what rules do you favor?

[FrankTrollman]

Neat trick. Although I personally, wouldn't have picked the combination of the Negative Energy Plane and Lord Soth as an example. Isn't he undead, so doesn't negative energy heal him?

That depends upon which section of the story you are talking about. IIRC, he starts as a human, and then becomes a death-knight like dude, and then he becomes a human again and then becomes a death knight dude again. Although it is true that it probably would have been better to use Mordenkainen or Rothar in the example.

Of course, using Gate to kill your enemies is simply symptomatic of the fact that it is basically too powerful for you to name anyone you want and have them serve you for 17 rounds. It's more powerful than Dominate Monster (as they get no save), and more powerful than Greater Planar Binding (as it always works and takes only a single action). You can also get yourself wishes with it, it's all crazy.

And while we are on the subject of Wishes, anyone else notice that the 3.5 Wish allows you to get Magical Items of unlimited power? The XP cost of the spell goes up - but creatures with Wish as a spell-like abilitiy (such as Pit Fiends and Efreet), and thus pay zero no matter how high the cost gets. So Efreets can now give you Staves of Power and even Mantles of Supreme Stealth - for free.

-Frank

 

[Pax]

I'm so sorry...

I thought I was on the RULES BOARD where people talked about the rules. The things that the books actually say. Not a place to sit around and be touchy feely about how we like to play the game, and how we can ignore all the things we don't like.

It's also where we discuss how the rules are used. That'd be one of the reasons why "IMC" is a fairly-commonly-known abbreviation here.

I strongly suggest that you either grow up, or find somewhere else to troll; your name is ludicrously apt.

 

[The_DarkAngel]

House rules, you need them. WOTC peeps dont know the head form thier a**.

DA

 

[Bauglir]

I must admit I came up with a variation of the gate thing myself in a game once (didn't actually carry it out for reasons of cheese). The plan was simple - jump into portable hole (extradimensional space), gate in BBEG, command it to stand still and coup de grace.. Not sure if the extradimensional space in the PH would count as being extraplanar for purposes of gate spells, but what the hey it was silly to begin with.

On the issue of the 'infinite power exploits' I have to agree they shouldn't be in the ruleset, not necessarily because players will exploit them, but because if they exist it breaks versimilitude(sp?) that noone ever has. (they aren't THAT hard to work out)

Yes you can house rule them out, but you shouldn't have to..

 

[jarlaxlecq]

His name is trollman, i think that kind of says it all

 

[hong]

Dear Frank,

Stop stealing my schtick.

ThaADVANCEnks!

 

[Saeviomagy]

Dear Frank,

Stop stealing my schtick.

ThaADVANCEnks!

Shouldn't that be AdvaTHANKSnce? Otherwise it's "advance in thanks"...

And he's not really stealing your schtick Hong - you actually do things to people before you annoy them. People seem to get spontaeneously annoyed at Frank.

My vote for best rules? Tricky. For the same reason as Frank, I'm a bit wary of 3.5. There seems to be a lot of changes for changes sake that have unwanted after effects. Beyond that there are many easy-to-fix problems which simply were not fixed (ie - most of the infinite power loops). OTOH, I like a lot of the changes, and they did fix at least one infinite power 'cheat' which Frank has failed to mention (clone wars).

 

[Camarath]

In third edition, you could gate in any named individual - like for example Lord Soth - and they had to do whatever you told them to do for 1 round per level. All you had to do was be on a plane that wasn't your home plane.

So you could go to the Negative Energy Plane (with a little NEP for your party), and then force the BBEG to do what you want for 17 rounds. You can substitute the Plane of Fire or any other unpleasant area.

Yeah, 3.5 didn't fix any actual problems and created more. Why would I be happy with it?

-Frank

I looks to me like in 3.5 this would no longer work at least with Lord Soth or other "unique beings". It would still work with Balors or other generic creatures though.

Deities and unique beings cannot be controlled in any event. An uncontrolled being acts as it pleases, making the calling of such creatures rather dangerous. An uncontrolled being may return to its home plane at any time.

 

[FrankTrollman]

I looks to me like in 3.5 this would no longer work at least with Lord Soth or other "unique beings". It would still work with Balors or other generic creatures though.

No. That language was in 3rd edition as well. A Unique BEing is something like the Terrasque, not Steve or Lord Soth.

If you could be described as "The Human" you are a unique being. If you are described as "Bob, a human" that's no good.

By naming a particular being...

It would be very difficult to name a particular being if simply having a specific name made you unique, wouldn't it?

-Frank

 

[Li Shenron]

In third edition, you could gate in any named individual - like for example Lord Soth - and they had to do whatever you told them to do for 1 round per level. All you had to do was be on a plane that wasn't your home plane.

So you could go to the Negative Energy Plane (with a little NEP for your party), and then force the BBEG to do what you want for 17 rounds. You can substitute the Plane of Fire or any other unpleasant area.

So Lord Soth takes damage every round while he is hand rolling taquitos for you, and the entire party is clubbing him to death while he isn't able to defend himself.

Presto: the adventure ends and everyone gets free experience. When Andy Collins was asked if he had fixed that problem in 3.5 he said that he had not - and asked in return why anyone would bother to do a combo that large just to kill one creature.

And indeed, it's not fixed. It costs 1,000 XP now, but since you are using it on CR 17 creatures (each of which is worth 5,100 XP to "defeat") - you actually gain XP every time you do it.

I still remember very clearly an insignificant event of my childhood, at that age I was crazy for videogames in bars and later in home computers (it was the middle of the 80's). There was an older guy who was playing a classic spaseship game, so called "shoot'em up", with a tiny spaceship firing thousands of evil enemy spaceship in a simple vertical-scrolling environment. Every 10000 points or such the player could win an extra "life". The guy had found a spot on one level when there was a bonus extra "life" to be easily taken just by catching an item on the screen; if you purposefully died a few seconds after taking that bonus life your spaseship would have had to start a little before that area, and you could have taken the same bonus life again at next passage. Nothing lost, nothing gained, but the process of going from the re-start of the spaceship to take the bonus life and then die again took about 30 seconds and gave out some points in the meantime for killing few enemy spaceships, something like 500 points every time (just making this up, but it took something like 20 times this process for effectively gaining an extra life). The guy went playing for about 2 hours the same 30seconds scene, on and on, to gather up an extra life every 10-15 minutes, occasionally dying twice and wasting the last 10 minutes of play. I didn't stay longer to see when he stopped doing this and go on with the rest of the game, but after 2 hours of being there he was still at the same point, and didn't even seem to be having fun at all. I think it was a sick way to play.
More recently, I have seen friends of mine spending nights after nights playing Diablo II in almost the same way, doing the same level over and over, killing literally thousands of insignificantly challenging opponents to gather few miserable powerups to their characters every evening or so, and to collect hundreds of items which were always just the same, and just the same were discarded all the time.
Your example of how to abuse the rule (which of course I see you would never do yourself) just reminded me such things. It is so sick that it doesn't even need to be corrected.