To each their own. I like 'em. But I also like rust monsters. : DNegative level bestowing creatures exist to make future creatures harder.Viewing it short term you are right. Long term they are like rust monsters. They make the party poorer and are annoying like hell. Unless you want to annoy your players I can't see any reason (even after reading this thread and thinking about it) to use either instead of other appropriate enemies."That's a nice sword you have there metal-man. I'll take it! *eats the fighter's sword.* Delicious!"
I think the problem some GMs do is just spring negative levels and expensive item destroying creatures/traps/hazards on players without alluding to the fact that these exist. Losing a 15 gp longsword isn't a problem while losing a 2015 gp longsword is a problem if the GM isn't ensuring this is balanced out with either extra money or drops.
Not only that. Most of the time rust monsters and level drainers mainly hit the martials. Rust monsters because martials are the ones with metal gear and level drainers because the martial's job is it to stand between the monsters and the squishies.
And yet, depending on the group, it is the martial who has to pay the bill.So yes, they are fantastic monsters. Just there to pick on the weak.
Last time I've seen a rust monster it was in an AP where the party was below half WBL and it destroyed the only magic armor in the whole party (level 6). That is not gamemastering, that is showing your players the finger. And most occurances of level drainers or rustmonsters and the like is just that.
Your mileage, apparently, may vary. The last time I hit the party with rust monsters, the only one affected was the wizard, whose crossbow was eaten to pieces. The rest of the party was smart enough not to engage.
And in my experience, level- or ability-draining monsters tend to hit whomever they are able to hit, which usually meant slow, squishy wizards instead of armored fighters (corporeal enemies) or the nimbler Dexterity-based characters (incorporeal enemies).
So please don't turn this into yet another "Paizo hates martials" thread. It's certainly not the reason level-draining monsters were invented back in the day.
So please don't turn this into yet another "Paizo hates martials" thread. It's certainly not the reason level-draining monsters were invented back in the day.
Not my intention, at all. But most monsters attack what attacks them instead of moving to another target and eating AoOs for it.
Undead have a really antagonistic feel to them, because they present like a common combat encounter, but in reality, they are a trap-like puzzle to be solved in quite limited ways (run or avoid all physical contact, create lots of distance, bypass damage protections, get immune to fear).
Much like a thief with a great disable device on a trap, if you have the right tools (Death Ward) they become trivial.
The frustration of undead effects (ability and level drain) is that you cannot functionally boost your pool in any measurable way, especially at low level. The danger is that they spawn additional threats via removing the death protection from standard stat damage. Add to this that the effects are semi-permanent to heal, taking days or weeks for low level characters to manage.
From a system standpoint, damage, ability damage, level damage, poison, disease, lava, illusions, falling, disintegration, etc. are all mechanisms to add risk to player progress.
Stacking various types of potential threats forces players to design characters as they progress that can respond to varied situations as opposed to only resisting a since form of threat, like hp vs. AC/DR.
If you remove too many from your game, you run the risk of invincible players.
If anything, pathfinder made many undead weaker by limiting the Earth Glide of incorporeal.
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It's not a statistical anomaly if it happens over the course of months of RL play. Presume you make about 40 d20 rolls in a session. Statistically about 2 of those would be "fail by one" and about 2 would be "exact roll needed." One negative levels bumps those into "fail by 2" and "fail by one" - and now those instances of fail by one are much more noticeable because you have something to blame. It's no wonder those incidents stick out in a player's mind after many sessions of dealing with it.
Negative levels are much less nasty than they were in previous editions as noted. Who remembers actually losing 1-2 real levels per hit, and needing a 7th level cleric spell to "fix," which would just restore you to the minimum of the level you lost? Gotta love being close to leveling and then resetting to the beginning of your level even if you got healed, incidentally losing all the XP gained between the level drain and the healing spell as well.
Really, I only have two problems and a quibble with negative levels right now. One is that, while they are meant to be a quick-build version of losing a level, they also penalize things that your level may not affect. A wizard loses 1 to hit per negative level, even though they don't gain BAB that quickly. All skills take a -1 per neg level even without ranks. In some ways they hurt more than losing a real level would.
The second is that a good proportion of energy draining monsters also target touch AC, which makes defending against them a pain and/or super expensive. Ghost touch is awesome if you're going to be fighting a lot of incorporeals but very situational for its price.
My quibble is that even with all the progress made toward having parties without needing a dedicated healbot, one thing an experienced group should ask themselves during character creation is "How are we going to handle negative levels?" If you don't have a good answer to that question you can end up in a bad situation - see having to live with a negative level for 2 RL months of play.
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I set multiple fires in the only nearby major city and caused a few explosions. One of our party members also got in a scuff with some guards during the panic and chaos I caused but everyone thought it best to high-tail it out of town almost immediately. The guards blocked our path (not letting anyone out, despite the city being on fire) so we got out of pur cart and helped the citizens beat up the guards so people and ourselves, could escape. That was the only place with clerics of high enough level who could help me. Our own party cleric just recently hit 6th level so is not capable of casting the spell I need, and as an oracle, I did not use one of my spells known to acquire it. Since then, we've been with brigands and exploring an ancient temple-like structure which is essentially a flying tower and we are now on an apparently unknown island with native peoples. We don't know their level but they have no spellcasters besides one who is a cleric that came to visit long before we ever arrived. Depending on his level, he may be able to help me. Statistically, though, he should be under 7th level and unlikely to provide me direct aid. I a! Probably stuck with the curse until our cleric levels or we find a larger settlement so several more sessions seems likely. The chararacter has had the negative level long before setting the city on fire, though.
Nothing anomalous about it. In fact if I was not failing by exactly 1 or 2 it would be bizarre. Did you miss the part about me being the party rogue? Our group is reasonably organized so at every door and entranceway I roll to check for traps, listen at door, if there is a trap I roll to disable if the door is locked I roll to unlock. So per door I have 1-4 skill checks to make. If I do hear something I open the door quietly and make another skill checks a stealth roll. Then, depending on the situation I may need to make a perception check to see what is in the room. So now we are at 1-6 rolls on any given door...the gm does roll for disable and trap based perception which definitely cuts down on how much it seems like I am rolling. But I roll probably 10x as much as anyone else in the group does. That number is not exaggeration. I sneak off ahead of the party to scout with message cast to transmit info, those are stealth checks. I get caught, bluff checks in the right circumstance.
We explore a lot of dungeons because we are looking for treasure. We take on a lot of jobs in temples, caves, ruins and wilderness. I have tons of opportunities to make skill checks. Failing by seldomly would be the anomaly.
Then there are all of the role playing situations where it is an opposed roll versus an NPC. Maybe it is bluff vs sense motive or a raw diplomacy check where I only get to use my sizable charisma bonus but have no ranks. Maybe it's a stealth check because I don't want to be seen but need to gather information or perhaps a perception roll to see something important or divine a clue. Then identifying magic items, making sense motive checks, appraising merchandise to determine authenticity (I'm a treasure hunter)....and I make almost all of these rolls per session as we have a good gm who mixes combat, role play and everything else. So in any given session, I notice the negative level....and I have not even gone into the combat issues it caused, like beating spell resistance, making concentration checks and neutering my damage output by 7 points per spell. It sucks. Having 5 fewer hit points is why I went unconscious in our last encounter with a hungry bullette. It dropped me to -1. You remove the negative level and I would have been conscious to fireball it (for less damage) again, ending the encounter.
So factor this for an entire scenario and it is noticeable. Repeatedly. Because at least a few of those rolls are ones where I could have succeeded but didn't -specifically because- of the negative level. Of course plenty are failures due to plain poor rolls and most are successful due to high modifiers and decent rolls. But on dice roll #80 you feel the -1. Multiplied over 2 months of gaming with it and you start to feel cursed as you inevitably have failed quite a few critical rolls specifically because of it. When using skills you're not optimized munchkined out for but are simply passably good with, the -1 makes every attempt a real gamble because now you're actually not likely to succeed whereas before you had roughly a 50% chance. Try it out on a well rounded character built for a legitimate game (none of the theory crafted stuff that is rampant on these boards). You'll grow to hate having these things. You'll call it a curse, too.
*cries*