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This is FWIW exactly what literally Gary Gygax was worried about - that, when actual rule restrictions were cut back, the game would become The Weird Wizard Show. It's not just that the wizard is super powerful, it's that the entire game slowly begins to revolve around the wizard - why they can or can't do, what the DM does to stop them, etc, etc. Everyone becomes a bit player to the drama between DM and Wizard.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:11
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ProfessorCirno posted:This is FWIW exactly what literally Gary Gygax was worried about - that, when actual rule restrictions were cut back, the game would become The Weird Wizard Show. It's not just that the wizard is super powerful, it's that the entire game slowly begins to revolve around the wizard - why they can or can't do, what the DM does to stop them, etc, etc. Everyone becomes a bit player to the drama between DM and Wizard. I don't think this will happen in most games. Hell most games won't get up to the levels were making a hundred skeletons can happen.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:15
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eth0.n posted:OK? So, what, exactly, are you actually disagreeing with? The disagreement is in the extremes. I agree its a poorly designed skill, but I think in most instances presented so far, reasonable (i.e. normal) GM officiating renders the complaints mostly null. For instance, to summon 20 Skeletons and use them to one shot the dragon and obviate challenge there are a few narrative/combat hurdles to overcome, none of which is "adversarial" in nature but which naturally mitigate the issue. 1) Corpses/Bones - A sufficient supply to summon that many skeletons 2) Spell Economy - It becomes difficult to summon and control that many skeletons for more than ~1 day (while also having any kind of additional utility or capability) 3) Dungeon hazards - even if you can find that many bones, and proceed quickly enough, they have to manage to survive a series of encounters (combats, traps, etc) that make up the dungeon 4) Intelligent target - to top it all off the Dragon is not a passive force in his own domain and could easily set a trap for a small army of attackers, decide to withdraw, or otherwise prepare for the adventurers. None of this requires 'bullshit' on the part of the DM, it's not as good as firm mechanical limits, but its there.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:16
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There exists literally no game rule so poorly designed that a reasonable GM cannot render complaints about it mostly null, at a given table. Your statement is wholly meaningless. There aren't any "extremes" that you're disagreeing with. 1 and 2 are total DM-fiat bullshit. It's the DM doing the job of the designer for him. These are probably the best solutions, however, if you are intent on playing 5E. 3 and 4 is the DM making the game (as Cirno pointed out) about a battle of wits between the wizard and DM. Not about all the other members of the party (certainly not the fighter), but about the wizard. They're even more bullshit because they're not even solutions. They simply allow the wizard to be the most awesome person in the world. eth0.n fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 03:24
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MonsterEnvy posted:I don't think this will happen in most games. Hell most games won't get up to the levels were making a hundred skeletons can happen. How many skeletons will a Necromancer be able to summon in "most" games?
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Aug 12, 2014 03:37
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As for number 2, 20 skeletons take 4 spell slots which you regain with a short rest, so your not really impacting you spell casting ability what so ever in order to make the warrior obsolete.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:40
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AlphaDog posted:How many skeletons will a Necromancer be able to summon in "most" games? If we assume that they stop at 10th level, only 30 or so members of the skeleton secret service. No biggie.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:41
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Vorpal Cat posted:As for number 2, 20 skeletons take 4 spell slots which you regain with a short rest, so your not really impacting you spell casting ability what so ever in order to make the warrior obsolete. Ah, I misinterpreted that as an arbitrary DM fiat introducing some kind of disruption to spell casting. No, rules as written, it's not a solution at all, unless the DM introduces other fiat bullshit to force it to become a solution.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:43
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eth0.n posted:There exists literally no game rule so poorly designed that a reasonable GM cannot render complaints about it mostly null, at a given table. Your statement is wholly meaningless. There aren't any "extremes" that you're disagreeing with. 1 is DM fiat, yes. 2 is the mechanics of the game as currently laid out regarding Long Rests/24hrs and the Animate Dead spell. 3 is normal dungeon design. I'm not talking about some super secrete trap just for skeletons, i'm saying that in any given dungeon there will likely be multiple combats and probably a trap or two (or many more as one would expect in a high level antagonist lair). The skeletons will likely not all survive this (or even the players). Most games, even ones without any wizards like my current 3.5 campaign, have interesting traps to overcome. 4 is...playing the part of the monster? I dunno what to say about this. Do you seriously expect a monsters actions within the context of the world, to be completely limited to those explicitly listed on their stat block? Maybe for a mindless zombie, but NPCs and intelligent antagonists are going to do things unexpectedly. It's not about out thinking or dicking over players, its about having interesting challenges beyond standard-move-minor
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Aug 12, 2014 03:43
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Is it really a serious "GM fiat" thing to observe that, most of the time, you just don't have enough sets of bones to hand to animate 40+ skeletons?
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Aug 12, 2014 03:50
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treeboy posted:its about having interesting challenges beyond standard-move-minor I suspect some people are coming at this from the point of designing a 4E encounter, where your dragon would have mooks, and interesting traps and terrain obstacles and so on and so forth...and it was 1) all easy to do because of the setup and 2) all represented as actual mechanical portions of the fight rather than a sort of DM-Wizard battle of wits thing.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:50
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treeboy posted:1) Corpses/Bones - A sufficient supply to summon that many skeletons None of these are limitations. Like, you could literally say the same thing about a fighter. Oh, you're bringing a fighter into the dungeon? Guess what, fucker, you need to find that guy some armor and weaponry first. Have you thought about the spells you'll need to buff or heal him? What about all the traps? Your fighter won't be that good after wandering into a bunch of traps, will he? Well the thing is that despite all those difficulties a horde of skeletons is massively strong and allows a wizard to steamroll poo poo that's supposed to be steamrolling the wizard.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:51
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treeboy posted:I'll admit, I am sad that Leadership-ish stuff didn't return (that i've seen). I've never heard of Fighters actually rolling around dungeons with their armies, but i've heard more than one story about using it as a narrative control "we siege the castle" that kinda thing. Animate Dead renders many challenges trivial. It is a single spell in a whole arsenal of spells. Fighters have nothing that remotely compares to that. That is a problem, and I don't know why people are having such a problem admitting that. Animate Dead (especially as it is written) is a bad power to give to players. It was put into the game because it "feels" like D&D, and left relatively untouched because of laziness or lack of awareness. There are other spells that fulfill the role of a fighter in combat. Also, how would anyone defeat an adult blue dragon in its lair? As a DM, you can foil the plans of any table of PCs. You obviously want to stop the animate dead scenario, but why? Because the challenge was trivialized?
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Aug 12, 2014 03:53
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treeboy posted:1 is DM fiat, yes. 2 is the mechanics of the game as currently laid out regarding Long Rests/24hrs and the Animate Dead spell. See above regarding 2. quote:3 is normal dungeon design. I'm not talking about some super secrete trap just for skeletons, i'm saying that in any given dungeon there will likely be multiple combats and probably a trap or two (or many more as one would expect in a high level antagonist lair). The skeletons will likely not all survive this (or even the players). Most games, even ones without any wizards like my current 3.5 campaign, have interesting traps to overcome. Like I already said, now the skeletons simply trivialize the dungeon instead of the dragon. Problem is simply shifted, not fixed. If the dungeon now has those things precisely because of the wizard, so that the dragon would still be challenging, then, like I said, the game is now a battle of wits between DM and wizard. The wizard player is the most important player. quote:4 is...playing the part of the monster? I dunno what to say about this. Do you seriously expect a monsters actions within the context of the world, to be completely limited to those explicitly listed on their stat block? Not at all. What I'm saying is that the NPC reacting to the wizard in particular is already the wizard being the most awesome. The DM has already failed to provide a game where all players are equal participants. Whether the DM fiats a justification for why the dragon totally outsmarted him this time is irrelevant. Got another "solution" for you: have Pelor strike the Necromancer dead and condemned to hell for eternity for making so much undead. That "makes sense", within the fiction, right? It still wouldn't solve the problem. I'm still confused about this argument. If it is literally just "see, a DM can totally do [arbitrary stuff] to fix [bad thing]" then just say so. seebs posted:Is it really a serious "GM fiat" thing to observe that, most of the time, you just don't have enough sets of bones to hand to animate 40+ skeletons? It's not about whether it's a reasonable fiat or not. Fiat isn't bad. Fiat to fix bad game design is bad. No matter how reasonable the fiction justification is, it's still bad. Just perhaps less bad than letting lovely design stay lovely. But anyway, I'd say yes, it is utterly ridiculous that a high level wizard would have a hard time managing to find that many bones. eth0.n fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 03:53
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It sounds to me like a large and ongoing resource investment to keep finding bones fast enough to replace skeletons getting destroyed. I mean, I don't think I'd try to do it.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:57
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I just see 5E allowing people to play Dark Souls bosses. You guys have been talking about Nito for the past 50 pages, that neat pole-arm wielding Warlock is Ornstein... Don't really have much to add to the discussion besides thinking it would be nice if there were subclasses or feats so other players could have a thieves' guild, a bunch of nature guardians, ancestral spirits, or whatever equivalent as well.
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Aug 12, 2014 03:59
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Skeletons can last for millennia if they aren't buried in acidic soil, so I'm just picturing Jane Necromancer sitting around twiddling her thumbs and looking at her wrist-hourglass as she waits for set #10 of risen dead to burrow up from sixty feet down.
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Aug 12, 2014 04:02
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Are we seriously now arguing that a group of dangerous murder hobos would somehow lack for dead bodies? Remember skeletons are reusable unless destroyed for fewer spell slots then it took to make them in the first place, so you know need 20 skellies a day just 20 more then have been killed. And now every random encounter or town vitiated becomes a chance to replenish your stocks.
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Aug 12, 2014 04:03
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And if your skeleton army is zapped or falls in a pit and crumbles apart, just friggen animate the bones again Also never forget, inside each of us... is a skeleton
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Aug 12, 2014 04:07
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seebs posted:It sounds to me like a large and ongoing resource investment to keep finding bones fast enough to replace skeletons getting destroyed. I mean, I don't think I'd try to do it. I'm sure a DM could find a way to make this "make sense". Maybe standard burial rites involve dissolution in hydroflouric acid? But like I said, it wouldn't matter. Also, the wizards existence has now made the world more awesome, so yay wizard player! Bullshit DM fiat isn't bullshit because it doesn't "make sense". It's bullshit because it fixes bad game design.
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Aug 12, 2014 04:09
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jigokuman posted:It's literally how Robilar cleared the Tomb of Horrors when Gygax originally ran it. I've never suggested (quite the opposite in fact) that Wizards and Fighters are totally a-okay on par with one another. If this entire argument is people complaining about Fighters again (and again, and again) then it's *really* nothing new to the thread. I'm simply demonstrating that it's not the run-away-train that so many have made it out to be. I'm not trying to "foil" their tactics, if they decide to summon 200 skeletons then fine, if they determinedly cheese their way through it by digging up every cemetery on the Sword Coast and arguing every single rule, then they feel clever for the moment until they realize its cheese and therefore dumb, then that's their loss. Maybe a conversation needs to take place and make sure the game they're playing, or the one I'm running, is actually what they want to play. My whole entire point has been, despite the disparity in scope of casters and martials, the gap is hardly unbridgeable, nor is it completely broken. I daresay it's entirely possible for a DM to design a challenging but fair dungeon which would be fatal to their summons and stress players to the point that a dragon and some minions at the end are still tough without any particular DM-fiat or special attention beyond "Sure there are some bones here, but probably only five or six complete sets suitable for your purposes." that doesn't strike me as particularly unfair or 'adversarial'
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Aug 12, 2014 04:16
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Ederick posted:I just see 5E allowing people to play Dark Souls bosses. You guys have been talking about Nito for the past 50 pages, that neat pole-arm wielding Warlock is Ornstein... The thing is you could probably make a really awesome game out of a standard-ish fantasy RPG where every player has their main character and then a horde of followers. The Fighter gets men-at-arms, the Rogue gets a thieves' guild, the Druid gets woodland animals, the Necromancer gets skelingtons, the Cleric gets zealots, etc. That sounds like it could be really fun actually. But even if, even if, you accept the argument that the Wizard being able to summon a clattering undead army in Next isn't inherently problematic for the many, many reasons people have illustrated having your army of minions represented by individual units is loving ridiculous. It is the height of terrible game design in the year of our lord 2014 to allow a character easy access to something that's going to break the action economy over his loving knee. If for no other reason than that this is stupid game design. There exist plenty, plenty of ways for a game to let Bob Necromancer have a throng of skeletal minions other than "okay, here are the rolls for the first 20 skeletons..."
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Aug 12, 2014 04:17
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treeboy posted:I'm not trying to "foil" their tactics, if they decide to summon 200 skeletons then fine, if they determinedly cheese their way through it by digging up every cemetery on the Sword Coast and arguing every single rule, then they feel clever for the moment until they realize its cheese and therefore dumb, then that's their loss. Maybe a conversation needs to take place and make sure the game they're playing, or the one I'm running, is actually what they want to play. My whole entire point has been, despite the disparity in scope of casters and martials, the gap is hardly unbridgeable, nor is it completely broken. Consider this: You're talking about what "they" are trying to do, but it's actually what one player is trying to do. Edit: or, more precisely, what one player is allowed to try to do and the others are not. Bongo Bill fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Aug 12, 2014 |
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Aug 12, 2014 04:19
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My players rarely operate individually. In my experience it is "they"Kai Tave posted:The thing is you could probably make a really awesome game out of a standard-ish fantasy RPG where every player has their main character and then a horde of followers. The Fighter gets men-at-arms, the Rogue gets a thieves' guild, the Druid gets woodland animals, the Necromancer gets skelingtons, the Cleric gets zealots, etc. That sounds like it could be really fun actually. which is why no DM in their right mind would ever say "of course there's always an unlimited source of perfectly adequate bones nearby! have a field day!" Common sense limitations don't strike me as particularly...difficult
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Aug 12, 2014 04:20
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treeboy posted:which is why no DM in their right mind would ever say "of course there's always an unlimited source of perfectly adequate bones nearby! have a field day!" So as soon as something becomes a problem, it's shut down? Seriously? Doesn't that stop being Dungeons and Dragons and start becoming a pissing contest, where one guy has a hose hooked up to his dick?
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Aug 12, 2014 04:21
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Effectronica posted:So as soon as something becomes a problem, it's shut down? Seriously? Doesn't that stop being Dungeons and Dragons and start becoming a pissing contest, where one guy has a hose hooked up to his dick? if that's how you play D&D then...sure? Can't say I've ever gotten in a pissing contest with a DM though. In this case the spell specifically calls out that it requires a certain quality/amount of bones, to me that suggests an implicit restriction at DM's discretion. Is that shoddy design? Yup! Professionally I would never suggest a system be designed in such an unpredictable way, but it's also clearly not intended to be at the player's discretion.
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Aug 12, 2014 04:28
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One, "well no GM in their right mind/common sense dictates" is a terrible way to balance a game because it assumes that all GMs have an equal interpretation of what's fair, what's sane, and/or makes sense. If Next had a problem with players summoning an undead army then the simpler solution to that would be to not make it possible to do that in the first place. Two, "the GM can just fix it!" still doesn't excuse lovely game design no matter how many times people repeat it. A better designed game wouldn't require the GM to have to play a constant game of one-upsmanship with Bill the Wizard in the first place. Three, whether it's 100 skeletons or 40 or 20 or 10, giving someone at the table that many extra attacks to take and minions to maneuver is still a terrible idea, it has been a terrible idea in every RPG that's included the option for players to take their own personal army, and when the previous edition actually had a very simple and elegant solution to the "horde of whatever" issue that then got promptly ditched for the next one it sticks out even more in its pointless, regressive terribleness.
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Aug 12, 2014 04:30
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treeboy posted:if that's how you play D&D then...sure? Can't say I've ever gotten in a pissing contest with a DM though. In this case the spell specifically calls out that it requires a certain quality/amount of bones, to me that suggests an implicit restriction at DM's discretion. Is that shoddy design? Yup! Professionally I would never suggest a system be designed in such an unpredictable way, but it's also clearly not intended to be at the player's discretion. OK watch. The problem that most people are identifying is that this gives a player too much narrative control relative to the other players. The solution on offer has been to make being able to use the spell reliant on DM fiat, that is, removing all narrative control from the player (and incidentally producing a string of related headaches if we really take it all the way, but whatever). The solution doesn't really address the problem in a meaningful way, it just ties everything up in the DM's hands.
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Aug 12, 2014 04:31
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treeboy posted:My whole entire point has been, despite the disparity in scope of casters and martials, the gap is hardly unbridgeable, nor is it completely broken. Fighters are very much stuck in the "mundane". They are forced to conform to reality as we understand it. Casters are "magical" and do not have that restriction. In D&D anything that doesn't conform to reality as we know it is automatically "magical" and is thus the domain of wizards. Non-casters have to follow the rules. Most of their ability to interact with an change the world is gated by dice rolls. Casters get to explicitly break the rules, and anything that breaks the rules is theirs. That, to me, is a completely broken gap. I will add that it can be bridged, through DM fiat, but does that really count?
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Aug 12, 2014 04:32
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treeboy posted:which is why no DM in their right mind would ever say "of course there's always an unlimited source of perfectly adequate bones nearby! have a field day!" I absolutely would. Because I also wouldn't DM a game where "how many bones can the Wizard find" is the question an ability's brokenness rides on. How many bones a wizard can find, or how does a dragon react to a skeleton army, or whatever are all the same thing. They're DM fiat-ing some fact about the world. This is arbitrary. Maybe there are lots of bones, maybe not. Maybe the dragon is super smart and knows just how to counter the wizard, or maybe he's greedy and cocky and doesn't prepare, or maybe he flees. Among good reasons to make a particular fiat decision are: 1) because it sets a cool scene that facilitates collaborative storytelling among all players 2) because it sets a cool scene for combat/skill challenge/some other gameplay, that's fun and engaging for all players A bad reason to make a particular fiat decision is because the DM is too chickenshit to have a conversation with the player like two reasonable adults, and fix the overpowered character some lazy designer broke. "Because it just makes sense" is an excuse. Never a reason. A DM can justify anything.
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Aug 12, 2014 04:32
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Sir, you have impugned the integrety of D&D. I challenge you to a duel on the field of honor. The weapon shall be skeletons.
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Aug 12, 2014 05:09
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DalaranJ posted:Sir, you have impugned the integrety of D&D. I challenge you to a duel on the field of honor. The weapon shall be skeletons. If it's only one at a time sure. Someone just pointed this out to me. Some guy on the Internet posted:Animate dead gives you a bonus action on your turns to command the creature, but it's still just one bonus action for to command one creature, so only one skeleton can attack in each round. To get 100 skeletons to all attack at once, you're going to need an army of 100 necromancers. So they will stand around and defend themselves and move around with you. But you can only do one thing with one of them pur turn.
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Aug 12, 2014 05:26
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No, you can use your action on all of the skeletons. But it needs to be the EXACT SAME action, so if you're not fighting on a big open field there's a practical upper limit to what you can do without creating a huge traffic jam. In particular since they can't share a square, when commanding more than one you can no longer choose their exact move and action, and are limited practically to basicially "attack that dude" and "walk straight forward". It's why I think there's the implicit assumption that you only have one animate dead spell active at a time and they just forgot to write that down. It all makes sense on the scale of "You have one skeleton minimum, 14 skeletons maximum".
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Aug 12, 2014 05:28
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hito posted:No, you can use your action on all of the skeletons. But it needs to be the EXACT SAME action, so if you're not fighting on a big open field there's a practical upper limit to what you can do without creating a huge traffic jam. In particular since they can't share a square, when commanding more than one you can no longer choose their exact move and action, and are limited practically to basicially "attack that dude" and "walk straight forward". Then I won't be shocked if there is Errata. Still that makes it less of an issue already.
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Aug 12, 2014 05:34
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Effectronica posted:So as soon as something becomes a problem, it's shut down? Seriously? Doesn't that stop being Dungeons and Dragons and start becoming a pissing contest, where one guy has a hose hooked up to his dick? Not really? I mean, my usual habit in games has been pretty strongly simulationist, and there are a whole lot of circumstances under which you're not going to have a convenient source of lots of bodies unless you go to a civilized area and kill a lot of people, at which point, Consequences. You're gonna run out as they get wrecked.
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Aug 12, 2014 05:35
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jigokuman posted:I think this is where the disagreement is, and it is a pretty root issue to D&D. I think that gap is at least somewhat intentional. I note: I continue to hear about people picking martials in 5e. And saying they are having fun and doing well. I don't think this problem is necessarily as big as it sounds.
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Aug 12, 2014 05:37
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It seems to me like a dungeon with enough traps designed to kill 60 skeletons would probably TPK a group without 60 skeletons in the first few rooms.
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Aug 12, 2014 05:57
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seebs posted:I think that gap is at least somewhat intentional. Some people like a thing? Guess nobody csn ever complain!
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Aug 12, 2014 06:43
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I don't think I've ever played with a group that would have difficulty finding a copious number of skeletons. I've had groups with no ability to do anything whatsoever with bones collect the bones of their enemies for fun. Consider that the average encounter with Goblins at like... level 1 probably has 3+ Goblins. I'm a Wizard. I buy a cart. We will never want for skeletons.
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Aug 12, 2014 06:44
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Skeletons have crap saves, no skills, and can't communicate so they probably can't really aid one another. Remember how people used to complain that all the DCs in the dungeons were too drat high? To skeletons they're even higher. Not only that, skeletons can't heal. You know what would own, though. Is if someone sent their skeleton squad into a dungeon to scout, and they all got trapped but undamaged, and whisked away. That way, unless the necromancer delved after them before 24hrs elapsed, they'd lose control and have to fight them in the dungeon later. Like the plot of Taken but with skeletons.
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Aug 12, 2014 06:46
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