As for the *stuf* you do to the small buggers, all very nice, but half of it is countered by having all the little buggers have javelins, and all of it assumes you go first.
Try 'small buggers' Kobold Sorc 1 x20, Magic Missile. They might actually land more than 3 in 20 hits.
Tempting, but 50 damage would one-shot a level 7 wizard, even with greater mage armor, mirror image and displacement, so that would be a bit harsh for a quick in between encounter only desinged to slow things down a bit and force the casters to think about rescourse management.
Or you know the caster casts shield and ignores the magic missiles.
Yes, of course, if available. Then again, the level 7 wizard we're talking about here did got his spell slots filled up rather tightly, the last few pages. Of course every attack I can image can get countered by A spell, there are bloody thounsands. But no level 7 wizard has them ALL prepared. A level 7 wizard that has shield, greater mage armor, mirror image and displacement memorized, can't end that much encounters a day. Watch out,
general statement: as far as I'm concerned, people on this board are a bit too quick to uncritical accept any statement on uberwizardness. Discussions often go - situation A "but wizard can do B to counter that" , situation C - "but wizard can do D to counter that", et cetera. While in the end, no wizard can have all those options available at the same time.
Or you can acknowledge magic is generally more powerful than a lack of magic and run with it.
Eh.... that's what this threat was started with, wasn't it? And which something I already said several times in this discussion. It amazes me slightly that any comment that suggest that (in this case: with some good DM'ing) the gap between casters and non-casters can be made smaller, people immediately jump up in a fighting mode to ask "SO YOU'RE ONE OF THOSE GUYS THAT THINK NON-CASTERS ARE BETTER THEN CASTERS, HUH?!!?" Really remarkable.
Wall of Stone is a wizard spell.
Wizard waves his hands, he creates a wall of stone.
Wizard waves his hands, he creates an illusory wall of stone.
Hell, if he's using illusions, he probably has that skill trick from CScoundrel that lets him make a something check to pretend to cast a different spell than he did!
You have been implying rather strongly that casters are not a win button. That mixed groups of casters and melee/fighters can work perfectly fine if the DM puts some work into designing encounters specifically to shit all over the casters.
Yeah, they can work perfectly fine, when everyone just blithely ignores that the wizard is vastly more powerful than the fighter, or when the guy playing the fighter is an optimizer and the guy playing the wizard thinks 'fireball' is the most powerful spell in the game.
That doesn't mean that the wizard is in any way balanced against the fighter in terms of what they can deal with and what they can achieve and how many options they have and what can and can't kill them and how successful they are at y'know, succeeding. And not failing, dying, or being useless by comparison.
1. Designing encounters specifically to shit on the caster is metagaming. Yes, intelligent monsters would know to go for the artillery in the back rather than the armoured meatblossom in the front, but the fact of the matter is that it's literally harder to kill a 5th+ wizard than it is to kill a fighter assuming equal levels of competency. To put this into perspective, my kid brother has never played DnD before. He sat down with a wizard character sheet. He looked at the PHB spells. He had one 5th level spell, he picked teleport. Black Tentacles, Glitterdust, Alter Self. He hasn't even played NWN or Baldur's Gate. He just read the spell list blurbs and picked out the spells that sounded like they did awesome shit as opposed to 'sending' and 'animate rope'. And you know what, his wizard rocked the house to the point I literally handed the guy playing the fighter a literal dragon because it was the only way for him to keep up.
Furthermore, that you have to design encounters specifically to shit on the casters? That right there tells me we have what we in the business refer to as a balance problem. If we didn't you wouldn't be metagaming the world so it's harder for casters and easier for Fighting Men.
2. Having an unspoken gentleman's agreement between your players that they aren't going to play optimized casters so that everyone has fun is fine and dandy. But again, it's a fix. And it's a fix because it's fixing something, to wit, that casters are infinitely more powerful than Fighters and Paladumbs and whatnot.
Yeah, you can totally play games without houserules where fighters and wizards amiably rub shoulders. But inevitably that is because the GM has skewed the world and fights to favour the fighters, or a gentleman's agreement has been (spokenly or unspokenly) made between the players.
- wall of stone: fair enough, I'm convinced.
- implying casters not an 'I win button': yes, I think I
do imply that. For all their power, they might easily take out some encounters, but there's nothing stopping a DM from throwing in a few more encounters then. Plenty of times, the "I win" button is a "I win 70% of the time" cause it's still a SAVE or die.
- 'designing encounters to shit on casters' is your interpretation. Which is again remarkable, since what I advocate is smart DM'ing, complex situations, multiple opponents, smart opponents that care to take out the big threat first. As for that level 5 wizard that's harder to kill then a level 5 fighter, that's exactly what I mean by looking uncritical at casters; yeah, with displacement, shield, mirror image and mage armor on, the wizard is much harder to kill then the whatever, great, congratz. How many of those do you have on when you aren't expecting an encounter? How many will you cast if you are surprised? How many rounds will that take you? What happens in the time between? If you do have all those spells on before every encounter you expect, how many can you take on 1 day? Those questions are rarely asked, unfortunately.
- that there is a balance problem is clear. Else I wouldn't say it can be made smaller with good dm'ing.
- you misinterpret my 'gentlemens agreement'. The people I play with do optimze up to a reasonable degree, the example I mentioned with the barbarian and the god-style wizard: the wizard does play with abrupt jaunt, EBT, glitterdust, sod's, etc. The barbarion was aiming for champion of ghwynwhatever, so had to take some sucky feats. Even then, getting to a sort of balance was possible.
- and yes, I do use fixes, also. That doesn't mean that my need to fix isn't smaller because I take into acount strong and weak poins of all my players when I design my encounters.
and all of it assumes you go first.
It also assumes that your scout failed to notice 50 mooks before they were in range to attack you. If he did, he deserves to be fired (or Fireballed, however you want to handle it).
And WTF... do you roll one initiative roll for 50 NPCs, and if it happens to beat the PCs roll(s), then all 50 NPCs go first? How's that for being shafted by the DM? If you don't, how likely is it for all 50 mooks to beat the wizard on initiative? If he's optimized at all, he should beat more than half of them. Which means he might survive the first volley, and be able to defend himself against the rest, even if he didn't have a defensive measure in place before the fight started.
Standard D&D just doesn't do well with mobs of enemies and mass combat. They're either no challenge at all, or they'll take down much higher level PCs (depending on PC preparedness and mook tactics). Either way, they offer no XP at all, because you're not supposed to be fighting enemies that much lower level than you are. (And if they're not that much lower level than you, then you also shouldn't be fighting that many, because the EL would be off the charts.)
So it's not a very "by the books" scenario.
As for the example, when did it became 50 mooks? I didn't make 'em that... I made 'em an undefined bunch of small creatures that were quickly made up for this discussion as an illustration, then somebody made them 20 kobold sorcerers casting 1 magic missle for 50 damage... and then it were suddenly 50 mooks. I especially didn't work out the example too much to avoid it starting to lead it's own life.... epic succes *sigh*
As for mobs: dunno if they're not 'by the books', there are plenty of rules for those combats, plenty of those situations in premade adventures and DMG has rules on how to deal with XP in weird cases...
Neither are many of your other ways of dealing with this stuff. You mentioned that your group bans troublesome spells like the Polymorph line, and that they aren't really optimizers at all. So in your group, with your house rules and lack of optimization, what you're saying is no doubt true. In a group where the spellcasters are ran by capable optimizers without a bunch of houserules sandbagging them, it isn't. Isn't that pretty obvious? Why is this argument still going on? If it weren't true, you guys wouldn't be houseruling those "troublesome" spells. So you've basically already conceded.
See lines above about party with barbarian and conjurer about the level of optimzation we play; we do houserule very little and spellcasters
are ran by capable optimzers. Up to quite a high level of optimzation my 'fix' works, that's all I'm saying. I wouldn't know if it still works up to the point where the wizard because a pyro-hydra, cause I never tried.
But I wouldn't know what I 'conceded'? That non-casters are as strong as casters? That wasn't my point to begin with. Of course they aren't, and our group (sometimes) uses other fixes, just as other groups I play in usually do. I responed to
Logically, when the casters are low on spells, and especially if the group expects random encounters, the group will stop so casters can recover spells. At higher levels, parties are expected to rest before casters are out of spells just so the group can recover HP and undo status ailments.
in the OP, and the later statement that only peak power counts. And that if
that's the case, the DM is doing a sloppy job. And that
by doing his job well, a DM can make the caster/non-caster problem a lot less problematic.
