Nothing a fighter can do to render a entire adventure irrelevant? Ha. " while he's talking I fire an arrow at him. Hmm, natural 20, confirmed." BBEG is dead, one shot, one kill.
Adventure over.
You know BBEGs can roll 1's against SoD's right? So this is something a caster can do do. Which means it's not really a point in the Fighter's favor.
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You know BBEGs can roll 1's against SoD's right? So this is something a caster can do do. Which means it's not really a point in the Fighter's favor.Nothing a fighter can do to render a entire adventure irrelevant? Ha. " while he's talking I fire an arrow at him. Hmm, natural 20, confirmed." BBEG is dead, one shot, one kill.
Adventure over.
Not the point he was making. He was responding to the idea that there's nothing fighter can do to change / end a campaign in an unexpected way. The fact that a wizard can do the same has no bearing on the validity of his statement.
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True his statement is accurate and valid. But it's irrelevant to the discussion because the Wizard can do more to end a campaign unexpected ways and that's ultimately what the issue is. It's not that Fighter don't have options; they do. The issue is that the Wizards (really all casters) have those options, plus many many many (that really does need said 3 times) more options. That's what's being discussed. The fact that the Wizard has so many more options. Not that the Fighter doesn't have any.
True his statement is accurate and valid. But it's irrelevant to the discussion because the Wizard can do more to end a campaign unexpected ways and that's ultimately what the issue is. It's not that Fighter don't have options; they do. The issue is that the Wizards (really all casters) have those options, plus many many many (that really does need said 3 times) more options. That's what's being discussed. The fact that the Wizard has so many more options. Not that the Fighter doesn't have any.
No argument there. Magic = versatility simply because it doesn't have to play by the rules.
I do believe it's important, however, to keep in mind the limitations of what magic can do when comparing it to what the non-magical solutions offer. If the purpose of these debates is getting a better idea of what house-rules people would want so as to put the two concepts on parity effectiveness-wise, an understanding of small but relevant details, such as a spells range or casting time, is a necessary thing. So, Dr. Deth's point, that large amounts of weapon damage are just as effective a method of solving the problem of your opponents continuing to draw breath as a Disintegrate or Phantasmal Killer spell, is very relevant to overall purpose of this thread.Unless, of course, the purpose of the thread is just to b*@#^ and whine without any ultimate goal or higher purpose. In which case, I should probably make some popcorn.
@Lucy_Valentine: Don't forget better chances to pass concentration checks, to the point that all but the highest spell-levels can be cast defensively without fail.
Regarding changing the magic system, what about these changes:
- Make concentration a Constitution-based skill again.
- Make SR work against all spells, no exceptions.
- All spells allow a saving throw for at least a reduced effect, no exceptions.
- Bonus spells slots due to high stat are limited to one at each spell level.
- Limit the bonus to spell DC from primary casting stat to a maximum of 1/2 the total caster level.
They should all fit very neatly into Pathfinder and address many of the issues people point out as being completely imbalancing.
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You must cross the Desert of Woe and reach the Forbidden Temple of - "Teleport" DAMMIT, STOP IGNORING ALL MY ADVENTURES!
Oh gosh, that's not a issue at all|
1. They can't tepeport to a unknown place.
2. If they skip the desert,they skip two levels and 50k of loot.
3. If they skip the desert, they fail to find the macguffin needed to get into the temple.
The issue isnt that there are not negative consequences for the caster's action. The issue is that they can do this. That they have power over the story. They have narrative power. They can alter the circumstances in both small scale and large scale.
The issues you mention are entirely metagame constructs designed to limit that narrative power, but they dont change it's existance. The fact that the party will pick up loot and xp as they travel to a place is part of the adventure design, it has nothing to do with the character's choice of how to travel to their destination. And unless he knows ahead of time that he needs a macguffin at location x in the desert, again that is a contivance of the dm/adventure writer.
The fact that the caster can alter the story, and the mundane character cannot is the issue. This applies to big things like teleporting to mount doom and dropping the ring in, but it also applies to circumstances of individual encounters.
A caster can alter the nature of a challenge presented to him. Need to convince the hostile king to help you deal with an orc invasion of a neiboring kingdom...well making him your bestest best buddy with an enchantment spell changes the nature of this challenge. Ambushed on a shakey bridge over a deep casm by archers? Cast fly, or turn into a bird, suddenly the bridge and the casm are no longer real issues.
The mundane characters can only use abilities that act within the situation. They oppose it directly with skills and attacks. The caster can if properly prepared alter the situation to better suit his needs. Have enemies shooting at the party from the back of a long halway? Well hasting the party will help us not have to slog through arrows for 4 turns before we can fight back. That sort of thing is what makes the difference.
And in order to 'fix' the problem, you have to either give mundane characters back the narrative power they used to have (hint its the basis for the leadership feat everyone hates) and have the fighter's discussion with the king be predicated by his army camped out on the fields outside the city walls, or the rogues search for information on the bad guy aided by his theives guild that stretches around the country/region. Things like this should be part of what the class gets as they get to high level. Not story dependant. Just what you get. Wizard gets world altering powers, cleric becomes a walking miracle (literally), fighter gets an army, rogue gets a thieves guild. Thats the way it SHOULD be. But dms balk at the idea of not having control over who gets to have an army, or where theives guilds show up. But they dont balk that the wizard can bend space and time, because...magic.
So thats not part of the game anymore. And the remnant of it, leadership is the most reviled element of the game.
The other option, restrict the narrative power of casters. But cut the mother may I dm vs player crap. CHANGE magic. From the ground up. Ditch the heritage of the game, magic cant be the way jack vance envisioned it in a game world where you want to limit narrative power. Make it different. Make it like the dresden files, or any other of the many many visions of magic. But you have to fundamentally change the classes to go with it.
Those are you choices. Effectively, give worldshaping narrative power to mundane characters, best examples: an army, or a large theives guild, or completely ditch what magic is in this game and start over.
Actually there's a third choice, but thats the second most contentious debate in the game. Make everyone 'magicish'. ToB tried. It wasnt perfect. But it works to a degree.
SO yea, those are your 3 choices. You can try to nerf magic, but that will likely just make casters less fun to play, and not fix the problem of narrative power, it will just change the degree.
Nothing a fighter can do to render a entire adventure irrelevant? Ha. " while he's talking I fire an arrow at him. Hmm, natural 20, confirmed." BBEG is dead, one shot, one kill.
Adventure over.
The BBEG isn't the adventure. He's at best part of the adventure, and getting to him is the other part.
.... unless you're a caster, of course, and can simply bypass his guards and wards.
The issue isnt that there are not negative consequences for the caster's action. The issue is that they can do this. That they have power over the story. They have narrative power. They can alter the circumstances in both small scale and large scale.The issues you mention are entirely metagame constructs designed to limit that narrative power, but they dont change it's existance. The fact that the party will pick up loot and xp as they travel to a place is part of the adventure design, it has nothing to do with the character's choice of how to travel to their destination. And unless he knows ahead of time that he needs a macguffin at location x in the desert, again that is a contivance of the dm/adventure writer.
I love how everyone complains that the DM's job is made much harder because of magic when those tricks actually hurt the party and caster far more over the long run than the DM, and that's assuming that the caster has the necessary trick available at the right time. The party could very well have needed those levels before reaching the temple and now the party as a whole is screwed because they don't have the necessary power and resources to deal with the temple itself. You don't always have a day to wait for the cleric or wizard to reprepare spells and the wizard may not have the needed spell in his spell book. Magic is precisely as overpowered as the DM lets it be, no more and no less; the DM controls access to gold, time, and other materials, such as scrolls. At higher levels, PC casters face rival NPCs that keep most of the scenarios that people use to show how broken magic is from ever actually developing. There's a reason that Elminster rarely uses his magic directly; the raw power of higher level magic is just as likely to be turned against the caster as it is to solve the problem the way the caster expects, with a myriad of possible results in between those two extremes as well. It simply is not easily controlled and creates a lot of secondary ripple effects beyond what the caster even knows about, and a good DM will take advantage of that very quickly.
At certain levels, the type of adventure that the DM has to design changes, but that is just as true of martials as it is for casters. In all cases, at higher levels, a single adventure or encounter is not going to have much impact, even if you're an all fighter party. Using magic and plotting long term strategies take on greater importance than winning a single battle or defeating a single enemy. This is nothing new to 3rd edition; it's always been present in all editions of D&D. People who love traditional dungeon crawls and treks through the desert should never play above 7th or 8th level in any edition because they will break down at that point. Martials will blow through them easily enough they aren't worth playing through in most cases, and casters will ignore them; the end result is the same. The types of adventures and encounters that work at lower levels will not work with any party at higher levels. Stand alone adventures or encounters in particular are going to fall flat very quickly at high levels; the emphasis, whether people like it or not, must move beyond the raw class abilities of the character and focus on how that character interacts with the world and it's inhabitants. The precise level may differ from a caster heavy party to a martial heavy party, but the basic reality is still there regardless.
To me, the problem with magic is in how the entire D&D family tends to handle magic, not a problem with any one of the several systems within that family. It's more apparent in 3rd edition and requires different solutions than what you would do in other editions, but at it's core, it's no better or worse than any other edition. There will never be an edition of D&D where magic is balanced with martials; the two systems are designed with two completely different goals in mind and therefore use two completely different approaches; any attempts to try to change the goals of either system to allow for a balanced system are not going to be met with open arms (just look at 4E for proof of that; many fans of both martials and casters united in disliking that approach).
Nothing a fighter can do to render a entire adventure irrelevant? Ha. " while he's talking I fire an arrow at him. Hmm, natural 20, confirmed." BBEG is dead, one shot, one kill.
Adventure over.
The BBEG isn't the adventure. He's at best part of the adventure, and getting to him is the other part.
.... unless you're a caster, of course, and can simply bypass his guards and wards.
And the caster (and his party mates) also misses out on the experience and any loot that may have been gained by doing it the longer way. He better hope he now has the necessary spells to deal with the BBEG, because that's all the party has at this point, since the martials were denied access to the upgrades they needed to fight the BBEG. In short, the caster can do what you say, that is true, and in the process, actually help the DM by making it harder for himself and the party who all now have to face the end dungeon with none of the resources that the DM had prepared for them on the journey there. All it will take is getting burned once, and the caster may find the rest of party unwilling to join him in his shortcut.
Odds of a Ranger beating a caster's initiative: Low.
Odds of them being taken out by a Swift Action Save or Die at 10+: High.
Odds of them being taken out by a standard action Save or Die at 10-: High.Huh? Neither of those even look like full round actions... weird. It's like casters can subdue opponents with less action use then martials. Odd that.
Sure sure, I am sure you are about to compare the initiative of that Divination specialist, with improved init, the greensting scorpion, and walks around all day with moment of prescience, right? How about the average wizard with the dex of 14 against the ranger with the dex of 18 or 20?
Again, you are talking about level 11+ wizards who are just waiting for this encounter. Your arguments every time on these are so myopic. You clearly have a hard on for casters, that's fine, when you run a game just have everyone play fighters and be done with it.
An Elf Wizard (i.e. the most common wizard... seeing as it is PAINFULLY obvious elves are meant to be wizards) would have a 16 dex.. also take into account that wizards tend to grab Improved Iniative... and can easily pump up their Initiative by another 4 with a simple choice of a familiar. Divination is just gravy on the cake...
Additionally, where are you getting your maths??? It is very rare for a ranger to have more than a 18 AFTER racial modifers in dex... It is rare for ANY martial to have more than an 18 in a stat after modifiers (Zen Archers being one of the big exceptions) but to all martials being MAD... I mean, between Str (for damage if you use anything other than scimitar/rapier or if you use Longbows), Dex (for AC and to hit with bows), Con (your a combatant... you need it), AND wis (spells), you look MAD as all hell vs a Wizard who is looking at Int (spells), a bit of con (3rd stat) and Dex...
Er, that's not what hypoglycemia is, to begin with.Well, your statement didn't seem to make a lot of sense. A complaint about how it's impossible to do a desert survival adventure because of Create Food and Water is somewhat undermined when you then say the spell would contribute to low blood-sugar in the army. Typically, you think that having LESS food available to you would do this, since the inverse, an abundance of food in the short term, contributes to a spiking in glucose levels. In fact, after reading up on the possible causes of hypoglycemia, I'm even more confused as to how you intentionally decided to use that term in conjunction with this scenario. Ergo, I made an assumption about what you meant. Apologies, I won't do so again.
Sieges work because the besieged can't get supplies (largely food and medicine) and so takes casualties from hunger and disease to the point where they're willing to surrender. If you could take a castle by force main, you have done that already. Since you can't take the castle by force, and you can't starve them out, you'll simply taking casualties yourself with no benefit.No, I mean how does a single casting of Planar Ally break a siege in that way? Obviously, a single outsider isn't going to break any but the most mild of sieges, but I don't see how they'll supply your allies with food and water either. Outside of using a LOT of bound genies for their 1/day use of Create Food / Water, all the major outsider with prepared divine spellcasting that can be reconfigured over a long haul to do this many times per day to shore up the defenders are stuck under the greater version of Planar Ally. By the time you're 15th/16th level, I don't think we should be worried about how casting a few spells will help turn the tides of a siege slightly in one side or the others favors.
Because it's trivial to repair a damaged skull (make whole will...
Create Water is a cantrip... you will never run out of water...
Utilize Planar binding to create a shipping lane between your city and another plane of existance (bartering with Genies is always fun)...
Nothing a fighter can do to render a entire adventure irrelevant? Ha. " while he's talking I fire an arrow at him. Hmm, natural 20, confirmed." BBEG is dead, one shot, one kill.
Adventure over.
Yeah... if you can get to the BBEG...
And the caster also misses on on the experience and any loot that may have been gained by doing it the longer way. He better hope he now has the necessary spells to deal with the BBEG, because that's all the party has at this point, since the martials were denied access to the upgrades they needed to fight the BBEG. In short, the caster can do what you say, that is true, and in the process, actually help the DM by making it harder for himself and the party who all now have to face the end dungeon with none of the resources that the DM had prepared for them on the journey there. All it will take is getting burned once, and the caster may find the rest of party unwilling to join him in his shortcut.Nothing a fighter can do to render a entire adventure irrelevant? Ha. " while he's talking I fire an arrow at him. Hmm, natural 20, confirmed." BBEG is dead, one shot, one kill.
Adventure over.
The BBEG isn't the adventure. He's at best part of the adventure, and getting to him is the other part.
.... unless you're a caster, of course, and can simply bypass his guards and wards.
You are aware that simply "defeating" an encounter earns you XP right? You don't need to kill something to earn XP. Getting a golem stuck in a pit and walking right by it is sufficient enough... sure you lose out on loot maybe but the XP is not much an issue...
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The issue isnt that there are not negative consequences for the caster's action. The issue is that they can do this. That they have power over the story. They have narrative power. They can alter the circumstances in both small scale and large scale.
You must cross the Desert of Woe and reach the Forbidden Temple of - "Teleport" DAMMIT, STOP IGNORING ALL MY ADVENTURES!
Oh gosh, that's not a issue at all|
1. They can't tepeport to a unknown place.
2. If they skip the desert,they skip two levels and 50k of loot.
3. If they skip the desert, they fail to find the macguffin needed to get into the temple.
Yes, this. If you're designing a cross-the-desert-and-reach-the-temple adventure for a party of tier 3 characters, you don't need to pay attention to this, because the tier 3 characters can't break your adventure. (And, no, one-shotting the BBEG doesn't count as "breaking the adventure," since the bulk of the adventure was getting to the BBEG in the first place.) They'll either use mundane transport (I foresee lots of Ride checks) or they'll use some form of magical transportation that you yourself put in as a shortcut.
This is basically the "why didn't the eagles fly the Ring to Mordor" question. There is, in fact, a gaping plot hole in the whole story, and a lot of fan time has been spent trying to create these "metagame consequences" that Tolkien rather obviously neither knew nor cared about. Tolkein was telling a story, and so he deliberately limited the roles and actions of the characters in such a way as to make an effective story. Even at a more limited level, if Elrond had had the sense simply to send Aragorn and Gandalf with Frodo (and Sam), leaving Pippin and Merry, whom he knew to be liabilities, at home, the group would have been able to cross Moria in safety and Aragorn would have been able to lead Frodo in safety to Mt. Doom -- and then throw Frodo into the fire by force main, if necessary. The whole deus ex machina bit with Gollum was only necessary because Tolkien was able to force a degree of predestination on the whole plot, and enforce bad decisions throughout in support of it.
Indeed, this is a standard trope in much of fiction -- it's only because the protagonist/PC makes stupid decisions in the first third of the book that the rest has a chance to exist. If the amateur detective had told the police of his suspicions, instead of investigating himself, the case would have been wrapped up by chapter 4. If the witness to the murder had talked to the detective, he wouldn't have ended up as the second corpse. Hell, if Princess Leia had made a second copy of the Death Star plans and simply dropped them in the mail, Luke's heroics would have been unnecessary.
A Game Master doesn't have that kind of control ("no, you can't make good decisions because it will further the plot if you carry the Idiot Ball around for a while.") But by the same token, "martial" characters usually don't have the game-destroying power that will derail plots. Once it was decided that Frodo would walk to Mordor, much of his adventure path was more or less locked in, because he didn't have the ability to summon Eagle Express.
You are aware that simply "defeating" an encounter earns you XP right? You don't need to kill something to earn XP. Getting a golem stuck in a pit and walking right by it is sufficient enough... sure you lose out on loot maybe but the XP is not much an issue...
You first have to actually have the encounter, and most of the complaints here have been about wizards bypassing encounters entirely, as in, they never happen. That means no xp. And for the encounter ending spells, the loss of loot may not hurt once or twice to the caster, but it will to the caster's party members, and after a while, the caster will start to feel it too when they can't afford any more scrolls. Add in the fact that many DMs will give less xp for an encountered bypassed that easily, and the loss of xp also will become noticeable over time at most tables. In the end, magic is not the silver bullet or campaign destroyer that many people try to make it out to be. It's great for that one time you really, really need to do something quickly and without using many resources, but over time, over reliance can become a liability that enemies can and, under a smart DM, will exploit.
And the caster (and his party mates) also misses out on the experience and any loot that may have been gained by doing it the longer way.Nothing a fighter can do to render a entire adventure irrelevant? Ha. " while he's talking I fire an arrow at him. Hmm, natural 20, confirmed." BBEG is dead, one shot, one kill.
Adventure over.
The BBEG isn't the adventure. He's at best part of the adventure, and getting to him is the other part.
.... unless you're a caster, of course, and can simply bypass his guards and wards.
Not a problem. The caster simply handles transportation, and lets the martial kill the bad guy and take all the credit. Caster gets half of the loot and a small fraction of the experience in exchange for none of the risk.
If the caster's motivation for adventuring is money and loot, this is a much more efficient way to do it. If his motivation for adventuring is killing the BBEG, it's still much more efficient.
Create Water is a cantrip... you will never run out of water...
Utilize Planar binding to create a shipping lane between your city and another plane of existance (bartering with Genies is always fun)...
I'm aware of how Create Water works. That's not the issue. An army that has sated their thirst will live for a time. An army that is still starving is not going to be doing any fighting worth a damn. That is the major issue with sieges.
If you're trying to setup that kind of thing with a single Lesser Planar Ally, you need to consider how much it will cost, both up front and in the long haul. Assuming that you want a full week for people to eat and recover some of their strength (definitely not an unreasonable amount of time), that's 500 + 1000 x 7 for a total of 7500 gp. That's one CR 4 genie's help, mind you. If you want him to actually bring in extra help sufficient to really feed a very large number of people, he's going to need some extra bargaining power. This means you'll be paying a lot in the form of more offerings for his friends or some kind of special incentive to the one coordinating genie in question. And of course, you should keep in mind that it's entirely up to the GM whether such a thing is actually possible in any given instance. There's nothing hard-coded into the game to say this always an option.
Yes, this. If you're designing a cross-the-desert-and-reach-the-temple adventure for a party of tier 3 characters, you don't need to pay attention to this, because the tier 3 characters can't break your adventure. (And, no, one-shotting the BBEG doesn't count as "breaking the adventure," since the bulk of the adventure was getting to the BBEG in the first place.) They'll either use mundane transport (I foresee lots of Ride checks) or they'll use some form of magical transportation that you yourself put in as a shortcut.
At higher levels, though, the party is still going to make short work of the traveling aspect of the adventure. Whether it be hand waving away a lot of Ride and Fortitude checks that are basically auto successes, so not worth rolling, and mostly skipping over the vast majority of random encounters because the party can steamroll over them in one round, or the caster casting a single spell, the effect is likely going to be the same, save that the first example still has the party getting at least some xp and loot, while in the second, the party doesn't actually gain anything save time. Their ability to deal with the BBEG hasn't improved any and chances are that if the DM planned for them to go through the desert, he made the encounters in the temple harder to compensate for the additional expected xp and loot. The DM doesn't lose by having a caster bypass the desert; the caster actually made it harder for the party to ultimately succeed.
A large part of the problem is that a lot of people want to have a traditional traveling and dungeon crawl type adventures at level 10, and that just doesn't work, at all, for any party. And it's the same for the stories that these people so often reference; how often do you see tales of the struggles Hercules went through to get to his challenge? Almost never, and for good reason; he either shrugged them off or paid someone to deal with them, just like a high level party of martials would. The desert trek would still end up being a very dissatisfying story for everyone involved, and largely hand waved as a result.
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love how everyone complains that the DM's job is made much harder because of magic when those tricks actually hurt the party and caster far more over the long run than the DM, and that's assuming that the caster has the necessary trick available at the right time. The party could very well have needed those levels before reaching the temple and now the party as a whole is screwed because they don't have the necessary power and resources to deal with the temple itself. You don't always have a day to wait for the cleric or wizard to reprepare spells and the wizard may not have the needed spell in his spell book. Magic is precisely as overpowered as the DM lets it be, no more and no less; the DM controls access to gold, time, and other materials, such as scrolls. At higher levels, PC casters face rival NPCs that keep most of the scenarios that people use to show how broken magic is from ever actually developing. There's a reason that Elminster rarely uses his magic directly; the raw power of higher level magic is just as likely to be turned against the caster as it is to solve the problem the way the caster expects, with a myriad of possible results in between those two extremes as well. It simply is not easily controlled and creates a lot of secondary ripple effects beyond what the caster even knows about, and a good DM will take advantage of that very quickly.
If the DM's goal is to make sure everyone at his table has fun, things that hurt the party, make his job harder.
The whole point is that the dm shouldnt have to 'let' anything be powerful or overpowered. It should just work.
And again, the whole point is that the dm shouldnt be trying to take advantage of anything. Its not the dm's job to screw the player for using his abilities. Its his job to create an interesting story for the player to play through. What you are describing is the exact problem with the state of the game. GMs that, oh lets say, want to play a fun game with their friends without getting antagonistic, have alot of trouble managing high level magic. We dont want a player vs dm mentality where i have to shut down my players in order to make the story work. If I wanted that I'd play magic the gathering, not a collective storytelling adventure game.
If I was hosting all my friends and we were playing video games. If one was playing on my xbox one, and the other was playing on my nes. I would not even out the experience of both players by periodically punching my friend who is playing xbox in the face. That doesnt make me fair, that makes me a jerk.
And again, obviously not all casters can do everything. But most casters can do anything. The problem is potential, not the effect of each individual caster on each individual day.
At certain levels, the type of adventure that the DM has to design changes, but that is just as true of martials as it is for casters. In all cases, at higher levels, a single adventure or encounter is not going to have much impact, even if you're an all fighter party. Using magic and plotting long term strategies take on greater importance than winning a single battle or defeating a single enemy. This is nothing new to 3rd edition; it's always been present in all editions of D&D. People who love traditional dungeon crawls and treks through the desert should never play above 7th or 8th level in any edition because they will break down at that point. Martials will blow through them easily enough they aren't worth playing through in most cases, and casters will ignore them; the end result is the same. The types of adventures and encounters that work at lower levels will not work with any party at higher levels. Stand alone adventures or encounters in particular are going to fall flat very quickly at high levels; the emphasis, whether people like it or not, must move beyond the raw class abilities of the character and focus on how that character interacts with the world and it's inhabitants. The precise level may differ from a caster heavy party to a martial heavy party, but the basic reality is still there regardless.
What are you talking about? Martials only blow through encounters that are not appropriately scaled for their capabilities. If you put tougher more numerous opponents in those dungeons the difficulty remains the same. With high level casters, the concept of a location being an obsticle becomes unworkable.
In order to challenge high level fighters you just need bigger numbers. Higher ACs more hit points, better attacks. Thats it. Scale that with what the fighter can do and your fighter is challenged.
In order to challenge a high level caster you need to change the kind of story you are telling, since he can walk through walls, teleport or fly over forests, ask the gods who killed the merchant, and summon a literal army of angels to fight for him. You have to either change the story to one that caters to what the caster is able to do, or directly counter what the caster is doing in order to challenge him.
To me, the problem with magic is in how the entire D&D family tends to handle magic, not a problem with any one of the several systems within that family. It's more apparent in 3rd edition and requires different solutions than what you would do in other editions, but at it's core, it's no better or worse than any other edition. There will never be an edition of D&D where magic is balanced with martials; the two systems are designed with two completely different goals in mind and therefore use two completely different approaches; any attempts to try to change the goals of either system to allow for a balanced system are not going to be met with open arms (just look at 4E for proof of that; many fans of both martials and casters united in disliking that approach).
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You cant please everyone. 4E was actually a very good game. It did what it was trying to do. Some people liked it, some peoble didnt.
But you are wrong. You can balance martials and magic. You just have to teach dms to let go of some of their control when it comes to martials. If rogues got a large theives guild as a matter of leveling up when they got to high levels, and abilities that would come with that, rogues would stand just fine along side magic characters. And the messed up thing, is they used to get this. But dms dont want to hand over that kind of story based power to players unless its 'magic'.
Give the fighter an army, and again, give him relavent abilities to match as he levels up, and guess what, he's going to matter at high levels. Have a social encounter where you are worried about the fighter participating? Well his army probably gives him some serious boosts to diplomacy and intimidate checks regardless of what his actual personal score is. The point is, these things should be baked directly into the class. They should and can get a toolbox as robust and effective as magic. It wont do precisely the same things, but thats not the point. The point is for them to have the same influence over the story that casters have.
But again, it means dm's giving up some of their narrative power to a mundane ability.
Not a problem. The caster simply handles transportation, and lets the martial kill the bad guy and take all the credit. Caster gets half of the loot and a small fraction of the experience in exchange for none of the risk.
If the caster's motivation for adventuring is money and loot, this is a much more efficient way to do it. If his motivation for adventuring is killing the BBEG, it's still much more efficient.
But if the fighter was relying on the loot and/or xp found along the way to actually defeat the BBEG, than instant transportation doesn't actually help, since no one gets any loot or xp when the BBEG ultimately is rendered unbeatable by the party's own actions, making it a losing proposition for the caster as well.
As for the second part, rarely does a good story end with the killing of a single BBEG, nor is that usually as simple a process a single climatic battle. Campaigns usually center around entire organizations or groups, even those that feature a final big boss at the end. If I were a DM and the party managed to kill the BBEG that quick, they would find out that skipping ahead to the BBEG without dealing with the rest of the group was counterproductive, and now they had to deal with an even bigger problem that may or may not have a clearly distinguishable solution.
Again, the assumption is being made that the dungeon crawl is the desired story and adventure mode at higher levels. That doesn't work, and most of the people having problems are those that are not willing to accept this very basic detail. Adventure types must change as PCs level; low level adventure scenarios will almost always break down at higher levels, regardless of the party.
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Er, that's not what hypoglycemia is, to begin with.Well, your statement didn't seem to make a lot of sense. A complaint about how it's impossible to do a desert survival adventure because of Create Food and Water is somewhat undermined when you then say the spell would contribute to low blood-sugar in the army. Typically, you think that having LESS food available to you would do this, since the inverse, an abundance of food in the short term, contributes to a spiking in glucose levels. In fact, after reading up on the possible causes of hypoglycemia, I'm even more confused as to how you intentionally decided to use that term in conjunction with this scenario.
Look up "reactive hypoglycemia" sometime. It's probably the most common form of hypoglycemia, and it's caused by eating too much food, especially high carbohydrates. You may know it better as "carb crash."
Sieges work because the besieged can't get supplies (largely food and medicine) and so takes casualties from hunger and disease to the point where they're willing to surrender. If you could take a castle by force main, you have done that already. Since you can't take the castle by force, and you can't starve them out, you'll simply taking casualties yourself with no benefit.No, I mean how does a single casting of Planar Ally break a siege in that way?
The Planar Ally brings food in from elsewhere. The simplest way is to bind a hound archon to teleport the goods in. A hound archon, for example, could carry a portable hole to the local lake, open it underwater, and bring back 20,000 gallons of water in less than a minute. Similarly, that same hound archon could teleport to a grain merchant and bring back roughly a hundred thousand pounds of wheat. Even a fully-loaded handy haversack could bring food and water in at hundreds of pounds a minute, and you could get at least 100 pounds a minute via an ordinary mundane container. Work like this for six hours, and, even assuming only mundane resources, you've got enough food and water to keep 5,000 people alive.
A more sophisticated approach would be to use that archon to convey a message to his friends asking for their help, and then a lot of outsiders drop by for five minutes or so to deliver everything you could ask for.
But if the fighter was relying on the loot and/or xp found along the way to actually defeat the BBEG, than instant transportation doesn't actually help, since no one gets any loot or xp when the BBEG ultimately is rendered unbeatable by the party's own actions, making it a losing proposition for the caster as well.Not a problem. The caster simply handles transportation, and lets the martial kill the bad guy and take all the credit. Caster gets half of the loot and a small fraction of the experience in exchange for none of the risk.
If the caster's motivation for adventuring is money and loot, this is a much more efficient way to do it. If his motivation for adventuring is killing the BBEG, it's still much more efficient.
Shrug. So I bring another martial. Hell, I can bring a dozen martials, all created as magic simulacra.
Alternatively, I find easier ways to get loot (planar ally again; I simply need to rent some equipment from the higher planes) and kit the fighter out, again with minimal risk.
Man, you don't have to punch the other guy. Imma stay on the NES all night!
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"You'll miss out on XP" is fine as a metagame construct, but it seriously misses the mark if you're trying to run a game with any semblance of verisimilitude.
When you break the 4th wall with it, it means a smart PC would kill thousands of mooks during his spare time to farm the xp until he had enough, then stop when he realized the God of the World was going to start throwing tougher encounters at him that he would otherwise experience.
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At higher levels, though, the party is still going to make short work of the traveling aspect of the adventure. Whether it be hand waving away a lot of Ride and Fortitude checks that are basically auto successes, so not worth rolling, and mostly skipping over the vast majority of random encounters because the party can steamroll over them in one round, or the caster casting a single spell, the effect is likely going to be the same, save that the first example still has the party getting at least some xp and loot, while in the second, the party doesn't actually gain anything save time. Their ability to deal with the BBEG hasn't improved any and chances are that if the DM planned for them to go through the desert, he made the encounters in the temple harder to compensate for the additional expected xp and loot. The DM doesn't lose by having a caster bypass the desert; the caster actually made it harder for the party to ultimately succeed.
Lets get one thing straight. If the party fails. IE they all die. Its not just the party that failed. The dm also failed. His story is over without a satisfying confusion.
As for the desert. This is simply untrue. Yes, higher level characters will make more of their saves. But they still need to worry about food and water (without magic), they still have to fight the things in the desert. A dm can simply make those tasks harder to keep the challenge up. This new desert has less plant and animal life, the survival checks are harder. This desert is hotter, perhaps even supernaturally hot, the fortitude saves are higher. This desert is more dangerous, the random encounters are harder to fight and thus still meaningful.
A high level caster does not need to go through the desert. He can walk through the dungeon walls to the end. This isnt a matter of difficulty. The numbers dont need to be higher, this kind of challenge no longer applies. And if you are using xp, yes the players will be lower level and probably die when they get where their going, but thats also the dms problem. Party wipes are bad because they end the game. If this happens its not just the party that failed, the dm did too.
A large part of the problem is that a lot of people want to have a traditional traveling and dungeon crawl type adventures at level 10, and that just doesn't work, at all, for any party. And it's the same for the stories that these people so often reference; how often do you see tales of the struggles Hercules went through to get to his challenge? Almost never, and for good reason; he either shrugged them off or paid someone to deal with them, just like a high level party of martials would. The desert trek would still end up being a very dissatisfying story for everyone involved, and largely hand waved as a result.
Hercules isnt a mundane character in pathfinder terms. He can do superhuman things. He doesnt just do things better, he does stuff like divert a river. If fighters could do stuff like hercules could, no one would be making this argument.
But fighters arent hercules. He's just a slightly more effective aragorn playing in a Justice League superheroes adventure.
And again, I dont mind having different categories of challenges as you level. The problem is mundane characters dont drive this need.
If I have a party of fighters and rogues, I can still have a dungeon crawl at 20th level. I just need tougher enemies, better locks, and sneakier traps. A ravine is still an obstacle to a 20th level mundane party. All that is necesssary is that it be wider. All that has to go up is the numbers. They still have to walk through the dungeon, find the traps, kill the bad guys, and fight the big bad at the end.
Hercules doesnt have to walk through the dunegon. He smashes down the walls between the corridors and breaks all the traps in the process.
Speaking of Simulacrum...
I am just going to point out that a level 15 wizard could make a Simularcum of Cthulhu... so pretty much you would be walking aroung with a mini elder god because why not?
Oh and at level 17 a Wizard can easily become the most powerful general in all existance... Cast Greater Create Demi-plane, port to your plane, bind a few earth elementals to your service, open a gate between your demi-plane and the elemental plane of earth, have your Earth elementals run back and forth bringing you Adamantine, and you spend your time making Adamantine Golems to create a rediculously powerful, immortal Golem Army... because why not?
Man, you don't have to punch the other guy. Imma stay on the NES all night!
And if you are happy with your nes, go for it. The problem is the guy who doesnt want to just play the nes while someone else is playing titan fall or some such thing.
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But again, it means dm's giving up some of their narrative power to a mundane ability.
No, what it means is that everyone needs to look past simply what the class abilities say that character can do, regardless of the class, and actually put that character in the world. Mechanically, a wizard and a fighter will never have the same potential; that difference is far too engrained into the D&D dna for that ever to change. There are things that could be done to limit that difference a bit better, but it will never, never disappear. What made it work early on, and what makes it work in 3rd edition as well as any edition, is to look past the class mechanics and embed the characters in the world itself, giving each character their own allies, enemies, and resources beyond the WBL, which in my mind only governs access to immediately available adventuring resources, and let the world be the vehicle that drives the story for everyone. You do that, and suddenly, the wizard doesn't have narrative advantage because you're not basing narrative control on class mechanics.
@Orfamay Quest: Ah, so temporary hypoglycemia, essentially. Hmm, I'm wondering if the 'highly nourishing' part of the food created by that spell would indicate it's essentially magically balanced to avoid this kind of thing. Topic for another thread, I guess.
Okay, I take it back, that's both cheap AND incredibly effective. I'll have to remember that about hound archons.
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At higher levels, though, the party is still going to make short work of the traveling aspect of the adventure (in 3.X). Whether it be hand waving away a lot of Ride and Fortitude checks that are basically auto successes, so not worth rolling (in 3.X), and mostly skipping over the vast majority of random encounters because the party can steamroll over them in one round (in 3.X), or the caster casting a single spell (in 3.X), the effect is likely going to be the same, save that the first example still has the party getting at least some xp and loot, while in the second, the party doesn't actually gain anything save time. Their ability to deal with the BBEG hasn't improved any and chances are that if the DM planned for them to go through the desert, he made the encounters in the temple harder to compensate for the additional expected xp and loot (in 3.X). The DM doesn't lose by having a caster bypass the desert; the caster actually made it harder for the party to ultimately succeed.
A large part of the problem is that a lot of people want to have a traditional traveling and dungeon crawl type adventures at level 10, and that just doesn't work, at all, for any party (in 3.X). And it's the same for the stories that these people so often reference; how often do you see tales of the struggles Hercules went through to get to his challenge? (Hercules was a 10th level, Non-Mythic PC?)
Almost never, and for good reason; he either shrugged them off or paid someone to deal with them, just like a high level party of martials would (you can pay people to travel to the dungeon for you?). The desert trek would still end up being a very dissatisfying story for everyone involved, and largely hand waved as a result (IN 3.X).
Fixed and added some notations for you.
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You do that, and suddenly, the wizard doesn't have narrative advantage because you're not basing narrative control on class mechanics.
Sure, everyone agrees that if you just have a Magical Tea Party, everything is hunky-dory. The issue is that some people want to actually play the game using the actual rules, which include pesky things like "class mechanics."
Shrug. So I bring another martial. Hell, I can bring a dozen martials, all created as magic simulacra.
Alternatively, I find easier ways to get loot (planar ally again; I simply need to rent some equipment from the higher planes) and kit the fighter out, again with minimal risk.
All of those options require DM help and support. The wizard gets none of those automatically. At the very least, it requires the DM to give the party enough treasure in previous adventures to afford all the simulcra. If a player tried that in a game I was DMing and seriously thought it would happen exactly as he wanted it to when he wanted it to, I would laugh out loud. There are costs, consequences, NPC reactions, and secondary effects related to all of those things, and the player controls none of them; they are all firmly in DM territory without any metagaming or stretched explanations required.
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But again, it means dm's giving up some of their narrative power to a mundane ability.No, what it means is that everyone needs to look past simply what the class abilities say that character can do, regardless of the class, and actually put that character in the world. Mechanically, a wizard and a fighter will never have the same potential; that difference is far too engrained into the D&D dna for that ever to change. There are things that could be done to limit that difference a bit better, but it will never, never disappear.
I completely disagree. The game isnt world specific. It is setting neutral. The rules, should just work. As written. I should be able to change things for my world. But I shouldnt HAVE to make it work. That is precisely why this problem makes a dms job harder.
And you are completely mistaken. I just told you how to make martial characters and magic character have equal potential within the framework of dnd. Give the rogue a theives guild. Automatically. At x level, he gets the 'henchmen' ability. From this, he can choose daily tasks for them such as, find information, rob this place, kill this guy, kidnap this guy, intimidate these people, take this thing from here to here under escort. Each day he can change these tasks according to need. As he levels up, he gets more potent tasks, and the guild is better at performing them. The rogue is still a rogue, the wizard is still a wizard. But the rogue gains the same influence over the story.
What made it work early on, and what makes it work in 3rd edition as well as any edition, is to look past the class mechanics and embed the characters in the world itself, giving each character their own allies, enemies, and resources beyond the WBL, which in my mind only governs access to immediately available adventuring resources, and let the world be the vehicle that drives the story for everyone. You do that, and suddenly, the wizard doesn't have narrative advantage because you're not basing narrative control on class mechanics.
No, what made it work early on were the rules were badly written, and often poorly thought out which FORCED gms to make it work. You are welcome to play the game in whatever style you want. If you want players to not use abilities because the dm says so, thats fine. Me I want the game rules to work. To put everyone on an even playing feild, and to allow every player to participate to an equal degree. You wanna punch your friend in the face for playing xbox one, go for it.
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[
The Planar Ally brings food in from elsewhere. The simplest way is to bind a hound archon to teleport the goods in. A hound archon, for example, could carry a portable hole to the local lake, open it underwater, and bring back 20,000 gallons of water in less than a minute. Similarly, that same hound archon could teleport to a grain merchant and bring back roughly a hundred thousand pounds of wheat. Even a fully-loaded handy haversack could bring food and water in at hundreds of pounds a minute, and you could get at least 100 pounds a minute via an ordinary mundane container. Work like this for six hours, and, even assuming only mundane resources, you've got enough food and water to keep 5,000 people alive.
I'd just like to point out -- I know, responding to my own post -- that this illustrates a way out of another "classic" DM trick, the "how do you transport Smaug's hoard" method of limiting treasure. I've seen estimates of 6000 cubic feat of treasure in Smaug's hoard, which will have a lot of DM's cackling evilly about "so, what are you going to do with all this?" That's about 3.6 million pounds of copper, for example, so just over 100,000 gp worth even if it's entirely copper pieces.
At 50 pounds per teleport, it will take a hound archon about 70,000 minutes to carry it away, seven weeks of service. I can easily offer to split the money with the archon. Alternatively, I can buy a portable hole (he can easily pick it up for me somewhere), lend it to the archon for ten minutes, and it's all in my castle at home.
Because casters bypass problems.
You do that, and suddenly, the wizard doesn't have narrative advantage because you're not basing narrative control on class mechanics.Sure, everyone agrees that if you just have a Magical Tea Party, everything is hunky-dory. The issue is that some people want to actually play the game using the actual rules, which include pesky things like "class mechanics."
I never said ignore class mechanics; I said don't use them for controlling story narrative. It's not that hard to do. Magic is really, really good at solving immediate, concrete goals, but that's about it, just like martials are really good at killing things immediately in front of them. The goals may be larger in size, but they are still concrete, limited goals with more or less the same scope.
No class has an inherent advantage in shaping the world as a whole; casters can do a lot, but it can be undone just as quickly by parties that are more powerful and have a vested interest in keeping things from going off kilter. Kings will have their own powerful casters; most regions will have magic police forces with rules on when magic can be used and sold. It's a very simple matter of extending the type of government responses to martial classes to the threats that casters pose.
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You do that, and suddenly, the wizard doesn't have narrative advantage because you're not basing narrative control on class mechanics.Sure, everyone agrees that if you just have a Magical Tea Party, everything is hunky-dory. The issue is that some people want to actually play the game using the actual rules, which include pesky things like "class mechanics."I never said ignore class mechanics; I said don't use them for controlling story narrative. It's not that hard to do. Magic is really, really good at solving immediate, concrete goals, but that's about it, just like martials are really good at killing things immediately in front of them. The goals may be larger in size, but they are still concrete, limited goals with more or less the same scope.
No class has an inherent advantage in shaping the world as a whole; casters can do a lot, but it can be undone just as quickly by parties that are more powerful and have a vested interest in keeping things from going off kilter. Kings will have their own powerful casters; most regions will have magic police forces with rules on when magic can be used and sold. It's a very simple matter of extending the type of government responses to martial classes to the threats that casters pose.
And we are saying you should not have to undo the things your players do in order to keep one character from having greater influence then the other. That simply removes player agency. It doenst solve the problem. It just adds a new one, including an antagonistic relationship between the caster and the dm trying to one up eachother. Some of us play this game with our friends, and want everyone to have fun.
If my buddy is playing xbox one, and my other buddy is playing nes. My solution is not to limit the guy on the xbox to only running the nes emulator and not actually using the xbox. Nor is it to penalyze him secretely or openly for playing titan fall instead.
Speaking of Simulacrum...
I am just going to point out that a level 15 wizard could make a Simularcum of Cthulhu... so pretty much you would be walking aroung with a mini elder god because why not?
Oh and at level 17 a Wizard can easily become the most powerful general in all existance... Cast Greater Create Demi-plane, port to your plane, bind a few earth elementals to your service, open a gate between your demi-plane and the elemental plane of earth, have your Earth elementals run back and forth bringing you Adamantine, and you spend your time making Adamantine Golems to create a rediculously powerful, immortal Golem Army... because why not?
Sounds like you're gonna want to spend ~22,000 gp on making the demiplane permanents first. Which is fine because hey, personal plane of existence. Where's the other 250,000 gp per golem coming from? And how do you ensure the elementals aren't prevented from doing their work at any given point when they're out of your sight?
Not even going to go into the Simulacrum debate. It's only been forced back into a torturous nightmare of existence more times than the T-virus has wiped out whole complexes / cities in the Resident Evil universe.
No class has an inherent advantage in shaping the world as a whole
Are we playing the same game? In Pathfinder, a caster can make his own world, once he gets tired of shaping the existing one.
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All of those options require DM help and support.Shrug. So I bring another martial. Hell, I can bring a dozen martials, all created as magic simulacra.
Alternatively, I find easier ways to get loot (planar ally again; I simply need to rent some equipment from the higher planes) and kit the fighter out, again with minimal risk.
You mean, they require the DM not to go out of his way to screw the wizard out of his abilities.
The wizard gets none of those automatically. At the very least, it requires the DM to give the party enough treasure in previous adventures to afford all the simulcra.
Shrug. The martial is also at the GM's mercy, as the martial doesn't get his equipment either automatically, either. A 13th level wizard (the level that would be casting simulacrum) has 140,000 gp in wealth by level according to the guidelines -- a simulacrum of a 14th level fighter costs 7,000 gp. So I could make ten of them and still have enough left to kit myself out reasonably.
If you're going to complain about giving a wizard a 7,000 gp minion and not complain about the archer's 8000 gp bow, then you're being unfair. And, more to the point, you're doing exactly what Kolokotroni described "restrict[ing] the narrative power of casters," in a way that you're not restricting the narrative power of martials.
And why? Because martials have so little narrative power to restrict. You don't need to play silly-assed "taking equipment away" games with martials, because their equipment won't break the adventure.
I'd just like to point out -- I know, responding to my own post -- that this illustrates a way out of another "classic" DM trick, the "how do you transport Smaug's hoard" method of limiting treasure. I've seen estimates of 6000 cubic feat of treasure in Smaug's hoard, which will have a lot of DM's cackling evilly about "so, what are you going to do with all this?" That's about 3.6 million pounds of copper, for example, so just over 100,000 gp worth even if it's entirely copper pieces.
At 50 pounds per teleport, it will take a hound archon about 70,000 minutes to carry it away, seven weeks of service. I can easily offer to split the money with the archon. Alternatively, I can buy a portable hole (he can easily pick it up for me somewhere), lend it to the archon for ten minutes, and it's all in my castle at home.
Because casters bypass problems.
And players of casters assume a lot when it comes to setting up the perfect conditions. The archon may not ask for payment in coin, but in service, or may refuse payment entirely and do it (or not) based entirely on the overall alignment of the party. Or, he may start the process, and deliberately drag it out or twist it to test the caster and the party. In the end, just because the player has a grand idea of what the caster can do, the world is in no way obligated to cooperate and carry out the plan exactly and it may often dissent just for the sake of dissenting. Enemies will rarely give the party time to fully buff on a routine basis. NPC wizards are not going to just allow a PC to copy a spell out of their spellbook without some kind of very hefty payment, which will not always be coin. If anything, the king is going to be far more likely to trust the fighter acting as a general than the smooth talking bard that looks and sounds far too much like the constant schemers in his court. In the end, the plans and actions of casters are only as good as the reaction the world has to that plan.
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Kings will have their own powerful casters; most regions will have magic police forces with rules on when magic can be used and sold. It's a very simple matter of extending the type of government responses to martial classes to the threats that casters pose.
Ugh. There's not a whole lot of difference, to me, between saying "If you overstep your [my] bounds using magic, the king's pet gods will shut you down," and coming right out and saying, "Magic randomly doesn't work the way the rules say because I don't want your abilities to ruin my story." You're back to playing Magical Tea Party again, and, as Kolo noted, you've now created an antagonistic relationship besides.
No class has an inherent advantage in shaping the world as a wholeAre we playing the same game? In Pathfinder, a caster can make his own world, once he gets tired of shaping the existing one.
At which point, he can play in his own world and forfeit any control over the world that everyone else is playing in. He then becomes an NPC and the player gets to make a new character. At no point is his ability to shape the greater world all that different from anyone else; he can change it faster, but the changes can be undone at an equal rate or create additional changes that are beyond his ability to control, limiting the overall impact.
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And players of casters assume a lot when it comes to setting up the perfect conditions.
Not really. In the case of the archon supplying the besieged city, that's what archons do.
Or, he may start the process, and deliberately drag it out or twist it to test the caster and the party.
That's an interesting interpretation of "lawful good" you have there.
But you've basically proven my point -- you're going out of your way (and providing some really strained rulings) to restrict the narrative power of casters.
At which point, he can play in his own world and forfeit any control over the world that everyone else is playing in. He then becomes an NPC and the player gets to make a new character.
Oh, good, more DM fiat. Dude, check out this thing called "Oberoni Fallacy" and then come back, okay? It'll save everyone time if we're all on the same footing here.
But again, it means dm's giving up some of their narrative power to a mundane ability.No, what it means is that everyone needs to look past simply what the class abilities say that character can do, regardless of the class, and actually put that character in the world. Mechanically, a wizard and a fighter will never have the same potential; that difference is far too engrained into the D&D dna for that ever to change. There are things that could be done to limit that difference a bit better, but it will never, never disappear. What made it work early on, and what makes it work in 3rd edition as well as any edition, is to look past the class mechanics and embed the characters in the world itself, giving each character their own allies, enemies, and resources beyond the WBL, which in my mind only governs access to immediately available adventuring resources, and let the world be the vehicle that drives the story for everyone. You do that, and suddenly, the wizard doesn't have narrative advantage because you're not basing narrative control on class mechanics.
Except by that logic, Wizards would most probably be EVEN FARTHER ahead of martials...
After all, what is the most profitable things to sell/make? Magical Items. And who makes magical items? Casters...
A caster would also have an easier time gaining allies as well. Why? A guy who can swing a sword around are a dime a dozen. A guy who can cast spells though? They are, usually, much more rare.
No class has an inherent advantage in shaping the world as a wholeAre we playing the same game? In Pathfinder, a caster can make his own world, once he gets tired of shaping the existing one.
Wizards are making whole planets now?
[
The Planar Ally brings food in from elsewhere. The simplest way is to bind a hound archon to teleport the goods in. A hound archon, for example, could carry a portable hole to the local lake, open it underwater, and bring back 20,000 gallons of water in less than a minute. Similarly, that same hound archon could teleport to a grain merchant and bring back roughly a hundred thousand pounds of wheat. Even a fully-loaded handy haversack could bring food and water in at hundreds of pounds a minute, and you could get at least 100 pounds a minute via an ordinary mundane container. Work like this for six hours, and, even assuming only mundane resources, you've got enough food and water to keep 5,000 people alive.I'd just like to point out -- I know, responding to my own post -- that this illustrates a way out of another "classic" DM trick, the "how do you transport Smaug's hoard" method of limiting treasure. I've seen estimates of 6000 cubic feat of treasure in Smaug's hoard, which will have a lot of DM's cackling evilly about "so, what are you going to do with all this?" That's about 3.6 million pounds of copper, for example, so just over 100,000 gp worth even if it's entirely copper pieces.
At 50 pounds per teleport, it will take a hound archon about 70,000 minutes to carry it away, seven weeks of service. I can easily offer to split the money with the archon. Alternatively, I can buy a portable hole (he can easily pick it up for me somewhere), lend it to the archon for ten minutes, and it's all in my castle at home.
Because casters bypass problems.
Or you can always take advantage of my favorite spell, Shrink Item.
One of my GMs had forgotten the spell existed once... it was funny. He tells us there is a bunch of large golden statues lining a hall. Normally it would be much to heavy and unwieldy to carry around... until I decided to be a smart ass and shrink item them and carry them in my bag:P
Oh and nothing is funnier than seeing the look on your GMs face whenyou bypass a minor "try and find an entrance into the fortress" thing by whipping out a shrunken Trebuche or Battering Ram :P
I never said ignore class mechanics; I said don't use them for controlling story narrative. It's not that hard to do. Magic is really, really good at solving immediate, concrete goals, but that's about it.
Except that magic is also awesome at solving long-term abstract goals, if you simply read the spells. Simulacrum is a very good example -- as a matter of fact, given the casting time, it's not actually very good at immediate goals. But as a long-term buff, it gives you a mini-me that can do more or less whatever you like (and at a fairly nominal cost) permanently.
You can crank out an army of golems one at a time until you have enough to sack the bad guy's castle and leave no two stones touching. You can even do this before you know whose castle you wish to sack.
You can create a private sanctum to which you can instantly retreat any time you feel the need.
Wizards are making whole planets now?No class has an inherent advantage in shaping the world as a wholeAre we playing the same game? In Pathfinder, a caster can make his own world, once he gets tired of shaping the existing one.
They're making planes. How many planets would you like in your plane?