Dumb Wizard Tricks

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Apr 10, 2018 2:27 am

I would be super into a game about a wizard academy rivalry and pissing contest over stupid wizard tricks.

erik · Post by **erik** » Tue Apr 10, 2018 4:41 am

I think players would be totally fine if over time you had the rest of the world learning about their deeds and tricks. Maybe they overhear one of their porters bragging over drinks at the tavern about how his masters owned some band of orcs. Months later word spreads and they might start hearing about some progressive wizard's academy changing their curriculum to include the latest tricks from the field.

Having some random off screen bumbfuck cleric do multiple divinations to investigate the death of some orcs is just stupid bullshit and players ought call their MC on it. Unless your campaign world has a fucking deity whose followers are CSI cults (which, actually, it totally should), then no, that's just MC being a wank.

I'm not really moved by your "1,2,3,4,5" scenarios Nockermensch, they're either never going to happen, non-problem, or non-sequitur. I've never seen any reasonable player or MC allow planar time stream manipulation (unless the game is totally broke and you're fucking around), or saying that your first 100 years of elf life were spent preparing 3rd level spells.

I have no problem with spending 6 months to make 2 book bombs. You should be able to do cool stuff with your downtime, and I wish more games had that downtime hard-coded in. I actually had a character in one campaign who was throwing leftover daily spells into a collection of explosive runes. We were house ruling that you could use subdual spell on Explosive Runes, so his was a non-lethal book bomb, but yeah.

Pariah Dog · Post by **Pariah Dog** » Tue Apr 10, 2018 4:42 am

Prak wrote:I would be super into a game about a wizard academy rivalry and pissing contest over stupid wizard tricks.

Frat wizards.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Apr 10, 2018 4:50 am

erik wrote:I have no problem with spending 6 months to make 2 book bombs. You should be able to do cool stuff with your downtime, and I wish more games had that downtime hard-coded in. I actually had a character in one campaign who was throwing leftover daily spells into a collection of explosive runes. We were house ruling that you could use subdual spell on Explosive Runes, so his was a non-lethal book bomb, but yeah.

Also, let's be serious for a minute, imagine what you could do with, instead of 300 3rd level spells, 300 DIVINATIONS.

A thing which you can technically bullshit at 3rd level on every Wizard.

I feel like the marginal utility of that MIGHT be better.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Apr 10, 2018 5:25 am

erik wrote: Unless your campaign world has a fucking deity whose followers are CSI cults (which, actually, it totally should)

"I can't tell you what happened, officer: we left him to do research and then there was this explosion. He said he was just going to hit the books."

"Well it looks like..."

shades.gif

"...the books hit back."

YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Tue Apr 10, 2018 6:46 am

Kaelik wrote:Also, let's be serious for a minute, imagine what you could do with, instead of 300 3rd level spells, 300 DIVINATIONS.

In theory, a hell of a lot. In practice ... maaaybe, but it's highly dependent on MC, and requires either annoying all the other players or having enough time to do it between sessions.

Divination spells in general, used systematically, could dig up huge amounts of information about people, places, things, etc in the world, and probably have the greatest potential for taking over the world at low-mid level. But that's virtually never a thing that happens in campaigns, for several reasons:
* MC may cock-block it because it's too powerful.
* Or may just not want to spend hours figuring out details that weren't previously necessary.
* Or simply has no idea how to reasonably adjudicate it and rules in a way that makes it useless.
* Or does the reverse, you become ruler of the world in short order, and the campaign ends because nobody knows where to go from there.
* Or calls your bluff and makes you spend hours going through each question and watching surveillance of ordinary NPC life in full detail like you were a bored NSA agent.

That said, I think a game that was actually geared around the divination thing - probably PbP, because the GM will need time to think of details - could be interesting. Say the players are all mages arriving on a new world (or waking from a thousand-year slumber, whatever), and it's about using divinations and deploying minions to learn about the world and start some machinations. Dunno if D&D would end up being the best system for it or not though.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Tue Apr 10, 2018 6:23 pm

erik wrote:I think players would be totally fine if over time you had the rest of the world learning about their deeds and tricks. Maybe they overhear one of their porters bragging over drinks at the tavern about how his masters owned some band of orcs. Months later word spreads and they might start hearing about some progressive wizard's academy changing their curriculum to include the latest tricks from the field.

Well, yes. Then the next campaign (do you guys also use persistent campaign worlds to save yourselves the trouble of creating lots of maps/countries/gods again and again, right? Right?) comes around and wizards are log throwing ninjas.

Having some random off screen bumbfuck cleric do multiple divinations to investigate the death of some orcs is just stupid bullshit and players ought call their MC on it. Unless your campaign world has a fucking deity whose followers are CSI cults (which, actually, it totally should), then no, that's just MC being a wank.

I hadn't even considered an independent agency investigating the PCs actions. My idea is that villains in many cases ARE spellcasters, and then they should do some due diligence before appearing and having the combat music start.

I have no problem with spending 6 months to make 2 book bombs. You should be able to do cool stuff with your downtime, and I wish more games had that downtime hard-coded in. I actually had a character in one campaign who was throwing leftover daily spells into a collection of explosive runes. We were house ruling that you could use subdual spell on Explosive Runes, so his was a non-lethal book bomb, but yeah.

More downtime should be an absolute requirement, specially as the PCs rise in level. Both because not doing that screws with people who took item crafting feats and because we want to avoid people going from zero to god in like 6 months, for world coherence reasons.

That being said, the game expects that in 180 days, a spellcaster can prepare 5 items that grant a +6 bonus to a stat (for an effective +3 on rolls you care about) or about 3 +5 weapons. Or, you know, make 90 +1 weapons, or 180 cloaks of resistance +1, if this is something they want to do. The problem with a book bomb is that it uses the time that should be legitimally used for modest increases to the character's stats to completely fuck up the action economy: you're essentially finding a way to cast ALL THE FIREBALLS EXPLOSIVE RUNES with one action. This is way more burst damage than the game is prepared to deal with, at the cost of one downtime declaration. It's sad.

Iduno · Post by **Iduno** » Tue Apr 10, 2018 8:54 pm

Launch Item(MoF p105) – Hurls Fine-sized item (10 pounds or less) up to 400’ + 40’ per level.

What's the price on a 10 lb rock (or a 1 lb rock), and what's the falling damage for 400 feet at 1st level?

To be fair, the bolt thing is a cantrip, so it's that much more impressive.

Also, this thread is about stupid things that happen because spells + creativity, not necessarily "crap I've tried to pull in-game."

Fwib · Post by **Fwib** » Thu Apr 12, 2018 3:21 pm

Re: Divination - a few times in one campaign, we used one of those yes/no divinations iteratively on a map to determine where the thing we were looking for was - I guess we decided that wasn't fun, since it didn't happen any more after that.

Zaranthan · Post by **Zaranthan** » Thu Apr 12, 2018 3:50 pm

Fwib wrote:Re: Divination - a few times in one campaign, we used one of those yes/no divinations iteratively on a map to determine where the thing we were looking for was - I guess we decided that wasn't fun, since it didn't happen any more after that.

Well, actually playing that out on-camera would be an exercise in tedium. If you simply established the pattern and the DM said "okay, 37 days later, you get a yes," that would make me feel good as a diviner.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Apr 12, 2018 5:09 pm

Zaranthan wrote:
Fwib wrote:Re: Divination - a few times in one campaign, we used one of those yes/no divinations iteratively on a map to determine where the thing we were looking for was - I guess we decided that wasn't fun, since it didn't happen any more after that.
Well, actually playing that out on-camera would be an exercise in tedium. If you simply established the pattern and the DM said "okay, 37 days later, you get a yes," that would make me feel good as a diviner.

I did it once to narrow down where a vampire was hiding in a city to a few city blocks. It wasn't that tedious. It took a couple of minutes or so, and then I had a direction to go, which seemed infinitely better than "There's a vampire in the city. Wat do?"

Dividing a city into subsequent halves to narrow down a search doesn't seem like that abusable or even lame of an application of a bunch of binary questions. It's not the same as trying to set a bunch of bit flags to get a single number as a "single" answer to a bunch of questions. That actually seems lame and not genre appropriate.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Wed May 02, 2018 4:15 pm

Hicks wrote:To be absolutely fair, it just means that Tippiverses don't exist and the campaign world actually takes place on a plane of the abyss, because all the others were destroyed. The only safe space is being mind blanked inside a magnificent mansion with 9' ceilings.

I mean, that's what infinity means; if it ever could happen it is happening an infinite number of times for every infinite fraction of a second since the beginning of time.

This is a mathematical fallacy. Just because something is infinite, and even if it is non-repeating, nothing in particular ever needs to happen. There are an infinite number of alternatives.

If I started to transcribe the digits of pi but skipped writing every numeral 4, I would still be writing an infinitely long, non-repeating, irrational string, but it would never ever contain my phone number.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Thu May 03, 2018 12:32 am

Eikre wrote:
Hicks wrote:I mean, that's what infinity means; if it ever could happen it is happening an infinite number of times
If I started to transcribe the digits of pi but skipped writing every numeral 4, I would still be writing an infinitely long, non-repeating, irrational string, but it would never ever contain my phone number.

He said anything that could happen would, you responded by saying if an infinite number couldn't contain a 4 then it wouldn't contain a 4. You altering the rules of what can happen doesn't address his statement about how things that can happen will happen.

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Thu May 03, 2018 12:57 am

Dean wrote:
Eikre wrote:
Hicks wrote:I mean, that's what infinity means; if it ever could happen it is happening an infinite number of times
If I started to transcribe the digits of pi but skipped writing every numeral 4, I would still be writing an infinitely long, non-repeating, irrational string, but it would never ever contain my phone number.
He said anything that could happen would, you responded by saying if an infinite number couldn't contain a 4 then it wouldn't contain a 4. You altering the rules of what can happen doesn't address his statement about how things that can happen will happen.

His first bit that you deleted is true though. If something can happen, it does not mean it will necessarily happen even with infinite resources. The probability will always be approaching 1, but it will actually be 0,99(9)%, meaning there's always a minuscle chance it does not happen.

Like the very universe we live in is only possible because of a bunch of universal constants just happen to align in just the right way. If either was even a bit different, then you couldn't even have atoms. Assuming infinite parallel universes theories, we're the stupidly lucky ones that got the right combination of universal constants and that they stayed, well, constant.

Or how an infinite hotel can never be filled even if you bring in infinity times infinite guests.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Thu May 03, 2018 9:18 am

Dean wrote:
Eikre wrote:
Hicks wrote:I mean, that's what infinity means; if it ever could happen it is happening an infinite number of times
If I started to transcribe the digits of pi but skipped writing every numeral 4, I would still be writing an infinitely long, non-repeating, irrational string, but it would never ever contain my phone number.
He said anything that could happen would, you responded by saying if an infinite number couldn't contain a 4 then it wouldn't contain a 4. You altering the rules of what can happen doesn't address his statement about how things that can happen will happen.

I'm not actually setting a "rule," as such, I'm just creating an arbitrary number and demonstrating that this particular number is infinite and non-repeating even though we can't sit down and audit it digit-by-digit. Granted, it's a specific number that suits my purposes, but there's no reason that it couldn't also be result of an RNG. It's absolutely possible to start rolling on a conventional d10, transcribe the results, and end up writing out the digits of my number for the rest of all time without ever deviating from it.

The mere fact that you know that it's possible to observe a 4 in any particular infinitely long, non-repeating string of digits does not mean that there is a mathematical certainty that your RNG will ever actually get around to it. The mere fact that it's possible for some particular occurrence to happen in an infinitely-large, endlessly original universe does not mean there's a mathematical certainty that the universe will ever actually be host to that occurrence. It is almost certainly true that it will occur, but it's not a necessary predicate to qualify as infinite in scope and novelty.

Infinity just simply doesn't mean that all possible things must necessarily happen. Infinity means that there is always some other alternative to a particular thing happening.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Thu May 03, 2018 2:01 pm

Hilbert's hotel isn't a paradox, it must take infinite time to empty room 1, because information only travels at the speed of light and so takes forever to propagate through all the rooms and actually free up room 1 to accommodate another guest.

Like the very universe we live in is only possible because of a bunch of universal constants just happen to align in just the right way. If either was even a bit different, then you couldn't even have atoms. Assuming infinite parallel universes theories, we're the stupidly lucky ones that got the right combination of universal constants and that they stayed, well, constant.

And that's just completely wrong. The odds of us being in a set of universal constants that support us is 100%. The odds of us living on a planet with a punctuated equilibrium of life on it for billions of years leading up to us is 100%. The odds of you reading what I'm writing when considered from the conditions of the early universe is 100%.

Because the past, it happened. We're not lucky, we just are, welcome to now.

Past probabilities of their future being us are useful for understanding which possible past is the more likely to be ours. Probably there was a 5th large planet in our solar system initially, because those models are vastly more likely to end up in our current configuration than one starting with just the four we have now, but whatever we had, the chance of them getting here, for us, now, is still 100%, because here we are.

And lastly...

If something can happen, it does not mean it will necessarily happen even with infinite resources.

You don't understand infinity. If you have infinite attempts at "everything", not only will everything have happened, each thing will have happened an infinite number of times. It just takes infinitely long for it to do so for any particular attempting critter.

The argument against people having figured things out is not that they wouldn't eventually figure it out, because they would do so repeatedly, for everything, it's that they just didn't happen to do so yet. Heat death of the universe is not infinitely far award, also.

The argument against book bombs though, is that D&D is a game, and obviously that wasn't the game designer's intent to have them do that, in the same way we just fucking let Ride-By Attack work (even though it doesn't, by the rules). You just don't do book bombs. Not any more than you play a creature immune to cold who is also warm blooded and fill the planet up to space and beyond with brown mould, or tie up bunches of 100 acid flasks and shink item them for 100d6 touch attacks for pocket change.

The stuff in the book should do what it says it does. If you find another thing to bolt onto it for double damage, or even double again, that's probably fine because damage sucks in 3rd edition, but if you find 100x, fuck off, no, not happening. No you can't buy book bombs in big cities, fuck off, also some of the 2x stuff is also stupid and the game might just be a lot better if you don't.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Thu May 03, 2018 3:54 pm

You really need to define "thing" to even start arguing about "everything".

In the broad sense, "everything" is a continuum, and thus a single random thing out of a continuum can't happen even once.

In the particular case of a thing being a game event described using a finite (though not pre-capped) amount of English words, everything can indeed happen infinity times (because letters are countable and words are countable and stories are countable).

maglag · Post by **maglag** » Fri May 04, 2018 1:34 am

tussock wrote:Hilbert's hotel isn't a paradox, it must take infinite time to empty room 1, because information only travels at the speed of light and so takes forever to propagate through all the rooms and actually free up room 1 to accommodate another guest.

It's an infinite hotel meaning infinite space and food and electricity and whatnot, infinite speed communication is also assumed.

tussock wrote:
If something can happen, it does not mean it will necessarily happen even with infinite resources.
You don't understand infinity. If you have infinite attempts at "everything", not only will everything have happened, each thing will have happened an infinite number of times. It just takes infinitely long for it to do so for any particular attempting critter.

No, it's you that don't even understand yourself, since just before you were saying "nyah nyah no infinite time!" and now you're going "nyah nyah yes infinite time!"

Alas by definition a D&D campaign is running at a specific point of time that is not infinite, so not everything that may happen will have already happened even assuming the D&D multiverse has infinite space.

Dogbert · Post by **Dogbert** » Sun May 13, 2018 6:13 am

Not for 3.X (this is for 5E) but:

1) Assemble an "alchemist" background, with training in both alchemy and poisoner tools. If possible, make sure as many of the party's muggles as possible are also proficient with poison use.
2) Transmuter School. The first school power allows you "temporarily turn any substance into any other substance." This power is not limited in its uses per day.
3) Transmute water into Purple Worm Poison and have party's folks-at-arms dip their weapons in it every hour or every combat. 46 dmg hits (and Purple Worm Poison happens to be an "injury" type poison).
4) Win game (against everything that isn't immune to poison, that is).

I'm sure a chemist will find numerous other ways to make a DM cry with this exploit.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun May 13, 2018 7:28 am

Transmutation and Creation is a problem in that respect in pretty much every edition. In 3e people use minor creation to make healing salves and black lotus extract by the cubic foot. The fact is that pharmaceuticals and toxins are not different on a fundamental level from wood or paint. So if you make magic that could create a table or a door, wording it in such a way that it couldn't also make an equal number of kilograms of cocaine.

Once you get into chemistry and industrial processes and shit, the physical properties you can define like weight and volume and shit just don't have very much correlation with value or utility. Saffron is worth more than gold, but pine sure as fuck isn't.

-Username17

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sun May 13, 2018 7:40 am

Build walls on the Ethereal Plane side of your lair. Now, effects like magic missile won't be able to harm you on the Material Plane, because force effects extend from the Material to the Ethereal and those ethereal walls will provide total cover.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Sun May 13, 2018 9:38 am

virgil wrote:Build walls on the Ethereal Plane side of your lair. Now, effects like magic missile won't be able to harm you on the Material Plane, because force effects extend from the Material to the Ethereal and those ethereal walls will provide total cover.

Similarly on the base-building side:

Tired of having people teleport in to your fortress? Don't have the resources to block teleportation? Just hang up thin chains or strands of beads everywhere, close enough together that not even small-sized space exists without displacing them. Now leave one designated open space for any would-be teleporters to be shunted to, and trap the hell out of it.

It will be somewhat annoying to walk around in, but as a bonus it reveals invisible people. Also, if you've got resources and/or a way to cast Permanency for free, you can make all the chains invisible for better aesthetics and to fool scrying.

Bonus Tip: Composite walls made of multiple separated layers (ideally of different materials), are more a pain in the ass to go through with spells.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Sun May 13, 2018 5:20 pm

Ice9 wrote:Tired of having people teleport in to your fortress? Don't have the resources to block teleportation? Just hang up thin chains or strands of beads everywhere, close enough together that not even small-sized space exists without displacing them. Now leave one designated open space for any would-be teleporters to be shunted to, and trap the hell out of it.

Teleport doesn't have a shunting clause. Or a "you can't teleport inside of objects" clause. Or even a "you can't teleport inside of creatures" clause.

Which raises the fascinating question of "what happens if a wizard tries to teleport into a thimble?"

Pariah Dog · Post by **Pariah Dog** » Sun May 13, 2018 7:16 pm

Well according to Quake and Doom, telefragging.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sun May 13, 2018 11:09 pm

A creature or object brought into being or transported to your location by a conjuration spell cannot appear inside another creature or object, nor can it appear floating in an empty space. It must arrive in an open location on a surface capable of supporting it.

I doubt the designers intended for the "to your location" clause to... no, no, it's 2018, I'm not arguing the RAI of D&D 3.5 in 2018.