D&D Spells [Rebalancing 3.5]

[RobbyPants]

Possibly.  Maybe higher level spells could grant full invisibility.

Even still, I don't know if it's that necessary.  You can be detected normally with Listen checks.  You can even be pinpointed with a good enough Listen check (+20 DC). 

I see what you two are saying, but I'm not sure that Invisibility is the same "auto-win" scenario that things like True Seeing, Freedom of Momvement, Knock, and Zone of Truth are.  I guess that Invisibility defeats nomral sight, but there seem to be lots of built in counters.

[veekie]

Well, not even normal sight, if you can get your Spot up enough. I figure since it's already built into the Spot/Hide skill uses, why not take it all the way?

[RobbyPants]

Maybe I missed your point the first time then.  Are you saying to give the Invisibility-defeating spells a boost to Spot, so you have a chance to detect the foe with opposed rolls?

[veekie]

For See Invisibility, yes, the Purge and Glitterdust would give a penalty to hide instead, and Invisibility itself is then just a big bonus to hide. Basically, turn the invisibility/see invisibility thing into an extension of the Hide/Spot war, rather than a subdomain by itself.

[RobbyPants]

Well, Glitterdust already imposes a -40 penalty or so on hiding creatures.

Perhaps Invisibitlity just gives you a +20 bonus, and you can hide in plain sight with no cover or concealment.

[SiggyDevil]

Perhaps Invisibitlity just gives you a +20 bonus, and you can hide in plain sight with no cover or concealment.

Essentially, a 4e Invisibility. They at least got some things right. 

[veekie]

Perhaps Invisibitlity just gives you a +20 bonus, and you can hide in plain sight with no cover or concealment.

Essentially, a 4e Invisibility. They at least got some things right. 

True that, just such a pity the things they got wrong are in very hard to remove places.

[SiggyDevil]

I know of quite a few easily avoided failures in 4e, but what did you have in mind veekie?

[veekie]

The powers available
Not enough variety.

[Mister_Sinister]

- Everyone is essentially a carbon copy of everything else
- High-level optimisation is needed just to be VIABLE at higher levels
- You feel like a pathetic weakling no matter what you do
- Solo monsters create combat times of WTF
- Ritual mechanics are.... blithely stupid
- Items are... blithely stupid
- You are locked into race-class combinations in a more hardcore way than 3.5 ever was
- You could get more entertainment out of playing WoW or Guild Wars

...and before 4E lovers pounce on me, I am not deriding the game, I am merely pointing out its failures.

More to the point, granting bonuses to skill checks off spells is something that is good in this case, I think.

[InnaBinder]

I didn't notice any psionics yet addressed, though you put them in this heading.  One word:  synchronicity.     

[Mister_Sinister]

Agreed. There's a few confusing things in there too, but that's the biggest offender.

[RobbyPants]

I didn't notice any psionics yet addressed, though you put them in this heading.  One word:  synchronicity.     

I'm a busy guy.  What can I say?

I certainly would like to address it.  Even though I own the XPH, I've yet to play in a game where the DM allowed psionics, and almost no players in my games ever express an interest.  Thus, I'm quite a novice when it comes to identifying problematic psionic powers.  Some of the no-brainers are the ones that replicate the Polymorph spells.  Still, I'd appreciate any help from all of you to point out any power specifically that need to be pulled back.

At this point, I'd probably just focus on stuff from the XPH.  I don't own Complete Psionic, and I want to have a smaller set to begin working on this.

[RobbyPants]

Bkdubs suggested a fix to Warmages Edge a while back that I liked.  Part of the fix is to drastically increase the damage you get (he suggested Int mod x spell level).  The other half of his suggestion was to decrease the raw damage granted by direct damage spells that I suggested earlier.  This was to help make the warmage a more obvious choice for a blaster character.

Basically, my current suggestion was to increase direct damage by adding half the spell's level (round up) to each damage die of the spell.  To decrease this just a bit, how about dropping it to a third, round up?  So, the ammount added to each damage die for each spell level would look like:

0: +0
1: +1
2: +1
3: +1
4: +2
5: +2
6: +2
7: +3
8: +3
9: +3

[RobbyPants]

Based on the idea of changing percentage-based miss chances into a flat AC bonus, some spells need to be modified.

The idea is to make a 20% miss a +2 concealment bonus to AC and a 50% miss a +4 concealment bonus to AC.

Also, Mirror Image has a miss chance-like mechanic involved.  Now, each image grants a +2 concealment bonus to your AC, with an AC cap of +10.  If an opponent attacks and misses you, but rolled well enough to hit your AC without the concealment bonus (i.e. within a margin of the concealment bonus), then one of the images disapears (along with its AC bonus).

[RobbyPants]

I think the only serious open issue on spells is figuring out what to do with crowd control spells.

In my original design, I classified the bulk of offensive spells as direct damage (DD), crowd control (CC) and save-or-dies (SoD).  This, of course, might leave out some de-buffs and other miscelaneous spells, but generally speaking, I wanted to bring these three types to about the same level.

So, to fix DD, I added an amount to each damage die based on the level and added an extra effect based on the damage type.  These effects still need a bit of work, admitadly.

To fix SoDs, I wanted to make them all take a full round to cast (not a full round action), to give the opponents time to react.  This makes it more of a tactical desision ("Can I pull it off?") as opposed to a caster-always-wins scenario ("Roll a d20 or die, fucker!").

This leaves me with CC.  Given the above two changes, CC seems like the obvious choice for your spell slots.  A while back I thought of allowing a save every round to negate, but this results in more rolls and would require a lot of specific spell rewrites.  I could do the whole full-round-to-cast approach of SoDs, but I'm not sure if it's too much.  I think this would be my fall back approach in the absense of any other solution.  Does anyone have any ideas?

Of course, figuring out which spells exactly qualify as CC is another issue, but at this point, I'm looking at the big picture.  Also, I plan to tweak the DD damage-type effects a bit.

[veekie]

Crowd control(as I assume this includes terrain alteration?) is a bit hard to quantify though, what areas are they too good at to require a change? Mostly because I can't think of a solution to someone being able to say, plonk down a wall and cut off half the battlefield, except not let him do it, nor can I see a problem with that, off hand. Lil help here?

[RobbyPants]

I guess this would be terrain alteration, movement hidering, and save-or-sucks in general.

Spells that come to mind off the top of my head would include:

Grease
Color Spray
Sleep
Entangle
Web
Glitterdust
Slow
Deep Slumber
Stinking Cloud
Evard's Black Tenticles
Solid Fog
etc...

[veekie]

Terrain Alteration(walls, fogs, grease and web?), can't do a lot about it(changing the cast time doesn't really change matters here), but it can be more or less left alone.

Movement hindering, see terrain alteration, theres a lot of overlap here.

Save or suck, the same treatment as Save or Dies should apply if they render the victim incapable of fighting back in any coherent manner. Glitterdust might be one, except again, if it's a full round cast, it's not much good for it's intended(I presume) use of locating invisibles, who'd get out of the suspect area once they figure it out. Color Spray might be a safe one to do the cast time increase to.

Looks like it's on a case by case basis here, too much variance within the category for any broad statement not to have far reaching consequences.

[RobbyPants]

Looks like it's on a case by case basis here, too much variance within the category for any broad statement not to have far reaching consequences.

It might be more simple than that.  When you broke CC up into three types, you made it obvious that only one of them is more powerful than the otherse (save-or-sucks).  Perhaps the easiest way to identify a save-or-suck spell is to see if it imposes one of several conditions to the target.  Some potentals could be (just off the top of my head):

• blindness
• nasuea
• dazed
• stunned
• confused
• unconscious
• entangled in some circumstances

Basically, anything that would prevent people from taking actions as normal.  Other conditions, such as sickened, shaken, and fatigued are more of debuffs, in that they tend to apply penalties to rolls more than anything else.  Those can probably be left alone.  Although, this brings up another issue: fear.

Figure that shaken is more of a debuff, but frightened and panicked are more of SoSs.  That's all fine and dandy, but fear affects stack.  So, if you add shaken to shaken, you get frightened.  Should this still be considered a debuff as opposed to a SoS?  I'd be inclinde to keep it as a debuff, but I can see doing it either way.