Building dungeons to account for spells without negating them

[Yora]

One very old complaint about D&D in general has always been that after a few levels, wizards have spells that let them ignore pretty much every obstacle they come up against. You can fly over chasms, read the minds of NPCs, ask a corpse who killed it, and so on. And apparently, a lot of GMs and also adventure writers supposedly developed a habit of creating dungeons and NPCs that had specific magical traits or items to make them immune against those spell to make the players solve the obstacles in the propper ways they are supposed to and not play the game according to its rules.

I often feel that such claims are overstating what certain spells can actually do. And while they can completely circumvent a hypothetical obstacle (often one specifically set up to be easily circumventable by that very spell), I don't think they are the instant win button they are supposed to be.

I want to exchange ideas about which spells in 3rd edition might be highly effective in getting around obstacles in dungeons, and under what not overly contrived circumstances they might not be enough all by themselves. Obviously things get increasingly convoluted and out of hand at higher levels. But I think since the vast majority of adventures, and especially dungeon crawling, takes place at low to mid levels, it's probably most useful to focus on spells up to 5th or maybe 6th level. I don't think the hypothetical issues with higher level spells don't really come up much in practice.

One important thing about spells in D&D is that you're limited in casting spells by spell slots. Most of the time you only have a spell prepared only once per day. So just because you know a spell doesn't mean you can throw it at any inconvenience in your path without thinking.
An issue that is commonly, and rightfully, brought up about 3rd edition is you can make any spell into a scroll, and all low- and many mid-level spells into wands. Which enables you to actually cast a given spell 3 times in a row. Or 50 times if you want to. But when you're casting spells from a scroll or wand, you're basically casting it with money. For a 1st level scroll you made yourself, that's 12.5 gp. For a wand, it's 7.5 gp per charge. For 3rd level spells it's 187.5 gp and 112.5 gp respectively, and for 4th level spells 350 gp and 210 gp. That is cheap for a mid level party, but that's a cost that has to be paid every time you use the spell. And you probably would want to have a dozen utility spells ready if you really want to trivialize dungeons.
Now how much of an issue this might be for any given party depends on how many obstacles they have to overcome to reach their treasures, and how many other ongoing expenses the party has to cover over the course of the campaign. But this is certainly a dial that a GM can work with. I don't have an issue with the players using a spell to overcome an obstacle. That's what those spells are for, after all. But if we can force the players to be economical with their spells and make them hesitant to just throw a spell at any obstacle theh encounter, I think a lot has already be gained.

And suppose something happens to the only person in the party who can use the wand! It had fallen out of fashion probably before 3rd edition to let PCs get killed or even captured and separated from the group. But it was understood to be a given in the earlier games where dungeon crawling was mostly a thing. But I think for dungeon crawling as a main element of play to work, fear for your character's survival has to be a real and believable concern. There's no need to actually have large numbers of PCs to die. What matters is that the players have a mindset that if they miscalculate in how they deal with the challenges of the dungeon, someone will die. And then that risk will factor into their calculations on how much they can rely on their magic being reliable.

I guess the most notorious utility spell is probably fly. It lets you fly over walls or chasms with no skill required or risk of failure or accident.
However, the 3rd edition spell only targets one person and lasts only for 1 minute per level. So probably 5 to 10 minutes in most situations. If you cast it on the strongest character in the party, he might be able to carry everone to the other side on multiple trips back and forth.
If you need to make it back over the chasm or wall again, then you need to cast fly again. If you have three or four chasms in a dungeon, that otherwise just really doesn't justify staying there for a full week spend mostly resting, then the players might be motivated to look for options to not use a wand of fly for all of them and burn through 1,000 gp. If there are enemies on the other side of the chasm, you probably don't want to shuttle over each PC one by one. And you don't want to do it either when you have flee back across the chasm pursued by an overwhelming force of enemy. You could use a wand to cast fly at every party member, but then you're really starting to burn through money if they make a habit of that.

With the existence of fly, you can't have unclimbable walls or unjumpable chasms to make it impossible for someone to get across. But a wall or chasm still remains something that the players have to spend thoughts, time, and resources on. Reaources they might no longer have when they really need it.

Another notorious candidate is passwall. Instant tunnel through any wall that remains open for 1 hour/level. So the chsnce of it disappearing before the party wants to use it on the trip back out are low. But it's also only 10ft. deep at 9th level, and 15 ft. at 12th level. Irrelevant in a castle or temple, but in an underground complex or cave, the distance between paralel passages can be a lot larger than that. In fact, in caves it really might be hard to estimate the height of the floor or ceiling of the chamber you want to tunnel into, relative to your current position.
And again, only one passage per casting of the spell. As a 5th level spell, you can't make a wand of it. And as a scroll it's 562.5 gp per use. You wouldn't want to use it carelessly, and to get real use out of it might require some planning and prep-work by the players to come out in the space they want to. Which is great. Working with a spell as a tool, rather than using a spell to not have to do any work.
People would know about the existance of passwall, and a wizard consulted for magical security could tell them that the spell can't tunnel through metal. So if this is a concern for the builders, covering the walls in steel or bronze plates would be an option. Expensive, but probably not that much for someone who's installing magic traps and seals. Of course, the PCs could just break throug steel wallpaper pretty easily, but that's another (minor) obstacle for which they need to make a plan. And it might ruin any attempt at stealth, which might be the reason they wanted to use passwall in the first place.

[Silva Stormrage]

The best general advice I have is to use the standard improve advice of "Yes, and"

Don't want PC's teleporting in? Well the villain can't afford to completely block teleportation into his entire fortress/city but he can disrupt it requiring a high CL check and it would deposit them in a random location. PCs can still get in but it could be tense if they suddenly find themselves in a room with no idea where they should go.

Fly spell or move speed rending gaps and height's moot? Add strong winds that require a strength check to actually fly through. Carrying PCs would dramatically increase the DC and would cause a risk of dropping a PC. Flight would work but maybe they need to use a spell like polymorph to turn into a strong flight form or have another caster suppress the winds for a few rounds if the winds are magical. If PCs expend resources to overcome a challenge that's a good thing.

Passwall doesn't go through metal so like that one is pretty easy to just block. Even if the entire dungeon is stone the druid spell earthfast is a 2nd level spell that would make the stone harder than metal and would block passwall. Since it is stone you could possibly allow them to use multiple passwalls to get through or just say it doesn't work for the last 20ft or how far the earth fast is. It is a 5th level spell, level 9 characters should be able to get around doors fairly easily at this point.

A lot of spells have ways they could partially succeed or require additional checks to succeed. Generally outright immunity should be used sparingly unless at high levels when that kind of rock paper scissors gameplay is kinda expected. A level 20 lich wouldn't have lived this long if he hadn't figured out how to deal with scry and die.

I generally agree with you though that the issues people state with magic are generally overstated. I find it generally occurs with DMs who want a low magic game and expect their D&D session to be like LoTRs and gets frustrated at being "Outsmarted" by their PCs. Either that or new DMs who aren't familiar with all the different tools 3.5 casters have and get flatfooted when they didn't expect one. (Which is fair, their are a lot)

[Zanos]

Yeah, people overstate the capabilities of a lot of spells. "I teleport to the big bad and kill him in his sleep!" You don't know where he is. "Okay, I use commune to find him!" Commune only allows for yes or no questions, so we're going to be here for awhile... "Okay, now that I got his location, I teleport there." You have no familiarity with that location. You can't teleport to a location you have no familiarity with. "Grr, okay I scry him!", Well he's got a large will save bonus(and his castle has lead sheeting in it), so it fails. "Well I scry him during the day." Okay, after many, many attempts, it succeeds. You can see his current location, and teleport to him as he patrols the grounds with his entire honor guard. "I teleport into a nearby building where he can't see me!" Well, scrying only allows you to view 20 feet, and people are going to notice a band of heavily armed people just pop into existence, but okay...

Don't get me wrong, spells are capable of overcoming a lot of low level challenges, but they're very bad at dealing with persistent environmental conditions until higher levels. There are also many players I've seen incredibly eager to spend spell slots to solve problems that are easily fixed with 50ft of rope. I've seen a wizard spend his entire allocation of 2nd level slots levitating the party up a cliff with easy handholds, that the fighter could have just climbed on a take 10 and anchored a rope to the top for the entire party to climb up. Most of the time DM's who are complaining that spells are "solving" their entire adventure had extreme preconceived notions of how the PCs would engage with it and designed a bad adventure for a party with magic casters in it; hunting down an antidote for a poisoned NPC is not an adventure when a 7th level cleric is in the party, for example, and that's okay in my opinion. Characters having tools is good, and understanding that past level 5 or so characters are starting to become pretty major figures in the setting is important.

[Yora]

I had never though about the effect of wind on flying creatures before.

As it so happens, my homebrew setting has a pretty stormy climate, and people have a very long tradition of really being into building towers. Perfect conditions to have a lot of ruins and lairs be swept by significant winds much of the time.

The wind does not have to block the use of levitate and fly. It just has to make the players pause and consider if they really want to do that, or put in additional work to make it succeed.

As I think I might have said before in that wall of text above, we don't want to negate the use of spells to overcome obstacles. We just should want to make spells a tool that still requires some thinking to overcome obstacles.

Another thing that just occured to me is the use of hostile flyers. If only one character levitates or flies up with a rope, he will be both separated from the rest of the party and highly exposed to being spotted for a while. Having just one or two fliers known to be in the area can be a potential problem that the players have to consider. Doesn't need to be difficult to have the flting character somewhat covered from being attacked while hanging in the air. Distract the creature. Chase or lure it away. Or use invisibility or charm animal. Covering the exposed character with ranged attacks is of course always an option, but that's another case where wind makes things more complicated.
As long as a one-step solution turns into a three-step solution, the game should be a lot more fun.

[ShurikVch]

I had never though about the effect of wind on flying creatures before.
RAW already have relevant conditions for strong Winds (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/weather.htm#winds): Checked (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/conditionSummary.htm#checked), Knocked Down (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/conditionSummary.htm#knockedDown), and Blown Away (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/conditionSummary.htm#blownAway)

[King of Nowhere]

some people dsagree with this interpretation of the spell, but i always intended the teleport requiring familiarity with the location as requiring you to actually know where you are going. a closed room seen through scrying once won't do, because it could be anywhere in the world. to teleport there, you need to have enough information to locate the place. so, keeping to close, same-looking rooms does a lot to reduce teleportation.

having multiple groups of guards in eye contact with each other is a wonderful mundane counter to invisibility. so is keeping doors closed. wearing bells on your body lets you detect if someone has cast silence in your area. dogs can smell intruders.

another counter to teleport is to clutter the room where you sleep with enough stuff that there's not enough space to actually get in.

[Yora]

The spell description is very clear. Studying a location for an hour with scrying means that you roll on the Studied Carefully row. Which has a 94% chance to get you to the right destination. There's a 1% chance to take 1d10 damage, which even for a wizard is irrelevant at 9th level.

[NichG]

I think the biggest places where 'dungeons' as a concept get into trouble are:

- When time is not a factor (e.g. tomb robbing or going into places occupied by automata, undead, animals, etc mostly who won't organize or respond or counter-attack). This opens up a lot of strategies that basically only work because they're un-opposed and because there's no rush.
- When the dungeon as a whole is vulnerable to being acted upon from the outside. If the party decides to redirect a river to flood it (or endless decanter it?), or smoke out the inhabitants, or poison the water supply, or other such things, does the dungeon still need to actually be run?
- When things which shape the flow of exploration are easily bypassed. Adamantine weapons means that things can be mined out pretty quickly for shortcuts, long before Passwall comes online. Does the dungeon still need to be run at all if things like Move Earth, Stone to Mud, etc are available?

So turning that around, I'd say that for something with the concept of a 'dungeon' as a perhaps nonlinear but structured sequence of contexts that have to be passed through to get to one or more endpoints to be relevant at a given level of play, there must be things at that level of play which: make time a factor, allow responsiveness in ways that pose actual risk to the objectives at hand (not necessarily to the character's lives; 'get the evidence before the crime lord disposes of it' could count), protect internal states from external unopposed actions available at that level, and provide things which can shape the flow of exploration.

The trick for very high level play is, these things don't have to be physical objects. A series of clues which each are scrying foci for the location of the next, where the last reveals the treasure for example isn't that different from a sequence of rooms that must be passed through linearly. Things which break lines in space, things which are more conceptually connected than physically connected, etc can help I think. Find the Path for example bypasses entire genres of physical dungeon (basically the tricks&traps genre) in a single cast, but if the state of 'knowing what you're looking for' is broken up and even potentially misleading, then 'find what we're actually looking for' becomes a non-skippable step. Similar things can stretch out divination-based solutions, where 'what is the question I should actually be asking?' is itself something that needs to be answered.

[Eladrinblade]

It's okay for players to use the abilities they have. If they encounter a chasm in a dungeon, they can cast fly to get over it; that's fine. They used one of their resources to handle something. If they never had anything to use their abilities on, things would get pretty boring. I'm going to note that they prepared (or chose, for spontaneous casters) fly, which limits their other options, naturally. A fly used is a fireball not.
They could jump the chasm instead, in which case they have taken jump ranks in lieu of anything else, which again limits their options. Or use rope and pitons to go down and then back up the other side, which took time and expendable resources (and can be removed later by dungeon gremlins) and probably made a lot of noise. So basically it's just not a problem.

Now, if the DM expected the chasm to be a challenge on its own, and didn't compound any problems on the party, like a fight afterward or some motivation to get back over the chasm again later, then it may fall flat. Even then, though, if they were unable to get across the chasm until they got fly, it is probably satisfying for them to finally do so.

Building dungeons specifically to negate player abilities is generally bad, in my opinion. It's okay for the occasional impediment to some of their abilities (like strong wind in a cave that makes flying difficult or impossible), which can be interesting and fun to deal with, but if its commonplace for their abilities to be useless, then that's no good. Personally, I go out of my way to give players things to use their abilities on; that's what we're here for; I don't give my character balance/climb/jump/etc to never use them; I want to use them often!

[Curse]

For me it is far simpler - especially at mid to high levels when there are more diverse and powerful options for the players to use - to build a dungeon from a point of consistency.
For example lets say it is the lair of a lich. Now lets assume the lich took advantage of an old mine.
What are the implications that result from this choice? What are logical choices for the lich to make when designing the lair?
There will be lots of "corridors" that follow no fixed orientation because whoever dug out the mining shafts had to follow whatever was the resource.
How will the lich secure this? Will he put in heavily guarded entrances and beyond that maybe a trap that might collapse a corridor? Will he use the mazelike structure of the mine to his benefit and add a little illusion? Did the dwarves who originally dug in the mine dig too deep and wake a fiery demon that now acts as a very comfortable guard for one part of the mine? As a lich I would expect heavy use of undead and magical traps. Undead are unimpressed by cold so maybe the whole mine is at a temperature below freezing? How did the lich achieve that? May there be a mechanism that the players can disable to put the temperature back to normal and kill that disadvantage? Where are the phylacteria? Are all in the same place or are they scattered and disguised?
If the main concept stands I can tweak a little so that not every obstacle needs the same solution and a little more diversity is possible.

A dungeon that feels consistent will (hopefully) invite players to act and react according to this internal logic. Also they might find a solution that makes it incredibly easy and they are able to quickly dispose of the lich - which can be rewarded if there is a creative solution. Let the players enjoy their success and tell their story at the next inn. Next time might be harder 🤷

[Jack_Simth]

And suppose something happens to the only person in the party who can use the wand! It had fallen out of fashion probably before 3rd edition to let PCs get killed or even captured and separated from the group. But it was understood to be a given in the earlier games where dungeon crawling was mostly a thing. But I think for dungeon crawling as a main element of play to work, fear for your character's survival has to be a real and believable concern. There's no need to actually have large numbers of PCs to die. What matters is that the players have a mindset that if they miscalculate in how they deal with the challenges of the dungeon, someone will die. And then that risk will factor into their calculations on how much they can rely on their magic being reliable.

There should generally be at least two people who can use the wand: A "standard party" with a Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, and Rogue: A wand of Dimension Door? The Wizard can use it without a roll, the Rogue via UMD. Air Walk? Cleric and Rogue.

Mind, a probably more ideal party would be a Cleric, a Wizard, a Druid, and a Beguiler, but how common is that?


I guess the most notorious utility spell is probably fly. It lets you fly over walls or chasms with no skill required or risk of failure or accident.
However, the 3rd edition spell only targets one person and lasts only for 1 minute per level. So probably 5 to 10 minutes in most situations. If you cast it on the strongest character in the party, he might be able to carry everone to the other side on multiple trips back and forth.
Counter: Everyone carries a couple of fifty foot ropes, right? Carry the rogue (or just send the rogue), and tie everyone up a little. Falling is limited by the rope length.

You know, until the harpies show up wanting to cut the ropes, but the climb check to stay in place is much lower than the climb check to cross the chasm.


If you need to make it back over the chasm or wall again, then you need to cast fly again. If you have three or four chasms in a dungeon, that otherwise just really doesn't justify staying there for a full week spend mostly resting, then the players might be motivated to look for options to not use a wand of fly for all of them and burn through 1,000 gp. If there are enemies on the other side of the chasm, you probably don't want to shuttle over each PC one by one. And you don't want to do it either when you have flee back across the chasm pursued by an overwhelming force of enemy. You could use a wand to cast fly at every party member, but then you're really starting to burn through money if they make a habit of that.
Higher level spells do better. Fly is 3rd at minutes/level, Air Walk is 4th at 10 minutes/level, Overland Flight is 5th at 1 hour/level... and the Druid's Wildshape is hours/level, and the halfling Druid's Dire Bat Animal Companion doesn't expire - available at level 4.


With the existence of fly, you can't have unclimbable walls or unjumpable chasms to make it impossible for someone to get across. But a wall or chasm still remains something that the players have to spend thoughts, time, and resources on. Reaources they might no longer have when they really need it.

But they spent the slot, regardless: That's one less spell they don't have for toasting BBEG. Just make sure there's some form of clock, and you're good to go.


Another notorious candidate is passwall. Instant tunnel through any wall that remains open for 1 hour/level. So the chsnce of it disappearing before the party wants to use it on the trip back out are low. But it's also only 10ft. deep at 9th level, and 15 ft. at 12th level. Irrelevant in a castle or temple, but in an underground complex or cave, the distance between paralel passages can be a lot larger than that. In fact, in caves it really might be hard to estimate the height of the floor or ceiling of the chamber you want to tunnel into, relative to your current position.
And again, only one passage per casting of the spell. As a 5th level spell, you can't make a wand of it. And as a scroll it's 562.5 gp per use. You wouldn't want to use it carelessly, and to get real use out of it might require some planning and prep-work by the players to come out in the space they want to. Which is great. Working with a spell as a tool, rather than using a spell to not have to do any work.
People would know about the existance of passwall, and a wizard consulted for magical security could tell them that the spell can't tunnel through metal. So if this is a concern for the builders, covering the walls in steel or bronze plates would be an option. Expensive, but probably not that much for someone who's installing magic traps and seals. Of course, the PCs could just break throug steel wallpaper pretty easily, but that's another (minor) obstacle for which they need to make a plan. And it might ruin any attempt at stealth, which might be the reason they wanted to use passwall in the first place. Applicable to this (and also Dimension Door) is that you need to know where to go. If you're building with stone (e.g., a castle), you sandwich lead sheeting between thick stone walls. Divinations now no longer work, one casting of Passwall only gets you halfway through, and lead is (at least, per Stronghold Builder's Guide) relatively cheap compared to other wall materials, especially the metals.

Speak with Dead: Only gives you information that the dead guy knew. If he didn't know who killed him (e.g., he didn't beat their disguise check, got ganked by someone hidden/invisible, killed by a one-shot trap placed where his assassin knew he'd be, was killed by a summoned monster [or other disposable minion, since disposed of], et cetera), then Speak with Dead doesn't tell you who killed him. Oh yes, and the corpse must be mostly intact: A few minutes with a hammer fixes that, assuming that the assassin wasn't in a hurry.

[Yora]

Somehow I've never seen anyone talk about permanent alarm and permanent private sanctum.

As a 9th level wizard with a lair, there's really no reason to not have a couple parmanent alarms placed. And at 13th level there really is no excuse to not have permanent private sanctum on your lab and private chambers.
Even a sorcerer should really try to get a few scrolls of the respective spells.

Clerics get forbiddance at 11th level. Permanent duration, covers a huge area, no XP cost, and isn't really that expensive for teleport proofing your temple.

Another thing to consider is to have guards on patrol to check for any signs of intrusion. While some spells to get past obstacles can be very sneaky, others leave very obvious signs. And your average low-level goblin minion should be instructed to report powerful intruders immediately instead of trying to stop them by himself.
And it might take a while for the players to realize their presence has been discovered and a response against them is being organized. So if they are not being completely covert, players should feel in a position where they need to have a plan in case they were already discovered 15 minutes ago.

[RNightstalker]

Worried about invisibility? Hang a bunch of ropes from the ceiling spaced less than a foot apart. Smart defenders know their sanctuaries/strongholds; they know about the dead magic zone over the top of the chasm. They know about the wild magic zone around and constructed their personal chambers inside the hollow of that zone. Remember LoTR: when the fool of a Took knocked over the bucket it banged and ECHOED just a little bit. Certain structures amplify sound, others suppress them. In a world where magic is normal, builders will take that into consideration during construction. IRL we adjust building codes for earthquakes and hurricanes. In-game they should do the same. I'm actually working on a campaign/encounter where a necromancer marches an undead army against a surface city because the necromancer is the reason (for example (s)he enslaved a few fire elementals to do the hokey pokey in the magma chamber) the volcano is erupting just enough to create an ash cloud to block out the sun. Then the evil druid cohort steps up to help control the weather so the ash cloud doesn't disperse or can guide/divert the ash cloud. If I'm going to be a nerd for playing D&D, I say nerd out.

[Jack_Simth]

Somehow I've never seen anyone talk about permanent alarm and permanent private sanctum.

As a 9th level wizard with a lair, there's really no reason to not have a couple parmanent alarms placed. And at 13th level there really is no excuse to not have permanent private sanctum on your lab and private chambers.
Even a sorcerer should really try to get a few scrolls of the respective spells.

Clerics get forbiddance at 11th level. Permanent duration, covers a huge area, no XP cost, and isn't really that expensive for teleport proofing your temple.

The big problem with Alarm and Forbiddance is that they can be found and disarmed as magical traps. They're just fodder for the rogue to do his work. Private Sanctum isn't... but it's still an abjuration, and will reduce the DC to find other nearby ones.


Another thing to consider is to have guards on patrol to check for any signs of intrusion. While some spells to get past obstacles can be very sneaky, others leave very obvious signs.
Like dead and looted bodies. How many parties actually dispose of all those re-dead zombies, for instance?


And your average low-level goblin minion should be instructed to report powerful intruders immediately instead of trying to stop them by himself.
And it might take a while for the players to realize their presence has been discovered and a response against them is being organized. So if they are not being completely covert, players should feel in a position where they need to have a plan in case they were already discovered 15 minutes ago.

Unless they have detailed intel on the people they're invading, plans will need to be very general.

[icefractal]

another counter to teleport is to clutter the room where you sleep with enough stuff that there's not enough space to actually get in.I've used this one, both as a low-level defense and a very high level one.

Low-level - most people can't teleport in if you hang small chains / strings of beads from the ceiling throughout the whole room (tightly enough that a small-sized creature can't fit), but that density should still be relatively ok to see and move through. A bit unwieldy for most rooms, but suitable for a bedroom, secret meeting room, vault, etc.

High level (spoilered because somewhat off-topic) - So you've made your teleport-proof demiplane sanctum, and you're sitting pretty. But you have a big problem - Wish. Wish doesn't give a **** about all your anti-teleport defenses, it just straight-up ignores them! And neither does your Will save matter if they're using it to send themselves to you instead of vice-versa. Solution:
1) Tame / control a big ooze.
2) Give it a Monk's Belt and a +1 Ghost Touch Amulet of Mighty Fists (modified for an ooze, obvs)
3) Get that for yourself too, plus whatever you need to safely existing inside the ooze
4) Permanent mind link to the ooze. Standing order to fill the entire room unless told otherwise
5) When you want to travel there, tell the ooze to squeeze over and free up some space
Now other people can't travel to your plane because there is literally no space for them to occupy, even if they're shrunk down to ant-sized. Even if they're incorporeal, because the ooze's entire body is ghost touch.

Somewhat related: easy low level anti-spying tech - works on scrying, invisibility, arcane eye, polymorphed into literal fly-on-the-wall, etc. Sign language. Specifically, of the "writing / tapping on the other person's hand" method, with a big sleeve covering both people's hands. Even without spending much time to learn, you could easily use signals for "ignore this part" / "actually the reverse" / "a week earlier" / etc to augment spoken communication.

[Yora]

The big problem with Alarm and Forbiddance is that they can be found and disarmed as magical traps. They're just fodder for the rogue to do his work.

That's not a problem. That's interactivity.

That's what this thread is about.

[Jack_Simth]

That's not a problem. That's interactivity.

That's what this thread is about.
It's two skill checks (Search and Disable Device): Roll the dice twice (or just take ten) and move on. It has no more impact on the party's actions or builds than does burning hands trap #8637. It's DC 26, but the maker needs to be 9th level (minimum for Permanency). At 5th or so (when a 9th level Wizard is going to be a very fearsome, but possible, opponent), getting a +16 modifier to Search and Disable Device for taking ten isn't that difficult (you're halfway there just from ranks), and is fairly straightforward to get much higher still. As it's often viewed as the Rogue's primary job? Many (most?) will invest heavily enough that it's a complete non-event.

[King of Nowhere]

It's two skill checks (Search and Disable Device): Roll the dice twice (or just take ten) and move on. It has no more impact on the party's actions or builds than does burning hands trap #8637. It's DC 26, but the maker needs to be 9th level (minimum for Permanency). At 5th or so (when a 9th level Wizard is going to be a very fearsome, but possible, opponent), getting a +16 modifier to Search and Disable Device for taking ten isn't that difficult (you're halfway there just from ranks), and is fairly straightforward to get much higher still. As it's often viewed as the Rogue's primary job? Many (most?) will invest heavily enough that it's a complete non-event.

you can't take 10 on a search check to find traps. you can only take 10 when you are not threatened; I would say that if you are looking for dangerous traps, you are threatened by those very traps you are looking for.

[mabriss lethe]

While it can't stop things like scry & die tactics, something as simple as narrow passageways and tight corners can severely limit the magic a caster can bring to bear in an encounter by disrupting line of effect.

Want to curb passwall? Mark certain walls as "Load bearing" sure, they can use passwall on it, but it will undermine the integrity of the area they occupy, causing cave ins, tunnel collapses, changes in terrain, etc.

[Gnaeus]

So, first, the RAW spells are not the only possible spells. A BBEG has the same, or more likely more, opportunity to create spells and magic items as the players. He could absolutely have a spell to feed false information to scrying enemies. Or a lair that is proofed against teleport. That doesn't make teleport useless, it makes it not usable in a scry and die. We had a campaign in which the BBEG was blocked from divination but we had a command word that activated a homing function on a golem. So we had to follow the golem as it walked back to him. We could fly, but the golem couldn't. Or one where we had a delicate magical device which we needed in order to locate the McGuffin, and the device wouldn't survive a teleport, so we had to go overland. Teleport was still helpful, we could teleport to a nearby city to shop for example, while leaving the golem or the guy with the device in place. And we certainly teleported home when done.


It's okay for players to use the abilities they have. If they encounter a chasm in a dungeon, they can cast fly to get over it; that's fine. They used one of their resources to handle something. If they never had anything to use their abilities on, things would get pretty boring. I'm going to note that they prepared (or chose, for spontaneous casters) fly, which limits their other options, naturally. A fly used is a fireball not.
They could jump the chasm instead, in which case they have taken jump ranks in lieu of anything else, which again limits their options. Or use rope and pitons to go down and then back up the other side, which took time and expendable resources (and can be removed later by dungeon gremlins) and probably made a lot of noise. So basically it's just not a problem.

Now, if the DM expected the chasm to be a challenge on its own, and didn't compound any problems on the party, like a fight afterward or some motivation to get back over the chasm again later, then it may fall flat. Even then, though, if they were unable to get across the chasm until they got fly, it is probably satisfying for them to finally do so.

Building dungeons specifically to negate player abilities is generally bad, in my opinion. It's okay for the occasional impediment to some of their abilities (like strong wind in a cave that makes flying difficult or impossible), which can be interesting and fun to deal with, but if its commonplace for their abilities to be useless, then that's no good. Personally, I go out of my way to give players things to use their abilities on; that's what we're here for; I don't give my character balance/climb/jump/etc to never use them; I want to use them often!

I agree with this.

Fly doesn't really seem like an issue to me, in the sense that usually a wall or the like shouldn't be an issue for high level adventurers, but as mentioned, you could have things like high winds, or even an amf. But seriously, 3.5 is a game where by about level 8-10 every character is expected to have a method of flight, so maybe just consider a wall or chasm to be a lower level encounter. Or better, a complicating factor for an encounter, in which bad guys are disrupting PCs flight as they attempt to come across. PCs spending resources to bypass challenges should be rewarded, not punished.

[Yora]

One of the most basic principles of security is that you can not ever make anything impenetrable. All security measures can be overcome.

A proper security concept aims to make the effort of breaking it so costly that the gains of getting in are not worth it.
The more someone has to gain by breaking in, the greater your efforts at securing the space have to be.
And if you don't have unlimited resources, which you never do, you have to consider which specific areas are the most important to protect, and in which one the possible damage that can be caused does not justify making the maximum investment in security that you could.

A 5 meter high wall around your castle is not useless. It will take care of easily 99% of possible intruders. It won't do anything to stop the 1% of possible intruders that can fly over it, but you have already greatly minimized the amount of infiltration attempts that your guards inside the castle will have to deal with.
And enemies that use magic to fly over your castle walls probably aren't coming to steal your food supplies or even your horses. So having that outer wall means you don't have to invest into much more security for your larders and stables beyond that.

Another important principle is that you can't make anything impenetrable, but you can make it take a very long time to get in. If you only have passive security like locks and doors, then potential intruders can take all the time in the world to slowly force themselves a way inside. But to actually have something secured, you also need some kind of active security in either the form of guards, or a way to alert guards.

In normal everyday situations, thieves want to get in and out as fast as possible to avoid anyone noticing that they are there in the first place. Even if they can pick the lock on your front door, they don't want to be standing out in the open for 10 minutes looking suspicious. Someone could see them and call the police, and that's just not worth the risk. In a stronghold and dungeon situation, this means any occupants that are trying to have the place somewhat secured against intruders have to have means to raise an alarm. Going from room to room and dealing with the occupants of each room at a time should only work if the occupants of the dungeons have no allegiances and cooperations with each other. Or only for as long as you can keep all of your encounters stealthy.

[Silva Stormrage]

I agree with this.

Fly doesn't really seem like an issue to me, in the sense that usually a wall or the like shouldn't be an issue for high level adventurers, but as mentioned, you could have things like high winds, or even an amf. But seriously, 3.5 is a game where by about level 8-10 every character is expected to have a method of flight, so maybe just consider a wall or chasm to be a lower level encounter. Or better, a complicating factor for an encounter, in which bad guys are disrupting PCs flight as they attempt to come across. PCs spending resources to bypass challenges should be rewarded, not punished.

Pretty much everyone I think agrees with this. I saw this thread as essentially explanation for newer DMs who WANT a chasm to be relevant to mid level PCs but get frustrated if PCs just ignore it by easily flying. Which in my experiences not at all uncommon.

If you want a particular chasm to be threatening to mid level PCs it can't just be a deep pit, it has to either have monsters, winds, traps, environmental hazards (Spouts of Lava bursting up) but I don't think the concept of "deep chasm" is irrevocably only for lower level PCs.