Aubrey the Malformed's page

Lenarior wrote:

Acctually I had no idea the orb spells (and i presume your talking about orb of acid, orb of fire and so on) wasn't affected by SR. Cool.

I have to say that I don't agree with the orb-bashing going on here. When I first saaw these spells I thought: "Finally. A chance for sorcerers and wizards to have some real high-magic magic from level one (without it being small pink energyballs also called missiles). Besides I can make use of energy at lower, as well as higher levels, in a way not possible before making it more plausible with the orb spells to be a fire-wizard, or a electricity-wizard (or whatever you wanna specialize in).

All this said, I do see your point of view and understand, but the orb spells are such a small part of all the new spells introduced in Complete Arcane and Spell Compendium, that they can be removed without you feeling ripped off.

And on another topic, I do not think the warwizard takes the place of a powergamed sorcerer. But that's another discussion and I don't want to hog anymore space on this thread.

Alright. The orb bashing is because of one thing. ONE thing. They are conjuration.

Conjuration creates or transports a physical mass. Heat, electricity, and cold, are not phsical masses. You can get into physics all you want on this but as far as the game is concerned these are not physical masses they are energies.

Acid can be conjured because it is a physical material with properties that act like many energies. So orb of acid makes perfect sense. And guess what, any spell that deals acid damage is conjuration. But the more suppliments that come out the more they start messing with the ground rules.

More from the supliments. Raising outsiders is all but impossible for mortals. It involves no less than 9th lvl powerful magic. It is a flovorful part of the game In my opinion. But they couldn't leave it alone they had to make a spell that could raise outsiders ten times easier. The spell discription states "raising outsiders is all but...

This thread is great - so much to reply to! If it was me, I really wouldn't get so hung up on what spells are in which school, or whatever. This is the ultimate in metagame thinking, but I think it is a valid point: the schools are set out to try and be a bit balanced, for the sake of the specialist wizards. Between 3.0 and 3.5 there was a big re-jig of what spells went into which schools - in order to balance things out. So getting your knickers twisted about whether such-and-such a spell should be conjuration or evocation is besides the point. The schools as they stand are functions of how play in the game has panned out over time and shared experience of the designers, not about (frankly spurious) physical explanations of what "conjuration" and "evocation" actually mean.

I personally LIKE the fact that non-evokers have some blasting spells - why should evokers have all the fun? Is it beyond the realms of possibilities that a conjurer or two, wanting to make up for his inability to mow down hordes with a few syllables, mystic gestures and pinch of bat crap, created a conjuration spell that, while not the same, does something like an evocation (and also, like Melf's, avoids SR)?

So guys, lighten up, relax, enjoy the game. It's really not a big deal, and with a bit of creative thought the spells can be accommodated where they are. Or, if it really bothers you, moved to another school. The DM knows all, after all.

Sexi Golem 01 wrote:

...I think the warmage is just a sorcerer that saves you the trouble of munckinizing it yourself and It steals a large niche from the sorcerer...

And I think the warmage epitomizes what is often wrong with newer products: WotC needs to make new products with new ideas, but all the good ideas have (for the most part) been taken. That often leaves the bad ones.

Lots of people seem to have some problem with the class and/or its spells. In particular, several warmage spells should clearly be of the evocation school, yet they are not. It doesn't speak to a carefully thought-out class. An inconsistency that bothers me is that the warmage, a specialty-wizard, casts Cha-based spell. What's with that?

For some reason that really puts a bug up my butt :/

Regards,

Jack

I certainly think that very few of the new classes (as opposed to the PrCs) add anything much needed. Certainly, a lot of them really look like possible PrCs (ESPECIALLY the spellthief) instead of core classes. The only possible exception is the warlock, which is different and interesting. There has been an interesting debate on the efficacy and balance of the warlock already on these pages, so I'll leave the subject here.

Orb spells. I do not think they are unbalanced I think they are stupid because they are conjuration. They should be evocation like all the other spells that produce their effects.

What about Melf's Acid Arrow - that's conjuration (or it was last time I looked). There is an existing tradition of conjuration attack spells that avoid SR, so it is not unprecedented. So what's your beef? If it doesn't affect game balance, which you agree it doesn't, what is wrong with it? No one forces you to use it as a player, or a DM. Also, it makes taking evocation as a banned school - otherwise, who really doesn't ensure they have evocation spells available - more viable if you choose to specialise as a wizard (which chimes with me from a roleplaying/character concept angle if nothing else).

I agree with a previous post - 3E is about options (and 1E and 2E never was - which is why in D&D's heyday in the 80s I usually played RQ). This is just providing more options. I agree that there could be a bit more playtesting sometimes, but I really can't see why these things upset you so much. Don't like'em, don't use'em.

I can understand the nostagia that people feel for Greyhawk, though I am not one of them - I only began to play D&D seriously from 3E, so Greyhawk is a pretty peripheral concern to me (I used to play RQ as my main game when I was a nipper, as I found 1E and 2E D&D clunky). As a high level overview, I don't see anything very definitive about Greyhawk. It seems to me that the "world" of Greyhawk has been cobbled together from a series of basically unconnected adventures by St Gary of Lake Geneva and given a sort of "significance" as a world as an afterthought. Maybe a lot of worlds start that way, but as it is the generic world for D&D it fails to feel very special.

I also think think it, and FR to a slightly lesser extent (especially the western bits of Faerun) suffer from seeming a bit old hat - dodgy Tolkien rip-offs (though again, that's a question of taste - a player in my Eberron campaign is suffering from culture shock as it doesn't feel sufficiently medieval or "fantasy" enough for him, though I think it is actually wilder and more "fantastic" than the more "standard" settings). I'm not saying they are not a lot of fun to play, but they are hardly cutting edge. And FR pips Greyhawk, in my opinion, with the detailed back history that gives the setting a lot of depth.

That said, I understand that lots of people love Greyhawk. It seems a little cruel of WotC to just let it wither away unsupported even if they (for perfectly sensible commercial reasons - and let's face it, none of us want the D&D product line cancelled by the faceless Hasbro corporation because it is unprofitable) don't want to do anything with it. I feel they should let it "run free" with an oranisation that would want to issue products, since there is doubtless a demand. And another company may be more free to innovate and develop the setting in interesting ways.

I agree with you on Schweitzer - very unlike anything that I have seen and quite compelling. I read Mask of he Sorcerer and thought "Wow" and also The Shattered Goddess. Very eerie with a convincing feeling of otherworldlines. If it's like anything, maybe like some of the out-there Lovecraft or Clark Ashton Smith, but even those are fairly meaningless comparisons. He also seems to draw heavily from non-Christian mythos and religion, but also really pure fantasy - all down to magic and strangeness, with real world historical or political allegory nowhere in sight. That's all I have read, but it really left an impression. If I had to choose, it would be the Mask of the Sorcerer. Bizarre and powerful.

I like David Gemmell lots, and I think he has got better as he has written more books. His early stuff is a bit repetitive, and you can always be pretty sure what you will get in one of his novels: big, tough heroes who can kick butt in a VERY serious way; lots of fight scenes; generally, super-maho fun where men are men. But his plotting has got a lot better in the last few years. I would heartily recommend the first two books of the Rigante series, as I actually found them rather moving as well as a good fun read (the first two really are one novel, and I can't comment on the last two as I haven't read them) and I found Dark Moon likewise one of his best. Dark Moon is also slightly curious in that, while uber-violent like most of his stuff,it has at it's core an anti-violence message which comes out at the very end - again, quite poignant. So DG doesn't just write hack-'em up fantasy but there is some thought and moral force behind some of his latter works.

My average earnings per year are $0.00. I'm a stay-at-home father. The wife and I decided not to subject the kids to the Daycare of Doom. Luckily, I made way less than her:) The Wifey makes @80k a year so it was an easy transition.

FH

LUCKY BUGGER! Man, I'd love a rich wife. (Sighs) Still, my girlfriend has two boyfriends, which splits the cost at least.

I make about £60k (that's pounds sterling to you colonials) but the cost of living is higher in the UK. I drive a Honda Civic.

I think that's right, Paul - time and place for the reader is almost or as important as the book itself. Drizzt has run out of steam (I think RAS said so himself - I guess the power of the marketers keeps Drizzt going as much as RAS does) but he was fun for a while. And it is true - while I didn't have a gaming group, Drizzt was a sort of substitute. So all power to the dark one - may he enjoy a well-earned retirement.

I personally reckon Salvatore is well overrated. He had the benefit of being about the only guy writing novels for FR, so he had very little competition in the early days, and Drizzt is sort of cool with the two swords thing (also RAS innovation largely, though well over-used now). If you read the Icewind Dale trilogy - well, it's pretty terrible, but they were apprentice works. The first part of the Dark Elf trilogy is good, and they are as a whole better written. But overall Drizzt is a fairly annoying sanctimonious git on more than a few occasions - why can't he go out, get drunk, and try and pull some girls for a change, rather than moaning on about his moral dilemmas?

That's not to say that RAS doesn't have his strengths: his Drizzt books can be entertaining and often action-packed, and they don't pretend to be great works of fiction. So they are a good low-brow read for a gamer. And he has improved as time has gone on. (I haven't to be fair, read his non-Drizzt stuff, so any comments on that would be welcome.)

But he has some real down-sides too - and they normally involve dwarves: the punning names (Bouldershoulder? C'mon!!! [gags]), the cumbersome humour, the idiotic accents rendered phonetically, the general, slappable stupidity - aaargh don't get me started on Salvatore's dwarves.

And the pat morality grates after a while - I prefer something edgier, which you can get from some FR authors (Lisa Smedman's Yuan-ti trilogy - two books released so far - is good [unlike her War of the Spider Queen novel] and the first one is even slightly kinky in places, and Richard Lee Byers is good too) but Salvatore doesn't appear to have the stomach for that. All the good guys seem to think like middle class suburban Americans (especially Drizzt - I'm surprised he doesn't carry a rosary or something, he seems so consumed with Catholic guilt) (this is not an anti-Catholic/Christian rant, by the way) - not very fantasy, really.

All in all, WotC doesn't very often publish great novels. Salvatore is no exception. I don't even think he is the best of what WotC has. He's just been around the longest and made the biggest impact at a time when there was nothing much else for gamers to read. Nothing against the guy, and I have spent a few hours happily reading the Drizzt books when I had nothing else to do. But it is meagre faire, all said.

Aubrey the Malformed wrote:

...where do baby medusas come from?

Well Aubrey, when a papa medusa and a mama medusa get together and love each other very much, the papa medusa inserts one of his snakes into the mama medusa's "snake pit" and tells the mama medusa's eggs that it's ok for them to come out. Now, some of the papa medusas have "quiet snakes" so the mama medusa's eggs don't know when it's time to come out, so they have to adopt other baby medusas that don't have any mama medusas or papa medusas.

Hey, thanks Ultradan, that's cleared up a lot. And not just on medusas.
Dr. Ultradan

As a white guy (also out of shape), I've got no problem with there being more avatars of "race". We want avatars that represent us in some way, so it can be frustrating ( as it was for me - I don't really care for my avatar that much, but it was closest to the concept of the character from which I drew my online moniker) so why not. If no one says anything, the staff at Paizo would never know.

Sounds like a good idea to me. It is always a challenge dealing with the FR backstory, but a DM's gotta do what a DM's goota do if changes are necessary.

The Shining South is quite a good region for setting stuff in, as it is pretty neglected in terms of previous material. So you are less likely to clashes with established FR lore. Obviously, it's convenient for Halruaa too.

Question: are medusas immune to the gaze of other medusas? Not just a game-related questions, as such. I also wondered: if they can't gaze into eachother's eyes, where do baby medusas come from?

QUOTE="Luke Fleeman"] You're probably getting at something here.

The USA is known for doing what it perceives as good with its military. Our culture seems to have a belief in good being achived through violence, as if that justifies it. Sometimes, I think it does. I am American, though.

Be careful Luke, people make take your words out of context and be offended due to limited views of subject matter that should be viewed from an open-minded POV. All (most)americans believe that they are right because the government tells them that they are. People have, historically, died due to one corrupted leader's view on what was right. Vietnam is a good example of this. Many brave men died doing something that they should never of been asked to do. Most of them still believe that there was Some Great Purpose to their sacrifice, besides political gain, and I respect their individual heroism. Hitler was told that the best way to unify his country behind his rule was to invent an evil, then wage war against that evil(simplified version). Our outlooks are always going to be colored by our interpretation of actions commited by various governmental and clerical orders.
I believe that if you treat everyone with some respect and would immediately jump up to help when someone yells "Help!", then you are a good person. It doesn't matter what views you have, if you feel the need to help someone in dire need then you are a good person regardless of race, creed, or station. If you worry more about the damage you may suffer for helping someone then you are neutral. If you say "F them, they should've been more careful." then you are an evil person.
This is entirely my opinion, if it offends then sorry. Again.

FH

I think the interesting point is something I touched on myself earlier, but didn't necessarily follow through it's conclusion (so thank to those who pointed it out): where good and evil have a metaphysical reality, and even a physical reality with fiends, evil clerics and so on, the elimination of IRREDEEMABLE evil is probably a good act, in the terms of good also having a reality you can define in the same way. It becomes a bit trickier with people who are a bit nasty, maybe detect as evil, but are not mass murderers of traffickers with demons and devils - that's the nuanced decision that makes playing a paladin (in the right hands) interesting.

By the way, as the kicker-offer of the American=violent thread, please note that I don't want to paint Americans as a bunch of psychos. It was more a question of whether American culture has a thread within it that sees violence as a means to a good end, maybe arising from the Revolution, Civil War and frontier spirit. Obviously, it's more subtle than that, but maybe as an outsider from a slightly different culture I did wonder if there was something in that. Thanks for the measured replies - very interesting.

PS Peruhain wrote the first paragraph of the above post - the rest is mine.

Like some earlier posters, I too find that some of the alignment-focused spells being used on ordinary mortals who happen to tend toward evil/good/law/chaos to be a bit too much--the paladin's detect evil being used to decide who is a worthy target of violence is a good example....

Maybe it is just me, but I have always had a certain ambivalence about the paladin class. Supposedly holy warriors (well, definitely holy warriors) who roam about looking for evil-doers to, er, kill. Isn't killing, in most contexts, a bit, you know, wrong? Almost, sort of, evil?

I don't know if this is cultural - and please, any Americans (I'm British) please don't be offended by this, as it is a question more than a comment - but is this association (at least in the modern game of D&D, rather than the historical contect of Charlemagne) connected with ideas of gun-culture and the basic American-ness of the game? I appreciate that guns in the home are more often associated with hunting than homicide (hunting, by the way, is pretty anathema to most British, as a predominately urban society). But conversations I have had (with an admittedly small sample of US citizens) does seem to consider self-defence with lethal force to be pretty acceptable under a lot of circumstances I wouldn't. It puts the notion of what is an acceptable level of violence quite a few notches higher than I would ordinarily. (If you feel I'm out of line on this one, please feel free to flame me - I'm not armed.)

Now, I now D&D is just a game with certain conventions. And it is fun to rub out bad guys in the game precisely because we don't do it in real life. But to associate a guy handing out summary justice (again, a possible distortion of how lots of people play their paladins, I'm sure) with the LG alignment always made me squirm a little. Is there anyone out there with a view on this?

As far as alignment in the D&D world goes to describing our modern real world, I feel that a large amount of the world is NE. All self-caring and self-motivated. And that's just my opinion.

I'd say LN, for what it is worth. I would reserve NE for the actively evil out there - psychopathic work colleagues and the like (not that I have any..).

I also think that the alignment system helps ward against some boring player behaviour. A lot of stuff can degenerate into a selfish "kill the mosters and take their stuff" mentality. Alignment is a good hook to base a character concept upon - something that has interesting role-playing ramifications. You run the danger of having every character as a money-grubbing mercenary unless you have very role-playing-aligned (no pun intended) players without an alignment system to back up their behaviour.

As a philosophical point, there is possibly a major difference between the "real" world we live, work and die in and the game worlds our characters occupy: there are real gods (sorry to any Christians/Muslims/Hindus/Buddhists etc. - this isn't a dig at you) that can be objectively demonstrated to exist, interfere with real event and personify particular "moral" and "ethical" ideals - as set out in the alignment system. Also, being of a particular alignment has, in the game as it is set out in the rules, game effects - see the spell Dictum, and so on. So the alignment you have connects you with the universe as it exists in the game world - the universe has explicit moral facets which don't exist in the real world. So you can't be a moral relativist in a basic D&D world, because the concepts of Good, Evil, Law and Chaos absolutely can be demonstrated to exist, and to affect you as an individual.

Moral relativism arises from the erosion of the belief in gods and subsequent retribution in this and the next life following the general decline in religious life and the rise of rationalism over the last couple of hundred years. However, I would suggest that, as humans, we tend to like to see things in moral terms generally (we all like happy endings in books and films, for example) and the alignment system builds out of the cross-fertilisation of fiction and role-playing to entrench that in the rules.

This comes with the caveat, of course, that nothing forces you to use an alignment system. I'm just pointing out that I don't think moral relativism works under the current rules where gods define the various alignment types, and the planes of existence have alignment traits, and clerics must be of certain alignment to have their faiths, and so on - it doesn't make sense in that context. But you can, of course, dispense with alignemtn for all parties, including gods, should you wish.

A word on improvisation (from a guy who plays jazz piano occasionally) - and to reinforce a previous comment. You get good at making stuff up if you have some preparation behind it - you can riff on an already known theme, so to speak, and you have developed some technique before you play in public. Plus, you get better with practice. And also, you will be hit by inspiration from time to time. Maybe bland, generic and quite possibly useless advice, but I hope it helps.

Maybe you should consider setting up a sting - something that you can answer using their commune spell but will mislead them (maybe apply a Half-something template and then give the answer that YOU want to give when asked about it). Ordinarily you wouldn't want to do that, but in this instance it is probably worth it so they learn the limits of the spell (and your patience). Alternatively, maybe the gods are getting a bit cheesed off with all this pestering - maybe send them on a quest as penance. And perhaps the gods have an agenda, and don't answer honestly (I can't remember - is Commune always reliable). And finally - the gods in D&D are not omnipotent and omniscient. Possibly they don't know the answer to some stuff. Maybe another god or entity is involved and protecting the object of the enquiry. A simple "dunno, mate" might reduce the party's willingness to Commune with a deity on a regular basis.

Good question, not specifically answered in the rulebooks as far as I am aware. I personally would allow it, as it intended to allow sorcerer to get rid of spells which are no longer as useful as newer high level spells - like getting rid of Invisibility once Greater Invisibility is learned. It seems a bit rough to expect a character to keep those lower level spell just because he's taken a level of Archmage instead of sorcerer.

Not wishing to state the bleedin' obvious, but the skills/feats/class features issue is all about game balance. The reason that fighter have limited skills is because they are great at killing things - it is what they are for. Change the skill points and you upset the balance - so what do you want to change - lower BAB? No, I didn't think so.....

Also, the comment that a fighter with INT 10 isn't actually too bright seems fair (probably less intelligent that the average RPG-er - let's face it, we are all Einsteins, just modest with it). So a mastery of social graces, stealth and a profound knowledge of history and geography is probably a bit steep to expect. The system is flexible with multi-classing and feat options. There seems an issue of wanting cake and eating it.

BSc in Human Sciences from London University. Also a chartered accountant and a member of the Association of Corporate Treasurers (yup - exciting guy). All of my two groups have undergraduate degrees, one has an MSc in Computer Science and the other a PhD in History.

Basic point possibly missed, and possibly unimportant - a character on 0hp is not helpless or unconcious. Another point - while the Crisis of Breath power is scalable at higher levels, at 5th level it affects only one character (and only humanoids, unless scaled up at 7th level). So why not just have more than one enemy? And the psionic character in question, as you point out, is weak physically. Sure, if he is allowed to stand at the back and zap people, he is going to be powerful. But he would probably be challenged if the party is attacked from the rear by surprise or ambush. How about poison? How about assassins (sneak attack and death attck with Fort save)? How about area effect? How about things that don't breathe - undead or (every spellcaster's nightmare) golems? How about an enemy psion - see how much he enjoys choking to death? Obviously don't victimise the guy because he has chosen a psion, but don't give him a free ride either. As a DM you have plenty of options to deal with this and provide him and the party with plenty to challenge them.

This isn't a problem with the psionic rules - they seem reasonably balanced to me (compare Crisis of Breath with Phantasmal Killer - a higher level "spell" but also considerably more powerful with a "save or die" requirement). There are wrinkles and loopholes all over the place in the rules, not just psionics. Psionics is just not very clearly understood, so the average DM is playing catch-up more often.

I think WoL are a great idea, though not necessarily brilliantly executed in the book. For example, a lot of the weapons give you a penalty on your To Hit - so while it may be a +5 weapon, it gives you a -2 penalty to hit. Where's the logic/benefit in that? But if you find alternative sacrifices that maybe make sense (maybe restrictions on what a player can do in a roleplaying sense, which might be difficult to convey out of the context of a specific campaign and character, rather than a crude To Hit penalty mechanic or such like) the possibilities are tremendous - pregnant with potential, one might (not) say.

good post, Black Dragon - I can see we share some gaming similarities.

Saern, I have no problem with your "prove yourself" quest or assigning any quest (assigned by the church/cleric responsible for the resurrection) for those engaging such life-restoring services. This seems logical and not overly penalizing to me.
I agree with Black Dragon that the level penalty seems illogical and overly harsh. I mean, character is probably the weakest in the party and so dies during combat. He is raised and now he's a whole level behind everyone else, therefore the weakest, therefore the most likely to be killed. He's raised up again and loses another level, therefore he's the weakest ... Do we sense a pattern here? And God forbid this character died the first time because his player was a newbie or lacks certain wisdom in playing his character. Nevermind the time, energy and expense, that unfortunate player is never going to catch a break! How can a person be expected to learn and develop when the odds against his character are constantly mounting? I'm sure the creators of this game mechanic were attempting to reduce the use of restorative magic and ...well, they succeeded as is evidenced by the number of 3.x players who just scrap the old character and draw up a new one. I would too under such circumstances!

I think people are forgetting the old System Shock Survival roll - you had a percentile chance of actually not surviving the shock of resurrection in 1E (and 2E?). So a level loss seems a less drastic penalty. Of couse, the old SSS rolls could have be fudged, so it was less of a penalty ultimately.

I guess it boils down to what the players want. I know players where easy resurrection ruins the sense of drama for them. There are others who hate to lose characters. (Unfortunately for me, I have both types in the same group, which makes balancing things a bit difficult sometimes.) So long as everyone is having a good time, that is the acid test. That includes the DM, of course....

I personally think the issue is to make death a reasonably big deal. If it's just a case of a quick teleport to the temple, lay out the cash, and "Bingo!" you are back on the road - the issue of in-game death loses it's drama. Instead, it becomes an inconvenience. And as mentioned above, if the PCs can do it, so can the villains. Why bother slaying evil if, one True Res later, Lord Evil is back oppressing the peasants like nothing has happened?

The issue is to make getting a resurrection really tricky. You don't just buy off the cleric, he gets you to do him a big favour (preferably after, since the dead PC can't take part otherwise). Or maybe you quest to find the only guy on the co0ntinent with the power to Raise Dead. Also, in Eberron getting Raised is very hard since there are few high level clerics and House Jorasco can only help the living.

Dying sucks - if your player is really upset, well - unless it was a cruel or arbitrary DM decision - that is a bit of a shame. A character death should be a big deal, so maybe a momentary pang for a lost character will stick in the memory longer than a trip to the temple.

It may be worth pointing out that the Oriental Adventures 3E sourcebook had a series of chain weapons that could be used both as reach weapons and, separately, double weapons. In other words, you could attack a target 10' away using it as reach weapon, and then two targets within 5' the next round using it as a double weapon. I was always slightly disappointed not to see that translate into the 3.5 rules for the spiked chain - but maybe game balance came to the fore.

Bear in mind that it's a non-updated 3.0 prestige class - it might need some work to bring it up to scratch.