Quote Originally Posted by Seward View Post
That's interesting. It's similar to modern thought about incentives (perverse and otherwise). Basically the ideas is that you'll get the outcomes your incentives (intentional and otherwise) reward.

I'd give some concrete examples but it's hard to do without delving into politics, so lets stick with gaming.

In 3.5 D&D there was a spell called "spikes". It was a long duration low level cleric buff that turned a wooden weapon into a very superior enchanted weapon. So good in fact that Monks all switched to nunchucks instead of unarmed combat, and a Roy-style character tossed his greatsword that he'd invested many feats into to just use a greatclub, or even a normal quarterstaff or club. While it was in its original form any party with a mid-level cleric would have all melee characters switching out their normal expensive enchanted weapons for nonmagical wooden weapons that cost less than 50gp, some (quarterstaff and club) were entirely free. The buff was in fact so good that it was even worth doing when facing damage reduction, vs using the right metal, DR5 for sure, DR10 was about a wash.

WOTC responded by reducing the duration to rounds/level and I think raising it a spell level. That meant it might get busted out for an emergency or known difficult fight (say, clay golems when your fighter is optimized in a weapon that isn't blunt). Mostly warriors went back to their old weapons.

Game developers got the spell outcome they wanted (a buff that was sometimes used to make a wooden weapon better, especially for those that had not heavy feat/wealth investments in a primary melee weapon - this was a cleric/druid spell after all, intended to be used on themself, not Roy or Belkar), once they changed the spell parameters. In 3.0-3.5 conversion the change to Greater Magic Weapon was a similar problem, and the variety of changes both to the spell and how DR worked did pretty much put that spell in the role desired by the game developers in actual play.

And then they introduced Mighty Wallop and its Greater cousin in Dragon Magic.