Post/Author/DateTime	Post
rydi123 04-26-06, 05:07 AM	hi, i posted this in the dming sub-thread and was told to post it over here instead. hello. i am running a campaign w/several casters, one of whom (a wizard that has arcane disciple: healing) uses the craft wand and scribe scroll feats to make a stockpile of emergency spells that can be used by all the rest. as i am attempting to run something of a military campaign (the characters are military but not necessarily fighting another army all the time), w/large battles and tactical encounters, i find these extra spells and overabundance of casters frustrating. so my question is this: how best does one handle (provide a challenge, add danger, prevent tedious and repetitive spell tactics, prevent boredom on the part of warriors) parties w/many casters, especially those willing to sacrifice the gold and xp to make large amounts of scrolls/wands, at low lvls. to give you a feel for my problem ill describe what ends up happening in a standard fight: 1)area affect damage (fireball, or burning hands/color spray before 5 lvl) via wand/scroll/sorcerer to kill the weak monsters and stop swarms 2)crowd control (web/entangle/etc) the field and larger monsters using the party sorcerer or a wand/scroll 3)once the field is locked down, spam healing spells via wand/scroll on any wounded 4)release webs individually to release monsters in a controlled manner, using fireball/m.missile/searing ray wands and scrolls to eliminate the monsters while the warriors protect the casters or the casters use levitate scrolls to move away from the monsters 5)rinse, repeat there are several obvious problems resulting from this: 1-the warriors are bored, often being caught in the casters webs or having movement cut off 2-the characters are never in danger of running out of resources unless i run back to back battles, resulting in 8 hour combats that are tedious and taxing for all concerned 3-while there is a tactical element to such play, there is no variety, making most fights virtually the same regardless of the actual monsters or environment 4-web especially is a nightmare, as creatures are nearly immobilized, at least until freedom of movement is available or i decide to toss in enemy casters on every fight, that happen to be carrying dispel wands with them everywhere they go (because one dispel will definitely not be enough) due to the nature of the campaign there is often downtime to make alot of items and though the money is not any more than standard, the players are pooling party gold (just good sense imo) to make the items. i am also allowing some sharing of xp to make the items, but that really hasnt been a problem (and yes i do know that this allows for more crafting to occur, please read the next sentence :) ). the party wizard would be paying for it even if he had no help, and would not have significantly decreased his crafting (he might have made a few more scrolls and one less wand, but that is about the only change he would have made). i find it odd that this is causing me so many problems, as i have ran many d&d games before, one of which went from 1 straight through 40 over the course of a couple years, but none of the characters used wands/scrolls much, and i was not running the same type of campaign. actually, part of my problem may just be that i am used to running at higher levels; since my last game did go to 40, that means 3/4 of my time was spent at higher lvl play, and the low level play was a rather long time ago. at higher level i dont anticipate having as many problems, w/freedom of momement, more versatile monsters, and opposing spellcasters, but until the lvls are in at least the double digits i see this continueing to be a problem. i would appreciate any constructive advice on how to handle the situation and add interest/variety/danger back into my encounters. thanks, w.c.james
runestar 04-26-06, 05:20 AM	Set ambushes when your party is resting for the night? Or try monsters that have high sr. The psion killer in the XPH works against magic as well if you are playing magic-psionic transparency. Have silence cast on the enemy fighters before rushing them towards the spellcasters... :D And are you sure your adventures are paced right? The way your party is spamming spells, they should be dry quite quickly, meaning they are essentially commoners with crossbows for the rest of the day... Remember - they don't necesarily have to find their enemies, their foes can just as readily come to them... ;)
rydi123 04-26-06, 05:54 AM	the ambushes are a good idea, and it didnt occur to me to hunt down some low lvl/ high sr critters. that would help. thanks! the pacing is correct for the campaign setting, the problem is the wands/scrolls that can be made during downtime. they have enough utility scrolls that they can mem all combat spells, and the wands allow them to keep going even after running out of spells themselves. and the party wizard has made it rather clear that he is willing to stay a level behind the party if need be in order to ensure a steady supply of spells. i have thought of getting rid of the downtime, but that would be unrealistic ('no, sorry guys, you cant return to town and stay there. they kick you out and send you back to the dungeon' :) ), and having no downtime would cut heavily into non-combat roleplaying possibilities. Any more ideas?
Blazara 04-26-06, 06:56 AM	well i haven't got the books on me, but i'm pretty sure it takes a day to craft for every 1000 gp in the cost of the item. Just give the party quests that have to be done within a time limit, to stop mass preparation before the fighting starts
kelvinaw273 04-26-06, 07:46 AM	I would suggest isolating the disadvantages of the casters: 1) Weak (or not so strong) in melee 2) Poor stamina (need to rest to recover spells) 3) skills-light. So, to get around this: 1) use enemies that can attack with surprise of transport themselves around 'crowd control' effects (fly, dimension door, teleport etc.), get in close and deliver some mincing. 2) pace adventures as races against time, so they have to use their spells more economically or face running out. Give them little time to rest (night attacks?) so they don't get to recover spells. They will soon exhaust their supplies of scrolls, potions and wands. 3) use traps, riddles, social encounters and locks to stimmie them. Again, they will have to exhaust their utility spells in scrolls etc. to overcome these.
runestar 04-26-06, 08:03 AM	What lv is your party now? It might help if you need help finding the appropriate monsters against them. :)
aotrscommander 04-26-06, 08:18 AM	Do what I do in such cirumstances; use their own tactics against them! While not a long-term solution, it can do two things: 1) give you a much-earned chance to tip the tables and perhaps more importantly b) see how they handle it. You might well find *they* come up with the perfect counter to their own techniques. Which you can then implement. After all, in a military campaign, the other sdie going to have a think tank as such. Besides us on the boards I mean! Long term solutions might be to not give them AS much downtime, or worse, as you are in a military campaign, have the enemy disrupt their supply lines. Even the best wizard crafter actually needs something to work with. Assuming the PCs are becoming a threat in the own right, the opposition might actually have to take direct measures to counter them specifically. At a most basic level this could entain assination attempts (best put right in the middle of on of thier downtimes, potentially scewing their wizard's crafting). It could also mean more enemy rogues or warlocks with UMD and dispels. Rather than increasing the number of encounters, throw a couple of large-numbers of chaft encounters befoe a major encounter at them. Either they will burn precious resources tackling them with their spells (and thus softening them up for the later serious strike before they can rest), or they'll sit back and let the fighters wade in (which will at least let the fighters have some fun for once). Another nasty solution is having the enemy making things like arrows with Anti-Magic fields that activate on impact. If you're an enemy military, and you have a serious military application (i.e. dealing with what boils down to a very specialised and dangerous ops team), you can afford to burn some gold. Whacking out a few stacks of anti-magic arrows would not be unreasonable; you'd not need more than one or two in a normal combat unit, buyt that'll be enough to ruin your spellcaster's day. Warlocks (if you've got access to them) as have been pointed ou to me recently, have access to unlimited dispel magics, which would mean they would be useful to counter spell the parties wizards. Individually, either of these solutions is not useful very often (except maybe the anti-magic arrows), but used sparingly, they should make your players think a little harder.
Varia 04-26-06, 09:13 AM	Cant really fault them for playing to their strengths, although I grant you have to figure out how to challenge them. I'm sorta working on the problem too since I'm also running a very caster-heavy 1.0 campaign and its about to get messy(-er). My group of 9 contains 2 wizards, a fighter/wizard, a witch, a druid, a fighter/cleric and an incantatrix, for a total of 7 casters, and theyre verging on lvl 5. Thats gonna suddenly be 3 fireballs available when they hit lvl 5 (1 each from the 2 wizards and the witch), and another when the fighter/wizard hits lvl 5 a while later. And with a propadweomer from the incantatrix one of those is gonna be a maxed fireball at that. And thats just at lvl 5- when they get up to lvl 9+ its just gonna be rude. Anyways, it means I have some thinking to do too. The issues in 1.0 are somewhat different than 3.5 (they cant make their own scrolls/wands for a while yet, forinstance) but if I come up with anything I'll mention it, it may help you too. The one obvious thing you can do, and which fits with a military theme, is using modest swarms of lowbie troops to absorb some of that extra firepower. I dont mean throwing extra stuff to absorb stuff so they "play the real adventure properly", I mean making the swarms part of the real adventure, by cashing in some encounters for their equivalent weight in more numerous but lower level opponents. Instead of the lieutenant and his 3 goons, make it the seargant and his 5 squads of grunts, or whatever it balances out to (I havent really looked at the mechanics of challenge ratings etc in 3.5 yet to know how that works in practice yet). Vary the troop types used so that the wizards will need a variety of spells to cover all their needs. That suggests that the enemy armies are a coalition of some kind, to have several widely used troop types. You can, eventually at least, cut down on the playing time this involves by auto-successing the fights against a lot of the swarm attacks provided the correct magics are available and used so you dont have to play them all out, while changing up some of the attacks from the standards to provide the combats that actually do have to be played out. This swarms idea is assuming that your magic-heavy party does actually have corresponding weaknesses in other areas of course. If they dont, and their melee can just chop up lowbie troops in bulk without resorting to magic at all then this idea may not work. Perhaps you can make it work by modifying the troops to be melee-resistant in some way so that it becomes desireable for the wizards to do the work against them, while leaving the leaders and some rarer troop types for the melee to shine against? Dunno if that at all applicable to the background of your campaign but hope it helps. *Hugs* Varia