Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 4231441" data-attributes="member: 2804">But does it really make them scary? No, players don't want to tangle with undead for a purely metagame reason. I've seen groups run from Shadows that would tangle with Great Wyrm Red Dragons. Thats not right.And the fact remains that levelling down a PC because a monster touched you, is not a fun mechanic. Its worse than character death because now your character is permanently crippled. And if you have lost substantially more levels than the rest of the party, your character might as well be dead anyway. And depending on the pace of XP gain in your game, a single combat with undead can take away months of effort and character advancement. While everyone else gets the thrill of experiencing advancement, the poor sap who got level drained now has to go through all those levels again. I've seen players simply retire their PCs and make new ones that could start back at a level the rest of the party was at. And in one extreme case, I saw one jerkoff DM lose a player out of his game over it. The player was so disheartened at having to play a character that was now 5 levels lower than the rest of the party (and the DM refused to allow him to make a new character) that he quit playing. Quit playing a game he loved to play, because of bad rules and a jerk behind the screen.I quit that game after I saw that and started running my own game with house rules that fixed the BS that was level drain. Shortly after all the players left that other DM's game and joined mine. Gee, I wonder why?But that delay wasn't due to player indecision, it was caused by the rules of the game. Multiple attack rolls, multiple damage rolls. Discussion and lookups of whether this buff or that was in effect and what stacked with what.Not when your two rooms away from BBEG and his henchmen. Furthermore, non-casters are highly dependent on their gear to be anywhere as effective as a high level caster. Without their magical gear, a high level fighter is nothing but a mostly ineffective ground pounding meat shield.Believe me, we have white boards and spread sheets and its still a nightmare. Heck the fact that we even have to have a spreadsheet is a big red flag.Wind Walk isn't ethereal. Just gaseous form that can travel at 60 miles and hour and pretty much go anywhere.In some respects true. But lower level captains of the BBEG aren't realistically going to have the high level anti-scry defenses of the BBEG and thus are easy pickings for a shrewd party."You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Again the problem with Restoration is it means someone has to play Cleric. It also may or may not be effective depending on how many times the Cleric has it memorized and how many negative levels acquired.Or perhaps the flaw is that you need a program at all. And I have been less than impressed with a lot of published stuff. Even Paizo. I still have to doublecheck the stat blocks and I still find errors, or have to look up spells and buffs and apply them to the stat block when they haven't applied them or forgotten to do so.The thing is that D&D in prior editions worked differently. It didn't take hours to make a character in 1e. Heck in 1e the characters were thinly veiled avatars for the players themselves. Save or Die works when you play a beer and pretzels game where any death is only a 5 minute delay to roll up a new guy and jump back into the dungeon. But D&D has evolved since then. Its now more about story and continuity of characters and plot. Character creation is something that takes time and attention to detail, yet we still use mechanics from an era with vastly different assumptions on how the game was played. I see 4e as correcting this discrepancy.</blockquote>

Verification