Word of Recall

[BenjCano]

Where on Earth do people get Malack being paranoid and prepared? He's neither. Just because he does show some foresight and caution doesn't make him crazy-prepared. Or is it just the assumption that a high-level spellcaster has to be paranoid?

When you have a slam attack that inflicts negative levels, you don't study exotic grappling techniques that are only marginally better than what you can do on your own unless you're paranoid about encountering enemies protected from your natural attack and need a reliable way to immobilize protected spellcasters.

When your vampiric nature is a secret, you don't build backdoors into spells you help design with clerics you are friendly with unless you're paranoid about giving yourself an edge over them should the two of you ever come to blows.

When you don't plan anything more strenuous for the day than chilling with your friend on the terrace, drinking tea, you don't prepare the 1-2 fatal combination of Harm and Quickened Inflict Moderate Wounds unless you're paranoid about an unexpected adversary dropping in.

Plus at this point, Recall has already been used once, and retreading the same gotcha move would be lousy storytelling.

Because once you've established that clerics of sufficiently high level have an eject button that can instantly remove them from dangerous situations, the important thing is to never show it used ever again.

This is a technique of literary foreshadowing known as Chekov's Gun, which holds that as soon as you introduce a plot point, it should never intrude on the narrative again once it's served its intended purpose, regardless of how much sense it would make. The specific example in literature comes from a character in a Chekov play who loaded a shotgun in the first act so that the audience understood that this character was a hunter. The gun, having served its intended purpose, remained on the mantle throughout the second and third act of the play.

[/sarcasm]