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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4930044" data-attributes="member: 82106">I can understand the sentiment regarding spell casters, but even now in 4e a creative spell caster can really make a lot of mileage out magic. I kind of feel like if it went much further than it does now that we'd be pretty much right back where we were before. If someone has constructive suggestions on how to keep things balanced I'm all ears, but I just haven't heard any that I honestly thought were workable so far.About flight I don't disagree with you eriktheguy, I think limited tactical flight is perfectly fine. I think other forms of flight can be perfectly fine too. In a sense it seems to me that what D&D, and for that matter other FRPGs I've played, have always lacked is an elegant way to allow these kinds of extraordinary abilities without presenting major issues on the story telling side. If you look at the source material of the fantasy genre you don't see wizards being the ultimate answer guy for everything. Unfortunately games aren't novels and GMs don't have the option of just writing the story however they want and ignoring the "We just ride the giant eagles to Mount Doom" problem. Players will fully exploit whatever abilities they have available to them and they will do it mercilessly and consistently.After running my campaign under 4e for a year I've found it to be tremendously easier to tell a wide range of stories using it simply because of this. Sure, you can argue that anything was "possible" in earlier editions, but it was very awkward having to play the whack-a-mole game of trying to anticipate and nerf all the plot busters. It just got to be a bit silly when every time you wanted to make a place be hard to get into or a mystery hard to solve or a social situation hard to turn to your advantage you had to make up a laundry list of spells that would bypass the whole challenge and dream up some magic dodad explanation for why it wouldn't work or else tie yourself into knots trying to create a scenario that was resistant to all of that.And frankly I just don't want to give up the relative equality of classes that 4e has. Just because wizards could pick every day from a giant list of spells doesn't make that the only way the game can work. If you do it for one class then by gosh you DO have to do it for all the rest. What do I tell my player that runs a fighter? "Well, you should have played a wizard if you actually wanted to be able to cherry pick the best power for the day every day"!!!!??? Huh? Why, because of some slavish adherence to a poorly designed game mechanic that was thought up in 1974? Give me a break! Oh, I could let the fighter pick every day too, but how do you explain that? It just doesn't make sense. OK, we could just take away all of the fighter's goodies, but that was a bad idea in 1974 and it was a bad idea in 2001 and its a bad idea in 2009. No amount of nostalgia or rationalizing will make it a good idea.</blockquote>

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