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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="shurai" data-source="post: 345787">I find that the DM can tell the future, pretty frequently in fact.  After all, he can fiat every single event in the game world . . . except the PCs of course.  This is solved easily enough, especially if you consider the caster's motivation for answering the following question:  "So, what are you guys planning to do?"  You're right, sometimes there are unintended consequences, but even considering them I'd sure want the spell.  Also, saying it is more or less useful than another spell is very hard when they have such radically different effects.  I myself, thinking about it, would have a hard time deciding between Shapechange and Foresight.  I guess it would be influenced by the character, the game's play style, and the game world.I didn't actually say that.  I said, "the designers felt that . . . not all spells are equal to begin with."  The difference between 'meant to be' and 'are' is subtle but important.  'Meant' implies that the designers intended to make spells unequal for some reason, where as 'felt that' and 'are' presumes that the designers made a value judgement on an existing condition.  This 'outside condition' is the game world that we play in.  Though they chose to change many things for balance's sake, one of the things they left mostly alone was the inherent inequality of the corpus of spells, because I think they'd agree that not every spell of a given level in the game world is precisely equally useful.Now that that's out of the way, most forensics experts agree that a valid way to counter an arguement is to deny the validity of making such an arguement, regardless of how apropos the arguement itself may be.  So if I seem to be excusing the game designers from drafting a bunch of unequal spells, it is because I think having a bunch of unequal spells is okay.  If that's true, then panning a particular spell serves little purpose.  The excuse, as you called it, is the justification for the arguement, not the arguement itself.Also, I wanted to make everyone feel better by adding a sense of purpose to some of the perceivedly weak spells.  If the designers felt that the game was more interesting that way, maybe it's okay if it is so.  <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":]" title="Devious    :]" data-shortname=":]" />-S</blockquote>

Verification