What Spells give the DM the most headache...

[Cerubus Dark]

Ugghh... Alter Self. The midget mage in my group casts it to up his AC by 15 using the Ravid as his alternate form.

I thought alter self made you look like somethnig, its great for disguse checks but thats it. If I had known that you could use it to up your AC I should take it more for my wizards

 

[nsruf]

Scry and Teleport is still pretty bad in 3.5. I can't really justify each villain to have access to counter magic or items that prevent scrying. But since neither have the PCs, I can always hit them back the same way. However, this vastly changes the way the game is being played to a strategical spellcasting contest. I'm afraid this is going to lose its appeal soon

 

[DragonLancer]

The ones that give me a headache are Wish, Miracle, and limited Wish.
I hate dealing with them, and the fact that my players leave them so friggin open ended is annoying.

"I wish I had a million gold coins.", "I wish I was stronger than a dragon"
Blah blah blah.
Poof, you got your gold, go fetch it from the bottom of the lake.
Poof, your now stronger than a dragon, but your power won't last forever.

I once had a player who wished for "some pretty nice armour" and got a suit of leather with flowers stitched to it. Another wished for a Silver Dragon and got a life-size solid silver statue, so he could never move it and no one ever had the money to buy it from him.

My players learnt many years ago that wishing was not as good as it seemed.

 

[Lerris]

Our DM has already negated the scry spell by saying that it can't see through magical auras or through large amounts of stone. Something simular will appear for teleport i'm sure.

I've only seen one spell so far that I'd hate to come up against if i were dm'g and thats greece combine that with a trip and alot of things are unlikly to get back up.

 

[Thanee]

Right. Alter self only allows you to change to a creature of your same type (at least in 3.5, don't know about 3.0). He needs Polymorph, which is a whole different rant.

Polymorph doesn't work either, unless he is an outsider already.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Thanee]

Problem spells... Teleport surely can make it tough, you better be prepared for a lot of improvisation.

Find the Path is also one of those really problematic ones, or Foresight, Contact other Plane, the often listed Scry, etc. Many high-level divination spells can cause problems, but even a simple Detect Evil can be troublesome.

Those save-or-die spells can ruin the evening for some players, if they die within the first 30 minutes of the evening and have to watch the game from then on for the next few hours, until they can get resurrected or a replacement character can be brought in.

All things considered, I don't really have a serious problem with any spell, tho.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Tetsubo]

Fly. Seriously. It doesn't "transform" the target at all. The spell lets the target lift their normal weight limit. So a halfling and an ogre can use the same spell to lift much different amounts of weight. Why doesn't the spell lift a flat amount per level like Levitation? This spell just bugs the heck out of me.

 

[Darklone]

Two spells gave me problems once... usually most of the others have already been listed.

Detect Secret Doors: Silly. Simply silly. This is even silly in a computer game.

Deathwatch (3.0) with a certain range doubling metamagic feat applied several times. PC casts it, DM should have to look up several hundred monsters (or simply town citizens) whether they are undead, constructs, hurt... and where they are...
I usually asked for a will save to avoid being "fascinated" or otherwise distracted.

 

[Altalazar]

I think Freedom of Movement is a pain in the hiney spell. It shuts down so much including Grappling which as levels rise so do the numbers of Grapple monsters. I can live with it but sometimes it screws up an encounter.

Later

How does it screw up an encounter? Or are you talking about where you want to force the players to be captured or immobilized no matter how cleverly they might try and get out of it?

 

[Parlan]

"I wish I had a million gold coins.", "I wish I was stronger than a dragon"
Blah blah blah.
Poof, you got your gold, go fetch it from the bottom of the lake.
Poof, your now stronger than a dragon, but your power won't last forever.

As DM, I try to not to screw my PCs over too much for ambiguous wording, but I wouldn t be able to resist this one.

Being stronger than "A" dragon just means being stronger than the weakest dragon in existence.

There s gotta be some stupid-weak dragon hatchling with a Str of 4 SOMEWHERE. (Granted, it has a life expectancy of about ten minutes, but thats another story)

If I felt nice, I just leave the PCs Str unchanged.

f I didn't, I 'd change it down to four.

Hmmmm, would another Wish be able to fix that?