How many of you truly believe that only spell casters are worth playing?

[Kelb_Panthera]

I'm not advocating that the GM should ever run a "my way or the highway" game. That's a strawman - tyranny is as bad as anarchy.

What I am saying is that providing a selection of routes to your players, and pre-emptively dissuading them from others, is good design. What I am saying is that "No" can be a reasonable response. What I am saying is that the GM's fun matters too, and that for many of us, the time investment required to devise a world with infinite an arbitrarily large number of permutations for every potential action the PCs could take is frequently not fun.

Exactly this.

Well put, Psyren.

[Cosi]

You are really confirming that you don't get it.

More evidence that you just don't get it.

"No one who really understood things could possibly not see it my way! You must just disagree because you don't understand!"

It's not "bad mode". It's the way D&D started. It's the way the DM's Guides teach you to run the game. It's the way the game system was invented to enable.

<insert literally any example of anything that has ever improved ever>

But you're saying the DM shouldn't even do that, because it takes "agency" away from the players. I agree that a DM shouldn't say "this is a Pirate game!" and then never even have the characters see an open body of water... but the DM should be able to say "this isn't a Pirate game" and reasonably expect the players not to play pirates or try to turn the game into a Pirate game.

When planning a game, people should discuss the games they are willing to play. If the group can't agree, no game should happen with that group. If the group does agree, and then someone comes to the table and tries to force the group to play something else, that person is in the wrong, regardless of who they are. If the group agreed on Pirates and the DM puts them in a desert, he is wrong. If the group agreed on Intrigue and a player comes to the table with a pirate, he's is wrong.

As though a DM can't just block your teleportation spell? Poppycock. If you can produce the effect, the paradigm is shifted. The source is irrelevant.

The source is relevant, because it's what differentiates low level characters from high level ones. Can you find an item of teleport at 1st level? Can you find a NPC that casts teleport at 1st level? Can you go to a location that arbitrarily provides teleport at 1st level? Can you cast teleport at 1st level? The answer to one of those is no, and it is not the one you want it to be. The paradigm changes when you can cast teleport because you can now do something you couldn't do before.

And you've missed the point again. The point is manipulating the environment rather than adding something to it or subtracting something from it and you -can- do that with your hands rather than magic.

What is it with you and reductionism? You don't see a difference between "your hands" and "a movable remote force that you control"? All anything ever does is "interact with other things". It's the parameters of that interaction that differentiate abilities.

If you think that a lack of magic means you have no power to direct the story, I hope you never DM. FFS man, leadership is a thing. The contact, organization, and business systems are things. Even without those things, simply being able to succesfully persuade people in positions of power and authority can have huge impact; "the pen is mightier than the sword," or "spell," as the case may be.

Not no power, but less power, and power that doesn't scale. Use Rope influences the story, but its effect changes very little from 1st level to 20th.

'Cause macguffins aren't a long-standing fantasy trope. Who ever heard of the heroes having to go do some indirect step to overcome the BBEG or avert the impending disaster? Seriously, do you only ever make the most super direct-forward, linear problems for the players to confront? If not, you're just arguing semantics.

Should a CR 1 monster (an appropriate combat challenge for a 1st level party) be a challenge for a 20th level party? Of course not! Just as you should surpass low level combat encounters, you should surpass low level non-combat encounters. "Linear" and "non-linear" only make sense with respect to a given set of abilities. There are stories that you can tell about characters with plane shift that aren't just "I plane shift the problem solved". Those stories are every bit as potentially compelling as the ones where players must struggle to assemble something equivalent to plane shift as a challenge in and of itself.

This doesn't refute what I said at all. Not sure why you didn't skip it.

Please describe three battlefield control spells you would consider meaningfully different. If your system reduces every effect that modifies the battlefield to either "modifies the battlefield and hurts people" or "modifies the battlefield and doesn't hurt people", it is too reductionist.

FFS, you've acknowledged that people will use different spells in different circumstances. How is "sometimes you want to use A and sometimes you want to use B" a situation where A and B are the same?

The best way to do that is a matter of taste but I doubt anyone would call plopping completely random nonsense in front of them, with no concern for who or what they are, a good way to go about it, outside of an OG dungeon crawl.

So that's how you see it? Either I get on board with the DM's story, or I'm facing "completely random nonsense"?

How about the patently obvious? He has to do several times as much work as any other player to make the game function at all, perhaps even as much as twice or more than all of the players combined. If you don't think that warrants getting a greater say in what goes on, I don't know what to tell you other than, "you won't enjoy sitting at my table."

If the DM gets more say because he does more work, shouldn't people who create more optimized characters get more screentime?

Frankly, I'm surprised that you simultaneously believe that a DM puts in so much work, and that he needs so much veto power. How are you crafting a complicated world that doesn't support open exploration? Just throwing Earth mythology in a blender supports open exploration.

I'm not advocating that the GM should ever run a "my way or the highway" game. That's a strawman - tyranny is as bad as anarchy.

You remember how literally every time someone brings up teleport, you trot out "the DM can prevent that for totally arbitrary non-reasons"? Because I do. The position you observably hold is that the DM should make up restrictions to block things that disrupt his plans. Platitudes don't change that.

The other alternative: he takes ALL the jobs, and only the interesting ones, i.e. the ones the DM planned, actually show up in a book.

There's literally an example of him passing on a job in the second or third book. Some guy asks him to kill an Easterner who's agitating for revolution, he says no.

[Elkad]

I prefer casters. Specifically Vancian casters. But it isn't about power. It's about options.

At first level, the wizard makes the orc fall down, and the fighter hits it with a stick.

At 7th level, the wizard can make the giant fall down, or set it on fire, or blind it, or entangle it, or summon a giant hand to grapple it, or charm it to fight for him, or turn invisible to sneak past it, or 30 other things. The fighter hits it with a stick. Probably the same color stick, he just hits harder now.


Skillmonkeys are fun for short games, or with enough money to UMD, well, everything. ToB classes are sorta there, but they need to be able to change their maneuvers/stances more often (like completely reselect them every morning). Warmages might as well be fighters, you use your deathrays from 1-20. Sorcerers are in here too, despite their power. Because their selection is too limited.

If a fighter could at least rebuild his feats/stats every day and switch from ubercharger to TWF to dungeoncrasher to mounted combat to archery, he'd be better. Not necessarily from a power standpoint, from a fun standpoint.

Given the choice between an 16th level Sorcerer and a 16th level Wizard/Cleric/MysticTheurge without any early entry tricks, I'll take the one with a billion spells known. Even if he is sporting 2+2 7th levels at the top of his list instead of 4 8ths.


I rarely play in games where if you die, you reroll. But I see the attraction. Too many builds are pigeonholed. Once you've played it into the sweet spot of the build, kill it off and try something different.
With a Wizard, you just pick new spells tomorrow and accomplish the same thing.

[Thurbane]

I'm not advocating that the GM should ever run a "my way or the highway" game. That's a strawman - tyranny is as bad as anarchy.

What I am saying is that providing a selection of routes to your players, and pre-emptively dissuading them from others, is good design. What I am saying is that "No" can be a reasonable response. What I am saying is that the GM's fun matters too, and that for many of us, the time investment required to devise a world with infinite an arbitrarily large number of permutations for every potential action the PCs could take is frequently not fun.

If I had room, I'd definitely sig this.

I agree 100%.

[Sagetim]

Just exactly what the thread title says!

Personally, I am going to sit back and watch.

EDIT: I am Sorry, I forgot to post the reason I am asking.

Do you honestly believe you can't contribute without spell casting or is it that you can't conceive of way to contribute without being able to cast spells?

I am working up a campaign world of my very own and REALLY thinking about limiting spell casting (magic in general).

I would really like to hear your opinions.

I was in a campaign where the starting party was level 3 and we weren't allowed any full casters. This meant no cleric, no wizard, etc. We had a duskblade, a spellthief (who later converted to pure rogue because we all realized that spellthief was terrible for the campaign as we weren't fighting nearly enough casters for it to be useful in it's niche), a Soulknife, and a Barbarian. Suffice to say, we were doing a lot of melee (and I was throwing my mindblade pretty often, with psionic shot being my level 3 feat). It became apparent early on that not having a source of reliable healing was going to get us murdered, straight up. So the GM acquiesed and allowed a new player that we brought in to play and archivist. It helped that he didn't really know how to do any of the book work associated with his class, and insisted on trying to shoot things with his gun. I say this helped because it meant the GM wasn't keyed off to how hilariously broken Archivist can get until much later. We were around level 6, my soul knife was starting into his prestige classes (first soulbow, then illumine soul, then most of the rest of soulbow). And we encountered our first midboss, wielding a magical sword with enough of an ego score that it was taking over people and making them wantonly slaughter people. After we defeated the Deathknight wielding the sword, and realized people picking it up were getting taken over, it fell to my character to hold onto it. Being the highest will character in the group (soulbow is wisdom based damage with it's ranged attack, and zen archery makes the attack also wisdom based, so the 17 I had rolled at the start went into wisdom, then the base class and both prestige classes are all high will save classes) this made sense.

This becomes relevant shortly. The Barbarian decided he was going to go so hard into another campaign direction when we got to a crossroads that his player literally left the party rather than stick with the group, expecting the GM to keep running side sessions just for him. That didn't happen. But what did happen is that the sword we were carrying was given a choice by an antagonist. It could have a sweet mithral golem body and be tasked with killing us all. With a combination of convincing the sword (who had a player by this point) that serving the man was the exact opposite that Blackrazor The King Killer should be doing, and that joining us would result in a lot of killing that he would get to do, we managed to win him onto our party. And didn't have to fight a hilariously unfair epic encounter that would have party wiped us for sure. For a while we had to keep finding him commoners to take over the bodies of, and he was statted as a pure Fighter, just with disposable low hp bodies of commoners. That got a bit silly, and eventually he got his own actual body and a real hp value for it.

Proceeding on from there, our party consisted of Duskblade, Soulknife, Fighter, Archivist, and Rogue for a long time. Eventually the rogue's player left the group, and we wound up having a few different people rotate through as 5th party members. At one point a Warlock (the GM's girlfriend, who was there for like, 2 game sessions), and after that a dual wielding blender rogue/knife master with the whole bluff as a free action make them eat sneak attacks all day thing going on. He was the rogue we had with us when we wound up in Super Hell. Not just regular Hell, but Super Hell. Where, in an encounter with Vrocks, I used a ring of telekinesis to throw him at a flying Vrock so he could melee it, and he hit it so hard that it started falling out of the sky, and he used it to surf down the side of a nearby nearly vertical spikey cliff face back to safety on the ground. This was also where we killed a balor in like, 2 rounds at the end (in part due to throwing 9 holy cold iron halberds at it with the ring of telekinesis, followed up by the fighter and duskblade blending it, and finishing with my character getting a crit on his greater psionic shot soul arrow attack). It proceeded to explode, the Fighter tanked the 100 hp damage and stood there like 'what', the duskblade evaded, and my character took it to the face, was reduced to negative numbers, then had his illumine soul, ability kick in, healing enough hp from the 5d8+5 that he god back up and terrified the poor demon that had been watching the confrontation.

So...yeah, this is the same game we hit level 18 and killed an Atropal before the end of round 2 in our final fight of the game. And that time we didn't even have the rogue anymore.

Oh, and we fought the most unfairly wet up dragon fight possible and annihilated it because the Archivist stunned it with Dark Knowledge, forcing it to land next to our melee brute squad of a Paladin (one of the rotating players), The Fighter, The Duskblade, The Rogue, and my soulknife filling it with mind arrows.

This campaign is why I always think people online underestimate the power of fighters and other melee classes. Because we took on regular challenges and decimated them without the help of a full arcane caster in our party at any time.

Now, that said, if you're going to do the same to your players make sure that they are okay with that. And make sure that they have access to classes that can heal worth a damn. If it's pathfinder, the paladin has decent healing options in the lay on hands/channel energy ability. In 3.5 they'll need something with a bit more oomph behind it's ability to heal things or a lot of secondary healer classes forming the core of their group. Because, as far as I recall, monsters are set up with the assumption that the party has healing resources at it's disposal. More than just those that can permanently deplete, like wands and potions.

Oh, and making the party fight wizards when they aren't allowed to have any can be hilarious. In one case, the fight started with the wizard in a room at the top of a tower. The rogue had spent this entire scene solid snaking her way up to that room to start a fight with the wizard, got a sneak attack off...then I used up the walls to run up the wall and in through the window and just chucked a two hander mindblade into his face for massive psionic shot damage and he was dead.

A fight with a higher level wizard resulted in our fighter soloing him to death with his charge/momentum swing/retributive strike great sword build. The wizard barely got some buffs out before his hp was gone and the fight was over. That wizard also made the tactical error of casting tenser's transformation and thinking it was going to turn the tide against our Fighter, Blackrazor The King Killer.

One thing that we did have going in our favor was the sword, Blackrazor. It was always a +4 greatsword artifact, so it was an unsunderable +4 weapon for our two handing fighter to murder stuff with. The GM was also a fan of the artifact from previous editions, so for a while it had some of the hilariously broken abilities, like granting temporary hit dice on kills and sensing life. It rather quickly lost the temp hit die thing when it became apparent how hilariously broken that was. But it kept the sensing life thing, which was cool, flavorful, and provided our front man with some perceptive abilities he wouldn't otherwise have.

I suppose what I'm saying is: Don't be afraid to give your players some cool items if you're going to take away full casters. The game can be pretty rough without full casters, be they arcane, divine, or psionic.

[Dagroth]

Cosi, you keep skipping the most relevant parts of my posts when you reply.

If you have 5 people wanting to play:
5 Players & no DM means... nothing really gets done. There's no story, there's no narrative. The only conflict comes from between the characters.
5 DMs & no Players means chaos. It means that everyone has too much control and there's no story, no narrative.
1 DM & 4 Players means there's a story... there's a narrative. There are goals (possibly multiple goals to choose from... multiple adventure hooks the players can pick from). Lots of things to do, but the DM still creates the story and the players progress it.

I would have to say, just from reading threads here and my own experiences at various tables & game shops...

75% of Table-top RPGs are run by a DM/GM telling the story and the players interacting with & progressing the story.
15% are just random dungeon crawls that are essentially players testing out character ideas while the DMs & players get more used to combat rules and unusual rules interactions.
The last 10% are where the DM just says "this is the world. Go."

[Lans]

Define subsystem.

Basically any ability that will require you to go read another section of the book or other books, outside of the basic rules needed to play the game.

I think the answer would be Rogue, ACF Barbarian, and Ninja which are high tier 4 and mid tier 4. Which I think says a lot about class balance in dnd

[Psyren]

Basically any ability that will require you to go read another section of the book or other books, outside of the basic rules needed to play the game.

I think the answer would be Rogue, ACF Barbarian, and Ninja which are high tier 4 and mid tier 4. Which I think says a lot about class balance in dnd

So you consider the magic chapter in the PHB to be a subsystem?

I'm not sure what the balance point is supposed to be either.

[ryu]

So you consider the magic chapter in the PHB to be a subsystem?

I'm not sure what the balance point is supposed to be either.

Magic is THE subsystem. The most important one, but it's still a subsystem.