Are you really nostalgic for 3.5, or just for PHB Wizards?

[Foxwarrior]

Polymorph is actually a good example of why I think lack of nostalgia for phb wizards is the real problem with society today. Polymorph is a really cool and amazing spell, so cool and amazing that you could make a character where that was the main thing they could do and they'd pull their weight just fine. But instead of doing that, making a class for each really cool spell the wizard gets, people generally have just thrown away the cool spells and made games where you can't do enough cool things.

[Username17]

Shape Changing isn't an inherently broken character concept. It's basically conjuration except you lose actual characters for the duration of the transformation. Shape changing can actually be weak, as shown by the fifty million "Barbarian that turns into a Bear" prestige classes that 3.5 ended up with that are all hot garbage.

The broken part is the part where the Polymorph spells directly reference monster entries and are thus complex text inheritance problems that are about two thousand pages long. That's just not remotely OK.

Conjuration can be balanced if it gives you a finite list of monsters to summon. Transformation can as well. It's just when the conjuring list gets arbitrarily long and becomes full of killer apps that solve every possible problem that it becomes broken. And that's the same place we're at with Transformation.

3.5 was fine with telling people that they had a weird and arbitrary list of summon monster targets, and that was fine. Those spells are actually kind of on the weak side, although mostly because of duration issues. It's very notable that the planar binding spells actually do let people dumpster dive through the entire monster manual, and those spells are also completely broken.

Spells just can't have two thousand page text boxes. That's completely unreasonable. And it's totally insane to think that you could have a two thousand page spell that didn't have ridiculous interactions and loop holes in it.

-Username17

[merxa]

But making everything perfectly balanced isn't always fun either, part of the enduring appeal is all the rough edges that happen in 3.5, it also allows each group to sort of house rule their level of optimization.

Formalizing that elasticity seems pretty difficult.

Polymorph, especially PaO was especially unsatisfying because when you try to use it in play it becomes clear very quickly that you've descended into a mtp / mother may I scenario.

In some ways I preferred 2e polymorph, it was typically high risk and often lead to bizarre outcomes which seemed to emulate the fantasy genre my group often played at the time.

I don't have a fix for polymorph, I'd probably divide it up into different level spells and have it emulate different genres, from low level, 'i get bear claws' and light hearted sword-in-the-stone we're all squirrels now to mid level 'ill turn you into a newt' and grow wings you beautiful angel fighter, and finally high level open book craziness with insanity checks and grotesque/nightmarish scenarios along side the, let's all be dragons power fantasy.

[RobbyPants]

How strongly is Regeneration a "have the weak point or lose" ability?

'cause I swear the party just beat the troll warmage into negatives and kept beating it to keep it in negatives while their followers prepared a fire pit in my campaign.

Anyway back in Tome one option for pollymorph given was that each Thingy Form that magic lets you turn into is its own spell with its own effect that wasn't simply to replace you with a MM entry.

Is that a direction worth pursuing still, or does it hit the calssplosion problem

In that specific example, a dire bear should be outpacing regeneration 5, but the point is the bear can never actually kill the troll player. It lacks fire or acid damage, so even if it can chew it into a coma, it never kills it. Presumably, the other players just hang back and kill the bear while the troll PC just takes hits with relative impunity.

But this is just a single example. As Frank earlier noted, having a spell that lets you pick between various GTFO abilities means you get to pick how to comically fuck over your opposition.

Having a spell that lets you turn into various animals (with limits based on CL and CR) would probably be fine. Animals all tend to have similar abilities, and don't have too much in the way of GTFO abilities. Plus, wizards turning into animals is thematic. While I understand the idea that magic could theoretically turn a wizard into any creature, it's a pretty big design space, conceptually, and is pretty much impossible to balance. Even if you limit the CR of the monster you can use by CL, there are plenty of monsters with abilities that are appropriate to fight at level X, but aren't appropriate to have at level X.

[Username17]

But making everything perfectly balanced isn't always fun either, part of the enduring appeal is all the rough edges that happen in 3.5, it also allows each group to sort of house rule their level of optimization.

This is a weird straw argument. Obviously no one is suggesting that all characters be a Dwarven Cleric named Carlos. And further, no one is particularly denying that there is joy to be had in exploiting the edge cases when one weapon or feat is better than another. I've had an Illusionist who wielded a dwarven waraxe that he wasn't proficient with and a Fighter/Rogue who wielded a lucerne hammer. Both for reasons, and that was good.

But I don't think it's a contentious statement to say that no one wants to be dumpster diving through a two thousand page eight volume document to resolve the effects of one fucking spell cast during combat. That's not reasonable. And it's not remotely defensible. No one wants to do that. The fact that the outputs aren't balanced and can't be made to be balanced is almost beside the point. The primary issue is that it's just unusable.

By the end of 3.5's officially supported lifecycle, even the charop folks had pretty much given up talking about polymorph. Not because it wasn't horribly broken or because they had any particular honor code about not breaking things that were abusable, but simply because it had become too complicated to even meaningfully discuss. After several layers of nested errata and inheritance references and contradictory semi-official rulings, the spell was essentially impossible to parse and explain. Getting to the part where out of literally thousands of possible transformation end points the results were a ridiculous obscenity was out of the question because first you had to do Torahesque textual illuminations to even figure out what those end points might be.

3.5 Polymorph is indefensible on any grounds. You cannot excuse that bullshit.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

How about the Polymorph subschool spells they started printing in the PHB II? Those seemed relatively balanced.

[Username17]

How about the Polymorph subschool spells they started printing in the PHB II? Those seemed relatively balanced.

It's instructive to note that the Polymorph Subschool so spectacularly failed to solve the underlying balance issues with Polymorph that between the time that the preview copies went out and the point the PHB2 went on sale to the general public WotC walked it all back and did a scorched earth errata to every single instance of form changing magic and creature ability in the entirety of the core rules to disentangle them from the impending Polymorph Subschool shitstorm. If that shit had actually gone ahead, Silver Dragons would lose the Alternate Form ability when they used the Alternate Form ability.

The specific spells created by the PHB2 team to show off their dumb idea were mostly terrible spells that no one ever casts. Trollform certainly has its uses, but only when you remember the dumb way Regeneration works with non-fire damage sources. Mostly its duration is too short to be worth considering outside bizarre and contrived circumstances to abuse the fringier effects of Regeneration. Dragonform of course never gets cast at all, because fucking obviously.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Turning into a troll isn't a proof that polymorph is broken. charm monster is a 4th level spell with a duration measured in days, and becoming a troll isn't as powerful as having a troll.

[Whatever]

Charm Monster is a broken spell, though.

[virgil]

A fourth level spell that gave one of "Flight and a Ranged Attack," "Regeneration," or "Energy Immunity" would be a killer app that would reduce many combats to comical simplicity. A spell that grants any one of those, chosen when cast is essentially the answer to every encounter. It's probably beyond the acceptable power level for a fourth level spell, but it's certainly beyond the acceptable versatility of any spell. We're talking about a spell that has literally hundreds of distinct modes, and many of those modes turn encounters into trivial roflstompings. And not just combat encounters, since the list of modes includes gaining fast flight, burrowing, water breathing, and other mobility powers.

How would you make Polymorph Self today, as compared to the one you made for the Dungeonomicon? In that one, it was full character replacement, but the option list was still [CR = 3 - ECL, not including incorporeal or swarm].

[Username17]

A fourth level spell that gave one of "Flight and a Ranged Attack," "Regeneration," or "Energy Immunity" would be a killer app that would reduce many combats to comical simplicity. A spell that grants any one of those, chosen when cast is essentially the answer to every encounter. It's probably beyond the acceptable power level for a fourth level spell, but it's certainly beyond the acceptable versatility of any spell. We're talking about a spell that has literally hundreds of distinct modes, and many of those modes turn encounters into trivial roflstompings. And not just combat encounters, since the list of modes includes gaining fast flight, burrowing, water breathing, and other mobility powers.

How would you make Polymorph Self today, as compared to the one you made for the Dungeonomicon? In that one, it was full character replacement, but the option list was still [CR = 3 - ECL, not including incorporeal or swarm].

I would have a finite list of polymorphable shapes and not reference the monster manual at all.

-Username17

[virgil]

Would you have it scale by caster level for the available list, or would you have it work more like summon monster and have the available forms be higher for each spell level? What kind of forms would work for this list, using the character replacement model (as opposed to the buff-style)?

[Axebird]

DSP did a psionics port for Pathfinder where they reworked all the polymorph powers to let you pick a few abilities or modifiers off of a list and everything else was cosmetic. That seems like a reasonable path as well.

[Sacrificial Lamb]

How about the Polymorph subschool spells they started printing in the PHB II? Those seemed relatively balanced.

It's instructive to note that the Polymorph Subschool so spectacularly failed to solve the underlying balance issues with Polymorph that between the time that the preview copies went out and the point the PHB2 went on sale to the general public WotC walked it all back and did a scorched earth errata to every single instance of form changing magic and creature ability in the entirety of the core rules to disentangle them from the impending Polymorph Subschool shitstorm. If that shit had actually gone ahead, Silver Dragons would lose the Alternate Form ability when they used the Alternate Form ability.

The specific spells created by the PHB2 team to show off their dumb idea were mostly terrible spells that no one ever casts. Trollform certainly has its uses, but only when you remember the dumb way Regeneration works with non-fire damage sources. Mostly its duration is too short to be worth considering outside bizarre and contrived circumstances to abuse the fringier effects of Regeneration. Dragonform of course never gets cast at all, because fucking obviously.

-Username17

Not to be nitpicky, and not that it affects the core of your argument....but the spells are named TrollSHAPE and DragonSHAPE (shape, not form).

[zugschef]

Why not make polymorph like summon monster x? Difference being that you don't summon monsters but turn into one of the monsters on the polymorph x list.

[OgreBattle]

Buffs like bull str, illusionary monsters, summoned monsters, martial arts special maneuvers, and polymorphing feel like things one should work out in their game on the same page

[merxa]

While I agree a spell that has an includes list which spans an ever increasing rooster of stat blocks is completely untenable, limiting polymorph to a static lists feels disappointing.

I'd rather see different levels of polymorph that emulate to increasing degrees various creatures, so by the time you reach high level it's not especially broken to be digging through stat blocks for an answer to a problem.

Another alternative would be to limit polymorph forms to like a casters stat modifier, or a combination of both.

So at low level your could polymorph to half a dozen animals your size or one size smaller, and this would slowly expand to humanoids, magical beasts, monsterous humanoids, vermin, etc as size differences also increase. All while keeping the total limit to something like stat mod or stat mod+lvl, provide a mechanism for changing out known forms (ie, week downtime with access to suitable libraries or zoos) and I'd probably also just include a DM notes sidebar discussing possible power implications and considerations.

I'd do the same for summon monster and likely remove the distinction between summon and calling.

[jt]

Even bolting stat blocks together can work if you have a manually curated list of forms that have separate spells. Then if whatever stat splicing procedure you chose makes turning into a troll awesome, that just means Polymorph: Troll is a high level spell. If you really want to enable dumpster diving you could make Polymorph Level into another line on the monster block like CR and LA (hell, add a Summon Level too).

[tussock]

AD&D and 2e has Poly Self, Poly Other, and what the monsters do.

Poly Self gives you the movement speeds of anything out of the MM (land, swimming, flying, jumping), and that is all. Self only, 20 min/level, you can keep changing as a full round action. Same thing Druids get, though they have extra limits on forms (one fish, one bird, one beast, per day each).

Poly Other turns enemies into goldfish, who drown, despite their unchanged HD, HPs, and saves. (Though limiting it to environmentally appropriate and minimum size means people are instead turned into toads, which is better, but it's close enough). Big monsters save on a 3+ in AD&D, but still, just another save or die. Only it takes a few rounds so can be dispelled, or the target rescued into a bowl anyway, so it's OK at 4th level balance-wise.

Also has a small side effect where you can turn things into big hitter monsters and have them use the monster's basic attacks, but would often fail at that, in various catastrophic ways that made it only a dirty bomb or a crit-fishing trick for the bad guys.

Monsters, meanwhile, would just arbitrarily turn into a humanoid, keeping HD, HPs, saves, and all magic and resists. I don't think any of them can turn people into goldfish.

--

Like, that's the story stuff the game needs to represent.

[*] Changing into a bat or wolf to get to combat then just changing back to your normal form to fight it, and then turning into a rat and scuttling away when the fight goes bad, like Vampires (and Druids, and Merlin, and Gandalf) do.
[*] An evil witch turning a PC into a toad, or turning the whole party into rabbits and having a short rabbit adventure to fix that. Also PCs being evil witches.
[*] Someone on the town council being a secret ... well, lots of things can walk around looking like a human, obvs, that's why they aren't extinct yet. Great fun in the woods too, sometimes the lost elf is actually a lost elf.

But fishing through the MM for randomly powerful things that got marked as (Ex) and then using them in combat for a few rounds with forty other changes to your character you don't even want, it's just blind game design. 3e took the "this randomly kills and/or brain-fucks targets, so is not a spell PCs use on each other that way" limits away and massively opened up the use of the spell, and it was an unending disaster for the whole edition.

Maybe the Barbarian or Monk needs to grow bear-claws and hit like a bear because their class features suck, but that doesn't mean the Wizard does it to them as a 4th level spell, at all. We have like Prestige Classes for that in 3e, at that level, just make them not terrible. See also Druids, who really don't need being a combat bear with full casting at all; they already have lots of bears if they want them.

--

Oh, PAO was always stupid. Infinite stupid ways to explode the campaign that aren't allowed because the DM wants the game to continue, and otherwise nothing interesting compared to other spells. Save-or-die at -4 to saves, it's functional, but meh.

And Shapechange is Shapechange. At least in AD&D you did not get new magic stuff at all while you wrecked everyone's day.

[RobG]

Holy crap. My Polymorph thread is relevant again.

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=256410 ... ht=#256410

Spoilers: I fixed it. anyone who says I didn't.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I actually have more nostalgia for the "focused" spellcasters (Healer, Warmage, Beguiler, Dread Necromancer). I feel like that's how spellcasting SHOULD have been done (for the most part, Healer and Warmage came up lacking mechanically but the concept pleases me).

Also I liked Warlocks. Again, probably could have been tweaked mechanically but I like that concept as well, magic is something you just do.

I also liked the Magewright NPC class from Eberron, and still use it in Pathfinder as I feel like there should be a mundane arcane class.

Other than that, eh. Honestly I prefer Pathfinder and 5e to 3e/3.5. Fite me IRL.

[Ignimortis]

I actually have more nostalgia for the "focused" spellcasters (Healer, Warmage, Beguiler, Dread Necromancer). I feel like that's how spellcasting SHOULD have been done (for the most part, Healer and Warmage came up lacking mechanically but the concept pleases me).

Also I liked Warlocks. Again, probably could have been tweaked mechanically but I like that concept as well, magic is something you just do.

I also liked the Magewright NPC class from Eberron, and still use it in Pathfinder as I feel like there should be a mundane arcane class.

I feel the same, and I think the next time I run 3.5 I'll just redo the classic casters into something more interesting than "oh boy 9 levels of casting from the widest lists possible". That should put them on par with focused casters and provide a nice spellcaster variety without any of them being obscene.

Wizard might be an Ultimate Magus sort of deal - versatility and endurance out the ass, but only 6 spell levels. Clerics will just get domain spells with some generic things, so there will be maybe 20-30 spells per spell level for them at best. Druids will just be either a good shapeshifter with 1/3 casting or 9-th level casters with very minor shapeshifting and a focused list.

[VladtheLad]

I actually have more nostalgia for the "focused" spellcasters (Healer, Warmage, Beguiler, Dread Necromancer). I feel like that's how spellcasting SHOULD have been done (for the most part, Healer and Warmage came up lacking mechanically but the concept pleases me).

Also I liked Warlocks. Again, probably could have been tweaked mechanically but I like that concept as well, magic is something you just do.

I also liked the Magewright NPC class from Eberron, and still use it in Pathfinder as I feel like there should be a mundane arcane class.

I feel the same, and I think the next time I run 3.5 I'll just redo the classic casters into something more interesting than "oh boy 9 levels of casting from the widest lists possible". That should put them on par with focused casters and provide a nice spellcaster variety without any of them being obscene.

Wizard might be an Ultimate Magus sort of deal - versatility and endurance out the ass, but only 6 spell levels. Clerics will just get domain spells with some generic things, so there will be maybe 20-30 spells per spell level for them at best. Druids will just be either a good shapeshifter with 1/3 casting or 9-th level casters with very minor shapeshifting and a focused list.

That idea gained serious traction in giantitp forums, I think some of the most popular houserules for 3.5 did exactly that.

[merxa]

If that's what you want just play PF and ban all 9th lvl caster classes. Or play 'E12' of course I've never really heard of such a thing -- or you can play starfinder, cause that's essentially e12

[virgil]

I ran an E10 campaign. The notes are somewhere on the board