how a high level wizards are not know about borkeness of spell/combo?

[With a box]

They are total geniuses(int 18+) and they knows about how spells works (high spellcraft / knowledge(arcana))
I can't understand why they don't know about things if they exist (they can do not use that, but that is irrelevant)

and I think that high int person needs background reason to 'forced' to be a low-op one
(It doesn't make sense they don't know ban conjeration is bad idea (sorry :vaarsuvius:)

[eggynack]

Well, y'know, maybe they do. If there's a ridiculous combo in the game that hasn't been outlawed by the DM, then it seems pretty unreasonable that only the players would use it.

[Feint's End]

Well having high int and being exceptionally creative is not necessarily the same thing. Maybe nobody has realised the possibilities just yet.

On the other hand I don't like the arguement of people saying that most spellcombos make no sense in game because it is unrealistic characters would know about them. If somebody knows about them it's Wizards. It is entirely reasonable to know about these IC.

Basically both sides are wrong to a certain degree. Not everything that is possible has been discovered yet which makes justifying a low magic / low op world possible (even though somewhat unrealistic in some respects .... like banning conjuration). On the other hand if players and the DM know about a spellcombo and those spells are commonplace in the world then it is to be expected that every wizard with at least some skill will know of how to use them.

Then again. Who of us has actually a comparable intellect? The stat system in D&D is quite borked in that regard because stats are for gameplay stuff but at the same time they are supposed to say something about how smart/fast/wise/etc a character is. Is a character with 36 int double as intelligent as a character with 18 int? Who knows.
Using stats as an argument is almost never a good idea because they are not made to be compared to any real world "stats" (if you want to say so) therefor giving us no context of what stats actually mean.

[With a box]

Then again. Who of us has actually a comparable intellect? The stat system in D&D is quite borked in that regard because stats are for gameplay stuff but at the same time they are supposed to say something about how smart/fast/wise/etc a character is. Is a character with 36 int double as intelligent as a character with 18 int? Who knows.

npc rolls 3d6 to set stats and only 1/216 (0.5%) of human can has int 18
if we can assume Dnd humans are Homo sapiens, than
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice_notation#mediaviewer/File:Roll_of_3d6.svg
and top 0.5% means IQ 139 σ=15 / 141 σ=16

both can be approximate into Normal distribution for other ints

[Feint's End]

npc rolls 3d6 to set stats and only 1/216 (0.5%) of human can has int 18
if we can assume Dnd humans are Homo sapiens, than
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice_notation#mediaviewer/File:Roll_of_3d6.svg
and top 0.5% means IQ 139 σ=15 / 141 σ=16

both can be approximate into Normal distribution for other ints

is that so? I doubt 1 in 200 humans has an intellect just a little bit above an animal ... or are we assuming that not every point in intelligence is worth the same amount? Because then 2 to 3 would be an enormous jump.
What does IQ really measure? It is an extremely narrow measurement method and you can actually train for the test so as to score higher than you probably should.
How do you measure Intelligence increases above 18 ... lineary?

I just mean that we can't even measure intelligence in reallife and we have no clear definition of what intelligence really is. Some of the definitions are even extremely different from what intelligence measures in D&D. Now trying to explain something we cannot measure in a system that was not made to measure anything doesn't lead to anything.

[Dimcair]

I for example am still trying to figure out what the OP tries to ask...

[Morty]

Being smart, or even a genius, does not equal being infallible and omniscient.

[The Insanity]

Being smart, or even a genius, does not equal being infallible and omniscient.
This.
Also, intelligence doesn't equal competence.
And there's also laziness, which geniuses aren't immune to.

[infomatic]

Intelligence is not knowledge. Think of all those super-geniuses across the centuries who never know about DNA, or astrophysics or the atom, simply because nobody knew that stuff yet.

[sideswipe]

they all know. just none of them have the balls to attempt to annoy boccob by misusing his creations. he will bitch slap them 6 weeks before they even attempt it!

[The Insanity]

Intelligence is not knowledge.
It's the capacity to absorb, retain and recall knowledge.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Intelligence is not knowledge. Think of all those super-geniuses across the centuries who never know about DNA, or astrophysics or the atom, simply because nobody knew that stuff yet.
True, but there's a major difference here: The wizards would have all the pieces right there in front of them, while scientists even a hundred years ago wouldn't have had the tools and/or background knowledge to theorize about, oh, microbiology. It's less a scientific discovery and more putting together a lego set.

[ace rooster]

Spellcraft can be used to identify spells, but there is no guarentee that spell research will be able to let you cast a particular spell without knowing a particular trick that might be very obscure (even having seen the spell cast). PCs have the ability to choose the spells they can learn, but NPCs may not, instead discovering spells based on what they actually research. They may know that there is a particularly powerful way to damage dex that uses cold, but not be able to see the trick that was originally found by boccob, and has not been independently discovered since. Even when presented with the spell in a book there is no guarentee that wizards will understand the tricks required (cannot take 10 on copying spells).

Think of it like the civ game tech trees. Outside of the game you can aim to discover something in particular, knowing what the whole tech tree looks like, but characters in the world would have no idea that you are researching democracy to get mechanised warfare no matter how smart. A power orientated wizard might avoid researching an area that looks useless and so miss out on something crucial, ending up less powerful than one who did some botany research because they thought it would be fun.

The other possibility is that the combinations do not work as RAW would suggest. I regard myself as perfectly within my rights as a DM to say no to any combination of effects that requires more than one text source (ie come from different books, excluding core), and is not obviously designed to do what the player is intending (swift hunter for example). It is not breaking the rules. It is a reflection of the fact that the rules as written are a simplification of the actual rules of the universe and as such can not be trusted to reflect reality if misused (ie, used out of the context they are written for).

[jedipotter]

Being smart, or even a genius, does not equal being infallible and omniscient.

You can look at human history for an easy example. How long did it take humans to invent everything. Well, it took thousands of years, and we still have not invented everything yet. And there are geniuses born in every generation. Yet it took a long time for us humans to even invent things like the wheel, writing or the number zero. And a lot of societies made it all the way to the 16th century without inventing the wheel

The Real Answer: is that the game was created to be ''a couple hours of adventure and combat'' and not a ''real life simulation''.

[Kazyan]

How do we distinguish these combos in-universe, though? I understand optimization along the lines of "Web is pretty great", but what about other combos involving feats, class features, etc? Often, the fluff of these things get replaced or dispensed with, so there's nothing to go off of beyond the mechanical effect--which can be abstract, unhelpful, or not obviously beneficial to begin with.

Some combos are not the sort of thing that it's explicitly stated you can consciously choose--feats, for example, are a very metagame thing, and even if they weren't, there are a lot of feats that have similar fluff. And this assumes the fluff isn't rewritten. So...there's no solid in-game way to develop Greenbound + Ashbound + Rashemi Elemental Summoning + Augment Summoning, unless you make new fluff, which, in my experience, doesn't actually happen for individual feats.

There's also the problem of some combos being dangerous if you mess them up (do the steps in the wrong order for Psionic Sandwich and you might be dead), highly unpleasant for the user (Otyugh Hole), obscure in-universe (7th+ level spells are hard to come by), requiring statistical analysis (the benefits of Nerveskitter), seeming useless without experiment (Quicken Spell saves a few seconds...in commoner life, who cares?), involving Ancient Forbidden Unspeakable Evil (Mindrape), or any number of other things.

[Telonius]

They are total geniuses(int 18+) and they knows about how spells works (high spellcraft / knowledge(arcana))
I can't understand why they don't know about things if they exist (they can do not use that, but that is irrelevant)

and I think that high int person needs background reason to 'forced' to be a low-op one
(It doesn't make sense they don't know ban conjeration is bad idea (sorry :vaarsuvius:)

Divine Intervention. I make that explicit in my houserules:


Add Pun-Pun as an over-deity of Cheese, Exploits, and Metagaming. Pun-Pun is aware that he is a god in a fictional gaming world. Anyone that slips something past me in an attempt to break the game will bring down his wrath. He is jealous of his ultimate power, and will personally act to prevent any player/character from approaching it.

[Spore]

Wizards are not only walking talking spell dispensers. They're characters too. With an ego, with mistakes and a backstory. So while a sufficiently high level wizard knows a lot and his power is admired by the world around him he is not omnipotent. And he may pick up Enchantment just to show people that this school is worth specialising in.

I mean if transferred to the real world, conjuration would be engineering, transmutation would be physics and enchantment would be a major in psychoanalytics. No you cannot build fancy machines with a degree in psychology. But you're certainly a doctor in your field.