There are those who allow into their games the vast plethora of Dungeons & Dragons products that have been released by Wizards of the Coast, and go farther to include third-party d20 System materials published under a purchased d20 System License, or under the oft-maligned Open Gaming License.
I've often been quite amused at such people then claiming that something was "overpowered". The important thing to realize in all inclusions of any rules outside of the Core Rules (these being the rules contained in the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide and the first Monster Manual, exclusively) is that these are, in their entirety, optional rules, which should be carefully weighed by a given Dungeon Master so as to arrive at an educated conclusion about whether the power the optional feats, spells and prestige classes present would in some way unbalance a given campaign.
The simple fact is, there is no absolute for "unbalanced". There is only what is unbalanced for a specific DM's campaign.
This being said, however, I still found it highly amusing the number of Core Rules materials that many posters point(ed) to as "overpowered", "munchkined", or any other euphemism for "I don't like how this works" that you could come up with.
I examined this from all sides; I read as many of the "Is this overpowered?" or "This is way too freakin' powerful!" posts as I could, and then pored over my Core Rulebooks, paying, of course, special attention to the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide. I arrived at a single, simple conclusion, which was then further borne out upon examination of the optional materials, the core of which are often referred to as "splatbooks" (the character class handbooks). That conclusion was this:
"There is nothing within a given ruleset which is overbalanced unless that same ruleset cannot provide a counter."
This is a bold statement, I realize. Already there are those exclaiming in outrage, "Well what the hell about the 3.0 Haste/Harm/melee attack combination?!"
I'm glad you asked.
The reality is that every single one of the threads that lambasted Haste and Harm in conjunction with some other direct-damage attack (meant to show how easy even the most powerful encounter could be to win when you could reduce something to 0 or fewer hit points in the span of a single round), worked on the assumption that a) The one with these spells had superior initiative, and b) That the opponents were in no way intelligent. This is, to me, a sad commentary on how many games are likely played, if there are so many individuals who have encountered this style of play. The reality is this: Many of the spells in a given Dungeons & Dragons campaign can be generally assumed to be common in some form or another, barring specific Dungeon Master house ruling on the nature and presence of magic as a generalized force. With spells such as Haste and Harm being so common, one must conclude that anyone with the wherewithal to become "high level" (i.e., fairly experienced in their profession) has displayed some degree of wisdom and foresight in their career. Spellcasters should simply automatically assume the presence of such spells as the 3.0 Haste or Harm. Simple defenses, provided for easily within the Core Rules, can insure that someone isn't going to use these spells against you unless you're dealing with someone who has planned even more excessively than you have, and somehow hits on just the right combination to crack your defenses and bulldoze their way in. Harm being a 6th level spell, this means your average Cleric has to be 11th level to cast it, edging into territory that many consider "high level". Haste is only a 3rd level spell, which means your average Wizard only has to be 5th level to cast it, but by this time, counterspelling has likely become a way of life for enemy spellcasters, and even in the face of being unable to counterspell, on account of being caught unawares, the ability to cast Dispel Magic or even counter Haste with Slow shouldn't be ignored.
Higher-level spellcasters who make use of magic like Mordenkainen's Disjunction needn't worry about this spell being used against them; they're the ones being attacked in their sanctum sanctorum. If the PCs can just waltz in there and take over in the span of a couple of rounds, then the Dungeon Master isn't playing their BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) intelligently. It's kind of like expecting to just waltz into the White House and sit down in the Oval Office, and not have the President have so many Secret Service goons riding your behind that you're wondering if you didn't spontaneously sprout several mutations all looking like rejects from a Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones movie.
The long and short of this is that Dungeon Masters (I rarely heard players complain about this) who complained that any given spell or ability in 3.0, or 3.5 for that matter, was "overpowered", were Dungeon Masters who weren't willing to show the same level of rules proficiency and mastery that their players were. Once it was decided, presumably at the beginning of the campaign, which rulebooks were being used and which ones weren't, the players immediately took time out of the sessions to see how they could maximize their characters' potential through intelligent stacking of feats, class abilities, skills, spells, etc.
The Dungeon Master, as a pre-emptive strike, should realistically have been doing no less. Are you allowing Miasma into your campaign? You'd better bet that your players are going to get use of it, one way or the other (even if there isn't a Druid in the party, there's nothing stopping the Rogue, once they have enough ranks in Use Magic Device, from purchasing a scroll of it and having it handy), and you'd better have some way of insuring that its casting doesn't immediately end an encounter in which it's used. With intelligent logical application (also sometimes known as "using the spirit of the rules and not just the letter of them"), it's easy to see how a Necklace of Adaptation could prevent someone from falling prey to Miasma. Again, with such logical conclusions, it's easy to see how Negative Energy Protection (or the 3.5 spell it's been folded into, Death Ward) could be used to insure that Harm isn't a, well, harmful addition to the encounter.
Ouch. Bad pun. No donut for this poster...
The long and short of it is that if the Dungeon Master is displaying a level of rules mastery that's at least equal to that displayed by his/her players, no cries of "Overpowered!" should be resounding at the gaming table, much less on these message boards. A Dungeon Master who is as willing to use those rules, with all their deadly efficacy, as the players, is going to find that there are more than enough ways to challenge the players in spite of the power, which the rules being used in the game say they can have, rather than by weakening or removing the powers and thus weakening or removing the players' enjoyment of the game.
A player who shows mastery and intelligence in the playing of a given game is lauded as someone who is a true "master" of the game, someone whose playing style and knowledge is to be emulated. However, as good as a player is, a Dungeon Master has to be better, if only so that they can continue to challenge the best of their players to keep all of their players' interest. The DM has to be at least as good as their best player, so that challenges are there for everyone. Using the same rules to challenge the players that the players have used to challenge a Dungeon Master is nothing but intelligent, and ultimately makes one a better Dungeon Master.
That's what it's about: the Dungeon Master gets better at his or her craft, while the players do the same. You all, through your actions, push each other to ever greater heights, and the game becomes more complex, and more enjoyable, and becomes one of those campaigns that years from now, your players are going to be telling other groups about as a benchmark for how "Dungeons & Dragons ought to be played". You get immortality, and they get even more experience as a player with which to vex (and hopefully challenge to improve) future Dungeon Masters under whom they play.
But it's all for naught if a player chooses to use Time Stop, and you let your campaign be completely derailed by the spell's casting. You, as the Dungeon Master, should have anticipated a likely strategy (and more often than not, players tend to go with what they've either heard or experienced has worked), and should have found a way not necessarily to counter or nullify the spell, but to insure that the spell's casting isn't going to take what you planned to be an epic, grand, penultimate confrontation with evil into a one-round slayathon. You'll hand out the XP either way, but your players are going to feel like they earned that experience if they're sitting there with a few hit points left, charges on magical items nearly gone, most of their spells used up, and maybe even a magical item or two completely devastated, all because you as a Dungeon Master knew enough about the rules to insure that the challenge was just that: A challenge.
In other words, if you aren't a lazy Dungeon Master, you aren't going to find yourself dealing with "overpowered PCs".
1. Balance between players: If I've crafted a cool 11th level rogue with feats to max my sneak attack opportunities, but am constantly being overshadowed by the harm caster's good spell combo, that is not much fun. The DM has to correct not only imbalance between party and opponents, but within the party as well, making sure that there are plenty of opportunities where my sneak attack is more cool than some potent spell combo.
2. One of the major reasons I pay money to Wizards of the Coast for their D&D products is that so much balance work has been done for me. (If I use my own custom RPG rules it's likely to be much less balanced initially.) I think that when people see something that is slightly imbalanced, they get in a tizzy because they expected to do zero work balancing the game. This is unreasonable: the game designers can't anticipate the specific circumstances of everybody's campaign; even those things which slip past playtesting usually are not totally game-breaking.
3. There's a problem with the theory that "There is nothing within a given ruleset which is overbalanced unless that same ruleset cannot provide a counter." This gives the attacker an advantage over the defender, or give the advantage to the wizard that wins initiative. For example, let's say that there are 20 "killer combos" out there. Any given character really only needs one of them in most situations, but a defender needs to defend against all of them. The guy casting death ward expends a spell that could be used for other things. If your typical high-level defender is prepared for, say, 15 out of 20 killer combos, each party really needs only 5 or 6 killer combos before they are pretty sure that one of them is going to work. By the same token, though, the BBEG might have a few killer combos too, which the party then needs to defend against. This is why wizard duels often boil down to initiative rolls.
4. Balance generally means, "all character-creation decisions are equally powerful." This sounds good at first and is generally true. What people don't realize is that if absolutely all character-creation decisions really are equally powerful, this means that a gimp fighter or a dumb wizard need some way to be viable, which detracts from those people who put actual thought and effort into building a good character. In other words, a world with zero "killer combos" might be the most balanced, but it probably would be the least fun, too.
-- 77IM
I consider that a spell is overpowered if it makes the spellcaster more powerful than characters of other classes of the same level. If the only counter is to counterspell that means non-spellcasters are helpless against the spell, which is not fun for the players of such characters.
Besides, it's also a matter of group style. In the past 3 years playing 3.0. we did not encounter more than 5% of the rules questions and stuff that people find so bad here on the boards. If we don't know how something works we quickly think up a logical ruleset for the problem and stick with it and play on.
Originally posted by 77IM
What people don't realize is that if absolutely all character-creation decisions really are equally powerful, this means that a gimp fighter or a dumb wizard need some way to be viable, which detracts from those people who put actual thought and effort into building a good character.
I would not say that all character creation decisions need to be equally powerful for Balance to exist. There are almost certain to be many possible poor or sub-optimal choices, for example, a Wizard who takes as many Weapon Proficiency feats as possible.
To me, Balance says two things. The first, and less important, is that there should be a valid reason to use each option available, even if it rarely arises. Choices should not be obsolete.
For example, if there were a feat, Complete Martial Weapon Proficiency, that gave proficiency with all martial weapons, this would not be balanced with the current Martial Weapon Proficiency feat, that grants proficiency with only one weapon. However, it could potentially still be balanced with Simple Weapon Proficiency, as sometimes you might prefer to wield a dagger or a quarterstaff.
The second and more important part of Balance is that there be many viable choices. If the Longsword dealt 2d8 damage and got a critical on an 18-20, that would not be balanced. Not because 2d8 damage is too much (although it might be), but because there would be almost no reason to ever wield any other melee weapon. For a melee fighter, you would have only one choice: Wield a longsword, or be a poor combatant.
Or, to give a current example often debated, if a Cleric's buff spells always make him as good a melee combatant as a Fighter or Barbarian, that would be unbalanced. In that circumstance, you can play a melee fighter, or you can play a melee fighter that also gets to learn Miracle. There is really only one viable option there.
When something is overpowered, that really just means that by reason of its strength, something is reducing the number of viable choices, and perhaps making some alternatives obsolete.
Let's examine the case of 3.0 Haste. It was overpowered. Why? Well, consider a level 20 Sorcerer. He knows 4 level 3 spells. In the case of most level 3 spells, that spell existing gives him an extra choice for what to learn. More choices is good for Balance. However, in the case of Haste, if he didn't want to be well below par, the Sorcerer had to learn it, leaving him with only 3 spells to choose. Haste reduced choices, and was therefore overpowered.
And that's just the balance between spells. It doesn't even address the balance between classes.
Take Chonjurer as an example. Look at all the work he has done compiling a huge list of spells and exactly what is wrong with them and why it is wrong and a suggested fix. Does that sound like someone who is lazy with their campaign? Don't you think that if it was just a matter of thinking of good strategies conjurer would have done that? But the problem is deeper than that. There are no strategic solutions to so many things in 3.0.
Take Fabricate as an example. With Fabricate and Wall of Iron, I could chug out thousands of suits of platemail over the course of a month if I was a midlevel wizard. I could do this on my downtime between adventures, and it would only take a few minutes per day. One single wizard working like this would change the whole economy of a kingdom. If these two spells exist, there is no way a suit of platemail costs thousands of gold, it is a simple law of supply and demand, assuming one such wizard in the kingdom takes this wonderful opportunity. And why wouldn't one? This is only one example of a broken spell. There are no strategic counters to this spell that are not contrived solely to screw the PC that uses this combo. It isn't even a combat combo.
Really, what is it that I am not seeing? How is it this is O.K. and balanced? What would be your nonnerfing solution to a player that did this? Let him have thousands of gold for free? Let him single-handedly rearrange the world's economy and war tactics? Or would you hidden “nerf-screw” him? Perhaps send assassins to kill him before he starts pumping out iron suits. None of these solutions work. Just remove the combo; it doesn't work, and this is not for lack of thought on the matter.
Tony
Thanks for your input. I wanted to answer your questions specifically.
You mention the Wall of Iron/Fabricate combination to allow a Wizard to craft endless suits of plate mail or other metallic armors. You mention that there's no reason a Wizard wouldn't do this, because it could mean thousands (or more) of gold pieces that he/she can command with minimal effort.
The reality, however, is that with knowledge of the rules, which I advocate in my article, you find that Craft checks are required for items which require a high degree of craftsmanship. I don't know about you, but to me, that means anything that requires a Craft check in the first place to make, and armor most definitely requires a Craft: Armorsmith check. Fact is, it should require two different Craft checks, one for leatherworking (for Leather armor and Studded Leather), but I don't know that the game enforces that, so that would then become a house rule, which falls outside the mandate of this discussion.
So the Wizard requires a Craft check to make metallic armor from his wall of iron. Let's even assume that the Wizard has the appropriate ranks in Craft to do such a thing.
Then you look at "cause and effect", something else my article advocates. Don't nerf the spell, find a way around the "offending" ability so that the player isn't cheated of their rightfully-earned power and creative use of that power.
Do you really think that the armorsmiths of the area would put up with someone undercutting them like that? They may only be commoners, but you'd be surprised what commoners can accomplish when they band together; sometimes it's nothing more than finding the cash to hire an adventurer (or group of adventurers) to deal with the offending spellcaster/item crafter. It's kinda like walking on union territory in the United States. You step on their toes, they're going to let you know about it, and "encourage" you to either knuckle under to the jurisdiction they have as a union in the field in question, or deal with sanctions which can make the success of your business significantly more difficult.
Say this Wizard decides to "deal" with the commoner armorsmiths who are being a pest to him. Wow, that sounds to me like a definitely evil attitude, and repeated "dealings" of this nature would likely result in an alignment change. While this doesn't carry the overly-stringent XP penalties from 1st Edition and 2nd Edition, an alignment change is still radical to anyone, particularly spellcasters. Their allies have changed (or turned on them), their familiar may no longer feel properly connected to them, and if they're using material from the Book of Exalted Deeds, all of a sudden large portions of their spell power (and possibly even feats) has become null and void.
Sounds to me like the beginnings of a great story.
Amazing how that can happen. And through it all, the player gets to keep the power their Wizard earned, completely unaltered. Knowing the rules so you can challenge a PC isn't a "hidden nerf", because you aren't affecting the power in question at all, you're simply using those same rules to come up with adequate challenges.If you put some work into being a good Dungeon Master (and I'm not saying you don't), you'll find that no spell from the Core Rulebooks is "unbalanced".
Just like I stated in my article.
As for Chonjurer, I respect the intense amount of effort he's put into his "Problematic Spells" threads, and I appreciate his overall highly-favorable contributions to the WotC boards at large, but the fact is that he and I just don't agree when it comes to magic. That's why you and he are part of the Nerf Magic Foundation, while I, even though it's no longer in my sig (foundations have fallen out of vogue in 3.5), was a member of the Nothing Sucks Foundation, practically the antithesis to the Nerf Magic Foundation.
So while he's put a lot of work into his threads on magic, I can't give them weight personally because, quite simply, I disagree with just about every spell "problem" he's noted. I can see in-game solutions to nearly every one of his stated magic problems, and in so doing, those in-game solutions all draw on the same rulesets which gave birth to the magic in the first place.
In other words, just as I said in my article, nothing is overpowered if something from the same ruleset which birthed the power in question can be used to counter it.
Thanks for your input.
Minor Point: Lots of ranks in craft are a small price to pay for the potential rewards of the combo.
Major Point: By using the Hidden Nerf, it would royally suck to be a player in your campaign. Because I would know that if I came up with anything powerful and creative, you would find some way to make it fail while claiming that you are "challenging the party" or "using a subset of rules to counter it".
Let me ask you this: If a wizard casts a normal, not-really-that-powerful, unremarkable spell such as cone of cold a lot, would you find a way to make it backfire? Probably not. But when someone comes up with the Fabricate/Wall of Iron combo, you concoct ways of making it fail.
Therefore, by your own actions, you know that the fabricate combo is overpowered. You just won't admit it.
I suppose, by your reasoning, that any spell would be balanced, because all spells in your campaign carry the added invisible line "if you find a good way to use this spell, the DM will screw you, while keeping this spell unchanged." Wonderful.
Consider the imaginary 5th level spell "Kill Anyone". This spell kills anyone with no save and no SR at long range. The spell is balanced in your campaign because there is always a way to screw the person who uses it. Perhaps commoners come after them, perhaps dieties come after them, perhaps whatever. Balance has no meaning when you use the Hidden Nerf, because the DM just adds more weight to the other side somehow. If I am a player, I want to feel that intelligent use of spells will be rewarded, while poor choice and use of spells will make life harder. I am sure you understand the importance of rewarding intelligent players because you mention it in your own posts. However, you don't seem to notice that you did completely screw the player in your proposed angry blacksmith solution while only technically still allowing them to cast the spell.
Major Point: When you use the Hidden Nerf, you are just getting yourself into more trouble and making the campaign world more inconsistent.
Consider the angry blacksmith solution you proposed. It may temporarily solve the problem of the player casting the combo, but it makes the campaign world inconsistent. Why doesn't every king who can afford it get their hands on a wizard with this combo? If you were a king, why would you have blacksmiths making armor at all? Why hire blacksmiths? Save all the money and gain the allegiance of a single mid level wizard. Surely the entire kingdom can ally/hire/coerce one (or a handful) of such mid level wizard(s) to arm themselves. This is a far better use of the money.
Since you used the Hidden Nerf, now you get yourself in more trouble. Now, in order to explain how the world is believable, you have to come up with another lie to cover the first one. Are the blacksmith's rebelling against the king also? This is getting unbelievable. Why would the society continue to make armor in such a slow, expensive, primitive fashion when a few hired wizards could arm an entire kingdom with ease? See the problems? This is like trying to make a believable country that has the facilities and technology to make cars but inexplicably citizens just decide to ride horses because the ranchers threaten anyone who start making cars. The idea that blacksmiths could stop a mid level wizard is questionable. To think that they could stop one sponsored by a king is just silly. If you were a king would you allow your army to be vastly undersupplied because the blacksmith's are angry? No. You would tell them to shut up and make horseshoes. Then you would arm you army in suits of platemail very cheaply using a well paid mid level wizard.
Using the Hidden Nerf is creative, and it sends the campaign in new directions. However, it is creative in a sick sort of way, sort of like the way lying is sick. You solved the problem for a minute, but you really just made it worse.
Minor Point: I disagree with you on most things, but you are interesting to talk to.
Tony
Why wouldn't a king be employing Wizards who could use this combination you're talking about? Because in addition to paying the costs of the actual items being crafted (and a Wizard in such a profession would be foolish to charge anything less than the actual going rate, retail of course, for a suit of armor or a weapon), the king also has to pay the cost for the spell casting (which, again, the Wizard would be foolish not to charge; if they're in the whole thing for the money, they're going to charge for everything they can; it's kind of like going to the auto shop, where you not only pay for the parts, you also pay for the labor, and that's where they nail you; the last shop I was in charged $70 per hour for labor...).
A sensible king who wants to be a good steward of the money he's collected and put into the regal coffers is instead simply going to go with the local weaponsmiths and armorsmiths, because while they charge the same for their goods as the Wizard would, they aren't also charging for the use of magic. Wizards make it easier, but they also make it more expensive. A king can pay a single master armorsmith and a single master weaponsmith, and all their retinue of journeymen and apprentices, and crank out weapons quite fast, more than fast enough to keep the regal armories well-stocked for massive invasions, either repelling those or instigating them. The costs for this are significantly less than paying even half that number of Wizards for doing the same thing. The Wizards are quicker, but they're more expensive. It just isn't good fiscal policy to choose speed and higher cost over lower speed and lower cost. Ultimately, cost becomes the deciding factor.
It isn't that it's a hidden nerf at all, and I blatantly deny the accusation.
The full power of the spells are available, and Fabricate and Wall of Iron in this instance aren't changed one singular iota. The choice to cast those spells for the purposes of undercutting local weapon and armorsmiths, however, might make one reconsider whether they truly want to do it. Is choosing not to cast Mordenkainen's Disjunction because you don't want to blast away magic items the party wants a "hidden nerf"? Or is choosing not to cast it because you're worried the target(s) might have an artifact of some sort on them, and you don't want to jeopardize your future spellcasting ability, a hidden nerf? I doubt it. It's being sensible in the approach to the use of magic. It isn't a tool that can be used without cost, and I'm not even talking pure financial and XP costs.There's a reason that worlds outside of Eberron don't have massive factories populated by primary casting classes cranking out products. One, they're more rare in most D&D games, two, they're not inclined to enter into a life of manufacturing rather than the promises of greater power to be gained from adventuring, and three, they quite honestly aren't likely to take well to someone attempting to minimize the importance of the power they wield by reducing it to nothing more than a convenient way to quickly manufacture something for a purpose which doesn't directly benefit, in any way aside from momentary finances (and we all know how quickly Wizards and Sorcerers go through cash, since they have costs associated with their class that no other class does), the caster.
Can someone use the Fabricate / Wall of Iron combination to manufacture massive amounts of weapons and armor in a small amount of time? Sure, if the caster is inclined, and if the caster wants to spend the time, and if the caster can find someone willing to pay their spell casting and resale costs, and if you can pull a caster away from their own researches to do this.
But will someone use the Fabricate / Wall if Iron combination to manufacture massive amounts of weapons and armor in a small amount of time? Not likely, unless magic is so unbelievably common in your world that the primary casters have nothing better to do with their time than do this in between adventures. And, as mentioned, they would then have to deal with the very logical repercussions that would arise from an entire manufacturing sector being put out of work because they're being undercut by an enterprising arcane caster.
Methinks the forces of the Nine Hells might not levy so vicious a reprisal against such an offender as an entire country's worth of angry weapon smiths and blacksmiths would...
10 ranks in Bluff
Charisma 20 (including items)
Glibness!!!
Total bluff score: +45 (and I'm not even trying)
How to convince anyone of almost anything.
Worked example:
Opposition: Level 20 Paladin
23 ranks in Sense Motive
Wisdom: 24
Item: +5 to sense motive.
Total score to resist the bluff: +35
(and this isn't a very likely scenario)
So a very high ranking paladin specialising in Sense Motive has only a 1 in 2 chance of resisting the bluff of a level 7 bard with just one spell to help him if the bluff is hard to believe.
Almost anyone with a power remotely comparable to the bard doesn't even stand a chance unless he casts Zone of Truth or Dispel Magic first.
As bluff is a skill that can easily be used to control mobs and send armies to fighting each other, we have problems. (If anyone resists the bluff, the next bluff should be to call him a traitor or a fraud)
You are telling me that all this is balanced? It's certainly all core.
1)The narrower the focus the greater the depth of mastery.
A player who spends 2 hours a week can quickly become a specialist and master all the rule subsets surrounding their character, allowing them to come up with specialized combinations and permutations.
A DM who spends 2 hours a week will remain a generalist, since once they write up their adventure, reference all the rules the adventure will touch on, pick out magic items to populate it with and make sure the adventure advances the campaign story line 2 hours has been long gone.
It’s much easier, and faster, for a player to master 100 to 200 pages out of the Players Handbook then it is for a DM to do the same with 900 pages from the Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual. Thus while most DM’s would love to have the same level of rules mastery as their players, in all areas, the sheer volume of material a DM is required to master typically prevents them from doing so.
2) You comment "There is nothing within a given ruleset which is overbalanced unless that same rule set cannot provide a counter."
True. However, surprise matters and few players are willing to volunteer any information that will reduce their effectiveness. If a player gains new spells following the last play session and has a new x+y+z spell combo the DM has no way to prepare for it. Long term this shouldn’t be a problem, since humans are creatures of habit and it can be prepared for the following session, but short term such surprises can wreak havoc upon a play session.
3) “A Dungeon Master who is as willing to use those rules, with all their deadly efficacy, as the players, is going to find that there are more than enough ways to challenge the players.
I agree, until it leads to a Total Party Kill. And the session where that occurs will most likely be the last play session of that campaign. Use deadly efficacy enough and you may gain the title "Killer DM" while simultaneously losing your group.
4) “A Dungeon Master has to be better, if only so that they can continue to challenge the best of their players to keep all of their players' interest.”
Once again I like the theory, but the reality seems to be messier.
A “better” DM I’m assuming would be the most creative, most intelligent, most experienced person with the best rule recall and understanding of game mechanics in the group, this would allow them to “continue to challenge the best of their players.”
So, my question is: If a DM isn’t better, for whatever reason, then what? Should the best players force out the DM and get a better one? Should the best players build “overpowered” characters and then proceed to run the campaign to ruin on the theory that it’ll make the DM a better DM the next time around, since “You all, through your actions, push each other to ever greater heights”?
5) You comment that that the DM is responsible for making sure that everyone is challenged.
But why should the DM have to shoulder the entire burden for that? Why aren’t players just as responsible for making sure their characters are challenged? Shouldn’t a good player voluntarily check their pc’s power, from time to time, to make sure that other players have a chance to shine, or to try something new. (Sure you can kill the ogres with a few fireballs, but could you still kill them if you voluntarily restricted yourself to 1st and 2nd level spells for the length of the combat?)
6) “In other words, if you aren't a lazy Dungeon Master, you aren't going to find yourself dealing with ‘overpowered PCs’".
Lazy was probably a poor choice of words since most DM’s put in far more time on a per week basis and have a greater working knowledge of the entire system then their players, who often only master the particular rules relevant to their particular characters.
Ultimately, I like the premise of your article and agree with the basic idea that "There is nothing within a given ruleset which is overbalanced unless that same rule set cannot provide a counter." However, there are certain realities that it doesn’t seem to take into account. Thus, while you make a good argument you do so primarily by relying on examples in an individual context.
My experience is that most of the problems with “overpowered” arise not in the individual context but in dealing with multiple spell combinations or in the context of the power levels of specific PC’s in relation to the rest of the party, as some of the other posters, like Eldren and Ranthanas, have already pointed out. Thus, it would be helpful if you’d further clarify your original premise, taking those factors into account.
O.K, we seem to be getting somewhere. Maybe.
First of all, you seem to be confused about what a Hidden Nerf is. A Hidden Nerf has nothing to do with what the players are doing. A Hidden Nerf is an act by the DM. Specifically, it is an act by the DM where he rearranges something specifically to counter the PCs.
Be careful here. It has to be DM.
Suppose the party specializes in critical hits and sneak attacks. The DM thinks this is too powerful but refuses to admit it to them or himself. He then decides that the rest of the campaign will feature undead, constructs, and plants. This is a Hidden Nerf.
Suppose the party specializes in critical hits and sneak attacks. The DM decides that this is balanced, but decides to throw a few constructs, undead and plants at the party once in a while just for fun. The campaign is not rearranged because most campaigns feature undead, constructs, and plants once in a while. Therefore this is not a Hidden Nerf.
Suppose the party specializes in critical hits and sneak attacks. The DM decides that this is balanced, but when the party goes up against very intelligent monsters, those monsters use reconnaissance to figure out the party's tactics beforehand and then tries to send undead and golems against them if they own such creatures. This is not a Hidden Nerf because this is exactly how evil guys would act in real life. The DM isn't doing it, the intelligent monsters are. Figure out their tactics and try to counter them if you can. Therefore this is not a Hidden Nerf.
Suppose the party wants to specialize in critical hits and sneak attacks. The DM decides this is too powerful and tells them up front that he is weakening such attacks for such and such a reason. This is not hidden because he told them the nerf. Therefore, this is not a Hidden Nerf.
Does that clear things up at all?
Secondly, I would like to mention the ranks in craft. These are rather insignificant compared to potential benefits of Fabricating platemail. If this is a wizard, he gets 2 + Int skill points per level. Intelligence is his prime stat. He can afford the skill points. I can't understand why we are having trouble with this point.
Furthermore, you say that wizards having ranks for crafting armor is rare. Normally, yes it would be very rare. Wizards would hardly want to study armorsmithing, would they? But you missed the obvious point. Given the potential for gold income with the Wall of Iron/Fabricate combo, now , in that type of gameworld how many wizards would take ranks in armorsmithing as they approached level ten or so? That was the point.
I'll be right back.
Tony111
A few more points....
I am wondering about your understanding of economics (no disrespect intended). I only took high school economics and one college economics course but I found it to be very interesting.
Anyway, let us look at a few examples.
Look under equipment. The price of a sheep is 2 gold. Sheep are not just arbitrarily priced by the universe at 2 gold. There is a reason. What is that reason? Because the rarity of sheep, and the labor needed to raise a sheep, is measured by the market to be about 2 gold worth of value.
Look under candle. A candle is priced at 1 copper. Why is this? Because the materials and labor required to make a single candle are valued by the market around 1 copper.
Now suppose that sheep grew on trees. Literally. You could walk up to any tree and pick a leaf or something and have it change into a sheep. Basically, the economy has as many sheep as it wants, for free. Now what will happen to the price of sheep? Sheep are very common now, there is almost no labor required in getting a sheep, and no materials. Therefore sheep will be valued at less than a copper.
Suppose the DM tries to create a universe where sheep grow on trees but are still valued at 2 gold pieces. Is this realistic? Is it believeable? See the problem? Why would anyone pay 2 gold (20 days average labor), for something that grows on trees all over the place?
Could you imagine people paying 100 per blade of grass in the USA? Under present conditions? Something is wrong.
I hope this is making a little sense.
Now let us examine things in detail. I will show how Fabricate/Wall of Iron makes the campaign world unbelieveable. I will make my points one at a time.
Platemail costs 1500 gold in the PHB.
Platemail weights 50 pounds.
Take a 12th level wizard casting Wall of Iron Such a wall is 15 feet by 20 feet by 0.25 feet. This wall has a volume of
(15*20*0.25) ft^3 = 75 ft^3.
I forget the exact density of iron at the moment, but I remember it is between 7.0 and 8.0 grams/cm^3. I will take the value to be 7.5 grams/cm^3.
Using this value, a cubic foot of iron weights 468 pounds. Imagine a cube of iron with sides 1 foot. Pretty heavy. Thus the Wall of Iron has a weight of (468 * 75) = 35,100 pounds.
Now we turn to Fabricate With the same wizard casting fabricate, he would affect 12 cubic feet. Therefore, this wizard can use the same wall of iron spell for (75/12) = (over) 6 castings of fabricate .
Are you still with me?
O.K., now each casting of fabricate affects 12 cubic feet of iron. This means each casting affects (12*468) = 5616 lbs of iron. With each suit of platemail weighting 50 lbs, the wizard could produce 112 suits of platemail with each casting of fabricate.
Such a horde of platemail is valued in the PHB at 168,000 gold per casting of a fifth level spell (plus a wall of iron every 6 fabricates.
How long does this casting take? Fabricate changes things at 1 cubic foot per round. The wizard can get the whole thing done in a little over a minute.
In one month, casting two fabricates per day, the wizard can produce (112*2*30 days per month) = 6720 suits of platemail, worth 10,080,000 gold.
See the problems. If a single mid level wizard can produce things at this rate, how can platemail be valued so high. If platemail is valued high wizards will fabricate the stuff and sell it making lots of money and bringing the price down.
You say, "if the caster is inclined", but why wouldn't a wizard be? The rewards of adventuring pale compared to this.
You say "if the caster wants to spend the time," but it one take 2 minutes, he can do it on his coffee break and still perform magic research or other wizardly business.
You say "if the caster can find someone will to buy it", but the wizard can lower the price until everyone wants to buy and still make an enormous fortune.
Even accounting for failed craft checks, selling at the armor at big discounts, and having to sell the idea to kings and merchants, the wizard is going to be much richer than he would be by adventuring. You just can't have a spell where a single mid level wizard can change the entire economy with it. You are going to have the same problems with ships. Why spend thousands of gold to make a ship, a wizard can do it with a single spell.
I have to either remove fabricate from the campaign, OR nerf the spell, OR reduce the prices of all expensive manufactured items and make them common (say 10 gold and up) to reflect wizards who periodically cast fabricate and sell the goods, OR have an inconsistent campaign world.
Having a campaign world with the fabricate/wall of iron combo AND platemail priced at 1500 gold is like trying to make a believable world where grass is priced at $100.
One more thing, since I find these rebellious blacksmiths amusing.
In an economy, when there is a will and a way to produce superior products, or equal products cheaper, or both, the new way takes over.
There are examples of this everywhere, but I will use weapons as an example.
First people used slings or something. The someone invented the shortbow. The sling producers where probably angry and put out of business, but shortbows are superior so they took over. And so on with longbows, and canons and so on. The producers cannot stop progress. Think of how many people have an interest in the platemail being produced. The army, the king, the wizard, the entire society being defended by the army, etc. If you think about it, there are actually many more people who want the wizard to use the combo than the blacksmiths who are angry about it. It just doesn't make any sense that a hundred blacksmiths would labor for weeks making 112 platemail when a single wizard can produce 112 per fifth level spell slot.
Tony111
[Edited for spelling, added one paragraph]
Originally posted by Tony111
I am wondering about your understanding of economics (no disrespect intended). I only took high school economics and one college economics course but I found it to be very interesting.
I've done economics for the last 4 years, so have an idea of what I am saying too. Economics is great fun--I'm hoping to major in it. :D
In an economy, when there is a will and a way to produce superior products, or those equal products cheaper better, or both, the new way takes over.
There are examples of this everywhere, but I will use weapons as an example.
First people used slings or something. The someone invented the shortbow. The slinger producers where probably angry and put out of business, but shortbows are superior so they took over. And so on with longbows, and canons and so on. The producers cannot stop progress. Think of how many people have an interest in the platemail being produced. The army, the king, the wizard, the entire society being defended by the army, etc. It just doesn't make any sense that a hundred blacksmiths would labor for week making platemail when a single wizard can produce 112 per day. It is not believable.
You'd be surprised at how 'technology' (aka progress) can be foiled by groups that are not interested in it. It might be easy to think that progress is hard to stop- indeed it is nigh impossible in our world. But this adaptability in our world was 'learned' by our society, and only in the last few decades and by the really 'industrialised countries'.
I come from Costa Rica (open your atlases everyone--it is one of those little countries in Central America) so I know what its like to be in a non-industrialised country-minded place. You'd be amazed at how many nifty 'progress'-created goods are not used. Why? It’s not because someone can’t afford them. There are enough entrepreneurs willing to risk money. It’s because the PEOPLE that progress replaces are very unwilling to accept it. Whenever a new invention comes in that can replace hundreds of jobs appears, do you think those hundreds of possibly unemployed are going to sit idly waiting for their jobs to be taken over? They are going to move-- to go on strike.
If you think this silly, just look at the power the worker unions have all over the world. Imagine, say, the number of workers in supermarket stores. And now imagine that some genius comes up with a few robots that can do their jobs. The shop owners would have no wages, no pension, no healthcare, zip, nothing, zero, nada. You think the workers are going to allow it?
Now, equate the workers to the blacksmiths, the genius with the wizard (sorry, bad pun...) and the shop owners with the army/king/etc. Pure logic would argue that yes, the more innovative way will be used.
BUT, chances are it won’t be, or at least, it won’t be in any system where people can join together to express their feelings. And no ruling system does can truly stop people from joining together.
Besides, some kings have priorities like making their population happy/content/not unhappy. In those cases, it could be preferable to keep hundreds of blacksmiths with work than allow a single wizard to have it all. If you really want to become 'economist'-like in the argument, remember that those hundreds of blacksmiths will use their earnings to pay the weaver, the cooper, the baker- loads of other people for whom the blacksmith's expenses become earnings. If the blacksmiths don’t earn, others won’t either. One wizard earns is not going to eat/wear/consume/etc what hundreds of blacksmiths (and their families) are going to.
In summary, economics (at least short-term economics) can be used to argue that the wizard’s production of plate armor will usually not be favoured. In the LONG RUN, yes, technology will win. But unless you are willing to have your characters live through quite a few decades/centuries, it won’t happen in a normal D&D campaign. To quote real economist John M. Keynes, "In the long run, we're all dead."
Just my 2 cents.
MT
2. Wall of iron creates iron not steel.
3. Fabricate allows you to convert material of ONE sort into A product of same material. With appropriate skill checks dc 18 for plate. So even if the DM allow it to be wall of steel either you have on big suit of plate or spend lots of time cutting the steel into 50 pd hunks. Then casting lots of fabricate spells.
4. The DM needs to use some common sense when x spell, + y spell, + Z player hopeful interpretation results in anything like wall of iron + fab = lots of loot.
5. Tony forgets just because a sheep is listed in PHB for 2 gp. It does not state a sheep always has to be this price. So a flock of 40 sheep could be just 40 gp or 100 gp during a siege. Or Tony could force me to the book price. But even if he bought all the sheep in the city he could not raise sheep. Because nowhere in the books do the sheep breed.
A lot of all these arguments are just number crunching in a vacuum to the tune of pennies from heaven.
First of all, I think Eldren has made some good points. I agree that in some cases what is otherwise considered broken may be simply the DM not being effective enough at countering an otherwise ok combination.
On the other hand, from my experience as both a player and a DM, I believe certain spells, feats and even class features are not balanced. Not the use of the word balanced rather than broken . I do not mean to start an argument over whether particular effects are ok or not, I merely wanted to point out that where you seem to imply everything WotC has put out is well thought out and perfectly balanced, I have found that a portion of their material needs a little tweaking. This is purely our house rules and we all find our campaign better for it.
That said, I do know of DMs who are not so good with the rules and/or are not effective tacticians. (I believe this to be a big problem in a lot of cases.) The result of this I believe is that those DMs will have more difficulty with effects which are more exploitable (many have been mentioned above). A DM who is a better tactician and has a better grasp of the rules will no doubt be better equipped to handle such situations. That is not to say a DM who isn't is lazy! I do not mean to imply that at all. Going off on a tangent a bit, I think it is sort of like being good at math or being good at English but not both. I am good with numbers, figures, and formulas (I am a math type person) and have little trouble with rules and counters for slightly problematic combos, but I am not so good at thinking up really cool campaign ideas. My flatmate is more of a "good at English" type person and she thinks up great campaign stuff but has more problems with the rules and stuff. So maybe it is just that different DMs have different strengths. In this case, as a DM I find what you need to do is work extra hard on your weaknesses (campaign ideas in my case) to make up for it.
Tony111 came up with some really good arguments about a particular combo, and I tend to go with him in this case. Just because it is in the core rules does not mean it doesn't need tweaking. If it became a problem in any campaign I am in (as a DM or as a player) I would just suggest that it be slightly rewritten - perhaps the duration goes down as the hardness goes up. Paper and cloth and so on last forever, wood lasts for maybe 1 day per caster level, and metals last for only 2 hours per caster level. Anyway, I have not thought that one through so ignore it if you want.
Hmmmm .... 'nough rubbishing on I think, you guys must be either bored or confused or both after reading all this!
Happy gaming!
This game isn't about the DM trying to outplay the PCs. Believe me if you're the DM it ain’t that hard. I could easily gate cheese my PCs or have them be subject to a scry teleport assassination. But I take it you don't do this to your PCs, now do you?
It just wouldn't be fun, and nor is it fun for the DM when PCs just cheese out NPCs in the same manner. Sure the munchkin druid may be getting a kick out of constantly wildshaping into an elephant and falling on people to abuse the falling object rules, but what happens when you decide to have a flock of griffons go on a collision course with the PCs? TPK, that's what happens. And doing this isn't being a good DM. In fact, you're an awful DM if you do this, because you're playing the DM versus PC game.
This game is about fun, it's not about DM versus player as you seem to be stressing. When you play with poorly balanced rules, a knowledgeable DM can easily nuke his players into oblivion. In 3.0 this can be as easy as fighting a mage with time stop and not acting first.
And lets not forget intraparty balance. If one PC is stealing the spotlight, there isn't always a solution for the DM without nerfing rules.
The purpose of the game is fun, and that doesn’t' always necessitate living with a bad part of the rules just so you can wear a "I play D&D with 100% official rules" T-shirt with pride. Because honestly... very few people actually care about that. In fact if playing with 100% official rules is the #1 priority of a potential PC, I don't want him in my game.
What is up with the DM versus PC attitude that's so prevalent these days. The DM's job isn't to outplay the PCs tactically, this isn't a strategy game, it's an RPG. While there are strategic elements, the number one goal is to have fun, and nobody says you have to live 100% by the book.
Last I checked, nerfing the wall of iron/fabricate and scry/teleport combos didn't cause anyone but munchkins to complain.
To the economics lady from Costa Rica, I doubt a strike would be the best form of protest ;) Good points, though. Read Vonnegut's Player Piano.
I'd like to take this opportunity to question the existence of a "Hidden Nerf." If you magically port a million golems onto that backstabbing group, that's not exactly hidden. However, anything short of that would be remarkably similar to the example where the villains scout out the PC forces.
At the same time, I do recognize the importance of restricting material that warps the game; anyone who keeps up with Magic: the Gathering will know all about the shennanigans with skullclamp and its recent banning. Make sure your players know what they're getting into 'cuz then they'll...know what they're getting into, I guess. It's their own pot of stew, so they should be happy enough to drink it once they've opened Pandora's can of worms...I'm sorry, I'll stop.
Also, could someone explain the scry/teleport combo's brokenness to me? It seems that it would only get you to a person, and there would still be the issue of killing them. There are also several non-magical methods to achieve the same end without too much trouble and without taking 11 levels in wizard.
Plate armor is made of steel, not iron, as well as other things. Leather for example, for the straps and buckles specifically mentioned as holding the suit together.
Also, each suit must be made for the individual to wear it, so you'd likely need a buyer for EACH suit, because not many people would buy a suit for 1,500 gp, which is a lot of money for a non-adventurer, and then later spend hundreds more getting it fitted.
It would be quite amusing though, seeing the fighter trying to swing his sword in a 100 lb+ suit of iron plate with no straps holding it together.
What I want to say with this is: Spells are oftentimes hard to control, although there might exist a countermeasure against it, because the DM cannot know everything.
In addition to this, I absolutely despise monopoly-style roleplay, which sometimes DnD through it's spells makes possible. I do not want a dishwasher-chest (masterwork chest with a prestidigitation spell on it), a fridge (chest with some sort of very low level cold-spell on it), etc in my game. A wall of iron/fabricate thingy falls into that category as well. It takes the epic part out of the game. I just don't think that this is what roleplaying should be about. But it is possible. And that has something to do with what spells in DnD can achieve.
Are some spells in DnD broken mechanically? I'd say: maybe.
Do some spells endanger epic forms of play? I'd say: very much.
I think A. Terevoth put his finger on the heart of the problem. If your players regard the campaign as a "he who breaks the game, wins" D&D game, you really ought to advise them to go back to Monopoly for a while. To the best of my knowledge, most DMs want to create an interesting story which will entertain their friends. (Even the most combat-happy DM wants to create such a story, even if it does bear a striking resemblance to a huge Braveheart/Saving Private Ryan/Secret Wars crossover...)
If your players find happiness in destroying campaigns, tell the grossest offender, "Congratulations! You're the first player ever to win D&D with your masterful grasp of the rules! Your prize is, you get to be DM!" (Be prepared for him to stink at it. And show no mercy, for you have received none.
)How about this: make a 1st level spell that slays all enemies in sight (no save, so SR). Supposedly a clever DM can counter this and balance the campaign. Reading the new spell closely, we see that it requires the enemies to be 'in sight'. Therefore, the DM will plan adventures in which enemies attack from hiding, use Invisibility, blind the PCs in some way, etc. etc. Sure, all of this is possible, and it will lead to a game in which the PCs don't win all the time. So even this ridiculous spell is not 'overpowered'.
But there is still something wrong with it, isn't there? Wouldn't the campaign be so much better without it? The issue, as I see it, is that it forces the campaign to focus on it. ALL encounters will take it into account; since friend and foe can use the spell, everyone knows that surprise is everything. Everyone knows that Invisibility can save your life, and everyone takes that spell (and casts it when jumpy). We end up with a bizarre campaign world, that if we think about it doesn't even make sense unless painstaking work is done - for example, a king would never reveal himself to his subjects (for fear of being seen and slain). Never! Think about how much this and other things like it change basic facts of life in a campaign. The more you think about it, the more issues you find and the more alterations you need. Now, if all you are going for is a little dungeon crawl, you might not notice these problems. But in a more serious game, suspension of disbelief will fail, and quickly.
Ok, back to the start. Yes, the spell suggested here is non-core and ridiculous. But the point is this: certain spells (and other stuff) in the core rules are 'problematic' in the sense that the 'kill-em-all-if-I-see-em' spell is: they require a serious rehaul of the campaign, and they force attention to them all of the time. If all of these things were removed, the game would make more sense and probably be more fun. So don't call them 'overpowered' if you don't like, but the issues raised by what are commonly called 'overpowered' spells and so forth must be faced.
Originally posted by 77IM
Halfway correct! That is, I agree with most of what you said, but I think you forgot a few elements.
1. Balance between players: If I've crafted a cool 11th level rogue with feats to max my sneak attack opportunities, but am constantly being overshadowed by the harm caster's good spell combo, that is not much fun. The DM has to correct not only imbalance between party and opponents, but within the party as well, making sure that there are plenty of opportunities where my sneak attack is more cool than some potent spell combo.
Each player chooses to play the character they create, each for his/her own reasons. It's not the Dungeon Master's responsibility to make all of the characters feel equal... because at high levels, it's impossible... and at low levels, it's difficult. At low levels where BAB and hp are what really matter, the casters (especially arcane) are going to take the back seat to fighters because they don't have many spells. Casters, wizards especially, are going to shine at high levels because, let's face it... a fighter's strength and hp just aren't nearly as useful as a WISH spell. And that's part of D&D. Rogues may not be the most damaging... but went the wizard or fighter step into that trap that drops them into red, hot magma... they're going to WISH the rogue was there. At high levels, mages near gods. Timestop, Wish, etc. are just incredibly powerful and there just isn't much any of the fighting classes have that can compete.
If you don't like it... play a wizard.
2. One of the major reasons I pay money to Wizards of the Coast for their D&D products is that so much balance work has been done for me. (If I use my own custom RPG rules it's likely to be much less balanced initially.) I think that when people see something that is slightly imbalanced, they get in a tizzy because they expected to do zero work balancing the game. This is unreasonable: the game designers can't anticipate the specific circumstances of everybody's campaign; even those things which slip past playtesting usually are not totally game-breaking.
A single feat may not be unbalancing, it's unique feat combos, or spell combos that by themselves aren't overpowering... together, in the right order... they're VERY potent. Sort of like a fighters brawn, a rogues wiles, a clerics piety and a wizards spells. Against a dragon, none of them shine... they're pretty much going to be dragon snacks. Together, working in synergy, they can overcome the dragon. There's always something that will break something else. Generally, as a DM, I suck it up... and then turn around and use the tactic against THEM. A few times of doing that, and they get the message. Or the monsters start getting prepared better.
3. There's a problem with the theory that "There is nothing within a given ruleset which is overbalanced unless that same ruleset cannot provide a counter." This gives the attacker an advantage over the defender, or give the advantage to the wizard that wins initiative. For example, let's say that there are 20 "killer combos" out there. Any given character really only needs one of them in most situations, but a defender needs to defend against all of them. The guy casting death ward expends a spell that could be used for other things. If your typical high-level defender is prepared for, say, 15 out of 20 killer combos, each party really needs only 5 or 6 killer combos before they are pretty sure that one of them is going to work. By the same token, though, the BBEG might have a few killer combos too, which the party then needs to defend against. This is why wizard duels often boil down to initiative rolls.
As a long time black belt and martial arts instructor, I can tell you almost definitively... the aggressor almost ALWAYS has the advantage. It's always easier to ACT than it is to REACT. Training can cause your reaction to be extremely effective against things you practice against, seemingly giving you an advantage. But consider this scenario:
Someone pulls out a knife and goes to stab me. I know dozens of self defense moves for knifes attacks and might be able to block, disarm and even inflict serious bodily harm on my attacker.
However, if that same person pulls out a vial of acid and splashes it on me... or (god forbid) some type of biological agent... I'm pretty much helpless. Why? Because I suck? Hopefully not. It's because HE has the advantage. He knows what he is going to do. I don't. It's really as simple as that.
So why should D&D be any different? And killer combos aren't the only thing that can take down an enemy who goes last in a round. I've had players take out a nice size encounter because they went first, rolled well and worked together.
Something isn't broken just because it can done when someone wins initiative. At 1st level, a barbarian who wins initiative can charge an orc, hit it and kill it with one blow. Does that mean the barbarian class it overbalanced? At 1st level, a rogue with rapid shot can shot two arrows, both sneak attacks and take down that orc. Does that mean the rogue class is over balanced? At 1st level, a mage can color spray an orc and know him out... which is basically death. Is the mage class unbalanced?
4. Balance generally means, "all character-creation decisions are equally powerful." This sounds good at first and is generally true. What people don't realize is that if absolutely all character-creation decisions really are equally powerful, this means that a gimp fighter or a dumb wizard need some way to be viable, which detracts from those people who put actual thought and effort into building a good character. In other words, a world with zero "killer combos" might be the most balanced, but it probably would be the least fun, too.
ALL CHARACTER-CREATIONS ARE EQUALLY POWERFUL! Any character that can be played the way the player wants it is powerful. If a character wants to play a weak fighter, that's fine. As long as he understands that the character isn't going to be as effective. Same thing with a dumb wizard. I don't think anyone expects all characters to be equal when someone deliberately sabotages the characters ability to be effective. If I want a half-orc sorcerer, I understand that he has penalties to CHA and he does NOT have the same potential as some other race. Same with a gnome fighter or barbarian. If I play them it's for flavor or story purposes.
The long and short of it is... if everyone has fun... everyone's a winner.
Originally posted by Tony111
Elden, you silly rabbit, why do you dismiss those who have found certain spells to be too powerful as being too lazy to put effort into their campaigns? Don't just patronize us because we disagree with you. How would you feel if someone said, "That Eldren just doesn't put much effort into making his characters, otherwise he would have seen how so many spells under 3.0 can be taken advantage of"? Kind of sucks, doesn't it?
Wouldn't that be a good reason to move to 3.5? Besides... I agree, there are GOOD in-game ways to counter many of those.
Take Chonjurer as an example. Look at all the work he has done compiling a huge list of spells and exactly what is wrong with them and why it is wrong and a suggested fix. Does that sound like someone who is lazy with their campaign? Don't you think that if it was just a matter of thinking of good strategies conjurer would have done that? But the problem is deeper than that. There are no strategic solutions to so many things in 3.0.
Again many ways to counter act it.
Take Fabricate as an example. With Fabricate and Wall of Iron, I could chug out thousands of suits of platemail over the course of a month if I was a midlevel wizard.
Don't forget, he would need to put points into the craft skill to do it. Which may not be THAT big of a deal considering a mage's intelligence. But I for one would rule that magic items that enhance armorsmith (hammer of smithy, etc.) would NOT work with this combination. But even so... at 9th level, his skill could be 13 ranks + 5 (int) = 18... which is enough to make almost any metal armor.
How many suits of IRON plate mail do you think the wizard would sell? Plate mail is generally made of Steel, which is a combination of refined metals. It's stronger than iron. Still, it must be worked. Consider the samurai's blade. The steel was folded dozens, if not HUNDREDS, of times to give it the razor sharp edge.
So what the wizard would be cranking out would be HEAVY (iron is heavier than steel), inferior (softer), less durable (steel is stronger than iron) armor. Which even if he was able to create the metal parts, he would still need to create and attach the leather straps, rivets, etc. Plus, platemail especially is usually made to fit a certain person. He would need to alter it, or take orders for it.
And consider, that the Local Smithy Union #503 would be up in arms about this. They might strike (how long can you go without horse shoes, tools, weapons, etc.). They might petition the king, etc. They might band together and hire an assassin to bump off the mage who defiles their craft. Desperate men do desperate things.
Besides, supply and demand hop in. In most cases, only nobles (the ones who can afford plate mail), are going to to be able to afford the plate mail. There is small demand, so the price is high. If the supply goes up, the price goes down and keeps going down until there is simply no demand. How many peasants or merchants or common folk need plate mail? How many of them could wear it even if they have it? And even the fighters/warriors in the area who COULD wear it... how many would really WANT to wear it? It's one thing to patrol the village in studded leather... but entirely different to patrol in PLATE MAIL... and IRON plate mail to boot!
Again... it boils down to lazy DMing.
I could do this on my downtime between adventures, and it would only take a few minutes per day. One single wizard working like this would change the whole economy of a kingdom.
Not really. Again... supply and demand. How many suits would you REALISTICALLY expect to sell? And once you filled that large order for the army, then what? This isn't NEARLY as good as it sounds simply because, not everyone one is going to want one. And once the price comes down, it probably isn't even worth it to make it.
If these two spells exist, there is no way a suit of platemail costs thousands of gold, it is a simple law of supply and demand, assuming one such wizard in the kingdom takes this wonderful opportunity.
Maybe a wizard already has.... maybe that's why he's lying face first in a puddle with an assassin's blade in his ribs. Or maybe he does destroy the economy for IRON plate armor.
And why wouldn't one? This is only one example of a broken spell. There are no strategic counters to this spell that are not contrived solely to screw the PC that uses this combo. It isn't even a combat combo.
Again... lazy DM. See my arguments above. Not to mention... I'm sure the local lord will want TAXES on the money the wizard makes! A business that's churning out armor will be expected to pay ALOT of taxes!
Really, what is it that I am not seeing? How is it this is O.K. and balanced? What would be your nonnerfing solution to a player that did this?
Each action has an equal and opposite REACTION. If the DM thinks logically what the impact of the situation would be on the economy, on warfare in the world, to the smiths whose lives are being destroyed, to the warriors who are killed because the armor didn't hold up or was too heavy... there are PLENTY of things that can be done.
Let him have thousands of gold for free? Let him single-handedly rearrange the world's economy and war tactics?
Absolutely. Let the character face the consequences. Next time he faces a tribe of plate mail wearing kobolds with new iron weapons.... maybe he'll learn his lesson.
Which brings up a good point. You could have someone put in a big order, and later have it reveal that it was actually for the lord/kind/etc.'s ENEMY. I'm sure the king would put a stop to that REAL quick.
Or would you hidden “nerf-screw” him? Perhaps send assassins to kill him before he starts pumping out iron suits. None of these solutions work. Just remove the combo; it doesn't work, and this is not for lack of thought on the matter.
The assassin idea is PERFECTLY legitimate. See the above reason. You can't screw with people's lives and expect it not to have consequences. A single smith might not be able to touch the mage... but a nation of smiths watching their income vanishing, their children starving and their wives complaining can make sure the mage pays.
Tony
That haste/harm/harm combo (and other combos) is great for the players... until you as a DM start using it against the players. And as a DM you can design a monster with a on-shot encounter in mind. You can make sure the NPC has everything in line with one single mode of attack (the haste/harm/harm) with no thought of distracting feats or skills. Once you do that, the players will learn that if they want to come up with "killer combos", they better be ready to be on the receiving end. What? Killing players is bad? Why? If the combo is THAT effectively.... surely it's know and used. Right?
Again, there are no broken spells, so long as you remember two things. One, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Two, anything a player can do, the DM can do better.
Originally posted by Tony111
Eldren, A few points...
Minor Point: Lots of ranks in craft are a small price to pay for the potential rewards of the combo.
I agree.
Major Point: By using the Hidden Nerf, it would royally suck to be a player in your campaign. Because I would know that if I came up with anything powerful and creative, you would find some way to make it fail while claiming that you are "challenging the party" or "using a subset of rules to counter it".
If they come up with a unique combo, they might benefit from it for a while, but just like in real life... someone is either going to suffer from it (look at the diet pills that got recalled), it's going to lose it's value and not be worth the value (how many beanie babies you see nowadays, or pet rocks, or cabbage patch kids, etc.), or the people who are now out of a job because of you will want to get even (look at the people going postal). That's life. That's reality. If you're a player... SUCK IT UP. Nothing last forever. Actions have consequences. As the old saying goes, don't do the crime, if you can't pay the time. Players need to learn that actions DO have consequences. Unless you're playing a monty haul, munchkin game to begin with in which the players have already killed the ancient red dragon at level 5.
Let me ask you this: If a wizard casts a normal, not-really-that-powerful, unremarkable spell such as cone of cold a lot, would you find a way to make it backfire? Probably not. But when someone comes up with the Fabricate/Wall of Iron combo, you concoct ways of making it fail.
Who is the cone of cold hurting? What is the reaction to the action? The action is instanteous, so the reaction (ie. damage) is instantaneous. I don't see any fallout from this spell... expect to use it to make ice and sell the ice. Now THAT would be profitable... until ALL the mages started doing it and you had competition, driving the ice prices down.
Therefore, by your own actions, you know that the fabricate combo is overpowered. You just won't admit it.
Um... no. Apparently you are having difficulty understanding economics, human nature and cause and effect. The mage is creating armor is the cause, you as a DM have to determine the EFFECT. It's simple physics.
I suppose, by your reasoning, that any spell would be balanced, because all spells in your campaign carry the added invisible line "if you find a good way to use this spell, the DM will screw you, while keeping this spell unchanged." Wonderful.
Apparently, you believe that character should be able to do whatever they want with no regard for the law of the land, the laws of economics or the law of cause and effect.
Consider the imaginary 5th level spell "Kill Anyone". This spell kills anyone with no save and no SR at long range. The spell is balanced in your campaign because there is always a way to screw the person who uses it. Perhaps commoners come after them, perhaps dieties come after them, perhaps whatever.
If the player uses that spell in a dungeon to kill a monster, there are no repercussions, assuming there is no one out to avenge the monster. If the same player uses that spell in the city, to slay a commoner, he becomes a murder, is hunted by the law and adventurers and bounty hunters come after him. To you, this is a "hidden nerf"... in actuality, it is cause and effect. Cause: The player broke the law, effect: the player is an outlaw, hunted by the authorities.
That's not a nerf. That's good, realistic DMing.
Balance has no meaning when you use the Hidden Nerf, because the DM just adds more weight to the other side somehow. If I am a player, I want to feel that intelligent use of spells will be rewarded, while poor choice and use of spells will make life harder. I am sure you understand the importance of rewarding intelligent players because you mention it in your own posts.
Creative or intelligent use of spells does not absolve the player of the consequences of his actions. The player may find a new way to teleport 5000 ft into the air. The reward is that he gets to go where no one has gone before. The downside is.... the lack of oxygen and the fall are going to bring a quick end to his creativity unless he's prepared. That's cause and effect.
However, you don't seem to notice that you did completely screw the player in your proposed angry blacksmith solution while only technically still allowing them to cast the spell.
No he's not. He's pointing out that even creative uses of spells can have unforeseen consequences. If the player isn't "intelligent" enough to know what those are... that's not the DMs fault. And it certainly isn't nerfing.
Major Point: When you use the Hidden Nerf, you are just getting yourself into more trouble and making the campaign world more inconsistent.
How is enforcing the laws of economics and realistic human reaction making the world more inconsistent? The examples he game are real world examples of how people REALLY act. People get ANGRY when they're source of income is threatened. And in a medieval society where there's not going back to school to learn a new trade, you better believe the smiths would be up in arms.
Consider the angry blacksmith solution you proposed. It may temporarily solve the problem of the player casting the combo, but it makes the campaign world inconsistent. Why doesn't every king who can afford it get their hands on a wizard with this combo?
Good point... and maybe evil kings do. Good kings realize that smiths do more than make armor. To a player, that's all they are... armor machines. But smiths play CRUCIAL roles to medieval society. They make everything from weapon to the tools the other commoners need to do their work. You put them out of work, and suddenly there are going to have problems throughout the kingdom.
If you were a king, why would you have blacksmiths making armor at all? Why hire blacksmiths? Save all the money and gain the allegiance of a single mid level wizard.
Again, perhaps some do. But keep in mind, that they'd be cranking out mediocre, heavy IRON armor instead of the lighter, stronger steel plate mail that smiths can make.
Surely the entire kingdom can ally/hire/coerce one (or a handful) of such mid level wizard(s) to arm themselves. This is a far better use of the money.
Again, to what aims? Once the army is fitted, then what? Who do they sell the armor to? Peasants? Smiths? Merchants?
Since you used the Hidden Nerf, now you get yourself in more trouble. Now, in order to explain how the world is believable, you have to come up with another lie to cover the first one.
Huh?
Are the blacksmith's rebelling against the king also? This is getting unbelievable.
It's about as unbelievable as the Magna Cater or Taxation without Representation.
Why would the society continue to make armor in such a slow, expensive, primitive fashion when a few hired wizards could arm an entire kingdom with ease? See the problems?
Nope. Again, not every soldier is going to wear plate mail. Archers aren't. Footmen will not be as effective in plate. Traditionally, only mounted soldiers (knights) wore platemail.
And again, the lord of the land is going to understand his people (smiths included), as well as the laws of economics FAR, FAR better than you and will actually consider the CONSEQUENCES of what that might do. But again, it might be something an evil country might do.
Besides, you assume that all mages are going to be driven by money enough to want to invest time into studying armorsmithing... not to mention, armorsmithing takes years to master in real life. It's a trade taught thru apprenticeship. After the first mage does something like that... what makes you think any other smiths are going to train any other mages?
This is like trying to make a believable country that has the facilities and technology to make cars but inexplicably citizens just decide to ride horses because the ranchers threaten anyone who start making cars.
That's about as hard to believe as a country that has had the technology to make cars that don't run on gas, but who doesn't. Oh wait, that's us. The powerful oil companies have squashed ideas on automobiles that don't use gas.
And remember the Amish? Thye live here.... but use buggies and don't use electricity. Not so far fetched.
The idea that blacksmiths could stop a mid level wizard is questionable.
Again... one blacksmith... no. Dozens of blacksmiths can come up with enough money to hire an assassin.
To think that they could stop one sponsored by a king is just silly.
About as silly as a small series of colonies overthrowing one of the most powerful empires in the known world - oh wait... that’s happened.
If you were a king would you allow your army to be vastly undersupplied because the blacksmith's are angry? No.
And if the blacksmiths are angry... the other commoners who needs tools, etc. are going to be angry. It's a cascade effect.
You would tell them to shut up and make horseshoes.
And if ALL the blacksmiths either didn't, or left the country? Then what?
Then you would arm you army in suits of platemail very cheaply using a well paid mid level wizard.
And so the opposing army, knowing that ALL of the kingdom's soldiers are wearing plate mail... hire druids to cast heat metal.... OUCH! Besides, NOT ALL SOLDIERS WORE PLATE MAIL. History is not full of min-maxers. It's full of practicality. Footmen wearing plate mail will tire more quickly and move slower, both of which will make them less effective. And the cavalry is only so big because of horses and trained horsemen.
Using the Hidden Nerf is creative, and it sends the campaign in new directions. However, it is creative in a sick sort of way, sort of like the way lying is sick. You solved the problem for a minute, but you really just made it worse.
Once again, cause and effect isn't a hidden nerf.
Originally posted by Tyreus
You mention a lot about the DM needing to be better then the best of their players, but I believe this to be unrealistic, because there are alot of players that have exceptional skill. Not to toot my own horn, but I am willing to bet that there are few DM's that can match my skill when it comes to making a truly powerful character. I don't think all the complaining should be dismissed as laziness. If the rules made it easier to challenge a gifted player, it wouldn't present so many prerequisites for being a DM.
I'd take you up on that challenge any day. Because as DM, I decide how much the BBEG has heard about your tactics and how prepared he is. You might pull a surprise on me, but then again, maybe not.
Besides, it's not a DM vs. player game. It's a "Let's all have fun" game. Sometimes, I've let my normal campaigns degenerate into monty haul "let's slay gods" campaigns. Why? Because it shows the players how boring those campaigns really are. Good players are going to want a balanced, interesting game. Why? Because that's when good players have the most fun ROLE-PLAYING.
Originally posted by Archtyrant Terevoth
Lazy DMing, eh?
And lets not forget intraparty balance. If one PC is stealing the spotlight, there isn't always a solution for the DM without nerfing rules.
In my 15 (or is it more now) years of Dming, I have yet had to nerf a single rule because of party imbalance. There are challenges for different ability/skill sets whether those be combat or otherwise. DMs forget that the higher level the PCs are, the more their reputation precedes them and the more prepared for them the opposition is going to be.
If the wizard is stealing the spot light, chances are the bad guys KNOW he's powerful. It's not inconceivable that the party can be tricked into entering a magic dead zone where the wizard is useless. Not something you'd do every time, but there ARE neutralizing factors to nearly everything.
If you play Magic: The Gathering, the same thing applies. Recently the Magic higher-ups decided to ban a Magic card called Skullclamp. It was a powerful card, but that's not in and of itself why it was banned. It was banned because almost every deck either played with Skullclamps, or played with cards meant to fight Skullclamp. The entire tournament scene revolved around Skullclamp and how to best use it or stop it. That was unhealthy, so the card was banned. The same logic can be applied to D&D. Either the whole campaign revolves around some nasty spell (such as Harm or Wall of Iron/Fabricate), or I nerf the problem spell and remove the issue entirely.
In my 15 (or is it more now) years of Dming, I have yet had to nerf a single rule because of party imbalance. There are challenges for different ability/skill sets whether those be combat or otherwise. DMs forget that the higher level the PCs are, the more their reputation precedes them and the more prepared for them the opposition is going to be.
And you totally missed my point. The opposition is irrelevant, the problem is that certain party members deal with the opposition better than others do, creating internal problems and no amount of DM opposition tinkering is going to fix that kind of problem. You must alter the rules or tell a PC to make a new character.
When you've got a party with an uber druid and a couple of fighters who get overshadowed by the druid, the party itself might be perfectly balanced overall, in the they can take out EL encounters of the correct levels and do OK, but intraparty, the druid is stealing the spotlight, and making the game no fun for everyone else.
If you raise up the opposition, then you challenge the druid and destroy the fighters. If you lower the opposition, then the fighters can do something, but the druid completely dominates. Neither fixes the problem. Your only recourse is to resort to rules alteration, usually nerfs.
And you totally missed my point. The opposition is irrelevant, the problem is that certain party members deal with the opposition better than others do, creating internal problems and no amount of DM opposition tinkering is going to fix that kind of problem. You must alter the rules or tell a PC to make a new character.
When you've got a party with an uber druid and a couple of fighters who get overshadowed by the druid, the party itself might be perfectly balanced overall, in the they can take out EL encounters of the correct levels and do OK, but intraparty, the druid is stealing the spotlight, and making the game no fun for everyone else.
If you raise up the opposition, then you challenge the druid and destroy the fighters. If you lower the opposition, then the fighters can do something, but the druid completely dominates. Neither fixes the problem. Your only recourse is to resort to rules alteration, usually nerfs.
Actually, you missed MY point. As a DM, you can tailor challenges to various players. Sure... the druid may be "uber"... but how good is he/she underground? Against a golem? In the city? When there are obstacles that can't be solved by magic or skills which he/she possesses?
I've had players of all sorts. And, yes, occasionally, I've had a player who was a min/maxer. But I've been able to deal with them without nerfing rules. Nerfing is for the uncreative and the unimaginative. It's a last ditch effort and the equivalent of throwing your hands up.
Remember, Anything a player can do a DM can do BETTER.
Let me start with:
That haste/harm/harm combo (and other combos) is great for the players... until you as a DM start using it against the players. And as a DM you can design a monster with a on-shot encounter in mind. You can make sure the NPC has everything in line with one single mode of attack (the haste/harm/harm) with no thought of distracting feats or skills. Once you do that, the players will learn that if they want to come up with "killer combos", they better be ready to be on the receiving end. What? Killing players is bad? Why? If the combo is THAT effectively.... surely it's know and used. Right?
If the encounter is appropriate for the level of the PC's why wouldn't you do this or the PC's do this every time. In a realistic campaign world there is no reason when you are fighting for you lives to do this, since its kill or be killed. If your players didn't use this, it would be unrealistic for the monsters to not use this, since its there very lives, or someone else’s on the line. When a string of feats or spells becomes the best available option in all situations or 90% of them (since harm would have no effect on UD) its overpowered. Just because you decide to use it on your PC's does not make it balanced. When the only options are:
1) prepare for this OR
2) win initiative
it’s not balanced.
Why wouldn't a king be employing Wizards who could use this combination you're talking about? Because in addition to paying the costs of the actual items being crafted (and a Wizard in such a profession would be foolish to charge anything less than the actual going rate, retail of course, for a suit of armor or a weapon), the king also has to pay the cost for the spell casting (which, again, the Wizard would be foolish not to charge; if they're in the whole thing for the money, they're going to charge for everything they can;
This was a bad argument. If the king wasn't willing to hire the wizard unless the casting of both spells was free you think any wizard would pass this up? They will still make more money than if they refuse.
Also for the people saying iron is inferior, I agree. Lets say the heavier Iron has a -10 Armor check penalty, and weighs 80 pounds instead of 50. Its also softer, so it has it hardness cut in half. As a wizard realizing this I would sell it for lets say 300gp cheaper than market value. My platemail would be worth 1200 as opposed to 1500. I make 600 per suit still. Lets say I paid some ridiculous amount to some workers (who I am now creating jobs for) to attach the rivets and straps and such that is needed. So I am now only making 300 per suit of armor. Size is not a factor at all, since i am creating 112 suits of armor per casting I can create them at nearly every conceivable size. So with the proposed restrictions or "counter balances" I am now making a little over 300,000 per casting of fabricate. Lets say I do this for a week, once a day. I have accumulated 2,100,000 of gold approx, and tick a lot of blacksmiths off. They are rich blacksmiths and there are 100 of them in the kingdom. They have 1000 gold to spare to hire the best assassin(s) possible. So they spend 100,000 gold and hire whatever assassin they want. If I am that rich and making that many enemies why not make investments in protection myself? If I spend half my money on "protection (Items, spells, people, informants) there is no reason, realistically that any assassin they hire can outmatch the money I have spent. Not to mention I have just acquired 1,050,000gp by spending 2 minutes a day and 2 spells, for an entire week.
Even if it drops the price of platemail forever, I am still rich, it is still unbalancing, and there should be no reason I have thought of it first. Platemail and other items consisting of primarily 1 material should never be worth more than 1gp in a world like that. You talk about blacksmiths unions? What about the wizards guild who uses this for funding for whatever purpose? Which group would realistically win?
If the player uses that spell in a dungeon to kill a monster, there are no repercussions, assuming there is no one out to avenge the monster. If the same player uses that spell in the city, to slay a commoner, he becomes a murder, is hunted by the law and adventurers and bounty hunters come after him. To you, this is a "hidden nerf"... in actuality, it is cause and effect. Cause: The player broke the law, effect: the player is an outlaw, hunted by the authorities.
Realistically, as a DM, no non commoner in your world with int OR cha score 11 or higher would take a level as anything else but a wizard or sorcerer either. What would be the point? Why would you ever use a sword or miracle spell, when this is available? You wouldn't and thats what makes this overpowered. Just because you can counter it does not make it balanced.
Just because you can counter it does not make it balanced!!
To assume everything is going to be able to counter it is unfair to your players, and very unrealistic. Lets go with the haste/harm/attack combo. You can either have your BBEG lose the 1st or 2nd round of combat, under almost any circumstance. You can use this back on the players (which if you are running a realistic world why wouldn't they be?).
You can have every BBEG have some form of negative energy protection (and when the only way to live is to specifically counter ONE ability something is wrong), which is unrealistic. Or you can change one or both the spells in a way so that your entire campaign's battle scenes are determined by the same 3 spells (haste/harm/negative energy protection).
Actually, you missed MY point. As a DM, you can tailor challenges to various players. Sure... the druid may be "uber"... but how good is he/she underground? Against a golem? In the city? When there are obstacles that can't be solved by magic or skills which he/she possesses?
Underground? Pretty damn good. You still have wildshape and most of your spells. Against a golem? again wildshape+buffs. In the city? Well depends on what you're doing in the city I suppose. The druid does have diplomacy as a class skill so they aren't totally out of it in a diplomatic setting. The last is a loaded hypothetical scenario.
What kind of obstacles exist that a druid can't solve, but a fighter can? Aside from some weird scenario like a quest entirely in a dead magic zone, I really can't think of any.
I've had players of all sorts. And, yes, occasionally, I've had a player who was a min/maxer. But I've been able to deal with them without nerfing rules. Nerfing is for the uncreative and the unimaginative. It's a last ditch effort and the equivalent of throwing your hands up.
Remember, Anything a player can do a DM can do BETTER.
Trying to out min/max your PCs is only ok if the entire party is min/maxers. Otherwise you're going to inevitably put your weaker PCs into battles they can't win just to try to challenge the min/maxers.
I strongly disagree that nerfing is uncreative. Creating a balanced game is far from uncreative. The designers aren't perfect. Look we've already had a bunch of revisions from 2nd edition to 3rd to 3.5. And there are still problems there.
Changing the rules is a much better fix IMO than trying to do various bandaid fixes to the campaign midfocus. Yeah, you can go through the trouble of metagaming scenarios against the power player, denying him any useful magical items for his character archetype and otherwise bringing the full brunt of reality down on him. But the very fact that you have to do this should tell you theres a balance problem that should be fixed.
Players don't like to be singled out and blatantly victimized by the DM, and that's what you do when you start making every tailored encounter based around "Beating" a problem PC. When you nerf you can then worry about running a fair game instead of how to really stick it to the power PC using metagamed encounters. And nerfing is fair because it applies to both sides equally.
Actually, you missed MY point. As a DM, you can tailor challenges to various players. Sure... the druid may be "uber"... but how good is he/she underground? Against a golem? In the city? When there are obstacles that can't be solved by magic or skills which he/she possesses?
I've had players of all sorts. And, yes, occasionally, I've had a player who was a min/maxer. But I've been able to deal with them without nerfing rules. Nerfing is for the uncreative and the unimaginative. It's a last ditch effort and the equivalent of throwing your hands up.
Remember, Anything a player can do a DM can do BETTER.
Actually, I think you lost.
I consider this a D&D equivalent of Gershwin's law:
"The first person to bring up anti-magic zones to demonstrate how anything is 'balanced' loses the argument".
...most players just don't bother maxing out Craft: Armorsmithing or Craft: Weaponsmithing when they're playing a primary caster...
Well, they don't need to. With an int of +4, an int boosting spell (+2) and a little bit of skill roll help (heroism or the like for +2), they're already up to +8.
Then they take 10 during the fabricate.
So "what sort of wizard puts ranks into fabricate anyway?" is a really weak argument.
While I find your assertion intriguing, and I like the general idea behind it, you seem to have overlooked a few things in your post:
1)The narrower the focus, the greater the depth of mastery.
A player who spends 2 hours a week can quickly become a specialist and master all the rule subsets surrounding their character, allowing them to come up with specialized combinations and permutations.
A DM who spends 2 hours a week will remain a generalist, since once they write up their adventure, reference all the rules the adventure will touch on, pick out magic items to populate it with and make sure the adventure advances the campaign story line 2 hours has been long gone.
It’s much easier, and faster, for a player to master 100 to 200 pages out of the Players Handbook then it is for a DM to do the same with 900 pages from the Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual. Thus while most DM’s would love to have the same level of rules mastery as their players, in all areas, the sheer volume of material a DM is required to master typically prevents them from doing so.
I haven't (and probably won't) read this thread all the way through to the end, but I did want to second the above sentiment. I am currently running a homebrew campaign that has been going on for 15 levels and 2 years. There are about a dozen recurring villains of about the same level, to say nothing of the party's allies and NPCs who haven't yet taken sides. It is simply inconceivable that I could spend the time and energy on every last one that my players manage to spend on their sole PC.
Another related point is that the PCs essentially GROW UP with their powers; they accumulate them gradually, learn how to use and integrate them, realize their strengths and weaknesses over the course of many gaming sessions. DMs have to birth mid- and high-level PCs fully formed from their heads like Zeus birthed Athena. Adapting a character from 12 to 13th level is easy; creating one whole-cloth at 13th level and immediately understanding its every strength and weakness without ever having run it before is impossible.
I was just playing over there in the other town with my 2nd group and the party went into an evil temple and missed a great opportunity to defeat the enemy cleric. I was playing an elf fighter and the evil cleric, a servant to the priestess (of the temple), was running down a twisting passage and fighting us at every other corner. I ran up and attacked him then he dropped me with 1 blow, I had diehard but I didn't use it. My character was already in trouble for fighting the cleric and hates fighting evil magic users so he was looking for a way out of this mess.
The thing is the Dm had the cleric torture me with blindness. My party being dismayed with the fact the cleric could not be bested left the temple with my now blind character.
I have a blind character and then I thought that this is the greatest place for roleplaying ever. :D I just don’t see why other people need to get their characters to level 12 in the first place. Just how often does the party with the fabricate/wall...ect ever have a problem with blindness. I will probably have to deal with this blindness for more than 3 sessions(21 hours of gaming on every other weekend) and I absolutely love the fact that it cannot be fixed easily at all( in fact I laughed with joy as the other players looked at me and told me that this was going to be unfixable for quite awhile). I think that if you really want fun D&D don’t let your players reach level 9. Don’t let them become munchkins. No matter what!! Make them look at your game more than they min/max.
And don’t ever ask players what they think about your changes to the game. Enforce the changes you make to the core rules and be consistent to a fault or your game will be ruined. This is working for me and I changed the stats for all my players so that magic was a 7th stat used instead of int wis and char for spellcasters and psions. You can use that stat to activate magic crystals located throughout my game( the crystals do temp drain on the stat when you use them). I got this idea from considering a magic bug with no brain (int, wis, char) but great magic powers.
I don’t even use the monsters' stats from the MM. I draw up all of the stats myself before battle and I test play my players vs the monsters. Some of the names of the monsters and pictures are the same, but I use whatever I concoct. I even make my own classes for NPC's and I made more alignments for instance like MC (mildly chaotic) which likes few laws.
I have players in my DM game and I don’t know how they will handle my modification to D&D( when I tell them to multiclass or have restraints put in place if they try to continue leveling beyond level 8), but I think if I try hard enough as DM I can make them accept anything I put in my world. I think I can even give the drow player, and two goliath players( who positively cheat in my game ) something more than a game where they have battle after battle in a munchkin race for exp. My normal munchkin player is now strangely not munchkinising. I have no explanation.
My plot very simply put is((( while a war with druids in the far west falls evermore deadlocked the Yuan-ti Sneak iron weapons(only produced by one other race Dwarves) into the bronze only weapons of the other races in a ploy to destroy the empire with rebellions. Then Vampires emerge and the Yuan-Ti wage a battle on them. Who do the PC's help? Druids? Yuan-Ti? Vampires? or the Empire which has done its share of evil? Even though the pc's will become strong, the strongest people I have made for this world are barely strong enough to cast 5th level spells. AND THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS world I DM is to make a point to all of them that this is what I want as a player from D&D. I will never tell them that which was stated above, but I just had to describe to someone out there that I want a game completely void of exp, feats, and PRC's. I want a game that I can BEND to my will.
I have one great post for the new book forum.
Um, XPH should be the equivalent of a core book, say the PHB. Compare a splat book with any core book and you begin to notice power inflation. Moreover, Hulking hurler and Frenzied Berserker seem to be more NPC classes because of their weirdness...
There are other equally valid definitions of overpowered.
I consider that a spell is overpowered if it makes the spellcaster more powerful than characters of other classes of the same level. If the only counter is to counterspell that means non-spellcasters are helpless against the spell, which is not fun for the players of such characters.
A fair point, but also very flawed.
It is impossible to have equal balance at every level for every class.
It is impossible for every class to remain equally consistent in every encounter.
It is impossible for a precisely balanced treasure distribution.
My advice; look after your own character, and let others look after theirs. If they start power trippin' and cause the fights to occur within the party then there is cause for concern.
Otherwise don't blame others for your own choices.
Cheers
Depending on the politics of the region, a lord's standing force may only be a couple of hundred men. Not much point trying to sell 300 men 6,000 suits of armor!
I am a player, and I really do not want to spend every gaming session working out rates of employment, distribution, warehousing, leatherworker and rivet putter inner interviews.
And finally, if you are going to attempt to introduce realism into the game, why bother putting 500 men at arms into plate armor, when they are all gonna be killed by a squad of 10 1st level mages, each armed with a 2 charge wand of fireballs?
A basic shortfall of any RPG is that once the PC's get to be high level, there is no place for anyone who isn't high level.
I agree that with a very few exceptions 3.0 and 3.5 are superbly balanced games, but what you have to take into account is that with the difference in power levels between PCs and NPCs, once a character is 10th level, they can do basically whatever the heck they want in a realistically based game. Banning stuff because you don't like it makes the game ultimately pointless for both the player and the DM. Be willing to accept that some things aren't gonna fall into a totally realistic framework.
Hmm. I am a king, and I have the only army in the world that is totally equipped with plate armor. The first thing I do is kill the wizard so he doesn't sell to the guy I am about to invade.
Please explain why you have the only army in the world totally equipped with plate armor. Why would your kingdom have a monopoly on fabricate?
Depending on the politics of the region, a lord's standing force may only be a couple of hundred men. Not much point trying to sell 300 men 6,000 suits of armor!
Any wizards in the plane who knows fabricate can sell all sorts of iron items (locks, armor, weapons, etc.) at cheap prices because of the neglibible cost to themselves. Any fabricating wizard can equip as many people that any king can field that have heavy armor proficiency.
And finally, if you are going to attempt to introduce realism into the game, why bother putting 500 men at arms into plate armor, when they are all gonna be killed by a squad of 10 1st level mages, each armed with a 2 charge wand of fireballs?
Why not? The platemail didn't cost the king much. If you are going to field the army put them in plate.
I am a player, and I really do not want to spend every gaming session working out rates of employment, distribution, warehousing, leatherworker and rivet putter inner interviews.
There is no need to work out complicated economic models. The point. which you obviously missed, is that the game expects you to believe that platemail and other items are priced expensively...
...while simultaneously expecting you to believe that a single wizard can supply enormous amounts of iron products with a single casting of fabricate.
That is not plausible.
There is no need to work with complicated supply and demand models. Because anyone looking at these facts can see how implausible the two conditions are together. That was the whole point.
Tony111
Now let us examine things in detail. I will show how Fabricate/Wall of Iron makes the campaign world unbelievable. I will make my points one at a time.
Platemail costs 1500 gold in the PHB.
Platemail weights 50 pounds.
Take a 12th level wizard casting Wall of Iron Such a wall is 15 feet by 20 feet by 0.25 feet. This wall has a volume of...
Lets look at Fabricate:
"You convert material of one sort into a product that is of the same material".
Firstly, is Full Plate made of Iron? Almost certainly not, it will be a form of steel. Therefore Fabricate will make you Iron Full Plate which will probably be worth less than normal Full Plate.
Secondly, is Full plate made of only Iron? Definitely not. Therefore you cannot use fabricate to turn a lump of iron into full plate, you would need a spell that allows you to turn a set of differing materials into a product that is made of those materials.
The closest you can get to this with a kind DM that applies the spell description is turning iron into the pieces of full plate that are normally made of steel. But Fabricate doesn't say it lets you create sets of things just "a product" so a more strict DM would let you create one individual piece of the armor, out of iron, with each casting of Fabricate.
Even if that's not true and it summons that much raw iron that can then be worked into anything that could lead to interesting problems. Why couldn't a wizard or a score of wizards summon multiple walls of iron daily while other wizards/artisans are working the iron into 'stuff'? There could quickly be an entire city made of iron.
I think in my campaign I would just rule that it's a Wall of Iron, it's not a 'create a big hunk of workable iron' it's a spell that creates a wall of iron. If they take part of the wall, then that part ceases to exist. Or perhaps give it a duration that's one week per level of the caster. After that duration it begins to rapidly rust away until there's nothing left.
Interesting thread. It's given me much to consider. Thanks for that.
You are so right.
Besides, it's also a matter of group style. In the past 3 years playing 3.0. we did not encounter more than 5% of the rules questions and stuff that people find so bad here on the boards. If we don't know how something works we quickly think up a logical ruleset for the problem and stick with it and play on.
Indeed. However, in the years I've been playing/running 3.x D&D, the various groups I've been a part of have come across about 1% of the rules questions, since we generally just make a ruling and continue, but we've encountered about 50% of the interpretation questions on these boards, and the numbers continue to grow with every new book acquired, WoTC or 3rd party. Even in the face of all this information that so many others consider "Overpowered" or "Broken" in many cases, I (as a DM) have only outlawed a small number of rules from my game, all of them either because they involved a rules SET (such as Gunpowder technology) that I didn't want in my games, or they were directly and irrevocably tied to a specific campaign setting (such as the Harpers from FR) and could not function with any real efficiency outside their home setting.
Nearly all of the "Overpowered" material has made it into my games, and no player has complained about its power level, only that it wasn't right for their character (it didn't fit their concept, or they would have to stray too far from that concept to acquire such power). The groups I game with most often use both 3.0 and 3.5 material, and the general consensus is to use the more "Broken" version of nearly everything, with the exceptions of Heal and Harm: In their 3.0 context, those two spells were actually too powerful for their spell level; the pre-3.0 Cleric who had access to them could only cast up to 7th level spells, and they were indeed 6th level spells back then (and the first Cleric, before AD&D, could also cast Wish as a 7th level spell).
Someone mentions how the economy cannot support an infinite number of plate suits being produced at low cost, and Tony provides the "sheep grow on trees" analogy. He does this, and then states that doing anything that does not comply with the core rules is a "Nerf." I may very well be twisting your words here, kindly correct me if I am.
So, just from that one post, we appear to have Tony saying both that an economy cannot support an infinite number of cheaply-produced suits of plate selling at list price, and that the economy must support them. Again, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I shall make a few points now.
Picture: A PC wizard who uses the aforementioned Wall of Iron/Fabricate combo. For convenience, we will assume he is self-employed. He makes... what's the number he could make from one wall again? Oh, whatever. However many he could make. He then carts them into town. How? Each suit is quite heavy, he would probably need help not only from his party, but several pack animals as well. There are magical solutions, of course. He then sells them to a blacksmith. He will not get full listed price for them. Several reasons.
1) An item always sells for half or less than the price listed in the DMG. This is PART of the rules.
2) These will be low-quality suits of iron plate. A blacksmith won't pay full price for these, he made better suits on his first try!
3) The wizard has a LOT of them. Since the local rumor mill didn't have any news about a cadre of bandits in full plate, he's going to assume the wizard is either up to something hinky with magic or he stole them from a more exalted source. Either way, he's going to be reluctant or unwilling to touch potentially bent gear.
4) How much gold does this blacksmith have, anyway? Corollary, how's the wizard going to transport the gold, since it'll weigh more than the suits?
All right, the wizard's just made a tidy sum, assuming all went well. During all this, the DM has just been nodding and going along. If I were, for some reason, the wizard, I'd cut my losses and quit now. However, if the wizard decides to do the Fabwall trick again tomorrow, things will be the same as above, only the gold he makes will be cut at least in half, because there's now a glut on the market. In a metropolis, he might be able to keep up the gold amount for a few times, or maybe even increase it a little, as some blacksmiths would panic and try to outbid him in an effort to keep up with Blacksmith Bob's new supply of armor. But after that, comes... THE HORROR.
Armor prices fall dramatically. Peasants, believing themselves safe in their new suits of plate, stop hiring low-level adventurers to clear their cellars of rats. Without low-level adventurers to stimulate the economy by buying lower sets of armor, these prices drop as supply begins to outstrip demand. Additionally, virtually all the gold possessed by the blacksmiths of this town is in the hands of one man. Dragons begin to take an interest in him, at far too low a level, I might add. Plus, since he likely didn't know when to cut his losses and run, he has this extra load of platemail he couldn't sell.
...You know what, I just forgot where I was going. I think it was off-topic anyway. But let me postulate some guidelines here:
With appropriate knowledge and preparation, there is nothing X can throw at Y that Y cannot counter. Note that the business end of that sentence is "With appropriate knowledge and preparation."
Corollary: "Appropriate preparation" is NOT limited to feat/spell/monster selection. With the knowledge that Tim the Enchanter is going to Fabwall on you, you can take Tim's player aside and say something along the lines of, "Dude, NO. Please. You'll be hitting a dragon hoard soon, you won't be needing money that badly." (I typoed that as dragon horde, which is what hits him after he Fabwalls.)
Countering a specific strategy through in-game tactics is not in and of itself nerfing in any way, shape, or form. In the Haste/Harm/Hit sense, surely he's not the ONLY caster who could have thought of it? There you go, someone else has thought of it, too, and has prepared for it or will use it on the party.
As a side note, if the "Nothing Sucks" Foundation was still around, I'd join it in the time it takes to cast a quickened spell. There is actually not a single thing that sucks. Well, 3.5 Druids half-suck, since they blew my gnome weasel-horde Druid out of the water almost before I had him planned. One day, WotC, ONE DAYYYY! *shakes fist* ...yeah. Sorry, long night.
Well, they don't need to. With an int of +4, an int boosting spell (+2) and a little bit of skill roll help (heroism or the like for +2), they're already up to +8.
Then they take 10 during the fabricate.
So "what sort of wizard puts ranks into fabricate anyway?" is a really weak argument.
Better plan. They first make a +10 or +15 Craft: Armorsmith amulet.
Then proceed as per normal.
Okay, so we can still fix this right? We'll just say items that give "craft" bonuses cost 1,000 times more gold. Presto, the game is restored!
On the other hand, we can just nix this nonsense straight up. "Not in my game!" You might need to make some changes just for this to make sense. For instance, give the Wall of Iron spell a duration. But that's still fixing the problem directly. And, that way, the players aren't going to come up with some random combination of abilities that will open up the "create arbitrary amounts of gold" style ability again. Doing that is very nice for them, I'm sure. But so what?
Okay, I make a character who can kill Balors at level 6. Great. Did I "win" Dungeons and Dragons now? What possible justification can there be for keeping this in the game, yet now planning every single encounter around this ability over just eliminating that trick?
On the one hand, I can force my game world into such bizarre contortions that it actually screams and bleeds human blood in order to keep the wall of iron/fabricate silliness from totally blowing the game out. I can invent economies and "blacksmith unions" and assassins and worlds of intrigue and I can cut into the margins by forcing the iron platemail to be substandard quality. I can let everyone else do that and pump all the encounters up to take this change to the game world into account and I can alter the way the characters fit into the world and i can retroactively even re-write the game world's history to take all of this into account.
I can do all that because I am the dungeon master. As the dungeon master, i can always win. Even if my players come up with some sort of unstoppable combo attack that destroys every single core monster from CR 1/2 to CR 50 I can still just make a new kobold monster and write "Immune to player characters and dying" on it. In fact, such a creature might even pose a challenge to the PCs in this hypothetical. I can do that because that's what I do. It's in the job description. The question isn't whether or not I can, if placed into an adversarial role with the player characters, come out on top. Of course I can. I can always win! The only way it would even be a challenge--the only reason there would be any doubt--is if I limited myself with a whole bunch of arbitrary rules to make it seem fair.
So I can do all that. And I can provide the characters some challenge in spite of all the nonsense being injected into the game. On the other hand, I can say "Sorry, not in my game" to the nonsense and stick a duration on the wall of iron's effect.
Problem solved.
When faced with the choice between flat-out nixing a particularly abusive effect and changing, almost literally, everything else in the campaign I simply cannot understand how people can come to a rational decision to do the latter. Now, that doesn't mean I don't provide challenge or that I nail any PCs who "step out of line". But there comes a time when changing stuff to accommodate a certain ability or trick is simply more damaging to the game than saying "Nope, not going to happen."
I'm all about challenging players who love combat mechanics (or role playing or whatever else) and that's perfectly legitimate. However, to say that nothing ever requires just simple nerfing it is ridiculous.
(One side note: a lot of these "rules-neutral" (or "stealth-nerf", if you prefer) fixes rely on player stupidity. Relying on player stupidity is not going to balance the game. DM stupidity can unbalance the game, but player stupidity is never a safe balancing mechanism. I'm not even sure why I'm saying this as it should be obvious, but I'm reading through the thread and seeing some rather unsafe assumptions being made... Side note two: for the person who asked about wall of iron radiating magic, it doesn't. Wall of iron has an instantaneous duration, not a "permanent" duration. In other words, the magic brings a whole lot of iron into existence and then stops. The iron was created by magic, but the iron itself is still non-magical.)
The prices in the PHB and DMG are just guidelines. They assume that you are either selling equipment from a dank dungeon or it has simply been worn out from use while adventuring. Outside of the game rules, there is no special distinction between PCs and NPCs. The "half price" rule also takes into account that you are selling, probably, to a merchant, and they want to make a profit. There is nothing stopping your character from offering a higher initial price (some Diplomacy or Bluff might be required here).
Just my 1.5 Canadian cents. (Today, anyway).
It's often been argued on the boards here that this or that class, ability, feat, spell, etc. is, in some way, "overpowered". Discussions raged rampantly in the 3.0 Spells & Magic Items board about spells such as Mordenkainen's Disjunction (or the "Dungeons & Dragons Tactical Nuke", as some called it), Heal, Harm, Polymorph Other, Time Stop and Haste being "too powerful". Many presented reasonable arguments to support their cause, but the one thing none of them ever quite managed to do was present such overwhelmingly empirical evidence to support their stance that no one could come up with a logical refutation to it, and would instead be forced to simply admit that, hands down, the poster was correct.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make with this because it is pretty much impossible to come up with so much empirical evidence in support of an argument that "no one" can come up with a logical refutation. Sometimes people won't be convinced no matter how "logical" an argument is.
I've often been quite amused at such people then claiming that something was "overpowered". The important thing to realize in all inclusions of any rules outside of the Core Rules (these being the rules contained in the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide and the first Monster Manual, exclusively) is that these are, in their entirety, optional rules, which should be carefully weighed by a given Dungeon Master so as to arrive at an educated conclusion about whether the power the optional feats, spells and prestige classes present would in some way unbalance a given campaign.
The simple fact is, there is no absolute for "unbalanced". There is only what is unbalanced for a specific DM's campaign.
This being said, however, I still found it highly amusing the number of Core Rules materials that many posters point(ed) to as "overpowered", "munchkined", or any other euphemism for "I don't like how this works" that you could come up with.
I examined this from all sides; I read as many of the "Is this overpowered?" or "This is way too freakin' powerful!" posts as I could, and then pored over my Core Rulebooks, paying, of course, special attention to the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide. I arrived at a single, simple conclusion, which was then further borne out upon examination of the optional materials, the core of which are often referred to as "splatbooks" (the character class handbooks). That conclusion was this:
"There is nothing within a given ruleset which is overbalanced unless that same ruleset cannot provide a counter."
No offense but that premise is nonsense. Within the game universe the DM is omnipotent. The DM can quite literally counter anything any way possible because he has full control over resources and the reality of the game world even within the rules. If I took your premise to be true the DM can legitimately counter a PC cleric using the overpowered 3.0 haste/harm combo by simply dropping an asteroid on him so long as it is within the rules (which it is).
Let’s try this numerically. The numbers only have value relative to each other for ease of comparison. They don’t equate to anything in the real world or the game world.
Say a PC has an ability which on the power scale is an 8, but the rest of the PCs can only at best reach a 3 on the power scale. Your argument implies that that ability is not too powerful if the DM can match it with an equivalent 8 or better. What your argument overlooks however is the balancing factor (the DM) has an effective infinite power level within the rules.
What if the other PCs have a power level of 30 and an arguably overpowered ability jacks one PCs power level to 100? You argue that that is not overbalanced because a good DM can match that power level within the rules. I argue that a good DM can not just match that he can exceed that or any number a PC uses perfectly within the rules because the DM is the one who governs the rules. The DM can match ANY number, but that does not make it balanced between that player with the 100 and the others with 30s.
Without even using the exaggerated asteroid example, if I accept your hypothesis as true; assuming I have a wizard using the alleged wall of iron - fabricate abuse in my campaign (I disagree that this is unbalanced however), I can simply build an assassin for the blacksmith’s guild to hire that is specifically tailored to counter the wizard’s weaknesses and use it to kill him as a means of game balance. Note this is perfectly within the rules, but this has nothing to do with whether or not the fabricate trick is actually balanced. Essentially, you can’t argue that something is balanced because the DM can match it within the rule, because the DM can match ANYTHING within the rules (or outside of them) because he is the DM.
Your hypothesis is basically ignoring two points:
1. The rules of the game are a tool not a straitjacket (to borrow a cliché). They are NOT absolutes. You imply that the rules serve corral to maintain control over a character’s abilities but in fact the rules are a loose blueprint intended to be used for the DM to create a fun and fair game world.
2. The purpose of the game is not to obey the rules, it is to have fun. If the DM has to keep bludgeoning a PCs with the game rules because he is using an ability that is disrupting the campaign, that is not fun and it begins to look very arbitrary very fast. It is not fun for that PC who is being bludgeoned, it is not fun for the DM to have to constantly do the bludgeoning and it is not fun for the other PCs because they only way they can compete is if the DM continues to wield the bludgeon. I know because I ran a campaign with the busted 2e psionics rules. It really puts a damper on everyone’s fun (DM included) that I had to constantly reign in the psionicist.
The reality is that every single one of the threads that lambasted Haste and Harm in conjunction with some other direct-damage attack (meant to show how easy even the most powerful encounter could be to win when you could reduce something to 0 or fewer hit points in the span of a single round), worked on the assumption that a) The one with these spells had superior initiative, and b) That the opponents were in no way intelligent. This is, to me, a sad commentary on how many games are likely played, if there are so many individuals who have encountered this style of play. The reality is this: Many of the spells in a given Dungeons & Dragons campaign can be generally assumed to be common in some form or another, barring specific Dungeon Master house ruling on the nature and presence of magic as a generalized force. With spells such as Haste and Harm being so common, one must conclude that anyone with the wherewithal to become "high level" (i.e., fairly experienced in their profession) has displayed some degree of wisdom and foresight in their career. Spellcasters should simply automatically assume the presence of such spells as the 3.0 Haste or Harm. Simple defenses, provided for easily within the Core Rules, can insure that someone isn't going to use these spells against you unless you're dealing with someone who has planned even more excessively than you have, and somehow hits on just the right combination to crack your defenses and bulldoze their way in. Harm being a 6th level spell, this means your average Cleric has to be 11th level to cast it, edging into territory that many consider "high level". Haste is only a 3rd level spell, which means your average Wizard only has to be 5th level to cast it, but by this time, counterspelling has likely become a way of life for enemy spellcasters, and even in the face of being unable to counterspell, on account of being caught unawares, the ability to cast Dispel Magic or even counter Haste with Slow shouldn't be ignored.
Yes high level characters know the combo exists, that doesn't mean you can do anything about it. Therein is the problem. You are confusing knowledge of something with the ability to do anything about it. If you never get to act, you have no way to mount a counter and it is easy with the rules to build a character whose sole purpose is to win initiative. If the 3.0 hasted cleric wins initiative (by the way he may have improved initiative, a high dex, gloves of dexterity and some other feat to boost initiative for a total of +14 to initiative since he is specifically build to use the 3.0 harm and haste combo) his opponent likely will never get to go. There is no counter for this unless the foe is somehow prescient and actually gets to take his turn. Yes the DM can build an even better character and use it on the PCs but that is not a counter. That is a first strike. Even then, how is that fair to the other PCs. The character built do take out the +14 initiative Haste/harm cleric can absolutely destroy the rest of the PCs who have not used overpowered abilities themselves.
If an ability is so powerful that the only way to counter it is for the target to get lucky and go first so that he can raise the only available defense or run away, or have the DM keep smacking down the individual PC using the ability, then there is a problem with that ability. At that point, the ability has taken over the game and it needs to be fixed.
The long and short of this is that Dungeon Masters (I rarely heard players complain about this) who complained that any given spell or ability in 3.0, or 3.5 for that matter, was "overpowered", were Dungeon Masters who weren't willing to show the same level of rules proficiency and mastery that their players were. Once it was decided, presumably at the beginning of the campaign, which rulebooks were being used and which ones weren't, the players immediately took time out of the sessions to see how they could maximize their characters' potential through intelligent stacking of feats, class abilities, skills, spells, etc.
I stated my answer to this above. There is no need to repeat this here.
In other words, if you aren't a lazy Dungeon Master, you aren't going to find yourself dealing with "overpowered PCs".
You underestimate payer competence a lot if you think that the only way overpowered characters come to pass is through lazy DMs. You also seem to assume that WoTC is perfect when they design something the first time. That assumption I should add is quite false. Note the tons of errata and faqs and Sage Advice and other error correction mechanisms that WoTC uses to fix the mistakes they make and clarify things that they left “unclear” (a euphemism for mistakes). Yes some of the cries of “broken” on the web are DMs who don’t know what they are doing, but not all of them are. Sometimes, bad writing or a poorly thought out concept on WoTC’s part generates an ability that is out of whack. The solution to those problems is to fix them not stick the head in the sand and pretend that DM laziness is always the problem.
Tzarevitch
So what do the gods do? Intervene on anyone trying to abuse Wishes or Miracles and throw up the ease of control of Gate (by following it's rules all the time).
Ultimately, anything you can do, the enemy can do better, and certain entities won't let that happen. Most of these abuse loopholes never properly consider the actual implications of their actions. Oh and a Wizard who ups the wealth of the party simply ups the suitable CR of encounters they should face for XP.
, Iron and Steel are the same, except for carbon content (some types of steel contain other substances such as chromium but stainless steel armor would be... unusual so lets not get side-tracked), now transmute metal to wood would, on heating, leave a load of carbon in the iron, leaving if done correctly what to all intents and purposes was steel, sure it would be difficult but if you are an Int 19 wizard it isn't unreasonable to discover it *takes off lab coat* this may be adding too much realism to D&D but this is just to point out that the fabricate limit to of the same material could be bypassed whether or not this is worth it is another matter I'll leave that to others to decide as I currently have no strong opinions either way in this debate.Now then, assume we've somehow generated a hoard of iron related materials (or even polymorphed it into adamantine/mithral gear). Who's going to buy it? At what price and how often? So far you've assumed that it's all going to be sold, by people who actually need and can afford these items and that the profits will outweigh the cost of casting.
Let's assume you've done all that, the impact on the party (or just you) is that you have vast sums of gold or other trade items. What can you actually do with all that? Is someone going to accept all these trade items for their cash value? Can you handle the protection of all these valuables 24/7 and still continue adventuring?
Anyway, this has little to do with the balance of a party, because you're talking about people experimenting with the limits of magic, and it absolutely falls into the category of lazy DMs who let you do these things, not a DM who simply applies reality to it.
Furthermore, this still only ups the appropriate Encounter Level the party should be faced with due to their wealth. Then you have the issue of downtime to actually sell these 1000's of Adamantine Locks to people who can just about handle the costs of living. I suppose Mindflayers taking over the surface just generates new customers?
Well that wouldn't work as per the spells, you'd either permanently polymorph (I assume polymorph any object as Transmute Metal to Wood would never work, and is a Druid spell) the metal into wood, or it would return to it's original state. None of this produces leather for armors.
Now then, assume we've somehow generated a hoard of iron related materials (or even polymorphed it into adamantine/mithral gear). Who's going to buy it? At what price and how often? So far you've assumed that it's all going to be sold, by people who actually need and can afford these items and that the profits will outweigh the cost of casting.
Let's assume you've done all that, the impact on the party (or just you) is that you have vast sums of gold or other trade items. What can you actually do with all that? Is someone going to accept all these trade items for their cash value? Can you handle the protection of all these valuables 24/7 and still continue adventuring?
Anyway, this has little to do with the balance of a party, because you're talking about people experimenting with the limits of magic, and it absolutely falls into the category of lazy DMs who let you do these things, not a DM who simply applies reality to it.
Furthermore, this still only ups the appropriate Encounter Level the party should be faced with due to their wealth. Then you have the issue of downtime to actually sell these 1000's of Adamantine Locks to people who can just about handle the costs of living. I suppose Mindflayers taking over the surface just generates new customers?
You are of course right about the spells, next time I will look up the appropriate sections about magic.
I didn't have the PHB in front of me at the time, although I wasn't exactly trying to say it would work, merely that if you are applying true chemistry (never a brilliant idea in D&D but if there is a precedent set then according to the universal law that your players do exactly what you didn't want them to do, someone will pick up on it) it could work as a way of bypassing the problem with creating breastplates etc from iron. This would reduce the cost rather than totally eliminate it (note if I am wrong about the chemistry here I don't think I am but I don't have a reference in front of me, and you can see what that did last time, please correct me) but as to selling it, it really depends on what you are trying to do, whilst it may not effect party CR too much, if you are applying economics then this could cause some interesting effects on a kingdom's economy and the availability of other items such as other items depending on campaign specifics which could do strange things to party CR (albeit mostly in the negative direction), alternatively simply melting down the iron and adding sufficient mundane carbon could suffice. This is extreme and outside my experience so I'll close and leave this to slightly more experienced DMs to decide on whether its too outrageous to ever occur or not.The thing with most of this "abuse" is that it is simply not broken if you work with it. You could do any number of things with Iron wall, crafting, fabricate and polymorph any object. There are probably any number of loopholes you could find. The actual value of these loopholes is minimal from a player perspective because they pointlessly break the campaign (if allowed to succeed).
The player value of these loopholes depend on what they achieve, but usually they just set you up for a massive fall.
More importantly to this thread, they do not affect game balance because they are simply broken applications of material. When you consider that "overpowered" spells or features of the game are more to do with straight forward application (3.0 haste and harm), it has nothing to do with broken applications. No-ones potentially upsetting global economy with Harm for instance, they're just killing supposedly tough creatures (and even then those situations are questionable and easily controlled).
a mundane effect should be cheaper to achieve through mundane means than magical
It must be cheaper for a smith to make a suit of armor than a mage.
It must be cheaper to build a castle than magically create one.
etc.
Magic of course might be used for mundane purposes if there are issues of security, time, logistics, etc. E.g. a Good wizard in a civilized area will hire stonemasons to build his tower. And Evil one who wants too build it half way up a mountain 100 miles from civilization will use magic.
It seems that the originator of this thread feels that D&D is played as if the PCs are competing against the DM. So if the PCs build "Overpowered" characters, the DM can't handle them and is forced to whining on these boards (I'm paraphrasing, but that is somewhat of the general idea). This isn't the way D&D is meant to be played. Personally, I see the DM role as someone that sets up the story and challenges for the players to overcome. The DM isn't competing with the player because, if he was, the players would be defeated easily. The DM can always win. It is the DMs world, and he can do anything. There is no such thing as "Overpowered" character compared to the DM. He (or she) can easily destroy the players with little difficulty. Any DM looking for a "lazy" way to defeat the players can just build up opponents the same as the players, up their levels and hit points a little, and use the players' tactics against them (always fun to do). Players don't compete with the DM, they meet his challenges (whether it be in combat, traps, in roleplaying scenarios, or anything else).
I see players as "Overpowered" when they make the rest of the party useless. Let me explain: Lets say I have a party of 6 players in a campaign. One player, by an unique combination of Classes, Feats, Special Abilities, Spells, Magic Items, or anything else, has gained the ability to instantly defeat all opponents in combat. At this point, he is "Overpowered". Not because he can defeat my challenges with ease (I'll just make them tougher next time), but rather because none of the other players can no longer keep up with him. With all of the supplement books, feats posted on the web, etc., this is a easy point to reach. This is the point where the DM gets 5 unhappy players wondering what they are doing here because one player does everything better anyway. D&D is about players working together, not 1 guy with uber-abilities and 5 worthless others. Speaking from experience in my games, players who have no use in the party aren't happy players.
Now, of course, people could argue that the players that didn't build that uber-character are at fault. Some would argue that the "Overpowered" character outplayed the others and deserves to be rewarded. Perhaps they are right. But I feel that every player tends to go something unique and different. Some players will want to try out different character concepts, focus on roleplaying a character, be beginner players, or try a million other things. I would argue that players better off to be free to try what they want and shouldn't feel forced to build the best character statistically possible.
In any case, the DM now has a problem. He has 1 "Overpowered" player and 5 "Underpowered" players. The original suggestion in this thread was "There is nothing within a given ruleset which is overbalanced unless that same ruleset cannot provide a counter". I agree with this statement. I'm sure I could analyze the Overpowered player's feats, abilities, etc. and come up with a counter. Nevertheless, I feel that would probably be a bad thing to do for the campaign. Why? Because now the DM is making the campaign about defeating that 1 Overpowered player and ignoring the rest of his players. This will only fuel the other player's feeling of pointlessness if the DM is going to skip them over and focus on just dealing with Overpowered characters. Worse yet, if the DM does counter and defeat the Overpowered player, odds are that the rest of the party is going to be instantly defeated since they weren't as powerful as the Overpowered player.
Another solution may be to change the focus of the game to put the "Underpowered" players in more useful situations. Of course this may or may not be possible based on how Overpowered that one player is. As well, it ends up ignoring the Overpowered player's ability, to which he will get annoyed since he can no longer use his character as he would like. Ever play in a campaign where a player gets bored and starts killing everyone the party meets? This is likely the result if you ignore an Overpowered character (he will use his abilities for the fun of it - regardless of whether it is appropriate in the situation).
Let's look at an example. The one going around on this thread is the wizard player using Fabricate and Wall of Iron to build tons of Full Plate Mail Suits (I think this is just plain ridiculous, but whatever). The response on the thread seems to be that this spell would unbalance the Kingdom's economy be countered by armorsmiths rising up against the wizard. If this is the DMs reaction, then he has just rewarded the player. Think about it. Does any DM honestly believe a player would be upset if he ruined the game's world economy and has armorsmiths rising up against him? The player is going to love it! He's going to cast the spell more often to see how it turns out. The wizard would probably try to build a kingdom with this money. Now the situation has gotton worse. The DM is going to need to back up this threat and send hordes of armorsmith at the wizard, to which the wizard will counter with something or other. All of this going between the DM and 1 player while 5 other players, who can't cast this spell and probably don't even care about this, are bored out of their minds. I'm sure some DMs are going to say they can incorporate the other players in the story (assuming they don't find the entire thing utterly ridiculous and just quit), but the truth is that, whatever the DM does, they are just playing second fiddle to the wizard player. The "Overpowered" player is controlling the story, and everyone else is secondary on that storyline.
Another reason for rule changes is if the DM just doesn't agree with the rule itself. For example, I recently came to the Wizard boards seeking clarification for the Riding Cover Rules. The problem I have is that, even if a rider is surrounded by 12 people on all sides, the rider can use his horse for cover from everyone around him. The Cover gives the rider a +4 AC advantage and the cover is cancelled when the rider's turn comes and he attacks. Can I (the DM) counter this? Of course. I can put my own men on horses to get the same advantage, up their base attack to hit the player through the cover, use magic to hit the rider and the horse, or counter the bonus in some other ways. This isn't even really an "Overpowered” rule. However, I personally just don’t believe someone using their horse for cover should have cover from all sides. So I imposed a house rule requiring a rider pick a side to have cover from, which lasts up to their turn. This isn’t because I can’t overcome the official D&D rules, but just because I don’t agree with the rules. It’s silly to say that any DM should be bound by the official rule, and imposing their own rules is just "lazy" or "not creative". If DMs don't agree with the rule, what's the problem? It's their world after all. If you don't like it, don't play in it. I thought it was funny that Eldred mentioned that players don't complain about Overpowered abilities. Of course they don't. Who is going to complain about something that makes you more powerful? This is like expecting someone to complain if you give them free money. Only the DMs that have to deal with are going to have problems.
As for the suggestion that DMs and Players should apparently "square off", each trying to counter and top the other with various rules, all while building a better game in the process is nonsense. This isn't a competition where the person that knows the rules the best win. I'm not suggesting that the DM should be ignorant know the rules. Indeed he should know it at least as well as the players. But the idea that the DM needs to: 1) Read all Core Books and Supplements; 2) Analyse all feats, abilities, spells, etc.; 3) Determine all possible combinations; and 4) Develop a counter strategy for everything in case the players use that combination is just foolish.
We have all played at one time or another. So, I throw it back to discussion, Do rules lawyers really make the best DM? Or is a good DM someone that knows his players, challenges the party to work together, but occasionally needs to check a rule or two?
One more thing. In general, the DM is the person that does all of the work in setting up the campaign, preparing settings, traps, monsters, encounters, and so on. He is the one that works the most in the campaign. Every DM I know works several hours a week on his campaign. I just can't accept that the DM is "lazy" just because he was unprepared for what a player might do in the campaign.
Thanks for taking the time to read all of this.
I think that in a gaming group, if there is a rules lawyer, then it has to be the DM. Why? Because of course the DM has to have the final word on what can be done in his campaign. However, if there is no rules lawyer in the group, then I don't think that the DM's knowledge of the rules are so important.
I did play with some "lazy" (I hope they'll forgive me) DMs. It can happen. DMs who don't prepare well their scenario or encounters or with plots they don't manage well. The solution is very easy : stop playing with that person as the DM. Maybe somebody in the group is more qualified or has more free time to be the DM.
IMHO a few rules may need to be changed - in my gaming group we changed the 3.0 Haste as soon as we used it - but that change should be made clear to all players and a clear explanation has to be given as to why it has to be changed.
According to my experience the biggest problem lies in situations described by Jeffrey with the He has 1 "Overpowered" player and 5 "Underpowered" players.In that case, the solution I found so far -which isn't very satisfying - is to talk to the player to try have him tone down his character.
So the example of the PCs waltzing into the oval office and sitting down does not apply because if you are going to beef the place with traps and hidden things then the EL will change. An ogre hiding behind an illusionary wall waiting for the PCs to pass by is not the same as the ogre walking into the hallway and spotting the PCs.
How do you balance a thief and a fighter? For what type of game? Dungeon crawl? City adventure? Political intrigue? Each class is good at a few things, and usually bad at a lot of other things, that's the nature (and indeed, purpose) of a class based system. Hence, as long as each class is viable and useful, its "balanced".
But that is beside the point. The point is whether it is possible for players to build overpowered PCs. They can (I think I see a few munchkins, or at least power gamers on this thread). The other is that DMs can prevent it if they work hard. They can.
Last I checked encounters include outsmarting foes through diplomacy and bluff, overcoming traps, tricks and puzzles, beating all kinds of foes (many of whom are even more intelligent than the characters), and it is more important to uncover and figure out the plot of the adventure as much as knowing which skills the PC needs to max to multiclass my third PrC.
I think it is a crying shame that both players and DMs feel compelled to metagame like this (PCs don't know which feats/skills/abilities they need to be min/maxed to the hilt and the DM's world wouldn't meld itself to deter their muinchkinity). The way to solve this is to have a CHARACTER in a WORLD. Not a uber arcane warforged double wielding healer for j00r 741/\/\ DM, and a "that'll teach THEM a lesson" from said DM.
RPGs are one of the few games where no one loses, but the only way to win is for everybody to have fun. It's like being in kindergarten. When you slice and dice the rules to find a new exploit to get nerfed, you ooze into a cold harsh realm that frankly I wouldn't want to play in (like junior high or something).
Having those spells be instantaneous makes those goals achievable, not just money-wise, as that is never really an issue (only an adventure hook), but TIME wise. After all, time matters in the game (unless the entire party is made up of Elves).
If you really wanted to nerf it, just flip the duration to permanent. Then, it becomes dispel-able. Of course, this still keeps it from being a building base (since who wants a dispel-able tower?). Of course, even so, a clever person will find ways to abuse any spell.
This, once again, gets back to the core concept of the lazy DM. The lazy DM is NOT the one who does not answer every brokenness. The lazy DM is the one who fosters and allows an atmosphere where the players are searching for every brokenness. The Good DM lets his players know that no matter how powerful they grow, there will always be risks and unknowns. The Good DM lets his players know that whatever they want their character to be can be done, rule or no rules, given time.
Thus, your games don't degenerate as your characters wage war against you. If they want money for some project or some item, they should just let you know, and seek out lucrative adventures.
There is a kinder, gentler, D&D out there where you can hack and slay to your heart's content.
Also, if a King is going to pay a mage, they are more likely to have the mage scry upon their enemy to come up with better tactics so as to save lives, since getting the jump on the enemy is easier than making armor custom fitted armor for X hundred military units.
Furthermore, saving lives of soldiers is more valuable than equipping those soldiers with Full Plate. Given this, the King would be better off paying a temple to send Clerics to the battle, who can bolster the armies strength, heal the injured and Dispel enemy mages attacks as well as the occasional well placed attack.
Lastly, just cause a mage can make 10 million gps worth of Full Plate doesn't mean their is a way for them to unload it all. And while they are out trying to find a buyer for all this crap they have, some adventures kill a Dragon and find a couple suits of magic armor, magic weapons, some staffs, wands etc, and a ton of gold that doesn't require finding a buyer for, just someone selling you what you want...
While a King may like the idea of equipping their army for cheap, they should be smart enough to realize that firing every blacksmith they have will not go over well on the peasants. Given the example, a King could pay a dozen wizards to accomplish the same tasks that everyone they employ performs. However this would leave them ruling over a country of poor as dirt peasants that can't afford to take care of themselves.
...and you better believe that would lead to rebellion and plenty of thievery.
If you get enough down time to do anything, the game will probably fall apart at the higher levels because you've got the ability to do any number of things. That's part of the game, it's set-up to allow casters stupid powers so they can achieve great fantasy. Why it does that is obvious - to cater fantasy, if it was a sci-fi roleplaying game, it might be more reasonable, then again it might be less interesting depending on tastes.
Broken spells and features are just that - broken. It doesn't really effect the balance of a game with a sensible DM. This is more to do with the limitless potential of magic - which can easily hurt a game world, but less able to hurt a game on a simple run through.
Lets pretend Mindflayers invade the surface whilst the Wizard is off crafting his iron goods and offing them to people. Does Iron wall help him kill legions of Mindflayers? Time stop would do though.
Sometimes spells are overpowered, and sometimes they have broken applications. Broken applications don't have to break the campaign if you let them, overpowered material just needs to be handled with care. Only the former is justification for change, whilst the later might need a little tweak.