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And remember, PCs over 11th level are vulnerable to legend lore themselves.
That tactic they always use? It's well known.
Using fame is actually valid even without legend lore. One of the fellow PCs that Peter plays with recently faced down a false double of the villain mastermind, and found that the mastermind had prepared an 'extra thick' (4 walls) wall of force as a countermeasure against the PC's well known tendency to utilize disintegrate. And he appreciated it, because the minor and temporary setback of not being immediately able to blast through the force field is balanced against the major and permanent status of his personal fame within the campaign world. Not every foe is going to have quadruple force wall protection, but for it to crop up means that they are making a difference beyond just their initiative and hit points.
Using the player's own fame justifies pretty much any time you have competent badguys with proper countermeasures.
Wrath, thanks for the posts, wish you were sticking around to make more great posts like that. :)
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I've always been of the opinion that, to a native of the Astral plane, we're the outsiders.
When I have all the free time in the world, I'm going to write an adventure where the PCs are grabbed by a planar binding spell and yanked to another dimension, to fulfill whatever miserable job the caster isn't willing to dirty his own hands with.
Or better still, opposing extra planar casters bind the PCs to defeat their enemies which gets you into endless non-lethal party violence, until one side overcomes the other and one of the outsider spellcasters. Ideally, PCs think their way out of the jam.
So, what do you know? Designer weighed in on Simulacrum. Enjoy Kain.
Great, so what do you think of that 10 hd pit fiend?I think it has problems. I think in this case its deserves more parring down. It's caster level 8, but has at least one caster level 9 spell-like ability, and probably a number more that you should shed (for balance sake), and 10 HD deserve more than chopping off the ability scores by 1. The Bestiary has the numbers that are appropriate for a 10 HD creature, and while you can stray a little bit from them, that should be your guiding principle in creating a 10-HD pit fiend simulacrum.
Maybe the bestiary should be the guiding principle, but right now it definitely is not.I don't know. In my mind--and bear with me, I might be a wild eyed idealist here--but this game is not a computer game with rigid code and commands with no bends or common sense. It is a storytelling game with a rather complex matrix for combat and some less complex matrices for other things that have a final adjudicator in a thinking, rational, and creative person.
What should be the guiding principle, is what defiantly is the guiding principle.
GMs don't do this? This floors me and lets me rationalize some of the posts I see on this site. For me, this is the defining factor between theorycrafting and actual play. Can simulacrum give you "free" wishes? Potentially, yes. However, in such a game world other weird things are bound to happen. It's the GMs job to explain why those things aren't happening (if they aren't) or why they are (if they are).
If GMs don't do this and just let it fly that creates a cognitive dissonance that leaves people filling in the gaps for themselves since it actually doesn't make sense to let things happen without ramifications. The mind is a great problem solver. Even if we're not consciously aware of something the mind has a way to chipping away at things and providing an impetus with which we can then use to consciously investigate things. Then, as opinions are like a!# h@&&s, everyone has one which sets up a situation for even more weird behavior when people start acting on those assumptions they've had to make on their own.
See how GMs are really an invaluable resource? :)
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GMs don't do this?
Most do, but many just get tired of spending our effort doing that sort of thing rather than, say, running the game. So we add a bunch of houserules up front, with player agreement, so everyone is on the same page, and make our jobs easier and more enjoyable thereby. Some people just go an extra step and say, "What if the designers had already done that?"
GMs don't do this?Most do, but many just get tired of spending our effort doing that sort of thing rather than, say, running the game. So we add a bunch of houserules up front, with player agreement, so everyone is on the same page, and make our jobs easier and more enjoyable thereby. Some people just go an extra step and say, "What if the designers had already done that?"
Me? I'm lazy. I'd rather deal with most of them as they come up because, if they don't come up, I don't have to do anything. I'm always just dealing with the types of players I have rather than trying to build in guardrails against player types I may never encounter.
The system is separated into rules and setting materials for a reason. The GM can mishmash as they want without feeling constrained by "this is what the RULES say." Not that the GM need this, per se, but when everyone is reading how something works and the GM says it doesn't that just feels weird.
@Bill, do you always just say no to odd situations? I think in some settings and circumstances oddities are fine AS LONG AS they come with an explanation. A blanket "no" just feels flat in an otherwise rich world of wonders. It's not about guardrails to me. Sure, you can do this seemingly "broken" use of x or y spell. To me, that just creates a hook to use later and not a mallet to bash a player over the head for being genuinely crafty.
@Bill, do you always just say no to odd situations? I think in some settings and circumstances oddities are fine AS LONG AS they come with an explanation. A blanket "no" just feels flat in an otherwise rich world of wonders. It's not about guardrails to me. Sure, you can do this seemingly "broken" use of x or y spell. To me, that just creates a hook to use later and not a mallet to bash a player over the head for being genuinely crafty.
I don't believe I've said anything that would indicate how often I say No compared to how often I say Yes. It depends on the situation.
Would I say yes to a player wanting to wait for the wyvern to make his fly-by attack and the try to grapple it so it crashes? Yes I did. Would I let an injured character fleeing the guards jump off a high castle wall in desperation aim for the stables at the base and shave off some damage? Yes. But would I let a simulacrum of an efreeti bestow wishes? No.
Hence me asking a question. ;)
Most settings can be seen as balanced, in the long run. Where it gets interesting is when they are unbalanced in the NOW.
Any campaign that actually uses large amounts of magic up to 9th level can be considered an unbalanced, high-magic campaign. However, this lack of balance is fine, so long as verisimilitude is preserved by hints or harbingers showing that the situation as it is cannot last forever.
The goal of any such unbalanced campaign (or one goal, at least) might be either to bring things back into balance or to shift the way the balance seems to be tipping.
In my campaign world, two campaigns ago a PC party following an elven map dating back to the Great Racial Wars (with intriguing notations inked on it seeming to refer to magical weapons caches) inadvertently set off an ancient magical superweapon. Despite several hints, they failed to assess the situation well enough to realize the chanting dark naga they encountered and immediately started attacking surrounding something that looked like a Sphere of Annihilation were NOT performing a ritual to control it to create a bad effect, but were instead acting more like nuclear weapons technicians, trying to keep an old and unstable weapon from becoming UNcontrolled.
After killing most of the nagas, the PCs realized their mistake and teleported away just in time, but this weapon not only destroyed the dark naga weapons complex and surrounding countryside but also created an extremely large and slowly expanding horizontal portal to the Negative Material Plane that became known as the Deathsea Gate. The radiation from the nearby Deathsea warped the culture and denizens of the nearby orc tribes and inspired the building of the City of Bone. More than one dark energy-themed prestige class became available to villains. The PCs in that campaign and the one after knew of this, but decided it all sounded too dangerous and risky to mess with. Now, two campaigns later, the Deathsea has finally been destroyed by the PCs just in time to blunt the strength of an undead/orc invasion of the Northlands, but in the course of its destruction the resultant explosion has reshaped the continent, caused a tidal wave that ravaged the coast, and the dust cloud has led to a nuclear winter that is devastating an already damaged agricultural food delivery system. The PCs are not in a post-apocalyptic world--they are living through the apocalypse, which gives them plenty to do with their high level powers.
Additionaly, the destruction of the Deathsea and its planar bonds gave me an in-game excuse to disrupt Teleportation and Plane Shifting spells for a time, making them substantially more risky, without making them useless. Any teleportation effect of less than 7th level was 15% likely to draw the caster to a specific spot in a living The players are fine with, even enjoy, the fact that their actions have repercussions that can at least temporarily affect the laws of nature (core rules).
I enjoy campaigns in which the actions (or inaction) of the PCs have major consequences. That's much more possible in "unbalanced" settings.
Very nice, Zog! Excellent ideas all around.