quick link: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/3rd-party-spells/ascension-games/void-field
So a friend of mine is playing a nightblade right now, and me and another GM friend (i'm the guy who uses a ton of 3rd party stuff of the group) were having a discussion because the nightblade found out about this spell.
So I've got a few questions about this spell because if i'm reading it as-is, it sounds really powerful. Do you get no saving throw from the effects when you're within it (blindness/deafness)? What's to stop someone throwing this on a backline and having them be completely removed from the fight if you're not in a fairly wide open area? For example, if you get no saving throw, you'd almost have 0 reason to not just throw it on a caster immediately because they now don't have access to a significant portion of their spells.
I'm just curious cause looking at it without a lot of context, this spell seems rather powerful for its level.
It is powerful, yes. And no, you get no saving throw. There's a number of reasons I feel it is balanced:
- On most creatures the effects are similar to casting deeper darkness and silence in the same area. Compared to these, however, void field has a much shorter duration and radius than deeper darkness, and a shorter range than silence.
- Unlike both silence and deeper darkness, void field is always a stationary effect. The creatures inside are still capable of moving at half speed (or full speed, with a DC 10 acrobatics check), so getting out of the 20-foot radius area isn't very hard (especially since the other creatures can't make attacks of opportunity against them).
- As it is magical darkness, the nightblade's allies are going to have a tough time seeing into it without specific abilities prepared and/or resource expenditure, meaning actually harming the people inside the field is difficult.
There are plenty of cheaper spells that already can be used to shutdown most of a caster's abilities, like black tentacles or the aforementioned silence, and those don't prevent your allies from still targeting the now-helpless mage with attacks.
Sorry I never responded earlier, but thanks for the help here! Putting into context like this really helps.