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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldragon" data-source="post: 1464234" data-attributes="member: 3962">You seem to have a very high and lofty sense of what a DM should be. I will speak from personal experience, and observations. Perhaps I may bring your opinion of DMing back into the real world. I play with 6 other players who each passed the bar exam on DnD Rule Law. Among all the players, at least one copy of every WotC produced book is owned. I read most of them, skimmed the rest. Many other d20 books are also available. So in short, many books are floating around my house. As the DM, I focus on developing the plot, and planning where my PCs may go astray from said plot. My players on the other hand, have time to read each of these books, and focus on how these books have feats and spells that affect their characters. I read my players character sheets, and read the spell descriptions. However I fail to read into the ramifications of combining certain spells with feats (henceforth called the Killer-Combo). Jolly Giant may see this as a shortcoming in my own DMing ability. And would probably reccommend I scrap my campaign and stick to low level campaigns. In order for a DM to have a counter prepared for every Killer-Combo a PC may have available to him must spend equal time reseaching the PC as the player in question. This is assuming the Player and the DM are both equally qualified Rules Lawyers and equally intelligent. The player spends time looking for the right/feats and spells to make a killer-combo, the DM must then read the character sheet and find the killer-combo himself, then devise an encounter that exploits a weakness in the killer-combo. The preceding can  be a lot of fun, and it is what I enjoy about being a DM. Unfortunately there are some spells and feats that are just plain unbalanced. Killer-combos that do not have a sensible counter. The 3.0 Scry-Teleport assasination was one such killer-combo. Yes, there are counters to it, but who wants to play in a game where everyone is hiding inside rooms lined with lead, only venturing forth for the duration of thier improved invisibility spell?The argument "If you can't handle X spell, then you are a bad DM" has been on these boards since their inception. I remember when people were saying that very argument with the 3.0 haste. The DM should not be the person who has total mastery of the rules, owns every book, memorized every line in the errata. The DM just needs to tell a good story, and know a basic understanding of the rules. A DM should not need to spend several hours a day developing counters to every killer-combo.</blockquote>

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