Death Spells

[RaistlinandPals]

Recently my DM has made a house rule of no "death spells" allowed. That being, any spell that has a save or die descriptor. The problem is that now that the PCs are a higher level, we can throw out several of these if we wish. Combat has become, at least to my DM, pointless due to the fact that he will set up the board only to have the monsters killed within 1-2 turns. So he has decided to exclude all spells in the game with save or die. While I can understand his frustration, isn't there some better solution than taking a good amount of spells and abilities from the game?

[Yuki Akuma]

Death Ward is a fairly low-level spell, and many creatures are just innately immune to death effects.

[oriong]

Or just high saves, many high CR monsters have tons and tons of HD, which means the saves are tough for even high level casters to beat (along with SR)

[Piccamo]

Considering he should be making the encounters as challenges for the party and not competition for the party, he may have messed up. He could try sending hordes of enemies after you, use lots of Undead (immune to death effects), use creatures with high SR, or use ambush encounters.

[Fax Celestis]

Well-built and well-strategizing parties are entirely able of decimating opponents of CR far above their ECL, even without save-or-die/save-or-lose, so it may be a moot point entirely.

[tarbrush]

It depends if he's using save or die back at you. If he's not, it seems reasonable, even if it's not the way I'd do it personally. If he is, then he just needs to give his monsters a few more HD or pick em with good SR.

[cupkeyk]

Its not banned in our games but we don't use them because they are cheap. There are savvier ways of winning. Most save or die spells are high level and using up high level spell slots on offensive spells is just bizarre. This means the party will at most have one to three encounters a day. I am guessing the DM is not setting up the encounters right.

[Saph]

If I were you, I'd be grateful if anything. The reason is that save-or-die spells are much, much worse when used against the PCs than when used against the monsters.

Do the math. If every combat, every spellcaster PC uses one save-or-die, and every monster with the ability to do so uses one save-or-die, how many combats will it take before everyone can expect to fail a save? Not very many. Losing characters to save-or-die spells sucks - "Oops, I rolled a 1, I'm dead before I had a chance to act". It's much better that the DM is solving the problem this way than by getting annoyed and throwing save-or-die effects back at your party.

- Saph

[Thomas]

What's a "save or die descriptor" ? Descriptors are the bits in the square brackets: [Evil] etc.

Anyway, who cares about save or die? Use save or lose (slow, confusion, etc.).

[Aximili]

Recently my DM has made a house rule of no "death spells" allowed.

Where do you play??!! Can I join?!

And to the question: There are definitively better ways he could have handled this, but I support the removal of such spells. Take away death spells along with ressurrection (and variants), and, all of a sudden, death is a big deal. (Although good players usually already behave accordingly.)

IMO, death effects should not exist, and raise dead whould be a 9th level spell.

[ImperiousLeader]

One way to mitigate "save-or-die" spells is class levels. Since most monsters have a weak save that casters exploit to target, advancing the monster with 2 or 3 class levels that have that save as a strong one will make that save easier to make.

[Shhalahr Windrider]

Hm, class level + Iron Will/Great Fortitude/Lightning Reflexes == +4 bonus to save. That's pretty nice.

Throw in that a class with a good <x> save is likely non-associated for a monster with a poor one, and you can add at least two class levels with minimal change to CR. So that would be +5 bonus or larger (still counting the feat).

[Roderick_BR]

If he removed something from the game because he thinks it doesn't suit the campaign, he's not in the wrong. Him and the players need to get to an agreement first, though.