Why is flight considered a game breaker?

[Azgulor]

<lots of stuff>

I didn't say they had no place in the game, I said they were too low level for the benefit/advantage they produced.

As for Teleport & Raise Dead specifically:

Teleport - while you can deal with it, you can only do so to a limited degree. Once you've invaded the BBEG fortress, say for recon, you can teleport at will (barring ridiculous provisions against it) for hit and run tactics. It's cool the first time PCs do it. It becomes tedious the sixth or seventh. It also feeds the "you must pick these spells" meta-game approach. Finally, while your suggestions are good, a real issue for me is that once I spend more time planning around the PCs abilities rather than working on adventures & NPCs, my fun-quotient as a GM goes into the crapper.

Raise Dead - cheapens the whole experience. Raise Dead shouldn't be equivalent to a heal spell. The death of a character should be a big deal. There are a variety of additional mechanics available ranging from Action Points, to Fate Points, to Cheating Death rules that are more thematically appropriate to thwarting a bad roll than the following, all-too common scenario:

<Distraught PC> Sniff. "Bob's dead!"
<Unconcerned PC> "Medic! I mean, cleric!" Looking at Distraught PC, "Seriously, don't sweat it. He's just dead. He's died like 5 times already..."
<Distraugh PC> sniff, sniff "REALLY?!?"
<Cleric PC> "BE HEAAAALED-AH!!"


Bringing back the dead should be 7th level or higher spell (3.x/PF). Raising the dead shouldn't be something that someone at the high-end of MID-LEVEL (and that's pushing it) should be able to do. IMO, obviously.

 

[CleverNickName]

The more I read in this thread, the more inspired I feel to run an E6 game. Capping stuff at 6th level fixes *so many* of my power and balance issues with the game.

 

[Celebrim]

I take it you weren't keen on 1e's ring of invisibility either?

1e is a whole different beast than 3e when it comes to magic items. 1e magic items were priced according to the percieved utility of the item, and because Enchant Item and Permenance were so high level (to say nothing of Wish, which was implied to also be a common requirement), they were generally nigh impossible to manufacture. The practice of making magic items freely available for purchase was highly looked down upon, and so if you found something it was usually off a random table or becaues the DM placed it. In either case, it was only there if the DM was willing to accept the results of having a ring of invisibility in his game. Magic items were considered the exclusive territory of the DM, and so much a perusing the DMG when you weren't the one running a campaign was considered bad form.

3e is different in every regard. PC's are empowered to create their own items and can do so easily at low levels using readily available commodities (feats, spells, XP, and gold) rather than an unknown or even unknowable list of random hard to obtain items combined with spells which required major sacrifices to cast and were generally not obtained at the usual levels of play anyway. Many campaigns readily accept the notion that gold is freely tradable for any item of the player's choice, and PC's generally have the equipment that they want when they want it and even plan out what equipment that they plan to have at a given level.

There are numerous problems with both models in my opinion, but the biggest single problem with the 3e model is that is 'one size fits all' system for pricing magic items does not in any fashion take into account the actual utility of the item. For a game that prides itself on balance in a way that 1e did not this is an amazing oversight. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the 3e item creation rules are the least balanced and most abusable part of the system, which makes it amazing to me that they escaped as much scrutiny as they did. A 3e ring of invisibility is priced as a relatively minor item. This suggests all sorts of major problems with the system.

How about the 1e invisibility spell?

One of the single most abused spells in the games history and one of the most frequent complaints about the 1e system, not only by me but by players generally. The biggest problem here is the 1e version of the spell had unlimited duration. So long as you didn't attack, it was permenent. And as a 2nd level spell, it came up almost immediately in a way that much of the brokenness of the game never did. What made the problem even worse is that 1e didn't have a well thought out system for dealing with invisibility the way 3e does. There was no concept like 3e's 'Scent' ability, and the table for detecting an invisible foe wasn't really easily integrated with 1e's concept of attributeless monsters.

I can see what you're saying, but one area where I disagreed with the 3.5 revision was turning the invisibility spell from a spell with some good non-combat utility into a short duration combat spell.

I'm notorious as a 1e thief/M-U. I know all about the 'non-combat utility' of invisibility, and while I'm not completely happy with the 3e implementation, I know exactly and from personal experience why it is that way.

 

[TarionzCousin]

It's a genre-breaker.

These guys would disagree with you.

 

[pemerton]

I think you'll find your adventures becoming more interesting in general if you don't rely on railroading or define every railroad-avoidance technique in the game as a "problem".

I dont think that the common objections to the fly spell arise because it is a railroad-avoider.

And I'd add my voice to those who have had bad experiences with fly and invisibility. The small consolation that D&D players can draw is that in Rolemaster it's even worse - flight and invisibility are more easily available and more frequently castable.

I don't have quite the same issue with strategic-level teleports - these take away wilderness crawling, but I can handle that for some games at least. Tactical-level teleport, on the other hand (not 4e-style, because that doesn't allow passage through walls) is another gamebaker that Rolemaster suffers from worse than D&D.

I've never had the same issues with Passwall, because it's always been higher level and so less frequently used.

 

[Greylock]

The only AC my Wizard has is Fly. If my DM takes that away, he may as well take away Invisibility, Greater Invisibility and Mage Armor. And Fireball and Empowered Scorching Rays, since those are his best weapons. Take away Fly, and you'll quickly have one dead mage.

While he's at it, he should totally take away the Cleric's Turnings, because that completely nerfs his undead, and the Thief's lockpicking/trap-sensing and Sneaking, because it makes his traps useless. And for that matter, what does that Fighter think he's going with a flaming Greataxe, or the Ranger with the mighty Bow and a rocking Track bonus?

We keep breaking his game, and I don't know how he puts up with it.

 

[The Human Target]

The only AC my Wizard has is Fly. If my DM takes that away, he may as well take away Invisibility, Greater Invisibility and Mage Armor. And Fireball and Empowered Scorching Rays, since those are his best weapons. Take away Fly, and you'll quickly have one dead mage.

While he's at it, he should totally take away the Cleric's Turnings, because that completely nerfs his undead, and the Thief's lockpicking/trap-sensing and Sneaking, because it makes his traps useless. And for that matter, what does that Fighter think he's going with a flaming Greataxe, or the Ranger with the mighty Bow and a rocking Track bonus?

We keep breaking his game, and I don't know how he puts up with it.

This post reminds me why I switched to 4E.

I had almost forgotten.

 

[Jhaelen]

Even Bilbo used giant eagles on occasion.

Yep. And did he fight anything while riding a giant eagle? Using flight as a method of overland travel isn't overly problematic. It's combat encounters where things get ugly quickly.

I have yet to see a good and easy system to deal with 3d combat. We've had lots of combats involving flight in D&D 3e, but the flight rules aren't particularly good and are only easy to use if you ignore half of them.

In D&D 4e the designers continue to pretend that there's no such thing as flight. I mean, the pity excuse for rules the system provides is from a chapter about underwater combat!

 

[TheNovaLord]

So, bears hibernate in caves because they're scared of being attacked by eagles?

Caves are natural fortifications. That makes them a) useful against any type of attacker, not just flying ones, and b) not requiring time, technology, or opposable thumbs to build, which is why monsters from orcs to dragons like living in them. Undead live in crypts and tombs because, well, they're undead and that's what undead do. Drow live in the Underdark because the other elves kicked them off the surface.

There are lots of reasons why monsters live in dungeons. Defense against flying foes is a minor one.

.

let me know when you tink of a good one

bears arent monsters
undead dont live anywhere
drow would like to live back on the surface

Again, it has never been a problem in any gaming ive known. worlds full of magic, and its just one bit of it
i dont think its fits 4e 'role' system to well, so thats why its nerfed so much as a combat thing

its no worse than invisbility and any other number of in-game affects

interesting discussion al the same though

 

[I'm A Banana]

I have yet to see a good and easy system to deal with 3d combat. We've had lots of combats involving flight in D&D 3e, but the flight rules aren't particularly good and are only easy to use if you ignore half of them.

In D&D 4e the designers continue to pretend that there's no such thing as flight. I mean, the pity excuse for rules the system provides is from a chapter about underwater combat!

Well, FFZ does it, but it goes very abstract and gamist with it, which doesn't mesh well especially with 4e's grid combat, but can be useful on its own.

Essentially, it boils down to: "If your enemies cannot attack you, this isn't a combat."

It could be other things. It could turn into a sort of attack-roll based skill challenge at that point, with the big beast looking for cover and the players trying to snipe it down before it reaches cover. If they fail, the best survives. If they succeed, they manage to kill it. It could just end like the character ran away from combat.

In FFZ, because of the abstraction, you can melee attack at basically any range (you are assumed to move, jump, leap, trap, or otherwise find an opening, but we don't have to specify it), so if you're out of range, you're out of range for all attacks, and they're out of your range, too.

You could take the "if your enemies can't attack you, this isn't a combat" thing by itself, though it might be harder to justify in a more simulationist combat.