Suggestions for spell fixes

[Radu the Wanderer]

This isn't so much playtest feedback as my play experience from playing 3.0 and 3.5 so often:

Please remove/revamp save or die and save or suck spells. They're some of the most anticlimactic and unexciting spells out there, despite their spectacular effects.

Charm Person-- why not give a scaling bonus on all Charisma related rolls relative to the caster? It achieves the same effect (or similar enough) but is no longer an automatic spell.

Blindness/Deafness --- I've added in a 1 round/level duration on this spell, with another save each turn. It's almost an insta-kill spell in disguise at lower levels. Nearly a TPK when I had a drow party with a sorcerer go against my party. Blinded the rogue and wizard, the fighter was grappled, and the druid was deafened then had deeper darkness tossed on him for good measure.

There are, of course, many many more save or die spells (or save or suck spells, such as Feeblemind).

They make the game less fun and far less interesting. There surely must be a way to preserve their effect while tweaking the mechanics to be less absolute.

[Tamago]

In my experience, save or sucks are annoying but not game-breaking, whereas save-or-dies just kill the fun. I've houseruled most of the save-or-dies in my game to leave the target at -1 HP, but it's really a band-aid fix.

I agree that this part of the system definitely needs a revamp.

[seekerofshadowlight]

Leave save or die be there part of the game going back to the start and i myself like em .

[Archade]

I agree that save or die is not great if you are a player. But taking it away nerfs those abilities and spells far too much.

I don't know if Paizo is considering using Action Points officially, since they are OGL, but I found as a DM including Action Points really solves the save or die issue quite well, since they can take a poor save and do something about it with the resources they have.

[Tamago]

Archade wrote:

I agree that save or die is not great if you are a player. But taking it away nerfs those abilities and spells far too much.

I don't know if Paizo is considering using Action Points officially, since they are OGL, but I found as a DM including Action Points really solves the save or die issue quite well, since they can take a poor save and do something about it with the resources they have.

Right; it turns them from "Save or Die" to "Save or Lose a Bunch of Action Points" ;)

[Jeremy Mac Donald]

The spells I have the biggest issue with are the ones that seem to exist mainly to break good plots.

Spells like
locate object, locate person etc.
These spells all seem to exist to essentially locate the plot and circumvent the adventure. In my many years of adventuring I'm not sure if I have ever responded to a player that cast one of these spells with anything other then "Ha ha - I went through all the divination school spells before writing this - I caught that and found a way to make it not work". For my players this spell always fails and it always fails becuase the only time they want to use it is when I've faced them with some kind of mystery and this spell will very quickly solve the mystery thus destroying the adventure. Essentially these spells are bad for the game.

wind walk is another spell thats bad for the game. It makes the PCs incorporeal, very fast and invisible. If it works as advertised it essentially allows the entire group to circumvent the adventure by floating invisibly through it. Pretty quickly it becomes apparent that avoiding the adventure is, generally speaking, not really a fun thing to do on a Saturday night. Its no fun for the DM and its pretty quickly not even fun for the players. The players then get into something of a dilemma. Clearly the best course of action from their characters point of view is to keep on hiding from the adventure but from the players point of view - well they came to be adventures - not fog. I've seen parties actually bicker with each other over whether or not to keep using this spell depending essentially on how risk adverse the player in question was. In other words some players are more tolerant of boredom so long as it keeps their PC safe then others.

There are some well designed 'scouting' spells in the books. Things that work on fewer players or tip the opposition off or work for a very limited time. These spells are interesting - they reward the players for tactical planning but either have a price or only work for a very short scout run. One way or another the players are soon actually adventuring and the fun continues. Not so with wind walk which seems primarily designed to kill the fun.

A final spell thats a pet peeve with me is cure disease. This one does come up for game mechanic reasons so its not as bad as the ones above but its existance also serves to break perfectly good plots. Whens the last time your campaign featured disease prominently? Probably not to recently since fairly low level clerics should be able to meander about curing the disease. So one can't easily have plagues and such as the back drop for an adventure without first inventing magic plagues that are immune to this spell. Not really all that good for the game.

[Neithan]

Many of the plot-breaking spells are not problematic by themselves, but it's usually the way the DM implements them.

For example, remove disease is a 3rd level spell, so you need level 5 clerics to cast it. Getting one of them shouldn't be that much of a problem, but he likely can only cast it 3 or four times a day. In a large Town of 4000 people, he can only cure 0,1% of the population every day. Even if the spell would make them immune to a new infection, he would need 1000 days to cure them all, that's almost 3 years. Alternativly, you could have a swarm of 20 or 40 clerics of 5th level or higher, but those are most likely very hard to get on short notice. And in times of large scale epedemies, there's a bunch of other towns where people need healing too.

Same with detect evil. It only detects if someone is evil. Being evil is not a crime and doesn't indicate that someone has commited a crime, or ever intends to commit a crime. Being evil just indicates that the person wouldn't have problems with other people having to suffer when he works to acomplish his goals. And if you soppose, that 60% of all people are neutreal, 20% good and 20% evil, it really doesn't help at all to help the plot along. There are some few exceptions, for example when an evil NPC disguises himself as a compassive cleric of the god of charity.

I think, what the spells need is a bit more information on what long term effect they really have, not just the immediate effect.

I'm no fan of save or die spells either, because in the games I play, it's not the excitement of combat or exploration that drives the game, but development of the characters and the story. Dying without being responsible for it is really unfun.
And feeblemind is far too powerfull for 5th level.

[JDJarvis]

all buff spells-
Have all buff spells assign flat scores. Not uncapped additions. So Strength of the bear (or whatever) would give one a STR of 20, strength equal to or greater then that already, well then it doesn't work (can't be munchkined into an attack spell). Higher level buffs, higher scores but always the same scores for each spell.

divinations-
have all divination spells allow everyone in the area of effect a saving throw to notice, "we are being watched". It's a good dramatic device and it alters the impact of divination/buff/teleport.