Pathfinder Is Still Bad

[K]

I never understand why people think high-level wizards are gods. They really aren't.

The archmages of the world don't kill the Zhents because the archmages of the world are glass cannons like every other wizard.

All the more reason to be the one on the offensive. The FR paradigm of having wizards sit in castles and towers and wait to be attacked is just plain stupid. Dying isn't a problem. The problem is dying without backup so that that nobody is there to bring in your body and prevent people from trapping your soul. It's highly unlikely somebody takes out Elminster's wizard strikeforce.

The reason that wizards sit in towers is because setting up traps that can take out an entire strike force of archmages is pathetically easy. It's not even hyberbole to say that the Rogue with an AMF and a locked room is red-hot death to a strike force of archmagi.

It's a real thing. The theoretical power of a wizard is huge, but the practical power is a different thing. Blasting spell slots can be wasted on enemy's summoned crap, foolproof escape spells can be shut down, and killer protection spells that are perfect protection in a teleport ambush fail when the durations run out.

I mean, what spell lists let archmagi's take on a city of Zhents and their armies? Certainly, it's not the spell lists on the NPCs that are statted up.

Putting 5-6 archmagi in a room is just a recipe for losing 5-6 archmagi and it can be from something as common as a collapsing roof to something as exotic as being tricked by an illusion into walking into a gate to a dead magic area on the Negative Material Plane.

As for teleport, I stand by my argument that you can still tell stories with it. Star Trek has decades of stories that prove that it's possible, and their teleportation has a lot fewer restrictions than many other settings.

Teleporting in Star Trek is limited in that it won't work through shields, across a solar system and is often totally removed whenever the story calls for it by any number of technobabble explanations.

The point is that you create magi-babble explanations for teleport that work with a fantasy setting. Maybe a wizard can only memorize five or six locations at a time. Maybe teleport circles are a secret known to only five people in your setting and require special feats and years to learn, so you tend to find them in old ruins and they never go somewhere you need them to.

Considering the fact that you can set magical traps and ambushes on the other side of a teleport circle, I don't even know why anyone would use one. You could be dead the instant you arrive at the other side because someone set up forty symbols of death or something more exotic.

As for the argument that the existence of high-level characters invalidates the work of low-level ones, I have to call foul again. People seem to love this argument, even though it has the assumption built into it that high-level characters know about every danger in the world AND aren't currently involved in some other adventure AND care enough to get out of bed for things that can be handled by lower-level characters.

Anyone with a scroll of sending can totally just send over a 911 emergency to one of the archmagi heroes. As for not caring, if they're good aligned, they should care that people are suffering and they can stop it. I don't buy the crap that high level heroes are constantly busy with saving the world 24-7.

This doesn't mean low level people do nothing, but it does mean that failing a low to mid level quest won't have any serious consequences. Even if you fail to stop the warlord, at most that means that Elminster has to devote a day of his time to smacking him down personally. So the end result of your glorious heroic quest is that you saved Elminster a day to do something else.

So there are going to be tens of thousands of sending scrolls hidden away all over the world by so that mid-level characters can use them so that high-level characters can solve their problems?

What happens when the day comes that the spell slots Eliminister spent tackling your goblin bandit problem means that a dragon burns Waterdeep? High-level and good character realize that there are better things for them to do than to solve problems that other people can solve on their own because teaching people to be dependent on you is a failure of a strategy. One day they won't get to the scrolls, and the consequences low-level people failing their adventures is things like people dying and not getting a raise or getting turned into shadow spawn.

Who even says that Eliminister could solve your adventure in a day? What exact spells is he using that let him do that? The answer is: that's not how it works.

Again, you are confusing theoretical power with real power. Eliminister has a very nice spell list, but running the actual statted-out characters through even a published 10th level adventure has him either dying horribly OR not completing it because he lacks vital skills OR taking as much time as a normal party because he needs to find clues in a sequence or explore things the old fashioned way.

[Psychic Robot]

how often do rogues have amfs though, reallly
especially in various literary sources

[Blicero]

how often do rogues have amfs though, reallly
especially in various literary sources

How many literary sources have amfs in the first place?


For those that do...

The Second Apocalypse has Chorae, which make the bearer immune to sorcery and are fairly prevalent among castenobles.

Malazan Book of the Fallen (which is probably a better depiction of what D&D would look like than just about any other fantasy series I can care to think of) has Otaral or something, which, again, makes the bearer immune to sorcery.

[Archmage]

The point is that you create magi-babble explanations for teleport that work with a fantasy setting. Maybe a wizard can only memorize five or six locations at a time. Maybe teleport circles are a secret known to only five people in your setting and require special feats and years to learn, so you tend to find them in old ruins and they never go somewhere you need them to.

This is a good and important point for designing new rules with accompanying setting fluff, or even houseruled D&D, but the core game doesn't work anything like that. You can rule that teleportation only works between circles or cover every dungeon in a dimensional lock spell, but all this needs to be laid out in advance so you don't frustrate players by cockblocking their efforts in ways that feel overly arbitrary.

Solutions to caster supremacy in 3.5e specifically are good to keep in mind when figuring out what tweaks need to be made, but realistically any solution supposedly based on core rules that relies on "rogue with scroll of anti-magic field" is a battle of "who can prepare the most counters and contingencies to the other's strategy," and I think we all know that round goes to casters with arbitrarily-large spell lists.

[fectin]

But the homefield advantage is HUGE. Bury bookbombs under specific floortiles, throw up persistent illusions, build paper-thin floors over deadly gas, hang contingencies on all your mooks, and slather lead over your home to prevent te first half of scry-and-die.
Or, don't actually live there. Live in your lead-lined underground arctic compound, and teleport to your castle bedroom each morning.

[DSMatticus]

11-13+ Wizards do not teleport into other places where 11-13+ wizards are likely to be. They are very good at killing eachother. The only wizards that live that long are crazy paranoid.

[Maxus]

11-13+ Wizards do not teleport into other places where 11-13+ wizards are likely to be. They are very good at killing eachother. The only wizards that live that long are crazy paranoid.

And sneaky.

[Guyr Adamantine]

Dead men's pointy shoes?

[Psychic Robot]

maybe we should just nerf wizards

[Midnight_v]

maybe we should just nerf wizards

By that you mean the spells. . .

Which sounds like what they're talking about.
Thats fine really as long as it doesn't go too far in one direction, making them worthless. Basically the opposite of what happend to the cleric.

ALSO, AND MORE IMPORTANT.

Don't kill peoples concepts.
Teleporting in with deathrays (Star Trek, style, I guess, as they say above?) could be limited, if thats the perogative

Nightcrawler, style combat teleportation should remain imminetly possible. Also for that matter... line of sight teleporting isn't that bad.

[Stubbazubba]

Don't kill peoples concepts.
Teleporting in with deathrays (Star Trek, style, I guess, as they say above?) could be limited, if thats the perogative

Nightcrawler, style combat teleportation should remain imminetly possible. Also for that matter... line of sight teleporting isn't that bad.

I agree; limited-range teleportation like line-of-sight is a cool magical effect, and having limits on long-range teleportation is a great opportunity for good fluff.

I made a setting once where magic energy was stored in a certain kind of crystal, and greater magical effects required arranging said delicate crystals in a ridiculously intricate pattern in order to, for instance, get to the proper point in space all in one piece. It was the work of full-time crystal engineers to do this, basically magic nerds with magnifying goggles so they could tell exactly where to put things. So it really worked almost just like Star Trek's teleportation, you had a specialist there to do it for you.

[Swordslinger]

The reason that wizards sit in towers is because setting up traps that can take out an entire strike force of archmages is pathetically easy. It's not even hyberbole to say that the Rogue with an AMF and a locked room is red-hot death to a strike force of archmagi.

Yes, and no. While summoned creatures go away in AMF, called creatures don't. So you can totally gate in a solar, titan or whatever and have it rock the rogue. Any kind of grapple monster is instant death in an AMF. And naturally the strike force has more time to prepare these kind of teams than defenders do.

High level characters sitting in rooms as guards are rare. They have better things to do and that shit is expensive. Getting together a strike force for a day is however pretty easy.

It's a real thing. The theoretical power of a wizard is huge, but the practical power is a different thing. Blasting spell slots can be wasted on enemy's summoned crap, foolproof escape spells can be shut down, and killer protection spells that are perfect protection in a teleport ambush fail when the durations run out.

Sure. but you can just teleport away and recharge. Or if you're using astral projection, you don't even care about dying.

I mean, what spell lists let archmagi's take on a city of Zhents and their armies? Certainly, it's not the spell lists on the NPCs that are statted up.

The statted NPCs spell choices are notoriously stupid for characters with super high intelligence to the point they make no sense.

The point is that you create magi-babble explanations for teleport that work with a fantasy setting. Maybe a wizard can only memorize five or six locations at a time. Maybe teleport circles are a secret known to only five people in your setting and require special feats and years to learn, so you tend to find them in old ruins and they never go somewhere you need them to.

Yeah sure, if you're going to limit teleportation to being effectively similar to just fixed portals, that can work. Though then it's no longer really teleportation as most people think about it, because now you're talking about defining specific places you can go as opposed to restricting specific places you can't go.

So there are going to be tens of thousands of sending scrolls hidden away all over the world by so that mid-level characters can use them so that high-level characters can solve their problems?

Not tens of thousands, but every city or town will have at least one, plus at least a few high level characters able to cast sending.

What happens when the day comes that the spell slots Eliminister spent tackling your goblin bandit problem means that a dragon burns Waterdeep?

The problem is that big events are few and far between and the active threat of saying that they can call in the big guns at any time is a huge deterrent. Also if Elminster happens to be busy, you just call in the Simbul or Khelben or whatever. It's not like you've got one dude doing all this stuff, you've got tons of archmagi in a world like forgotten realms.

Who even says that Eliminister could solve your adventure in a day? What exact spells is he using that let him do that? The answer is: that's not how it works.

If it's an attack on your city, he just blows the enemy to hell. You obviously won't call in Elminster for enemies whose location you don't know, so banditry and such will probably still exist. But as far as actual city takeovers or known strongholds of evil, they won't happen.

Again, you are confusing theoretical power with real power. Eliminister has a very nice spell list, but running the actual statted-out characters through even a published 10th level adventure has him either dying horribly OR not completing it because he lacks vital skills OR taking as much time as a normal party because he needs to find clues in a sequence or explore things the old fashioned way.

The Archmagi don't really explore or gather information. That's more the work of low level people who then phone in an air strike once they know where the enemy is at.

[K]

The reason that wizards sit in towers is because setting up traps that can take out an entire strike force of archmages is pathetically easy. It's not even hyberbole to say that the Rogue with an AMF and a locked room is red-hot death to a strike force of archmagi.

Yes, and no. While summoned creatures go away in AMF, called creatures don't. So you can totally gate in a solar, titan or whatever and have it rock the rogue. Any kind of grapple monster is instant death in an AMF. And naturally the strike force has more time to prepare these kind of teams than defenders do.

High level characters sitting in rooms as guards are rare. They have better things to do and that shit is expensive. Getting together a strike force for a day is however pretty easy.

High-level strike forces of evil characters are just as easily gathered if a bunch of crusading archmages starts deciding to kill anything they think is bad, and in places like Zhentil Keep they actually live there.

Also, you've obviously never played a high-level rogue. Solars die just as easily as archmages.

It's a real thing. The theoretical power of a wizard is huge, but the practical power is a different thing. Blasting spell slots can be wasted on enemy's summoned crap, foolproof escape spells can be shut down, and killer protection spells that are perfect protection in a teleport ambush fail when the durations run out.

Sure. but you can just teleport away and recharge. Or if you're using astral projection, you don't even care about dying.

You think dying is the worse thing that can happen in DnD? It really isn't.

You can be petrified, turned into spawn, have your soul trapped or even destroyed, placed in suspended animation underground, exiled to demiplanes with no magic, energy-drained into powerlessness, stripped of your ability to cast magic forever, changed into hideous forms, mind-controlled, have your personality rewritten, and nearly unlimited number of other horrible fates that a true resurrection and even a wish can't undo.

Hell, there are even higher-level effects that don't even have saves. It's just instant boning for archmages.

So there are going to be tens of thousands of sending scrolls hidden away all over the world by so that mid-level characters can use them so that high-level characters can solve their problems?

Not tens of thousands, but every city or town will have at least one, plus at least a few high level characters able to cast sending.

You do know that there are failure chances on scrolls and there are thousands of towns in Forgotten Realms? This means thousands of scrolls and thousands of mid-level characters who can reliably use them.

.

Who even says that Eliminister could solve your adventure in a day? What exact spells is he using that let him do that? The answer is: that's not how it works.

If it's an attack on your city, he just blows the enemy to hell. You obviously won't call in Elminster for enemies whose location you don't know, so banditry and such will probably still exist. But as far as actual city takeovers or known strongholds of evil, they won't happen.

How is he "blowing the enemy to hell?" What exact spells is he using?

I don't think you've ever actually played a high-level mage, or else you wouldn't have this grossly exaggerated opinion of them. When you actually get down to brass tacks and come up with a spell list and actually run it through adventures, you find out that pretty quickly that mages aren't that powerful and are really weak to enemy attacks.

I mean, are they using Meteor Swarms to blow up cities? Well, then they maybe damage two or three buildings before running out of slots and not killing anyone of note.

Fireballs with metamagic? Well, then they are being counterspelled by a single low-level mage.

How are they avoiding the hundreds of archers? Disjunction traps? No save spells? AMF clerics?

I want you to seriously think about it and come back with a spell list that can take on Zhentil Keep and the many high-level characters there who are working together (like the pack of beholders they have as allies who can just shut down all magic, or the golems, or the dragons, or the several archmages and high clerics they have on staff who are equally favored by the gods).

[DragonChild]

Hay guyz.

This is sort of off-topic for this thread. Can you take it elsewhere, so people can give us Ultimate Combat info? You know, the Pathfinder book that just came out?

[K]

Hay guyz.

This is sort of off-topic for this thread. Can you take it elsewhere, so people can give us Ultimate Combat info? You know, the Pathfinder book that just came out?

Is anyone actually doing that? This thread seemed pretty dead to me.

[FatR]

I never understand why people think high-level wizards are gods.

Because they are and stupid argument to the contrary, like yours (assuming you aren't just trolling, and seeing as you are seriously mentioning fucking Meteor Swarm as a spell someone is actually supposed to cast, I highly suspect you are), were disproved approximately 9001 times already, both in arguments and in practical tests. Well, I give you, official NPC wizards aren't gods. That's because they are statted like shit.

[K]

I never understand why people think high-level wizards are gods.

Because they are and stupid argument to the contrary, like yours (assuming you aren't just trolling, and seeing as you are seriously mentioning fucking Meteor Swarm as a spell someone is actually supposed to cast, I highly suspect you are), were disproved approximately 9001 times already, both in arguments and in practical tests. Well, I give you, official NPC wizards aren't gods. That's because they are statted like shit.

Way to miss the point. I mentioned Meteor Swarm specifically because it is a shitty spell.

No one has proved anything, in argument or practical tests. They say that they can destroy cities, but are silent on how they actually do that because they can't. They say that they could destroy Zhentil keep by just getting a few archmages together, but no one is actually saying how they fight off the other archmages living in Zhentil Keep or even a AMF rogue or cleric or even the mid-level characters living in the city, or even how they stay alive with their soul not trapped after the first two minutes.

They are actually proving their own ignorance.

Actually statting out a character that is as powerful as people think wizards must be is not possible because high-level is rocket-launcher tag for most character types (just not pure fighting guys who don't even get to play). Anyone who has actually played at high levels knows that.

I'm sure in your imagination you have infinite spell slots and always have the right spell for the situation and always choose the right spell and never take any damage or fail any saves and no one ever drops your protection spells and durations never run out and no one chooses spells off the same super list that you have that has things like no save spells, but actually playing the game is a different thing entirely.

The problem is that the evidence doesn't support what's in your head.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

The group I was DM'ing fought an uttercold assault necromancer.

It took the party 4 rounds to get to where the necromancer was sitting. In those 4 rouns, she had dropped the cleric and the barbarian, and had the duskblade and the ranger down very low. Finally the warlock and the warblade managed to get close, and kill the necromancer in 1 hit. The players were shocked when that happened because except for 1 guy, they had never fought a wizard before. (And yes, it COULD have been more difficult. However, the players regard the fight as THE most challenging fight of the campaign thus far, so I am calling it "close enough".

The Wizards/Batman comparison is interesting, because if Batman isn't aware of you and has never fought you before, you're probably going to beat his ass hardcore. Like a wizard...

[Kaelik]

Wizards are super great, but absent shapechange and calling magic and after a teleport (so no undead armies travelling with you) they basically can't deal with 3 Wizards 5 levels lower than them, and a 450 level 1 Warriors with bows.

[DSMatticus]

450 level 1 Warriors with bows.

Maximum bow range is what, 1,000 ft? Fly could work here. How many spells are there that are just "fuck you, arrows?" Are there ones that will follow a teleport? Or just "fuck you, non-magical weapons" would work, but that's assuming someone hasn't pimped out the people with magical weapons, which seems like a safe assumption of the core setting, but not a safe assumption of people trying to set an archer-storm trap for wizards.

Also, teleport lets you bring some people along, but without calling, I'm not certain what you could bring along that would be useful. Seems like DM fiat territory.

If I had to list the way wizards get really weird...
1) Utility. They have access to utility other classes just don't, or in some cases utility that just replaces other classes entirely. Nobody else can do a scry and die. AMF, the anti-wizard pwnage, is something you get from wizards. Binding, shapechanging/polymorph, true sight, etc, etc, etc.
2) They have access to abilities which invalidate entire character archetypes at a time. There are spells, which used against a character with a certain strategy, completely make that strategy stop working immediately. The most obvious example happens at level 5, when a wizard gets fly and he is fighting trolls. The troll literally has no action which can effect the outcome of the fight at this point; the wizard either kills him or fails to based entirely on his own actions and the troll's ability to soak scorching ray and fireballs.
3) Largely for the reasons above, wizards are disproportionately powerful against weak characters. A high-level fighter against a flying wizard probably has a pegasus or something, and he may actually get a chance to charge the wizard anyway. But a bunch of low-level mooks do not have flying horses, so they just die. Also, a high-level fighter's kill potential of chumps is limited to a handful of people at bow range, or everyone within 15-30ft feat (spiked chain/great cleave), where he is taking damage (even if it is nearly nothing). A high-level wizard's kill potential of chumps is '20ft radius of fiery death from a quarter-mile up in the air.'

So, a wizard's power really comes down to preparation. Whatever your character does, there is probably a set of spells that has a 100% chance of stopping your character. If the wizard has them, and gives himself the chance to use them, you lose. If you catch the wizard off guard, or you are another caster, or you have a bunch of different tricks he has trouble locking down, it's rocket launcher tag. If you are a low level mook, it's really easy to lock down the things you do, so the wizard does that and you just die.

[Kaelik]

450 level 1 Warriors with bows.

Maximum bow range is what, 1,000 ft? Fly could work here. How many spells are there that are just "fuck you, arrows?" Are there ones that will follow a teleport? Or just "fuck you, non-magical weapons" would work, but that's assuming someone hasn't pimped out the people with magical weapons, which seems like a safe assumption of the core setting, but not a safe assumption of people trying to set an archer-storm trap for wizards.

Okay, since you aren't paying attention I will spell this out a little more.

You are a level 15 Wizard in a universe where calling magic is nerfed. You are attempting to conquer Zhentil Keep, which has 3 level 10 Wizards and 450 Level 1 Warriors on staff at all times, to say nothing of Archmages that sometimes are present and such like.

What can you do to conquer Zhentil Keep?

1) You cannot fly over a 1000ft away and fireball, because they have indoors to retreat to.
2) You cannot conquer the keep with windwall, because it does not kill 450 warriors.
3) You cannot kill the warriors with very few spells, because they are spread out.
4) You also have to kill the three level 10 Wizards.

Wizards have a hard time doing this.

Rogues... actually don't. Rogues can bluff there way in, murder people one or two or three at a time, and generally accomplish this goal. Wizards cannot. A Druid actually could, he would just not do it with Teleporting in, but instead developing an infinite army of animals to lay Siege while his AC and he and a Treant went nutso on the place, murdering everyone.

But the whole "Sorcerers and Wizards are great at most 4 encounter workdays, but can't conquer Zhentil Keep" thing that K keeps saying is totally true.

[Ice9]

I pretty much have to agree with K/Kaelik here - it isn't that Wizards aren't powerful. They definitely are powerful, and in the type of encounters you see in published adventures, they generally blitz right through.

But their power is weird and asymmetrical. They can kill the crap out of a few people, and in some cases can kill entire armies, and they can do things that are in certain ways game-changing on a kingdom/empire scale ... but they have all kinds of odd gaps and holes in that power. It's easily possible that a Wizard could take over one kingdom in a day, but then spend years trying to take over another equally powerful but slightly different one and fail utterly.

One thing that people sometimes do is extrapolate. "Obviously, if a Wizard can bend reality itself and create a new demiplane, they can do something like insta-build a fortress." Well actually, no, there is no fucking spell that does that.* Sure, you can homebrew one in - in which case you've proved that Wizards are gods if you houserule them to be gods.

A related thing is to use inherently non-functional things like infinite loops, but just use them "a little bit", to achieve something that they extrapolated a Wizard "should" be able to do. For instance, you insta-build a tower by chain-binding Efreet to make one for you. Well sorry, that doesn't fly - you used a fucking infinite loop. At that point, you have proven nothing other than that 3.5 has holes in the rules. If that stuff flies in a given campaign, then sure, go ahead and use it. But it demonstrates nothing about the actual power of the class.

*Maybe I missed some obscure spell that does this. In which case, insert any other of the many tasks that fit this category.

[DSMatticus]

@Kaelik, blah blah blah shit I wasn't talking about. Read it again. Find the part where I said 'oh, dude, wizards could totally pwn Zhentil Keep because they can make themself immune to archers.'

What I actually said is 'don't wizards have tons of low-level spells that give archers the bird?' And it turns out, yes. There are level 2-3 spells that give archers the bird. And there are higher-level spells that double-up the bird, and then gouge their eyes out with it. And this is all even more true if we go splatbook diving.

None of the shit you tried to point out to me was a refutation of anything I have said. So while your post is pretty much spot on, fuck you potatoes aren't orange, why did you say they were?

[Kaelik]

@Kaelik, blah blah blah shit I wasn't talking about. Read it again. Find the part where I said 'oh, dude, wizards could totally pwn Zhentil Keep because they can make themself immune to archers.'

What I actually said is 'don't wizards have tons of low-level spells that give archers the bird?' And it turns out, yes. There are level 2-3 spells that give archers the bird. And there are higher-level spells that double-up the bird, and then gouge their eyes out with it. And this is all even more true if we go splatbook diving.

None of the shit you tried to point out to me was a refutation of anything I have said. So while your post is pretty much spot on, fuck you potatoes aren't orange, why did you say they were?

When other people are talking, and you jump into the thread saying something about what they are talking about, don't whine like a little bitch when the treat you like you are talking about the thing everyone else is talking about.

If you aren't talking about conquering Zhentil Keep, then don't make a post in which you quote someone who is talking about Zhentil Keep, and then tell them why the hypothetical Zhentil Keep defense system they are talking about wouldn't work.

Because that makes you the stupid one.

[DSMatticus]

No, the stupid thing to do is to assume that when someone says "hey, I disagree with you on X," what they actually mean is, "everything you say is retarded." If I had wanted to say that, I would have just said that instead.