for save or suck spells, enemies always roll 10's, bosses roll 15's. let the player's know this, it makes save or suck spells less random and more understandable that they only will be really effective on people who are weaker than you.Saying this up front makes it better, but I think players should get the same benefit. The GM has more NPC's than players have characters.
i avoid save or suck spells that allow for me to just kill people. so, like a sleep on a guy is fine because now the rest of the team has to deal with an it.
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It doesn't have to be. Mooks, terrain, LoS blocking are all factors to casting, archery, and melee.
This can be done against any strategies, this is talking about what makes SoD special compared to other strategies.
This is no different than if two people cast save or suck the first one failed and the second one saved. It just makes no sense that identical outcomes are felt so differently by players.
No, it is different because the first failed save does *nothing* to diminish the enemy's ability to resist the second ability. If init 20 deals 100 damage to a guy with 150HP, then init 15 deals 70, both were needed to win. If init 20 fails to make a SoD stick, then init 15 makes a SoD stick, init 20 did nothing to contribute. The former is teamwork, the latter is not.
Somehow buffing the monster is lame when it involves SoS or SoD but not when it's buffing HP or other defenses, and there will always be a 5% chance the bad guy is just dead or the small chance of triple 20's Permakilling some major setting BBEG.
The difference is that if you add more HP, every action still has the same chance of contributing to the overall victory. If add save bonuses versus SoD, it does nothing to reduce the effect of the SoD, it simply reduces the chance of it sticking.
In other words, it just makes it *less likely* than your boss gets negated instantly by negating a contribution towards victory. HP damage helps whether the enemy has 50 HP or 1000, but SoD only helps if they fail the save, whether they need a nat 20 to pass or a nat 1 to fail. If they pass, no effect, no moving the needle towards victory.
Bull. A 16 bought in STR and +2 from human along side power attack and rage 1 shots everything for several levels. If that (something that is literally a pregenerated level 1 character) is considered optimization I've got bad news for you. Archery is just as bad by level 6.
With very little optimization the average ranger will have 4 attacks which along side haste (again not exactly optimization to haste) grants him enough hits to 1 round basically anything within CR range. It's still good enough to kill pretty much anything by level 2 anyway. Average full martial characters are capable of pointing and saying "I kill you" and the target dies, earlier, more often, and worst off all day.
True, but he does so through incremental contribution. It is not a binary "you win" or "you lose". There is a chance of partial success, which moves the needle towards victory despite being partial. This partial success gives the DM room to buff up the monster without negating the player entirely. Can the barbarian one-shot the BBEG? Give him more HP and it becomes a 2-shot. Done.
In other words, your comment misses the entire point about what makes SoD lame: They are binary. They either work and you win, or they don't and you wasted a turn. It is impossible to make a boss more resistant in that scenario without locking out a player's contributions entirely. And as a DM that likes to see everyone contribute, that sucks.
As it is, pouncing tactics can only be achieved by specific builds of barbarian, brawler, alchemist, and druid
and eidolons
- Torger
Color Spray. Lol.
The other way to do this would be to have spells like this phase in. Color Spray dazzles on a successful save, and on subsequent failed saves ratchets up to dazed, then stunned, etc. Failed saves go straight to stunned and can ratchet up further. Progressive disabling. Save or Die sucks, but so does Save or Suck or Die. A 'consolation prize' for save based spells would be nice, as well as a limitation to Save or Die.
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One issue from a players perspective. They're very hit or miss.
Sure you can do stuff to increase the chance of success, but honestly saves still work. I that case you've just blown your round in combat. That's frustrating because effectively that's one third of combat wasted.
Then there's being on the receiving end. Losing control of your own character can be very dissatisfying. Occasionally it can be entertaining, as long as combat is quick in real time.
However, at high levels combat can take entire game sessions. Suffering a debilitating effect here, or being dominated or dazed etc, means you can literally be out of the entire four hour game session. That is never fun.
There are ways and means around it of course, but they still manage to come up enough that players get annoyed. I lost a fighter to a phantasmal killer. I had very good saves for the fortitude, and pretty good save vs the will since I was a dwarf with the blood of old trait giving me plus three. I rolled two ones in a row. That was it for my fighter. 130 hit points and DR due to his armoured fighter build, but all gone from one spell.
That incident didn't worry me, I take character death very well. However it does demonstrate a problem in mechanics where a bad roll or two can completely end a character.
I'm not a fan of all-or-nothing abilities. I much prefer M&Ms system of degreed success and failure. The save DCs are higher, but failing in the "just failed" bracket merely reduces your save a little until your next rest.On the all-or-nothing abilities: Imagine a system where being attacked required a defense roll to avoid ending up immediately face-down in a pool of your own blood. There are systems like that, but D&D/PF is not one of them (past level 2 or so).
Why do characters get Ablative Plot Armor against melee attacks, but not weird instant-death magic stuff?
Because its magic, and the game is designed to emulate several tropes. If I have to hit you with a death spell 5 times to kill you then it is not much of a death spell. Now of course emulating this trope in the game can make it unfun for some people, which is why many of the SoD spells were changed into hit point reducing spells in Pathfinder.
If a group came to me saying they do not want any death spells used against them I would have no problem taking them out of the game for that group, but I don't really mind them as a GM or player.
1- Because it's boring. Either it doesn't do anything (boring for the caster) or it outright defeats the enemy all by itself with a single standard action (boring for the target).
2- Because it involves no tactic. You roll a die and you either save or you lose. That's it. No tactics involved, it all comes down to luck.
3- It's frustrating. You can be a master of combat tactics, but if you roll a natural 1, you are done. Fun, huh?
My preferred save-or-suck type spell of the moment is most certainly tactical in nature. As a baseline, it denies a single enemy a single turn if they fail their save. Not all that great, but hey it's a 2nd-level spell.
With proper tactical positioning and consideration, that enemy's going to be spending their turn moving through threatened squares. Even failing that, you can at least use it to get the enemy to a position that gives your team a tactical advantage (get the caster drawn out from behind his beefy meatshield mooks, pull a squishy enemy into the middle of your rogues, stuff like that.)
Used creatively with a lenient GM, you might even be able to cheat two enemies out of their turns--one being overtaken by the spell, while the other has to deal with the first enemy getting all handsy with them and trying to remove their armor.
Save-or-suck usually seems alright against NPCs. I hate using it against players though (because shutting players out of participating isn't fun), so I'll usually try to avoid throwing it at them (unless a Pathfinder Society scenario specifically calls for it in an enemy's tactics and I have no other choice).
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I think that save spamming is the biggest culprit here. I'll always remember being a guest at one 3.5 game where the DM had a room with 8-12 SoD Bodaks. "By the rules" of CR it was probably a perfectly fine encounter, but in play it seemed like a slightly nerve wracking "don't roll a 1!" experience.
I agree that SoS can also be pretty boring. I frequently suggest nerfing such spells, often by allowing additional saving throws. For instance, in games where I have influence the Fear spell now allows a new save each round to reduce the condition to shaken. It is still a good spell (especially if you consider the fact that shaken is pretty similar to the effect you'd get from Crushing Despair (minus the damage penalty) and also stacks with it.
I often play with a guy who really loves SoS/SoL/SoD type stuff. He used Phantasmal Killer with a super high DC so much that one DM just started declaring it didn't work on particular monsters. The same PC used Cloak of Dreams so much that my PC got put to sleep by it accidentally a time or two. A subsequent PC took Greater Forbid Action and forbid creatures without ranged attacks (or meaningful ranged attacks) from moving so that the encounter became just a shooting gallery for the PCs.
I never felt that any of that was particularly fun, but for some reason when that fellow's turn came up to DM I built a PC who is ridiculously vulnerable to SoS spells. Now I spend a lot of my game time sitting on the sidelines or trying to kill my party members. My PC does a lot of non-lethal attacks (for Enforcer+Hurtful), so this has served mostly as comedy relief so far. When the DM decides to target the almost always invisible Ninja one of the other PCs is going to die gruesomely though.
I'll always remember being a guest at one 3.5 game where the DM had a room with 8-12 SoD Bodaks. "By the rules" of CR it was probably a perfectly fine encounter, but in play it seemed like a slightly nerve wracking "don't roll a 1!" experience.
Ever since a harrowing experience with a basilisk trap in my PFS group, I've joked to the home group I GM for that if I ever want to kill the party, I'll drop them into a room filled with just enough young advanced basilisks to be a "level-appropriate" encounter (CR = APL+1, probably). We went over the math for it, and the barbarian looked to have about a 5% chance of surviving the first round; other characters were closer to 0.5%.
I often play with a guy who really loves SoS/SoL/SoD type stuff. He used Phantasmal Killer with a super high DC so much that one DM just started declaring it didn't work on particular monsters. The same PC used Cloak of Dreams so much that my PC got put to sleep by it accidentally a time or two. A subsequent PC took Greater Forbid Action and forbid creatures without ranged attacks (or meaningful ranged attacks) from moving so that the encounter became just a shooting gallery for the PCs.
I've never had any players at a table complain about me setting up opportunities for them to easily roll big numbers. Maybe it's because my approach is different than most Save or Suck casters? (Disable/disrupt the enemy so my teammates have an easy time finishing them off, rather than instawinning the encounters.) My GMs have been more upset with my big damage-dealers, anyway. (Most recently, my paladin scoring a crit smite on the first round of the last encounter, and cutting the big baddie in half on the first round.)
Now I spend a lot of my game time sitting on the sidelines or trying to kill my party members.
This part, to me, is the bad part of save-or-sucks. Players shouldn't be made to sit uselessly through a 30minute+ fight because they failed a save at the beginning.
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It kinda works for higher level plays, since it takes too much time to do any encounters. When you have a limited amount of time in a session, you certainly don't want to spend 2 hours on a fight.
I don't mind , save or suck, guess mostly at our table, we kept on using them. But well, I tend to be one of the people who rolls very well, like currently my party, we have an fey sorcerer kitsune and as the DM I pass the saves 90% of the time but then again, guess kinda unusual due to my decent rolls. If you have poor luck with the dice in general, I can see these kind of abilities getting frustrating.
I find slaughtering groups of cowering or otherwise completely neutered monsters for the crime of failing a single tough to make save kind of dull even if I do get to roll some big damage. Honestly most people I play with are more likely to be upset by high AC than SoS spells though.
To be fair, getting killed by attacks will make you sit through fights too, and my PC has spent around 9,800gp on improving AC compared to 1,500gp on improving saving throws. The AC comes in handy in more fights, but when Will save fails it is often an all or nothing thing which not only takes me out of the fight but puts me on the other side of the fight. In a game where we use Hero Points it would literally be easier to deal with getting killed. Heck, even in a game where Raise Dead is available at the regular cost it might be cheaper to deal with getting killed.
Since AC as a defense comes up in practically every fight while Will SoS generally only comes up a few times a campaign there's a temptation to invest more in the defense which will be useful more often. The same recent fight where I got hit with Dominate Person also featured the Ninja getting KO'd by Suffocation. He survived due to boosting one of the 3 saves with a Hero Point, but his Fort save isn't much better than my Will save really while we both have very good AC. It is easy to boost AC. Boosting saves is a little tougher, and getting hit with negative levels can still make things tough - not to say that there aren't AC debuffs too of course...
@Undone - I think the fact that people strongly feel they should avoid bad Will saves says bad things about Will saves. I've rarely seen people advising that you shouldn't dare to play a PC with bad Reflex saves, for instance. When you fail a Reflex save you generally take some damage and move on (or once in a while fall and once in a great while die). When you fail the SoS Will save you become one of the 3 Stooges and there's a decent chance of producing an unintentional TPK.
A simple house rule for SoS spells:
If you would receive a status as a result of a spell you can choose to instead take 'Status Damage'. Status Damage is 1d8 per caster level of the spell for instant death effects (Phantasmal Killer), 1d6 per caster level for anything that would make you helpless or betray your allies, (Hold Person, Dominate Person), or 1d4 per caster level for any less serious status. If this brings your total Status Damage above your current hit points, your magical fortitude fails you and you are hit with the full effect. Status Damage cannot be healed magically but drops to zero after eight hours of rest.