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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6074761" data-attributes="member: 87792">Indeed. But this is because they do not have magic - or they would. And a D&D animal companion obviously puts up with a lot more than almost any trained animal. And above all they are used to magic and to the idea that if their human tells them something ... it's probably right.You can give them challenges - you just shouldn't say "No".Everything I read from you indicates that you play 2e using 3e rules - if taken on their own merits the games are very different in many ways (and 3.0 was tested as if it was 2e). And have never seen what a player can do with a wizard PC who is (a) smart and (b) determined.Flexibility is power. But take it back to the 2e situation where even the smartest wizards had caps on how many spells they use.[quoet]Again I have to say in 30 years of role playing I have never seen this happen. I have talked about this with my son and his friends and with the players in my group over the years and they to have never seen this happen. Where a wizard always takes out the big bad after using their most powerful spells just to get there.</blockquote>Scry and Fry? It definitely was a thing. But "Using their most powerful spells just to get there" actually saves them spell slots in the long run. Instead of using a level 5 spell and a level 4 to take the enemies out, and burning a couple of buffs, they use a level 5 to simply bypass the terrain and most of the guards. The problem isn't actually the wizard taking out the big bad - if the fighter can get in sword's reach of the big bad he can do a lot of damage. The problem is the wizard making things irrelevant (or almost irrelevant). Things including monsters he's just teleported past, or hit points because he's broken out the save or suck.Me, I put the blame squarely at the feet of the system. When I run a game I present the PCs with challenges and, depending on the game, a motivation. How they solve it is up to them. And it's not as if a castle designer goes round saying "I'll put a locked door for the rogue here, and a ward to dispel for the wizard here, and a portcullis to lift here". This is not a technique that fails in most games.Option C. Attack using spells like <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/glitterdust.htm" target="_blank">Glitterdust</a> or <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/slow.htm" target="_blank">Slow</a> which don't do damage but make the monsters sitting ducks for everyone else. Given these are the sort of spells a smart wizard uses anyway this isn't much of a hinderance.And yes, this is a change from 2e which is one of the many reasons I say you're playing 2e using 3e rules. Hit points rose massively from 2e to 3e due to the change in the way constitution works for monsters. The fireball is still doing only 1d6/level damage here and when a monster like a giant gets +5 hit points per hit dice, that no longer is as useful as it once was. (Which means, to take one example, that a cloud giant went up from 16+2-7 hit points (or about 80) to 17d8 + 102 (!) or over 170.) On the other side of the coin, saves also changed. In AD&D as level rose spells became easier to resist so you'd rely on the half damage from a fireball because it wouldn't entirely be resisted. And more debilitating spells would use the death or poison line or the paralysis or petrificiation line, both of with were easy to resist. The spell line on the other hand was hard to resist - so wizards didn't normally try to paralyse people and again fireball had a huge advantage that it's lost. Also save DCs now scale nastily with the attacking wizard - higher level means that the gap between the defences is bigger so a smart wizard can get an unresisted debilitating spell through easily.All this means that throwing direct damage spells in AD&D was a very good idea - and it really isn't in 3.X Very few. The highest PC in Greyhawk was Sir Robilar at level 14. And the game intentionally changed at level 10 in older editions (with the demihuman level limits giving further incentive to keep the level low). It wasn't playtested up there and wasn't intended to be run up there, and the game quite deliberately changed at level 10 (when, at least partly to keep the balance, the fighter gained an entire army).This is a myth. The fighter can keep bashing things until he runs out of hit points. He's as dependent on spells as a wizard (unless you're playing with Wands of Cure Light Wounds).And healing? And yes, this happens at lower levels. Especially if the wizards aren't scroll monkeys. On the other hand, if the wizard has a handful of colour sprays prepared, that ends a few encounters fast.Disable Traps: So useful 4e rolled it up with Sleight of Hand and Open Locks into one single skill (Thievery). It's also incredibly niche. Sneak Attack is just damage - useful I'll grant. And Evasion and Uncanny Dodge are both passive not active.No they don't. They get more skill points than any other class. And fewer skills than any other incarnation of the rogue.Why not?The ridiculous claim is that this is meaningful. That you want to pick locks all day long. That there are enough locks to make this meaningful except in edge cases. How many locks do you meet a day?See my comment above about direct damage spells being not terribly useful. The rogue's evasion is utterly useless against even a reflex-affecting spell like <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/web.htm" target="_blank">Web</a> (there's no save for a partial effect). And it certainly does nothing against <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/glitterdust.htm" target="_blank">Glitterdust</a>, (Evard's) <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/blackTentacles.htm" target="_blank">Black Tentacles</a>, <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/slow.htm" target="_blank">Slow</a>, or <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/stinkingCloud.htm" target="_blank">Stinking Cloud</a> - i.e. the sort of area spells a wizard casts when they want to end a fight in 3.X. <a href="http://www.materials.com/Titanium_tools.HTML" target="_blank">2lb</a>. W00t. Yes, <a href="http://tshaiwei.en.alibaba.com/product/674619813-212675180/steel_crowbar_W_02_3_66kg.html" target="_blank">most are heavier</a>. (7.5lbs there).So noisy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowbar_(tool)" target="_blank">real life burglars use them</a>. A crowbar breaks the lock, not the middle of the door. And breaks it at the weakest point. The advantage of picking the lock is it does no damage and people can't normally see where you've been.Silence lasts 1 minute/level. In other words a while. And kicking the door open doesn't give the monsters much time to react.If speed is that important, it's time to use knock rather than the rogue. Or to use the crowbar - it, too, is more reliable than the thief in most circumstances, and faster. (The entire combined strength of the party vs the weaker of the physical strength of the lock or whatever's holding the lock against the frame when backed up by a long lever allowing about a 10:1 force multiplier is a hugely unequal struggle in almost all cases).If all you have is a rogue and the door is locked with an <a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/arcaneLock.htm" target="_blank">arcane lock</a> you might as well just give up and go home. The rogue's having serious problems. If, on the other hand, you have a crowbar, you can force the thing open anyway. You can also continue if you have the Knock spell. You're making my case that the 3.X Rogue's Open Locks skill isn't that useful for me. (And no, a lock isn't a trap so trapfinding won't work here).That's because your wizards are going for direct damage spells... See above for how the game changed between 2e and 3e. And in 2e the high level fighter pretty much shrugged off spells. Not so in 3e where they have two weak saves including Will.The conditions were rigged to favour the fighter. No divination, no scrying, unprepared wizard, no pre-buffing.Translation: In plenty of games you've seen a fighter finish off a wizard after the wizard has been weakened by other factors.You're moving the goalposts. Hard. Different editions have different characteristics - and you haven't been playing 3.X for more than 12.5 years. 3.0 removed most of the previous restrictions on the wizard and slackened the rest, while stealthily crippling fighters by raising monster hp, lowering weapon damage against large monsters, reducing their number of attacks, and moving them from incredible saving throws at high level to arguably the worst of any PC class. By going for direct damage spells your wizards are bringing a knife rather than a gun - which is just as well because the fighter only has a knife.Is dumb. A wizard who has three scrolls of knock at the back of his spellbook and carries around a crowbar for the fighter to open any other doors on the other hand covers this job.4e fixed that one. The issue with wizards is twofold.1: Nova potential. This is in theory not a problem because of everything you mention.2: Type of resources. A properly prepared wizard can do anything. Including teleport straight to Mount Doom, or the like.Or to put things another way, you stop when you run out of spells. Right.[/QUOTE]

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