Mook-only Magic

[virgil]

There are spells like sleep that cap out a fairly low HD before becoming obsolete. A dragon's frightful presence will panic those of relatively low HD. The effects of blasphemy indirectly do this, but have the bottom scale upward.

How good of an idea is it to rely on this mechanic?

[Lokathor]

It's great, because it lets player feel strong and good about their characters to have mook-clearing magic while not pushing their ability to fight level-appropriate foes up into the "too good" category.

[ishy]

It is great at low levels and against players (and their summoned allies), but it quickly falls apart on the player side.

The two biggest reasons:
1: the amount of hit dice monsters have don't match up to their CR.
2: you can't really tell how much hit dice a creature has, thus your action is potentially wasted if you try your spell with a hit dice limit.

[DSMatticus]

Technically, one of those things is not like the other. Spells like sleep have their effect determined by level, while spells like blasphemy have their effect determined by relative level (frightful presence falls in this camp as well).

I wish more abilities worked like that (edit: based on relative level, I mean). And by more, I mean "all of them." Finger of death will rot a mook away to nothing in an instant, but against the big bad it's just level appropriate damage and a debuff. Dominate person might give you a round of limited control over the big bad, but a mook will dedicate the rest of the week to catching arrows for you with his face.

[Dogbert]

The issue here is how do you define a "mook" in a zero-to-hero game? You'd have to grab a page from 4E.

[Dogbert]

( double post, apologies )

[Swok]

I'd imagine you'd define it based on relative level kind of like how blasphemy kills you dead if you are sufficiently lower level than the caster and if you are closer it is a disable instead.

[tussock]

The mechanic makes a lot of story-sense and takes away a lot of problem tactics.

Like in AD&D a bunch of monsters have powers that make them functionally immune to low level armies and able to manipulate the town elders or whatever without saves. Get past the town guard to sneak in without saves. Powers that are 100% functional for the background story of why they matter but can't hurt the PCs at all.

Demon lords and such are immune to low level spells and low-plus magic items so they can waltz through your town or army and not suffer the death of a thousand needles. It's a giant "you must be this tall to ride" and it's kinda cool when you are just that tall (and fucking terrible when you aren't, so don't do that).

Where in 5e there's a tough monster so you hire an army of archers and it dies in one round. Or the enemy hires a score of 1st level Wizards and you just lose.

I wish more abilities worked like that (edit: based on relative level, I mean).

Meh. Even if you fix all the ways that's broken, a lot of abilities are thematically more suited to dealing with large populations of 0-level people and not at all suited to doing so against Giants, even when you're high enough level that Giants aren't a meaningful challenge. If anything, stuff should just get better at taking out more zero-level people. Put a whole city to sleep, but still not the captain of the guard and major NPCs.

[Username17]

Just gotta point out: Blasphemy is literally the most problematic attack spell in the entire game. So I'm openly dubious about people claiming that generalizing its effects to other spells is a good idea.

-Username17

[virgil]

I was under the impression that blasphemy's issues were from the effects being tied to level, while something like sleep & power word (death) have invariable upper caps on their effects. A dragon's frightful presence does scale, but only with the minor effect, while the more severe effect stays at a flat 5HD.

One could also make the argument that no-save action AoE stuns are problematic regardless of the circumstances.

[Omegonthesane]

Would the Wish & the Word have worked if Blasphemy was tied to caster HD or caster CR instead of caster level?

[Lokathor]

Just gotta point out: Blasphemy is literally the most problematic attack spell in the entire game. So I'm openly dubious about people claiming that generalizing its effects to other spells is a good idea.

-Username17

You say that it's the most problematic spell, but then the build's progression section starts with "Using the magic of the Thought Bottle", and the Items of Note section finally ends with having 18 Orange Ioun Stones which all stack because of untyped bonus. Plus all the other crazy bullshit in the middle.

The Sublime Chord resets all of your arcane caster levels to the sum of all of your arcane caster levels. So in this case, since The Word has 8 separate Arcane Spellcasting classes with a caster level of 11. If he pulls an Orange Ioun Stone out of his pocket, all 8 classes increase by one, and all eight of them are set to the new sum – of 12. Repeat this with 17 more Stones, and we get a grant total of 28 for all his classes. The Ur Priest, which The Word can use as if he had all 10 levels of it thanks to his “Recall Class Features” ability of the Emancipated Spawn class, takes as its caster level half the sum of all other caster levels. In this case, that's half of eight times 28, which is 112, plus a base caster level of 10. So The Word casts all Arcane Spells at level 28, and all Divine spells at level one hundred and twenty-two.

Blasphemy is hardly the culprit here, it's just a showy finish compared to that.

[Red_Rob]

Probably, there are some bullshit ways to accumulate usually useless monster HD (and therefore probably CR) using Shapechange tricks and Barghests / Shambling Mounds. Bards Inspire Greatness could allow some funkiness too.

Really, at the point W&W came about there were too many holes in the system to lock them all down. You needed to design your system so that Caster Level==Character level from the ground up for the Blasphemy paradigm to work and they just weren't rigorous enough about it from the start.

[Username17]

Neither caster levels nor hit dice have any especially fixed relationship with power. Comparing one to the other to see if you automatically win is bullshit. The Word uses Blasphemy because it's so fucking obviously and hilariously broken. It uses a completely arbitrary and insane formula to determine if an enemy is a trash mob or not, and if they are (according to its arbitrary and insane formula) it murders them without a saving throw. That is completely fucked.

-Username17

[GreatGreyShrike]

In general, I don't think I've ever seen any real and concrete benefits from spells referencing a creature's HD in any way. Whether it's polymorphing or otherwise getting abilities from something with low HD for it's CR and abilities, or Turn Undead not scaling properly without massive boosts from items and so forth because undead hit dice go up way faster than level, in pretty much all cases it ends up feeling arbitrary and really weird. I think using a number that's explicitly supposed to be about the creature's power (CR) seems more likely to give reasonable results - even though as we all know CRs are occasionally really badly messed up, e.g. the Giant Crab. at least they are supposed to be the correct number, while basing things off HD is just sort of laughable when CR 4 includes a wyvern zombie at 14 dice and a pixie with 1 die. If there are creatures at low CR who are supposed to be immune to sleep and highly resistant to color spray just continue to include that in their subtype or creature abilities as appropriate.

I am not sure anything good ever came out of having characters with a caster level that is not their character level for spell effects. Was there any benefits for allowing that at all? As far as I can tell the idea that caster level might not be character level is solely to make people with offensive spells at a low spellcaster level not actually have those spells for most purposes against level-appropriate opposition, which is not really a thing I think that needs to be done as we are mostly talking about screwing people who prestige into a spellcaster class that give terrible advancement like core Assassin or have a base class that gets minor spellcasting like rangers, etc. The only actual benefit I can think of is that it allows you to have more treasure that your party Wizard will care about than just +Int headwear and spellbooks, and it allows you to print feats that give spellcaster levels for certain circumstances (that your players will work out how to have happen at all times) - but of course if you actually start handing out lots of Wizard +caster level gear and lots of feats that do the same and letting it all stack the game will of course break in half even more so than it does already, so that seems to be a quite marginal benefit considering the cost.

If you were making a game from scratch, I don't think either mechanics where your spell's caster level is not your character level or where your spells effects directly scale based on a number that is extremely loosely correlated to enemy power instead of one that is supposed to be exactly enemy power are super well thought out starting points.

[BearsAreBrown]

One of the many other problems with basing abilities on HD is that they are totally disconnect from ingame power. Mooks aren't mooks if you don't think they're mooks. And a level 4 party shouldn't treat a Pixie as a mook if it's CR appropriate either.

[DSMatticus]

Just gotta point out: Blasphemy is literally the most problematic attack spell in the entire game. So I'm openly dubious about people claiming that generalizing its effects to other spells is a good idea.

-Username17

I don't think anyone's confused about that. Neither HD nor CL are reliable indicators of what level a creature is, and if you wanted to calculate the relative level between two creatures you would not use either of those numbers. You would use CR and hope for the best.

[hogarth]

2: you can't really tell how much hit dice a creature has, thus your action is potentially wasted if you try your spell with a hit dice limit.

This. In my experience, whenever a GM is asking "Why don't my players do X more?", 9 times out of 10 the answer is "Because the players don't have the same information that the GM does".

I'd rather go with something like 4E or M&M has: give minions a tiny amount of HP and then every spell is a mook-destroying spell.

[Lokathor]

Yeah I figured this was more of a "If you were designing a game from scratch" type of question so that you can make HD = Caster Level = Character Level = Power Rating. I suppose I should have mentioned that.

Adding more abilities to Tome directly without updating HD and Caster Level to be more closely linked to Character Level would be a mistake, yes.

I'd rather go with something like 4E or M&M has: give minions a tiny amount of HP and then every spell is a mook-destroying spell.

The problem with this route is that this is pretty immersion/simulation breaking.

[hogarth]

The problem with this route is that this is pretty immersion/simulation breaking.

Just about every action genre has chumps that go down with one punch/bullet/grenade/sword thrust/whatever. I would even go so far as to say that most action games are "simulation breaking" if you can't knock a chump out with one attack.

[Username17]

The problem with this route is that this is pretty immersion/simulation breaking.

Just about every action genre has chumps that go down with one punch/bullet/grenade/sword thrust/whatever. I would even go so far as to say that most action games are "simulation breaking" if you can't knock a chump out with one attack.

The problem of course is that D&D is also the high fantasy zero to hero genre. Which means that while there are chumps that go down in one hit (indeed, lots of them), there are still people in the world to whom they are not chumps and don't go down in one hit. That's why the "minion rules" in 4e are so insulting and terrible even though they are almost the same thing (and written by the same man) as the "mook rules" in Feng Shui which were reasonably well received.

Take a look at a book series like the Wheel of Time, because it's so exactly patterned off of D&D. The Trollocs (Orcs) become mooks that go down in one hit or even in vast swathes to explosion magic or whirlwind attacks pretty quickly. But they don't start as mooks, in the first book just one of them is a serious threat to our apprentice level heroes. The Myrddral (Nazgul) spend several books being pretty bad ass, although eventually the main character blows up lots of them as an afterthought with a single spell. And most importantly of all: when the various Shadowspawn expire as a meaningful threat for the main character, they continue to be threatening to other characters in the books. There are people who can't one-shot a Mutddral or even a Trolloc even quite deep into the series, and that's actually important.

It's important and necessary that Orcs who show up as mooks in a D&D game do not have "one hit point," they have "less hit points than your fireballs and blade rushes dish out." 4e's minion rules were genre breaking and offended people because of it.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Yeah but that's like 4e and that sounds dumb. The games you're talking about probably don't involve moving between the power tiers as much as dnd does. Or they just don't sound like games I'd wanna play. Either one.

It's fine for that to happen at any particular point, but if you level up then the old foes need to go down fast, and if you change around their mechanics instead of just having higher level attacks be more bad ass then that upsets the simulation. Just having guys that die easy is fine. Having 1HD kobolds is okay. Having 6HD Minotaurs go from "guy that has stats" to "guy that just auto falls over in one hit" is what's bad.

Edit: Damn, ninja'd.

[hogarth]

That's why the "minion rules" in 4e are so insulting and terrible even though they are almost the same thing (and written by the same man) as the "mook rules" in Feng Shui which were reasonably well received.

So use the mook rules from Feng Shui. Problem solved!

[DSMatticus]

That's why the "minion rules" in 4e are so insulting and terrible even though they are almost the same thing (and written by the same man) as the "mook rules" in Feng Shui which were reasonably well received.

So use the mook rules from Feng Shui. Problem solved!

I can't tell if that was really funny or really dumb.

[Zaranthan]

I always liked the Assassination mechanic from the Exile games by Spiderweb Software. When attacking a lower-level enemy, you had a chance to do something like quadruple damage.