Murtak at [unixtime wrote:1112613660[/unixtime]]Aycarus wrote:
Your assumption for diversification appears to rely explicitly under balanced circumstances; where all combats are essentially nothing more than battles where every character's abilities are still available. In any campaign with even the slightest bit of flavour, this doesn't happen. If you need the target to be polymorphed, a fear spell will be useless - similarly, a fighter inflicting damage will be useless.
So you want to balance your mechanics based on "flavour"? Guess what, in most of DnD it does not matter all that much how you defeat your opposition. Quite often - heck, nearly always - I do not care at all whether my opponent has just been polymorphed into a bunny or turned into a statue or held. So when I can use a spell that stacks with that of my party members or I can use a spell that does not .... guess what, we are all using the same spell, simply because it is the only thing that makes sense, and unless I am playing an extremely stupid character being grossly inefficient is against my flavor. In all likelyhood the party will still be better off using the same spell even against resistant enemies. At least in todays DnD the different characters still do different things.
I disagree completely with you there. If it never mattered how you defeated your opposition, then you're not playing very good D&D; under that assumption there would only be use for one kind of spell - straight damage dealing. Why? Because at least this type of spell stacks with what the type of damage the remainder of the party is dealing. A wizard becomes nothing more than a ranged fighter with a few creative attack forms and accessory spells that are useful outside of combat.
Ignoring setting or flavour is impossible. If you're playing a fire wizard and the DM sends you up against nothing but fire-resistant opponents, your character's going to be fvcking useless. Can this be balanced out with game mechanics? No. Any specialization whatsoever can be easily countered by an adversarial DM. Now does this imply specialization is bad? Again, no... You've got to assume that your DM isn't going to be an adversary to some degree; but it's something you can't counter by imposing game mechanics on him.