Jonathan_Drain wrote:
Were it my choice, I'd immediately step in and say "Look, you can't do that. If you can do that, you can get plus a zillion to Bluff, Diplomacy and Intimidate and run around doing epic Bluffs all day."
Of course, most people aren't me,
I'd really like to think that most people are you, at least in this scenario. I shudder to think that some DMs are willing to allow loopholes they know are broken simply because it's RAW. To me, part of DMing is putting your foot down when someone is going to utterly ruin the game, the rules be damned. If someone doesn't have the balls to say, "I am the law. I don't care what the book says, that doesn't work." then they shouldn't be sitting in a DM chair.
If any of those "Designer X is a moron" threads should have proven, it's that the designers make a ton of mistakes. Why anyone would follow them with blind faith is beyond me. Total internal consistency isn't a fair trade for a shitty game.
But the major rules abuses I don't really consider much of a threat, mainly because everyone can see they're insane. You don't have huge arguments whether the Word, the Wish or the hulking hurler is broken. Because you don't need to.
Fixing them is certainly another matter... but not all that difficult really. I generally don't have trouble fixing infinite loops mostly because I find the abuse tends to be rather obvious.
The real danger lies in stuff that isn't obviously broken, but is merely numerically overpowered. Because this stuff even the experienced DM may never see, and even when he finally does realize it, figuring out what you need to fix and how to fix it is very difficult.
I'm talking about stuff like 3.0 haste/harm/heal, polymorph effects, spikes, pounce, deadly charge, Quillblast, deathless frenzy, starmantle and so on.
These things are a heck of a lot more complicated. Because you don't immediately know its broken, or if it is, why. And fixing abilities like that is extremely tough. And it's where I think the web starts to break down as a DM aid tool, because people have trouble even agreeing there is an imbalance, let alone trying to find a way to fix it.
See, with polymoph or wild shape, nobody is going down to baator at level 10 and soloing Asmodeus. You don't see the game totally fall apart, but balance has certainly been disrupted. And these are the kinds of topics that are most important, the ones that could imbalance normal games, and the ones the casual DM may just not notice and let past. This is where rules discussions should be focused. Not on infintie loops and bag of rats tricks that no DM is going to let in his game anyway.
