oldsaxhleel's page

Ironically, the best way to f%%+ with necromancy is more necromancy. Chaining Command Undead will turn all those enemy minions into your minions, and those huge bloody storm giant skeletons too(no save for your standard undead, so who cares about the DC). And wizards love rolling fortitude saving throws, so break out the heightened persistent blindness. Mix and Match your favorite CC spells(dazing chain lightning if you're high enough level) and you're golden.

Legio_MCMLXXXVII wrote:

It's a problem for people who end up with Rogues in their party, being a useless burden on their allies too.

If you can't hang on your own, stay home. Don't make me waste my resources cause you're bad at your job.

I'm not a fan of this mentality. The complaint is applicable to EVERY class as long as they're not optimized to a certain degree. If you find this to be a waste of your time, you should stay home and do something else with your time, don't ruin the fun of others.

And the Rogue can pull its own in some regards, you're not stuck with a Kobold Commoner.

Never underestimate a Kobold.

oldsaxhleel wrote:

if the wizard isn't a lich, served only by golems and undead, etc, then he probably has servants to tend to all of those tedious day-to-day tasks. No wizard wants to scrub clean the pit he keeps his goblinoid test subjects in.

So, grab a human commoner, knock him out, and put him under a geas(He must use his weekends off to go to a specific pub), and get him a job scrubbing the goblin pits. Then you have a guy on the inside who doesn't know he's your guy (after all, he just got mugged, and he has a nice routine on his saturday off, where the serving girl just so happens to be re-geasing him).
Let your manchurian candidate get into the wizards good light, then one saturday while he's enjoying his stout, place a new geas instructing him to use a dose of powerful poison (player provided of course) to kill the wizard, using whatever means at his disposal.

Best case scenario; a several month long plan comes to fruition, and your nemesis lies dead.

Worst case scenario; you waste a dose of poison, and a few scrolls.

If you worry about the poison approach, a necklace of fireballs makes a great gift, and nystul's aura can help you slip it in via your commoner's, ah, smuggling hold. and lets be honest, who spends all of their spell slots keeping protection from energy up 24/7?

If a wizard needs servants, why would he hire some bum off the streets when he can planar bind Planetars to do his housework?

Not that he needs to, when freaking Prestidigitation literally takes care of most day-to-day issues. >.>

But that's aside from the point. Level 20 wizards are likely to only surround themselves with those they can fully control. Your plan relies on a lot of assumptions that make it very likely to fail right from the start.

Plus, we're talking about a level where Astral Projection and Create Demiplane have been in full effect for ages. Even best case scenario you're looking at a slightly inconvenienced wizard with a dead Astral Projection/Clone.

We're both relying on assumptions, you that the wizard is played as you would play it; a hyper-paranoid control freak with no vices or oversights whatsoever, I that the wizard is played like a human or elf wizard in any of a thousand novels. I choose to assume that the wizard in question has flaws and oversights, because that's how I run them when I Dm. Great power creates great arrogance. Sure, the wizard can make a chain of demiplanes and hide his real body behind a long line of astral projections, but would he? At that level, a wizard is sure to have made outer planar enemies, who could find and snip his silver cord with some ease. Is he willing to leave himself open to an easy assassination by various outsiders all to forestall a death at the hands of mortals he no doubt considers himself above? Look at Elminster; always very concerned with the goings on of important folks; kings, malaugrym, devil princes, and consistently overlooks things that should be obvious, Narnra for instance, lives under his nose for 20 years unseen.

Against a living wizard in a living game, subterfuge and assassination can and do work if the proper steps are taken to avoid divination. Only the theoretically optimized wizards of this and similar forums are immune to their own arrogance, addiction and lust.

I'm still on the fence about PF. I play it, but I still only DM 3.5, Call of Cthulhu, etc.

I greatly dislike the skill system, the way a lot of the spells were changed (particularly stuff like Death Ward, SoDs should have an easily available counter the same way domination does), and the front loaded character creation(Archetypes instead of an emphasis on PrCs). I dislike the fact that most of the Archetypes, Rogue/Barb talents/powers etc are pretty useless, or extremely niche, leaving only a few choices that actually make a difference in normal gameplay.

The fact that every spellcasting class gets bumped up in power tier while my beloved rogues wallow in the dirt irks me, and paizo's senseless development practices make me not want to touch books they put out. More than anything, the fact that PF seems to have classes, archetypes, etc designed around very specific play styles, as opposed to 3.5 where most classes are pretty much a blank slate upon which a character can be built, makes it quite annoying trying to make characters. What if I want to play a spellcaster built on the concept of enchantments? in 3.5 I pick an arcane spellcaster, whether a beguiler or a wizard, and pick the spells I want to use. in PF, I can do that, but the Serpentine bloodline Sorcerer is laughing at me every step of the way.

The over-specification of classes and archetypes is the single worst thing I've seen in a game that could have been very good. It's not RIFTS-tier bad where you play a Juicer or end up wasting half your actions dodging, but it's pretty damn close.

IMO PF isn't even really playable without extensive house ruling. Sure you house rule for 3.5, and I've incorporated there a few of the recent suggestions concerning casting time (I don't recall the poster, but it hinged on bumping all spells up to 1 full round casting time, and scaling those down as you pass them by).

Blasting is generally less than optimal for wizards anyway, so bringing down their blasting potential isn't exactly new. Besides metamagic, wizards have been doing the same damage forever, while folks have started getting con to HP at all.

The thing that makes wizards able to kill s@#@ so much more effectively (as you've mentioned in passing) are the spells that bypass HP entirely. what are the rules in this sub system for dealing with persistent wail of the banshee, or chain-reach-finger of death? Does it try to limit the number of nukes in wizard's pockets, or does it just make wizards just crappy blasters(eg; 5e)?

Have spells like baleful polymorph, Wall of X, and Ghoul Touch been completely removed, or are you just not using them in this demo?

If it's limited to just buffs/blasts, it's going to get boring *very* quickly for anyone who plays wizards precisely because they dont have to fight head on, Damage vs HP, and you might as well play 5e (Seriously, have a look at that spell list, might be exactly what you're looking for).

If it's not limited to just buffs/blasts, somebody is going to figure out a way to break it. if you can jack your DC up high enough, Silent Image is all you really need to break up a group of enemies and leave them waiting and willing to be killed, no different than a high DC Entangle.

Most of the combat-oriented examples of how a caster is so much more powerful than a martial seem to assume that the caster has prepared for the combat(buffs in place, floating above the world with plenty of summons to defend him), is in a place of absolute security(his extra dimensional fortress), and has plenty of clones, and maybe a phylactery, in the event of his death.

Like most of the theoretical optimization stuff I've seen on these boards, it relies on massive "what-if" circumstances, and requires that the spell caster take the exact same precautions that you would.

First of all, it has already negated the fact that the spell caster (let's assume wizard) is going to be, or should be, a living creature in the game world. So unless we're talking about a Larloch styled recluse, that situation is suddenly thrown out. Let's look at our *actual* high level spell casters from fiction; Elminster, who despite being a high powered spellcaster actually went out and did things gasp in person, carrying a handful of magic items. Szass Tam, who almost invariably throughout the War of the Zulkirs engaged in combat in person, and, in fact, is depicted as changing his rings, amulets, and bracers prior to the final battle, meaning that he wasn't prepared for combat prior.

so what do we have there? spellcasters who live lives, prepare their spells based on their day to day lives as opposed to exclusively preparing for combat, and are so self sure, so arrogant, that they go out into combat personally, rather than sending a simulacrum, or using their 99th iteration of Astral Projection. Wizards use the restroom, they take a break from studying their spellbooks and take a walk around the palisade, they prepare a bunch of Sending spells so they can chat with their other wizard friends, they turn into birds and go flying, because f*ck you they're wizards. And don't forget the Mage Lords of fiction. the arrogant, preening overlords. Vices are enormous weak spots, I think we can look to Hollywood and Washinton DC to see what power does to people in that regard, and Mage Lords of fiction tend to have a penchant for being killed by their intended lovers. Give the half orc barbarian a potion of disguise self and a corset, job done.

The assumption that they're all powerful is based on a combination of wizards' own false assumption that they are all powerful, and the all too common power gaming shenanigans that produce things like the Mailman Sorcerer, but those assumptions should make them more vulnerable. People who are convinced that no one would be foolish enough to try to poison them eventually stop casting detect poison every time they want a drink of water.

Spell casters being broken has a very simple fix; Stop looking for ways to break them.

If your DM runs wizards as being recluses that live on their own demiplanes, locked in a massive throne room, behind thousands of wards and permanent scrying spells, peering at every corner of their lair with a thousand facsimile eyes searching for the slightest sign of an intruder, all spell slots devoted to combat, then your DM is an a$$hole who cares more about combat than about providing a roleplaying experience where NPCs and PCs actually live in the world, rather than existing only for the purpose of a fight no one will care about a week later.

if that's your wizard, then congratulations, you've successfully reduced what could have been a character to nothing more than a stat block and a gimmick to eliminate all of your vulnerabilities. Hope you have fun reducing what could be an entertaining and immersive hobby down to a mechanical grind for no better reason than so that your character can be "better" than everyone else's.

There's no reason to re-work the way spells work, or the way martials work(aside from making them more flexible, "putting the extraordinary back in Ex," etc.)

the only real reason that spellcasters are so powerful is that they can effectively spend a whole bunch of nuke spells whenever they please, particularly at high levels. there are a few reasons for that;
1) spellcasters aren't made to worry about their spell components.
They should. It's a simple change, just make spell component pouches start as empty, and force the spellcasters to fill them. that means the evoker will spend a lot of time in alchemical shops haggling over the price of sulfur, and he's probably going to have a bat familiar because he needs the guano. but more broadly it means that the wizard can't cast Chain Lightning every round, regardless of how many spell slots he has.
2) expanding on 1), more spells should have components. Teleport especially shouldn't be free to cast.
3) require a certain amount of time be spent per spell level to prepare spells. whether it's a wizard reading his spellbook, a cleric praying to his god, or a sorcerer resting and focusing his internal energies, it shouldnt be a matter of simply spending 1 hour after you rest to regain *everything.* require 1 hour per spell level. you might have a hell of a lot of spell slots, but you have to chose which ones to replenish.
4) Clerics dont get their *entire* spell list for free, and wizards don't learn 2 spells for free at each level. Talk with your cleric players, and put together a smaller list of spells that make sense for their cleric, and their god. talk to your wizard players and put together a small list of spells that they already have in their spellbook. possibly one that their old master gave them. they can't cast all of them yet, and it may only stretch up to 3rd level spells, but it limits that massive wall of choice and makes things more personalized. then, for actual spell gains, let both clerics and wizards learn spells from scrolls and spell/prayer books. give the wizard actual *wizard* stuff to do, it's an RPG after all.

in summary; spellcasters get limited on the spells they can cast, can have prepared, and even know, but the spells themselves are just as powerful.
a 9th level wizard *should* be a terrifying foe, if he's prepared. they shouldnt be ground into the dust just to make the martials seem more powerful, just limited so that they can't use their world shattering power every single day. Form of the Dragon seems more 'magical' when the wizard may only be able to cast it once a year, and a cleric casting Implosion will seem more like heavenly wrath when this may be one of the few times you see him cast it.