Level Allowances still SUCK!

[Username17]

Even if she only kept four to five thousand commoners charmed at one time, thats way too much. Way too much.

Huh? A 9th level Wizard can planar bind about thirty succubi. Anything the Succubus can do out of combat a Conjurer can do thirty times over.

A 9th level character can have LandLord ad have their own Stronghold covered with peasants working for you. How is the ability to spend you every waking moment wanderig around keeping a small town magically enthralled a big deal at a character level when you can just plain own small towns?

Do you see the difference?

Yes, the Succubus can do in one step fully a small fraction of what any other spellcaster can do in three steps. Less bookkeeping and less power, I fail to see how this is a big dealio.

At all.

-Username17

[The_Hanged_Man]

1091461737[/unixtime]]

The other option is that you go through the nonstandard races and decide how many levels that race is worth. The advantage here is that it's quick, and probably can be done as races are proposed as characters. The problem is that it is abitrary by it's very nature (And therefore you're prone to finding out you guessed wrong), and what's balanced against other characters at level five may very well not be balanced against them at level fifteen, especally if you're playing a caster. It's very hard, in fact almost impoissable to make this actually work on any real timescale.

It's actually not all that quick. The thing is, that to make this work you actually need to bust out PrCs to advance these monsters into various character roles.

Far simpler, of course, would be to break the monsters themselves down into a few monstrous core classes that scaled up in CR and granted some selectable abilties. Once you've made it so that a Gorgon can be extrapolated from adding some levels to a Basilisk you'll be in a situation where the Basilisk is itself a playable character.

And then you could just create a "Friends and Foes" stat-block of a CR6 Basilisk, a CR10 basilisk, and so on. Not that complicated in theory.

But the big problem w/ monster "classes" is that it is virtually impossible to balance them after a while. There are so many "abilities" involved - and so many weird blends of "caster" and "fighter" and "thief" out there. You could break out basic "class" abilities like Demon, or Dragon, or Giant - but that doesn't get you to Succubus, or Retriever, and so on, "classes" that really have as much making them different as similar. Succubus would be, what, Demon+bard+caster, but very specific aspects of each one. And of course the caster levels don't follow anything like the class system. Complicated.

The other problem is that the "monster" balance system is totally different from the "class" balance system. Classes are balanced based on starting from nothing and graduaally adding cool stuff that builds on the prior stuff. Monsters, OTOH, just get ability X at a certain level and power. IOW, monsters as currently created are not scalable, and any attempt to make them scalable in a consistent way is going to run into inherent problems.

I just don't see a rational way to graft a "generaly" class system onto things that just get Unholy Word at a certain level.

[User3]

Frank,

So you're trying to say that a monster's ability can't be broken since a spellcaster can use a broken spell to summon and use said broken monster's abilities?

That's the worse argument I've ever heard, and I used to post on the WOTC boards.

[Username17]

Among other things. I actually don't think that the ability to charm 5,000 people is particularly broken. It's just the equivalent of having a big bonus to Diplomacy, which at 9th level you could just have.

Or having a bunch of mercenaries, which since you can have near limitless money at 9th level also isn't a big deal. Or owning the town, which at 9th level you can just do.

It would require a complete retooling of the entire game from top to bottom to keep people from having the practical benefits of charming the whole city at 9th level if that's what they want to do.

Going chicken little over the powers of a Succubus is completely pointless given the dozens of ways you can duplicate any possible game straining effects of such an act in the game already available to human characters.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1091465407[/unixtime]]
Even if she only kept four to five thousand commoners charmed at one time, thats way too much. Way too much.

So what? Seriously who cares... You've got them charmed for 7 days and you've got a lot of them... but they can't do shit for you.

The power in D&D is high level characters, not 10,000 commoners. And if you run around charming everyone in sight, you are eventually going to try it on a high level character, he's going to detect it and then he's going to come kill your succubus.

And even assuming you managed this huge army, you've still got to talk them into shit, remember to get charmed people to do stuff requires negotiation, it isn't like dominate where you just tell them what to do and they do it.

So your succubus would probably get killed before you got a whole town, and you can't do shit with peasants anyway... so what's the big deal?

[User3]

Controlling a town using money (not using some scheme requiring Plane Shift or Binding or Fabricate that ignores the realities of basic economic theory), or mercenaries, or Diplomacy requires real work and the possibility of failure or opposition, and there are things you can't buy and things you can't con people into and things people won't do even if you threaten them.

With a Succubus, she can use her big wang +13 to Cha checks vs the average commoner's +0 check to convince them to murder their babies, set the town on fire, or do any other "non-suicidal" but dangerous activity.
Sure, some high level guy might stop her eventually, but since she casts Charm Monster as a spell-like ability and commands with telepathy, the hero might know that someone cast a spell on him, he doesn't know who. The natural shapeshifting ability will serve as an excellent camo, and Teleport w/o Error is the perfect escape.

By the time the hero casts all the required divination spells and singles out the one succubus roaming the city, the city will be burned to the ground.

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Should a high level mage/character be able to control a town?

Sure, why not. It should be some kind of application coming off of a Limited Wish and it shoud cost a bunch of XP and it should be a whole "plot device" spell with RP restaints like "no 3 HD creature or PC is affected" and "a dozen virgins must be eaten by demons once a year," and all in all it should be a handled like any adventure plot hook to make it a viable story.

If a guy with Leadership brings his personal army w/ mercenaries from across the land into town there should be rebellions and militia and it should take weeks to take the town, and armies of the king should try and reconquer it and heroes and villains should hassle the invader and all in all its an adventure hook.

Taking an afternoon off to destroy a city befoire anyone can stop you is too powerful.

[Username17]

Taking an afternoon off to destroy a city befoire anyone can stop you is too powerful.

Too powerful for what exactly?

A 9th level Evoker can cast about 12 Fireballs in seventytwo seconds, if for some reason he wants to. I'm not saying that's the best thing he can do, actually he'd be way better off surrounding the village in four Walls of Fire, and then picking off stragglers with Magic Missiles. But it's not important.

If you are a 9th level character, you can work up your chi and level a small city in a couple of minutes if that's what you want to do. The Succubus is not the first, the last, or even the best character at doing that.

In fact, the only thing the Succubus really does well is run for office - which since this is generally a Feudal game is an ability which is somewhere between meaningless and completely without import.

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Woo-frickin-hoo. You can get people to start rioting. Or you can create a major image of a giant Flaming Pelor in the sky that demands the city be burned and evacuated at fifth level - that really ought to do it. Razing a city to the ground really spectacularly does not require even a 9th level character - that's why 6th level characters have BBEGs to fight.

Heck, the PCs are generally out there to stop people from destroying cities (which is, after all, difficult), rather than trying to destroy cities (as this is really easy and therefore not a meaningful challenge to build a story around). If the PCs, for whatever reason, want to be senselessly destructive, they can just do that. A 7th level wizard can cast Fly, Protection from arrows, and Fireshield, and simply land on every roof in the city in a couple of minutes - lighting the entire city on fire.

Terrorism is, even more so than in the real world, pointlessly simple to do. The only way to "stop players from doing it" is to have them play the heroes - the people trying to stop cities from being destroyed.

Your hand wringing over the fact that one 9th level character might also have the ability to get up one day and decide to destroy a town is puzzling more than anything else. Yeah, 9th level characters, especially magic characters, can destroy small towns pretty much at will if adventuring parties don't stop them. That's why adventuring parties always have stuff to do. That's why the player characters adventure.

-Username17

[User3]

Fire Shield shield doesn't work that way, unless you can get the rooftops to attack you in melee. Magic logic and all.

I think its to prevent you from killing your pals or youself from smoke inhalation when you cast it inside a wooden building or grassland or something.

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I'm not saying that 9th level guys are not powerful and that they can't do a lot of damage. I'm saying that it requires work and danger and once your have a "use any time you want" ability as powerful as Charm, you are opening yourself up for abuse.

A succubus can destroy a very large city with so little danger to itself that its crazy. An illusion of Pelor might cause some trouble as well, but since this is DnD and only a real minority of people worship Pelor(and they tend to be LG), I doubt that it would cause more than a minor disturbance. This is a world where people know that magic and illusions exist because sometimes mages fly by the pub for a pint.

Hell, after you kill the succubus, its Charmed minions will still be wreaking havoc. A simple "on Sunday, x days from now, burn your house and neighborhood down, and sneak around acting normally" means that after the fires start, after you hunt down the succubus and give her a righteous stabbin', you still have five thousand dudes to deal with. How many Dispels, or PfEs, do you have? Not enough, in my estimation, unless you summon an equally broken angel and have it run around dispelling everything around you.

Fireball is the same way. At six to 16 times a day, it can get pretty bad. At will, and add a little flying and teleporting(a la' pit fiend), and you could set the whole world on fire.

[Username17]

So a Succubus is an unbalanced character because at any time you can take a day off and get a cult of comoners for a week?



Oh man, that's hillarious. It's a cult of commoners. So fvcking what? It's not even a permanent cult of commoners. I mean, if your argument was that it made the game painfully binary, splitting the entire gamut of encounters into encounters that could be talked to (where you probably just win) and encounters that you can't (where you can't do much of anything) - then you'd have a leg to stand on. It's the basic story problem with all Bard-type characters.

But too powerful because they can, with just two die rolls and a minute's conversation get commoners to do whatever they want... that's just retarded. Completely retarded. It's god forsaken small folk you are talking about here, Fighters can push them around into fulfilling their dark will with Intimidate checks.

Yes, wooden cities are crazily easy to destroy. That's why at first level you have credible threats to the peace that the Player Characters can intervene against. You really don't need that much raw power to disrupt society - so pointing the finger and saying that such and such a character can disrupt society doesn't really say that much about their potential for raw power.

It's not that it means that they are or are not overpowered or anything - it simply doesn't mean anything at all. You can be a third level Wizard and destroy most medium towns by taking a good chunk of your wealth and investing it into a wand of fireballs. You could be a 6th level Half-Elven Bard and put all your feats into Skill Focus and Crazy Hook-Up Action on Diplomacy and do everything you just described only without bothering to allow people saving throws.

The ability to destroy cities is not hard to get and does not mean anything in the hands of player characters. Let's face it, every player character has the power to destroy the entire world by simply getting up and refusing to play anymore - and they can do that at first level regardless of race or class. What you are talking about is not a meaningful metric of anything at all.

-Username17

[User3]

Once again, Frank, you've displayed an ignorance of the rules.

As per the 3.5 SRD, Charm spells require an opposed Cha check when you make commands, not a Diplomacy check. So it takes 6 seconds, and anyone who can hear you can be commanded. Massive ranks in Diplomacy don't help at all with Cha checks, as per the description of Diplomacy.

Diplomacy also only allows limited actions if you get them to helpful, which are: "Protect, back up, heal, aid." It doesn't have the blanket statement like Charm that allows you to make people do things they would not ordinarily do(although, I will admit that its a judgement call on the part of the DM). An uber-Half-elf is just a guy that has friends, not the fanatical cultists granted by a Charm.

Intimidate will also only get people to friendly, which is: "Chat, advise, offer limited help, advocate." That's not Charm at all.

And sure, a Wand of Fireballs is pretty bad. A fanatical army of thousands, each day, is worse. Even if the heroes just murder the thousands of peasants burning the city, the Succubus has still caused thousands to die. And she can do it every day, all day since she doesn't sleep, and cause nigh unlimited damage. Since she has telepathy, heroes won't even have a visual description to use for Scry spells.

PCs can't do that. Every PC ability they have has a limit. Even fighters have a HP limit, which is why fast healing and regeneration is not an ability often given to PCs(and its always broken when it is). Mages run out of slots and spells have durations(with some exceptions, like druid shapechanging).

[RandomCasualty]

From the PHB, charm person.
"The spell does not enable you to control the charmed person as if it were an automaton,"

You are way overrating charm person and what it can do. There is no time specified for how long the charisma check takes, and as with any social action, the DM can pretty much choose an appropriate amount of time. Charm does not create any kind of fanatical cult. It just makes people friendly and makes them take what you say in the most favorable way.

It's going to take you a while to convince those commoners to do much of anything, especially if you're asking them to fight (considering they don't even know how). While your charisma check will inevitably succeed, the DM is perfectly within his rights to say it takes a while. I mean if your best friend suddenly asked you to kill someone or light fire to someone's house, you aren't going to just say "yes" without asking a hell of a lot of follow up questions.

And even if you do go by your interpretation of the spell which makes it more powerful than dominate, what exactly are you going to have them do that'd be so broken? I mean seriously... they're commoners. We're talking worse than a goblin here.

[User3]

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

Making people "do anything it wouldn't ordinarily do" seems to be a pretty broad mandate. Just because its not an automation just means when you tell someone to murder their mother, they get to choose the weapon.

[canamrock]

And that proves that monsterous races are not designed with the intent of being used by PC's. This is one of the two reasons LA exists - to make sure abilities that are 'at will' which get used maybe a few times per encounter at most cannot be so easily abused when given to a PC present at all encounters. The designers could have just put a limit onto how many times per day they could be used, or just given it caster levels and spell slots, but meh.

One of the easiest ways to make 'monster PCs' could be to make something akin to the SS template. However, it would instead use a normal +0 racial package, class levels in real classes (some of which could be special classes for race groups), and special feats to replicate their abilities.

As an example, if you look at the powers of a Nymph, it is is several important ways similar to a Druid 7 / Paladin 2 / Monk 2. Even more than the alignment restrictions, however, there are several differences in abilities. So, a Nymph might get +2 Cha, -2 Str, and a couple of other minor things. The normal nymph takes her first 7 levels in Druid, which could be forced here or not. Make three special racial feats for her Blinding Beauty, Stunning Glance, and Unearthly Grace. If those feats are not powerful enough, it's possible to merge with existing feats so that gaining those powers doesn't cause her to fall so far behind in the feat scaling chain.

If all monster become that sort of packaging together of class and power feat parts, converting them over as characters becomes a non-task. It does hurt in some way a DM's ability to tweak values about (if he goes by the book), but it makes monster creation a lot easier for new DM's as well.

[The_Hanged_Man]

I agree w/ Canamrock. Most monsters are incompatible w/ any class-based system. They're a random accumulation of sucky and cool powers. And that's all they are, not a rational build-up of levels gradually getting stronger.

You could, however, make many monsters "classable" using either templates, or a level system.

[Username17]

As per the 3.5 SRD, Charm spells require an opposed Cha check when you make commands, not a Diplomacy check.

I'm displaying a lack of familiarity with the rules?

Ha! The Charisma check is the same charisma check defined in adjusting NPC attitudes (DMG), which in turn is substitutable by a Diplomacy check. Which, since Diplomacy is usable untrained, makes that "Charisma Check" exactly the same as a Diplomacy check in all ways.

Which is just a case of bad editting and cross referencing. You shouldn't have to go from the spell description in the PHB to the NPC interaction section of the DG and then to the Diplomacy skill description in the PHB to figure out that they are talking about a Diplomacy check - but noone ever accused Andy of having a good organizational sense.

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This is one of the two reasons LA exists - to make sure abilities that are 'at will' which get used maybe a few times per encounter at most cannot be so easily abused when given to a PC present at all encounters.

That's pretty funny. All LA apologizing aside, I don't buy it.

There's nothing that slapping a LA on will stop something from being "abused". Ever. If something is actually unbalanced through recursivity, it's going to be unbalanced regardless of what level you are. In short, the fact that 3.5 Simulacrum scales slower and now grants unlimited power at 19th level instead of 13th level doesn't make it "balanced" - it just makes it unbalanced at a higher character level.

The fact that unlimited Charm Monster is not unbalanced is beside the point. If it were, Level Adjustment wouldn't help in any way, it would just mean that the character would be forced to "abuse" their powers on account of being too sucktastic in all other level scaling ways.

Level Adjustment has absolutely no effect on the abilities it is supposedly in there to "balance" - it only prevents you fro having other abilities. So if you were at all worried about an "at-will" ability becoming a story-dominating one-trick-pony, well congratufvckinglations: you just took away all their other abilities. Self fulfilling prophecy in action.

Regardless of whether a character is overpowering or not, Level Allowance guarantees the character will be a one note song.

-Username17

[User3]

It sounds like a Frank-ism.

I'd don't have my copy of the DMG on the table, so unless the DMG specifically says that Diplomacy can be substituted for any Cha check, or for a Charm Cha check, it sounds like you're making things up. I do know that the SRD doesn't say anything about it, and close doesn't count in this case. Just because it sounds like they might be talking about the same doesn't mean that they are.

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If the monsters weren't unbalanced, everyone would loose half their battles vs an equal foe and and no one would ever be scared of a less than powerful foe. Glass jawed monsters with big sticks mean that things feel powerful, even when they are weak like biatches.

Big sticks also mean that people feel like the monster is powerful when they gang-bang it with four to one odds.

And so they make crap PCs. All the monsters have often glaring weaknesses combined with 1-2 tricks that are far too powerful to put in hands of PCs.

[RandomCasualty]

1091486262[/unixtime]]
Making people "do anything it wouldn't ordinarily do" seems to be a pretty broad mandate. Just because its not an automation just means when you tell someone to murder their mother, they get to choose the weapon.

Yeah, so apparently you're going to convince someone in 6 seconds to turn against everything they believe in just because you said so. If that isn't acting like an automaton I dunno what is.

Social checks are not going to be instantaneous, They take time. If your best friend came up to you and asked you to kill someone, you will ask for a reason, and make them explain the whole thing, and that's going to take time. They may end up convincing you or they may not, but you won't just be able to do get everything done in 6 seconds. If you don't ask follow up questions then you are an automaton, and the spell description clearly states the spell does not do that.

[canamrock]

1091488675[/unixtime]]Ha! The Charisma check is the same charisma check defined in adjusting NPC attitudes (DMG), which in turn is substitutable by a Diplomacy check. Which, since Diplomacy is usable untrained, makes that "Charisma Check" exactly the same as a Diplomacy check in all ways.

Uhm... the opposed Charisma check in the spell is not the same thing as a Diplomacy check. The part from page 128 is worked in the opposite direction what you're saying it is: it says you'd make a Diplomacy check to influence someone (non-magically), using a Charisma check if the player has no ranks in Diplomacy, which is redundant since making an untrained Diplomacy check does that anyways. Only mistake there is the unnecessary redundancy for the Cha check part there.

1091488675[/unixtime]]

This is one of the two reasons LA exists - to make sure abilities that are 'at will' which get used maybe a few times per encounter at most cannot be so easily abused when given to a PC present at all encounters.

That's pretty funny. All LA apologizing aside, I don't buy it.

I never said I agreed with that logic... just stating a fact of design intent. Allowing it earlier ensures that using the power abusively will be more devastating in comparison with other party members. Giving it out later at the loss of other abilities just makes the PC suffer in order to make that power less devastating compared to the other party members. Just to note, the other reason for LA is to make sure that players will not choose unusual PC's as often, since if all characters are equally viable, the settings would have to answer why some races are so inherently beaten down, despite being equally powerful with PC races. (Again, not my idea, and I don't even like it, but this is pretty much a fundamental design intent.)