[DF] I hate Walk on Air - Alternative Spelllist anyone?

[Jovus]

For my upcoming ToEE game, I'm limiting things this way:

Races:
Humans, halflings, dwarves, high elves and wood elves only. No ifs, ands, or buts.

Classes:
Only things from DF 1, and then I'm also taking out the Martial Artist and the Swashbuckler. Yes I know that's extreme; I don't want monks or Inigo Montoya in my game.

Spells:
Shape Earth and Shape Metal only work on unworked stone and metal. No reshaping the dungeon walls, thank you. If you want to create a barrier so you can camp at night, feel free to cast Create Earth first.

Earth to Stone can't do metals. Or gemstones. Or any stones of significant value. Granite's fine. (And if you want to retire your Wizard to go become an artisan stoneworker, feel free.)

Generally speaking no meta spells except Ward, Counterspell, and Dispel Magic. If you want an exception, talk to me about it.

Magical missiles get a resistance chance to Missile Shield and Reverse Missiles, be they fireballs or enchanted arrows.

See Secrets doesn't exist. (Though I may take the ruling listed above instead, thanks!)

The Geas spells and Enslave must be cast ceremonially on a helpless subject.

I also reserve the right to decide in the moment that a given spell is no longer allowed. You can keep it for the session, but next session it needs to be replaced by something else, including rejiggering prerequisite trees and so on.

A couple of enhancements, though:

I agree about the Mass version of spells. They will never take longer than their Base Cost.

You can Concentrate while grappled, so long as you make a Will-6 roll.

We're using Threshold rules, which you need to know why this is an enhancement, not a limitation: Wizards (not Clerics) can burn HP to cast spells. Also, Lend Energy can lend either FP or Tally to the subject - caster's choice at time of casting.

Also, I'm considering using the Magically Potent Materials rules, but we'll see.

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by Jovus

See Secrets doesn't exist. (Though I may take the ruling listed above instead, thanks!)

It's still very, very effective. Secret doors, traps on locks and chests, and hidden compartments are easily found. The easiest way to think about it is that it makes finding such items automatic and passive, if you're in a line of sight to spot them.

Now, removing traps, triggering that secret door, figuring out the magic password to open the compartment - that's all a separate issue.

Originally Posted by Jovus

I agree about the Mass version of spells. They will never take longer than their Base Cost.

I'm not using Base Cost, but Minimum Cost. So Mass Sleep is cost 3 per area, min cost 6 = takes 6 seconds to cast regardless of size. Otherwise it's faster than Sleep.

[Sutibu]

I feel what you're saying OP. I made the same nistake with walk on air. The only solid option I came up with is to work with mana levels.. Just make mana very scarce and you'll have that wizard thinking twice to solve everything with a snip of his fingers. An alternative would be to use the unlimited mana rules.

[Pursuivant]

About that chasm and Walk on Air (or Flight or whatever).

As everyone else pointed out, it should only slow the party down. If that's all you want, you've got no complaint coming if the party figures out a nifty way of getting from Point A to Point B quickly.

If you want that chasm to be a SERIOUS obstacle . . .

1) Put a No Mana Zone in the middle of the air directly between tunnel on one side and the tunnel on the other side. Or, maybe have a few randomly spaced NMZ to form a sort of 3-dimensional maze.

2) Have something higher up the chasm just waiting to drop the net/rock/boiling oil on anyone who tries to cross. Alternately, have a squad of well-concealed, well-protected archers/mages/gunners covering the airspace in the chasm from the far side, above and below.

3) Put some flying monsters in the chasm who will attack anything trying to cross it. Alternately, choose monsters with Brachiator advantage (with a variant that allows them to climb rock walls with ease) and a Binding attack. Giant spiders are an obvious choice.

4) Maybe have some floating obstacles, some high winds, falling water or something else to make it much more tricky than just going from Point A to Point B even if you do kill the monsters.

The whole idea is to use the players preferred method of bridging gaps against them. It's even fair (as opposed to just being an Evil GM) if the party's opponents have had a chance to observe them in action and have had a chance to plan accordingly.

[Xplo]

As someone said, once you get up into middle levels in D&D, this kind of thing happens anyway - wizards just fly over things, or maybe the party has a magic carpet or something.

So the main difference between D&D and DF here is that D&D wizards could cast a lot fewer spells per day - and they had to pick them ahead of time, meaning that they'd have even fewer for dealing with any one particular situation.

The easiest way I can think of offhand to limit spellcasting would be to switch to something like Threshold Magic. You'd have to tweak the mage templates, of course, but overall TM is a pretty easy switch since all the costs and prerequisites stay in place.

Alternately, you could just accept that old-school dungeoneering was never quite the way you remember it - not for very long, anyway - and adjust to the new reality that sometimes mages fly over things. But no one ever appreciates that sort of advice. ;)

[Onkl]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Alternately, you could just accept that old-school dungeoneering was never quite the way you remember it - not for very long, anyway - and adjust to the new reality that sometimes mages fly over things. But no one ever appreciates that sort of advice. ;)

In my experience, stuff that happened in ones youth normally is held in higher esteem than it should be. It could very well be one of those instances. Thanks for your suggestions though!

Cheers

[PseudoFenton]

I find it funny how both cut down race lists so far have included multiple versions of elves - but culls everything else quite harshly. What's with the all the elf love?

So far its only the colour-coded elves that I've chucked out the window for my DF game (other than goblins and hobgoblins, who've had a major make over and one had to be put into the "not really a PC race anymore" camp) everything else has been worked in and some even given a lick of paint to make them a little more appealing.

I like options, I like to give the party the option of having a 'monstrous' party - to have a group of outsiders and social outcasts due to their race, or at least partly composed of them. It makes the game more interesting instead of having all the PCs be the good looking, shiny armoured, nice and cultured heroes that give all the bards more clichéd things to sing about. Yeah okay that Gargoyle Knight is going to be a pain when they just fly past the things you hoped would delay the group, but that's made up for when they try and buy new custom armour (thanks to the wings) and the blacksmith turns them away because they're vermin and "I aint gonna be armouring you rat-breathed scum, you'll just ruin more of this cities roofs and my good name in the process, now get out of here before I call the city watch!".


As for spells, yeah I've culled a few of those, or changed them slightly when I feel they overshadow someone else's niche a little too much. But overall it just seems like you want to keep you're players at a 'low level' - or at least keep them somewhat dis-empowered so that they don't constantly trivialise events that in a non-magic non-fantasy world would be significant challenges and require great feats of skill and prowess to overcome. That's fine, and I struggle against the same desire - but sometimes you just have to accept a fantasy world for what it is.

A world with flying races would have to have better anti-air defences than one without them, castles may have to be redesigned and look less iconic - but it's only logical that they should be different. Even if you don't allow PCs to go flying races or use the fly spell - there are dragons and other hostile flying race which would still need to be defended against (which I'm sure you wouldn't want to remove). In my option it's better to just build the world around these additional details, rather than stopping your PCs from having access to the more annoying elements of them.

[Bruno]

I haven't forbidden any of the races, although I've emphasized to my players that I'm not going to let social disadvantages slide just because it's DF.

I don't use racial appearance in my games (except for a few very special exceptions) so most races that used to have an appearance penalty have an explicit stigma, or just plain cost more.

I haven't had any problems with flight, but as mentioned above my current attitude towards "barriers" is that they exist to try to ruin the PCs schedule, or to provide me with some entertainment value as I find out what cock-eyed solution they come up with to breech it.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I haven't had any problems with flight, but as mentioned above my current attitude towards "barriers" is that they exist to try to ruin the PCs schedule, or to provide me with some entertainment value as I find out what cock-eyed solution they come up with to breech it.

Occasionally they exist as a way to slow down the PCs while the archers or whatever on the other side shoot at them. That works just fine with walk on air, to be honest; if a mage for a party of five casts walk on air for everyone, with a skill of 15 or 16, he probably fails once or twice, for 11-12 fatigue spent, which is certainly combat-relevant, and there's zero cover while walking on air.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Occasionally they exist as a way to slow down the PCs while the archers or whatever on the other side shoot at them.

Yes, I mentioned that above; I was smooshing it under general "schedule" as in time constraints. The schedule may be nothing more than "We need to get to the plane before the horde of angry natives scares the pilot into taking off" or "We need to get over the chasm before the rampaging T-Rex catches us."