Rating enchantment as weakest school = greatest fallacy?

[Lactantius]

Whatever, whenever, well, just anytime you read a thread around wizard optimization, you get the same response: ban enchantment first, if you go specialist.

That's mainly because of those two barriers an enchantment spell has to pass: will saves and mind-affecting.

Ok, will save is not that big deal, all other spell have to deal with saves in either way.

But let's get to that argument around mind-affecting-immunites.

Besides very natural immunites coming from race abilites (like, being undead), there are very few REAL blockers out there:

Candidate number 1 is the spell mind blank.
I wonder why people refer to this spell over and over again.
You would think that the enchanter meets only wizard15+ guys with this spell up. All other enemies won't have this spell up if you exclude exotic and cheesy stuff.
Even if we stick to the wizard as primary target, a PC wizard would surely stick to other spells than his enchantment (like, dispelling in the first place).

So, I'm not convinced with the mind blank stick.

Canidate number 2 is the spell protection from evil.
That's a really popular choice since it comes out of the box at level 1.
I'm totally convinced that this is an effective way to block enchantments - for a very small timeframe.

Now, the real enchantment powerhouses are Charms and Dominates since they are so open ended.

I really, really wonder if anyone considered the paragraph that protection form evil does not more than merely suppressing the charm/domination effect.
After a few minutes, protection from evil ends and the target is back on the domination status.

Sure, if a battle ends (with the death of the enchanting caster), the compulsion is pointless.
But if we reach mid-level or high-level, it appears more often that an intelligent enemy makes use of escape mechanisms to delay the battle - just to come back a few minutes later.

What I want to clarify for all players banning enchantment so easily is that the total immunity to this school is not there, at all.
It is just suppressed, nothing more.
A smart player would arrange this mindgame by delaying the combat until PvE wears off (if we wouldn't dispel PvE in the first place).

[Kyeudo]

What you are missing is that the advice to ban Enchantment comes from three sources, not just the one.

The first is that it is pretty easy to get short or long duration immunity to Enchantment if one does not already possess it. You've covered that this is not total, but you've shown that it can be annoying to work around the problem.

The second is that the most dangerous creatures have good Will saves if they don't have some form of immunity to the best Enchantments available at the level you get them. This means that Enchantment is the worst spells to use to deal with these enemies and that Fort or Ref targeting spells (or rays or no-save-just-suck) spells would be better options.

The third is that Charm and Dominate are the best spells Enchantment can offer. What other Enchantments do you really lose out on? Every other school that you can ban except maybe Evocation has at least as many desired spells on the list, usually many more. Enchantment has a high opportunity cost compared to, say, Conjuration.

[Eldariel]

Don't forget that it's fairly easy to get mind control abilities through summons/planar binding/etc. so they're eminently replaceable and not the type you need in the moment.

[eggynack]

There's another major issue, which is that enchantment doesn't cover a very wide range of problems. The whole school is mostly save or suck/save or lose stuff, and those effects can be reasonably replicated by other schools. Sure, you can potentially get a free meatbag out of the deal for the duration of the effect, but you're getting that in exchange for consistency. A wizard's abilities are incredibly potent, so they greatly benefit from increasing consistency as much as they can. Even if not every enemy has something that hoses enchantments, some do, and that makes the spells riskier to cast. Moreover, it is the most powerful enemies who will have enchantment immunity, so enchantments can fail you when you need them most.

Ultimately, enchantment is a very narrow and high risk school, and that makes it better for banning than pretty much any other school. I'd actually probably ban it before evocation most of the time, because evocation has so many good non-blasting effects. enchantment has like one effect that isn't mind-affecting, and that is a problematic thing. You just kinda hand waved enemies who are naturally immune, but that's yet another good segment of enemies that you can't really affect. I'd really rather not prepare a bunch of spells that might just end up being completely useless in a given day, especially because I can prepare other spells that probably won't do that. It's just a big ol' confluence of issues that make enchantment a very bannable school.

[lsfreak]

You're missing several things.

One is that you're understating the type immunities. Undead are the single most populous type in the MMs. While less populous, throw in constructs, oozes, plants, and vermin, and you're talking a significant chunk of the monster manual with immunity by default.

In addition, many of the enchantment school is further limited by type. Your 1st level charm only works on humanoids up until 7th level. For being one of the powerhouse spells of the school, that's a LONG time to be useless against a huge number of enemies. Dominate doesn't start affecting non-humanoids until 17th level. Suggestion is language-dependent. Many of the low-level spells are HD-capped to very low levels. And so on.

The second is that charm and dominate are the powerhouses, and there's simply not much else. Enchantment is a very focused school that doesn't offer the variety of other schools. By banning it, you're simply not losing as much. You have to look at what the others school bring to the table, and they all have more variety than enchantment. In addition, enchantment is one of the smallest schools, if not the smallest, in terms of the spells it has, further limiting the variety.

Third, diplomancy exists.

EDIT: Actually there's a chance I'm misremembering the ratio of different monster types, I can't seem to find the chart I was remembering. Either way though, it's a non-trivial percent of the MMs that have immunity based purely on type.

[Psyren]

Protection from X is not a "small timeframe" at all. They last a whole combat even at 1st-level, never mind the magic circles that last even longer.

Anyway, in addition to charm and dominate, there's also sleep and the Hold X line - these are useful due to being able to bypass Protections which prevent direct control. but yeah, enchantment has very little beyond those 4.

Compare even to Evocation - even when blasting isn't appropriate, they still get control spells (walls, resilient sphere/forcecage) and utility (Gust of Wind, Floating Disk, Contingency.) And blasting, even if it doesn't kill the enemy in one round, is always useful - particularly if your allies are capable of high damage as well.

[Emperor Tippy]

The only Enchantment spells that aren't fairly easily replaced are Feeblemind and Mindrape.

The first is the easiest method of rendering an arcane caster a non threat if you want to imprison them or otherwise screw them over.

The second is the best interrogation and mind control method in the entire game. Even if your DM rules that unconscious creatures don't autofail their save, there are plenty of ways to drop a captured creatures saves and once that happens you know everything that the target knows; every plan, every secret, every scrap of information. No checks, no more saves, no need to know what you are looking for. And then you get to rebuild the targets mind however you want and the only way to break it is with Wish.

Both can, however, be gained through scrolls without much effort.

Enchantment is generally the best school to ban but it's still better to ban no schools (absent Incantatrix).

[Psyren]

Even those massively powerful effects are totally shut down simply by being undead or having a mind blank up though, which is part of the problem with the school.

Mindrape has the additional problem of being 3.0, and thus the DM is instructed to make adjustments while converting it.

[Dusk Eclipse]

One important thing that most people are missing, is that even if the spell itself doesn't have the [Mind-Affecting] tag, all Enchantment spells are [Mind-Affecting] by default.



Enchantment
Enchantment spells affect the minds of others, influencing or controlling their behavior.

All enchantments are mind-affecting spells. Two types of enchantment spells grant you influence over a subject creature.

Charm
A charm spell changes how the subject views you, typically making it see you as a good friend.

Compulsion
A compulsion spell forces the subject to act in some manner or changes the way her mind works. Some compulsion spells determine the subject’s actions or the effects on the subject, some compulsion spells allow you to determine the subject’s actions when you cast the spell, and others give you ongoing control over the subject.


Source (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/spellDescriptions.htm)

So yeah a single spell shuts down a complete school of magic.

[Psyren]

So yeah a single spell shuts down a complete school of magic.

A single spell, and multiple creature types too.

[Emperor Tippy]

Even those massively powerful effects are totally shut down simply by being undead or having a mind blank up though, which is part of the problem with the school.
Polymorph to change creature type and Dispel Magic to remove Mind Blank.


Mindrape has the additional problem of being 3.0, and thus the DM is instructed to make adjustments while converting it.
Except what is adjusted in a spell conversion is laid out in the WotC conversion guides and none of them apply to Mind Rape.

And RAW it works exactly as it says in the BoVD.

[Dusk Eclipse]

A single spell, and multiple creature types too.

My main point still stands, while Enchantment definitely has some pretty big guns, it is relatively easy to counter all of them with low cost; Necropolitan is really cheap for complete immunity, as other have noted a level 1 spell completely neuters around a half of the school.

If you are going to specialize I don't see why you would not ban Enchantment.

[Psyren]

Polymorph to change creature type and Dispel Magic to remove Mind Blank.

1) You mean PAO, right? Polymorph is willing only and you can't render an undead creature unconscious. And PAO is close range, dispellable, save/SR etc.

2) Ghostly Visage Symbiont = Ex Mind Blank.



Except what is adjusted in a spell conversion is laid out in the WotC conversion guides and none of them apply to Mind Rape.

Link to the the BoVD conversion guide?



And RAW it works exactly as it says in the BoVD.

By RAW, unupdated 3.0 material requires adjustments that are up to the DM.


My main point still stands, while Enchantment definitely has some pretty big guns, it is relatively easy to counter all of them with low cost; Necropolitan is really cheap for complete immunity, as other have noted a level 1 spell completely neuters around a half of the school.

If you are going to specialize I don't see why you would not ban Enchantment.

Relax, I was agreeing with you :smalltongue:

[Rubik]

PAO could be used on an undead or construct, and if the construct is a golem, you can always use a rod of construct command, followed by commanding the golem to use a psychoactive skin of proteus.

[Story]

The third is that Charm and Dominate are the best spells Enchantment can offer. What other Enchantments do you really lose out on? Every other school that you can ban except maybe Evocation has at least as many desired spells on the list, usually many more. Enchantment has a high opportunity cost compared to, say, Conjuration.

Apart from stuff like Ray of Stupidity and Mindrape, the main thing Enchantment has to offer is buffs. When I ban it, I really miss stuff like Heroics. Of course, that doesn't stop me from banning it first, but obviously there are spells there that are somewhat useful. However, it's still a lot fewer spells then most schools.

[Coidzor]

Not necessarily weakest so much as most commonly rendered ineffective or unusable due to immunities or the ability to acquire immunities.

[ArcturusV]

I always viewed Enchantment as an inverse usefulness scale.

At low levels? It's probably the best thing a Wizard can really do. Sleep an encounter into a laughable state. Charm Person not only to potentially end an encounter, but to make the next one even easier. Etc.

But yeah, as you get to higher levels then things like Mind Blank and such start kicking in, more creatures with Immunities, etc. Of course there's also a controversy in my mind at least if "Protection from _____" really works against Enchantments as effectively as people say. Charm spells are... a lot more subtle. I wouldn't rule them as outright "Domination" or control like Protection seems to say it's suppressing. Much less other useful effects like Hold, Sleep, etc. And one of the interesting spells that severs a character from their divine power.

But yeah, once you gain in power the ability of Enchantment starts to get stolen away by other schools. Summon X, not really as good as Charm X. But Planar Bindings? Sure. Immunities start to crop up, etc. Just once you get to higher levels it gets less useful. The school is very front loaded like that. Compare to say... Evocation. Evocation tends to get much better at higher levels and at low levels is very weak.

Then again, I've always been of the mindset that banning schools is generally for short sighted people.

[Kalmageddon]

To be honest I'm under the impression that these optimization advices treat the game like it was meant to be PvP or meaningles theorycrafting.
In a typical D&D campaign blowing things up with fireballs is perfectly viable, so is using enchantment and so is playing a fighter or a monk.

Optimization exist for optimization's sake, there is no actual need for it if you just play the game as it's meant to be played.

[Dusk Eclipse]

I always viewed Enchantment as an inverse usefulness scale.

At low levels? It's probably the best thing a Wizard can really do. Sleep an encounter into a laughable state. Charm Person not only to potentially end an encounter, but to make the next one even easier. Etc.

But yeah, as you get to higher levels then things like Mind Blank and such start kicking in, more creatures with Immunities, etc. Of course there's also a controversy in my mind at least if "Protection from _____" really works against Enchantments as effectively as people say. Charm spells are... a lot more subtle. I wouldn't rule them as outright "Domination" or control like Protection seems to say it's suppressing. Much less other useful effects like Hold, Sleep, etc. And one of the interesting spells that severs a character from their divine power.

But yeah, once you gain in power the ability of Enchantment starts to get stolen away by other schools. Summon X, not really as good as Charm X. But Planar Bindings? Sure. Immunities start to crop up, etc. Just once you get to higher levels it gets less useful. The school is very front loaded like that. Compare to say... Evocation. Evocation tends to get much better at higher levels and at low levels is very weak.

Then again, I've always been of the mindset that banning schools is generally for short sighted people.

Protection against Evil totally works against Charm Person, let's review the spell shall we?



Protection from Evil
Abjuration [Good]
Level: Clr 1, Good 1, Pal 1, Sor/Wiz 1
Components: V, S, M/DF
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Touch
Target: Creature touched
Duration: 1 min./level (D)
Saving Throw: Will negates (harmless)
Spell Resistance: No; see text
This spell wards a creature from attacks by evil creatures, from mental control, and from summoned creatures. It creates a magical barrier around the subject at a distance of 1 foot. The barrier moves with the subject and has three major effects.

First, the subject gains a +2 deflection bonus to AC and a +2 resistance bonus on saves. Both these bonuses apply against attacks made or effects created by evil creatures.

Second, the barrier blocks any attempt to possess the warded creature (by a magic jar attack, for example) or to exercise mental control over the creature (including enchantment (charm) effects and enchantment (compulsion) effects that grant the caster ongoing control over the subject, such as dominate person). The protection does not prevent such effects from targeting the protected creature, but it suppresses the effect for the duration of the protection from evil effect. If the protection from evil effect ends before the effect granting mental control does, the would-be controller would then be able to mentally command the controlled creature. Likewise, the barrier keeps out a possessing life force but does not expel one if it is in place before the spell is cast. This second effect works regardless of alignment.

Third, the spell prevents bodily contact by summoned creatures. This causes the natural weapon attacks of such creatures to fail and the creatures to recoil if such attacks require touching the warded creature. Good summoned creatures are immune to this effect. The protection against contact by summoned creatures ends if the warded creature makes an attack against or tries to force the barrier against the blocked creature. Spell resistance can allow a creature to overcome this protection and touch the warded creature.

Arcane Material Component
A little powdered silver with which you trace a 3-foot -diameter circle on the floor (or ground) around the creature to be warded.

Now let's see Charm Person


Charm Person
Enchantment (Charm) [Mind-Affecting]
Level: Brd 1, Sor/Wiz 1
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: One humanoid creature
Duration: 1 hour/level
Saving Throw: Will negates
Spell Resistance: Yes
This charm makes a humanoid creature regard you as its trusted friend and ally (treat the target’s attitude as friendly). If the creature is currently being threatened or attacked by you or your allies, however, it receives a +5 bonus on its saving throw.

The spell does not enable you to control the charmed person as if it were an automaton, but it perceives your words and actions in the most favorable way. You can try to give the subject orders, but you must win an opposed Charisma check to convince it to do anything it wouldn’t ordinarily do. (Retries are not allowed.) An affected creature never obeys suicidal or obviously harmful orders, but it might be convinced that something very dangerous is worth doing. Any act by you or your apparent allies that threatens the charmed person breaks the spell. You must speak the person’s language to communicate your commands, or else be good at pantomiming.


So no matter how subtle your charm effects are, they are stopped cold by a Protection from Evil (and similars)

[ryu]

Then again, I've always been of the mindset that banning schools is generally for short sighted people.

Name literally any effect that can't be gotten easily as an SLA that I would actually still want and couldn't just get a scroll to UMD. Seriously like right now. Find even one and I'll start considering putting enchantment at the grownup table with the good schools.

[ArcturusV]

... you could say that about ANY school however. So that seems like a strange argument to use. What school can you not just ban, get scrolls, and UMD on demand?

And touche about the Protection. Forgot the exact wording and bit me in the ass. :smallbiggrin: Ah well.

[eggynack]

To be honest I'm under the impression that these optimization advices treat the game like it was meant to be PvP or meaningles theorycrafting.
I don't know where you got that impression. The criticism that enchantment doesn't work on undead, plants, oozes, and many other creature types has very few applications in PvP contexts. The same is true of the fact that enchantment is one of the most narrow schools in the game. It'd be nice if you could point out a place where people were saying stuff that didn't apply in real game states, instead of just saying stuff that's unrelated to what we're talking about.

[Psyren]

I always viewed Enchantment as an inverse usefulness scale.

At low levels? It's probably the best thing a Wizard can really do. Sleep an encounter into a laughable state. Charm Person not only to potentially end an encounter, but to make the next one even easier. Etc.

Color Spray can end encounters just as easily though.

What hurts enchantment the most isn't that it's objectively weak - it's not. No school is really. Rather, the problem is that there's another school focused on will-save-or-lose (Illusion) that also does many other things thanks to figments, glamers and shadows.

[Amphetryon]

To be honest I'm under the impression that these optimization advices treat the game like it was meant to be PvP or meaningles theorycrafting.
In a typical D&D campaign blowing things up with fireballs is perfectly viable, so is using enchantment and so is playing a fighter or a monk.

Optimization exist for optimization's sake, there is no actual need for it if you just play the game as it's meant to be played.

Could you give an example of a Character, or group of Characters, that are made in the absence of any optimization? Pretty please?

[Rubik]

Could you give an example of a Character, or group of Characters, that are made in the absence of any optimization? Pretty please?That's easy. Set up some randomized lists of everything from race to ability scores to skills, and roll to see what you get. No optimization means that absolutely everything must be random, since optimization is making choices that suit your character, and if there are no choices, there's no optimization.

[Kyeudo]

Optimization exist for optimization's sake, there is no actual need for it if you just play the game as it's meant to be played.

Sorry, but unless you play a Commoner with Skill Focus(Profession) and no ranks in Profession, you are optimizing to some degree.

There is no "way the game is meant to be played". There is only "the way my group plays it" and "the way some other group plays it".

[Dusk Eclipse]

Sorry, but unless you play a Commoner with Skill Focus(Profession) and no ranks in Profession, you are optimizing to some degree.

There is no "way the game is meant to be played". There is only "the way my group plays it" and "the way some other group plays it".

One would argue that taking skill focus (Profession) is optimizing, since you are in fact becoming better and something, mind you it isn't good optimization, but optimization none the less.

[Rubik]

Sorry, but unless you play a Commoner with Skill Focus(Profession) and no ranks in Profession, you are optimizing to some degree.

There is no "way the game is meant to be played". There is only "the way my group plays it" and "the way some other group plays it".Actually, Skill Focus is optimizing somewhat for that skill, making you better at it. At least, it is unless you find some way to antioptimize by giving yourself severe penalties for making those checks.

[edit] Landlorded!

[ryu]

... you could say that about ANY school however. So that seems like a strange argument to use. What school can you not just ban, get scrolls, and UMD on demand?

And touche about the Protection. Forgot the exact wording and bit me in the ass. :smallbiggrin: Ah well.

Any school wherein you actually intend to cast the spells involved more than four or five times in YOUR ENTIRE CAREER is an example. Any more is a waste of wealth for what you could get for free. Enchantment has none of these spells that I would want to cast or otherwise have available with regularity at a high enough level that I can't just use conjuration to get the spell for free with summoned in SLAs.

[Fax Celestis]

Candidate number 1 is the spell mind blank.
I wonder why people refer to this spell over and over again.
You would think that the enchanter meets only wizard15+ guys with this spell up. All other enemies won't have this spell up if you exclude exotic and cheesy stuff.

Scroll of mind blank, 3000gp. UMD check necessary: DC 28. When can you hit DC 28 reasonably often and afford 3000gp for an emergency? About 6th level.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Actually, Skill Focus is optimizing somewhat for that skill, making you better at it. At least, it is unless you find some way to antioptimize by giving yourself severe penalties for making those checks.

[edit] Landlorded!

That is something I haven't hea... em read before. Why Landlorded? (isn't that the feat which is essentially "Screw with WBL" the feat?)

[Spuddles]

Apart from stuff like Ray of Stupidity and Mindrape, the main thing Enchantment has to offer is buffs. When I ban it, I really miss stuff like Heroics. Of course, that doesn't stop me from banning it first, but obviously there are spells there that are somewhat useful. However, it's still a lot fewer spells then most schools.


Heroics is transmutation; heroism is enchantment.


Color Spray can end encounters just as easily though.

What hurts enchantment the most isn't that it's objectively weak - it's not. No school is really. Rather, the problem is that there's another school focused on will-save-or-lose (Illusion) that also does many other things thanks to figments, glamers and shadows.

Color spray requires you to be within 15ft of your enemy. That's way too close for comfort with d4 HD.


To be honest I'm under the impression that these optimization advices treat the game like it was meant to be PvP or meaningles theorycrafting.
In a typical D&D campaign blowing things up with fireballs is perfectly viable, so is using enchantment and so is playing a fighter or a monk.

Optimization exist for optimization's sake, there is no actual need for it if you just play the game as it's meant to be played.

Take your judgmental fallacies to another thread- please dont derail this one.

[Juntao112]

To be honest I'm under the impression that these optimization advices treat the game like it was meant to be PvP or meaningles theorycrafting.
In a typical D&D campaign blowing things up with fireballs is perfectly viable, so is using enchantment and so is playing a fighter or a monk.

Optimization exist for optimization's sake, there is no actual need for it if you just play the game as it's meant to be played.

If wizards were supposed to be blasters, why are there so few blasting spells per level?

[Dusk Eclipse]

Heroism is also on the Bard's spell list so it isn't hard to get.

Edit: Wizards are supposed to be blasters if you come from an AD&D mindset, where the most effective spellcaster where blasting (HP wasn't that high so 10d6 was a serious threat to everything even at higher levels).

[Rubik]

That is something I haven't hea... em read before. Why Landlorded? (isn't that the feat which is essentially "Screw with WBL" the feat?)Here's a link for you. http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=16060499#post16060499

[Bhaakon]

Scroll of mind blank, 3000gp. UMD check necessary: DC 28. When can you hit DC 28 reasonably often and afford 3000gp for an emergency? About 6th level.

Then they're either wasting a round casting it, using DM fiat to predict precisely when to cast it before a battle, or lose initiative and get dominated before they can use it.

Sure, it's a useful defense that many mid-high level NPCs and intelligent monsters would reasonably have access to, but not every opponent is a batman wizard in disguise, with the perfect counter to ever situation prepared ahead of time (unless your DM is a bit of an ass).

[Rubik]

Then they're either wasting a round casting it, using DM fiat to predict precisely when to cast it before a battle, or lose initiative and get dominated before they can use it.

Sure, it's a useful defense that many mid-high level NPCs and intelligent monsters would reasonably have access to, but not every opponent is a batman wizard in disguise, with the perfect counter to ever situation prepared ahead of time (unless your DM is a bit of an ass).Mind Blank lasts 24 hours. You use this when you're going up against illithids and such.

[ryu]

Then they're either wasting a round casting it, using DM fiat to predict precisely when to cast it before a battle, or lose initiative and get dominated before they can use it.

Sure, it's a useful defense that many mid-high level NPCs and intelligent monsters would reasonably have access to, but not every opponent is a batman wizard in disguise, with the perfect counter to ever situation prepared ahead of time (unless your DM is a bit of an ass).

You don't need EVERY enemy to have the counter. Even a single one completely and utterly saying no to your to your tactic outside of the several creature types that do the same invalidate that tactic as a tactic. If your entire school can be countered even in the five or six total situations where it would otherwise be optimal it's demonstrably less valuable than the other schools in every definable way.

[Bhaakon]

Mind Blank lasts 24 hours. You use this when you're going up against illithids and such.

So an NPC is going to spend 3000 gp every 24 hours?

That's stretching credulity, even at higher levels, unless they know that the PCs specialize in enchantment or divination and are coming for them in the next 24 hours with enough advanced notice to acquire the scrolls (which can happen, but it shouldn't be particularly common if the party is competent)

[Karnith]

Also relevant to the thread: Mind Blank may be an eighth-level spell, but evil characters/creatures can spend two feats to get Deformity (Madness) for immunity to mind-affecting effects (also a 1/minute bonus to a single Will save) as early as level 1/1 HD.

[ryu]

See the previous note about the fact that the already incredibly narrowly useful school can be obviated even in the few cases it should work. At high levels it's not even scrolls or wands or any other spell charge holder. It's just a continuous item of eternal no.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Any NPC you would actually want to Dominate instead of just kill him has reasons to have Mind-blank up, they will usually be kings or similar and in a world where mind control is known and easy to access (Charm person is a level 1 spell people!) the fact that important people aren't protected would stretch credulity a lot more.

[eggynack]

You don't need EVERY enemy to have the counter. Even a single one completely and utterly saying no to your to your tactic outside of the several creature types that do the same invalidate that tactic as a tactic. If your entire school can be countered even in the five or six total situations where it would otherwise be optimal it's demonstrably less valuable than the other schools in every definable way.
This is very true. There's something of a herd immunity effect where enchantment is concerned. If half of your enemies are immune to enchantment, then all of your enemies might as well be immune to enchantment, because preparing a spell that's just going to fail half the time isn't worth it. This also generally applies to lower ranges of immunity probability, especially when it's high powered enemies who are most likely to be immune.

So an NPC is going to spend 3000 gp every 24 hours?

That's stretching credulity, even at higher levels, unless they know that the PCs specialize in enchantment or divination and are coming for them in the next 24 hours with enough advanced notice to acquire the scrolls (which can happen, but it shouldn't be particularly common if the party is competent)
This seems like the kind of place where divination would be useful. The question in question would be, "Is a mind affecting spell going to be used against me in the next 24 hours." You could expand that to divination, if you think it's worth it to block divination. That means something more like, say, 350 GP for two uses of augury per day (to enhance the probability that your first augury isn't wrong).

[Amphetryon]

That's easy. Set up some randomized lists of everything from race to ability scores to skills, and roll to see what you get. No optimization means that absolutely everything must be random, since optimization is making choices that suit your character, and if there are no choices, there's no optimization.

I'm willing to bet that, provided your Character actually qualifies for the Feats selected, they would provide some measurable mechanical benefit. Such measurable benefit could, in the broadest sense, be considered "optimization."

And, of course, if you're taking Feats for your Character that he doesn't qualify for, you're either intentionally breaking the rules, or operating under a set of house rules significant enough that the general Character Creation paradigm is fairly different than standard.

[Bhaakon]

This seems like the kind of place where divination would be useful. The question in question would be, "Is a mind affecting spell going to be used against me in the next 24 hours." You could expand that to divination, if you think it's worth it to block divination. That means something more like, say, 350 GP for two uses of augury per day (to enhance the probability that your first augury isn't wrong).

A 10th level NPC would find themself in the poorhouse in less than a month if they used this strategy.

Like I said, it can make sense if you're in a situation where the baddies know the PCs are coming in the next few days to a week (long enough to acquire the scrolls, short enough that they don't go broke buying divination), but that's a fairly specific circumstance.

[Dusk Eclipse]

He is still technically right (the best kind of right), there is no way to make a character in D&D (and I bet in most systems too) without optimizing something if you are making conscious decisions about how you make it.

Of course that is also supporting your point...

[Rubik]

So an NPC is going to spend 3000 gp every 24 hours?

That's stretching credulity, even at higher levels, unless they know that the PCs specialize in enchantment or divination and are coming for them in the next 24 hours with enough advanced notice to acquire the scrolls (which can happen, but it shouldn't be particularly common if the party is competent)As Eggynack mentioned, divination is easy.

Alternately, you can spend 8,000 gp and get a constant Protection from [Alignment] to you and your minions within 30' via the banner from Heroes of Battle (p132).

[Story]

Heroics is transmutation; heroism is enchantment.


Good catch! It's kind of sad when the best example of a useful Enchantment spell I can think of turns out to not be enchantment.


You don't need EVERY enemy to have the counter. Even a single one completely and utterly saying no to your to your tactic outside of the several creature types that do the same invalidate that tactic as a tactic. If your entire school can be countered even in the five or six total situations where it would otherwise be optimal it's demonstrably less valuable than the other schools in every definable way.

Having just played with a party of rogues through an all-undead session, I can't imagine why anyone would want to play Enchanter.


I'm willing to bet that, provided your Character actually qualifies for the Feats selected, they would provide some measurable mechanical benefit. Such measurable benefit could, in the broadest sense, be considered "optimization."


Well there is Focused Lexicon which literally does nothing except make you weaker. But I think randomized character generation would be the best bet.

[tomandtish]

Protection against Evil totally works against Charm Person, let's review the spell shall we?

Originally Posted by SRD
Protection from Evil
Abjuration [Good]
Level: Clr 1, Good 1, Pal 1, Sor/Wiz 1
Components: V, S, M/DF
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Touch
Target: Creature touched
Duration: 1 min./level (D)
Saving Throw: Will negates (harmless)
Spell Resistance: No; see text
This spell wards a creature from attacks by evil creatures, from mental control, and from summoned creatures. It creates a magical barrier around the subject at a distance of 1 foot. The barrier moves with the subject and has three major effects.

First, the subject gains a +2 deflection bonus to AC and a +2 resistance bonus on saves. Both these bonuses apply against attacks made or effects created by evil creatures.

Second, the barrier blocks any attempt to possess the warded creature (by a magic jar attack, for example) or to exercise mental control over the creature (including enchantment (charm) effects and enchantment (compulsion) effects that grant the caster ongoing control over the subject, such as dominate person). The protection does not prevent such effects from targeting the protected creature, but it suppresses the effect for the duration of the protection from evil effect. If the protection from evil effect ends before the effect granting mental control does, the would-be controller would then be able to mentally command the controlled creature. Likewise, the barrier keeps out a possessing life force but does not expel one if it is in place before the spell is cast. This second effect works regardless of alignment.

Third, the spell prevents bodily contact by summoned creatures. This causes the natural weapon attacks of such creatures to fail and the creatures to recoil if such attacks require touching the warded creature. Good summoned creatures are immune to this effect. The protection against contact by summoned creatures ends if the warded creature makes an attack against or tries to force the barrier against the blocked creature. Spell resistance can allow a creature to overcome this protection and touch the warded creature.

Arcane Material Component
A little powdered silver with which you trace a 3-foot -diameter circle on the floor (or ground) around the creature to be warded.




Now let's see Charm Person

Originally Posted by SRD
Charm Person
Enchantment (Charm) [Mind-Affecting]
Level: Brd 1, Sor/Wiz 1
Components: V, S
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Target: One humanoid creature
Duration: 1 hour/level
Saving Throw: Will negates
Spell Resistance: Yes
This charm makes a humanoid creature regard you as its trusted friend and ally (treat the target’s attitude as friendly). If the creature is currently being threatened or attacked by you or your allies, however, it receives a +5 bonus on its saving throw.

The spell does not enable you to control the charmed person as if it were an automaton, but it perceives your words and actions in the most favorable way. You can try to give the subject orders, but you must win an opposed Charisma check to convince it to do anything it wouldn’t ordinarily do. (Retries are not allowed.) An affected creature never obeys suicidal or obviously harmful orders, but it might be convinced that something very dangerous is worth doing. Any act by you or your apparent allies that threatens the charmed person breaks the spell. You must speak the person’s language to communicate your commands, or else be good at pantomiming.



So no matter how subtle your charm effects are, they are stopped cold by a Protection from Evil (and similars)

Minor clarification I bolded above: Protection from Evil (and similar effects) doesn't stop it cold. It suppresses it from taking effect until the protection effect wears off. If the Charm effect lasts longer (and you failed your save) you then still become charmed. So it's not quite as effective protection as one can hope for. Especially if I can target my opponent with a charm effect without him/her realizing it and wait out their protection spell.


It's still a weak school relative to the other options.

Mindblank becomes the much more effective defense since it keeps the spell from taking hold in the first place so time limit is irrelevent.

[Lonely Tylenol]

Scroll of mind blank, 3000gp. UMD check necessary: DC 28. When can you hit DC 28 reasonably often and afford 3000gp for an emergency? About 6th level.

A wondrous item of continuous Protection from X costs 4,000gp and achieves the exact same effect, always-on, but has an effective CL of 1, making it relatively easy to dispel.

[Coidzor]

To be honest I'm under the impression that these optimization advices treat the game like it was meant to be PvP or meaningles theorycrafting.
In a typical D&D campaign blowing things up with fireballs is perfectly viable, so is using enchantment and so is playing a fighter or a monk.

Optimization exist for optimization's sake, there is no actual need for it if you just play the game as it's meant to be played.

Problem being figuring out how the game is meant to be played. If you go by how the designers and play-testers did it, that means blatantly ignoring your class features in favor of pretending you're playing 1E. Druids who never wild-shape but don't trade it away and who don't use their animal companions or even their spells, instead favoring plinking away in mid-level combat with a barely magical scimitar and no combat feats. Clerics who do nothing but play magical band-aid box. That sort of boring stuff that sets fire to 90% of the game.

[Jade_Tarem]

There's one other reason why enchantment is a subpar school (alongside phantasm-style illusions). I've been playing a lot of PFS lately, and one thing my Feyblood Sorcerer has noticed is that even though enchantment is better in PF (more human enemies, fewer things thrown at you with mind-affecting immunity), stuff like Charm Person, Suggestion, Domination, etc. is all very GM dependent... and at, say, a convention, you're going to get as much resistance from the GM as possible. Even if you have time to work it out with a GM in a home game, it's a source of additional grief.

For example, in one encounter with a pair of enemies, I used Suggestion to see if I could get one of them to surrender. Suggestion has a two sentence rather than seven word limit in PF, so I also tossed in a line about how they should surrender because they were outnumbered three to one and getting thrashed. The GM informed me that I had completely misunderstood the situation and that they would never do that. Three rounds later, both had died horribly, so I'm not sure what part of the situation I misread, but despite the bad GMing, the fact is that he wouldn't have been so uptight about a fireball. Leaving it up to the GM is giving the GM another excuse to arbitrarily declare that the spell doesn't do anything, and the heavy hitting spells are all about leaving it up to the GM.

[Eldariel]

A wondrous item of continuous Protection from X costs 4,000gp and achieves the exact same effect, always-on, but has an effective CL of 1, making it relatively easy to dispel.

Unlike Scroll though, that's a custom magic item and thus not automatically existent.

[lsfreak]

To be honest I'm under the impression that these optimization advices treat the game like it was meant to be PvP or meaningles theorycrafting.

Yea, what's with the PvP? Players never go up against NPCs with class levels or anything.

[ArcturusV]

There's one other reason why enchantment is a subpar school (alongside phantasm-style illusions). I've been playing a lot of PFS lately, and one thing my Feyblood Sorcerer has noticed is that even though enchantment is better in PF (more human enemies, fewer things thrown at you with mind-affecting immunity), stuff like Charm Person, Suggestion, Domination, etc. is all very GM dependent... and at, say, a convention, you're going to get as much resistance from the GM as possible. Even if you have time to work it out with a GM in a home game, it's a source of additional grief.

For example, in one encounter with a pair of enemies, I used Suggestion to see if I could get one of them to surrender. Suggestion has a two sentence rather than seven word limit in PF, so I also tossed in a line about how they should surrender because they were outnumbered three to one and getting thrashed. The GM informed me that I had completely misunderstood the situation and that they would never do that. Three rounds later, both had died horribly, so I'm not sure what part of the situation I misread, but despite the bad GMing, the fact is that he wouldn't have been so uptight about a fireball. Leaving it up to the GM is giving the GM another excuse to arbitrarily declare that the spell doesn't do anything, and the heavy hitting spells are all about leaving it up to the GM.

True enough I suppose. It seems from topics like this that I'm in the minority in that I don't really go out of my way to screw certain things. I mean I see comments like "Well anyone would...(insert immunities)". I've never really run off that sort of idea. My enemies I cook up aren't all True Seeing, Mind Blanked, etc. But I can see how in a Living Campaign/Encounters Sessions/Convention setting DMs might be that way.

So I guess it's up to gaming style. The fact that something exists is true. Then again a lot of the "I can just summon X to do it for me" has counters as well. Including some nasty ones that turn summons against you. It's probably just whatever certain tables find more appealing or less appealing and the need to counter.

[Rubik]

Unlike Scroll though, that's a custom magic item and thus not automatically existent.As I said earlier, there's an official item that does just this for everyone within 30' of you for 8,000 gp.

[Coidzor]

True enough I suppose. It seems from topics like this that I'm in the minority in that I don't really go out of my way to screw certain things. I mean I see comments like "Well anyone would...(insert immunities)". I've never really run off that sort of idea. My enemies I cook up aren't all True Seeing, Mind Blanked, etc. But I can see how in a Living Campaign/Encounters Sessions/Convention setting DMs might be that way.

It's more that if you never use any defences against that stuff and your players realize this and capitalize upon it, then things can take a turn for the boring, leading to either needing the players to not do that or to start using the counters to those player strategies.

[Psyren]

Color spray requires you to be within 15ft of your enemy. That's way too close for comfort with d4 HD.

And Sleep has a 1-round casting time, so it's just as dangerous to actually use. Plus it's a 10' radius, so there's a good chance you won't catch everyone. Also, HD limit.

[ericgrau]

Charm and dominate are superb with a lot of work and planning. Foes that are immune to them are not immune to attacks from others who are charmed or dominated.

Other than that it's an easy school to nix because it doesn't fit into a lot of character concepts. Those that use it should work hard at it. So while I'm still in favor of prohibiting the school frequently, I also think people should play more enchantment specialists. And DM fiat should lay off completely when it works. No, hey, hey, stop, nooo, there we go. It's so easy and tempting to bend the entire universe against an enchanter so there's nothing to target to shut him down completely, but it makes no sense at all and it's way beyond heavy handed DMing.

Without planning you have a lot of single target save-or-X with entire types of foes who are immune, and it doesn't get much worse than that. Planning is a must.

I have done better with sleep than color spray, but maybe that's how my DMs are. Both put you in danger: one against melee and the other against range. Depends on the foes. Both are bad against 5+ HD: Color spray may sometimes hit 5+ HD but it's a lousy effect making your death that much more certain. At least ranged attacks are unlikely to kill you during your failure to contribute.

[Eldariel]

Honestly, I prefer having both Sleep and Color Spray on level 1 and use them as the situation dictates. Need range? Sleep. Need speed? Color Spray.

And yeah, Enchantment is very powerful strategically but most important people should be protected against it precisely for that reason. It is, however, useful against the less important people. Still, the problem is you can achieve much the same goals through a proxy acquired through Conjurations.

[Vinyl Scratch]

I figured the thing was that Enchantment wasn't necessarily bad, but it is dumped first because specialization costs something. Less is lost banning Enchantment than most other schools, so it is considered for banning first.

[Lactantius]

So many playgrounders replies (which is nice), but I'm disappointed that there is not much anticipation what is stated.

But okay, I'll retry, no problem :)

First: Protection from Evil does not negate or block, it merely suppresses for 1 minute/CL. Charm Person and Dominate Person last 1 day/level.
This fact requires playing smart:
if you are the enchanter (as PC), you could delay or rearrange the combat situation, if necessary. Since you know that the protection will wear off, if would be a viable option.

Second: Mind-Blank is rare. I mean, REALLY rare.
It is only available if:
a) you play a high-level-campaign
b) you deal with a high level wizard
and
c) that this wizard has - oh- what a surprise - his mind blank spell already cast or prepared exactly when you start dominaing. Yes, sure, that can happen, on the paper. But not on our gaming table.
I mean, honestly: we talk about a spell of 8th level, only available to wizards (and some exotic stuff, cause it's D&D, y'know).
Some rounds never reach level 15. Think about it.

That brings us to
Third: Stretch goals of optimization.
this point is a bit more general, but it is still important enough.
I think it is similar to this posting:

Originally Posted by Kalmageddon View Post
To be honest I'm under the impression that these optimization advices treat the game like it was meant to be PvP or meaningles theorycrafting.
In a typical D&D campaign blowing things up with fireballs is perfectly viable, so is using enchantment and so is playing a fighter or a monk.

Optimization exist for optimization's sake, there is no actual need for it if you just play the game as it's meant to be played.

So, yes, as soon as you begin to play D&D, you automatically optimize, no one denies that.
More important is how far you, the DM, well, all participating players stretch this optimization or with other words: where are the boundaries?

This is totally personal and can't be evaluate generally.
What I can tell is that we like to optimize in our round strongly, but I am suprised to see what stuff people seem to usw if I read this board.
For example, I woulndd't use such really exotic stuff like getting a necropolitan to render myself immune to enchantments (one reader said so).
Honestly, I pick races and templates for roleplaying reasons exclusively, so that's one natural boundary of opt what I'm talking about.

Or let's take the cascading of spells, SLAs and so on my summoning critters which do that stuff to you. Creative, sure. Some monsters with their SLAs are pretty good to pick up yes. But then again, I wouldn't search my MM I-V just for cheesy and exotic ways to circumvent natural boundaries (again).

Get the point?
Sure, you can always find a tool to cicumvent something. It's just about how hard you work and play. And that's the dangerous (and uncertain) part if we talk about D&D. Some groups have stricters boundaries of opt. Some have gentemen agreements about dysfunctional rules. Some are just casual gamers which stick to core and maybe 2,3 completes. Evaluate that if you talk about optimization.

Lastly, creature and races.
Sure, there are some creatures with immunity to enchantments. On the other hand, many of those subtypes are very rarely found on my gaming tables.
Take Oozes, for example. I think that I have fought an ooze-type only 2-3 times in 15 years playing D&D. Plants are rare, too.
Undead are (naturally) common, that's why I mentioned them in my first post.
And even then:
It's not like an enchanter would be losing if the party deals with animals or plants. It's just another tactical application of spells. So, an enchanter would save his charms/dominiates and just use a buff or BFC spell as any wizard would do.
With other words: Your enchantment won't get weaker just because some creatures are immune to it. If you would have ONLY "enchantment-attacks," then you would be weaker, yep.

But if we talk about scenarios where you can meet creatures which are immune to enchanments, then we should be so fair to include scenarios where the enchantment-line gets more effective.
A classical scenario is the city-adventure.
Naturally, you deal with WAY more humanoid creatures and you would have more chances for non-combat-situations where you can apply enchantments more effectively.
Don't forget that charm person is more a spell for social interaction than for pure combat. That's one valid point which gets forgotten. An enchanter rises in investigations, political/intrigue/all-around-city-adventure. Just like a rogue shines more in cities.

Enchantment requires more thinking. More working out-of-the-box. More effort. Maybe that's why people drop this school.
Frankly, I drop enchantment cause I'm too lazy too get my creativity started. But nontheless, it IS possible.

These are the reasons why rating enchantment as weakest school is the greatest fallacy.

[ryu]

Enchantment as the weakest school doesn't require it to be useless. It just requires it to be less useful than the others.

Your reaction to encounters immune to enchantment is to use other schools.

Lets compare what happens in an encounter where the enemy is blatantly immune to conjuration or transmutation in full.

The response is that THERE ARE NONE.

Can't beat something with an enchantment? Hope the DM handed you someone to dominate earlier or crawl to some other school for help.

Can't kill something with your orbs and battlefield control? You also have access to summons your DM doesn't have to hand you and can't stop without directly acting against them.

Power in magic is a factor of applicability. Enchantment doesn't apply in large swaths of gameplay. Even whipping boy evocation comes with battlefield control and some sweet utility spells. Not enough to avoid the bottom rung mind you but order of magnitude more directly useful than enchantment.

[Turion]

So many playgrounders replies (which is nice), but I'm disappointed that there is not much anticipation what is stated.

But okay, I'll retry, no problem :)

First: Protection from Evil does not negate or block, it merely suppresses for 1 minute/CL. Charm Person and Dominate Person last 1 day/level.
This fact requires playing smart:
if you are the enchanter (as PC), you could delay or rearrange the combat situation, if necessary. Since you know that the protection will wear off, if would be a viable option.

Second: Mind-Blank is rare. I mean, REALLY rare.
It is only available if:
a) you play a high-level-campaign
b) you deal with a high level wizard
and
c) that this wizard has - oh- what a surprise - his mind blank spell already cast or prepared exactly when you start dominaing. Yes, sure, that can happen, on the paper. But not on our gaming table.
I mean, honestly: we talk about a spell of 8th level, only available to wizards (and some exotic stuff, cause it's D&D, y'know).
Some rounds never reach level 15. Think about it.

That brings us to
Third: Stretch goals of optimization.
this point is a bit more general, but it is still important enough.
I think it is similar to this posting:


So, yes, as soon as you begin to play D&D, you automatically optimize, no one denies that.
More important is how far you, the DM, well, all participating players stretch this optimization or with other words: where are the boundaries?

This is totally personal and can't be evaluate generally.
What I can tell is that we like to optimize in our round strongly, but I am suprised to see what stuff people seem to usw if I read this board.
For example, I woulndd't use such really exotic stuff like getting a necropolitan to render myself immune to enchantments (one reader said so).
Honestly, I pick races and templates for roleplaying reasons exclusively, so that's one natural boundary of opt what I'm talking about.

Or let's take the cascading of spells, SLAs and so on my summoning critters which do that stuff to you. Creative, sure. Some monsters with their SLAs are pretty good to pick up yes. But then again, I wouldn't search my MM I-V just for cheesy and exotic ways to circumvent natural boundaries (again).

Get the point?
Sure, you can always find a tool to cicumvent something. It's just about how hard you work and play. And that's the dangerous (and uncertain) part if we talk about D&D. Some groups have stricters boundaries of opt. Some have gentemen agreements about dysfunctional rules. Some are just casual gamers which stick to core and maybe 2,3 completes. Evaluate that if you talk about optimization.

Lastly, creature and races.
Sure, there are some creatures with immunity to enchantments. On the other hand, many of those subtypes are very rarely found on my gaming tables.
Take Oozes, for example. I think that I have fought an ooze-type only 2-3 times in 15 years playing D&D. Plants are rare, too.
Undead are (naturally) common, that's why I mentioned them in my first post.
And even then:
It's not like an enchanter would be losing if the party deals with animals or plants. It's just another tactical application of spells. So, an enchanter would save his charms/dominiates and just use a buff or BFC spell as any wizard would do.
With other words: Your enchantment won't get weaker just because some creatures are immune to it. If you would have ONLY "enchantment-attacks," then you would be weaker, yep.

But if we talk about scenarios where you can meet creatures which are immune to enchanments, then we should be so fair to include scenarios where the enchantment-line gets more effective.
A classical scenario is the city-adventure.
Naturally, you deal with WAY more humanoid creatures and you would have more chances for non-combat-situations where you can apply enchantments more effectively.
Don't forget that charm person is more a spell for social interaction than for pure combat. That's one valid point which gets forgotten. An enchanter rises in investigations, political/intrigue/all-around-city-adventure. Just like a rogue shines more in cities.

Enchantment requires more thinking. More working out-of-the-box. More effort. Maybe that's why people drop this school.
Frankly, I drop enchantment cause I'm too lazy too get my creativity started. But nontheless, it IS possible.

These are the reasons why rating enchantment as weakest school is the greatest fallacy.

Okay, first of all, Protection from Evil. The idea is, you use the 1 min/CL extra time to kill the caster. That way, it doesn't matter anymore. If your fighter is treating the corpse as friendly, it's still a corpse. Also kinda hard to take orders from one, too. As was noted previously, it is pretty simple to get it in the form of a continuous item, as well.

Moving on to mind blank: it is only available on a level 15 wizard... or a level 16 sorcerer, or psychic warrior, or beguiler, or a level 15 cleric, or an archivist, or a level 14 wilder, or a level 13 artificer, or a psion, or erudite, or ardent(?) or a level 11 psionic artificer, or any monster that can cast from these lists, or has it as an SLA, or anyone who buys a scroll/power stone of it and has a halfway decent UMD/UPD check, which is not limited to warlocks, rogues, spellthieves, psychic rogues, factota, and incarnates. In general, it's really not that rare. As noted, it has a 24-hour duration, so any decently prepared wizard would just cast it at the beginning of the day, forget about it until he needs to lolnope an enchantment.

As for the rest, what you wrote all holds true... at your table, specifically. to give a counterexample: the first campaign I played in, we were dealing almost exclusively with high-level illumian wizards, and undead. Enchantment would have been a nightmare, had we actually thought to try it.
Charm can be helpful in social situations, provided it's not expected by the target. Charming a merchant to get information would probably work, as there's no reason for him to be casting mind blank each day. A king, on the other hand... assuming that he's not a caster himself, and that the court wizard hasn't already dominated him, he's going to have immunity to mind-effecting up around the clock, possibly in layers. Same with most other characters in positions of power; a charm spell on the guild bookkeeper is pretty much THE WORST THING, so those who can afford immunity would pay through the nose for it.

[eggynack]

First: Protection from Evil does not negate or block, it merely suppresses for 1 minute/CL. Charm Person and Dominate Person last 1 day/level.
This fact requires playing smart:
if you are the enchanter (as PC), you could delay or rearrange the combat situation, if necessary. Since you know that the protection will wear off, if would be a viable option.
Minutes/level might as well be forever in D&D time. These spells are close range, and then the enemy has a turn, and you're dead. You're basically casting a save or die spell that takes awhile to work, and you could be casting a save or die spell that works all at once, and the latter is better. There's a whole range of save or die/loses that don't have a wide range of nearly perfect defenses, and I'd rather cast one of those. The enemy could even theoretically dispel the dominate persons while you're running and hiding, and the delayed death plan wouldn't even work. This is also assuming that the enemy doesn't have one of the longer term protection from evil effects.


Second: Mind-Blank is rare. I mean, REALLY rare.
It is only available if:
a) you play a high-level-campaign
b) you deal with a high level wizard
and
c) that this wizard has - oh- what a surprise - his mind blank spell already cast or prepared exactly when you start dominaing. Yes, sure, that can happen, on the paper. But not on our gaming table.
I mean, honestly: we talk about a spell of 8th level, only available to wizards (and some exotic stuff, cause it's D&D, y'know).
Some rounds never reach level 15. Think about it.
So, your spell only completely doesn't work against the types of enemies you'd most want it to work against. Mind blank is slightly rare to expect it on everything, but it's such a powerful ability that you can expect your bbeg to have some access to it.



Third: Stretch goals of optimization.
this point is a bit more general, but it is still important enough.
I think it is similar to this posting:


So, yes, as soon as you begin to play D&D, you automatically optimize, no one denies that.
More important is how far you, the DM, well, all participating players stretch this optimization or with other words: where are the boundaries?

This is totally personal and can't be evaluate generally.
What I can tell is that we like to optimize in our round strongly, but I am suprised to see what stuff people seem to usw if I read this board.
For example, I woulndd't use such really exotic stuff like getting a necropolitan to render myself immune to enchantments (one reader said so).
Honestly, I pick races and templates for roleplaying reasons exclusively, so that's one natural boundary of opt what I'm talking about.

Or let's take the cascading of spells, SLAs and so on my summoning critters which do that stuff to you. Creative, sure. Some monsters with their SLAs are pretty good to pick up yes. But then again, I wouldn't search my MM I-V just for cheesy and exotic ways to circumvent natural boundaries (again).

Get the point?
Sure, you can always find a tool to cicumvent something. It's just about how hard you work and play. And that's the dangerous (and uncertain) part if we talk about D&D. Some groups have stricters boundaries of opt. Some have gentemen agreements about dysfunctional rules. Some are just casual gamers which stick to core and maybe 2,3 completes. Evaluate that if you talk about optimization.
Plenty of these counter-enchantment plans are from pretty limited book sets. Anyways, you're laying claim to enchantment as a weak school being a fallacy, and that requires a defense against the whole game, rather than your tiny corner of it.



Lastly, creature and races.
Sure, there are some creatures with immunity to enchantments. On the other hand, many of those subtypes are very rarely found on my gaming tables.
Take Oozes, for example. I think that I have fought an ooze-type only 2-3 times in 15 years playing D&D. Plants are rare, too.
Undead are (naturally) common, that's why I mentioned them in my first post.
And even then:
It's not like an enchanter would be losing if the party deals with animals or plants. It's just another tactical application of spells. So, an enchanter would save his charms/dominiates and just use a buff or BFC spell as any wizard would do.
With other words: Your enchantment won't get weaker just because some creatures are immune to it. If you would have ONLY "enchantment-attacks," then you would be weaker, yep.
I'd rather just cast a non-enchantment that hits these creatures, and also other creatures. Like, dominate person is a fifth level spell that doesn't work on a bunch of stuff. Baleful polymorph is an also fifth level spell that only doesn't work on incorporeal, gaseous, or shapechanging creatures. If I'm preparing a save or die, I want it to be frigging consistently deadly to justify being single target and intrinsically high variance. You're adding variance to variance, and that's like squared variance, and that's a bad direction to go.


Enchantment requires more thinking. More working out-of-the-box. More effort. Maybe that's why people drop this school.
Frankly, I drop enchantment cause I'm too lazy too get my creativity started. But nontheless, it IS possible.
How's that work? You pick a target, and then that target might lose. It seems pretty straightforward. Compare that to something that actually requires out of the box thinking, like silent image or stone shape, or something that really requires thought and effort, like polymorph or summon monster. Enchantment is crazy direct by comparison.


These are the reasons why rating enchantment as weakest school is the greatest fallacy.
It seems like the school's opposition is made up of some completely logical and cogent points. Even at its best, enchantment is really one note. It's just save or die, save or suck, and save or lose, as far as the eye can see. There're exceptions, but those exceptions are actually worse than the ones evocation offers. This isn't what a fallacy is. Those require some lapse in logic, and there really isn't one here.

Edit: Actually, even if you were absolutely correct about everything you've said, you wouldn't have proven that enchantment isn't the weakest school. In order for enchantment to not be the weakest school, you need there to be a weakest school in its place. Moreover, it can't even be evocation, because that school is also often cited as the worst school. So, what's replacing enchantment in its role, and why is it worse? "Worst" is a relative measure, not an absolute one.

[ericgrau]

Mind blank and protection from evil are poor reasons against the school because foes rarely have them and even when they do you can always command the unprotected foes to attack the protected ones. And protection from evil must be used reactively meaning by the time foes figure it out it's often too late. But the real reasons against the school are monsters like undead and constructs, which are way more common. The solution is still the same. And one-time-use save-or-X spells against a single foe are poor in general, but that's why you re-use your slave. And employ other such creative uses of enchantments. It's only bad at direct foe elimination, that's all.

[ArcturusV]

Just to go off the Protection from Evil thing. I mean... it's short duration means you can't really expect to have enemies have it cast already before you start throwing out an enchantment. And typical enemy dispersion usually has encounters (At least in published adventures I'm familiar with) where you have something like 1 spell casting enemy, and a bunch of thugs. And since the Wizard does know how powerful spell casters are... he'd just Charm the spellcaster most likely. And why would the spellcaster then cast Protection from _____ on himself to end that effect? He wouldn't.

And for Conjuration, isn't there also a series of spells that basically says "Conjuration doesn't work/backfires horribly against him"? I seem to recall something like that in Vile Darkness or Exalted Deeds. Think it was Exalted Deeds. So there are things which do severely gimp Conjuration as well. It's just not as commonly run into. Which is fair. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just that most people seldom bring it up. I've had villains bring it up on players who depended on Conjuration as their only means of handling a problem (And that the villain knew about that). But that sort of thing tends to crop up for any plot where someone is being a one trick pony.

But I mean, in the end... it's like Evocation. it's maligned, it's seen as weak. It still has a few useful spells though. Sure you could waste WBL and Skill Ranks to UMD it if you had to. But why? Specializing isn't THAT good. And sometimes you're gonna wanna Mindrape. Or Charm. Or you're going to want to use that Enchantment that makes Divine Casters powerless (I can't remember it's name right now), or Heroism, etc. Yeah, it's a bit swingy, just like Illusions. Then again Illusions tend to avoid the "three weakest" mark as well and they're almost entirely up to DM screweth you adjudication for about 98% of their spells as well... and similarly have really easy counters out there available.

I don't think anyone is really arguing that... due to the VERY broad definition they ran with for Conjuration (It's everything), that anyone is going to say that's not king of the heap, with Transmutation (Be Anything) not riding close second. But there's a heap of difference between "powerful and situational" and "totally worthless, don't even think twice about dropping it for a very minor benefit".

[Emperor Tippy]

So many playgrounders replies (which is nice), but I'm disappointed that there is not much anticipation what is stated.

But okay, I'll retry, no problem :)

First: Protection from Evil does not negate or block, it merely suppresses for 1 minute/CL. Charm Person and Dominate Person last 1 day/level.
This fact requires playing smart:
if you are the enchanter (as PC), you could delay or rearrange the combat situation, if necessary. Since you know that the protection will wear off, if would be a viable option.
Combat lasting a minute is rare. Seriously, when is the last time you took 10 turns? That is one minute of combat. So Protection From X pretty much stops the tactical usage of Charm/Dominate/ and similar spells cold.

There are also a number of creatures that have always on Protection from X.

And then you can spend 8K GP for protection for everyone within a 30 ft. radius (i.e. the whole party most of the time, or the guard post, or the front gate, or the King's meeting room, etc.).


Second: Mind-Blank is rare. I mean, REALLY rare.
Not really.


It is only available if:
a) you play a high-level-campaign
It's available for a full fourth of the game (and a little under half of the game for some characters) natively. It can also be bought for 1,650 GP with a 2 day duration. And is available in the form of a continuous item at level 14 if you really want to break the bank.


b) you deal with a high level wizard
and
Or any other character that was smart enough to dump the gold into it. Or has a caster buddy who casts it on him. Or is a Psion. Or is a Psychic Warrior. Or is a Cleric with the Protection Domain.


c) that this wizard has - oh- what a surprise - his mind blank spell already cast or prepared exactly when you start dominaing. Yes, sure, that can happen, on the paper. But not on our gaming table.
I mean, honestly: we talk about a spell of 8th level, only available to wizards (and some exotic stuff, cause it's D&D, y'know).
I can count on both hands with fingers left over the number of times that I have seen a caster who had the ability to cast Mind Blank not have Mind Blank cast (absent some other means of immunity to divination's and mental attacks).


This is totally personal and can't be evaluate generally.
What I can tell is that we like to optimize in our round strongly, but I am suprised to see what stuff people seem to usw if I read this board.
For example, I woulndd't use such really exotic stuff like getting a necropolitan to render myself immune to enchantments (one reader said so).
Honestly, I pick races and templates for roleplaying reasons exclusively, so that's one natural boundary of opt what I'm talking about.
Necropolitian is not "exotic". And it's about the only mechanically viable way to play an undead if that is what you want to do.



Lastly, creature and races.
Sure, there are some creatures with immunity to enchantments. On the other hand, many of those subtypes are very rarely found on my gaming tables.
Take Oozes, for example. I think that I have fought an ooze-type only 2-3 times in 15 years playing D&D. Plants are rare, too.
Undead are (naturally) common, that's why I mentioned them in my first post.
And even then:
It's not like an enchanter would be losing if the party deals with animals or plants. It's just another tactical application of spells. So, an enchanter would save his charms/dominiates and just use a buff or BFC spell as any wizard would do.
With other words: Your enchantment won't get weaker just because some creatures are immune to it. If you would have ONLY "enchantment-attacks," then you would be weaker, yep.
A full third of the creature types in D&D are immune to mind affecting attacks. Another 20% or so are practically immune for one reason or another. That is fully half of the creature types in the game that Enchantment doesn't work on. Of the remaining half, a lot of individual creatures are immune for one reason or another.


But if we talk about scenarios where you can meet creatures which are immune to enchanments, then we should be so fair to include scenarios where the enchantment-line gets more effective.
A classical scenario is the city-adventure.
Naturally, you deal with WAY more humanoid creatures and you would have more chances for non-combat-situations where you can apply enchantments more effectively.
Don't forget that charm person is more a spell for social interaction than for pure combat. That's one valid point which gets forgotten. An enchanter rises in investigations, political/intrigue/all-around-city-adventure. Just like a rogue shines more in cities.
And it shows up on Detect Magic and Arcane Sight. Running the city guards (and anyone else who will pay 500 GP to the city coffers and is in good standing) through your trap of Permanent Invisible Arcane Sight (can't have everyone's eyes glowing blue) is something any city worth the name should do and now they can see you casting magic on them or their buddies.

[eggynack]

And for Conjuration, isn't there also a series of spells that basically says "Conjuration doesn't work/backfires horribly against him"? I seem to recall something like that in Vile Darkness or Exalted Deeds. Think it was Exalted Deeds. So there are things which do severely gimp Conjuration as well. It's just not as commonly run into. Which is fair. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Just that most people seldom bring it up. I've had villains bring it up on players who depended on Conjuration as their only means of handling a problem (And that the villain knew about that). But that sort of thing tends to crop up for any plot where someone is being a one trick pony.
You're probably going to actually have to name the spell, cause I don't know what you're talking about.


But I mean, in the end... it's like Evocation. it's maligned, it's seen as weak. It still has a few useful spells though. Sure you could waste WBL and Skill Ranks to UMD it if you had to. But why? Specializing isn't THAT good. And sometimes you're gonna wanna Mindrape. Or Charm. Or you're going to want to use that Enchantment that makes Divine Casters powerless (I can't remember it's name right now), or Heroism, etc. Yeah, it's a bit swingy, just like Illusions. Then again Illusions tend to avoid the "three weakest" mark as well and they're almost entirely up to DM screweth you adjudication for about 98% of their spells as well... and similarly have really easy counters out there available.

Illusions basically just have the, "several hyper-efficient defenses" problem. It's not a school that's narrow in the least, so it sees some love despite the general true seeing type issue. There's not much of a replacement for mirror image, or invisibility, or silent image in other schools. The role of, "single target save or lose" is one you can fill with other schools. Save or dies are also very high variance, so you're getting extreme variance levels on these spells.


I don't think anyone is really arguing that... due to the VERY broad definition they ran with for Conjuration (It's everything), that anyone is going to say that's not king of the heap, with Transmutation (Be Anything) not riding close second. But there's a heap of difference between "powerful and situational" and "totally worthless, don't even think twice about dropping it for a very minor benefit".
Well, as has been mentioned, you need some kinda other worst school of magic to take its place. The heap is really massive, and enchantment sits right around the bottom of it. I'd put it at actual worst school status, but it might be second worst. The benefits you get from specializing and incantarixing aren't all that minor, so you've gotta at least consider what the worst school is.

[Urpriest]

The other point to be made (Tippy said it in a glib way that someone not anticipating it wouldn't notice) is that Enchantment also fails if your target has a higher than normal Will save (unless you go all Snowcastingly crazy about things), or high SR. Most schools will have no-save no-SR options, or at least will let you target different saves. Enchantment has very few options that do either. So it's not just that you can't do anything against Undead, Oozes, Plants, Vermin, and Constructs, and are somewhat limited against many Animals and Magical Beasts, you also aren't going to make headway with Dragons or Outsiders, for whom you almost never want to use anything that grants SR and has a save. So you've got Aberrations, Elementals, Fey, Humanoids, Monstrous Humanoids, and Giants. And of those, Aberrations, Fey, and Monstrous Humanoids all have good Will saves. Hope you're on the Elemental Plane of Giants.

[Terazul]

Also, for everyone saying Protection from Evil only lasts 1 minute per level, let's not forget its big brother, Magic Circle Against Evil (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magicCircleAgainstEvil.htm). At a minimum of 50 minutes, it is completely reasonable to have it up in advance, or lesser rod of extend it to nearly 2 hours at the minimum caster level.

But yeah, as everyone's been saying, Enchantment tends to only target 1 save (Will) which can often be unusually high, and then if you manage to get past that there's often a myriad of other things you have to worry about dealing with such as language barriers (for a bunch of spells that command creatures), racial/community barriers (I'm looking at you, Tasha's hideous laughter), Immunity to mind-affecting, Immunity to morale-based things, Immunity to Fear, Creature types (Dominate Person only works on humanoids, folks), and the list goes on and on. Furthermore, its spells tend to be unfortunately often limited by HD alot; I mean cool, you got lesser Geas at 7th level but most monsters scale faster in HD than by CR, so finding something with less than 7 HD worth geasing becomes even more of a pain. Same for a number of other spells that would be worthwhile if after a certain point enemies couldn't just ignore them.

The number of hurdles you have to deal with compared to other schools is what really makes it a pain.

[Sith_Happens]

And for Conjuration, isn't there also a series of spells that basically says "Conjuration doesn't work/backfires horribly against him"? I seem to recall something like that in Vile Darkness or Exalted Deeds. Think it was Exalted Deeds.

There's two spells (the ones you're probably thinking of) that turn someone's summons against them, and two that say "nope" to Orbs. The entire rest of the school? In the clear.

[Story]

c) that this wizard has - oh- what a surprise - his mind blank spell already cast or prepared exactly when you start dominaing.

You mean there are level 15+ Wizards who don't run around with permanent Mind Blank?


And why would the spellcaster then cast Protection from _____ on himself to end that effect? He wouldn't.


He would if he made the Spellcraft check to recognize the spell. Being friendly with someone doesn't mean you want your friends mind controlling you.

[GreenETC]

But if we talk about scenarios where you can meet creatures which are immune to enchanments, then we should be so fair to include scenarios where the enchantment-line gets more effective.
THIS is the key problem with your argument.

Handbooks, guides, advice, and everything that says Enchantment is the worst school usually do so at a "non-biased, everything-goes" sort of mentality, because the chances of you being in a city, a forest, an ocean, the Abyss, an undead crypt, the Elemental Plane of Water, or anything else is entirely random, so for every good option, there is an equal and opposite bad one. Sure, Enchantment is great in a city campaign where nobody has Magic Circles Against Evil, but there's just as many zombie apocalypses or construct towers.

All of these guides say that you should adjust for your personal campaign, but when a school of magic is basically useless against a third of the monsters ever made, the chances of a random campaign having one of them is high. Transmutation, on the other hand, is useful if you have an underwater campaign, a sky-boat campaign in Ebberon, or a trip to the Nine Hells.

The spells are all much more open to DM interpretation, which is why Enchantment and Illusion often find such varying degrees of use. Sometimes a Charm is basically a Dominate, other times the guy "hands you his sword" by sticking it through your chest. As opposed to Transmutation, where your DM is less likely to say "Oh, you can only Fly while naked and on Thursdays."

[gomipile]

I don't see comparisons in this thread between the supposed titular fallacy and every other fallacy. Without such a comparison, I don't see a reason to claim that the titular fallacy is greater than any other fallacy, let alone the greatest of them all.

[TuggyNE]

I don't see comparisons in this thread between the supposed titular fallacy and every other fallacy. Without such a comparison, I don't see a reason to claim that the titular fallacy is greater than any other fallacy, let alone the greatest of them all.

It's the greatest fallacy because no other fallacy has such an immediate and drastic influence on Wizardly power!

[Lactantius]

1.) Protection from Evil:
If I recommend "thinking out-of-the-box," it involves thinking about WHEN to apply your spells and when not.
Stop narrowing the scenarios down to pure combat situations, ticking in rounds. Start using your spells in the right situations.
This is a general, broad statement, but that's exactly when enchantment start to rise: hitting the enemy unprepared.
The popular charm- and domination-series are less made for direct combat situations, they are more made for out-of-combat, or "just-before-combat-would-happen" situations.
There are dozens of cases where you can rise. The disadvantage is getting creative. Think out-of-the-box. Don't narrow yourself down to combat situations with rounds, initiative and so on.
I mean, aren't you a wizard? Didn't we get tell that you are Batman, a God and else who picks the fight as you wish to?

Only the sky is the limit on how to apply your enchantments. Without going in detail, think about enchantment from a different point of view:
think of if like a new tool, coming along with your other combat spells. Think about enchanments in the same degree you would think about divinations.
Some divinations are good in direct combats, but the most shine out-of-combat. Enchantment works similarily.
Enchant a villain and use it later, for example.
That's working out-of-the-box. An enchatner picks the targets when he wished to, not when the situations dictates it.

2.) Mind Blank
Yep, mind blank is rare. In my books, Wizard15+ have them (and sure, they prepare them NEARLY every day since there are many 8th-level-spells, but only 1-2 slots/day).
All other examples called are rare and exotic, yep. A cleric with protection domain? Sure, if your patron god got in in his portfolio.
Archivists? Sure, if the upper called clerics share their precious knowledge with some non-pious dudes just collecting their prayers.

And drawing the argument with custom crafted items is very, very weak. The DMG itself explicitely states that the crafting rules are guidelines with the last call of the DM. There's a good reason for that, or dou you want to see the infamous, cheap continous true-strike item?

We could continue that and I would tell you that we have no common playground if you assume that all books are available, all tricks allowed, no DM-fiat, no level-based campaign end, using dysfunctional rules and so on.

Boundaries. Limits. If there are none (which is fair and possible), sure, enchantment drops down since there are more counters the more books and exotic stuff you allow.

2. Weaker schools?
Illusions and Necromancy are top candidates for this title.
Both schools have to live with the same problem you could arrange against enchantment: one single counter-tool.
True Seeing shuts down illusions, Death ward/Soulfire/Ring of Lives etc. shut down necromancy.
They can get show down way earlier than level 15: true seeing is way more accessible to most spellcasting classes, same goes to death ward.

Frankly, Illusion drops drastically afters level 4. greater mirror image (which is a non-core spell, FYI) and greater invisibility are my personal capstones of illusion. Even mirror images can be exchanged by other miss chance defenses (like greater blink, for example).

Necromancy loses its potency if the counter-measurs are online but even more, it is nearly as narrowed down as enchantment: either you deliver save-or-dies/sucks or you create/boost your undead minions (which would be pure utility).

Both schools are good candidates for being the weakest school. I tend to necromancy.

3. Counter for other schools?
Sure, they exist. You hear rarely of them cause no one bothers (or thinks out of the box).
- Transmutation? - There is an armor enchantment to shut down most dangerous transmutation attacks. Sure, proof against transmutation is expensive, but if we allow a ring of mind blank.... well, exactly.

- Any school? - Otiluke's Suppressing Field. Fairly strong school. Underrated cause it requires a caster level check. My, oh my, our wizard must succeed a caster level check, a check with variables he wouldn't max out in the first place.
Shut down the conjuration school. Shut down the transmutation school. Shut down evil descriptors. This spell IS awesome.
- Then, we can dish out Io7V's indigo veil.
- Prismatic Sphere, wall of force etc. as indirect tools to shut down other schools.


All in all, it is D&D. It depends on too many factors. Do you allow all obscure stuff? Are we playing core-only? Do we have a quick-witted DM? Do we have all books? Is there a level-limit in the campaign (like, RHoD)?
Do we have casual players who don't opt that much (so that you shouldn't opt too far, too)?

All those factors are important if we ban enchantment or not.

[eggynack]

1.) Protection from Evil:
If I recommend "thinking out-of-the-box," it involves thinking about WHEN to apply your spells and when not.
Stop narrowing the scenarios down to pure combat situations, ticking in rounds. Start using your spells in the right situations.
This is a general, broad statement, but that's exactly when enchantment start to rise: hitting the enemy unprepared.
The popular charm- and domination-series are less made for direct combat situations, they are more made for out-of-combat, or "just-before-combat-would-happen" situations.
There are dozens of cases where you can rise. The disadvantage is getting creative. Think out-of-the-box. Don't narrow yourself down to combat situations with rounds, initiative and so on.
I mean, aren't you a wizard? Didn't we get tell that you are Batman, a God and else who picks the fight as you wish to?
I'd really much rather cast a regular save or die in that situation, or, y'know, something without a save at all. It really depends on the situation. The last thing I want to do is get in close range of an enemy, shoot my spell at them, and have it do nothing. That's a very un-batman thing to do. I'd also rather not prepare a spell under the assumption that I'll be in an advantageous position when I cast it. If I'm catching the enemy unawares, I don't need a spell specialized for beating the enemy when they're caught unawares, because most of my spells are like that. You need spells for worst case scenarios, not best case scenarios.



Only the sky is the limit on how to apply your enchantments. Without going in detail, think about enchantment from a different point of view:
think of if like a new tool, coming along with your other combat spells. Think about enchanments in the same degree you would think about divinations.
Some divinations are good in direct combats, but the most shine out-of-combat. Enchantment works similarily.
Enchant a villain and use it later, for example.
That's working out-of-the-box. An enchatner picks the targets when he wished to, not when the situations dictates it.
You really probably should go into detail. You can pick your targets all you like, but when you get right down to it, you're casting a save or lose. That's it. Compared to baleful polymorph, dominate person gives you a brain slave, but it's far more situational. I'd rather just cast the spell with less variance that does less when it works.


2.) Mind Blank
Yep, mind blank is rare. In my books, Wizard15+ have them (and sure, they prepare them NEARLY every day since there are many 8th-level-spells, but only 1-2 slots/day).
All other examples called are rare and exotic, yep. A cleric with protection domain? Sure, if your patron god got in in his portfolio.
Archivists? Sure, if the upper called clerics share their precious knowledge with some non-pious dudes just collecting their prayers.
It's somewhat rare, but it lasts awhile, and not everyone needs to have it for it to be effective. All it takes is one guy packing mind blank at the wrong time, and you've placed yourself in prime position for a punch to the face.


And drawing the argument with custom crafted items is very, very weak. The DMG itself explicitely states that the crafting rules are guidelines with the last call of the DM. There's a good reason for that, or dou you want to see the infamous, cheap continous true-strike item?
Folks were talking about an actual permanent item of protection from X, so that'll work just fine. The minute we stop talking about stuff like dominate and charm, and start talking about spells with less lingering effects, enchantment loses the little edge it has.


We could continue that and I would tell you that we have no common playground if you assume that all books are available, all tricks allowed, no DM-fiat, no level-based campaign end, using dysfunctional rules and so on.

Boundaries. Limits. If there are none (which is fair and possible), sure, enchantment drops down since there are more counters the more books and exotic stuff you allow.

Why wouldn't we assume no DM fiat. That just seems basic. Additionally, you called the idea of enchantment being weak a fallacy, which means that you have to protect it within the arena of the whole game, instead of within the arena of your game. In any case, even without extra stuff, enchantment is still an incredibly narrow and situational school, especially when compared to other options.


2. Weaker schools?
Illusions and Necromancy are top candidates for this title.
Both schools have to live with the same problem you could arrange against enchantment: one single counter-tool.
True Seeing shuts down illusions, Death ward/Soulfire/Ring of Lives etc. shut down necromancy.
They can get show down way earlier than level 15: true seeing is way more accessible to most spellcasting classes, same goes to death ward.
This is not the only problem that enchantment has. Necromancy and illusion are cited as possible ban options for these reasons, but enchantment gets it more because the payoff is lower. Illusion is a far more dynamic school than enchantment, and necromancy is also more dynamic but to a lesser extent.


Frankly, Illusion drops drastically afters level 4. greater mirror image (which is a non-core spell, FYI) and greater invisibility are my personal capstones of illusion. Even mirror images can be exchanged by other miss chance defenses (like greater blink, for example).
That stuff is more than enchantment offers. Invisibility effects and miss chances are incredibly powerful defenses, especially when that miss chance is provided by mirror image. Illusion also has the shadow line, project image, simulacrum, and silent image (which is seriously powerful, even at high level). That's all core stuff. These effects can't really be replicated by spells outside of illusion, while enchantment's bevy of save or loses can be.


Necromancy loses its potency if the counter-measurs are online but even more, it is nearly as narrowed down as enchantment: either you deliver save-or-dies/sucks or you create/boost your undead minions (which would be pure utility).
Both necromancy and enchantment rely on save or x's, it's true, but necromancy gets both those and the undead raising, which is one more thing than enchantment gets. Necromancy also often hits touch AC's, which is more reliable than save or x's, and it hits a broader swath of creature types. Finally, you get magic jar, which is just utterly made of shenanigans. It's not a super versatile school, but it offers more than enchantment.


3. Counter for other schools?
Sure, they exist. You hear rarely of them cause no one bothers (or thinks out of the box).
- Transmutation? - There is an armor enchantment to shut down most dangerous transmutation attacks. Sure, proof against transmutation is expensive, but if we allow a ring of mind blank.... well, exactly.
It'd be nice if you could actually name the thing you're talking about. The most dangerous "transmutation attack" is the polymorph line, and I haven't heard of much that blocks that.


- Any school? - Otiluke's Suppressing Field. Fairly strong school. Underrated cause it requires a caster level check. My, oh my, our wizard must succeed a caster level check, a check with variables he wouldn't max out in the first place.

Shut down the conjuration school. Shut down the transmutation school. Shut down evil descriptors. This spell IS awesome.
An effect that works against all things in equal measure isn't exactly an argument for enchantment. It also doesn't help that that spell is really really bad. I mean, you cast it, and then your opponent just so happens to cast the type of spell you named, and then you manage to win the caster level check, and bravo, you've stopped a single spell. After that, your opponent casts a spell of a different school, because he can. It's also a full round action, because why not? It's super situational, and pretty bad in most of those situations. In other words, the opposite of awesome.


- Then, we can dish out Io7V's indigo veil.
- Prismatic Sphere, wall of force etc. as indirect tools to shut down other schools.
These are better, but still suffer from the issue that you're affecting everything universally. The violet veil is also even higher level than mind blank, so that's a thing to contend with. Seriously though, these things are absolutely meaningless to your argument unless enchantment bypasses them.



All in all, it is D&D. It depends on too many factors. Do you allow all obscure stuff? Are we playing core-only? Do we have a quick-witted DM? Do we have all books? Is there a level-limit in the campaign (like, RHoD)?
Do we have casual players who don't opt that much (so that you shouldn't opt too far, too)?

All those factors are important if we ban enchantment or not.

Not really, actually. As I note, a lot, enchantment isn't even all that great when you're not dealing with all of the mind-affecting immune creatures. I don't think it's been brought up yet, but dominate person suffers from even stricter type limitations than enchantment does, so it's crazy situational. At the end of the day, a save or lose is pretty much a save or lose. Enchantment sometimes gets you better aftereffects than most schools, but it also effects less stuff, so it's at best getting parity with the save or loses from less commonly banned schools. If your only spell effect is getting parity with one of the several effects from other schools, your school isn't very good.

[Emperor Tippy]

1.) Protection from Evil:
If I recommend "thinking out-of-the-box," it involves thinking about WHEN to apply your spells and when not.
Stop narrowing the scenarios down to pure combat situations, ticking in rounds. Start using your spells in the right situations.
This is a general, broad statement, but that's exactly when enchantment start to rise: hitting the enemy unprepared.
The popular charm- and domination-series are less made for direct combat situations, they are more made for out-of-combat, or "just-before-combat-would-happen" situations.
There are dozens of cases where you can rise. The disadvantage is getting creative. Think out-of-the-box. Don't narrow yourself down to combat situations with rounds, initiative and so on.
I mean, aren't you a wizard? Didn't we get tell that you are Batman, a God and else who picks the fight as you wish to?

Only the sky is the limit on how to apply your enchantments. Without going in detail, think about enchantment from a different point of view:
think of if like a new tool, coming along with your other combat spells. Think about enchanments in the same degree you would think about divinations.
Some divinations are good in direct combats, but the most shine out-of-combat. Enchantment works similarily.
Enchant a villain and use it later, for example.
That's working out-of-the-box. An enchatner picks the targets when he wished to, not when the situations dictates it.
It runs into the same problem. Generally anything worth enchanting has the resources and the motivation to protect its self from subtle enchanting.

A simple Craft Contingent: Protection from Evil set to trigger if the individual is hit with a spell from the enchantment school and fails his save is enough. That costs 100 GP and is good until expended. Sure, it does nothing if you have the time to blast down the protections (pretty much any Dispel Magic casting will do it) or have already disabled the individual but subtle usages are stopped cold.

The best use of Dominate Person tends to be to extract information.

Mind Rape is great but it's not Shapechange and isn't enough to save the school on its own.


And drawing the argument with custom crafted items is very, very weak. The DMG itself explicitely states that the crafting rules are guidelines with the last call of the DM. There's a good reason for that, or dou you want to see the infamous, cheap continous true-strike item?
Who said anything about custom crafted items?


We could continue that and I would tell you that we have no common playground if you assume that all books are available, all tricks allowed, no DM-fiat, no level-based campaign end, using dysfunctional rules and so on.
Um all you just stated are the standard assumptions of this forum. Unless an OP places specific restrictions in the OP then all of that is assumed to be the case.


Boundaries. Limits. If there are none (which is fair and possible), sure, enchantment drops down since there are more counters the more books and exotic stuff you allow.
Enchantment is screwed by the SRD more than it is any other source. Mind Blank, Protection from Evil, Constructs, Plants, Vermin, Undead, Angels, Archons, Oozes, etc. All from the SRD and all immune.


2. Weaker schools?
Illusions and Necromancy are top candidates for this title.
Both schools have to live with the same problem you could arrange against enchantment: one single counter-tool.
True Seeing shuts down illusions, Death ward/Soulfire/Ring of Lives etc. shut down necromancy.
They can get show down way earlier than level 15: true seeing is way more accessible to most spellcasting classes, same goes to death ward.
True Seeing is shut down by Mind Blank. True Seeing as an expensive material component. True Seeing lasts a minute per level (generally meaning that the enemy has to realize that illusions are in play before casting it). True Seeing does nothing to block Shadow Evocation/Conjuration.

Illusion has Simulacrum and Ice Assassin. Either one is enough to put Illusion up there with Transmutation and Conjuration in the contest for strongest school of magic.

Necromancy has a number of great spells that don't care about Death Ward. It also has Clone, which is just about the only native resurrection method that a Wizard has access to and Astral Projection. It's still the second weakest school, after Enchantment.


Frankly, Illusion drops drastically afters level 4. greater mirror image (which is a non-core spell, FYI) and greater invisibility are my personal capstones of illusion. Even mirror images can be exchanged by other miss chance defenses (like greater blink, for example).
Then you are sadly under utilizing Illusion magic.


Necromancy loses its potency if the counter-measurs are online but even more, it is nearly as narrowed down as enchantment: either you deliver save-or-dies/sucks or you create/boost your undead minions (which would be pure utility).
Or you make yourself harder to kill permanently.

Both schools are good candidates for being the weakest school. I tend to necromancy.

[Emperor Tippy]

It'd be nice if you could actually name the thing you're talking about. The most dangerous "transmutation attack" is the polymorph line, and I haven't heard of much that blocks that.
Proof Against Transmutation. Complete Arcane. +5 armor bonus, makes you immune to pretty much any direct attack by a spell from the transmutation school. It's on the list of defenses that you should absolutely buy in high level play.

[eggynack]

Proof Against Transmutation. Complete Arcane. +5 armor bonus, makes you immune to pretty much any direct attack by a spell from the transmutation school. It's on the list of defenses that you should absolutely buy in high level play.
That is a pretty neat thingmajig. Still, it's about what I expected it to be i.e. good against a small fraction of transmutation, rather than good against most or all of it.

[Karnith]

Death ward/Soulfire/Ring of Lives etc. shut down necromancy.Not really. I mean, sure, they shut down some Necromancy effects, but not to the degree that immunity to mind-affecting effects shuts down Enchantment. Immunity to mind-affecting effects means that none of your Enchantment spells will work on that creature. Death Ward and the like do nothing to Ray of Enfeeblement (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/rayOfEnfeeblement.htm), Fear (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/fear.htm), Ray of Exhaustion (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/rayOfExhaustion.htm), Bestow Curse (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/bestowCurse.htm), or Contagion (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/contagion.htm), to name some spells available at roughly the same level. Or animated minions, for that matter, but the same applies to Enchantment spell minions, so that aspect's kind of a wash.

Necromancy loses its potency if the counter-measurs are online but even more, it is nearly as narrowed down as enchantment: either you deliver save-or-dies/sucks or you create/boost your undead minions (which would be pure utility).Also not true. Necromancy has a lot of save-or-die and save-or-lose effects, yes, but its SoDs and SoLs target both Fortitude and Will saves, whereas Enchantment pretty much only targets Will saves. Additionally, Necromancy has a lot of no-save effects, and is particularly famous for its debuffs. In Core this means spells like Ray of Enfeeblement (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/rayOfEnfeeblement.htm), Enervation (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/enervation.htm), and
Waves of Exhaustion (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/wavesOfExhaustion.htm). Necromancy gets minionmancy through Animate Dead (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/animateDead.htm) and the like, which is utility and bodies in combat. And the school has a number of other useful effects that don't fall into any of those categories, like False Life (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/falseLife.htm), Magic Jar (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magicJar.htm), Clone (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/clone.htm), and Astral Projection (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/astralProjection.htm).

Necromancy isn't a great school (even though I love it, it's honestly one of the worst), but it's far better than you're giving it credit for.

[Logic]

*snip*
These are the reasons why rating enchantment as weakest school is the greatest fallacy.

You keep asserting your claim that enchantment isn't the weakest school by giving examples of how useful or powerful it is. Perhaps you should use examples of why another specific school is less useful or powerful than enchantment?

I am inclined to agree with the majority here, but in my opinion, the only school that comes close to enchantment is Evocation, and Evocation is my favorite spell school.

[Psyren]

1) As others have said, the problem is not that Enchantment is weak, but that other schools are stronger. You can generally get the job done with Enchantment - if you come across something immune to your spells, go dominate a Giant or something and come back with it.

2) RE: Necromancy - even against enemies that are Death Warded/Soulfired, Necromancy is useful because you can create minions with it. Death Ward won't protect you from being choked out by a Mummy.

3) If you do want Enchantment to be stronger, play Pathfinder, where a significant number of its weaknesses have been mitigated or erased.

[Novawurmson]

3) If you do want Enchantment to be stronger, play Pathfinder, where a significant number of its weaknesses have been mitigated or erased.

I'd like to talk about this for a little bit. I know Mind Blank (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/mind-blank) got nerfed down to only a +8 resistance bonus, and Protection Against Evil (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/protection-from-evil) gives a new save (but doesn't auto-suppress) an ongoing enchantment effect. Are there any other changes in PF?

Edit: Also, I feel like Enchantment gets more buff spells in PF, increasing its usefulness.

Edit: There's also Waves of Ecstasy (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/w/waves-of-ecstasy) for a "No save, just suck" enchantment spell.

[Psyren]

I'd like to talk about this for a little bit. I know Mind Blank (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/mind-blank) got nerfed down to only a +8 resistance bonus, and Protection Against Evil (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/protection-from-evil) gives a new save (but doesn't auto-suppress) an ongoing enchantment effect. Are there any other changes in PF?

Actually, Pro:Evil et al. do auto-suppress new effects. So if you have a pro-evil up and someone tries to dominate you, you won't have to make a second save; it simply won't let them control you. The "second save" language is for trying to ward someone who is already being charmed or compelled.

However, the suppressions are now tied to alignment - so if you are a TN Enchanter, none of them will be able to stop you.

As for other changes, another major weakness for enchanters that has been removed is undead, thanks to Threnodic Spell (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/metamagic-feats/threnodic-spell-metamagic) (and rods thereof. (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/rods/metamagic-rods/metamagic-rod-threnodic))

[ahenobarbi]

Enchantment as the weakest school doesn't require it to be useless. It just requires it to be less useful than the others.

That so much. If T-34 is the weakest tank I can name right now (it is) it doesn't mean I could just fight it with my bare fists and win (I couldn't).

Similarly Enchantment is a useful school and if you are building character for maximum power you shouldn't give it up. However if you want to prove its' not the weakest you should demonstrate that another school is weaker.

EDIT: And again too late ;(

[Eldariel]

Honestly, it's a matter of a trade-off; whether what you get for giving up a school is enough to make up for what you give up. In Enchantment's case, yes, you're giving up something but the extra slots, access to Master Specialist and so on can be worth it. Especially on low levels, spell slots are at a premium and I'd either Generalize (with Elf Generalist) or Specialize; though Domain Wizard does alleviate this prob better, it's kind of busted. Higher up, it becomes less of an issue either way.

[Segev]

Enchantment's "flaw" is that it offers only a couple real go-to spells. However, those go-to spells don't just let you have solid potency against anything vulnerable to them, but also give you effectively multiple cohorts to wield against those who are immune to your Charms.

[Psyren]

Enchantment's "flaw" is that it offers only a couple real go-to spells. However, those go-to spells don't just let you have solid potency against anything vulnerable to them, but also give you effectively multiple cohorts to wield against those who are immune to your Charms.

You're one dispel/protection away from having a serious problem on your hands though.

[Karnith]

Enchantment's "flaw" is that it offers only a couple real go-to spells. However, those go-to spells don't just let you have solid potency against anything vulnerable to them, but also give you effectively multiple cohorts to wield against those who are immune to your Charms.
Of course, Necromancy (also Conjuration and Illusion, but those aren't really fair comparisons) can do the same thing, but Necromancy also offers other stuff.

The problem isn't "Enchantment can't do anything," the problem is "Enchantment doesn't do a lot compared to the competition."

[Segev]

I believe there are dispelling buffers, and you can also reserve your own actions for countering Dispels if you're really worried about them.

Speaking as a necromancer-by-preference in gaming, I agree: necromancy does it better. But Enchantment isn't QUITE as bad as advertised. It still isn't great.

[ryu]

Again segev what is enchantment better than as a school that isn't also a common ban? Find me something we can agree is actually agree is worth having and show enchantment is equal to or better than it.

[Psyren]

I believe there are dispelling buffers, and you can also reserve your own actions for countering Dispels if you're really worried about them.

One problem though is spammability; even if you apply a "buffer" effect, they can simply keep firing off dispels until one gets through - particularly since dispel magic is two levels lower than Dominate Person. And unless you keep all your thralls in visual range you might not even what's realizing what's happening until it's too late. And there's always the simple expedient of them putting on a magic circle against X and walking up to your thrall, then walking away with him, which has no check at all.

Counterspelling meanwhile has a range issue. Unless you're riding each slave's coattails, there will be an angle of approach where the dispeller can be out of your range but still able to zap your thrall.

[Karnith]

Speaking as a necromancer-by-preference in gaming, I agree: necromancy does it better. But Enchantment isn't QUITE as bad as advertised. It still isn't great.
That's the problem, though: Necromancy does it better, and Necromancy is still a pretty weak school (again, compared to the competition). Enchantment can certainly be game-breakingly powerful, but if it doesn't offer anything that the other schools don't (okay, the thread agreed on Mindrape, I guess), what do you have to lose by banning it?

[Segev]

Er... no. There are deep flaws in the current analysis I'm seeing.

First off, you don't need Dominate Person to have your multiple allies. Charm works almost as well, provided you're Charming adventuring types or those whom you can treat as hirelings to get them to go with you. A small payment and your company is all many will need.

A well-played enchanter is going to be at least a quarter social skills. Charm is less powerful than Dominate when it comes to forcing people to do your will, but if you can keep using Diplomacy and the like to get them to like you while you work with them Charmed, even a dispel is only going to diminish it slightly (unless your DM interprets Charm as "obvious hateful mind control," in which case yeah, Enchantment is just a bad school, because the DM screws it over).

Secondly, necromancy only "does it better" in that you're not going to have your weakest undead - the generic minion horde - taken from you with a Dispel effect. Your biggest ones are likely held by Command Undead, which is definitely vulnerable to a Dispel. Moreover, while there's no save against Animate Dead, it creates skeletons and zombies. Outside a few specific creatures, they lose much of what makes them potent in the transformation.

I still like necromancy, mind, more than enchantment, but there are definite advantages to Charm and even Dominate over standard necromantic minion-control. (When you get up to Control Undead on intelligent ones, you're right in the same boat as the Enchanter with Dominate Monster.)

[Jade_Tarem]

Are there any other changes in PF?

Dominate got nerfed, as most DMs I know interpret the line about "Ordering the dominated person/creature to do anything against its nature confers a new save with a +2 bonus" to mean "it gets a new save every round unless you order it to do whatever it was going to do before you dominated it."

Confusion, if anything, got better. A few new enchantments, which are *not* subject to GM negation, have sprung up, such as the one that lets you quasi-mimic the effects of repulsion, plus it nauseates foes who are forced to stand near you. They even named it with a Wicked reference. There's also Cloak of Dreams, which nails anyone getting near you with Sleep effects, with no action required on your part. There's a save, but it's a sixth-level spell, and a dedicated enchanter will likely land one eventually. Moonstruck is a 4th level spell which, if you can land it on a caster, sends them into barbarian rages and prevents them from casting any more spells (arguably only useful *because* it's fourth level, as one level up you get Feeblemind, which is the same as its 3.5 incarnation).

Ultimately, the biggest buff is just the way the gameplay works out, especially in PFS (the organized play). You never get to mind-blank levels, there are fewer things that can even cast it, and fewer creatures are just point-blank immune to mind affecting. The most common enemy type is humanoid, so while undead, constructs, and the random extra monster can be immune, your spells work most of the time. Protection from X is an issue, but NPC casters don't always have it because they generally need that spell slot for something else. No doubt if they played with the Tippy stamp of approval, it would be harder, but PFS mods aren't really written that way.

So long story short, Enchantment got buffed the way Elemental Fire did... fewer things have immunity to it than in 3.5, so it seems more powerful by comparison. It's still arguably the least useful school (and is definitely the least versatile), though in PFS I would consider it highly competitive with Necromancy, at least, and possibly *any* school for offense, since the top 3-4 spell levels are inaccessible and there aren't 50,000 splatbooks dedicated to making sure that there's absolutely nothing Conjuration, Transmutation, and Illusion can't do.

[ryu]

Why stop at zombies and skeletons? I tend to keep all corpses in a bag of holding and animate as I please shrink item dragon corpses are kinda hilarious for example. I also get to use anything the group kills rather than hapless nooks the dm hands out like candy out of charity.

[Frosty]

How did Confusion get better in PF? :smallconfused:

[Segev]

Yeah, when DMs start pulling the "I think this shouldn't do anything, so it won't" card out, things start sucking hard. Dominate should not allow a new save just because the monster would have done something very specific if you weren't dominating it; it should allow a new save if you tell a hungry animal not to eat easily-available food, or if you tell a greedy dragon to hand over parts of its hoard, or if you order a Paladin to attack the also-good cleric in his party.

But if you tell the paladin to defend you from his allies, unless he would never ever defend the likes of you, he shouldn't get a new save. If you tell the paladin to attack the evil cleric in the party that he's only tolerated due to "greater good" constraints, he doesn't get a new save. If you dominate the greedy dragon into attacking a rival party that's also raiding his hoard, he doesn't get a new save. Even if you dominate him into coming with you after taking steps to protect his hoard, he doesn't get a new save unless he's got a deeply-rooted desire to never leave his cave.

Dominating an orc into attacking some goblins also isn't going to provoke a new save under most circumstances.

"Against his nature" doesn't mean "against his current interests." It means "he has a deep-seated resistance to doing anything like this." Getting the good to attack the innocent or the greedy to part with their personal belongings counts. Getting the evil to backstab their buddies or the merely profit-motivated (as opposed to deeply greedy) to hand over their property without you paying for it will not. i.e., if the merchant could normally be convinced, even with difficulty, to hand out a freebie, you can dominate him into doing so. Only if it's to the point that "your money or your life" gets him to think seriously about whether his life is worth more than his money is this going to run against "his nature" for the spell's purposes.

[Psyren]

Dominate got nerfed, as most DMs I know interpret the line about "Ordering the dominated person/creature to do anything against its nature confers a new save with a +2 bonus" to mean "it gets a new save every round unless you order it to do whatever it was going to do before you dominated it."

Actually, paizo had a blog post about that IIRC. It mentioned that for many evil/savage monsters, fighting each other is not against their nature - so if you dominate an ogre or even a demon then it's going to gleefully tear into its comrades without getting another save. Similarly, dominating the Belkar or other morally questionable member of a party to attack his comrades could bypass the save too depending on how vicious/bloodlusty they are.



Ultimately, the biggest buff is just the way the gameplay works out, especially in PFS (the organized play). You never get to mind-blank levels, there are fewer things that can even cast it, and fewer creatures are just point-blank immune to mind affecting. The most common enemy type is humanoid, so while undead, constructs, and the random extra monster can be immune, your spells work most of the time. Protection from X is an issue, but NPC casters don't always have it because they generally need that spell slot for something else. No doubt if they played with the Tippy stamp of approval, it would be harder, but PFS mods aren't really written that way.

Note that Mind Blank just boosts your save now anyway (and doesn't even stack with a Cloak of Resistance or Protection From Spells) so even if PFS got to those levels it wouldn't necessarily defeat the enchanter.

You reminded me of another advantage too - Giant was downgraded to a subtype, so there are more creatures vulnerable to the cheaper "Person" line of enchantment spells (Charm, Hold, Dominate.) In addition, some monstrous humanoids were bumped down to humanoid, e.g. Derro, making them more susceptible as well.

[Segev]

Why stop at zombies and skeletons? I tend to keep all corpses in a bag of holding and animate as I please shrink item dragon corpses are kinda hilarious for example. I also get to use anything the group kills rather than hapless nooks the dm hands out like candy out of charity.

Um. You're still stuck with skeletons and zombies unless you resort to Create (Greater) Undead. And that requires Command or Control Undead, putting you back at "one dispel away from trouble."

And you're not "stuck" with "hapless nooks the dm hands out like candy out of charity" as an enchanter. You may need to try a couple times, but an optimized mage IS going to have a decent save DC, and so enemies who aren't DM-cheesed for absolute immunity can be taken down.

If a blaster or a debuffer is expected to have to spend 2-3 rounds and as many spells to reasonably help bring down a foe, the save/lose caster should expect 2-3 tries before he might succeed (or, rather, the target might fail). Especially with something that's a full-swing shift in combat power: not just removing the target, but adding him to your side.

[Eldariel]

Ultimately, the biggest buff is just the way the gameplay works out, especially in PFS (the organized play). You never get to mind-blank levels, there are fewer things that can even cast it, and fewer creatures are just point-blank immune to mind affecting. The most common enemy type is humanoid, so while undead, constructs, and the random extra monster can be immune, your spells work most of the time. Protection from X is an issue, but NPC casters don't always have it because they generally need that spell slot for something else. No doubt if they played with the Tippy stamp of approval, it would be harder, but PFS mods aren't really written that way.

To be fair, that's only PFS, not PF. PFS is quite easy in my experience; I'm playing your average Wizard and been in a bad position exactly once (non-combat encounter in God's Marketplace Gamble). PF in and of itself is still deep down the same as 3.5 and mostly leads to the same kind of gameplay logically.

But yeah, my PFS Wizard barred Evo and Necro instead of Enchantment so I could more easily prepare Charm Persons; exceedingly useful spell, that. Then again, the "prepare at the cost of 2 slots"-option in PF makes not banning for individual spells less of a big deal.

[Novawurmson]

How did Confusion get better in PF? :smallconfused:

Look at the confusion tables. 3.5 Confusion they had a chance to target the caster and a chance to flee, whereas PF Confusion they have a chance to hurt themselves.

[Jade_Tarem]

How did Confusion get better in PF? :smallconfused:

The random confusion behavior chart is now (arguably) more favorable toward the caster and his allies.

3.5:

1-10: Attack Caster with Melee or Ranged Weapons
11-20: Act Normally
21-50: Babble
51-70: Flee from caster at top speed
71-100: Attack nearest creature

PF:

1-25: Act Normally
26-50: Babble Incoherently
51-75: Strike self for 1d8+STR damage
76-100: Attack nearest creature

My opinion, at least. True, there's a 15% greater chance of "act normally," but a 5% greater chance of babble, a 0% chance of fleeing (which honestly is just going to make the combat take longer), and a 100% greater chance of making a pokemon joke. :smalltongue:

[Psyren]

How did Confusion get better in PF? :smallconfused:

Several ways:

1) The "Attack Caster" and "Flee" options were removed from the table. The remaining options therefore went up in probability, which means a higher chance for the monster not to attack the caster unless he is the nearest threat. "Attack Self" is almost strictly worse than flee because it steals your action and lets the enemy surround you more easily.

2) In PF, confused creatures treat everyone as enemies. This means that allies must succeed on a touch attack to buff or heal them; it could also mean that they will save against allied spells, though this isn't specifically called out. And because the ally needs an attack roll to heal them, that person becomes the last "attacker" and thus their target.

[Jade_Tarem]

To be fair, that's only PFS, not PF. PFS is quite easy in my experience;

Your experience clearly doesn't include Bonekeep or the Waking Rune.

[Segev]

Actually, paizo had a blog post about that IIRC. It mentioned that for many evil/savage monsters, fighting each other is not against their nature - so if you dominate an ogre or even a demon then it's going to gleefully tear into its comrades without getting another save. Similarly, dominating the Belkar or other morally questionable member of a party to attack his comrades could bypass the save too depending on how vicious/bloodlusty they are.

YEah, this more or less says what I was trying to get across. This is how it SHOULD be treated.

If I were a DM, Belkar would not get a new save if asked to attack anybody except Mr. Scruffy and maybe Roy. (Roy because of combination of respect and a deep-seated personal preservation; Roy is his main defender in the party, and keeps the others from attacking him. If Domination had him kill Roy, the others would likely terminate him without too much remorse due to his danger to the rest of them and a lack of a voice speaking against his death.)

The others...it's not against his nature, even if he's not normally going to do it because he relies on their alliance for his own ends.

Honestly, even good people can be made to attack each other unless there's something deeper-seated than "I don't attack innocent people." Adventurers are warriors, all. Now, when you're dealing with a party, you always risk deep bonds of commaraderie that would get in the way and might invoke "against their nature," so be careful. But monsters, particularly evil ones, in a military or hunting party type situation? You're probably safe. Especially if they're CE and establish pecking order via violence anyway.

[Psyren]

Note that the Giant even had a paladin attack a good person (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0519.html) without a save, simply because she was a thief. You can interpret these things pretty broadly.

But yeah, against monsters and evil races - which are your most likely targets in a campaign anyway - dominate is still mostly a safe bet.

[eggynack]

First off, you don't need Dominate Person to have your multiple allies. Charm works almost as well, provided you're Charming adventuring types or those whom you can treat as hirelings to get them to go with you. A small payment and your company is all many will need.

A well-played enchanter is going to be at least a quarter social skills. Charm is less powerful than Dominate when it comes to forcing people to do your will, but if you can keep using Diplomacy and the like to get them to like you while you work with them Charmed, even a dispel is only going to diminish it slightly (unless your DM interprets Charm as "obvious hateful mind control," in which case yeah, Enchantment is just a bad school, because the DM screws it over).
Charm person is nice, but it's just the one spell, and it suffers from its share of problems. At the most basic level, you're limited in scope to low will save humanoids, and preparing a spell to deal with low will save humanoids seems a bit narrow. I don't think you can really assume a heavily social skill based caster here. We're talking about a wizard, because they're the only ones who really care about which school you're using, and they're lacking in good social skills, so being a diplomancer wizard seems kinda distant from their normal style of play. It's not really a perfect control either, so you're rather lacking in terms of using charm person for minionmancy.


Secondly, necromancy only "does it better" in that you're not going to have your weakest undead - the generic minion horde - taken from you with a Dispel effect. Your biggest ones are likely held by Command Undead, which is definitely vulnerable to a Dispel. Moreover, while there's no save against Animate Dead, it creates skeletons and zombies. Outside a few specific creatures, they lose much of what makes them potent in the transformation.

Well, necromancy has the advantage of not relying on all that much to work. With dominate, you have to stand next to your opponent, cast your spell, and pray that it works. It's a plan that's intrinsically flawed by its ties to enchantment. Necromancy, by contrast, just needs dead bodies, and has basically zero risk involved. Command undead is also only as vulnerable to dispel as dominate is, and it's not as vulnerable to other anti-enchantment trickery.

When you get right down to it, enchantment does one thing, and it does that thing inconsistently and situationally. Other schools of magic don't have to perfectly emulate what enchantment does, because those other schools have other things they can do. Other schools can do enchantment most of the way, and most of the way is enough to make enchantment the worst school.

[Jade_Tarem]

Actually, paizo had a blog post about that IIRC. It mentioned that for many evil/savage monsters, fighting each other is not against their nature - so if you dominate an ogre or even a demon then it's going to gleefully tear into its comrades without getting another save. Similarly, dominating the Belkar or other morally questionable member of a party to attack his comrades could bypass the save too depending on how vicious/bloodlusty they are.

I understand what you're saying, and you're probably correct. However, given the choice between casting Dominate Person and having to argue with the GM over Paizo blog posts or casting Feeblemind and just being able to point to the line in the book where it says they have the intelligence of a particularly dim gecko, I'm going to go with the second one. If it's a good GM, I don't get any more benefit out of Dominate (PFS mods are never written under the assumption that you have to dominate something to get the information you need, and you can't carry mind-slaves with you from mission to mission). If it's a bad GM, I get extra benefit out of Feeblemind.

You can certainly make a case that Dominate would be worth it in a home campaign with a solid GM. In organized play... not so much.

Edit: It's not that I'm saying that GMs are smelly trolls who the players are trying to outwit in order to have a fun game, but my experience has been that GMs tend to be *very* restrictive when interpreting what spells like Dominate Person and Suggestion can do. Basically anything you've seen done with Suggestion in OOTS would not have worked at this year's Dragoncon.

[Psyren]

PFS is fun and all but we're speaking in general, not about organized play. Also, if Dominate was meant to not work in PFS it would be banned.

Feeblemind is potent but that is only a 1-point swing (take somebody out of the fight.) Dominate meanwhile is a 2-point swing (remove from enemy team, add to your team) so simply comparing the two and saying Feeblemind wins isn't quite accurate.

[Jade_Tarem]

PFS is fun and all but we're speaking in general, not about organized play.

And in general, it's a good spell.


Also, if Dominate was meant to not work in PFS it would be banned.

False. Lots of things aren't banned that don't work in PFS. Short answer, hopefully without derailing the thread:

Party: "This ship investigation is clearly an ambush. Instead of going into the hold full of traps and enemy monks, we just burn the ship."
GM: *Reads Mod, realizes that there's no way to proceed from there.* "...no you don't."

Party: "Now in possession of the MacGuffin, we take well-lit and public streets back to the lodge to avoid getting ambushed by the people who have been stalking us all day."
GM: "...so as you turn down the deserted alleyway..."

This isn't even a bad GM. "Fire" and "other streets" are real, non-banned things in PFS, but they stop working if the mod didn't account for their use. "Equal Play Experience" trumps everything.

[Deadline]

You keep asserting your claim that enchantment isn't the weakest school by giving examples of how useful or powerful it is. Perhaps you should use examples of why another specific school is less useful or powerful than enchantment?

I am inclined to agree with the majority here, but in my opinion, the only school that comes close to enchantment is Evocation, and Evocation is my favorite spell school.

Lactantius did this exact same topic for Evocation a couple of weeks ago. The results were the same: everyone pointed out exactly why it was often selected as a banned school, and Lactantius kept saying something about "out-of-the-box thinking". I tried to point out multiple times that just because it was a less useful school of magic, that didn't mean it was useless, but I think my responses were ignored along with everything that didn't match Lactantius' personal experience.

The simple fact is, taking all levels, foes, and resources available from levels 1-20, there are a few schools of magic that are clearly inferior. Again, that doesn't make them useless, but they just aren't as good as some of the other schools. Some of the defenses don't come online until later in the game, but contrary to Lactantius' experience, people do play games from level 15 and up. Sure, if you only play in the 1-6 range for levels, you aren't going to see why people say wizards are so powerful and melee types just can't compete, because you are catching them when they are even-keel (or possibly in favor of the melee types). You also won't see why people talk about Evocation or Enchantment being among the worst schools of magic, because spells from those schools can single-handedly end encounters (although Enchantment still has the issue of nearly half of the monsters in the various MM are immune to it). And, as the various handbooks all point out, things will be different if your GM runs the game without certain options, or you consistently face certain types of foes.

[Psyren]

False. Lots of things aren't banned that don't work in PFS. Short answer, hopefully without derailing the thread:

Party: "This ship investigation is clearly an ambush. Instead of going into the hold full of traps and enemy monks, we just burn the ship."
GM: *Reads Mod, realizes that there's no way to proceed from there.* "...no you don't."

That's a terrible example. Obviously if there's something in the hold they need and they burn it, they fail the mission. You can fail in PFS you know. And there are rules for burning/sinking ships in the GameMastery guide.



Party: "Now in possession of the MacGuffin, we take well-lit and public streets back to the lodge to avoid getting ambushed by the people who have been stalking us all day."
GM: "...so as you turn down the deserted alleyway..."

Also a terrible example - if the macguffin is important enough they can get jumped for it in broad daylight just fine; not to mention if it takes them too long to get back to the lodge night can fall on them en route anyway.



This isn't even a bad GM.

He may not be "bad" but he's certainly not very good either if his only solution to the above scenarios is blatant railroading.

[ArcturusV]

More or less Deadline. Though mine was less about "Enchantment is Awesome", or at least I was hoping that my point was showing as that, so much as "Banning schools in general is typically short sighted and not exactly optimal". Granted, never ran Incantrix at my table, or had anyone who even asked me about it. But the free Spell Focus and +1 spell per spell level isn't really worth trading out any schools in my book. The ACFs from PHB II kind of... almost make it palatable. But most of them aren't all that impressive either as far as I can tell. Well I know Abrupt Jaunt makes people cream themselves at the very thought of it. Though 10' teleport 3-5 times a day or so (realistically, best case, by the time your Int Mod is higher than that you'd likely have much better defenses/mobility online than this so it won't be relevant) doesn't really do it for me. Handy, sure, best one there, but I'd still only consider it barely an even trade for dumping schools. But other than that?

[ryu]

Banning schools is only short sighted if you lose the ability to do something you wanted and didn't get something better in return. Enchantment and evocation have literally five to ten total castings from in my entire career. Just the free slots are better than those castings and are worth more than the scrolls I'd be buying to umd. Then all the other cool stuff happens.

[Fax Celestis]

Plus, you can take the Item Reprieve/Spell Reprieve/Arcane Transfiguration feat chain to gain one of those schools back.

[Eldariel]

Your experience clearly doesn't include Bonekeep or the Waking Rune.

It does not. But you can bet I'll strive to change that in the near future. Any suggestions for the worst tier to do these on? So far I only have 1-4 open but I can wait a bit and level up first.

[ryu]

Plus, you can take the Item Reprieve/Spell Reprieve/Arcane Transfiguration feat chain to gain one of those schools back.

Ten scrolls worth of gold has less value than three feats. Granted there's also skill investment but that also means I can hand my feat acquired hummingbird wands for double spell economy. Tasty as hell.

[Fax Celestis]

Ten scrolls worth of gold has less value than three feats. Granted there's also skill investment but that also means I can hand my feat acquired hummingbird wands for double spell economy. Tasty as hell.

You can't use spell completion items (eg: scrolls) from a banned school.

[Story]

A well-played enchanter is going to be at least a quarter social skills. Charm is less powerful than Dominate when it comes to forcing people to do your will, but if you can keep using Diplomacy and the like to get them to like you while you work with them Charmed, even a dispel is only going to diminish it slightly (unless your DM interprets Charm as "obvious hateful mind control," in which case yeah, Enchantment is just a bad school, because the DM screws it over).


Divination, Illusion, and Transmutation are just as useful in social situations, if not more useful due to the fact that they work even against a defended target.

I'm currently playing a Wizard who banned Enchantment and he can be a pretty good Diplomancer if he wanted to.

[ryu]

You can't use spell completion items (eg: scrolls) from a banned school.

Not inherently no. That's what the umd is for. Either way my familiar is under no such explicit limitations.

[Aharon]

Dropping in because of the "Protection from Evil stops Enchantment" sub-discussion. The exact clause in the SRD is


Second, the barrier blocks any attempt to possess the warded creature (by a magic jar attack, for example) or to exercise mental control over the creature (including enchantment (charm) effects and enchantment (compulsion) effects that grant the caster ongoing control over the subject, such as dominate person).

In my opinion, the bolded part needs to be read as one condition. So it doesn't block all enchantment (charm) and enchantment (compulsion) effects, but only those that grant ongoing control - something that Charm Person, for example, doesn't - you have to make Charisma checks repeatedly to control the subject.

I agree with the other main stated points, but would also like to remind everybody that other ways to remove immunities etc. exist (Ability Rip, Knowledge Devotion Affiliation pinnacle). If I were bent on playing an enchanter, I would make sure to use those.

[Psyren]

In my opinion, the bolded part needs to be read as one condition. So it doesn't block all enchantment (charm) and enchantment (compulsion) effects, but only those that grant ongoing control - something that Charm Person, for example, doesn't - you have to make Charisma checks repeatedly to control the subject.

Charm Person is specifically called out as being suppressed. And if you rule that one doesn't work, then no charm at all will work because none of them let you direct the person's every action, only compulsions will do that.



I agree with the other main stated points, but would also like to remind everybody that other ways to remove immunities etc. exist (Ability Rip, Knowledge Devotion Affiliation pinnacle). If I were bent on playing an enchanter, I would make sure to use those.

Those are still terrible though because now you're spending two turns (or lots of resources, or both) just to get your attack through. Meanwhile the Illusionist, Conjurer and Necro can just fire off will save or lose without needing to prep the field first.

[Jade_Tarem]

That's a terrible example. Obviously if there's something in the hold they need and they burn it, they fail the mission. You can fail in PFS you know. And there are rules for burning/sinking ships in the GameMastery guide.

We already had what we needed from that ship. I am well aware that you can fail PFS mods. We wanted to burn the ship to avoid the obvious ambush and to lure the ship's owner (our actual quest objective) to the dock so that we could bag her. And no, burning it wouldn't have scared the lady away, especially since she was perfectly fine with taking us on even knowing that we'd defeated her kung-fu assassins in terrain that gave them every advantage.


Also a terrible example - if the macguffin is important enough they can get jumped for it in broad daylight just fine; not to mention if it takes them too long to get back to the lodge night can fall on them en route anyway.

The scenario I was referencing was First Steps Part 1 - the one that nearly every PFS player has played. The final fight occurs when you get bushwhacked in a backstreet by an enemy group.

But... you *know* someone is tailing you. You've been making perception checks all day long. At this point, a sane module would allow you to have multiple options, such as trying to lose them, trying to set up your own ambush, etc. Instead, you *must* go down the alley. You *must* be surprised unless your specific character made the perception check earlier, and you *must* be standing in Easy Color Spray Formation when the combat starts. A good GM can alter or tweak that... but then that's the GM fixing the issue, not anything inherent to PFS. No, not every mod is railroaded that hard, but they want to "make a point" about the fact that you can fail a mission. While the players *can* win the fight, all they really learn is that outside the box thinking will be denied or punished... nnnnooot the thing you want to have as the moral of your player's very first pathfinder mission.

I can provide dozens of other examples. It's not so much that the examples are terrible as that they're examples of terrible flaws in certain PFS mods, which "ban" certain moves in practice even if they aren't officially banned from the game. You can't suggestion your way through social encounters because mods aren't designed for it. You can't charm your way through faction missions (and thank every higher power they finally got rid of those) because... no reason is given, other than "it CLEARLY says you have to use diplomacy." Yes, even if you only need the target to do one thing for you.


It does not. But you can bet I'll strive to change that in the near future. Any suggestions for the worst tier to do these on? So far I only have 1-4 open but I can wait a bit and level up first.

Bonekeep is fairly harsh at any level. Waking Rune is harder at level 10-11 (but can be played at 7-9), and also comes with a special Hard Mode for bragging rights. Honestly, the hardest thing to do would be to take a 6 man, level 9 party in and play on hard mode at the higher tier. If your GM is even in the same zip code as competent, you will all die. :smallamused:

[Squirrel_Dude]

Edit: It's not that I'm saying that GMs are smelly trolls who the players are trying to outwit in order to have a fun game, but my experience has been that GMs tend to be *very* restrictive when interpreting what spells like Dominate Person and Suggestion can do. Basically anything you've seen done with Suggestion in OOTS would not have worked at this year's Dragoncon. I would ad the caveat to this that almost everyone becomes the strictest interpreter of rules as soon as dominate is cast at their characters. Losing control of a character may be the only thing worse than permadeath. At least when you die you can engross yourself in rolling up a new character and get back to playing something soon. When you lose control of your character you have to sit there with no available input other than arguing over whether or not your character would do that.

[Story]

By the way, for anyone saying that Protection From Evil is unrealistic since it only lasts min/level, there's also Disobedience at level 3 which does the same thing for hours/level. You can easily have it up all the time if you want to.

[Psyren]

We already had what we needed from that ship. I am well aware that you can fail PFS mods. We wanted to burn the ship to avoid the obvious ambush and to lure the ship's owner (our actual quest objective) to the dock so that we could bag her. And no, burning it wouldn't have scared the lady away, especially since she was perfectly fine with taking us on even knowing that we'd defeated her kung-fu assassins in terrain that gave them every advantage.

So if your objective wasn't even on the boat, why exactly couldn't you burn it if you wanted to? (And really, if he wanted to stop your plan, he could have stuck a random spellcaster inside the ship spamming a Make Whole wand, which heals it.) "The fire licks at the timbers but you don't notice any lasting damage no matter how long it burns in one spot. Even the paint on the outside seems to staying intact. Make a Spellcraft check.")

Again, this sounds more like a railroady and not very imaginative DM to me than any failing inherent to the module, spells and/or rules.



But... you *know* someone is tailing you. You've been making perception checks all day long. At this point, a sane module would allow you to have multiple options, such as trying to lose them, trying to set up your own ambush, etc. Instead, you *must* go down the alley. You *must* be surprised unless your specific character made the perception check earlier, and you *must* be standing in Easy Color Spray Formation when the combat starts.

Ugh. That just sounds horribad on every conceivable level to me.

And while I've only had a few myself, none of my PFS games were anything like that. We always felt there was player agency and multiple ways to get things done.


There was one module where we infiltrated a Cheliax ball, snuck past the party room in servants' garb in the garden outside, and broke into a library through the air vents. In that library was our objective. Our wizard also had detect magic up and noticed an abjuration on the door before anyone could touch it - he passed on the information and we wisely left it alone. We had a time limit, and going back through that door would have been faster than crawling all the way back through the vents and sneaking back through the garden etc to the door we entered the mansion through, but we still made it. Afterward, our GM told us that putting on the servants garb was a smart move (apparently there were partygoers on the overlooking balcony, who didn't raise the alarm despite seeing our less stealthy members) and not touching the library door was also smart (it was rigged with a loud alarm that would have also summoned a couple of devils to keep us busy until guards arrived.) We went through almost the whole scenario with no fights and that's why we had time left to escape.

Point being that there were actual options and our choices/ingenuity felt like they mattered. Nothing like the two modules you mentioned. But if your experience is the rule rather than the exception then I'm glad I don't play PFS more often.

Oh, and our DM always asked us our marching order/formation.



You can't suggestion your way through social encounters because mods aren't designed for it. You can't charm your way through faction missions (and thank every higher power they finally got rid of those) because... no reason is given, other than "it CLEARLY says you have to use diplomacy." Yes, even if you only need the target to do one thing for you.

What I'm hearing is that there's no point to being an enchanter at all in PFS, certainly outside of combat. If you're not playing a high-Cha class, just give up trying to be persuasive in any way. It's... quite frankly repulsive.

But again, in my 2-3 games I've never noticed anything like that. So either I lucked into more sandboxy modules, or the DMs in my state(s) are just better?

[Jade_Tarem]

So if your objective wasn't even on the boat, why exactly couldn't you burn it if you wanted to? (And really, if he wanted to stop your plan, he could have stuck a random spellcaster inside the ship spamming a Make Whole wand, which heals it.) "The fire licks at the timbers but you don't notice any lasting damage no matter how long it burns in one spot. Even the paint on the outside seems to staying intact. Make a Spellcraft check.")

Again, this sounds more like a railroady and not very imaginative DM to me than any failing inherent to the module, spells and/or rules.

Maybe so, but the GMs are, if you'll recall, strongly discouraged from making changes to the mod. I'm about 80% sure he would have allowed it if it wasn't a PFS mod.


Ugh. That just sounds horribad on every conceivable level to me.

And while I've only had a few myself, none of my PFS games were anything like that. We always felt there was player agency and multiple ways to get things done.


There was one module where we infiltrated a Cheliax ball, snuck past the party room in servants' garb in the garden outside, and broke into a library through the air vents. In that library was our objective. Our wizard also had detect magic up and noticed an abjuration on the door before anyone could touch it - he passed on the information and we wisely left it alone. We had a time limit, and going back through that door would have been faster than crawling all the way back through the vents and sneaking back through the garden etc to the door we entered the mansion through, but we still made it. Afterward, our GM told us that putting on the servants garb was a smart move (apparently there were partygoers on the overlooking balcony, who didn't raise the alarm despite seeing our less stealthy members) and not touching the library door was also smart (it was rigged with a loud alarm that would have also summoned a couple of devils to keep us busy until guards arrived.) We went through almost the whole scenario with no fights and that's why we had time left to escape.

Point being that there were actual options and our choices/ingenuity felt like they mattered. Nothing like the two modules you mentioned. But if your experience is the rule rather than the exception then I'm glad I don't play PFS more often.

Oh, and our DM always asked us our marching order/formation.

I liked The Disappeared too! It was a well-written module, hence my statement about how they aren't all created equal.


What I'm hearing is that there's no point to being an enchanter at all in PFS, certainly outside of combat. If you're not playing a high-Cha class, just give up trying to be persuasive in any way. It's... quite frankly repulsive.

But again, in my 2-3 games I've never noticed anything like that. So either I lucked into more sandboxy modules, or the DMs in my state(s) are just better?

I wouldn't recommend being *only* an Enchanter, no. My Fey Bloodline Sorcerer has one whammy compulsion spell at every spell level, so that in the event that we run up against an enemy who isn't immune to it (which happens fairly frequently) he can drop Confusion/Unadulterated Loathing/Feeblemind on them with a hideously high DC. He also has Memory Lapse, also known as "sacrifice a first level spell for a social reroll," which is really a fairly excellent spell and one of the few that works in social situations (due to the fact that if it works, the target forgets that you cast it and can't logically get mad about it), even if combat applications are extremely situational. However, all of his other spells lean toward classic utilty, buffs, debuffs, and damage, so despite being an "enchanter" he doesn't just stand around picking his nose when the undead show up.

And no, there's really no way to be influential without a good Charisma.

[Story]

And no, there's really no way to be influential without a good Charisma.

I don't know about PF, but in 3.5, Wizards can do pretty well at it just with Friendly Face, Share Skills, synergy bonuses from useless knowledge skills, etc. They won't match a dedicated Diplomancer build, but they can easily fill in for party face even with low charisma.

[Amphetryon]

I don't know about PF, but in 3.5, Wizards can do pretty well at it just with Friendly Face, Share Skills, synergy bonuses from useless knowledge skills, etc. They won't match a dedicated Diplomancer build, but they can easily fill in for party face even with low charisma.

Indeed. A Beguiler in 3.5 can also fill the Face role more than adequately, even with a CHA penalty, thanks to the available Skills, the number of Skill points gained per level coupled with an INT-based caster, and the native Spell selection of a Beguiler.

[Psyren]

And a PF Enchanter/Illusionist can do so easily too. (Unless he's in PFS apparently, and the GM du jour is paralyzed with fear about going off-script)

[Eldariel]

Maybe so, but the GMs are, if you'll recall, strongly discouraged from making changes to the mod. I'm about 80% sure he would have allowed it if it wasn't a PFS mod.

I liked The Disappeared too! It was a well-written module, hence my statement about how they aren't all created equal.

I wouldn't recommend being *only* an Enchanter, no. My Fey Bloodline Sorcerer has one whammy compulsion spell at every spell level, so that in the event that we run up against an enemy who isn't immune to it (which happens fairly frequently) he can drop Confusion/Unadulterated Loathing/Feeblemind on them with a hideously high DC. He also has Memory Lapse, also known as "sacrifice a first level spell for a social reroll," which is really a fairly excellent spell and one of the few that works in social situations (due to the fact that if it works, the target forgets that you cast it and can't logically get mad about it), even if combat applications are extremely situational. However, all of his other spells lean toward classic utilty, buffs, debuffs, and damage, so despite being an "enchanter" he doesn't just stand around picking his nose when the undead show up.

And no, there's really no way to be influential without a good Charisma.

1) Older modules are worse by and large. The writers have gotten better making things more player-driven and less railroady later on, at least in my experience.

2) I've had great impact with key Charm Person here and there. It's helped a lot with most of my faction missions. That and few key rolls (once I rolled a nat 20 when that was the only thing that would've done it for me) have allowed me to yet fail a faction mission on the Wizard. Also allowed me to make up for lacking social skills on a few occasions.


Bonekeep is fairly harsh at any level. Waking Rune is harder at level 10-11 (but can be played at 7-9), and also comes with a special Hard Mode for bragging rights. Honestly, the hardest thing to do would be to take a 6 man, level 9 party in and play on hard mode at the higher tier. If your GM is even in the same zip code as competent, you will all die. :smallamused:

Bah, there's no scenario a properly played Wizard cannot deal with :smalltongue: I'll just try and find out if I can play a Wizard properly, then.

[lsfreak]

I'd just like to throw out again that dominating giants isn't possible. At least, not until the level that we've also got to take into consideration spells like gate. Domination is humanoid-only until 9th level spells (for magic, this is definitely one of those things psionics does better). This makes animate dead strictly better, despite being lower level and nerfing the targeted creature, for a large chunk of the game because it can actually affect the hulking brutes (ogres, trolls, giants) you want to keep around as damage soakers. Charm, geas, and diplomacy can help with non-humanoids, but not in nearly as easy a way as animate dead or dominate. (Of course, for information or favors rather than extra meat, charm will be much more useful).

[Psyren]

I'd just like to throw out again that dominating giants isn't possible. At least, not until the level that we've also got to take into consideration spells like gate. Domination is humanoid-only until 9th level spells (for magic, this is definitely one of those things psionics does better). This makes animate dead strictly better, despite being lower level and nerfing the targeted creature, for a large chunk of the game because it can actually affect the hulking brutes (ogres, trolls, giants) you want to keep around as damage soakers. Charm, geas, and diplomacy can help with non-humanoids, but not in nearly as easy a way as animate dead or dominate. (Of course, for information or favors rather than extra meat, charm will be much more useful).

I'm not sure if this was directed at me, but I was talking about Pathfinder - where Giants are a Humanoid subtype. (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/rules-for-monsters/creature-types#TOC-Giant) Thus Charm/Dominate/Hold Person will work on Ogres, Trolls etc. This was another stealth buff to Enchantment in PF.

[Squirrel_Dude]

Giant is a subtype of humanoid in Pathfinder, so all person spells should work on them AFAIK.

[lsfreak]

Yea, there's kind of two sub-conversations going on; my comment was directed to the 3.5 half of it.

[ArcturusV]

Though it also does prove what I said a few pages back. Enchantment having it's niche at lower levels. There are just certain schools that are front loaded. Enchantment? At low 1-5ish levels? One of the more powerful things you can do. I'd rate it higher than Conjuration typically at that level, as Conjuration lacks a lot of it's "oomph" between short durations and mostly single target stuff. I'd take a Sleep or a Charm Person over a Grease or a Summon Monster I. Same with Illusion, it's similarly front loaded powerful. And schools like Conjuration and Evocation both are kinda weak at low level. They have good effects at low spell levels, but generally need higher caster levels to really get the mileage out of it. Course this is also helped out as Low Level adventures tend to be Humanoids of various types, occasionally Animals (Rarely, as it's hard to feel proper "heroics" in the game when you're killing rats and dogs). And sometimes undead. But you typically see the "undead adventures" kicking in at 4-8 (At least in my experience). So combine with having some of the more powerful options for what you can do with your sharply limited spell slots, and the fact that most encounters are going to be in your wheelhouse.

Course it drops off quickly after that. Other schools start becoming much more useful. The "I can do anything" schools rapidly pick up in power, etc.

[ryu]

Grease has shorter casting time and summon monster doesn't require a person to work. Applicable is better than swingy and situational.

[Psyren]

Grease and Obscuring Mist are just as useful at level 1 as anything in the Enchantment school. In both cases you're going to want a Fighter standing in front of you, whether it's to chop up whatever you've made prone, chop up whatever you've put to sleep/made your best friend, stop someone from stabbing/shooting you in the gut while you're putting things to sleep. And Obscuring Mist makes you flat out untargetable past 5 feet, making it as good at stopping magic missiles as shield, plus stopping rays and arrows etc.

[eggynack]

Though it also does prove what I said a few pages back. Enchantment having it's niche at lower levels. There are just certain schools that are front loaded. Enchantment? At low 1-5ish levels? One of the more powerful things you can do. I'd rate it higher than Conjuration typically at that level, as Conjuration lacks a lot of it's "oomph" between short durations and mostly single target stuff. I'd take a Sleep or a Charm Person over a Grease or a Summon Monster I. Same with Illusion, it's similarly front loaded powerful. And schools like Conjuration and Evocation both are kinda weak at low level. They have good effects at low spell levels, but generally need higher caster levels to really get the mileage out of it. Course this is also helped out as Low Level adventures tend to be Humanoids of various types, occasionally Animals (Rarely, as it's hard to feel proper "heroics" in the game when you're killing rats and dogs). And sometimes undead. But you typically see the "undead adventures" kicking in at 4-8 (At least in my experience). So combine with having some of the more powerful options for what you can do with your sharply limited spell slots, and the fact that most encounters are going to be in your wheelhouse.

Course it drops off quickly after that. Other schools start becoming much more useful. The "I can do anything" schools rapidly pick up in power, etc.
I generally prefer the low level illusion stuff to the low level enchantment stuff. Color spray has a heck of a lot of advantages over sleep (and a big range based disadvantage), and silent image is frigging amazing. Also, in addition to grease, first level conjuration gets you wall of smoke and benign transposition, and those are pretty nice. Enchantment certainly has its moments at low levels, but it's far from irreplaceable.

[Story]

Though it also does prove what I said a few pages back. Enchantment having it's niche at lower levels. There are just certain schools that are front loaded. Enchantment? At low 1-5ish levels? One of the more powerful things you can do. I'd rate it higher than Conjuration typically at that level, as Conjuration lacks a lot of it's "oomph" between short durations and mostly single target stuff. I'd take a Sleep or a Charm Person over a Grease or a Summon Monster I.

In my admittedly limited play experience (2 campaigns, ~15 encounters, both playing as a level 3-6 Wizard), I have yet to see an encounter where Web or Glitterdust would not be helpful. I can think of very few where an enchantment spell would have even been usable, let alone effective.

[eggynack]

In my admittedly limited play experience (2 campaigns, ~13 encounters, both playing as a level 3-6 Wizard), I have yet to see an encounter where Web or Glitterdust was not helpful. I can think of very few where an enchantment spell would have proved similarly effective.
Yeah, also this. Enchantment is pretty good at low levels, but low levels might top out at level two in this case. At that point, other schools are getting stuff like web or alter self, while enchantment is getting hideous laughter. It's a decent spell, but to some extent you're casting a single target version of sleep. It can hit higher HD targets, but that's irrelevant if we're comparing enchantment at first level to enchantment at third level. The school is comparable to other schools at first level spells, but it just goes downhill from that point on.

[Story]

On second thought what I said wasn't strictly true. There was one encounter where we faced some Oozes, but it's not like Enchantment would have faired better.

[Deophaun]

1.) Protection from Evil:
If I recommend "thinking out-of-the-box," it involves thinking about WHEN to apply your spells and when not.
I had a DM that had, as his BBEG, an enchanter. This guy dominated everything: beholders, dragons, high-ranking NPCs, etc. This BBEG was going to be introduced to us early, just to show how he intended to make our lives hell. In our first encounter, he was very impressive and very showy, but we got to hit a couple 20s on our Sense Motive rolls to know the things razing the whole kingdom were dominated. On our next encounter, we cast magic circle against evil and fed the would-be BBEG to his silver dragon bodyguards.

We were level 5, and we turned level 9 spells back on their caster.

Now, granted, this DM didn't know how to use wizards. At all. But then, if he did, he wouldn't have made an enchanter to begin with.

[eggynack]

On second thought what I said wasn't strictly true. There was one encounter where we faced some Oozes, but it's not like Enchantment would have faired better.
It seems like a web, or oddly a grease, would do pretty well against oozes. It looks like grease can actually cause an ooze to fall down somehow, and web seems capable of trapping them. Glitterdust would admittedly fail, however, so if that's the one you had, I guess it's down to masterful wizard crossbow style.

[ryu]

It seems like a web, or oddly a grease, would do pretty well against oozes. It looks like grease can actually cause an ooze to fall down somehow, and web seems capable of trapping them. Glitterdust would admittedly fail, however, so if that's the one you had, I guess it's down to masterful wizard crossbow style.

Lawl. Guess how many ranks in balance oozes have. How about dex? This is just TOO amazing.

[eggynack]

Lawl. Guess how many ranks in balance oozes have. How about dex? This is just TOO amazing.
Yeah, I haven't found anything stopping you from knocking an ooze prone somehow. This might need to be added to the dysfunctional rules thread, if I'm not just making a horrible rules mistake.

[ryu]

Someone just has to make a silly little jpeg or demotivator about this if the internet hasn't already found this and reacted.

[eggynack]

Someone just has to make a silly little jpeg or demotivator about this if the internet hasn't already found this and reacted.
I'm not exactly sure what an image or video of an ooze slipping on grease and falling over would look like. Such is the nature of the issue, because the very thing that makes prone oozes illogical is the same thing that makes creating a picture of that event difficult.

[Squirrel_Dude]

Yeah, I haven't found anything stopping you from knocking an ooze prone somehow. This might need to be added to the dysfunctional rules thread, if I'm not just making a horrible rules mistake.I know that most oozes have the "(can't be tripped)" clause next to their CMD, but I don't know if even that's an ooze trait.

[Story]

It seems like a web, or oddly a grease, would do pretty well against oozes. It looks like grease can actually cause an ooze to fall down somehow, and web seems capable of trapping them. Glitterdust would admittedly fail, however, so if that's the one you had, I guess it's down to masterful wizard crossbow style.

I have a feeling that the DM would have ruled Web ineffective if I tried it though. Anyway, what I actually did was propose luring them back to an electric floor trap earlier in the dungeon.

[eggynack]

I know that most oozes have the "(can't be tripped)" clause next to their CMD, but I don't know if even that's an ooze trait.
I was thinking 3.5 for this one, and I don't think that they have any such clause. It's an odd thing.

[Sith_Happens]

Yeah, I haven't found anything stopping you from knocking an ooze prone somehow. This might need to be added to the dysfunctional rules thread, if I'm not just making a horrible rules mistake.

This has almost certainly been mentioned over there. What definitely was mentioned fairly recently is that you can strange an ooze to death.

[ArcturusV]

Definitely need to see something now like a picture of a human putting an Ooze into a sleeper hold.

[Story]

I suppose it can't be that much harder then supplexing a train.

[ryu]

I'm not exactly sure what an image or video of an ooze slipping on grease and falling over would look like. Such is the nature of the issue, because the very thing that makes prone oozes illogical is the same thing that makes creating a picture of that event difficult.

Just make an image of a shiny looking cube off kilter in mid-air. If in video form make it spin in that location. It technically probably doesn't even need to land. Oh or if it does maybe it lands on a corner somehow?

[Frosty]

I suppose it can't be that much harder then supplexing a train.More believable than a single bird-feather defeating a train?

[ryu]

More believable than a single bird-feather defeating a train?

More believeable than a guy singlehandedly murdering an enormous flying fish thing shoots balls of pure gravity by throwing a beach ball at it repeatedly?

[Frosty]

I'm pretty sure he had help from at least 2 other buddies. One of whom can summon encounter-appropriate monsters on her own.

[ryu]

I'm pretty sure he had help from at least 2 other buddies. One of whom can summon encounter-appropriate monsters on her own.

Not when I did it. Does it help that the beach ball had a sawblade coming out of it?:smallamused:

[Coidzor]

More believable than a single bird-feather defeating a train?

Ahh, phoenix down on the ghost train. Good times.

[Aharon]

Charm Person is specifically called out as being suppressed. And if you rule that one doesn't work, then no charm at all will work because none of them let you direct the person's every action, only compulsions will do that.

In the SRD, it isn't. Is there a difference between SRD and PHB? Firstly, ruling that would be ok, IMO - we're talking about the School being to weak, so if a strict RAW reading shows it's ok, where's the problem? Secondly, I would bet that somewhere in the myriad of DnD sourcebooks, there is an Enchantment (Charm) that grants such wide-ranging control.



Those are still terrible though because now you're spending two turns (or lots of resources, or both) just to get your attack through. Meanwhile the Illusionist, Conjurer and Necro can just fire off will save or lose without needing to prep the field first.

If you're looking at it only from the context of this one battle, yes. On the other hand, it grants you a new ressource - not dissimilar to Planar Binding etc.

[Der_DWSage]

Eh...honestly? Enchantment tends to get the boot for more reasons than just the whole 'Protection from X' spell line and Mindblank. In many ways, it's also the most restrictive school in what it does, and if you remember the rules of the Batman Wizard-flexibility wins out over all. Let's look at some of the big reasons why.

1:It's the school hit hardest by hit die limits.
Look at Sleep. Look at Lesser Geas. Look at Daze Monster, one of the few where they really shouldn't have put a hit die limit. Now look at the fact that, at those levels, you are likely fighting something that has more than that many HD on a regular basis, especially after the spell is no longer your highest level spell. This is a problem all the way up to 9th level spells, if you count the Power Word line of spells as HD issues.

The only other spells that tend to suffer from this kind of thing are the Necromancy Save-Or-Die spells (Which scale decently with level) or the Conjuration's Planar Binding line. I may be missing a few here and there, but I don't think it's exaggerating to say it's hit hardest with that particular stick.



2:It's the only school limited by creature type.
Charm Person is separate from Charm Monster. Dominate Person is separate from Dominate Monster. If we look at other classes, Charm Animal is separate from everything. Hold Person. This is a running theme throughout-you get the spells that work on the city guard, and then you get the spells that work on everything else afterwards. So long as it's not Undead. Or a Golem. Or...you get the point. So even the 'everything else' has sharp limitations on type.

Fireball, however, works against everything not immune to fire. And if it's immune to fire, you switch out for cone of cold. If it's immune to all elements, you can still trap it in a Resilient Sphere. Tell me what a wizard with only enchantment spells will do to the typical CR 1/2 skeleton.

Nothing is immune to being mauled by a bear, even if the bear can't overcome DR and is forced to flank or grapple instead. It's incredibly difficult to reliably overcome divinations, even with Mind Blank. (Oh, we can't find X guy? Let's try contacting another plane, then. And then we start scrying people we know he makes regular contact with...)

Necromancy gets screwed hard by Death Ward, but can still summon skeletons, put the fear of Wizard in them, and generally be half-effective, rather than not effective.



3:It's a school sharply limited by what effects it has.
Enchantment has three main effects-temporary allies, save-or-lose, and morale bonuses. At a stretch and with some tricky thinking, it can also be used for information gathering. These are very nice effects, but they're easily duplicated or done better by other schools, while also having other great effects that enchantment cannot duplicate.

Transmutation has bigger and better buffs, conjuration gives you more allies than you can shake a stick at without bothering with Will saves, and almost every school has some save-or-lose spells available to it. And of course, Divination is THE school of information gathering. Transmutation also comes with the polymorph line, the spells most easily touted as 'broken.' Conjuration...well, let's not talk about Conjuration. Divination has great defensive buffs. Heroism is nice, but it doesn't stack up to Illusion's 'you can't see me to hit me' tricks.

Enchantment is wonderful for the action-economy of depleting enemy resources while simultaneously giving yourself immediately disposable resources, but that alone isn't enough to save it.



4:Unreliability.
I didn't quite want to, but I'll touch on Protection from X and Mind Blank here. It's not the fact that they alone destroy your school-indeed, if you're running a low level campaign, they may never come up at all. It's the fact that there are protections against your entire school that make it stand on shakier ground.

Resist Energy needs to be cast five times to protect against most effects of Evocation, and even then it can throw Magic Missile or Resilient Sphere on occasion. Death ward screws over 80% of Necromancy, but at almost every level, they still have a fallback. Enchantment is the only school of magic to have every offensive spell in it nullified by a single all-day spell. Go look it up. If someone has Mind Blank, you're stuck using Greater Heroism or hoping you still have temporary mook allies. If you successfully Dispel Magic on his Mind Blank...that's still a round or two while you're hoping to remove his buff, and at those levels? Those levels are when you're most likely to be destroyed in a round.

Again, this is not the single thing that puts Enchantment on shaky ground-it's simply one of the legs of this argument. It's another hole in its effectiveness, and it's looking like swiss cheese already.



6:Single Save Failure
Finally, we hit the last point in this argument-the fact that it can only target a single save in its entire career. Yes, you can pump the numbers pretty high. Theoretically, you can pump the numbers higher than any sane DM would want you to. It doesn't matter-it only targets a single save. Against the Smart Enemies, you don't want to target will. Against divine casters, you don't want to target will. At best, you hope they have mooks and summons that you can subvert. At worst, you keep using Suggestion and hope they roll a one.

Which brings the second point of Enchantment-almost no spells in it give a secondary effect on a successful save. It lacks 'No Save, Just Suck' until very high levels. It lacks 'No save, minor suck' entirely. It's entirely binary-you either succeed, or you fail. Do, or do not. There is no 'try.'



So, there you have it. These are the reasons Enchantment is the weakest school. I may have even missed something down the line. It's not simply Mind Blank, but Mind Blank is another hole in its armor. It's not simply language-dependency, though it's a pain. It's all of those put together, and a little bit more, that make it the weakest. I still love it-Beguiler is my favorite class bar none-but that doesn't change the fact that the saying of Enchanters goes something like 'If you can't Dominate them, beat them' while sending the fighters to do what you can't, or going to other schools for help.

[eggynack]

It's the fact that there are protections against your entire school that make it stand on shakier ground.
Freezing glance from Frostburn might potentially not be mind-affecting, depending on whether you think that "All enchantments are mind-affecting spells," is descriptive or prescriptive.

[Der_DWSage]

That is one potential exception, based on what GM you have, that is still a mid-level, save-or-suck binary effect, will-save targetting, multiple-save granting effect.

Like I said. There's multiple issues with Enchantment-that particular spell is an exception to a portion of them, but not all of them.

[eggynack]

That is one potential exception, based on what GM you have, that is still a mid-level, save-or-suck binary effect, will-save targetting, multiple-save granting effect.

Like I said. There's multiple issues with Enchantment-that particular spell is an exception to a portion of them, but not all of them.
True enough. It's a pretty good spell, because it can lock down several enemies at once, lacks any creature restrictions, and can be used repeatedly, thus making it less of an all or nothing deal. It's only really hit by the third and fifth (listed as sixth) issues, which is better than most get. Also, it's a gaze attack, which is a pretty rare trick. I just thought that it was worth pointing out, because it's such a single case exception. There's another short list of enchantment spells that don't offer a will save, but it's all very rare.

[Karnith]

There's another short list of enchantment spells that don't offer a will save, but it's all very rare.
Of the ones that you'd actually want to cast, I can think of Power Word Pain, Ray of Stupidity, Ray of Dizziness, and Otto's Irresistable Dance. Are there others?

[eggynack]

Of the ones that you'd actually want to cast, I can think of Power Word Pain, Ray of Stupidity, Ray of Dizziness, and Otto's Irresistable Dance. Are there others?
Well, Treantmonk's guide has an enchantment section that's made entirely of spells with either no will save, or no mind-affecting. The latter group is just freezing glance. The whole list is hereabouts, (http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=394.msg8101#msg8101) though it's only 16 spells long. Not exactly the broadest school, enchantment.

[Der_DWSage]

Oh, no argument at all that Freezing Glance a good choice for anyone's spellbook-just that it's not immune to the inherent failings of Enchantment. I realize my post was a little too brusque in my effort to defend my position.

But I do touch on those spells of 8th level and above-essentially, Otto's Irresistible Dance. The real issue with them is that by the time you get them, Mindblank becomes widely available-in addition to the blanket immunity several creature types get.

The Power Words are limited by current HP, and have the issue of a potentially wasted spell with no effect whatsoever. In essence, it's a less strict limitation of hit dice, since you can beat it down and then enchant it.

The two ray spells are a good find (I assume-I can't seem to remember where Dizziness comes from) I didn't think of, but they run into the problem of #3. It's a debuff that other schools could do better. A minor penalty to their intelligence...or just start using Web, Color Spray, Scorching Ray, or other various things to do more than 1d4+1 intelligence damage? If you don't want them casting, the main reason to hit them with INT damage, there's Silence.

And even if you find one or two exceptions to the argument I've put forth-it doesn't change the fact that the majority of them fall into the various traps of enchantment, while the other schools do not have nearly as many intrinsic defenses against them. It simply means that you found an excellent enchantment spell that should go into any mage's book, and should likely be put into scroll form for those that banned Enchantment.

[Karnith]

The Power Words are limited by current HP, and have the issue of a potentially wasted spell with no effect whatsoever. In essence, it's a less strict limitation of hit dice, since you can beat it down and then enchant it.Power Word Pain is kind of stupidly powerful; it's a first-level spell that's going to deal about 10d6 damage on average to appropriate-CR enemies at low levels (i.e. those with under 50 hp), with no save. You might die waiting for it to deal all of that damage, of course, but it's pretty good for a first-level spell.

The rest of them are not great, though.

(I assume-I can't seem to remember where Dizziness comes from)They're both in the Spell Compendium.

I didn't think of, but they run into the problem of #3. It's a debuff that other schools could do better. A minor penalty to their intelligence...or just start using Web, Color Spray, Scorching Ray, or other various things to do more than 1d4+1 intelligence damage?Actually, the main reason to use Ray of Stupidity is against low-int creatures, particularly Animals (much as you use Shivering Touch against Dragons). Since it deals ability damage (not a penalty, actual ability damage), it can reduce an enemy's Intelligence to zero. So when you're facing something with 1 or 2 Int, it's devastating. Very narrow, but devastating.

[Der_DWSage]

Ah. Apologies-I was mistaking Power Word:Pain for Symbol of Pain. Yes, you're right about it being another exception, albeit a slow-acting one. And I overlooked Ray of Stupidity dropping low-Int creatures. Niche, but I have to admit that it pierces most of my arguments quite neatly.

But aside from that...even most of the ones in Treantmonk's guide still fall under argument #3, and he admits it. Heroism and Greater Heroism will be missed, to be certain. They are easily replaced with the various +4 stat buffs, Haste, and/or a Bard's singing. Otto's is nice, but we've had Forcecage for two levels now. Ray of Dizziness is a single-target slow, and I have a prejudice against single-target anything after 3rd level spells become available, especially when Slow is multi-target. Sure, it offers a save-but the people you want to use it on most are typically meaty types, and don't have great will saves.

You've got some great exceptions here. But the real issue is, they're exceptions-there were enough regular things for me to prove the rule. The point of my argument wasn't that Enchantment isn't salvageable, but that it has inherent issues with 99% of its spells. With this evidence, I'd concede it's merely 90% of its spells. That other 10% is glorious. Even those with big flaws are nice.

It doesn't change the fact that the other 90% make up the majority of the school, the last 10% can be put into a single staff or a handful of runestaves, and a Wizard can kick Enchantment without thinking too hard about it afterwards.

[eggynack]

You've got some great exceptions here. But the real issue is, they're exceptions-there were enough regular things for me to prove the rule. The point of my argument wasn't that Enchantment isn't salvageable, but that it has inherent issues with 99% of its spells. With this evidence, I'd concede it's merely 90% of its spells. That other 10% is glorious. Even those with big flaws are nice.

It doesn't change the fact that the other 90% make up the majority of the school, the last 10% can be put into a single staff or a handful of runestaves, and a Wizard can kick Enchantment without thinking too hard about it afterwards.
Oh, of course. I've been arguing against enchantment from the beginning, and your points are largely valid. Exceptions are just generally worth noting, because they often form the basis of a given school's power. If a wizard goes full enchanter, they're going to partially rely on those few spells that target a different defense, or do a thing outside the norm. In this case, those exceptions aren't exceptional, so it's really not enough to redeem the school.

[Amphetryon]

Forgive me if this was answered and I simply missed it. How many Enchantment spells can we name that hit more than a single target, discounting the "enemy attacking his own enemy" variety that only secondarily hit multiple targets?

[Der_DWSage]

Off the top of my head? Mass hold X, Mass Dominate, Mass Suggestion, Friend to Foe, Confusion, Sleep/Deep Slumber, Rage, Crushing Despair, Symbol of X, and if you want to get kitschy about it, Antipathy/Sympathy.

There's actually a decent number. I'm sure someone could fill this list with a lot more than I recall off the top of my head.

[ArcturusV]

Also on the "Lacks Mind Effecting" list for Enchantment isn't there another? I seem to recall there was an Enchantment spell that shut down Divine Casting/Powers for the target by cutting them off at the metaphysical knees that lacked the Mind-Effecting tag. So that might be the only other one on the list.

Still it's a fascinating discussion and I know I'm not really high on the Opt-Fu to make any better points at this juncture.

[Pickford]

Enchantment is screwed by the SRD more than it is any other source. Mind Blank, Protection from Evil, Constructs, Plants, Vermin, Undead, Angels, Archons, Oozes, etc. All from the SRD and all immune.

Actually that is quite misleading. Only vermin, some undead, some plants, some oozes, and arguably some constructs are mindless.

The Archons/Angels, etc... only have a magic circle spell. That means you can dominate them, then cast a targeted dispel magic to remove the circle and presto, they are yours for many many days.


True Seeing is shut down by Mind Blank. True Seeing as an expensive material component. True Seeing lasts a minute per level (generally meaning that the enemy has to realize that illusions are in play before casting it). True Seeing does nothing to block Shadow Evocation/Conjuration.

Actually no, Mind Blank protects against divinations that scry. True Seeing is neither a scrying effect, nor one that targets the mind blank character. It does nothing to stop the spell.

I'd cut Illusion first, it's almost entirely destroyed by true seeing or even permanancied arcane sight (oh, those are just illusions that I'm automatically seeing via an automatic spellcraft check? Then I know they aren't real, automatic will save achieved!)

Second Necromancy as it, like enchantment, is very niche. I might keep it around just to command undead things though.

The only really safe school is Abjuration. It complements Enchantment quite well, and is the easy counter to every school. Oh you're turning into anything via Shapechange (dispelled!), you're trying to PaO me? (Spell Reflection!).

Incidentally, depending on the type of campaign, Transmutation might be better to drop than Enchantment. The reason being that transmutation saves are, I think always, fortitude saves. So if you're only fighting melee types, their fort save will be high, and their will save low.

[Psyren]

Actually that is quite misleading. Only vermin, some undead, some plants, some oozes, and arguably some constructs are mindless.

Actually, Undead and (non-living) Constructs are immune whether mindless or not. All oozes are mindless; it can be argued that they can be targeted if you can somehow give them a mind but only PF states this explicitly.



The Archons/Angels, etc... only have a magic circle spell. That means you can dominate them, then cast a targeted dispel magic to remove the circle and presto, they are yours for many many days.

Incorrect - archon and angel magic circles are Su. You cannot dispel them at all.


Actually no, Mind Blank protects against divinations that scry. True Seeing is neither a scrying effect, nor one that targets the mind blank character. It does nothing to stop the spell.

This is also incorrect. Mind Blank stops all divinations, and then includes a separate sentence about scrying an area being ineffective too.

[Segev]

Perhaps this should be a new thread - if so, I'll consider going to make one - but the question arises: what (kinds of) spells might one add to Enchantment as a school to make it have as much "good stuff" as some of its competitors, while still keeping the general theme of being about manipulating and befuddling? What other themes might be sneaked in to bolster this while still being validly "enchantment?"

[Der_DWSage]

Actually no, Mind Blank protects against divinations that scry. True Seeing is neither a scrying effect, nor one that targets the mind blank character. It does nothing to stop the spell.

I recommend you read Mind Blank (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/mindBlank.htm) again, Pickford. Specifically...


The subject is protected from all devices and spells that detect, influence, or read emotions or thoughts. This spell protects against all mind-affecting spells and effects as well as information gathering by divination spells or effects.

Anything, from the smallest Detect Evil to using a Wish to gather information, is blocked. And yes, by RAW, it even stops True Seeing. RAI? Unsure.


I'd cut Illusion first, it's almost entirely destroyed by true seeing or even permanancied arcane sight (oh, those are just illusions that I'm automatically seeing via an automatic spellcraft check? Then I know they aren't real, automatic will save achieved!)

True Seeing lasts 1 minute per level. Mind Blank lasts 24 hours. Which one seems more likely to run into, especially when you want it least?

Arcane Sight is slightly more of a bother, but you know what can foil it? Misdirection (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/misdirection.htm), a second level Illusion spell. Just takes layers of illusion, mate.


Second Necromancy as it, like enchantment, is very niche. I might keep it around just to command undead things though.

No real argument against this one. It has its tricks, but they're mostly smelly and moan a lot.


The only really safe school is Abjuration. It complements Enchantment quite well, and is the easy counter to every school. Oh you're turning into anything via Shapechange (dispelled!), you're trying to PaO me? (Spell Reflection!).

Really? I've always found Abjuration...lacking, as a school. Vital if only for Dispel Magic, but otherwise kind of forgettable. After all, D&D rewards alpha strikes far more than defenses.


Incidentally, depending on the type of campaign, Transmutation might be better to drop than Enchantment. The reason being that transmutation saves are, I think always, fortitude saves. So if you're only fighting melee types, their fort save will be high, and their will save low.

What? No. Transmutation is one of the more flexible schools. You don't go into Transmutation for offense, save for Disintegrate. You go into Transmutation for all the fun, flexible things-Knock. Featherfall. Haste. Fabricate. The +4 Stat buffs. And of course, the ever-lovely Polymorph line. That's without even leaving core. Do you really want to be a Wizard without being able to play God? I suppose you could use nothing but Conjuration, but eventually, someone is going to want you to cast Greater Magic Weapon or Fly.

[Psyren]

Perhaps this should be a new thread - if so, I'll consider going to make one - but the question arises: what (kinds of) spells might one add to Enchantment as a school to make it have as much "good stuff" as some of its competitors, while still keeping the general theme of being about manipulating and befuddling? What other themes might be sneaked in to bolster this while still being validly "enchantment?"

I like the idea of specialized abilities (metamagic or class features) that let focused enchanters use their powers on creature types that are normally immune. For instance, Threnodic Spell for undead - I would like versions for plants, oozes and constructs. Those would alter the magic of your spell to intercept the means of commanding those creatures rather than them acting on some form of mind or consciousness within the creature.

Enchantment should also get some buffs, similar to transmutation, where you can power up yourself or your allies by affecting their minds. For instance, Psionics' Telepathy discipline includes unique effects like partitioning your mind for more actions (Schism), donating your powers to someone else (Psychic Chirurgery), unifying your party's perceptive abilities (Sense Link) and fooling alignment-based magic (Aura Alteration.)

Moving over to PF, there are more ideas from the Tactician list - Skills As One, Coordinate As One, Withstand As One, Battlesense etc. Abilities like this give you plenty of unique buffs with a distinctly Enchantment flavor.

[Deadline]

Actually, Undead and (non-living) Constructs are immune whether mindless or not. All oozes are mindless; it can be argued that they can be targeted if you can somehow give them a mind but only PF states this explicitly.

Plants also have the blanket immunity like Undead and Constructs, as per their type entry in the Monster Manual.

[Jade_Tarem]

Perhaps this should be a new thread - if so, I'll consider going to make one - but the question arises: what (kinds of) spells might one add to Enchantment as a school to make it have as much "good stuff" as some of its competitors, while still keeping the general theme of being about manipulating and befuddling? What other themes might be sneaked in to bolster this while still being validly "enchantment?"

There's the other definition of "enchanted" - the possibility of spells that add beneficial properties to a targeted individual, object, or location. Enchantment takes a step in this direction with Heroism and Rage... and then never touches it again.

True, part of the problem is that someone in development said "All buffs are transmutation lol" and that was that, but it wouldn't be hard to add a line of powerful boosting spells to the Enchantment school in the same line as Heroism, which would make the school universally useful, since your allies are rarely (if ever) going to be immune to you doing good things to them.

Even better might be a subversion line of spells that add interesting properties to the environment. The term "enchanted (forest/cave/fountain/etc.)" has been around forever. Imagine a mid to high-level enchanter changing the dark forest into an enchanted forest and being able to call forth fey and magical beasts and whatnot, as well as skewing the random encounter tables. Alas, any such spell would be "conjuration," by DnD reckoning, even though zero planar or dimensional travel was involved.

Really, the problem with this is the creative sterility that lead to "anything that brings you additional allies is conjuration, anything that changes something is transmutation, anything that makes people act funny is enchantment" line of reasoning, with no room for nuance or refluffing. Everything interesting that enchantment could have done was eaten by one of the other two schools.

[Der_DWSage]

Don't forget that you would only be able to enchant 5 HD of critters to become part of the enchanted forest at any point in time, no matter how high level you became.

(I'll post something a little less snarky and a little more helpful later.)

[Squirrel_Dude]

Really? I've always found Abjuration...lacking, as a school. Vital if only for Dispel Magic, but otherwise kind of forgettable. After all, D&D rewards alpha strikes far more than defenses.I find that abjuration isn't so useful in combat, but one of the most useful utility schools. IME it doesn't often have the tool you need, but the tools it dooes have are very potent at stopping the problem, and it has the spells that last the longest in their utility. Resist Energy, Dispel Magic, Magic Circle, Dimensional Anchor, etc. never go out of style.

[Psyren]

Abjuration is very useful - but most of the good stuff is on the Cleric list so it is often considered for the chopping block.

[GreenETC]

Abjuration is very useful - but most of the good stuff is on the Cleric list so it is often considered for the chopping block.
Of course, it is the gateway for Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil and Incantatrix, so there's a bit of a tug for keeping it anyway.

[Sith_Happens]

Incorrect - archon and angel magic circles are Su. You cannot dispel them at all.


This aura can be dispelled, but the angel can create it again as a free action on its next turn.

That's only for the angels, though.

[Segev]

One relatively powerful effect I could see:

Unfettered Confidence
Bard 2, Sor/Wiz 3
Duration: 1 min./level
Range: 60 ft.
Area: 60 ft. emanation centered on you
Saving Throw: Will negates (harmless)
Spell Resistance: Yes

Your presence is not inspiring in and of itself, but something about you makes others able to appreciate their blessings more. Your allies within 60 feet of you can stack Morale bonuses, rather than treating them as overlapping.

[Frosty]

One relatively powerful effect I could see:

Unfettered Confidence
Bard 2, Sor/Wiz 3
Duration: 1 min./level
Range: 60 ft.
Area: 60 ft. emanation centered on you
Saving Throw: Will negates (harmless)
Spell Resistance: Yes

Your presence is not inspiring in and of itself, but something about you makes others able to appreciate their blessings more. Your allies within 60 feet of you can stack Morale bonuses, rather than treating them as overlapping.This is a rather power spell for a 3rd level spell...too bad it's not in Pathfinder (what I play most of the time).

[Fax Celestis]

No, but this is. (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/moment-of-greatness)

So maybe Enchantment should get more buff spells.

[Pickford]

Actually, Undead and (non-living) Constructs are immune whether mindless or not. All oozes are mindless; it can be argued that they can be targeted if you can somehow give them a mind but only PF states this explicitly.

Actually that is a trait that not all of the examples of the type share, (except as noted). For example, Vampires (but not Vampire spawn) can be affected by certain enchantments.



This is also incorrect. Mind Blank stops all divinations, and then includes a separate sentence about scrying an area being ineffective too.

No it stops: information gathering by divination spells or effects

True Seeing is 'not' one such divination.

edit for DW: Various monsters, iirc the balor comes to mind, have constant True Seeing. Further, it can be permanent.

edit: In case it's not clear, information gathering would be under the vein of detect thoughts, where one is actually attempting to gain information 'from' the mind blanked character. True Seeing doesn't function that way.

[Psyren]

Actually that is a trait that not all of the examples of the type share, (except as noted). For example, Vampires (but not Vampire spawn) can be affected by certain enchantments.

You are talking about 3.5, right? Because all undead have the following quality:


Undead Type
...
Immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, phantasms, patterns, and morale effects).




No it stops: information gathering by divination spells or effects.

At the risk of a 50 page argument, this really depends on how you define "information gathering."

[Frosty]

If you're Mind-blanked and Evil, would Detect Evil pick you up?

[ArcturusV]

Actually I WOULD like to see Enchantment get more "buffs". I tend to think of Enchantment less as "Magic of manipulating others" (I would tag Illusions as being a better fit for that), and think of enchantment as "Magic which effects the mind of the target". Which is why it gets the Symbols, Heroism, Rage, as well as Charm, Dominate, Geas, Mindrape, etc. But after core.... they didn't really seem to explore the "Magic which effects the mind of the target" so much as "lol, make them your servant"... which are the sort of spells we're discussing as horrible. Course this problem is somewhat compounded as WotC thought Enchantment was insanely powerful because of that as well. Or at least seemed to if I remember my Tome and Blood. Seem to recall they rated it along with Evocation as one of the most powerful ever, with Conjuration and Divination as two of the weakest ones.

But then again that's a problem with how schools seemed to get defined over the 3.5 design cycle. You got ones that got very, very broad definitions like Conjuration's "Make anything possible" and Transmutation's "Be anything possible", combined with really narrow definitions on others like Enchantment's "Make people like you" and Necromancy's "Undead and Undead Related Things" (I still miss when healing was Necromancy, for example).

[Psyren]

If you're Mind-blanked and Evil, would Detect Evil pick you up?

Good question!

...What, were you expecting a response? :smalltongue:

[Squirrel_Dude]

You are talking about 3.5, right? Because all undead have the following quality Which edition is this not the case?

[Psyren]

Which edition is this not the case?

PF undead have the immunity too, but there is also Threnodic Spell to circumvent it.

Dunno about 4e.

[eggynack]

The Archons/Angels, etc... only have a magic circle spell. That means you can dominate them, then cast a targeted dispel magic to remove the circle and presto, they are yours for many many days.
If you have to cast two separate spells, both of which have rolls and defenses, in order to use your save or die, your save or die kinda sucks. Also, you said dominate, rather than charm, so we're talking about 9th level spells here if we're fighting angels. If I have 9th's, and I'm casting two spells, one of whom is 9th level, in order to take down one angel, that really really sucks all the time forever. It's just the absolute worst. They might as well have total immunity to these effects at that rate of exchange.


Incidentally, depending on the type of campaign, Transmutation might be better to drop than Enchantment. The reason being that transmutation saves are, I think always, fortitude saves. So if you're only fighting melee types, their fort save will be high, and their will save low.
The save thing has never been the biggest issue here. The biggest issue is how frigging narrow enchantment is. Against an enemy with high will saves, an enchanter has very little that they can do. Against a transmuter, an enemy with high fort saves has very much that they can do. Seriously, most of transmutation's best stuff doesn't even touch the enemy. Incidentally, I'd rather be able to hit high will/low fort enemies than high fort/low will enemies, because the biggest threat to a wizard is another wizard. Finally, if you actually think this, that transmutation should ever be banned, you are just wrong. You are double extra bananas wrong if you think it should be banned cause you like enchantment.

On illusion and necromancy, the reason they're better than enchantment is that they do more irreplaceable, versatile, and powerful things when they work. There's no real way to get a replacement spell for invisibility, silent image, mirror image, simulacrum, magic jar, or astral projection. You can kinda replace necro's debuffs, but necromancy's non-SoX's are better than enchantment's non-SoX's. Necromancy is also quite a bit less easy to just stop with various resistances and immunities. The school has its weaknesses, but they're smaller than those of enchantment.

[Deophaun]

Dunno about 4e.
4e has very, very, very few immunities, period. About the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is blind creatures being immune to gaze attacks (which players really don't do). Otherwise, an ooze or a golem or a zombie has no more protection against powers with the charm, enchantment, illusion, or psychic keywords (such as Sleep) than anything else (and generally worse because their Will defenses are terrible).

Of course, zombies and golems would be immune to anything that targeted living creatures only, which Sleep, for some reason, does not.

[lsfreak]

Really, the problem with this is the creative sterility that lead to "anything that brings you additional allies is conjuration, anything that changes something is transmutation, anything that makes people act funny is enchantment" line of reasoning, with no room for nuance or refluffing. Everything interesting that enchantment could have done was eaten by one of the other two schools.
Unless it's fear, fear is always necromancy. Except when it's illusion. But never enchantment! :smallannoyed:


Perhaps this should be a new thread - if so, I'll consider going to make one - but the question arises: what (kinds of) spells might one add to Enchantment as a school to make it have as much "good stuff" as some of its competitors, while still keeping the general theme of being about manipulating and befuddling? What other themes might be sneaked in to bolster this while still being validly "enchantment?"
Well, an easy way of making it better, if not as good as everything else, would be to cut HD limits or make them scale with CL, remove type-specificity and language dependency, and especially trash the ridiculous rule that every undead, mindless or not, is immune to mind-affecting effects. It doesn't help that WotC was immunity-happy everywhere in 3.5, but undead being lolno against enchantment is one of the big problems because they're likely to show up at all levels of play, on every level of optimization, because everyone loves undead.

I'd agree with more buffs, so long as they bonuses cover a variety of sources. As was pointed out with Transmutation, get enough good buffs and it doesn't really matter that most of your offense targets a single save. Tied in with buffing but overlapping the control aspect, I've always liked the idea of a good magical commander influencing or even hijacking the will of those under his command to make them better fighters.

And while blasting is not the best way to go on a wizard, I could see something in the telepath (or Warcraft shadow priest) vein where some decent blasts are added into the mix.

[Psyren]

4e has very, very, very few immunities, period. About the only thing I can think of off the top of my head is blind creatures being immune to gaze attacks (which players really don't do). Otherwise, an ooze or a golem or a zombie has no more protection against powers with the charm, enchantment, illusion, or psychic keywords (such as Sleep) than anything else (and generally worse because their Will defenses are terrible).

Of course, zombies and golems would be immune to anything that targeted living creatures only, which Sleep, for some reason, does not.

To quote the Giant:

"I used the power of abandoned verisimilitude!"
"Nothing is impossible when you stop thinking about what is actually possible!"

[Icewraith]

Thoughts on Enchantment gaining the mental +stat spells like Owl's Wisdom etc?

Basically you'd split any mental buffs from transmutation off into enchantment, on the principle that enchantment deals with minds and transmutation matter. (Yes there are gray areas with how transmutation could just improve a subject's brain it should still be transmutation etc, but there's a whole area composed of intelligent undead already raising that question.... why does a Lich gain any benefit from Owl's Wisdom for instance?)

[Story]

Unfortunately, those spells aren't terribly useful.

[eggynack]

Unfortunately, those spells aren't terribly useful.
Agreed. Minutes/level isn't long enough that you can really cast it out of combat, and the action cost is high enough that you wouldn't want to cast it in combat. I don't even know if the spell cost is high enough if you're casting it right before a combat, given how marginal the bonus is. I mean, it's nice to give enchantment some new stuff, but if that stuff isn't that good then there's not much point.

[lsfreak]

There's also the issue that, while they cost gold, most people are going to go for the +2/+4/+6 items, the latter of which the spells can't duplicate, precisely for the reliability over a minutes/level spell (and having to eat up more of the caster's spell slots casting it).

You could also go the other route. Rather than putting spells in enchantment that fit, take spells out of enchantment and trash the school entirely. Most of enchantment could fit under Illusion or Transmutation, with a few others going to other schools.

[Deophaun]

To quote the Giant:

"I used the power of abandoned verisimilitude!"
"Nothing is impossible when you stop thinking about what is actually possible!"
Meh, that's not really how it works. In 4e, Sleep isn't sleep. Sleep is just the name of a power that slows things down, and can be changed to, well, Slow if you so choose, and can work as much by making the target drowsy as by trapping the target in a temporal bubble. That's all fluff and highly mutable. All that matters is target is slowed and goes unconscious (itself also just a wrapper for a mechanical effect and can be renamed to "suspended" if the fluff offends) if it fails a saving throw.

[Emperor Tippy]

Enchantment would be powerful if it was the AOE "screw you" school.

Lot's of long duration, large area, spells. Thing's like "anyone inside this area not keyed into the spell needs to make a will save every minute inside the spell (with no knowledge of a successful will save unless they beat the save by 5 or more) and on a failed will save a concentration check of X DC (probably 10+CL of the enchantment spell) to cast any spell.

Or fail your save and everyone in the area looks identical to you.

Sure, this does nothing to negate the weaknesses of Enchantment but what it does do is give the school a number of useful abilities that can not be replicated by other schools easily (if at all).

Also grab things like Cloud Mind and Mass Cloud Mind from the psionics list and make them Enchantment spells.

[Psyren]

Meh, that's not really how it works. In 4e, Sleep isn't sleep. Sleep is just the name of a power that slows things down, and can be changed to, well, Slow if you so choose, and can work as much by making the target drowsy as by trapping the target in a temporal bubble. That's all fluff and highly mutable.

And how would you "charm" a mindless blob of animated magical acid?



Also grab things like Cloud Mind and Mass Cloud Mind from the psionics list and make them Enchantment spells.

There's a ton of Telepathy powers that would buff Enchanters considerably.

[ryu]

And how would you "charm" a mindless blob of animated magical acid?


Very carefully.

[Deophaun]

And how would you "charm" a mindless blob of animated magical acid?
Same way you would charm anything else: magic.

Besides, in 4e, I don't think there is such a thing as a mindless blob of animated magical acid. At least in published materials. Oozes have an Int of at least 1. There's no such thing as a null ability score.

[Psyren]

Same way you would charm anything else: magic.

Which brings to mind another Giant quote:

4e Vaarsuvius: "How can you cast the same spell twice in a row?"
3e Vaarsuvius: "Magic."

(bold his)

[Deophaun]

I seem to have lost the point.

[Philistine]

Nah. There wasn't a point there to miss.

[Coidzor]

I thought he might have been pointing out that we're not really discussing 4e by the nature of what subforum we're in? :smallconfused:

[Segev]

[b]Enchant Weapon[b]
Sor/Wiz 1
Target: Touched weapon
Range: Touch
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Duration: 1 hour/level
Saving Throw: Will negates (harmless, object)
Spell Resistance: yes (object)

More subtle than the simple application of magic to a blade to increase its accuracy and sharpness, this spell imbues a weapon with the power to teach its wielder how to better wield it. Anyone wielding the enchanted weapon gains the first benefit he does not already have (from any source) on the following list:

Proficiency with the weapon
Weapon Focus with the weapon
Weapon Specialization with the weapon
Greater Weapon Focus with the weapon
Greater Weapon Specialization with the weapon
One free re-roll of no more than one of the following in any round: attack roll, critical threat confirmation, damage roll, made with the enchanted weapon

The character need meet no prerequisites for any of the above save having all of the prior ones on the list already.

[Psyren]

Enchant Weapon
Sor/Wiz 1
Target: Touched weapon
Range: Touch
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Duration: 1 hour/level
Saving Throw: Will negates (harmless, object)
Spell Resistance: yes (object)

More subtle than the simple application of magic to a blade to increase its accuracy and sharpness, this spell imbues a weapon with the power to teach its wielder how to better wield it. Anyone wielding the enchanted weapon gains the first benefit he does not already have (from any source) on the following list:

Proficiency with the weapon
Weapon Focus with the weapon
Weapon Specialization with the weapon
Greater Weapon Focus with the weapon
Greater Weapon Specialization with the weapon
One free re-roll of no more than one of the following in any round: attack roll, critical threat confirmation, damage roll, made with the enchanted weapon

The character need meet no prerequisites for any of the above save having all of the prior ones on the list already.

That's pretty neat. I especially like that it gives more benefit to dedicated fighters than to any old sorcerer who grabs a sword lying around. I would put this on the Bard list too.

[eggynack]

That's pretty neat. I especially like that it gives more benefit to dedicated fighters than to any old sorcerer who grabs a sword lying around.
It doesn't really seem to. If you lack proficiency, this gets you a +4 to hit. If you have proficiency, and some amount of the relevant feats, this spell alternatively gives you either +1 to hit or +2 to damage. The free re-rolls seem quite powerful though, so that helps out fighters more than sorcerers, but those feats are bad, so a spell that makes such a fighter's lot in life better is a small consolation. Still, most of the time a given fighter and a given sorcerer are going to see similar benefits. The only real difference is if you're taking account the effect of base stats on the same bonuses, but (greater) magic weapon does the same thing in that case.

[Psyren]

By "more benefit" I merely meant "you go further down the list" not so much "you get a bigger increase over somebody nonproficient."

[eggynack]

By "more benefit" I merely meant "you go further down the list" not so much "you get a bigger increase over somebody nonproficient."
But going further down the list is meaningless with that feat list. It might make sense to say that it's nice that a fighter doesn't get less benefit than a sorcerer. Otherwise, the fighter either has to be getting the last ability, or most melee buffs could be considered to give more benefit to a melee guy.

[Segev]

Well, it is only a level 1 spell. And it would technically stack with GMW and most other buffs you might use.

[eggynack]

Well, it is only a level 1 spell. And it would technically stack with GMW and most other buffs you might use.
Sure, whatever. I'm not really arguing against the utility of the spell, or even its quality. It seems fine, though a free re-roll every round might be a bit too powerful. I was just pointing out the flaw in the reasoning that getting a higher feat in this feat chain is necessarily better.

[Squirrel_Dude]

Sure, whatever. I'm not really arguing against the utility of the spell, or even its quality. It seems fine, though a free re-roll every round might be a bit too powerful.Get ready for advantage/disadvantage in Next?

[Coidzor]

A long duration level 1 spell that remains relevant no matter who you are. That's not something I'd turn my nose up at.

[eggynack]

A long duration level 1 spell that remains relevant no matter who you are. That's not something I'd turn my nose up at.
Yeah, any low level spell with a long duration or a short (less than standard) casting time deserves a look at least. At high levels, the spell cost approaches zero, and the action cost is already basically non-existent, so anything such a spell gives you is basically just benefit with no loss. I'd actually see that spell being most useful for more casterish types, because they're sometimes looking for easy proficiency access.

[Pickford]

You are talking about 3.5, right? Because all undead have the following quality:

Look at the vampire, they do not, whereas the vampire spawn are specifically listed as having undead traits. There is an actual distinction made.



At the risk of a 50 page argument, this really depends on how you define "information gathering."

I think we can prevent that by my saying that I think you're using an overly free interpretation, whereas I would say the language restricts it to things that actually interact with the target (e.g. detect thoughts, scry, locate person, read thoughts etc...)

[Karnith]

Look at the vampire, they do not, whereas the vampire spawn are specifically listed as having undead traits. There is an actual distinction made.
Vampires, as undead, gain undead traits. The template does not need to specify this, because undead traits are gained along with the undead type. Per the SRD rules for applying templates (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/improvingMonsters.htm#sizeandType):

Templates often change a creature’s type, and may change the creature’s size.

If a template changes the base creature’s type, the creature also acquires the augmented subtype unless the template description indicates otherwise. The augmented subtype is always paired with the creature’s original type. Unless a template indicates otherwise, the new creature has the traits of the new type but the features of the original type.

If a template changes a creature’s size, use Table: Changes to Statistics by Size to calculate changes to natural armor, Armor Class, attack rolls, and grapple bonus.
(Emphasis mine)

[Psyren]

Look at the vampire, they do not, whereas the vampire spawn are specifically listed as having undead traits. There is an actual distinction made.

Wrong, read the template.


Creating A Vampire
...

Size and Type
The creature’s type changes to undead (augmented humanoid or monstrous humanoid).




I think we can prevent that by my saying that I think you're using an overly free interpretation, whereas I would say the language restricts it to things that actually interact with the target (e.g. detect thoughts, scry, locate person, read thoughts etc...)

Saying "I disagree" doesn't actually prevent an argument, it just states the side you fall on.

[Fax Celestis]

Yup. As a type change, it carries with it all benefits and drawbacks of the type.


Special Qualities
A template may add or remove special qualities. The template description gives the details of any special qualities a template provides, including how to determine saving throw DCs, if applicable. Even if the special qualities entry is missing from a template description, the creature still gains any qualities associated with its new type.

And...


Traits
An undead creature possesses the following traits (unless otherwise noted in a creature’s entry).


No Constitution score.
Darkvision out to 60 feet.
Immunity to all mind-affecting effects (charms, compulsions, phantasms, patterns, and morale effects).
Immunity to poison, sleep effects, paralysis, stunning, disease, and death effects.
Not subject to critical hits, nonlethal damage, ability drain, or energy drain. Immune to damage to its physical ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution), as well as to fatigue and exhaustion effects.
Cannot heal damage on its own if it has no Intelligence score, although it can be healed. Negative energy (such as an inflict spell) can heal undead creatures. The fast healing special quality works regardless of the creature’s Intelligence score.
Immunity to any effect that requires a Fortitude save (unless the effect also works on objects or is harmless).
Uses its Charisma modifier for Concentration checks.
Not at risk of death from massive damage, but when reduced to 0 hit points or less, it is immediately destroyed.
Not affected by raise dead and reincarnate spells or abilities. Resurrection and true resurrection can affect undead creatures. These spells turn undead creatures back into the living creatures they were before becoming undead.
Proficient with its natural weapons, all simple weapons, and any weapons mentioned in its entry.
Proficient with whatever type of armor (light, medium, or heavy) it is described as wearing, as well as all lighter types. Undead not indicated as wearing armor are not proficient with armor. Undead are proficient with shields if they are proficient with any form of armor.
Undead do not breathe, eat, or sleep.


Unless you mean to tell me vampires breathe, are affected by raise dead, or can be killed by finger of death.

[Pickford]

Wrong, read the template.

Saying "I disagree" doesn't actually prevent an argument, it just states the side you fall on.

Interesting...I wonder what you make of the specific exceptions from Antipathy and Sympathy:



Antipathy
Enchantment (Compulsion) [Mind-Affecting]


The kind of creature to be affected must be named specifically-for example, red dragons, hill giants, wererats, lammasus, cloakers, or vampires.

So, obviously there are exceptions to the general rule, the question then becomes how broad?

[Psyren]

Interesting...I wonder what you make of the specific exceptions from Antipathy and Sympathy:





So, obviously there are exceptions to the general rule, the question then becomes how broad?

Is that from the PHB? Because the SRD version (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/antipathy.htm) of Antipathy doesn't mention vampires, and the SRD includes the errata.

[eggynack]

Interesting...I wonder what you make of the specific exceptions from Antipathy and Sympathy:

So, obviously there are exceptions to the general rule, the question then becomes how broad?
I don't think those qualify as exceptions. The spells don't say that they actually affect vampires. They just say that they're a type of creature you can name. So, you name vampires, and then they glare at you and call you a dunce. And then you kill them, because you're carrying at least 8th level spells.

Edit: @ Psyren: Nah, it's just the SRD not listing the examples. It's not a rules issue, because it's just kinda not one. I mean, if it said, "Vampires are warded away by this spell," instead of, "You can name vampires," that'd be a different story.

[Kuulvheysoon]

Unless you mean to tell me vampires breathe, are affected by raise dead, or can be killed by finger of death.

I mean duh, of course they breathe. How else would they talk?:smalltongue:


Is that from the PHB? Because the SRD version (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/antipathy.htm) of Antipathy doesn't mention vampires, and the SRD includes the errata.

My June 2006 (softcover) PHB does indeed say that it affects vampires, so it's not completely Pickford's fault.

[eggynack]

My June 2006 (softcover) PHB does indeed say that it affects vampires, so it's not completely Pickford's fault.
Seriously you guys, this isn't an errata thing. It's like how the SRD sometimes leaves out flavor text and stuff. There's no contradiction between the rules in the SRD and the rules in the PHB in this case. You can name vampires, and you would be able to do so even if it didn't say so. You just probably should not do that.

[Psyren]

My June 2006 (softcover) PHB does indeed say that it affects vampires, so it's not completely Pickford's fault.

It says you can name vampires, not affect them.

And even if it did, that would be specific to that one spell rather than to enchantment as a school.

[Pickford]

It says you can name vampires, not affect them.

And even if it did, that would be specific to that one spell rather than to enchantment as a school.

So you're saying we should disregard any spell text that contradicts norms? I guess featherfall doesn't actually make you slow to a safe speed then, because the rules specifically say all creatures fall at a specific rate and take 1d6 damage per 10'.

It's in the book, it overrides the general rule.

[Terazul]

So you're saying we should disregard any spell text that contradicts norms? I guess featherfall doesn't actually make you slow to a safe speed then, because the rules specifically say all creatures fall at a specific rate and take 1d6 damage per 10'.

It's in the book, it overrides the general rule.

That's... that's not the same at all though. Antipathy says it's Compulsion, Mind-Affecting. Undead are immune to compulsion, mind affecting things. Straight up, doesn't work on vampires.

There is nothing there whatsoever that says "you can effect creatures that you normally couldn't with this." It just says, you need to name a specific kind of creature, and then gives examples of kinds of creatures; which makes sense, as you're being oddly specific in this case, moreso than you'd be with than say, favored enemy (Aberrations, Humanoids + subtype, etc) or knowledge devotion (Whatever is covered by knowledge[x]). As opposed to featherfall, which specifically says you fall at a slower speed than normal.

There's no rules there to be specific about in the first place.

[olentu]

So you're saying we should disregard any spell text that contradicts norms? I guess featherfall doesn't actually make you slow to a safe speed then, because the rules specifically say all creatures fall at a specific rate and take 1d6 damage per 10'.

It's in the book, it overrides the general rule.

How interesting. I suppose that by that measure all enchantment spells pierce immunity to mind-affecting except for those that specifically reiterate that they do not work against creatures immune mind-affecting effects. That would certainly make enchantment better.

[eggynack]

So you're saying we should disregard any spell text that contradicts norms? I guess featherfall doesn't actually make you slow to a safe speed then, because the rules specifically say all creatures fall at a specific rate and take 1d6 damage per 10'.

It's in the book, it overrides the general rule.
Were it in the book, it would have overridden the general rule. In that case, we'd be having the discussion you were intent on having, about various exceptions to immune to mind-affecting. It could have been nice, too. However, there is absolutely nothing in the book that says that antipathy affects vampires. There is no specific instance overriding the general case, because the specific instance that you're citing doesn't say what you think it does. It does what I said it does, which is list some creatures you have the capacity to name. If you can point to a place in the text where it says that antipathy can affect vampires, I'd be glad to hear it, but you won't find such a place, because the spell description is pretty short and I've read all of it. Such is my power.

[TuggyNE]

Somewhat relatedly, is there any example of errata updating example text of that nature? It seems probable that it's simply an error, one that was either not spotted at all, or simply glossed over. (Or, who knows, maybe the errata actually contains a correction that has not been mentioned yet; I don't feel like digging through right now, though.)

[Karnith]

Somewhat relatedly, is there any example of errata updating example text of that nature?
WotC occasionally errata'd incorrect example text. For example, the PHB errata fixed Spell Turning, where the spell description said near the end that it worked against Inflict Critical Wounds (it doesn't). I believe that the Complete Mage errata fixed the example for the Abjurant Champion's Abjurant Armor ability, as well, where it listed Mage Armor as an Abjuration spell.

They don't always errata incorrect examples, though.

[Segev]

Regarding Antipathy/Sympathy...

That list of specific things to be named aren't the target of the spell, but rather what the target is now attracted to/repulsed by. So there's no place where the "Mind-Affecting" tag is requiring you to influence a vampire. You just made somebody really attracted to/repulsed by vampires. Somebody who is not immune to mind-affecting effects, at least.

[Karnith]

Regarding Antipathy/Sympathy...

That list of specific things to be named aren't the target of the spell, but rather what the target is now attracted to/repulsed by. So there's no place where the "Mind-Affecting" tag is requiring you to influence a vampire. You just made somebody really attracted to/repulsed by vampires. Somebody who is not immune to mind-affecting effects, at least.
No, that's not how the spells work. You choose a particular kind of creature (or a specific alignment), and you target an object or location that will either attract (Sympathy) or repel (Antipathy) said creatures. Per the SRD entry for Antipathy (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/antipathy.htm):

You cause an object or location to emanate magical vibrations that repel either a specific kind of intelligent creature or creatures of a particular alignment, as defined by you. The kind of creature to be affected must be named specifically. A creature subtype is not specific enough. Likewise, the specific alignment to be repelled must be named.

Creatures of the designated kind or alignment feel an overpowering urge to leave the area or to avoid the affected item.

A compulsion forces them to abandon the area or item, shunning it and never willingly returning to it while the spell is in effect. A creature that makes a successful saving throw can stay in the area or touch the item but feels uncomfortable doing so. This distracting discomfort reduces the creature’s Dexterity score by 4 points. (Emphasis mine)
And per the SRD entry for Sympathy (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/sympathy.htm):

You cause an object or location to emanate magical vibrations that attract either a specific kind of intelligent creature or creatures of a particular alignment, as defined by you. The particular kind of creature to be affected must be named specifically. A creature subtype is not specific enough. Likewise, the specific alignment must be named.

Creatures of the specified kind or alignment feel elated and pleased to be in the area or desire to touch or to possess the object. The compulsion to stay in the area or touch the object is overpowering. If the save is successful, the creature is released from the enchantment, but a subsequent save must be made 1d6×10 minutes later. If this save fails, the affected creature attempts to return to the area or object.(Emphasis mine)
You sound like you're thinking of the Attraction (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/attraction.htm) and Aversion (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/aversion.htm) psionic powers.

[Psyren]

It's in the book, it overrides the general rule.

Even if you were right, it would only override it for that one particular spell, not the enchantment school as a whole. Specific trumps general does not mean that there is no general case anymore.

[Fax Celestis]

Y halo thar, Meestar Faq

Are thinking undead such as vampires and liches immune to mind-affecting spells? If so, what is it about becoming undead that changes the way the mind reacts to spells such as charm monster?

Yes, all undead are immune to mind-affecting spells. As to why that’s the cause, many sages have theories but no one knows the real answer. Some suggest it is a boon granted by Vecna or Orcus, while others believe it is a side effect of the creature’s defiance of life.

[Segev]

You sound like you're thinking of the Attraction (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/attraction.htm) and Aversion (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/aversion.htm) psionic powers.

Oops, so I was. My apologies.

[Pickford]

Were it in the book, it would have overridden the general rule. In that case, we'd be having the discussion you were intent on having, about various exceptions to immune to mind-affecting. It could have been nice, too. However, there is absolutely nothing in the book that says that antipathy affects vampires. There is no specific instance overriding the general case, because the specific instance that you're citing doesn't say what you think it does. It does what I said it does, which is list some creatures you have the capacity to name. If you can point to a place in the text where it says that antipathy can affect vampires, I'd be glad to hear it, but you won't find such a place, because the spell description is pretty short and I've read all of it. Such is my power.

Sure, it says you can name vampires in the book. That is indicating the power affects them. Otherwise it would be unnecessary, as you 'can' target anything with any spell, they just fizzle if the targets are invalid.

Edit: Karnith, absent a statement that the text is incorrect, it is correct.

[ryu]

Sure, it says you can name vampires in the book. That is indicating the power affects them. Otherwise it would be unnecessary, as you 'can' target anything with any spell, they just fizzle if the targets are invalid.

Edit: Karnith, absent a statement that the text is incorrect, it is correct.

No it really isn't. Spells give examples of functions the writers thought they could do but can't as written all the time. Do I even really need to bring up the silliness of the shapechange examples?

[Fax Celestis]

No it really isn't. Spells give examples of functions the writers thought they could do but can't as written all the time. Do I even really need to bring up the silliness of the shapechange examples?

CF: Abjurant Champion.