[What if:] No direct damage spells? (L1 - L10)

[Altaviir]

Greetings Giants,

As a GM I like to tinker with the system and I would like your input on things that pop into my mind!

So I ask you: How would the game change if I were to ban all "Direct Damage* spells"?
As most of my games run in the lower levels, I don't care about the implications for level 11+ gameplay.

* To clarify: all spells that have dealing damage as their main purpose, so Fireball would be out, but Evard's Black Tentacles would be in.

Things I think might happen:
- Evasion / Reflex saves become much less useful, thus increasing the value of Fort/Will saves and direct damage (class-)abilities.
- More tactical and longer fights, due to reduced damage output.
- A nerf to Sorcerers / limited spell classes?

[martixy]

You'd be nudging people towards more effective playstyles such as battlefield control or buffing.

* Shorter and less tactical battles due to more effects that rather than chipping away at HP, outright solve encounters.

[Inevitability]

Sorcerers won't be that hurt, to be honest. Consider beguilers, which already have zero direct damage and manage to be perfectly competent tier 3s. Sorcerers can still just cherry pick the best beguiler spells and then layer summoning, polymorphing, teleportation, buffs etc etc on top of that: direct damage was never a huge part of it.

Like, if you ask about Vow of Peace on these forums, you're more likely to hear people who think it's a waste of the feats than people who actually think you're weakening your full caster with it.

[Gruftzwerg]

You'd be nudging people towards more effective playstyles such as battlefield control or buffing.

* Shorter and less tactical battles due to more effects that rather than chipping away at HP, outright solve encounters.

^this

We are talking about lower levels as you said. Direct dmg spells already have lowis dmg by default. Especially at lower lvls. A 2h charge build can easily overshadow any direct spell dmg build of same lvl. And even with optimization, the ubercharger will deal more dmg. Same goes for the TWF sneak attacker builds. Both will do more dmg then a direct dmg caster. As such, you would push your caster into a more efficient play style like crowd control. If an enemy is CCed, he is no threat anymore and basically as good as dead.
Or how about summons?

You should consider yourself (as DM) lucky if your casters are so narrow-minded to cast direct dmg spells. Really. He is wasting one of his precious spellslots (not that many at low lvls) to deal dmg that most of the time doesn't kill anything of the same lvl of monsters. While the melee will most of the times drop at least one enemy no matter if the enemy is at full HP or just ate an fireball.

[Gnaeus]

Sorcerers won't be that hurt, to be honest. Consider beguilers, which already have zero direct damage and manage to be perfectly competent tier 3s. Sorcerers can still just cherry pick the best beguiler spells and then layer summoning, polymorphing, teleportation, buffs etc etc on top of that: direct damage was never a huge part of it.

Like, if you ask about Vow of Peace on these forums, you're more likely to hear people who think it's a waste of the feats than people who actually think you're weakening your full caster with it.

Agree (although the retiering project has beguiler at T2, but that only strengthens your point).

What are the most effective damage spells in that range? Haste, Polymorph, possibly Animate Dead or lesser planar ally/binding.

What are the most versatile damage spells in that range? Polymorph. Summon Monster line. lesser planar ally/binding.


You'd be nudging people towards more effective playstyles such as battlefield control or buffing.

* Shorter and less tactical battles due to more effects that rather than chipping away at HP, outright solve encounters.

More effective? Yes. Shorter? If they move towards CC maybe. If they move towards summons spam..........

[Telonius]

Depending on how broadly you define "spell," this could seriously impact Warlocks. Would Eldritch Blast be on the ban pile? They'd be limited to the "Other" invocations if so. Which are still all kinds of nice, but without any capacity for offensive output, they'd play even more like an underpowered sorcerer.

Some of the gish-in-a-can classes would be nerfed pretty badly, too. Warmage is out of luck.

Necromancy, summoning, and debuffing would become much more salient options.

[Firest Kathon]

You also have to keep in mind the other direction, i.e. spells targeted at the players. Mitigating direct damage is low complexity - lots of hp, heal, maybe a resistance spell if you expect it. The same thing that makes non-damage spells so powerful for players makes them also dangerous for players. I for example would not enjoy it to fail a single save and be out of the game for an hour (or however long the combat runs). Also those spells can easily escalate to TPKs due to a few unfortunate saves.

In higher level play, that is expected and players have the tools to protect themselves or mitigate the effects. In lower level play, especially non-casting classes lack the tools to reliably defend themselves against anything but direct damage. I would expect players to act much more careful and less aggressive, spending a lot of resources on defense. Casters will also be expected to spend part of their spell slots to provide group defense. Now your players may enjoy that challenge and style of gameplay, but I would confirm that beforehand.

[Gnaeus]

Some of the gish-in-a-can classes would be nerfed pretty badly, too. Warmage is out of luck.

Yeah, Warmage and Duskblade would need to be rewritten. As summoning and transmutation specialists (respectively) presumably.

There is always the question of whether banning the spells bans spell likes based on the spells. Are you taking them away from humanoid casters or all the monsters also?

[Amidus Drexel]

Incorporeal enemies get a lot harder to kill at low levels because you're missing cheap force-damage effects (magic missile, spiritual weapon, etc.). Relying on magic weapons with a 50% miss chance will make those combats deadlier for parties, and the spellcasters may not be able to contribute much.

Enemies with weaknesses to particular damage types will be a little tougher, as it's harder for the party to cover all types of energy damage without those kinds of spells. At mid levels, this is mostly going to deal with plant enemies, golems, and trolls, but there are probably some other "puzzle" fights where missing (for example) fire damage might give a party some trouble.

----
As far as what spellcasting looks like -

Evocation loses the most, obviously, though the impact is strongest at low levels and drops off as you get higher-level (some very strong utility spells are high-level evocations - notably contingency and sending). Conjuration, Abjuration, and Necromancy lose some of their worst spells, and most of the rest of the schools aren't meaningfully affected.

At the lowest levels, necromancy, illusion, and enchantment probably see more play, as their main competition is gone (evocation is strongest when a single spell has a real chance of killing one or more creatures - the strongest debuff is "dead", after all). I suspect you still see plenty of conjuration, abjuration, and transmutation.

Once mid-levels come around, crowd-control debuffs (e.g. solid fog, black tentacles, slow, etc.) and party buffs (fly, polymorph, haste, etc.) pull ahead, though crippling single-target debuffs (empowered ray of enfeeblement, shivering touch, suggestion, deep slumber) still have their place. Summoning continues to get stronger as you spec further and further into improving your summons, though it will eventually fall off. Single-target buffs are still strong, and ones that protect against melee attacks or fort/will saves will matter more.

The big thing you're missing out on at mid-levels is AoE damage, but black tentacles does a reasonable approximation of fireball against a lot of enemies, and it locks them in place, to boot. Single-target damage at these levels is largely going to come from melee attacks, and you should leave that to the party's fighter and/or rogue.

You're not terribly concerned with high-level play, but by and large these things remain true at higher levels too. Dimensional anchor becomes important as more enemies have at-will teleport (looking at you, evil outsiders).


You also have to keep in mind the other direction, i.e. spells targeted at the players. Mitigating direct damage is low complexity - lots of hp, heal, maybe a resistance spell if you expect it. The same thing that makes non-damage spells so powerful for players makes them also dangerous for players. I for example would not enjoy it to fail a single save and be out of the game for an hour (or however long the combat runs). Also those spells can easily escalate to TPKs due to a few unfortunate saves.

In higher level play, that is expected and players have the tools to protect themselves or mitigate the effects. In lower level play, especially non-casting classes lack the tools to reliably defend themselves against anything but direct damage. I would expect players to act much more careful and less aggressive, spending a lot of resources on defense. Casters will also be expected to spend part of their spell slots to provide group defense. Now your players may enjoy that challenge and style of gameplay, but I would confirm that beforehand.

Agreed. I suspect dispel magic becomes even more of a high-priority pickup for mid-level spellcasters, as it's the first real opportunity to counter a lot of these kinds of effects from enemy spellcasters. Invisibility also increases in value, as breaking line of sight matters quite a bit (both for not being noticed and for not being targetable).

[Particle_Man]

I think some players might have less fun.

As ineffective as it is compared to other spell choices, some players want to play spellcasters that deal damage directly with spells, shooting off fireballs and lightning bolts and cones of cold. This takes away that (admittedly suboptimal) option from them.

But this depends on your group. I don't know what your players want to play.

[tyckspoon]

Greetings Giants,

As a GM I like to tinker with the system and I would like your input on things that pop into my mind!

So I ask you: How would the game change if I were to ban all "Direct Damage* spells"?
As most of my games run in the lower levels, I don't care about the implications for level 11+ gameplay.

* To clarify: all spells that have dealing damage as their main purpose, so Fireball would be out, but Evard's Black Tentacles would be in.

Things I think might happen:
- Evasion / Reflex saves become much less useful, thus increasing the value of Fort/Will saves and direct damage (class-)abilities.
- More tactical and longer fights, due to reduced damage output.
- A nerf to Sorcerers / limited spell classes?

You could quite possibly shove all classes toward higher optimization levels - the game's default combat math is balanced (such as it is balanced at all) around all members of the party doing kind of mediocre damage. If you remove the contribution of a quarter to half of the party on doing that, the remaining party members presumably must then step up their output to compensate (or else the time to remove a threat gets too long and the party starts losing fights/spending an unsustainable amount of resources to try to recover from them.) Although also possible the spellcasters that are now forced to provide buffs/summons/disables might naturally cause that, as the Rogue and Fighter are now swinging bigger attack and damage bonuses/are always flanking with disposable summon buddies/can use more aggressive Power Attack numbers and don't miss their TWF Full Attack Sneak Attacks while they beat up on blinded or immobilized enemies.

[icefractal]

Swarms become deadlier. For swarms too small to use weapons against, you're going from a Fireball to, what, a flask of alchemist's fire?

Items like the Swarmbane Clasp become thus more important.

[Quertus]

How would the game change if I were to ban all "Direct Damage* spells"?
As most of my games run in the lower levels, I don't care about the implications for level 11+ gameplay.

Things I think might happen:
- Evasion / Reflex saves become much less useful, thus increasing the value of Fort/Will saves and direct damage (class-)abilities.
- More tactical and longer fights, due to reduced damage output.
- A nerf to Sorcerers / limited spell classes?

Um... no?

As others have mentioned, this would kill classes like War Mage (and maybe Warlock), act as a stealth buff to incorporeal creatures and swarms, and lead to (generally) faster and more optimized play.

Direct damage spells are very rarely taken at high levels of optimization; if anything, if one were balancing the game, I would look to see direct damage spells buffed, not banned.

Further, unless you're boringly only fighting samey human(oid) opponents instead of, you know, monsters, what spells you ban has little impact on the necessary defenses for the PCs; thus, Evasion and Reflex continue to be important against Dragon Breath attacks and the like.

In short, the only reason I can see to make such a change in a normal game is to force your players kicking and screaming into playing in a more optimized fashion... in which case, I wholeheartedly approve.

Now, if you are fighting a bunch of humaniods, and Wizards at that, such that a CR 7 threat has 7d4 HP instead of, say, (randomly opening the MM to... Hydra, and a CR 7 one has...) 8d10+43 HP, and you want to make those humanoid opponents no longer deal damage via spells? Yeah, at that point, why would anyone care about their Reflex save? Outside, you know, Entangle, Web, and the like... and Evasion becomes kinda pointless.

But, really, if you are playing a "humans v humans" game, I say just revel in direct damage spells actually getting to be useful for a change.

[ericgrau]

Greetings Giants,

As a GM I like to tinker with the system and I would like your input on things that pop into my mind!

So I ask you: How would the game change if I were to ban all "Direct Damage* spells"?
As most of my games run in the lower levels, I don't care about the implications for level 11+ gameplay.

* To clarify: all spells that have dealing damage as their main purpose, so Fireball would be out, but Evard's Black Tentacles would be in.

Things I think might happen:
- Evasion / Reflex saves become much less useful, thus increasing the value of Fort/Will saves and direct damage (class-)abilities.
- More tactical and longer fights, due to reduced damage output.
- A nerf to Sorcerers / limited spell classes?

I think some people are assuming between high optimization / infinite loop tricks / stretching "RAW" thin from internet discussions. I don't think this is the case for 95% of offline groups. So I am going forward without this assumption.

For levels 1-10 direct damage is quite strong but it's not essential. If you want to implement this change then feel free and I think it would provide for an interesting campaign.

- Saves: Not really assuming dragons still have dragon's breath and so on. Only changes if players are fighting a lot of mages and not monsters.
- Fight Length: At these levels fights could get longer and trickier via battlefield control, which is fun. In terms of number of rounds. But it doesn't drag out that much in real time because the actions of disabled/hampered foes are usually pretty straightforward.
- Nerf to Sorcerers: No. One of my favorite and strongest battlefield control sorcerers went a long time without dealing a single point of damage. He joined the group at level 12 though. Personally I prefer to do low level damage with wizards for earlier access and battlefield control (sleet storm, black tentacles, etc.) with sorcerers. Since the lower level BFC spells are still good and you can build a fairly versatile set with only a handful. Then as a sorcerer you can choose the right tool for the job from that set and not have to worry about needing it a 2nd or 5th time. I know most others in forums prefer the reverse and that also works well. For bards I also prefer a similar style, finessing with a set of tricky spells like haste and invisibility that work well even if lower level. Rookie players may struggle regardless of casting class since they may not know how to use the tricky spells well or which ones to pick, rather than a simple boom. Some assistance should solve that. Without high optimization tricks not having damage spells can hurt a bit in general for levels 2-6 and maybe 7-8, but it can still be worked around very well. It would be good to make sure the non-casters have some damage dealers.

That was a good point about it buffing incorporeal foes. There are ways around it but they aren't easy. But then mages who banned evocation were already struggling a bit depending on what spells they picked, and it's not insurmountable. Their other stats including HP tend to be low to make up for being incorporeal. Swarms otoh aren't that hard, since at levels 1-10 you can walk away from them briskly or kill them slowly with alchemical items or even oil since they don't do a lot of damage. A lot of modules hand out tons of alchemical weapons in treasure but it would be something to remember. Or players can just leave before taking much damage.

[Thunder999]

Considering such spells are generally avoided by most casters already, really not that much.

[Rebel7284]

While objectively, taking away options is a decrease in power, as folks have pointed out this is much more likely to make casters select BETTER spells on average at many tables. There is a reason, after all, that every single Wizard guide mentions that Evocation should be your first choice of schools to ban if you specialize!

[Asmotherion]

So, basically, tell all players to not go into a suboptimal route, but instead optimize?

Damage is really the suboptimal route of spellcasting in 3.5e.

Why should I use a Magic Missile Spell to deal 1d4+1 when I can: A) Buff my AC to beyond what my CR can hit without a nat20 for 1 hour (assuming a decent Dex), B) Make an Allie that lasts 1 hour, or C) Buff my Fighter to become Larger for a whole fight, for the same 1st level slot at first level?

I really don't get where this is coming from, or what your intention is by making such a Ruling, but yeah, if anything, it's a good optimisation tip for players.

[Troacctid]

Wow, so many people here bashing direct damage as if the Mailman and the Ubercharger weren't widely considered two of the most dangerous combat builds in the game? So disrespectful! Y'all need to play more campaigns with warmages so you can actually see those blasting spells in action, because I promise you, they are not weak, ineffective, useless, or suboptimal.

Deleting direct damage spells is essentially banning the warmage, kineticist, duskblade, and fire shugenja. (Although the shugenja basically banned itself already by being a miserable class to play.) It is a significant nerf to the sorcerer, as direct damage is one of their biggest strengths, and wings of flurry is one of their most exciting exclusive spells. I'd expect to see most sorcerer players switching to another class instead. Clerics are also significantly affected—many domains suddenly have holes in them, and evil clerics lose their spontaneous inflict.

Without direct damage spells to actually kill the enemies, fights are either going to be longer and more drawn out, as the casters have to wait for weapon-users to take enemies down one at a time, or shorter and anticlimactic, as the casters who would have used direct damage audible to save-or-lose spells. Since the lower level range doesn't have much in the way of true SoL effects, and the ones you do have tend to hit single targets only, I expect the former to be more common.

[Amidus Drexel]

Wow, so many people here bashing direct damage as if the Mailman and the Ubercharger weren't widely considered two of the most dangerous combat builds in the game? So disrespectful! Y'all need to play more campaigns with warmages so you can actually see those blasting spells in action, because I promise you, they are not weak, ineffective, useless, or suboptimal.

Deleting direct damage spells is essentially banning the warmage, kineticist, duskblade, and fire shugenja. (Although the shugenja basically banned itself already by being a miserable class to play.) It is a significant nerf to the sorcerer, as direct damage is one of their biggest strengths, and wings of flurry is one of their most exciting exclusive spells. I'd expect to see most sorcerer players switching to another class instead. Clerics are also significantly affected—many domains suddenly have holes in them, and evil clerics lose their spontaneous inflict.

Without direct damage spells to actually kill the enemies, fights are either going to be longer and more drawn out, as the casters have to wait for weapon-users to take enemies down one at a time, or shorter and anticlimactic, as the casters who would have used direct damage audible to save-or-lose spells. Since the lower level range doesn't have much in the way of true SoL effects, and the ones you do have tend to hit single targets only, I expect the former to be more common.

In fairness, the Ubercharger typically isn't built as a spellcaster. :smalltongue:

Very true about many cleric domains losing key spells. (I would also make the argument that if the direct-damage ban hits inflict spells, it probably should hit cure spells too, but that's mostly just pedantry).

I'm not sure I agree with your take on sorcerer, though - limiting the overall spell list should make sorcerers stronger (relative to their current position, relative to other casters), as reducing the overall pool of options makes their small spells-known less of a handicap. I don't think they're losing more than a wizard, at any rate. That fireball just becomes haste or fly.

[Thunder999]

Most casters aren't a Mailman, the base damage of pretty much every spell is 1d6/CL while pretty much every enemy gains more than that much hp per HD (even moreso per CR since many things have more HD than CR), the scaling just isn't there.

Wings of Flurry is only amazing because it's also an AoE Reflex based save or suck that basically nothing is immune to.

The Mailman is more an excercise in showing how OP Celerity and (Greater) Arcane Fusion can be than anything.

You don't need to build your whole character around it and abuse the action economy to make save or suck, save or lose, summoning or control spells work.

[Quertus]

Wow, so many people here bashing direct damage as if the Mailman and the Ubercharger weren't widely considered two of the most dangerous combat builds in the game? So disrespectful! Y'all need to play more campaigns with warmages so you can actually see those blasting spells in action, because I promise you, they are not weak, ineffective, useless, or suboptimal.

1) übercharger doesn’t cast spells, and this isn’t affected by this change.

2) IME, übercharger > Mailman. If you have both in the party, but you need crowd control, would you rather the übercharger switch to spiked chain tripping, or the Mailman switch to BFC?

3) even sight unseen, not knowing the rest of the party, would you really argue Mailman > BFC?

4) I’ve played with a warmage. I wasn’t impressed.

In short, conventional wisdom is that direct damage spells are suboptimal in comparison to what a tier 1 caster could be doing instead.


It is a significant nerf to the sorcerer, as direct damage is one of their biggest strengths, and wings of flurry is one of their most exciting exclusive spells. I'd expect to see most sorcerer players switching to another class instead. Clerics are also significantly affected—many domains suddenly have holes in them, and evil clerics lose their spontaneous inflict.

I’ve never seen a Sorcerer deal damage usefully, outside an explicit Mailman build (that really didn’t do anything else). And who uses spontaneous inflict for damage? It’s to heal your undead. :smallamused:

[Lorddenorstrus]

Greetings Giants,

As a GM I like to tinker with the system and I would like your input on things that pop into my mind!

So I ask you: How would the game change if I were to ban all "Direct Damage* spells"?
As most of my games run in the lower levels, I don't care about the implications for level 11+ gameplay.

* To clarify: all spells that have dealing damage as their main purpose, so Fireball would be out, but Evard's Black Tentacles would be in.

Things I think might happen:
- Evasion / Reflex saves become much less useful, thus increasing the value of Fort/Will saves and direct damage (class-)abilities.
- More tactical and longer fights, due to reduced damage output.
- A nerf to Sorcerers / limited spell classes?

If you think banning damage spells would increase the duration of combat your knowledge of 3.5 is probably to limited to be suggesting any modifications to the system to begin with. There's a reason the optimized caster is Batman not a Mailman. Ban the Mailman and people are forced to play Batman, which solves entire encounters with single spells. BE HAPPY a player wants to play a Mailman and have fun with wonky non optimized stuff.

[Troacctid]

Most casters aren't a Mailman, the base damage of pretty much every spell is 1d6/CL while pretty much every enemy gains more than that much hp per HD (even moreso per CR since many things have more HD than CR), the scaling just isn't there.
Polar ray stops being the baseline around the time you hit 3rd level spells (which is why it's in the running for worst 8th in the game). Fireball is typically somewhere between 2d6 and 5d6 per CL because it hits multiple targets.


You don't need to build your whole character around it and abuse the action economy to make save or suck, save or lose, summoning or control spells work.
You kind of do, if you want opponents to reliably fail their saves, or your summons to be powerful and action-efficient.


1) übercharger doesn’t cast spells, and this isn’t affected by this change.
No, but it's clearly a direct damage build.


2) IME, übercharger > Mailman. If you have both in the party, but you need crowd control, would you rather the übercharger switch to spiked chain tripping, or the Mailman switch to BFC?
Is this a trick question? Definitely the Mailman.


3) even sight unseen, not knowing the rest of the party, would you really argue Mailman > BFC?
I mean, yeah.

[Quertus]

I mean, yeah.

Yea, you would argue that Mailman > BFC? That Mailman is more likely to be MVP, more likely to be OP and banned, less likely to underperform, as the part optimization level increases he’s more likely to remain relevant, yeah?

If so, that’s not a common opinion in these parts, and I would love to hear your reasoning. I mean, I love damage (from a gameplay (or anime girlfriend) perspective), and I’ll admit both that the Mailman is easier to play and, as Milo in HPatN20 pointed out, a BFC mage isn’t exactly stellar as a solo character, but even discounting my indoctrination in Playground memes, my own experience hasn’t shown damage-dealing Wizards in a good light.

Now, part of that is related to your comment that Fireball deals from 2d6 to 5d6 damage per level. Because that hasn’t been my experience. IME, Fireball deals between 0 (foes immune) to ~20d6 per level to the enemies, and between 0 and 8d6 per level to allies. Because, even if you don’t intentionally catch allies in the blast, all it takes is one opponent with a held action to intercept the pea-sized ball of sulfur and guano to make that spell a nightmare of friendly fire.

Anyway, enough about me, please tell us why you find Mailman > BFC (“god Wizard”?).

[Thunder999]

The issue with saying you hit 3 enemies and therefore did 3d6/CL is that 3 enemies with 2/3rd of their hp left are significantly more threatening than one dead enemy and 2 unharmed ones, and even that is much more dangerous than 3 enemies who've been Nauseated by a Stinking Cloud.

Building for save or suck is just building to be a generally good caster, you pump your casting stat (already the most important one and a source of extra spells per day), you maybe get DC boosts that apply to entire schools, which can be a variety of effects.
Summoning takes 2-3 feats, and is still a lot better than blasting with 0, because the baseline effect of summoning is a big action economy win and disposable meatshield.

[icefractal]

Yea, you would argue that Mailman > BFC? That Mailman is more likely to be MVP, more likely to be OP and banned, less likely to underperform, as the part optimization level increases he’s more likely to remain relevant, yeah?
I'm not Troacctid, but I'd also consider that the case. "Mailman" is not just direct damage, it's enough direct damage to OHKO things, usually with no save and uncommon to resist, and "dead" is the best status condition. When you compare "save or die" vs "no-save just suck" vs "no-save just dead", is it really up for debate?

Could there be equivalently optimized BFC? Maybe so - using action-economy shenanigans and/or minion-mancy to spam a ton of BFC in a single turn? But then you still need someone to do clean-up, where-as the Mailman's already done with the fight.

And if the foes are highly-optimized too, packing Friendly Fire and other anti-Mailman defenses, then they're like to pack anti-BFC defenses and contingencies as well.

[Quertus]

I'm not Troacctid, but I'd also consider that the case. "Mailman" is not just direct damage, it's enough direct damage to OHKO things, usually with no save and uncommon to resist, and "dead" is the best status condition. When you compare "save or die" vs "no-save just suck" vs "no-save just dead", is it really up for debate?

Could there be equivalently optimized BFC? Maybe so - using action-economy shenanigans and/or minion-mancy to spam a ton of BFC in a single turn? But then you still need someone to do clean-up, where-as the Mailman's already done with the fight.

And if the foes are highly-optimized too, packing Friendly Fire and other anti-Mailman defenses, then they're like to pack anti-BFC defenses and contingencies as well.

That is definitely one route to consider. Not the only possible one, which is why I asked.

So… by what level can a Mailman reliably OHKO that… 87 HP hydra I randomly flipped to? By what level can they AoE kill an “arbitrary” number of them in 1 round? By what level can an übercharger do the same? By what level can a “god Wizard” reliably shut them down?

How many times per day can they do so at that level?

Or do you consider that to be the wrong set of questions to ask, when asking if X > Y?

[icefractal]

Or do you consider that to be the wrong set of questions to ask, when asking if X > Y?For a PC? Somewhat the wrong questions.

Obviously campaigns vary, but generally they start at "Xth level" and the party remains in sync or at most a level apart, so there's no benefit to "This monster that we're fighting at 15th level? I could have beat it at 10th level!" except for dubious bragging rights. And usually, fights are a variety of difficulties but roughly centered on the PCs - ie. you'll face a mix of weaker, equivalent, and stronger foes. So in those conditions, while BFC (as a much wider concept) comes online earlier, once you do have Mailman available it's somewhat more likely to be MVP and much more likely to attract the ban-hammer by OHKO'ing a major fight before anyone else gets to do much.

Now if you're talking about a solo sandbox campaign where the question is "how big a force can you be on the world at Xth level", that might favor BFC, depending on what your opposition is and how rapid a pace you need to maintain. Although in that case I'm pretty sure that minion-mancy beats both of them by a long shot.

[Troacctid]

That is definitely one route to consider. Not the only possible one, which is why I asked.

So… by what level can a Mailman reliably OHKO that… 87 HP hydra I randomly flipped to? By what level can they AoE kill an “arbitrary” number of them in 1 round? By what level can an übercharger do the same? By what level can a “god Wizard” reliably shut them down?

How many times per day can they do so at that level?

Or do you consider that to be the wrong set of questions to ask, when asking if X > Y?
I don't want to get into too much detail since this is veering away from the main topic of the thread. But talking broad strokes, two of the biggest weaknesses of a hydra are burst damage and Will saves, so all three builds are well-positioned against it, provided the ubercharger can dodge its AoOs and the two mages can avoid drawing its aggro too soon.

[Quertus]

For a PC? Somewhat the wrong questions.

Obviously campaigns vary, but generally they start at "Xth level" and the party remains in sync or at most a level apart, so there's no benefit to "This monster that we're fighting at 15th level? I could have beat it at 10th level!" except for dubious bragging rights. And usually, fights are a variety of difficulties but roughly centered on the PCs - ie. you'll face a mix of weaker, equivalent, and stronger foes. So in those conditions, while BFC (as a much wider concept) comes online earlier, once you do have Mailman available it's somewhat more likely to be MVP and much more likely to attract the ban-hammer by OHKO'ing a major fight before anyone else gets to do much.

Now if you're talking about a solo sandbox campaign where the question is "how big a force can you be on the world at Xth level", that might favor BFC, depending on what your opposition is and how rapid a pace you need to maintain. Although in that case I'm pretty sure that minion-mancy beats both of them by a long shot.

Well… sounds like you’re measuring more the way *I* do than I’m used to seeing. So cool. Definitely a party, not solo.

And you’ve brought up a big issue with damage; namely, when it comes online. Iirc, this thread specified 1-10 as the level range. So, how many of those are “dead levels” for even a dedicated Mailman (let alone a Wizard who happened to take an odd damage Spell)?

So, back to my random CR 7 example. What can a level 5 and 7 Mailman do against 1? What can a level 9 Mailman do against several?

And let’s add a random CR 3 foe… what’s a “Rune Hound”? How would a level 1 or 3 Mailman look when fighting one? A level 7 or 9 Mailman when fighting a pack?

And how many such encounters can said Mailman handle in a day?

[Rebel7284]

<snip>How would a level 1 or 3 Mailman look when fighting one?<snip>


Pretty sure a level 1-3 Mailman doesn't exist as such. Before Arcane Fusion/Celerity and metamagic reduction from Incantatrix, you're just a regular Sorcerer that MAYBE burned a spell slot on one damaging spell, but ideally are still spending most of your choices on battlefield control/buffs/debuffs/utility.

[Anthrowhale]

Some answers from the minimal mailman (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?628874-A-Minimal-Mailman) who picks up a lesser rod of empower spell (9k gp) at level 7 and a lesser rod of maximize spell at level 9 (13k GP).



So, back to my random CR 7 example. What can a level 5 and 7 Mailman do against 1?

25% dead and 86% dead in expectation if the orbs hit (Touch AC 9 so high odds of success). A CR X opponent is supposed to be a level-appropriate challenge for a party of 4 at level X, so 86% dead is overpowered after taking into account contributions from the other party members and 25% dead for CR = party level+2 seems reasonable.


What can a level 9 Mailman do against several?

One is dead.


And let’s add a random CR 3 foe… what’s a “Rune Hound”? How would a level 1 or 3 Mailman look when fighting one?

24% dead and 36% dead. If other party members chip in their share, you're on a path to success. It's rough for the level 1 party though---a 5d6 acid spit is no joke at that level.


A level 7 or 9 Mailman when fighting a pack?

At level 7: One dead and one 92% dead.
At level 9: Two dead.


And how many such encounters can said Mailman handle in a day?
4 (by spells) or 3 (uses of the rod).

There may be more optimal ways to expend wealth by level to enhance mailman play---I haven't really studied that. Note also that the above only takes into account one attack in the encounter. If the encounter goes for longer than a round, additional contributions towards enemy status = dead can be made, although they generally won't be as strong as the initial attack.

[pabelfly]

The other thing about direct damage spells is that even if you don't kill your enemy, you may put the enemy down to a level of health where someone else can kill it where they otherwise couldn't.

[RandomPeasant]

The flip side of that is that you may well be in a situation where your damage spell means the target gets overkilled by 30 instead of by 10. Lots of classes can deal damage. Many of them can deal damage at lower levels of optimization or lower marginal cost than a blaster build can. Basically no one except other casters can do the other things casters can do. Play to your strengths, don't triple-down on something animate dead can do without spending any spells that day (or even that month).


The issue with saying you hit 3 enemies and therefore did 3d6/CL is that 3 enemies with 2/3rd of their hp left are significantly more threatening than one dead enemy and 2 unharmed ones, and even that is much more dangerous than 3 enemies who've been Nauseated by a Stinking Cloud.

Also that fights with multiple weak enemies tend to be the easy fights, not the hard ones. As a 10th level character, the fight I'm concerned with is a single Fire Giant, not a whole bunch of Ogres.


Summoning takes 2-3 feats, and is still a lot better than blasting with 0, because the baseline effect of summoning is a big action economy win and disposable meatshield.

To be fair, I don't think in-combat summoning is that good either. The summon monster list is filled with creatures that are just not very dangerous when you get them. It's decent for utility, because by summon monster IV you can cash in for a whole bunch of different movement modes or utility SLAs, but for actual combat it's not particular effective. summon nature's ally is better (and with Greenbound Summoning it's pretty nuts at low to mid levels), but the downtime minionmancy spells are the real powerhouses.


I'm not Troacctid, but I'd also consider that the case. "Mailman" is not just direct damage, it's enough direct damage to OHKO things, usually with no save and uncommon to resist, and "dead" is the best status condition. When you compare "save or die" vs "no-save just suck" vs "no-save just dead", is it really up for debate?

If you want to do damage, stack a bunch of buffs on yourself. CoDZilla does enough damage to kill stuff too, and it does so at zero marginal spell slot cost. BFC spells are good because they effect lots of targets, and SoDs are good because they take people out of the fight without an optimization, allowing you to optimize by having a bunch of pets or some nutty PrC or whatever it is that speaks to your heart. Is Empowered Maximized Twinned Admixtured Split scorching ray better than finger of death? Sure. But is the guy who spent his entire build setting up the former better than someone who does the latter baseline and also has Spontaneous Divination + Versatile Spellcaster, Metamagic Effect, and Shadow Illusion? I would say probably not.

[pabelfly]

The flip side of that is that you may well be in a situation where your damage spell means the target gets overkilled by 30 instead of by 10.

I find players typically make decent choices with who they pick to damage. Players at lower damage output will pick enemies that are weaker or have less health, while stronger players will tackle healthier and more difficult enemies.

The probability of players overkilling an enemy and a damage spell not being relevant is much less than the damage spell contributing to that enemy's early demise.

[icefractal]

If you want to do damage, stack a bunch of buffs on yourself. CoDZilla does enough damage to kill stuff too, and it does so at zero marginal spell slot cost.Sure, but this was comparing Mailman to BFC, and only in terms of power. Since the opportunity cost for BFC is so much lower (including some BFC spells in your prepared/known, vs investing multiple feats and a bigger chunk of your spells), there's a lot more casters who'd benefit from taking that.


Iirc, this thread specified 1-10 as the level range.Ah, I thought the discussion had moved to be more in general. What I was going to say is that I wouldn't even consider Mailman to exist in most of that range, in the same way that I wouldn't call a 1st level lancer an Ubercharger, simply a "charger".

But then Anthrowhale posted, and it looks like Mailman is viable earlier than I thought! So I think there's probably a transition over levels of blaster to Mailman, where Blaster < BFC < Mailman.

[Quertus]

Some answers from the minimal mailman (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?628874-A-Minimal-Mailman) who picks up a lesser rod of empower spell (9k gp) at level 7 and a lesser rod of maximize spell at level 9 (13k GP).


25% dead and 86% dead in expectation if the orbs hit (Touch AC 9 so high odds of success). A CR X opponent is supposed to be a level-appropriate challenge for a party of 4 at level X, so 86% dead is overpowered after taking into account contributions from the other party members and 25% dead for CR = party level+2 seems reasonable.

One is dead.

24% dead and 36% dead. If other party members chip in their share, you're on a path to success. It's rough for the level 1 party though---a 5d6 acid spit is no joke at that level.

At level 7: One dead and one 92% dead.
At level 9: Two dead.

4 (by spells) or 3 (uses of the rod).

There may be more optimal ways to expend wealth by level to enhance mailman play---I haven't really studied that. Note also that the above only takes into account one attack in the encounter. If the encounter goes for longer than a round, additional contributions towards enemy status = dead can be made, although they generally won't be as strong as the initial attack.

Huh. Well, that’s definitely pulling their weight, even at low level. Stamina is a bit of an issue in some games / definitely requires a player who knows when to go big and when to go home (if you’ve got a dozen encounters, and some of the big ones are later encounters, for example).

Now… if the Mailman doesn’t go first, and there’s allies in melee with the foe, does that give them issues with this build? Are there immunities (especially at low levels) that give them issues? If neither of those are issues, that’s better than the arcane direct damage I’ve played beside, and evidence that I need to reevaluate this strategy.

[Anthrowhale]

Stamina is a bit of an issue in some games / definitely requires a player who knows when to go big and when to go home (if you’ve got a dozen encounters, and some of the big ones are later encounters, for example).

Yep. Particularly at low level, the good old crossbow bolt


Now… if the Mailman doesn’t go first, and there’s allies in melee with the foe, does that give them issues with this build?

The -4 penalty for using a range weapon in meleeing opponent does apply to weapon-like spells. This is typically not relevant for a hydra though because they are huge and hence have some portion of their body more than 10' from the nearest ally. If you want to worry about this, investing in dexterity is definitely recommended since it both assists in going first and in hitting. Edit: at L9+, there is the 'rod of magical precision' for 12k gp in complete mage which erases the -4 penalty always and additionally eliminates concealment 3x/day.


Are there immunities (especially at low levels) that give them issues?
Immunity to fire is a problem for levels 1-4. After that, immunity to fire only halves the damage. Immunity to fire is common in general, but it's not to common at low levels. Note that the build takes advantage of Mark of the Enlightened Soul in the mid+ levels which adds 50% damage to evil creatures (... so it does not apply to a Hydra but does to a Runehound). Note also that only 4 spells known are used so there are significant degrees of freedom which could be exercised to cover limitations or increase capabilities.

[Seward]

Short form is a well designed martial can generally exceed the direct damage of a spellcaster, especially in the level 1-10 range and can certainly do it if party buffs are added.

You can design a caster to keep up, at least until their higher tier spell slots burn out, but the system mastery to do so is pretty high. The way most casters "do damage that outstrips martials" is by either becoing a martial with self buffs (cleric can do divine power at level 7, and at level 8 your druid is wildshaping to large forms plus has a fairly beefy companion+summons) or some strategy involving summoning.

For a lot of casters, they have a small amount of direct damage in their prepared spells (or spells known) to handle the situation where something is near death and they need to finish it off, or to cover edge conditions their martials can't handle (such as doing damage to tiny swarms, or consistent damage vs incorporeals with force effects). Such casters tend to focus on battlefield control, utility, mobility and if they really absolutely need to kill a beefy target in one round, they do it by somehow getting that target next to a martial character, who kills it with their full attack.

Removal of direct damage spells will just shift resources to self-buffs or summoning that would normally be spent on prepping a few damage spells, and you probably want to stay away from enemies that expect you to have energy spells as part of party resources (again, such as swarms that are more powerful than the basic ones that can be killed with alchemist fire and similar). Yes, you don't get the Mailman in your campaign, but that's a pretty specialized approach that is relatively uncommon in normal play.

You'll eliminate the blaster archetype from casters sure, but that's about it. More balanced casters or those that use direct damage as a finisher only will find another way. I'm not sure what problem this solution is trying to solve. The game would mostly play fine with zero direct damage spells mechanically. Would such a change be more fun? Your mileage may vary.

=======

Regarding Mailman in level 1-10. Never played the 3.5 orb based version but did build a wizard in Pathfinder that did similar things via scorching ray. Basically could spontaneously convert any spell into scorching ray, could admixture it to fire cold or lightning more times a day than I ever needed, was always casting at very high effective spell level compared to her actual level plus eventually had spell penetration etc. It did a bit less than an orb-slinger vs enemies such as Demons, with resistance 10 to every element, but more when missing was an issue (as you only lose one of 3- rays if you get unucky, instead of the entire attack). Mostly played the same as playing a well designed archer, except her range was a lot shorter, her endurance at full burn was maybe 3-4 rounds a day then damage started tailing off, until after about 10 rounds of direct damage she was in the "wizard with relatively weak direct damage spells on tap" level. Unlike an archer she had the kn skills for monster weaknesses and a lot of utility spells and some AOE options that she could cast instead of direct damage if that was more useful on a given day. She was a solid contributor to a party but didn't end encounters by herself (she made them easier by simply removing an enemy or two in each encounter by herself, quickly, the rest of the party needed to do their thing too, and buffs didn't help her nearly as much as they helped martials). She was a kind of a mediocre wizard at anything not focused on scorching ray and damage metamagic, but a crappy wizard is still a wizard. I played her from level 1-12, and during level 1-2 she had caster level 3 magic missiles that carried her in a smilar way until the scorching rays came online...doing this took a bit of retraining to shift a feat from magic missile to scorching ray. In the baby levels, 4-10 points of reliable, can't miss damage is pretty useful. At level 1 she saves somebody from a greataxe weilding orc with a magic missile, at level 10 she uses an empowered maximized cold-admixtured scorching ray to remove a beefy fire elemental henchman from the fight. It's a handy thing to be able to do as your first action, but when the fight is under control you dial it back so you can repeat that feat in later encounters.

[RandomPeasant]

I find players typically make decent choices with who they pick to damage. Players at lower damage output will pick enemies that are weaker or have less health, while stronger players will tackle healthier and more difficult enemies.

But, again, the weaker enemies are not the ones you need to worry about killing. Spending resources on a fireball that clears up the chaff but does a rounding error to the primary threat is much less useful than something that meaningfully disables the primary threat, especially since you can often do that in ways that clear up the chaff too.


But then Anthrowhale posted, and it looks like Mailman is viable earlier than I thought! So I think there's probably a transition over levels of blaster to Mailman, where Blaster < BFC < Mailman.

The problem with that comparison is that you're taking the mailman build and comparing it to BFC as a combat strategy. That "minimal mailman" is doing quite a bit of resource investment (and a whole lot of dumpster diving) to get something that is maybe modestly better than simply casting BFC and SoD spells in combat. But if you get Player's Guide to Faerun, Dragon magazine, and the Spell Compendium, you can do a lot better than "I deal lots of damage until I run out of spell slots".


You can design a caster to keep up, at least until their higher tier spell slots burn out, but the system mastery to do so is pretty high. The way most casters "do damage that outstrips martials" is by either becoing a martial with self buffs (cleric can do divine power at level 7, and at level 8 your druid is wildshaping to large forms plus has a fairly beefy companion+summons) or some strategy involving summoning.

You don't really need a lot of system mastery to keep up. At low levels, there's just not that much air between (divine) casters and martials to begin with. A 1st level Cleric and a 1st level Fighter differ so little in their baseline capabilities that one or the other rolling well or poorly is as likely to decide MVP as anything about the classes. By mid levels, the Fighter's BAB and bonus feats start to pull them ahead to a degree that matters. But at that point the Cleric gets animate dead and the Druid gets Wild Shape, and those are both zero-op ways of doing all the frontlining your party needs without any dedicated martial. Plus, going all-in on minions is more synergistic with those "party buffs" than having a dedicated martial-type. Hitting a Wild Shape'd Druid, an animal companion, some skeletons, and a Cleric Archer with haste is much better value than hitting a Barbarian and a Cleric who's built as a support for that Barbarian.

The exceptions to this are the ToB martials and the Rogue. The ToB classes (more the Crusader and the Warblade, the Swordsage sorta takes it in the ear for no real reason) get enough tools that they can outshine low-effort martial casters and have uniquely powerful abilities. Having +1 BAB and Combat Reflexes at 1st level doesn't really put you over the Cleric (let alone the Druid and their wolf), but having +1 BAB, a stance, a couple of maneuvers, and maybe the Crusader's damage-staggering on top of that absolutely does. The Rogue needs to optimize more to keep up, but if they do they can do really impressive amounts of damage, ignore sneak attack immunities with wands, and have enough skills to do useful stuff outside combat and one of the few protected niches in Trapfinding (at least unless one of the casters decides to play a Beguiler).

[Anthrowhale]

But if you get Player's Guide to Faerun, Dragon magazine, and the Spell Compendium, you can do a lot better than "I deal lots of damage until I run out of spell slots".

Just to be clear, I generally agree with this. There are many things that a spellcaster can do other than damage which non-spellcasters either can't or can't efficiently do. In fact, you can make an effective spellcaster who does nothing at all in combat through a focus on utility, intelligence, and buffing.

[pabelfly]

I find players typically make decent choices with who they pick to damage. Players at lower damage output will pick enemies that are weaker or have less health, while stronger players will tackle healthier and more difficult enemies.

The probability of players overkilling an enemy and a damage spell not being relevant is much less than the damage spell contributing to that enemy's early demise.


But, again, the weaker enemies are not the ones you need to worry about killing. Spending resources on a fireball that clears up the chaff but does a rounding error to the primary threat is much less useful than something that meaningfully disables the primary threat, especially since you can often do that in ways that clear up the chaff too.


Players at lower damage output will pick enemies that are weaker or have less health

I don't know why you would ignore the next few words in the sentence I wrote when you were responding to my post.

And in your hypothetical scenario, a bunch of "chaff" enemies can also cause problems - they're each making attack and damage rolls, impeding movement, not to mention any other effects or abilities they might have. The caster with Fireball is quite suited to dealing with all of them at once, by your own admission, while martials might be able to deal with one or two per turn.

[icefractal]

And in your hypothetical scenario, a bunch of "chaff" enemies can also cause problems - they're each making attack and damage rolls, impeding movement, not to mention any other effects or abilities they might have.Indeed, and if nothing else they're slowing down the fight by having turns, and will eventually need to be dealt with.

While in general I would go BFC than direct damage (or more likely than either, a mixed strategy with buffing and maybe minion-mancy as well), the fact remains that someone has to actually defeat the foes. You can say you've made it so easy that it can be "left as an exercise for the reader", but still someone needs to go drop enough for the rest to surrender/flee (which against mindless or fanatic foes may be "all of them").

I've seen what happens when everyone decides "I'll leave damage-dealing to some other chump", and it's that fights end in a slow painful slog. In fact I recently changed a character who'd been primarily focused on locking down a single foe (plus having great defenses) to include some direct damage and AoE. Not because I couldn't handle a literal army of mooks without it, but because doing so would take so long everyone died of boredom IRL, and the squishier party members would have needed to either win the fight themselves or be dead by that point.

[RandomPeasant]

The caster with Fireball is quite suited to dealing with all of them at once, by your own admission, while martials might be able to deal with one or two per turn.

But so is the caster with stinking cloud. In fact, he's rather better suited to it, because the cloud is a persistent effect and takes people out on a failed save. While even a 10d6 fireball averages only a bit over the damage it takes to kill an Ogre on a failed save. If those Ogres are Trolls, you can forget about it -- even Maximizing that fireball won't net you kills. Conversely, the Ogre's Fort save is +6, so you've got a 50% chance to take it out with only an 18 INT. The Trolls are a lot more likely to save, but remember that the baseline for fireball there is "it literally cannot kill them under any circumstances", so even taking out a couple is a win.

Damage spells are simply a very bad way of turning spell slots into damage, and turning spell slots into damage is simply not a very important task. If you want to do damage as a caster, buff yourself or summon some friends. If you feel the need to cast spells in combat to increase your team's damage output, haste should be your pick, not fireball.


the fact remains that someone has to actually defeat the foes.

Sure. But the point is that blasting spells are a really bad way to do that. You don't need to cast fireball to damage the Ogres that are choking on your stinking cloud, you can just have cast animate dead last week (and have had the Cleric cast it too) and send in the skeleton brute squad to deal with them.


In fact I recently changed a character who'd been primarily focused on locking down a single foe (plus having great defenses) to include some direct damage and AoE.

But isn't the problem there precisely that you don't have any kind of battlefield control? I would readily agree that simply having finger of death is an insufficient toolkit for a caster, but to go from that to "take fireball over black tentacles" seems like skipping a step.

[pabelfly]

But so is the caster with stinking cloud. In fact, he's rather better suited to it, because the cloud is a persistent effect and takes people out on a failed save. While even a 10d6 fireball averages only a bit over the damage it takes to kill an Ogre on a failed save. If those Ogres are Trolls, you can forget about it -- even Maximizing that fireball won't net you kills. Conversely, the Ogre's Fort save is +6, so you've got a 50% chance to take it out with only an 18 INT. The Trolls are a lot more likely to save, but remember that the baseline for fireball there is "it literally cannot kill them under any circumstances", so even taking out a couple is a win.

Why are you changing the situation? You came up with a situation where the choice was between killing a "bunch of chaff", or "meaningfully disable the primary threat", and I said that killing the chaff was a great move since the chaff were all making attack and damage rolls, they might have extra abilities, and the caster could use one round to kill a bunch of enemies that would take the martials much longer to deal with.

Now, if I understand your argument, we can outright kill a whole bunch of chaff, or your suggestion is that we instead give them... nausea? I mean, nausea is a great status condition for an enemy to have and all, but dead is better. Unless you want to capture the enemy for questioning or had some story-related reason for not wanting to hurt them, but this seems like a very niche argument. Especially when the premise of the discussion was whether direct damage spells were the most efficient use of spell slots for a caster.

[Troacctid]

Controlling the battlefield to make the "chaff" enemies irrelevant and then having martials sweep them up later is riskier and more resource-intensive than knocking them out of the fight right away. And is stinking cloud really the best example you could come up with? A spell that has no effect on enemies who pass their saves and only temporarily inconveniences the ones that fail, all while granting concealment to everyone in the area so that your allies can't effectively clean up the enemies who were hit by it? You're willing to spend a 3rd-level spell on that when the same slot could have been spent on a fireball that would have straight-up killed the ones who failed their saves, left the others in one-shot range, and also conveniently contributed damage toward defeating the more threatening targets at the same time?

Stinking cloud isn't something you're supposed to toss around as your main tactic. It's a spell that's suited for a very specific situation: driving enemies out of favorable terrain in order to disrupt their formations and hinder their backline. Granted, if your melee guy is a warforged with a blindfold of true darkness, you can be a lot more loose with the spell. But that's still a pretty specific party composition. You certainly wouldn't be reaching for a Fortitude spell against ogres or trolls, even if you're a BFC mage—sleet storm is likely to be a lot more effective against big, dumb brutes, for example.


Indeed, and if nothing else they're slowing down the fight by having turns, and will eventually need to be dealt with.

While in general I would go BFC than direct damage (or more likely than either, a mixed strategy with buffing and maybe minion-mancy as well), the fact remains that someone has to actually defeat the foes. You can say you've made it so easy that it can be "left as an exercise for the reader", but still someone needs to go drop enough for the rest to surrender/flee (which against mindless or fanatic foes may be "all of them").

I've seen what happens when everyone decides "I'll leave damage-dealing to some other chump", and it's that fights end in a slow painful slog. In fact I recently changed a character who'd been primarily focused on locking down a single foe (plus having great defenses) to include some direct damage and AoE. Not because I couldn't handle a literal army of mooks without it, but because doing so would take so long everyone died of boredom IRL, and the squishier party members would have needed to either win the fight themselves or be dead by that point.
This is a great example of the good work that direct damage spells can do in making fights take up less time in a session, allowing for faster progress through the story.

[Anthrowhale]

Let me mention that I find "drown them in animated dead" a counterproductive (as well as inelegant) strategy.

In real combat, people think about a defensive onion (https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts/status/1346495171714695171/photo/1). Using animate dead means you pretty much give up on the first defensive layer.

Using strategies which enable a full range of defensive strategies plausibly makes the game more fun (since there are more subgames) and makes the party/characters more capable overall.

[RandomPeasant]

Now, if I understand your argument, we can outright kill a whole bunch of chaff, or your suggestion is that we instead give them... nausea? I mean, nausea is a great status condition for an enemy to have and all, but dead is better.

You clearly don't understand the argument, because even in this maximally favorable situation there is a very good chance that fireball doesn't kill the chaff. Maybe you roll slightly low and your CL 10 fireball does 28 damage. That's not a bad result, really. But it kills 0 Ogres. Maybe some of the Ogres save, and even an above-average fireball doesn't kill them. Conversely, stinking cloud lasts for an absolute minimum of 2 rounds, and if some of the Ogres make their save they have to either save again or re-position, which gives you control of the situation.

In short, dead is a good status condition. But "wounded" isn't a status condition at all. And most damage spells only inflict "wounded" most of the time.


Controlling the battlefield to make the "chaff" enemies irrelevant and then having martials sweep them up later is riskier and more resource-intensive than knocking them out of the fight right away.

Except we've just established that those aren't the alternatives. If you're throwing fireball at enemies who are merely five points of CR below your level (rather than the seven the Ogres are), it doesn't "knock them out of the fight right away". It might save you some marginal rounds having the martials deal with specific enemies, depending on your exact damage breakpoints, but also it might not. But putting status conditions on the enemies definitely takes rounds of actions away from them, and it takes them away at the start of the fight (when you are in the most danger). But you know what does knock someone out of the fight? Stopping them from taking the standard actions they need to actually hurt anyone on your team.


the same slot could have been spent on a fireball that would have straight-up killed the ones who failed their saves

That could have straight-up killed them. It also could have done nothing. And I really do mean nothing, because any competent 10th level martial is going to be hitting people for at least 30 damage, which means that no matter how badly your fireball scorches an Ogre it doesn't kill, you've contributed nothing to defeating that particular Ogre.


Granted, if your melee guy is a warforged with a blindfold of true darkness, you can be a lot more loose with the spell. But that's still a pretty specific party composition.

Or if, perhaps, you had animated some skeletons who don't need to breathe and are numerous enough that they can eat some misses from concealment and still effectively mitigate the efforts of your enemies to get out of the cloud. And maybe your Cleric friend had done so as well. Hell, maybe you really went in on the necromantic combined arms approach and you've got a Dread Necromancer sending in their guys as well (though at this point blasting does start to become appealing, because Uttercold shenanigans are quite strong).


You certainly wouldn't be reaching for a Fortitude spell against ogres or trolls, even if you're a BFC mage—sleet storm is likely to be a lot more effective against big, dumb brutes, for example.

Well that depends. Certainly if I knew I was going to be fighting a bunch of Ogres, I'd prepare something else. But that applies equally to fireball against a Fire Giant.


Using animate dead means you pretty much give up on the first defensive layer.

That first layer is pretty much shot the second your team includes anyone who didn't invest in Hide and Move Silently. Which is... basically everyone.

[pabelfly]

You clearly don't understand the argument, because even in this maximally favorable situation there is a very good chance that fireball doesn't kill the chaff. Maybe you roll slightly low and your CL 10 fireball does 28 damage. That's not a bad result, really. But it kills 0 Ogres. Maybe some of the Ogres save, and even an above-average fireball doesn't kill them. Conversely, stinking cloud lasts for an absolute minimum of 2 rounds, and if some of the Ogres make their save they have to either save again or re-position, which gives you control of the situation.

In short, dead is a good status condition. But "wounded" isn't a status condition at all. And most damage spells only inflict "wounded" most of the time.

You set up the hypothetical where our fireball was going to kill all of the chaff, don't suddenly change the situation just because you don't like everyone saying: "wait, killing a bunch of chaff is a pretty good move".

Edit: The probability of the damage being at least 29 is 88%. I'm taking my chances with only a 12% chance of failure in your hypothetical.

[Quertus]

Let me mention that I find "drown them in animated dead" a counterproductive (as well as inelegant) strategy.

In real combat, people think about a defensive onion (https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts/status/1346495171714695171/photo/1). Using animate dead means you pretty much give up on the first defensive layer.

Using strategies which enable a full range of defensive strategies plausibly makes the game more fun (since there are more subgames) and makes the party/characters more capable overall.

I mean, -X stealth, +Y “you attacked someone who isn’t me”, +Z “you choose a strategy to deal with the undead instead of a strategy to deal with me”, +NI damage (with Command Undead, and Extended Command Undead, and Chain Command Undead, and…)? It seems a pretty fair trade off to me. :smallcool:

(EDIT: and that assumes you’re actually losing anything wrt stealth. Most parties have one or more walking tin cans, who are generally noisier than Dex-bonus skeletons. Also also, while “bandits” and the like might track a small band to kill and loot them, they’re more likely to go the other way when they spot signs of an army (or at least “war band”) passing through. Your call whether that’s a “pro” or “con”.)

And, if you use, say, Shadows (and other incorporeal Undead), it can actually be +I to stealth. So, win/win?

[King of Nowhere]

The Mailman is more an excercise in showing how OP Celerity and (Greater) Arcane Fusion can be than anything.

not really. none of those taken individually is that OP.

I'd say none of the components of the mailman build is op by itself. it's just the synergy of piling so much damage multiplication on something. so a direct damage spell deals mediocre damage. maximize it, and it deals passable damage. twin it too (using all the tricks to not pay the level increase), and we're looking at good damage. twin greater arcane fusion, and you're casting 4 spells in place of one. use the ocular rays too, and we're at 8 spells. plus the quickened spell, make it 4 more spells. plus celerity lets you cast the spell of the next round, getting to 16 spells, which are enough to obliterate anything.
but each of the individual components, taken alone, is fine.


If you think banning damage spells would increase the duration of combat your knowledge of 3.5 is probably to limited to be suggesting any modifications to the system to begin with.
do not bash players for trying to modify the system. game masters should be encouraged to modify the game, as it is the only way 3.5 can be balanced to the specific needs of the table - it's the only way it can be balanced in general.
by all means, op, go ahead and try any modification you feel like trying. the only fundamental piece of advice when doing this, be open to criticism and feedback. if your players don't like a change, revert it and learn from the experience.


Let me mention that I find "drown them in animated dead" a counterproductive (as well as inelegant) strategy.

In real combat, people think about a defensive onion (https://twitter.com/DefenseCharts/status/1346495171714695171/photo/1). Using animate dead means you pretty much give up on the first defensive layer.

Using strategies which enable a full range of defensive strategies plausibly makes the game more fun (since there are more subgames) and makes the party/characters more capable overall.
yes, the best defence is to not be seen.
but do people really want to have to go through all those multiple layers of defence? some hardcore tryharder will, but most people will find boring to have to worry about all of that, to spend hours casting divinations and/or making spot checks and gather informations, without even seeing the opponent.


You clearly don't understand the argument, because even in this maximally favorable situation there is a very good chance that fireball doesn't kill the chaff. Maybe you roll slightly low and your CL 10 fireball does 28 damage. That's not a bad result, really. But it kills 0 Ogres. Maybe some of the Ogres save, and even an above-average fireball doesn't kill them. Conversely, stinking cloud lasts for an absolute minimum of 2 rounds, and if some of the Ogres make their save they have to either save again or re-position, which gives you control of the situation.

the idea that just because the ogres are not dropped in one hit then the damage is irrelevant is flawed. ok, so they are alive at 2 hp, it means the melee people will have a much easier time finishing them. unless your fighter has exactly 1 attack per round, and that attack always kills regardless of how many hit points the ogre has, then weakening the enemies is going to make his job that much faster.
in general, the effectiveness of save-or-lose effects depends a lot on how likely the enemy is to fail. which depends a lot on the specific table. yes, if you take cr-appropriate monsters straight out of the manual and throw them at an optimized party then you can expect those monsters to fail their saves 90% of the times, and you can expect the party fighter to instakill everything it touches. but then you may start wondering why the heck are you even rolling the dice in the first place. an optimized party against cr-appropriate monsters is not a good example of a fight.
it's true that bfc is generally stronger than direct damage, but there are exceptions and caveats.

by the way, the op never replied back. i wonder why people make a question and then disappear

[Anthrowhale]

...


...

It's a fair point that some parties just don't bother with stealth anyways.

In the games that I've played in, if you showed up with a noisy army, then the opposition would organize and typically have much greater resources available. It made more sense to function as a special ops infiltration/assassination squad.

[vasilidor]

You mean if I had to play spell casters as I have found myself inclined to play them?
Direct damage spells are really not worth it most of the time.

[Quertus]

You clearly don't understand the argument, because even in this maximally favorable situation there is a very good chance that fireball doesn't kill the chaff. Maybe you roll slightly low and your CL 10 fireball does 28 damage. That's not a bad result, really. But it kills 0 Ogres.

Only if the content writer is lazy, and assigns the same HP to all ogres.

(Sadly, most content writers are lazy.)


do not bash players for trying to modify the system. game masters should be encouraged to modify the game,

Should they though? Hmmm…



as it is the only way 3.5 can be balanced to the specific needs of the table - it's the only way it can be balanced in general.

In this case, no. “Balance to the table” is much more elegant than “GM’s first ‘no wealth and nerfed the ‘OP’ Monk’” game.

There’s other reasons I might accept to encourage such behavior, but “**** up game balance, for balance” is not one of them.



by all means, op, go ahead and try any modification you feel like trying. the only fundamental piece of advice when doing this, be open to criticism and feedback. if your players don't like a change, revert it and learn from the experience.

Two really good things I wanted to point out / emphasize here: 1) your focus on “your table” - in the end, what works for your table trumps what even the geniuses in the Playground have to say about things; 2) your focus on “feedback” - creating a culture of communication will solve so many problems, not just help with this issue; 3) (Because counting is hard) your advice to revert failed changes - not only does this acknowledge that failure is an option, it also encourages the mindset of being prepared to fix such mistakes.

All in all, a paragraph of concentrated goodness. Kudos!


the idea that just because the ogres are not dropped in one hit then the damage is irrelevant is flawed. ok, so they are alive at 2 hp, it means the melee people will have a much easier time finishing them. unless your fighter has exactly 1 attack per round, and that attack always kills regardless of how many hit points the ogre has, then weakening the enemies is going to make his job that much faster.

Or the Fighter could have 6 attacks, each of which drops an Ogre in 1 hit, and the Fireball is still irrelevant. So it’s the size of the hit, not the number of them, that determines the relevance of the fireball damage. And, given that we’re talking about a 10d6 Fireball, I should hope that the (… tier 4?) Fighter is balanced enough with a (tier 1) Wizard to be dropping Ogres in 1 hit.


by the way, the op never replied back. i wonder why people make a question and then disappear

Making a question has a disturbingly high fatality rate? :smalleek:

Those of us who are repeat posters must be immune. :smallcool:


It's a fair point that some parties just don't bother with stealth anyways.

In the games that I've played in, if you showed up with a noisy army, then the opposition would organize and typically have much greater resources available. It made more sense to function as a special ops infiltration/assassination squad.

The stealth (heh) benefit to the noisy army (EDIT: read “zombies”; skeletons are stealthier than most parties) is that your enemy knows where you are, and knows that they know where you are, and thus become complacent for when your black ops squad breaks off to assassinate them. :smallwink:

[Lorddenorstrus]

not really. none of those taken individually is that OP.

I'd say none of the components of the mailman build is op by itself. it's just the synergy of piling so much damage multiplication on something. so a direct damage spell deals mediocre damage. maximize it, and it deals passable damage. twin it too (using all the tricks to not pay the level increase), and we're looking at good damage. twin greater arcane fusion, and you're casting 4 spells in place of one. use the ocular rays too, and we're at 8 spells. plus the quickened spell, make it 4 more spells. plus celerity lets you cast the spell of the next round, getting to 16 spells, which are enough to obliterate anything.
but each of the individual components, taken alone, is fine.


do not bash players for trying to modify the system. game masters should be encouraged to modify the game, as it is the only way 3.5 can be balanced to the specific needs of the table - it's the only way it can be balanced in general.
by all means, op, go ahead and try any modification you feel like trying. the only fundamental piece of advice when doing this, be open to criticism and feedback. if your players don't like a change, revert it and learn from the experience.


yes, the best defence is to not be seen.
but do people really want to have to go through all those multiple layers of defence? some hardcore tryharder will, but most people will find boring to have to worry about all of that, to spend hours casting divinations and/or making spot checks and gather informations, without even seeing the opponent.



the idea that just because the ogres are not dropped in one hit then the damage is irrelevant is flawed. ok, so they are alive at 2 hp, it means the melee people will have a much easier time finishing them. unless your fighter has exactly 1 attack per round, and that attack always kills regardless of how many hit points the ogre has, then weakening the enemies is going to make his job that much faster.
in general, the effectiveness of save-or-lose effects depends a lot on how likely the enemy is to fail. which depends a lot on the specific table. yes, if you take cr-appropriate monsters straight out of the manual and throw them at an optimized party then you can expect those monsters to fail their saves 90% of the times, and you can expect the party fighter to instakill everything it touches. but then you may start wondering why the heck are you even rolling the dice in the first place. an optimized party against cr-appropriate monsters is not a good example of a fight.
it's true that bfc is generally stronger than direct damage, but there are exceptions and caveats.

by the way, the op never replied back. i wonder why people make a question and then disappear


Modifications require the knowledge to understand how a modification will effect the balance of the game as a whole. People who understand the game are by all means free to attempt what they want to fix issues. OPs suggestion is par to someone claiming Monk is OP and needs a neerf. it's wrong on so many levels it actively needs to be discouraged because it screams a fundamental misunderstanding of the game at a basic level. Quertus said it better *shrug* but the point is the same.

Something is seriously out of whack if the DM starts to think Evocation (The school Batmans usually ban and just never bother to use at all) is overpowered. Did their martials tank physical stats to try and do negative damage per hit or something? Like really. OP should give a lot more context when they get back because this is so warped something is wrong.

[pabelfly]

Modifications require the knowledge to understand how a modification will effect the balance of the game as a whole. People who understand the game are by all means free to attempt what they want to fix issues. OPs suggestion is par to someone claiming Monk is OP and needs a neerf. it's wrong on so many levels it actively needs to be discouraged because it screams a fundamental misunderstanding of the game at a basic level. Quertus said it better *shrug* but the point is the same.

Something is seriously out of whack if the DM starts to think Evocation (The school Batmans usually ban and just never bother to use at all) is overpowered. Did their martials tank physical stats to try and do negative damage per hit or something? Like really. OP should give a lot more context when they get back because this is so warped something is wrong.

My guess at what happened: a player that optimizes to a high level had a direct damage build, and outclassed the other players at the table who optimized to a low or moderate level and played stuff like martials or whatever. The DM in charge of everything looks at what is happening at their table, and then says: "how will the game work if I just ban blasting spells to deal with the problem at my table?"

[Gnaeus]

Or the Fighter could have 6 attacks, each of which drops an Ogre in 1 hit, and the Fireball is still irrelevant. So it’s the size of the hit, not the number of them, that determines the relevance of the fireball damage. And, given that we’re talking about a 10d6 Fireball, I should hope that the (… tier 4?) Fighter is balanced enough with a (tier 1) Wizard to be dropping Ogres in 1 hit.

If you hope that, you are playing the wrong game. The wizard dropping 10hd fireball at level 10 is incredibly low opp. Its a core spell with no optimization. An equivalently optimized fighter is doing probably d6+5/d6+5/d4+3 with his +1 rapier and dagger combo with a lot of waste feats.

[martixy]

My guess at what happened: a player that optimizes to a high level had a direct damage build, and outclassed the other players at the table who optimized to a low or moderate level and played stuff like martials or whatever. The DM in charge of everything looks at what is happening at their table, and then says: "how will the game work if I just ban blasting spells to deal with the problem at my table?"

It is silly to speculate, but it carries all the hallmarks of such an event. My guess would be the same.


As for blasting in general:

It's not that it isn't useful or optimizeable.

It's just that other forms of casting will usually bring a lot more overall value to the party.

A mailman will absolutely roll any encounter where the most optimal solution is "kill everything". But such encounters are what is usually known as "slog".

So you've got a few considerations here:


A mailman/blasting is excellent at avoiding slog and can bring enormous value for the players in a game heavy on slog.
A good DM is unlikely to create encounters that are all or mostly slog. Encounters are likely to feature other objectives and killing things may be merely a side effect on the road to said objectives. In such scenarios blasting's value drops direct relation to how little killing things actually brings you closer to the objective.
Some games are about killing things. You just want to get together with a bunch of friends and roll some dice and fry a bunch of monsters to a crisp. It's not slog if that's the whole point of the game.

[King of Nowhere]

Modifications require the knowledge to understand how a modification will effect the balance of the game as a whole. People who understand the game are by all means free to attempt what they want to fix issues. OPs suggestion is par to someone claiming Monk is OP and needs a neerf. it's wrong on so many levels it actively needs to be discouraged because it screams a fundamental misunderstanding of the game at a basic level. Quertus said it better *shrug* but the point is the same.

Something is seriously out of whack if the DM starts to think Evocation (The school Batmans usually ban and just never bother to use at all) is overpowered. Did their martials tank physical stats to try and do negative damage per hit or something? Like really. OP should give a lot more context when they get back because this is so warped something is wrong.

with this snobbish attitude, people would never do anything at all, ever. how are people supposed to learn the consequences of their tweaks if they can't try to tweak stuff, ever?
it's especially bad because people playing at a table have some balance issues now, not in maybe ten more years when they have more practice. I learned all I know about modding 3.5 on my own, trying to fix things at my table. And people like you on this forum had all the wrong advice about it, advice that is founded on all the wrong premises.

let's make a necessary premise: there is no such thing as overpowerd and underpowered stuff. not on its own. not in a vacuum. there is a very wide array of power levels, and each table is comfortable playing in one. people throwing around words like high optimization, low optimization, that means nothing. some tables consider a fighter with a two-handed sword the epitome of optimization. other tables see it as the bare minimum to make a contribution. at my table, in my specific environment (one favoring very high ac, which makes power attack unfavorable) i recently realized it's downright suboptimal.
words like high optimization are even less meaningful when the comparisons made are against cr-appropriate monsters. because anything remotely optimized can defeat regular monsters easily. stinking cloud will defeat a bunch of ogres. fireball will defeat a bunch of ogres. invisibility will defeat a bunch of ogres. a big shield and combat expertise will defeat a bunch of ogres. no clear winner here.

so let's analyze what actually happens at a table. at the beginning, you are all noobs - perhaps there is some pro who's toning down his build intentionally. anyway, the wizard is casting magic missiles, the fighter is dealing d6+5 damage, everyone is being challenged by fighting cr-appropriate monsters, and the game is working as the designers intended.
then at some point people want to try something new. and some of them will accidentally hit something that makes them a lot more powerful than intended.
it can be that they went and read a high op build on the internet (likely they are unable to use it fully, but it's still enough to overshadown the rest of the table).
it can be that they stumbled on something by accident.
it can be that the more skilled guy, the one intentionally gimping himself, still can't help being more effective than the others. it can be that some players learn to make better use of their resources along the way, while others don't.
anyway, the party is now unbalanced, and people are having less fun, and you can't say "i'm not experienced enough, maybe after 10 more years of gaming we can try and address the issue". No, your table has a problem right now, and you have to address it right now. and so you sit down to talk with the players - who are generally even less expert than you are - and try to find a solution. do you nerf the offending guy? do you change the rules so he's less powerful, or do you force him to change his character? this is possible, though that guy may have liked his new toy.
do you buff the rest of the party? how do you do it? do you drop personalized loot in their lap? do you provide them some plot-related bonus? this forum would insist on giving them more optimized builds, and that can work, but it can backfire: maybe those casual players don't want to learn to play at higher power, nor do they want the extra bookkeeping and complexity coming from it. and if you buff the party, then you also have to buff the opponents somehow, or it will become boring.
regardless of what you do, you fix the problems for now. maybe your fix won't work, and you'll need to sit down again and think of something else. or maybe you need to put a fix to the fix. and then some more problems will happen along the way. and every time you will adapt. eventually you will find a level of power that the table will be more or less comfortable with, and your future tweaks will be aimed at staying there. whether this is batman wizards or basket-weaving commoners or anything in between.

people talk about session 0, but that only works with super experts. I've been playing d&d regularly for 10 years, and even I am not good enough for session 0 to work well. sure, we compare notes and builds, we discuss what we would like to achieve. and still, we regularly stumble on problems. in my experience, 90% of rules tweaking, of bans and nerfs and buffs, do not happen in session 0. it happens because somebody accidentally breaks balance, and afterwards everyone looks at each others and we say "huh. that combo was a lot stronger than I thought. What do we do about it now?"
and this is why you need to mod the game at your table, and with time you'll also get good at it.

the first time i had to deal with such problems came when i had a party of a barbarian, a wizard, a cleric and a druid. and i was reading this forum, and everyone were telling me the poor barbarian would be so pitifully outclassed, that such a party could not possibly work out. so, taking advantage of the barbarian 18th birthday, i dropped him some very powerful loot. but guess what? my very low op casual players could never play their casters with any competence. the barbarian is a lot easier to play, and the players was vastly more competent that the others, and he also got some boons, and he was carrying the party. i had to step up and give gifts to everyone else to keep them roughly in the same league. multiple times. and so I started learning. not by following blind internet advice, but by tweaking and seeing the results.

Which is why I suggest to you that you refrain from giving close-minded advice to new players. giving advice requires the knowledge to understand how a people asking for advice work, and what can affect the balance of a table with a mix of casual players and moderate optimizers. People who understand how different tables work and how total optimization advice only applies to a tiny, tiny minority of tables are free to give advice. your suggestion is par to someone claiming that an elementary school kid should study quantum physics. it's wrong on so many levels it actively needs to be discouraged because it screams a fundamental misunderstanding of how the game is actually played at a basic level


If you hope that, you are playing the wrong game. The wizard dropping 10hd fireball at level 10 is incredibly low opp. Its a core spell with no optimization. An equivalently optimized fighter is doing probably d6+5/d6+5/d4+3 with his +1 rapier and dagger combo with a lot of waste feats.

exactly. and if that is the case, then a fireball reducing the ogres to few enough hit points that the fighter can kill them in one hit is helping a lot.

[Quertus]

If you hope that, you are playing the wrong game. The wizard dropping 10hd fireball at level 10 is incredibly low opp. Its a core spell with no optimization. An equivalently optimized fighter is doing probably d6+5/d6+5/d4+3 with his +1 rapier and dagger combo with a lot of waste feats.

Communication is hard.

Not “equivalently optimized”, “equivalently effective”.

Do you honestly believe that the Fighter you described is an equal contributor to a vanilla Wizard with vanilla Fireball, vanilla Invisibility, vanilla Flight, vanilla Grease, and vanilla Teleport? And Knowledge skills?

IME, a BDF who is that Wizard’s contributory equal is dropping Ogres in one hit.

You may measure balance differently, and disagree, of course. But 28 damage (a < 20% occurrence low roll) times a dozen Ogres is a lot of DPS, and an equal Fighter with no OOC (out of Combat) utility not dropping Ogres in 1 hit? That’s a hard sell.


how are people supposed to learn the consequences of their tweaks if they can't try to tweak stuff, ever?

That, otoh, is a reason to promote making tweaks that I respect.


let's make a necessary premise: there is no such thing as overpowerd and underpowered stuff. not on its own. not in a vacuum.



anyway, the party is now unbalanced, and people are having less fun, and you can't say "i'm not experienced enough, maybe after 10 more years of gaming we can try and address the issue". No, your table has a problem right now, and you have to address it right now. and so you sit down to talk with the players - who are generally even less expert than you are - and try to find a solution. do you nerf the offending guy? do you change the rules so he's less powerful, or do you force him to change his character? this is possible, though that guy may have liked his new toy.
do you buff the rest of the party? how do you do it? do you drop personalized loot in their lap? do you provide them some plot-related bonus? this forum would insist on giving them more optimized builds, and that can work, but it can backfire: maybe those casual players don't want to learn to play at higher power, nor do they want the extra bookkeeping and complexity coming from it. and if you buff the party, then you also have to buff the opponents somehow, or it will become boring.
regardless of what you do, you fix the problems for now. maybe your fix won't work, and you'll need to sit down again and think of something else. or maybe you need to put a fix to the fix. and then some more problems will happen along the way. and every time you will adapt.

people talk about session 0, but that only works with super experts. I've been playing d&d regularly for 10 years, and even I am not good enough for session 0 to work well. sure, we compare notes and builds, we discuss what we would like to achieve. and still, we regularly stumble on problems. in my experience, 90% of rules tweaking, of bans and nerfs and buffs, do not happen in session 0. it happens because somebody accidentally breaks balance, and afterwards everyone looks at each others and we say "huh. that combo was a lot stronger than I thought. What do we do about it now?"
and this is why you need to mod the game at your table, and with time you'll also get good at it.



giving advice requires the knowledge to understand how a people asking for advice work, and what can affect the balance of a table with a mix of casual players and moderate optimizers. People who understand how different tables work.

Boy, where to start?

I agree that there’s no such thing as objectively, universally overpowered; or, rather, with the more general concept that tables have different setups and expectations which will affect how things rate on such a scale. And that that scale, and the advice that is actionably useful, will vary by table. You’ll note I included a conversation starter of the ilk of, “what, are you exclusively fighting human(oid) opponents or something?” to try to evoke that “your table and your experiences do not match my expectations” call for elaboration.

But I don’t care how much Timmy enjoys stabbing people with his shiny new knife, if that knife is disruptive, Timmy needs to drop it. “Balance to the table”… all the groups I’ve played in, I’ve never had a Timmy so dumb that he couldn’t see that he was outside the group’s balance range, to drop the knife when asked*. So I have no sympathy for Timmy really enjoying his new toy. I have had multiple GM’s too dumb to comprehend when my character was underperforming, though (never mind “unwilling or unable to do anything to fix it”, they couldn’t even grasp the problem. Sigh.), so I certainly appreciate your “we should fix this!” attitude.

So, if the group is having problems right now, you fix it right now, sure. But IMO the best way to fix it involves getting Timmy to see the problem and offer a solution. You don’t hack the game into an unrecognizable mess of cognitive load for your players (and yourself!), you get Timmy to play a viable character who matches “balance to the table” standards.

“Session 0” is to set the baseline of “here’s some sample characters that meet the adventure’s expectations”. That doesn’t take a super Expert, just read and play through the module to find that baseline.

Also, why do your more powerful characters exclusively involve more bookkeeping, especially given your baseline of… Barbarian, Wizard, Cleric, and Druid? I think you may be doing something wrong, if the only way you can make characters more powerful is to make them more complex than those four.

* well, all the 3e groups. Back in the 2e days, there were some Timmy’s that had to be *shown* the error of their ways before they’d “drop the knife”.

[King of Nowhere]

But I don’t care how much Timmy enjoys stabbing people with his shiny new knife, if that knife is disruptive, Timmy needs to drop it. “Balance to the table”… all the groups I’ve played in, I’ve never had a Timmy so dumb that he couldn’t see that he was outside the group’s balance range, to drop the knife when asked*. So I have no sympathy for Timmy really enjoying his new toy. I have had multiple GM’s too dumb to comprehend when my character was underperforming, though (never mind “unwilling or unable to do anything to fix it”, they couldn’t even grasp the problem. Sigh.), so I certainly appreciate your “we should fix this!” attitude.

So, if the group is having problems right now, you fix it right now, sure. But IMO the best way to fix it involves getting Timmy to see the problem and offer a solution. You don’t hack the game into an unrecognizable mess of cognitive load for your players (and yourself!), you get Timmy to play a viable character who matches “balance to the table” standards.

well, if every time one of your players stumbles upon a powerful tool you ask him to drop it, then you risk getting pigeonholed into being one of those dm that ban everything.

there are always multiple steps to in-game troubleshooting. is the new power is really that powerful, and not just something that happened this once because all the circumstances aligned perfectly (like a fireball on a large group of targets with low hp)? is it a long term problem, or will it solve itself spontaneously (black tentacles very op right now, but in a couple more levels everyone will have freedom of movement)? are the players unhappy about it, or not? is it going to create problem in the campaign, and can those problems be solved by in-world countermeasures?
I won't digress because my posts are already too long.

but as for getting timmy to drop his toy... well... my wizard player is a nice guy. he does not want to disrupt the game. he also likes to be an incantatrix, have a simulacrum, and use shapechange liberally. because he likes to play with that stuff. but he does not want to overshadow the party. so he asked me - as the only guy with enough mechanical skill to have a chance - to nerf it to an acceptable level.
then i have a guy who wants to play a druid planar shepard who maximizes his firestorms for free (and in my setting the most common opponents are groups of high level npcs, so a maximized firestorm followed by a quickened maximized firestorm means bringing all the enemies near death in one action, it's potentially a big deal); he asks me if it's an ok build.
meanwhile, I have a guy who wants to play a dervish with 4 arms, wielding 4 scimitars. at high level he gets an ability to make 32 attacks per round, but he'll be dual wielding, how much damage can they really deal? how many will actually hit? i tell him that it's ok, as long as he doesn't apply precision damage to all his attacks.
and then there is the rogue. rogues are generally not a problem, but my setting has guns, and guns means sneak attack at range with high chance to hit; my table baseline for balance is "you can't reliably drop someone of your own level in one round", and it seems the rogue is about to do just that.
and finally a cleric, he's not doing anything special besides usual cleric stuff, and while cleric is very powerful he may well find himself to be outmatched by the rest of the party.
Oh, and I also have to build npcs that would provide a good, but beatable challenge for them.

and none of them is a problem player: they are all great guys, great teamwork, great communication, if I really have to take away their toys they never complain, and if someone else is stronger than they are they don't complain either - though we'd all want for everyone to be useful. but they have much less technical skill than I have, and they are all looking up to me to try and let them play the build that they like and make the table work.
so what else can I do? eyeballing some semblance of balance in all this mess, and being ready to tweak stuff on the spot when needed, is really my best option. else i'd have to tell them all to drp any fancy build and go back to play sword-and-board fighters and wizard/rogue multiclasses. and there would be balance problems even then.


Also, why do your more powerful characters exclusively involve more bookkeeping, especially given your baseline of… Barbarian, Wizard, Cleric, and Druid? I think you may be doing something wrong, if the only way you can make characters more powerful is to make them more complex than those four.
because "I step up and attack for 1d20+bab+str+weapon bonus is always a lot easier than trying to pile up different modifiers, many of them circumstantial. many of them that require actions on your part to ensure that you get them, like trying to achieve an ambush. also, because saying "I buy a better sword with an additional +1 to it" is a lot easier than having a dozen contingencies to a dozen different things that may happen to you.
from the caster perspective it's even worse. "i cast fireball at any encounter" is a lot easier than any alternative. a lot of casual players never, ever try to use some of the stronger stuff because it's too hard to track. invisibility? once you start reading the various modifiers for attacking invisible, you decide it's too complicated. black tentacles? ok, this requires the grapple rules... no, no way i familiarize myself with that stuff. and let's not even get started on polimorphing.
also, going a straight class is inherently simpler than mixing stuff.
i believe you - and a lot of other people in this forum - are suffering from donning-kruger effect: you are very experienced (a lot more than I myself am, and I am by far the most experienced person in every group I've ever been in), you have gathered around yourself other groups of very experienced people, and you forgot how confusing everything is for casual players.

Although, thinking about it, maybe I'm an equally special case. I've been the experienced player in groups of players that are just skilled enough to want to try fancy builds they read on the internet, but not skilled enough to work out a balance on their own, so I've been thrown in the spot of having to balance-fix things on the fly. Maybe it's my situation that's special, I don't know.
and probably I'm also selling myself short for donning-kruger effect. I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable about total optimization as most people in this forum, but when it comes to fix balance at a table? I spent years trying to create a balance between the eclectic builds of my players, and I've generally been successful at it. I'm probably really, really good at the whole "tweaking stuff when needed" thing.



Anyway, balance is not the only reason for making changes. Often you have worldbuilding reasons. For example, you may want to ban teleportation not because you think it's op, but because you want to create a world where people have to walk (ar at least fly) long distances. Maybe you remove all [fire] spells because in your world the fire god has died and now that specific magic does not work. Or you may introduce guns to a setting, and want somewhat realistic mechanics for them, because your setting has industrial level technology; and if that's too much of a buff for rogues, well, you'll see and you'll intervene if necessary.
taking away all damage spells... that's very drastic. seems less like something done for balance, and more like something done for flavor. Of course, without the op coming back, there's no way to tell.

[Lorddenorstrus]

size snip

You're talking small changes for story purposes vs someone miscomprehending game function and wanting to blanket ban an entire spell school basically.

[Seward]

The other thing about direct damage spells is that even if you don't kill your enemy, you may put the enemy down to a level of health where someone else can kill it where they otherwise couldn't.

Yeah. In addition to "dead is the best condition", "damage stacks with itself".

Putting your teammate in position to kill an enemy before it can move has won many a fight. Sometimes you do this by incapacitating the enemy or by moving the ally into position to be most effective but sometimes you take the simple route of injuring it, so they can kill it.




You don't really need a lot of system mastery to keep up. At low levels, there's just not that much air between (divine) casters and martials to begin with.

I was talking about making an arcane caster that can keep up in ranged direct damage department with a well designed archer (or other ranged martial if you have figured out one of the handful of ways that can work out, which varies a bit between 3.5 and Pathfinder, but still ends up around what a bow-fighter with offense-oriented feats does in terms of actual damage per round), and explicitly in doing that during the level 1-10 range, something I actually did, in real play, in Pahtfinder, from L1-12. I have also played well designed archers in that level range in both 3.5 and Pathfinder.

You have to know the handful of direct damage spells, metamagic and metamagic cost reducers and use them all as part of your build to just keep up with a decently strong archer who keeps up with WBL on his bow and picks class/feats/gear that always push the ability to reliably hit or increase damage per arrow or increae number of attacks. Making an archer that does similar damage is MUCH easier and takes much less system mastery. Hell, keeping up with a bog standard core-only fighter-archer from level 1-12 is actually fairly hard, especially if you are expecting to hold up other expectations of what an arcane caster brings to the party in terms of utility when not on a day that is mostly combat.

For this discussion though, a divine caster imitating a melee is orthoganal to the OP's question. Direct damage spells aren't how a divine caster tries to simulate a martial melee, where they absolutely are how an arcane caster simulates what a martial does with a bow or other ranged weapon.

So you nerf one style of a caster doing damage, while doing nothing to limit the other style, and also take away the most usual use of direct damage spells by any caster, which is to have a few prepared or in the spells known so you can contribute when piling on a bit more damage is the most helpful thing you can do in a given turn.


If you hope that, you are playing the wrong game. The wizard dropping 10hd fireball at level 10 is incredibly low opp. Its a core spell with no optimization. An equivalently optimized fighter is doing probably d6+5/d6+5/d4+3 with his +1 rapier and dagger combo with a lot of waste feats.

Yeah. Even in my very first 3.0 wizard character, I had empowered fireballs by level 10. Meaning I averaged over 50 damage and quite often could kill ogres even if they made saves. Although since we rolled attributes and she only started with 15 intelligence, I spent a lot of my effort on crafting and buffs. But she liked fire spells and always kept some boom around. It was always good to have, in moderation.



Anyway, balance is not the only reason for making changes. Often you have worldbuilding reasons.

Sure. I've been in campaigns where stuff was permitted but it was deeply illegal with quite effective law enforcement (ironically one society LN tending to good, the other as CE as it comes). You could do it but consequences might occur.

Other campagins where stuff doesn't exist because it doesn't make sense. My first big 3.x campaign the GM wanted to play in a setting similar to post-Roman Britain (his Rome equivivalent was an Elven empire and Caesar Augustus finally died of old age and all the legions went home to do civil war stuff. Non-elves need not apply). In that setting, well, no Elf PCs, although half-elves were ok, no heavy armor (had not been invented yet, basically), no crossbows (ditto) and we were supposed to be from a small town, which limited our starting resources and backstories (although it turned out much later that most of our town was retired adventurers, which explained how they survived in their extremely dangerous environment). Also very little downtime and the markets were small, and you could do things like run out of spell ink to buy at any price (which motivated me to eventually get teleport, just to get to other markets).

The campaign had WBL issues, and we pretty much could not tank damage, we had to work almost entirely in a skirmishing hit-and-run style. Which suited a bunch of players who grew up on Hero Games superhero 3-d fighting, but it wasn't for everybody, and we did have a player ragequit in the middle as the restrictions did lead to TPK-party-captured situations and eventually a 5 minute adventuring day, because only buffs could make up for lack of equipment due to lack of markets or crafting options (mostly because of time limits in the latter case).

This was a GM with 20 years of experience in many games but we were all new to 3.x, as 3.0 had just come out. He tinkered without knowing how important WBL assumptions in the game including free acess to use it to get the items appropriate to your character was to the challenge rating system. Tinkering for worldbuilding is fine if you are willing to adjust for the unintended consequences as they emerge in play (he was starting too near the end, in places, party with loot placement and in one case by having a magic item grow with the character, similar idea to a weapon of legacy)