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alexandraerinYou know how you said that D&D4E isn't broken?
Yeah?
Well, what about the "orbizard" build?
What about it?
Are you aware that it combines a maxed-out Wisdom score with the Orb of Imposition implement mastery feature and the Orb of Ultimate Imposition item to be able to dish out a net -16 to save, thus making it possible to make it absolutely impossible for a single creature to save from one effect, once per day?
Yeah.
What about it?
Any one creature, no exceptions. Do you not realize that this allows a Wizard to effectively take down Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead, or any of the other demon lords, archdevils, or deities that have defined stats, effectively in a single round because once they're hit with a stun condition that requires a saving throw to end they're locked down and can be killed at leisure?
Yeah. What about it?
The game's broken!
How so?
Dude. You can take out Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead, in one round. How is that not broken? My group, we made a party with five Wizards and we did a battle against five copies of Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead, and we got all five of them locked down and then killed. Five of them. Of Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead. How is that not broken?
You just like saying "Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead", don't you?
Maybe. But it's still broken.
Not even a little tiny bit.
But we could make a party with twenty orb Wizards and twenty Orcuses and...
Yeah.
Just stop.
First of all, is that an unreasonably powerful ability? If you spent thirty experience levels pursuing any character build, you are inches away from godhood, optimized or not. The reasons deities, demon lords, and archdevils have stats is just so that 30th level characters have something big left to fight.
Second of all, it's not something you can pull off at will.
You can only use your Orb of Imposition class feature (assuming you have a Wisdom of 30, this gives a -10 to save, making it all but impossible) once per encounter and you can only use your magic item, for the additional -6 to make it actually impossible even with a modest bonus, once per day.
You also have to hit first, with a power that stuns, as dazing or immobilizing doesn't prevent attacking. There are only so many of these. No matter how many rerolls and bonuses you can stack, you can still miss, especially against an epic boss monster, and even if you've got a way to recover the power and try again... well, that's still not quite the same thing as a one round guarantee, is it?
And stunning Orcus in one round is not the same thing as killing him. Five Orcuses versus five optimized Wizards is not a fight that's likely to happen. One Orcus alone against an optimized Wizard and his party is also not likely to happen in an actual campaign. Try one Orcus plus his legions of undead, other demons he could bully into protecting him, and assorted followers versus your optimized Wizard and his party. This is where your DM not being a tool comes into play: if your Wizard has been training for xty years to get to this power level and has been foiling the schemes of Orcus all along the way... that is, Orcus actually fits into the campaign and isn't just being randomly airdropped in to show off how badass your build is... then Orcus would be aware of your Wizard's peculiar ability to hold even the most powerful beings helpless, and he'd be ready.
Incidentally, Divine Mettle, which is a level one Paladin class feature, grants a bonus to an ally's saving throw equal to the user's Charisma mod. For an epic level Paladin with no orb-bearing Wizard in sight, that's practically a guaranteed save. Against the Wizard, it's enough to make your fancy one shot wonder that much less of a sure thing, which ought to make you nervous when going up against Orcus. And in 4th Edition, a Paladin's alignment and allegiance is not so narrowly restricted as it previously was. Even a good Paladin who falls in with a demon lord isn't going to "fall" and lose all those class features.
Just saying.
But let's say that you manage to fight your way through the preliminaries without pulling out your orb's daily power, you manage to defeat Orcus's fallen champion with Divine Mettle at the ready while not being killed by the demon lord himself or his undead hordes, you manage to get it down to just the big guy himself and your party and you still have your Orb of Imposition and your Elven Accuracy and a stunning spell unused, and you get them off and you have Orcus locked down before he can call for more reinforcements and then you kill him.
All it took was you reaching the thirtieth level of experience, acquiring a powerful magic item, attaining a Wisdom score higher than the gods, fighting your way through the abyss, defeating Orcus's armies and his personal guards and his champion, and then you unleashed your ultimate power on him and brought him down.
That doesn't sound like a broken mechanic to me. It sounds like a hell of a story. One mortal spends a lifetime perfecting one mystical technique to the point that it can be used to challenge even the Demon Lord of the Undead, then fights an epic battle for the chance to use it to bring him down.
Heck, while I'd do it, I wouldn't even necessarily say it's a bad DM who doesn't beef up the encounter to compensate for this... I mean, if your character fought so hard to get to that point already, then it could be said they've already "fought the battle".
When you get to the back end of the epic tier, the game's pretty much over. You have won, to the point that D&D can be won. Your character is the pinnacle of whatever it is you want them to be. The core rulebooks suggest that DMs give the PCs one last epic destiny quest, one final victory, to close their careers out gracefully... or possibly to go out fighting, ending on a high note or singing a swan song.
Monster stats for creatures like Orcus exist for exactly that reason. If you actually did play a Wizard up to level 30 and then went and fought Orcus with your little orb and while you held him helplessly in your stun spell you and the rest of the party beat him into nonexistence, congratulations... a winner is you. If you want to keep playing the game with no advancement ladder defined above you, and the DM and the rest of the group also wants to keep it going, more power to you. You can fly all over the Imaginary Lands showing off your ability to take one creature out of the fight and hold it helpless for as long as you want, but the game's not broken, it's done.
And it's always Orcus used as an example. It may just be because he was the giant epic threat presented in the first Monster Manual, but what about evil deities? Actual deities are immortal. You defeat them, and unless you have the story-driven way of killing them worked out (if there is one), they just discorporate and reform... and so even if it could be argued that Orcus has not paid that close attention to the doings of puny human or elven wizards, do you think an evil deity would suffer that treatment more than once? Or do you think they wouldn't take adequate precautions and then come back for revenge?
And on the subject of adequate precautions, Tiamat, the evil goddess of dragons, has this in her entry:
Wellllllllllllllllllll... how about that? That's one epic level foe who is immune to the big gun. It's not something they arbitrarily came up with as an anti-orbizard patch, either. That's just a beefed up version of the ability other many-headed foes such as hydras have, with the difference that it doesn't stack. You will never manage to stun all five of Tiamat's godheads at the same time. You could instead lock an ongoing damage effect on her, in which case she willdie discorporate as long as the Wizard remains standing long enough, while she has five independently active heads, an aura doing 25 damage per round, a dominating tail sting, and her breath weapon. And it would certainly be plausible for her to focus her attacks on bringing down the Wizard whose spell is slowly killing her round by round.
It seems like somehow more people read my "4E doesn't actually suck" posts than almost anything else I write, so I'm sure if enough people read this post, someone's going to roll up a 30th level party with an orb wizard in it so they can play out a fight against Tiamat to prove me wrong or something...
I get the feeling a lot of these people have been playing a different game than me all along.
The monsters in the books are there to be beaten. Even the epic level ones are not actually intended to only be things for the DM to drop from the roof to kill the entire party all at once. I'm not saying that Wizards with orbs can't beat Tiamat. It doesn't matter if they can or not. I'm just saying this one technique is not a gamebreaker, even if it does absolutely dominate in situations hand-picked to show off how well it can dominate them.
As I said in a comment on one of my posts below, min-maxing is itself not a gamebreaker because there's a min for every max and DMs can (and should) still hit you in the min. If you keep dumping in Wisdom and Charisma because you know the DM is never going to put you in a situation where those stats are advantageous if none of your powers use them, as so many players do, that's not a broken system. If you invest so many of your attribute points, feats, and power slots in being able to get off a "guaranteed" encounter-long stun, you're going to have fewer options elsewhere.
And if a party or player becomes overly reliant on one single tactic, the DM's fully justified in arranging for it to blow up in their face.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gamingdragon is fairly generous with allowing us to get surprise rounds in what might have been questionable circumstances, because it allows us to set up cool tactics. When said cool tactics devolved into the dragonborn barbarian kicking open the door and using hurl breath, she decided the next big bad guy was going to be able to deflect it back on the party.
And hurl breath isn't even anything near a gamebreaker.
Imagine getting to the throne room of Orcus and learning that he has the ability to divide his head into many parts to protect himself from this sort of tactic. Foolish mortal, did you truly believe that you were the first insect to ever unlock the true powers of the orb of ultimate imposition? I have learned how to deal with your kind. Alternately, that he can transfer any effect that a save can end to one of his aspects. Or that he's filled his room with aspects of himself and you have to survive long enough to identify the real one (if he's even there) before you fire the big gun. Or imagine finding out he's surrounded himself with Chaos Hydras (elemental beasts that are multiheaded and are already level 22... his could be unusually strong, though, meriting a higher level). If the DM really doesn't want the Orcus fight to be a cakewalk, it doesn't have to be.
And all of that is being nice and assuming the DM doesn't just nullify the orb outright. I'm not even going to list the ways that this could be done, because I know the refrain will be that if the game isn't broken then it wouldn't need a DM to nullify an existing mechanic. I'm sure some people would claim that giving Orcus a Paladin NPC follower, Chaos Hydras, or an extra ability would be doing just that... I'll concede that giving him a head split or the ability to transfer conditions would be stretching things (though customizing monsters is part of the game), but giving him Hydras and an epic level Paladin would be doing nothing more than what the Wizard's player is doing: using existing elements to achieve a specific effect.
The fact that the pieces are there to counter the "stun lock" technique demonstrates the truth of the "orbizard" tactic and the weakness of min-maxing - being great at a single tactic doesn't prepare you for all situations.
But while these sorts of surprises could be a great way of shaking up a party that's become dependent on that tactic, I contend that such a change isn't automatically necessary. Orcus is ultimately intended to be defeatable by epic level PCs. The fact that the "orbizard" gives a better than average chance of pulling it off doesn't reflect a broken system.
I'm likely to have a couple more posts about D&D over the weekend... tonight, we're having our last marathon session before my friends depart the state tomorrow... and then I'm going to be coming back "on duty" on Monday.
Yeah?
Well, what about the "orbizard" build?
What about it?
Are you aware that it combines a maxed-out Wisdom score with the Orb of Imposition implement mastery feature and the Orb of Ultimate Imposition item to be able to dish out a net -16 to save, thus making it possible to make it absolutely impossible for a single creature to save from one effect, once per day?
Yeah.
What about it?
Any one creature, no exceptions. Do you not realize that this allows a Wizard to effectively take down Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead, or any of the other demon lords, archdevils, or deities that have defined stats, effectively in a single round because once they're hit with a stun condition that requires a saving throw to end they're locked down and can be killed at leisure?
Yeah. What about it?
The game's broken!
How so?
Dude. You can take out Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead, in one round. How is that not broken? My group, we made a party with five Wizards and we did a battle against five copies of Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead, and we got all five of them locked down and then killed. Five of them. Of Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead. How is that not broken?
You just like saying "Orcus, the Demon Lord of the Undead", don't you?
Maybe. But it's still broken.
Not even a little tiny bit.
But we could make a party with twenty orb Wizards and twenty Orcuses and...
Yeah.
Just stop.
First of all, is that an unreasonably powerful ability? If you spent thirty experience levels pursuing any character build, you are inches away from godhood, optimized or not. The reasons deities, demon lords, and archdevils have stats is just so that 30th level characters have something big left to fight.
Second of all, it's not something you can pull off at will.
You can only use your Orb of Imposition class feature (assuming you have a Wisdom of 30, this gives a -10 to save, making it all but impossible) once per encounter and you can only use your magic item, for the additional -6 to make it actually impossible even with a modest bonus, once per day.
You also have to hit first, with a power that stuns, as dazing or immobilizing doesn't prevent attacking. There are only so many of these. No matter how many rerolls and bonuses you can stack, you can still miss, especially against an epic boss monster, and even if you've got a way to recover the power and try again... well, that's still not quite the same thing as a one round guarantee, is it?
And stunning Orcus in one round is not the same thing as killing him. Five Orcuses versus five optimized Wizards is not a fight that's likely to happen. One Orcus alone against an optimized Wizard and his party is also not likely to happen in an actual campaign. Try one Orcus plus his legions of undead, other demons he could bully into protecting him, and assorted followers versus your optimized Wizard and his party. This is where your DM not being a tool comes into play: if your Wizard has been training for xty years to get to this power level and has been foiling the schemes of Orcus all along the way... that is, Orcus actually fits into the campaign and isn't just being randomly airdropped in to show off how badass your build is... then Orcus would be aware of your Wizard's peculiar ability to hold even the most powerful beings helpless, and he'd be ready.
Incidentally, Divine Mettle, which is a level one Paladin class feature, grants a bonus to an ally's saving throw equal to the user's Charisma mod. For an epic level Paladin with no orb-bearing Wizard in sight, that's practically a guaranteed save. Against the Wizard, it's enough to make your fancy one shot wonder that much less of a sure thing, which ought to make you nervous when going up against Orcus. And in 4th Edition, a Paladin's alignment and allegiance is not so narrowly restricted as it previously was. Even a good Paladin who falls in with a demon lord isn't going to "fall" and lose all those class features.
Just saying.
But let's say that you manage to fight your way through the preliminaries without pulling out your orb's daily power, you manage to defeat Orcus's fallen champion with Divine Mettle at the ready while not being killed by the demon lord himself or his undead hordes, you manage to get it down to just the big guy himself and your party and you still have your Orb of Imposition and your Elven Accuracy and a stunning spell unused, and you get them off and you have Orcus locked down before he can call for more reinforcements and then you kill him.
All it took was you reaching the thirtieth level of experience, acquiring a powerful magic item, attaining a Wisdom score higher than the gods, fighting your way through the abyss, defeating Orcus's armies and his personal guards and his champion, and then you unleashed your ultimate power on him and brought him down.
That doesn't sound like a broken mechanic to me. It sounds like a hell of a story. One mortal spends a lifetime perfecting one mystical technique to the point that it can be used to challenge even the Demon Lord of the Undead, then fights an epic battle for the chance to use it to bring him down.
Heck, while I'd do it, I wouldn't even necessarily say it's a bad DM who doesn't beef up the encounter to compensate for this... I mean, if your character fought so hard to get to that point already, then it could be said they've already "fought the battle".
When you get to the back end of the epic tier, the game's pretty much over. You have won, to the point that D&D can be won. Your character is the pinnacle of whatever it is you want them to be. The core rulebooks suggest that DMs give the PCs one last epic destiny quest, one final victory, to close their careers out gracefully... or possibly to go out fighting, ending on a high note or singing a swan song.
Monster stats for creatures like Orcus exist for exactly that reason. If you actually did play a Wizard up to level 30 and then went and fought Orcus with your little orb and while you held him helplessly in your stun spell you and the rest of the party beat him into nonexistence, congratulations... a winner is you. If you want to keep playing the game with no advancement ladder defined above you, and the DM and the rest of the group also wants to keep it going, more power to you. You can fly all over the Imaginary Lands showing off your ability to take one creature out of the fight and hold it helpless for as long as you want, but the game's not broken, it's done.
And it's always Orcus used as an example. It may just be because he was the giant epic threat presented in the first Monster Manual, but what about evil deities? Actual deities are immortal. You defeat them, and unless you have the story-driven way of killing them worked out (if there is one), they just discorporate and reform... and so even if it could be argued that Orcus has not paid that close attention to the doings of puny human or elven wizards, do you think an evil deity would suffer that treatment more than once? Or do you think they wouldn't take adequate precautions and then come back for revenge?
And on the subject of adequate precautions, Tiamat, the evil goddess of dragons, has this in her entry:
Quintuple Brain: Each time Tiamat is dazed or stunned, she loses her next head activation instead. Such effects do not stack.
Wellllllllllllllllllll... how about that? That's one epic level foe who is immune to the big gun. It's not something they arbitrarily came up with as an anti-orbizard patch, either. That's just a beefed up version of the ability other many-headed foes such as hydras have, with the difference that it doesn't stack. You will never manage to stun all five of Tiamat's godheads at the same time. You could instead lock an ongoing damage effect on her, in which case she will
It seems like somehow more people read my "4E doesn't actually suck" posts than almost anything else I write, so I'm sure if enough people read this post, someone's going to roll up a 30th level party with an orb wizard in it so they can play out a fight against Tiamat to prove me wrong or something...
I get the feeling a lot of these people have been playing a different game than me all along.
The monsters in the books are there to be beaten. Even the epic level ones are not actually intended to only be things for the DM to drop from the roof to kill the entire party all at once. I'm not saying that Wizards with orbs can't beat Tiamat. It doesn't matter if they can or not. I'm just saying this one technique is not a gamebreaker, even if it does absolutely dominate in situations hand-picked to show off how well it can dominate them.
As I said in a comment on one of my posts below, min-maxing is itself not a gamebreaker because there's a min for every max and DMs can (and should) still hit you in the min. If you keep dumping in Wisdom and Charisma because you know the DM is never going to put you in a situation where those stats are advantageous if none of your powers use them, as so many players do, that's not a broken system. If you invest so many of your attribute points, feats, and power slots in being able to get off a "guaranteed" encounter-long stun, you're going to have fewer options elsewhere.
And if a party or player becomes overly reliant on one single tactic, the DM's fully justified in arranging for it to blow up in their face.
gamingdragon is fairly generous with allowing us to get surprise rounds in what might have been questionable circumstances, because it allows us to set up cool tactics. When said cool tactics devolved into the dragonborn barbarian kicking open the door and using hurl breath, she decided the next big bad guy was going to be able to deflect it back on the party.And hurl breath isn't even anything near a gamebreaker.
Imagine getting to the throne room of Orcus and learning that he has the ability to divide his head into many parts to protect himself from this sort of tactic. Foolish mortal, did you truly believe that you were the first insect to ever unlock the true powers of the orb of ultimate imposition? I have learned how to deal with your kind. Alternately, that he can transfer any effect that a save can end to one of his aspects. Or that he's filled his room with aspects of himself and you have to survive long enough to identify the real one (if he's even there) before you fire the big gun. Or imagine finding out he's surrounded himself with Chaos Hydras (elemental beasts that are multiheaded and are already level 22... his could be unusually strong, though, meriting a higher level). If the DM really doesn't want the Orcus fight to be a cakewalk, it doesn't have to be.
And all of that is being nice and assuming the DM doesn't just nullify the orb outright. I'm not even going to list the ways that this could be done, because I know the refrain will be that if the game isn't broken then it wouldn't need a DM to nullify an existing mechanic. I'm sure some people would claim that giving Orcus a Paladin NPC follower, Chaos Hydras, or an extra ability would be doing just that... I'll concede that giving him a head split or the ability to transfer conditions would be stretching things (though customizing monsters is part of the game), but giving him Hydras and an epic level Paladin would be doing nothing more than what the Wizard's player is doing: using existing elements to achieve a specific effect.
The fact that the pieces are there to counter the "stun lock" technique demonstrates the truth of the "orbizard" tactic and the weakness of min-maxing - being great at a single tactic doesn't prepare you for all situations.
But while these sorts of surprises could be a great way of shaking up a party that's become dependent on that tactic, I contend that such a change isn't automatically necessary. Orcus is ultimately intended to be defeatable by epic level PCs. The fact that the "orbizard" gives a better than average chance of pulling it off doesn't reflect a broken system.
I'm likely to have a couple more posts about D&D over the weekend... tonight, we're having our last marathon session before my friends depart the state tomorrow... and then I'm going to be coming back "on duty" on Monday.
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no subject
on 2009-07-17 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-17 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-17 06:25 pm (UTC)I'm working on a game, need ideas because I'm not uber awesome.
Concept is City in a Bubble. Thoughts?
/plead
no subject
on 2009-07-17 06:33 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-17 06:49 pm (UTC)but, the ORIGINAL reason, if you really want to know, is that all the mages on this world isolated themselves from the people, having been blamed for the destruction of a large portion of the planet. That is the past.
no subject
on 2009-07-17 07:42 pm (UTC)For example, if I were to set up a campaign in the Iron Kingdoms' city of Five Fingers, the backstory involving the Greylords' Covenant is likely to come into play. Why? Because that backstory influences their goals, their methods, and their rivalries. And it influences their role in any plots. Add in a player character who has connections to either the Covenant or their rivals, and boom. You're now capable of creating plots that involve both.
In your case, this city in a bubble sounds like it would be contain a lot of wizards, or at the very least a lot of arcane artifacts and baubles. Very high magic. Depending on what happens to the city between the original reason and the present, you could go a lot of ways with it. Including where this bubble is located, what sort of intrigues motivate its inhabitants and the people who outside of it yet interested in it, and so forth.
no subject
on 2009-07-17 07:50 pm (UTC)What I meant was- Back story isn't important for the broad scope of my question, I'm more looking for open ideas in an enclosed city environment. I have lots of stuff to go with the back story and to progress the Story as a Whole. I'm looking for filler ideas to flesh out the City in a bubble.
Here come on over to my LJ and we'll discuss more in depth so we can stop taking up AE's comment space. I like people with good and thorough minds.
http://hnmic.livejournal.com/9915.html
no subject
on 2009-07-17 08:07 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-17 06:33 pm (UTC)"Well, if I do A, and B, and C, and D, and get to E, and can find an F, and then G happens, I'll win. Every time. So the game is broken."
Which typically either results in someone refusing to play because their specific scenario 'proves' it isn't worth playing, or they end up getting frustrated because their highly conditional win never comes up in actual play, at which point they think the DM's out to get them.
Also I suggest a 'teal deer' tag for future posts like this ;P
no subject
on 2009-07-18 10:25 pm (UTC)/freaking icy manip...
no subject
on 2009-07-19 01:30 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-17 09:36 pm (UTC)*breathes fire*
Yeah, but it's not /exactly/ an existing mechanic. It's a possible PC build out of any number of potentially epic things you can do. And while I'm sure that there are ways to just work out the game for yourself, by yourself, a game /is/ the interaction between what the players think that can do and the world that the DM is giving them. For Chrissakes, how in the world would it be interesting, otherwise?
Also, any once a day ability doesn't a broken make.
Five wizards against Six Uber Baddies are still hosed. I think a game with an unimaginative DM is going to suck no matter the rule set. A game, to me, is broken when the mechanics are uninteresting or clunky all the time. Even if you can take out the uber boss in one hit-- I still have to say, if the DM lets you, because COME ON people-- as long as you can do it smoothly and with panache, who freaking cares?
no subject
on 2009-07-19 01:36 am (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-19 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-19 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-07-19 10:01 pm (UTC)If it's an effect that effectively prevents someone from moving/attacking, it'll either last a single round or it will be save ends... this means that spells like sleep and hold person are now more about winning the round than winning the combat, but it also means those spells never need to be nerfed or vetoed at higher levels.
The perceived gamebreakiness of the orbizard is that by being able to impose a penalty to save against an effect, they can take something that's meant to be shaken off in a turn or two and make it last indefinitely, or at least until either the caster or the victim dies.