De canistro textrinum

[hyzmarca]

3) If your PCs are five Monks who have items that make them play like five Wizards of their CR, then they are really just five Wizards and you are allowing them to lie to themselves that they are playing Monks.

Mr. Burning Hands and Mr. Flamethrower can both clear out VC pillboxes, but they operate on very different principles and have a very different impact on the game.

A monk with enough equipment to emulate a magic user of equal CR is objectively better than a magic user of equal CR, since he also has all of his monk abilities.

This remains true right up until he loses that equipment.

[K]

1) Being able to cast planeshift is fundamentally different from running around to portals.

Outside of combat, it's exactly the same. The spell is going to put you some arbitrary and DM-decided distance from the place you want to go to and then you travel there. There is literally no adventure that you can do with plane shift that you can't also do with the DM just telling you that there is a convenient portal nearby.

2) "Whatever the fuck battlefield control is" is where casters can cast things like Wall of Force/Web/Stinking Cloud that changes the battlefield, and 5 Monks can only move around hitting people within the existing field.

Check your post and my reply because you said "battlefield manipulation" and said it in the context of adventures, so it made no sense at all. Since no on in the history of DnD has ever said " we can't rescue that princess because no one has Evard's Black Tentacles," you'll have to forgive me for not figuring out your non-standard use of a term.

3) If your PCs are five Monks who have items that make them play like five Wizards of their CR, then they are really just five Wizards and you are allowing them to lie to themselves that they are playing Monks.

Who cares?

Seriously, is there anyone that cares that Monks might have interesting and flavorful items?

Or do you think that DnD is all about the miniatures combat game and the "play space" only means the kinds of effects that happen in combat? If so, I don't understand why you'd be offended that classes that don't participate in that regularly can do it with the most minimal work on the part of the DM

As I said, it might possibly be the case that if you put a whole lot of work into rewriting the entire MM, you can duplicate the play space of high level play with low level characters somewhat, but that is not naturally there, and it sure as fuck isn't a broader play space were you can fight green orcs and red orcs, but never any slaads/inevitables/demons/devils that have the qualities that make them what they are.

If it takes you longer than 30 seconds to nerf a monster into playability, you should turn in your dicebag. All it takes is reducing the stats to the levels you want and maybe scratching off an ability or two that is problematic.

The qualities that make monsters into "what they are" are just things like description and sometimes iconic abilities, not raw stats like HPs and AC. Does it really matter if your version of the slaad has a much lower-DC version of Implant Spawn that your PCs have a chance of resisting? Does it matter if the Ogre came at you with his fists instead of a great-club and so your PCs won't be one-shotted? Is the adventure ruined because you used a beholder who had lost his SoD eyes to some previous injury? Is a Purple Worm with half the HPs any less interesting from a story standpoint?

The answer is "no."

Playing at a lower or higher level than what the CR system predicts has no advantage, but does have the disadvantage of just a little more work on the part of the DM. If you want a criticism, the "I'm too lazy to care about the PC's experience and tailor adventures to their characters" is the only one you've got. I'd even agree with you since I think DnD should be well designed enough so that chargen does not lead to crippled characters and the game should be playable straight out of the box.

[fectin]

As an aside, a leveled-down purple worm is still extremely deadly. I dropped one to what I thought was ~EL-1, and nearly got a TPK by accident.

[...You Lost Me]

I had better turn in my dicebag...

[infected slut princess]

Is that what they are calling scrotums these days

[Dr_Noface]

The d20s on this guy.

[Kaelik]

Outside of combat, it's exactly the same. The spell is going to put you some arbitrary and DM-decided distance from the place you want to go to and then you travel there. There is literally no adventure that you can do with plane shift that you can't also do with the DM just telling you that there is a convenient portal nearby.

Because no one ever uses Planeshift to escape a plane that they were banished to, or to banish people to another plane.

Oh wait. Those totally happen and aren't replicated by Portals.

said it in the context of adventures, so it made no sense at all. Since no on in the history of DnD has ever said " we can't rescue that princess because no one has Evard's Black Tentacles," you'll have to forgive me for not figuring out your non-standard use of a term.

No I didn't say it in the context of adventures. I said it in the context of play space. Being able to do cool things is part of the fucking playspace, no matter how much you wish it wasn't.

Who cares?

Seriously, is there anyone that cares that Monks might have interesting and flavorful items?

Hey, dumbshit. You should care. If 5 Level 10 Monks can only play in the expanded playspace when you give them each an item of Level 10 Wizard, then by definition, you are wrong, and they can't compete in that playspace without being Wizards.

All it means is that you are writing "secret Wizard" on their character sheet and choosing their spells for them. That doesn't mean that low op can play in the entire playspace.

If it takes you longer than 30 seconds to nerf a monster into playability, you should turn in your dicebag. All it takes is reducing the stats to the levels you want and maybe scratching off an ability or two that is problematic.

Removing the "problematic" abilities is limiting the playspace. That is obviously the entire fucking point. If you take away Greater Teleport and see in Darkness so your Monk party isn't kited to death, you have made the Demon not a Demon.

This would be the part where I would give examples where scratching off abilities reduces the playspace. But then you did it for me:

Is the adventure ruined because you used a beholder who had lost his SoD eyes to some previous injury?

Yes. When the Beholder doesn't have disintegrate, Flesh to Stone, and Charm that drastically reduces the playspace. When Beholders can't have minions, have walls of stone former minions, and create their own tunnels with disintegrate, you drastically reduce the playspace.

[K]

Hey Kaelik,

Adventures are more than combat. In fact, combats are usually the boring bit and you are boring for focusing on them.

Your friend,

-K

[hyzmarca]

Because no one ever uses Planeshift to escape a plane that they were banished to

Well obviously not, because if you were banished there then it is obviously impossible to leave using Planeshift, otherwise the Banishment is entirely pointless.


And that can be replicated using portals, anyway. There are plenty of stories about characters being banished to other planes and needing to find the portal to escape. In fact, they vastly outnumber the stories about characters who are "banished" to other planes and escape by spending 6 seconds to cast a spell.

Likewise, you can banish a person by throwing him through a portal just as easily as you can by casting Planeshift.

[Kaelik]

Hey Kaelik,

Adventures are more than combat. In fact, combats are usually the boring bit and you are boring for focusing on them.

Your friend,

-K

Hey K, 90% of that is about adventures, like the part where you want to strip Demons of the ability to run messages in order to save your shitty party, or the part where you want to prevent Beholders from tunnelling, because otherwise your party dies.

Well obviously not, because if you were banished there then it is obviously impossible to leave using Planeshift, otherwise the Banishment is entirely pointless.

Unless of course you were banished by some method other than specifically the banishment spell, like say, a Portal that some one seals up afterward, or by casting Planeshift on you, or by casting Dismissal, or by casting Holy Word.

[hyzmarca]

Unless of course you were banished by some method other than specifically the banishment spell, like say, a Portal that some one seals up afterward, or by casting Planeshift on you, or by casting Dismissal, or by casting Holy Word.

None of those change the fact that if you can get back in six seconds then you aren't really banished, you're merely mildly inconvenienced.

If the DM spends 2 months creating an extremely elaborate adventure on the infinite plane of infinite banishment, with believable fleshed-out NPcs and an extremely well crafted culture and a painstakingly detailed adventure to find your way out, which should ideally take at least 8 sessions, and you bypass the entire adventure by saying 'I cast Planeshift', well fuck you. I know that physical violence violates the social contract between gamers, but I'd break a chair over your head anyway.

[Foxwarrior]

The DM shouldn't spend 2 months creating an extremely elaborate adventure in the house of infinite imprisonment if the characters can just open a window and walk outside, either. What's your point, hyzmarca?

[hyzmarca]

The DM shouldn't spend 2 months creating an extremely elaborate adventure in the house of infinite imprisonment if the characters can just open a window and walk outside, either. What's your point, hyzmarca?

My point is that no one is going to try to "banish" you that way if you can get out by casting Planeshift because it's stupid and pointless. They're going to either dump you somewhere that blocks Planeshifting, or just kill you instead.

A banishment adventure is going to be an actual adventure, which you can't escape with Planeshift, because there would be no point otherwise.

[K]

Hey Kaelik,

Adventures are more than combat. In fact, combats are usually the boring bit and you are boring for focusing on them.

Your friend,

-K

Hey K, 90% of that is about adventures, like the part where you want to strip Demons of the ability to run messages in order to save your shitty party, or the part where you want to prevent Beholders from tunnelling, because otherwise your party dies.

That crap is just tactics and doesn't prevent you from having adventures at all (or even prevent you from just providing those tactics in a less lethal way).

Seriously, no one cares. No one even expects adventures to be based on lists of monster abilities that they memorized beforehand and no one feels cheated when monsters have abilities that deviate from that list.

Would you flip over the battlemat if an Ogre was a spellcaster? Would you refuse to game with a DM who didn't use a vampire's charm gaze in combat or in the adventure? Does fighting a wounded Remorhaz bring on real man-tears because you feel cheated of a full-HP encounter?

If so, I think you should quit gaming. Cooperative storytelling is obviously not for you. Hell, games where people can design encounters with varying amounts of difficulty based on DM design for location, situation, and combat-script choice is beyond you.

I hear chess is nice. Maybe you'd enjoy that?

[Fuchs]

Kaelik does sound like Mistborn now, with "don't play beyond the CR" mantras coming up.

One point people always forget: One reason there's not much high-level playing being done, and very little support for it, is that the higher level you play, the more options you have, the more work is it for the GM. Not just the combat side, but the crossing the ts and dotting the is in any adventure so it doesn't have plot holes the players uncover.

So, in the average group, the more you "Open up the playspace", the more you risk that the game ends prematurely due to the GM getting sick of spending too much time in preparation to fill the same session length.

[ModelCitizen]

stuff about two months of work vs plane shift

Dude, read what you just wrote. If I hit refresh and found that post mysteriously deleted I wouldn't blame you.

[Red_Rob]

Who would have thought, now that Misty has finally realised his points are all insane and stopped posting an actual discussion has broken out! Maybe this thread isn't a total loss after all.

There seems to be some weird conflation going on here. High level != High optimisation, and a shittily played evoker can memorise Plane Shift as easily as a high-op God Wizard. It is only the enemies capabilities that are restrained at low op. The players may well fail to use their options effectively, but saying they aren't available is incorrect.

On the topic of high op specifically increasing the play space, it is trivially true that increasing the number of abilities the enemies have access to increases both the variety of combat encounters and the stories you can tell using those abilities, however it is also true that as the enemies abilities increase the players options paradoxically decrease. A party has to be able to deal with everything the game throws at them, and as they have to deal with more things the number of viable builds that can do this decreases. It seems to me to be a pretty zero-sum game, but I would guess there is a sweet spot in the middle where you have fairly optimised characters against reasonably well played and CR appropriate opposition allowing some freedom on both sides of the table.

[Fuchs]

On the topic of high op specifically increasing the play space, it is trivially true that increasing the number of abilities the enemies have access to increases both the variety of combat encounters and the stories you can tell using those abilities, however it is also true that as the enemies abilities increase the players options paradoxically decrease. A party has to be able to deal with everything the game throws at them, and as they have to deal with more things the number of viable builds that can do this decreases. It seems to me to be a pretty zero-sum game, but I would guess there is a sweet spot in the middle where you have fairly optimised characters against reasonably well played and CR appropriate opposition allowing some freedom on both sides of the table.

I have to point out that just as the players' options decrease as the enemies' capabilities increase, so do the NPCs options decrease as the players' capabilities increase. With increasing levels several stories are either not possible or require far more effort to bring about.

[fectin]

I'm actually irritated if most monsters don't match the MM versions. The characters are supposed to have lived in the world their entire lives. The shouldn't be any more confused by a zombie than you are by a bear: you may not have ever personally seen one, but you have a good idea what a bear can do. If a bear is too mundane, think of a helicopter gunship and an aboleth.

My recollections of the MM aren't perfect, and that does a great job of simulating the character living in the world.

[Kaelik]

That crap is just tactics and doesn't prevent you from having adventures at all (or even prevent you from just providing those tactics in a less lethal way).

So your official position is that a Beholder being a combat monster with absolutely no out of combat abilities is exactly the same play space as having him actually have out of combat abilities that change the adventure?

And then you make fun of me for thinking combat is the only important thing. You want to delete all non-combat abilities Monsters have. That is literally 4e.

[Red_Rob]

I'm actually irritated if most monsters don't match the MM versions. The characters are supposed to have lived in the world their entire lives. The shouldn't be any more confused by a zombie than you are by a bear: you may not have ever personally seen one, but you have a good idea what a bear can do. If a bear is too mundane, think of a helicopter gunship and an aboleth.

My recollections of the MM aren't perfect, and that does a great job of simulating the character living in the world.

Are you fucking kidding? Have you seen a medieval bestiary? People used to think all kinds of insane creatures were wandering around just due to chinese whispers and tall tale telling in an age without reliable long distance communication for the masses. For a long time it was accepted that geese hatch from barnacles and therefore were classed as seafood. Imagine the tales that get spread around in a world where giant lizards really do breathe fire!

The idea that everyone in the D&D world knows what an Aboleth does is ridiculous on the face of it simply because Aboleth's create illusions. Someone who encounters an Aboleth will have all sorts of crazy reports of it's powers, because it's powers are anything it can think of. Once you filter that through a few years of tales being passed around and changed in the telling, there is no way that anyone other than a seasoned adventurer or canny sage would have a good idea of the capabilities of anything that isn't regularly encountered wandering around outside the local village.

[K]

That crap is just tactics and doesn't prevent you from having adventures at all (or even prevent you from just providing those tactics in a less lethal way).

So your official position is that a Beholder being a combat monster with absolutely no out of combat abilities is exactly the same play space as having him actually have out of combat abilities that change the adventure?

And then you make fun of me for thinking combat is the only important thing. You want to delete all non-combat abilities Monsters have. That is literally 4e.

No, I'm saying that basing an adventure on tunneling beholders is gimmicky and stupid and no one will miss it if it never comes up. People don't see a beholder and say "OMG! Watch out for it's tunneling ability!"

Shit, you can just make it's Disintigrate eye have a really low DC or caster level if you have a giant boner for tunneling beholders but need to lower the ECL of the encounter.

But yes, not using a monster's out-of-combat abilities for a single adventure means nothing. An adventure isn't ruined if you don't use a monster's ability in the adventure because the monster only serves the role in the adventure that you planned for and nothing else. Every demon withAnimate Undead doesn't have to be surrounded by zombies and every teleporting monster does not have to have an elaborate plan revolving around teleport.

Otherwise, you are saying that every adventure involving a vampire needs the vampire to be surrounded by wolves, vampire spawn, and mind-controlled slaves, and a solo vampire IN ANY CONTEXT IN THE ADVENTURE would cause the game to explode into unplayability. That's dumb.

[K]

I'm actually irritated if most monsters don't match the MM versions. The characters are supposed to have lived in the world their entire lives. The shouldn't be any more confused by a zombie than you are by a bear: you may not have ever personally seen one, but you have a good idea what a bear can do. If a bear is too mundane, think of a helicopter gunship and an aboleth.

My recollections of the MM aren't perfect, and that does a great job of simulating the character living in the world.

Are you fucking kidding? Have you seen a medieval bestiary? People used to think all kinds of insane creatures were wandering around just due to chinese whispers and tall tale telling in an age without reliable long distance communication for the masses. For a long time it was accepted that geese hatch from barnacles and therefore were classed as seafood. Imagine the tales that get spread around in a world where giant lizards really do breathe fire!

The idea that everyone in the D&D world knows what an Aboleth does is ridiculous on the face of it simply because Aboleth's create illusions. Someone who encounters an Aboleth will have all sorts of crazy reports of it's powers, because it's powers are anything it can think of. Once you filter that through a few years of tales being passed around and changed in the telling, there is no way that anyone other than a seasoned adventurer or canny sage would have a good idea of the capabilities of anything that isn't regularly encountered wandering around outside the local village.

Do we have to mention that like 90% of the listed Undead monsters look like zombies? Or that "giant lizard that breathes fire" can apply to a surprisingly large number of potential monsters?

[Foxwarrior]

the monster only serves the role in the adventure that you planned for and nothing else.

Not to pick apart your argument or anything, but isn't one of the main goals of the players to make your plans go awry? Maybe your teleporting monster was intending to just stay in the room and guard the crystal, but when the players sneak past and teleport away with it, the fact that the monster has the ability to try to find them (because of its HD-boosted Knowledge checks, or whatever) suddenly becomes relevant.

[K]

the monster only serves the role in the adventure that you planned for and nothing else.

Not to pick apart your argument or anything, but isn't one of the main goals of the players to make your plans go awry? Maybe your teleporting monster was intending to just stay in the room and guard the crystal, but when the players sneak past and teleport away with it, the fact that the monster has the ability to try to find them (because of its HD-boosted Knowledge checks, or whatever) suddenly becomes relevant.

In specific, not really. Knowledge checks won't help a monster track PCs. Weeks of Gather Information might, as might divination.

In general, also not really. PCs who come up with clever plans should be allowed to get the benefit of those plans without the DM scrambling to come up with ways to ruin it. If the DM really wants to chase down the PCs and foil their clever plan, he really can just say something like "the monster consults an oracle who teleports the monster and some mercs to the PCs" or something like that. As a DM, there are no rules about additional elements you can bring in to preserve the plot and the only limit is how willing you are to dick over PC agency.

In super specific, teleporting is not an ability that I'd consider nerfing. It doesn't add much to a monster's ECL.