overland-travel and bounty hunting investigation to work. At Paragon Level, you can use half a mile wide chasms, and have the PCs attack two cultist bases spread over half the continent in two days to stop their World-Ending Ritual.</blockquote>

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