WayneLigon said:
False Life only gives 1d10+caster level hit points. For a ninth level wizard facing four or five strong thugs, that's going away in the first couple of hits, if not the first hit. And he still has to deal with the negative modifiers to casting anything with all the pain involved. That's going to be around about a DC 18-23 Concentration check he has to make; that brings it to a 50/50 chance he'll get a spell off at all (that in addition to the Concentration check he has to make to cast defensively so they don't all get a free attack on him, so it's technically lower than that; more like a 20% any spell will go off). Sudden Still or Sudden Silent; either a grapple or gagging him one is going to prevent the other. I won't buy that he's spent more than one feat slot on such a exotic feat.
Point the first; each hit during the action provokes its own Concentration save; the thugs will need to be doing 8-13 damage to provoke such high checks. This is a bit questionable; what kind of thugs were you envisioning? A squad of Rog1/Ftr1s that rush, grapple, and commence with the beating will do this nicely; however it's hard to hire people with PC class levels.
Next, since we're assuming a wall-of-iron capable wizard, we're assuming a wizard with 14 ranks in Concentration, and a Con of 14-16 (given the lack of need for stat increases to stats beyond Int, Dex, and Con), which means that we're looking at a modifier of +17 before feats
and skill-boosting items.
There are also a few trivial get-out-of-grapple-free items in the MIC; let's ignore those for the time being. In any case, a prepared wizard can escape a grapple, and given that this wizard doesn't need to craft items and can afford metamagic rods, he has little to spend his bonus feats on but defensive measures.
All-in-all, a group of well-trained thugs bum-rushing a wizard has a good chance of immobilizing and detaining him, especially if the thugs use things like tanglefoot bags and readied actions. However, all it takes is one high-initative roll for the wizard (possibly aided by Nerveskitter) and the wizard is now elsewhere, and each thug is now individually hunted down, had their memories and employer information forcibly extracted from their living brain, and their employers found naked and segmented in the city center, with their body parts spelling out "Don't **** with wizards."
If a group of wizards does some of the other stuff you mention, that's when adventurers get called in to slaughter them to the man. They might be powerful, but they soon find out that secular authority is more powerful than they ever thought about being.
Well...no. Civic authority has power because large numbers of people support it, and because they have the power to smack down those people who don't (with said large masses of people). Casters (especially wizards) past a certain level do not necessarily support civic authority, and no number of commoners or warriors can smack them down. The power of civic authority is directly tied to the number of powerful adventurers who listen to it; given that the arcane craftsmen can be richer and more moral than the civic authority trying to crush them, why would you assume adventurers would flock to the government, rather than the wizard?
I mean, a wizard's guild who takes payment to kill a wizard for simply engaging in legitimate business practice are up there with the Assassin prestige class in lack-of-morality. Mercenary adventurers (or adventurers who want to prevent the horrors of a wizard's war and are targeting the weaker party) will start aiming at our rogue wizard, yes. However, if these adventurers are civic-minded, they'll take a side mission out to splatter the Guilds (both wizardly and trade). If they're purely mercenary, then they can splatter the guilds, loot them, and then take up iron-conjuring on their very own.
Spell casters in D&D simply are not these powerful do-anything-I-want-anytime-I-want demigods.
I would love to see some evidence of this. Past about level 10, full-casters are able to bring massive regional devastation to entire areas, then vanish faster than any non-caster can follow. A caster who can scry, buff, and teleport can keep up; however, it's hard to catch a caster who doesn't want to be caught. It's easy to catch a city. End result is that while the high-level party will eventually cast the mid-level wizard, the wizard will have brought a whole lot of pain to a whole lot of people in the mean time.
Given this, one would expect that given a dispute between merchants and wizards, the wizards guild would simply eliminate the offending nonmagical guilds and put a few of their own on permanent conjuration and fabrication duty.
I mean, making things just seems so pedestrian when you could be summoning an extraplanar being or working out a new formula.
