Iconic Forgotten Realms Spells - As Powers and/or New Skill-based Spells

[Polydamas]

The trouble is that it seems like every town has several ultra-powerful characters (I think the same article introduced a few more). Its hard to have an interesting conflict which doesn't boil down to which side can get a 10th+ level caster on their side first, or a duel between the high-level characters on both sides. (There also ought to be a lot more recent devastation from mage wars; the Great Desert and Myth Drannor don't count). Playing the kind of games I'm used to in that setting would be like being adventurous normals in a supers setting with no strong taboo against killing normals; possibly entertaining, but not for light escapism! Still, you seem to have fun, et de gustibus non est disputandum.

My vision of D&D is based on typical campaigns with Basic, 1e, 2e, or 3e, where in a few years of weekly games characters advance from 1st to 4th level if they are very lucky and very cautious. I think the only time I saw a D&D character reach 5th level in play was in the 3e game I ran; Kromm's vision of Dungeon Fantasy is alien.

[mhd]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

The trouble is that it seems like every town has several ultra-powerful characters (I think the same article introduced a few more). Its hard to have an interesting conflict which doesn't boil down to which side can get a 10th+ level caster on their side first, or a duel between the high-level characters on both sides.

The Realms is the place were campaigns go to die. I think almost every "sector" of it is one DMs/writers playground, with most high-level characters being party members or major NPCs. Badly stitched together with several iterations of the same principle, painted over with a thick coat of decades of fiction (which, in turn, often repeated the above method).

So you're already looking at the "post mortem" of something. So the way I kinda-sorta made it work in the past is either ignoring all major PCs – or at least their stats, or just setting it in a different era. Which they actually did in the 4E revamp… (Not that I was the biggest fan of the Realms myself, but if your players want to mess around with Drow, I'd rather take the pre-fabricated pieces than taint my own creations with dark elves.)

And regardless of rule-set, deteriorating statistics is often a good approach to high level NPCs. Those points/levels where those they reached within their active career, it's mostly gone now (maybe enough remains to teach 'em to the PCs). Chubby Caramon is my premier inspiration for this…

(Although badass elderly David Gemmell characters are a good counter-argument)

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

My vision of D&D is based on typical campaigns with Basic, 1e, 2e, or 3e, where in a few years of weekly games characters advance from 1st to 4th level if they are very lucky and very cautious. I think the only time I saw a D&D character reach 5th level in play was in the 3e game I ran; Kromm's vision of Dungeon Fantasy is alien.

... if your gamers were only reaching 4th level in D&D 3e after a few (I'm guessing 3) years of weekly sessions (I'm guessing ~ 45 sessions a year, with time off for holidays and schedule conflicts)...

So in 135 sessions they never reach 5th level? That's 10, 000 xp.

You could hit 10, 000 xp if you only ever earned 75xp a week, every week, even as you went up through levels. You could earn 75xp a week based on really trivial rewards for interesting social encounters and problem solving, never mind somehow going for three years without ever getting into a fight.

[mhd]

Originally Posted by Bruno

…never mind somehow going for three years without ever getting into a fight.

Or getting into so many fight's that indeed there are quite a few level-ups, just not three for the same character before he's offed. If you play a mean sandbox campaign (i.e. lots of enemies, "natural" CRs), the survival rate is astonishingly low.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by mhd

Or getting into so many fight's that indeed there are quite a few level-ups, just not three for the same character before he's offed. If you play a mean sandbox campaign (i.e. lots of enemies, "natural" CRs), the survival rate is astonishingly low.

Oh, this is a very good point - although it presumes you always start replacement characters at level 1 (I'm more used to "within a level of the current PCs"). Obviously our group doesn't play "meatgrinder" games ;) although when we were playing D&D 3e, we'd habitually bring entirely new characters to every new adventure just for the heck of playing with a new wacky idea. Or sometimes half way during an adventure in progress if someone got bored with their current character.

I don't think we started at level 1 more than two or three times. Someone would say "I want to run an adventure with trolls in it! Lots of trolls! What CR are trolls? OK, everyone make characters two levels above that, so I can use LOTS of trolls at once!" and away we'd go, up to our armpits in trolls for the next couple of weeks.

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by mhd

Or getting into so many fight's that indeed there are quite a few level-ups, just not three for the same character before he's offed. If you play a mean sandbox campaign (i.e. lots of enemies, "natural" CRs), the survival rate is astonishingly low.

Exactly. In traditional D&D,* very few new characters reach second level; for those who do the risk remains high for a few more levels. In 1e there are lots of “save or die” effects at low levels (poison, Hold Person); in 3e there are orcs with greataxes who can expect to kill any character with one critical hit. Until 3e, the norm was that new characters were first level with 0 XP.

I don't think any character from the first six months of that campaign survived to reach third level (except for the last NPC fighter they hired towards the end of that period and was killed by shadows at the end of the campaign); the campaign died when the first stable party was broken up by too many deaths in too little time. Eventually they ran out of money for Raise Dead ... I started out at 20% listed XP rewards to make the advancement rate more like I was used to from 1e but quickly raised it to 50%. My experience in the two successful 1e campaigns I have played in was similar; after a period of a year or so with progress and few deaths, one bad fight and a few mishaps ended that plot line and started the survivors and some first level characters waging a war of attrition against goblins.

Back to the point of the thread, my test for a prospective D&D setting is "how will low level characters fit in" and the Realms isn't the best for that. If you start out powerful and like baroque action I can see how it could be fun!

* Say a long term campaign using any edition from Basic through 3e; I stopped buying rulebooks when 3.5e came out, and 4e is not the kind of product I am interested in.

[mhd]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Back to the point of the thread, my test for a prospective D&D setting is "how will low level characters fit in" and the Realms isn't the best for that. If you start out powerful and like baroque action I can see how it could be fun!

I believe the realms suffer a lot from the CEO gap, i.e. there's a huge difference between the common people running about and their leaders (and maybe a few elite residents). But the general power level of the Realms doesn't strike me as that higher than other D&D worlds. Krynn has its dragonlords, death knights, gods living amongst men etc., Greyhawk has its wizardly cabals and other EGG campaign remnants, etc.

Yes, some "normal" locations like Waterdeep go a bit beyond the call of duty, but the general setup of the world doesn't really preclude low-level adventuring. Ignoring some parenthetical stat remarks is all that's needed for about 80% of the problem. Doing that, you've got your bog-standard, cliched, inconsistent fantasy world…

It's no Dragaera or "Creation".

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Icelander

But he would not be able to destroy an army by his own powers?
.

What D&D spell would Tam use to destroy an army in one fell swoop? He'd run out of personally memorized Fireballs before he got all of them.

I said he'd send his own army because that's what I sincerely thought he'd do. Zulkirs have flunkies for a reason.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

What D&D spell would Tam use to destroy an army in one fell swoop? He'd run out of personally memorized Fireballs before he got all of them.

He'd probably create or command some undead immune to normal weapons to go terrorise the orcs. Maybe throw a few low level spells like Cause Fear or something.

That's just to get them bunched up and identify leaders and any that are more powerful. Hit the bunched up area with a Meteor Swarm. That gets you four 40' radius areas. Assuming that you have managed to get them to bunch up to try to defend themselves from the undead that you sent to pick up stragglers, that ought to get a few hundred. At mininum, it ensures that anything within 40' of the four areas that you identified as being the thickest with orcs is dead. Hell, if they are spread out more than this, just use a Widened Meteor Swarm, which gets you four 80' radius areas.

If needed, give them a couple of Widened Fireballs (in 3e) and a couple of regular ones. Clean up a bit with a couple of Circle of Death (each one kills around 50 orcs). You have six spells of each level, after all.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I said he'd send his own army because that's what I sincerely thought he'd do. Zulkirs have flunkies for a reason.

I do believe I said 'if he had to destroy 500 orcs sent by a rival Zulkir'. It doesn't really matter for the purposes of this mental exercise why he does have to, but we may assume that his personal army of bad-ass undead is otherwise engaged, fighting, perhaps, the main thrust of their attack. These orcs slipped through somewhere else. Perhaps they were a unit of his own troops whose loyalty was subverted by that cunning Lauzoril?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by mhd

Or getting into so many fight's that indeed there are quite a few level-ups, just not three for the same character before he's offed. If you play a mean sandbox campaign (i.e. lots of enemies, "natural" CRs), the survival rate is astonishingly low.

Why?

If the world makes any sense at all, clearly there are not random monsters eating a significant part of the population every day. That would mean that human society would quickly collapse and D&D settings generally assume cities and town where normal people are able to live in relative peace, most of the time.

If the game is a sandbox one, won't the players seek to achieve goals for their characters without blithely necessarily entering areas where they are in danger of meeting terrifying monsters?

People who spend all day entering ruins with bad reputations, infested with various monsters, may not last all that long. But it is possible to game for a very long time, defeating enemies and achieving goals, without that.

Low-level PCs may be caravan guards or they may be a part of a privateer crew. In either case, they are not travelling alone and even meeting a monster will not mean that they have to fight it alone. If someone who is every bit as subject to instant and gruesome death as the rest of the human population insists on ignoring this fact and routinely take risks that in no way justify the small rewards that he may take of the cooling bodies of his slain foes, of course his life expectancy is low.

Just because something is a fantasy game doesn't mean that freelance murder hobo is the only career path available for PCs. There are many exciting and interesting jobs in a fantasy world where the risk is lower and the rewards are better.

If and when the PCs have achieved powers beyond the ken of normal men, then they may behave in a more traditionally heroic manner.