The D&D/d20 Spell Conversion Thread

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by Emerald Cat

That's an interesting way to do it. But the actual D&D spell gives a bonus to hit. So you could do a version that gives a flat bonus instead. The hard part is making it good enough to be better than taking an Aim/Evaluate maneuver instead.

The d20 version gives a +20 to hit, pretty much guaranteeing a hit - but doing little for directly increasing your chances for a critical hit, since you still need to roll high for that.

Which is a bit hard to translate to GURPS, since a flat bonus to hit will either increase your chances of a critical hit significantly or allow you to pile on all sorts of to hit penalties in exchange for hitting weak points or reducing the Active Defense of an opponent.

My version discourages characters from going overboard with stacking penalties, since even re-rolls will only do so much. But if you have a semi-decent effective skill value left - say, 10 or more - you should be able to hit fairly reliably.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

The d20 version gives a +20 to hit, pretty much guaranteeing a hit - but doing little for directly increasing your chances for a critical hit, since you still need to roll high for that.

Which is a bit hard to translate to GURPS, since a flat bonus to hit will either increase your chances of a critical hit significantly or allow you to pile on all sorts of to hit penalties in exchange for hitting weak points or reducing the Active Defense of an opponent.

My version discourages characters from going overboard with stacking penalties, since even re-rolls will only do so much. But if you have a semi-decent effective skill value left - say, 10 or more - you should be able to hit fairly reliably.

The D20 version does let you make super-difficult hits and still sees limited use in my experience. this would be because of the cost (1 spell and 1 action) to use v. other "usual" uses for those quantities.

My Alchemist does carry 1 extract of it just in case but he has a very high number of 1st level slots for those.

Your versions till has the same opportunity costs and doesn't fill the same niche. I could see using to copper-bottom your bet when you were about to throw a maximally expensive Spell such as a charged for 3 rounds Fireball. It might still be better to throw 4x 1-3D Fireballs over that same amount of time.

[Bruno]

I've seen so much abuse of True Strike that I cringed just reading the spell title. Usually in 3.0e and involving a PC enchanter.

I like the Luck based version - the mechanic is very old and tested in GURPS, and the Luck advantages are often used for reality manipulation super powers, which is comfortingly consistent.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I've seen so much abuse of True Strike that I cringed just reading the spell title. Usually in 3.0e and involving a PC enchanter.
.

What in your opinion counts as "abuse" of this spell?

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

What in your opinion counts as "abuse" of this spell?

The common one is use-activated gauntlets of True Strike. 2000gp, turns into +20 on every attack roll, which includes disarm, defending against disarm, grappling, etc etc.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Bruno

The common one is use-activated gauntlets of True Strike. 2000gp, turns into +20 on every attack roll, which includes disarm, defending against disarm, grappling, etc etc.

That's abuse of the GM who allowed such an innovation. Proper items for True strike would be a Wand or a Scroll and you'd have to use an action for Spell Completion or Trigger and then make the attack next round.

Or if it was on a Wondrous item it'd be limited to just a few uses per day.

A lot of times when I hear about "abuse" of a spell or a Power it's actually abuse of a GM's tolerance.

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

That's abuse of the GM who allowed such an innovation. Proper items for True strike would be a Wand or a Scroll and you'd have to use an action for Spell Completion or Trigger and then make the attack next round.

Or if it was on a Wondrous item it'd be limited to just a few uses per day.

A lot of times when I hear about "abuse" of a spell or a Power it's actually abuse of a GM's tolerance.

Even the Bow of True Strike, the one item I could think of in the books that used the spell, needed to be activated like a spell completion to make the attack the next round, not a +20 on every turn. There's no reason that gauntlets would be any different.

[simply Nathan]

Originally Posted by Phantasm

Even the Bow of True Strike, the one item I could think of in the books that used the spell, needed to be activated like a spell completion to make the attack the next round, not a +20 on every turn. There's no reason that gauntlets would be any different.

I can absolutely see how that would be an abuse of the spell, given that +5 is normally the to-hit bonus on truly legendary weapons.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by simply Nathan

I can absolutely see how that would be an abuse of the spell, given that +5 is normally the to-hit bonus on truly legendary weapons.

Abuse of a magic item creation process which is optional and supposed toe tightly controlled. I've never seen a 3.x _official_ item that would allow use of True Strike every round.

For a Gurps version it might be enough to include the standard boilerplate language for "Can not be maintained, must be recast.".

You could achieve a generically similar result with a Boost Dexterity Item. At least if you thought a +5 bonus on one Dex-based roll for 5 pts of energy was a good deal.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by simply Nathan

I can absolutely see how that would be an abuse of the spell, given that +5 is normally the to-hit bonus on truly legendary weapons.

The d20 rules list that 2,000 gp price for Level 1, caster level 1 "use-activated" magic items.

Use-activated magic items are defined thus:

"Unless stated otherwise, activating a use-activated magic item is either a standard action or not an action at all and does not provoke attacks of opportunity, unless the use involves performing an action that provokes an attack of opportunity in itself. If the use of the item takes time before a magical effect occurs, then use activation is a standard action. If the item’s activation is subsumed in its use and takes no extra time use activation is not an action at all."

So the GM has leeway to interpret it either way. And even apart from balance issues, it makes sense to limit "not an action at all" to items that last for more than a single round than True Strike does.

And as for balance issue, allowing True Strike to affect every single attack is much better than casting the actual spell (which affects only one single attack roll in the next round) that it is clear why it should not be permitted.


Back to my version: Perhaps a special rule could be made that casting True Strike does not interrupt "holding" a missile spell. I'd be leery of allowing a similar rule to affect Aim actions, since that would provide an extremely strong incentive for Snipers to take this spell in order to remain "competitive".