Wait Wait Wait

[Dervag]

It's the exact same problem people were whining and moaning about when Psionics were introduced.

Then 1 simple thing happened with psionics: they were introduced to thought eaters. A random monster encounter that exploited the weaknesses of the class.

Unless those random monsters make up a large fraction of all enemies, so that you fight more thought eaters than anything else, it won't affect the class balance. Even then, it's an arbitrary kludge of a solution, as is scattering antimagic fields all over the world to weaken arcane casters. It's much better to design the classes so that they have power and effectiveness comparable to that of other classes than to create specialized, tailored menaces whose sole justification for existence is to keep the wizards in line.

Maybe if you actually read some of the M$TG Novels you'd understand what I mean. There's a lot that was added to AD&D wizards in 3e that makes them look more like those god awful WoTC creations.

I've read a number of those novels, though by no means a majority. I always thought that the wizard characters in those novels bore strikingly little resemblance to the 'wizards' found in the card game; they usually focus on characters with real limits and the dynamics of the novels' plots don't resemble the dynamics of game play.

I guarantee you, so many of these problems I keep reading about didn't exist in 2nd edition.

No, but a bunch of other problems did.

A player who has already abused the rules has attempted to destroy the fun.

In each game there is a certain amount of danger. Players who experience absolutely no danger or set backs to over come, are players who need to experience them.

When you make the players "cry and beg for mercy," you've gone beyond the level of "danger and setbacks" that are compatible with fun unless you're involved in some sort of bizarre, perverse S&M variant on the tabletop RPG.

If your idea of fun is to give the players whatever they want, then I suggest you take out a board game called: CANDY LAND and use that for your gaming sessions.

Obviously, you have never known the frustration of being stranded in the Molasses Swamp.

Dude, go back and read my posts. I didn't say shut down someone's character every time they game. I said instill the fear that they can be shut down if they keep abusing their character and their power.

You only ever need to shut down a munchkin player once or twice at a critical moment for them to rethink how they play the game.

What is with this munchkin fixation? Munchkins aren't the problem here; wizards being intrinsically more powerful than, say, fighters or rogues in combat encounters is the problem.

Alas, my dear Fax, what is described above (the post you quoted) is what a lot of people consider fun.

Only because they do it to other people and do not have it done to themselves.

With the attitude you've given me, Fax, I'll send your comments to my committee for review to determine how I should address you, dude.

I now dub you "slick," slick.

If you want to keep arguing that wizards are so over powered that there's nothing a DM can do to learn how to adjust the encounters, then maybe you and everyone else who agrees with that sentiment needs to stop allowing wizards or needs to stop playing 3rd edition

If the only way to adjust encounters to make wizards balanced is to impose arbitrary conditions that either completely remove their sole effective ability (spellcasting) or to break the rules in favor of their enemies so that those enemies are better at killing wizards than any combination of published statistics and published methods of strengthening them would indicate, the problem is with the quality of the system, not the quality of the DM.

Fax, I'm going to say this once and once only:

1. Dragons can sense anyone who enters their lair, unless they're little ones. I doubt we're talking about a little one.

2. Dragons have a stride measured by the size of their BIG FREAKING LEGS.

3. Crushing Damage is not an attack roll. You seem to think it is.

4. Any DM who doesn't have the capacity of thought to portray Dragons in a manner that allows them to WALK or STAND or RUN or STEP ASIDE while some worthless magically imbued peon of a hors’dourves walk up to them without taking any actions needs to be immediately stripped of their DMG and thrown out onto the street by the local Dungeon Masters guild.

I did not once ever suggest to break the rules.

Yes, you did. Dragons don't deal trample damage moving around. In fact, the rules of Third edition specifically, explicitly state that creatures the size of big dragons and creatures the size of humans can move around in the same space simultaneously without either stepping on the other, the premise being that the human is running around between the dragon's legs, just as a mouse might move between the legs of a human.

Therefore, your suggestion that characters entering melee combat with a dragon automatically take trampling damage breaks both the specific rules implied by the D&D definition of "dragon," and the general rules related to how large and small creature move around each other. So yes, Slick, you are breaking rules.

Any DM who doesn't design a Dragon who has protective wards or watchdog spells on his/her lair needs to have their badge taken from them and tossed to the side.

Wards and watchdog spells will hurt the other characters just as much as they hurt the wizard, if not more so.

I have and I've met players who thought they could outwit me and ate for breakfast using standard rules.

However, your unfamiliarity with the reasons why dragons are vulnerable to the effects of Shivering Touch suggests that the people playing with you haven't really tried very hard to be dangerous and effective. Note that this is not a question of munchkinnery- any intelligent character (such as a typical wizard) would seek to employ the most effective tactics available against a given foe. Against a dragon, touch attack spells are very effective, and since dragons are not famous for their agility, a spell that robs them of what agility they possess would also be very effective. Veteran players will tend to do things like that simply because it strains the suspension of disbelief for characters to employ deliberately bad tactics.

Nonveteran players will not know to do these things, which suggests that your experiences have been against nonveteran players. Therefore, your ability to suppress their sallies at being more effective than level would indicate doesn't prove much, just as the fact that you have a superb batting average against a Little League team would not be remarkable. Nor would it prove that it is automatically easy for any batter to have, say, a .500 batting average in all games and that all the Major League batters with their .300 averages must be incompetent.

IF YOU CAN GET WITHIN RANGE TO USE TOUCH.

Which you can.

Very few dragons can actually defeat a kingdom's army of warriors due the simple fact that enough will roll 20 on the attack rolls. An adult black dragon has roughly 200 HP. Thus, it only requires 4,000 ranged attack rolls for 200 ensured hits of 1 damage.

It's not quite that easy; we've had this argument before on this board. I was there.