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<blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 5960850" data-attributes="member: 6669384">Polymorph was not created broken, but had brokenness thrust upon it.As noted, when it was published the list of creatures you could change into was limited to relatively sane power levels.As time went on and their accountants demanded that they write more books to sell, an arms race started.&nbsp; From the Complete books to the PHB II to the setting books, they kept including minor power ups for all the classes.&nbsp; To match these, they included powered up monsters for the powered up PCs to face.If a given monster is supposed to face four powered up PCs, you need to power the monster up four times as much.And suddenly, Polymorph has a whole new tier of target creatures available to abuse.&nbsp; Now I'm not all that sure that Alter Self is all that broken.&nbsp; There is an implicit limit on what it can do for you, in that the DM can (and should) limit what races you have knowledge of, or which ones exist in your game world.&nbsp; If your character doesn't know of a race, you can't change into it, and if it isn't part of your game world you can roll Knowledge checks til the corners wear off your dice and you still won't get what you want.And in the end, while the duration is fairly long (10 minutes per caster level), the list of abilities you can gain from the available list of Humanoids with 5 hit dice or less isn't insane.It can give you a lot for a 2nd level spell, so it's a power-lump for 3rd level casters.&nbsp; By 7th level though it's pretty routine.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Greenfield, post: 5960850, member: 6669384"] Polymorph was not created broken, but had brokenness thrust upon it. As noted, when it was published the list of creatures you could change into was limited to relatively sane power levels. As time went on and their accountants demanded that they write more books to sell, an arms race started. From the Complete books to the PHB II to the setting books, they kept including minor power ups for all the classes. To match these, they included powered up monsters for the powered up PCs to face. If a given monster is supposed to face four powered up PCs, you need to power the monster up four times as much. And suddenly, Polymorph has a whole new tier of target creatures available to abuse. Now I'm not all that sure that [I]Alter Self[/I] is all that broken. There is an implicit limit on what it can do for you, in that the DM can (and should) limit what races you have knowledge of, or which ones exist in your game world. If your character doesn't know of a race, you can't change into it, and if it isn't part of your game world you can roll Knowledge checks til the corners wear off your dice and you still won't get what you want. And in the end, while the duration is fairly long (10 minutes per caster level), the list of abilities you can gain from the available list of Humanoids with 5 hit dice or less isn't insane. It can give you a lot for a 2nd level spell, so it's a power-lump for 3rd level casters. By 7th level though it's pretty routine. [/QUOTE]

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