Traditional D&D spells that make planning adventures difficult

[Thrudd]

Sure, but the idea that there is always a time limit and rest is never available is contrived in the extreme, and one mage who lives in a reasonably safe environment and can dedicate themselves to long projects is enough to completely warp most D&D settings, which calls into question why they haven't been warped yet.

Yes, 9th, 10th and above level wizards would likely have a safe home base, probably their newly constructed wizard tower/laboratory, which they would return to in order to recover from adventures. But adventures don't happen at home, they require going to dangerous places. And in a world with some sense of verisimilitude, time goes on and events happen even while characters are resting. To recover all your spells, you need to retreat from the adventure and spend multiple days sleeping, healing, and memorizing. Research and crafting are expensive, time consuming and unreliable enough that a wizard is not likely to warp the setting so much, at least not quickly. The degree to which the world is already "warped", with weird monsters and dungeons full of treasure and traps and magic items, is a result of high level wizards holed up in their laboratories doing this sort of thing.

3e didn't "become" Tippyverse so much as one guy intentionally misread some rules and was super smug about it, then half this forum jumped on the bandwagon.

Generally speaking, D&D rules are designed with the intent of representing specific exceptional individuals in specific exceptional circumstances, not providing the immutable Laws of Physics for a fictional universe (no matter how hilarious the latter might be). Whether they are presented correctly for this design philosophy is another matter entirely, but frankly it's the only way that makes any sense. Interpreting it another way and saying "this doesn't make any sense" should be your first clue that you're going about it cockeyed.

The representation of individuals is meaningless without the context of a setting by which to gauge their exceptional-ness. The rules are designed not only to describe the characters, but the setting in which they exist. They are not immutable laws of physics, as you said, but they are abstractions meant to simulate the goings on of a fictional world of a certain genre. Change the rules, the assumptions and feeling of the genre can be changed.

3e's changes in the magic system created a change in the assumptions which had prevailed in earlier editions. I agree that the common interpretation of 3.x D&D around this forum is an overly liberal reading of the rules, especially regarding the expected availability, purchasing and crafting of magic items. But regardless, there are substantial changes to the setting under this rule set which alter the perception of what characters are and should be capable of in relation to the world around them.

3e wizards have reliable access to things which can both increase the number of spells they have access to on any given day as well as trivialize the limits placed on them regarding recovering spells. This means the "exceptional individuals" in a world with access to those things is quite a bit different than the "exceptional individuals" of earlier editions, and the implications for the world they live in is different.

Of course, a different setting with more easy access to magic could be envisioned for an earlier edition game and the rules adjusted accordingly, or 3e could be scaled back to simulate a genre with more restricted magic. But this can't be said to be a property of the rules of those systems, rather something an individual table can do in spite of the given rules.

[Knaight]

Yes, 9th, 10th and above level wizards would likely have a safe home base, probably their newly constructed wizard tower/laboratory, which they would return to in order to recover from adventures. But adventures don't happen at home, they require going to dangerous places. And in a world with some sense of verisimilitude, time goes on and events happen even while characters are resting. To recover all your spells, you need to retreat from the adventure and spend multiple days sleeping, healing, and memorizing. Research and crafting are expensive, time consuming and unreliable enough that a wizard is not likely to warp the setting so much, at least not quickly. The degree to which the world is already "warped", with weird monsters and dungeons full of treasure and traps and magic items, is a result of high level wizards holed up in their laboratories doing this sort of thing.

Every single wizard going to dangerous places all the time isn't a believable constraint; that's my point. The whole trope of there always being some time limit can work just fine for a group of PCs, but as a setting wide thing it really doesn't.

[Thrudd]

Every single wizard going to dangerous places all the time isn't a believable constraint; that's my point. The whole trope of there always being some time limit can work just fine for a group of PCs, but as a setting wide thing it really doesn't.

The implication of the setting is, in fact, that all wizards gained their power from recovering lost knowledge from dangerous places. Of course, there may be retired wizards that stay in safe places conducting research, satisfied with what they have accomplished in their careers or sending others to do the dangerous stuff for them. Even without a strict time limit on what they're doing, the limits built into the spells themselves mean repeated and reliable use of high level spells for the purpose of negating the normal obstacles an adventuring party faces will be an infrequent occurrence.

Adventurer demographics is another issue to take into consideration. If adventurers are meant to be exceptional and rare individuals (at least the ones that survive to gain more than a few levels), and magic users have the most difficult career to survive at early levels as well as requiring the most time/experience to gain levels, then high level magic users would be among the least populous of higher level adventurers, which in general are extremely rare relative to the general population. So there may be high level wizards, studying and researching and making scrolls and magic items in their towers, who could have enough time, power and spell slots to teleport a whole party back and forth from an adventure location, but there is probably only a couple of them in the whole world/plane. Even if the wizard has nothing else to do for a year while they scribe a series of teleport scrolls to send with their adventuring party, the adventurers probably can't afford to wait that long.

To make an analogy with our world - we have the technology and people with the knowledge to build spacecraft to take us into orbit, to the moon, and even mars. So why doesn't everyone have a space shuttle and fly them everywhere? We could get people to the other side of the planet in minutes instead of hours, and have colonies on the moon and mars and other planets, why hasn't it happened yet? Just because something has the potential to happen in a world doesn't mean that at any given time, it will have happened already or will happen at all.
Finding a high level wizard with enough time and ability to teleport you places is like finding someone who builds their own space shuttles and will give you one to fly around in.

[Knaight]

To make an analogy with our world - we have the technology and people with the knowledge to build spacecraft to take us into orbit, to the moon, and even mars. So why doesn't everyone have a space shuttle and fly them everywhere? We could get people to the other side of the planet in minutes instead of hours, and have colonies on the moon and mars and other planets, why hasn't it happened yet? Just because something has the potential to happen in a world doesn't mean that at any given time, it will have happened already or will happen at all.

We have to deal with things like the ridiculous amounts of energy taken per trip, maintenance, the complexity per trip, and a whole bunch of other infrastructure related factors that you don't really see with stuff like established teleport circles, or the other D&D 3e capabilities. On top of that, that knowledge has made putting up satellites downright routine, so the knowledge is seeing plenty of use.

[Cosi]

If a party composed completely of magic users, all with their own fly and teleport spells, have survived to 9th level, or even 5th level, those players deserve to bypass all obstacles. They have won D&D.

This attitude is super bad for the game. Having the "all casters" or "no casters" party be non-functional in some part of the game or overpowered in another part of the game does literally nothing good. It's just a way of forcing some percentage of people to play characters they don't want to for no reason.

Exactly. Which is how 3e became Tippyverse. The traditional D&D spells require traditional D&D mechanics and limits in order not to become a magitech super hero game rather than a swords & sorcery game.

That's not true. Like, at all. The Tippyverse is stupid (on a lot of levels) but at no point is it dependent on the spells people cast. It's dependent of getting to use the Trap or Custom Magic Item creation rules to make self-resetting traps of create food and water, fabricate, and other spells so that society passively produces everything it needs. The actual spells people actually cast and the difficult of preparing them enters into the equation precisely never.

So no, we do not need Old School D&D's crappy game mechanics for magic to work.

[Thrudd]

This attitude is super bad for the game. Having the "all casters" or "no casters" party be non-functional in some part of the game or overpowered in another part of the game does literally nothing good. It's just a way of forcing some percentage of people to play characters they don't want to for no reason.



That's not true. Like, at all. The Tippyverse is stupid (on a lot of levels) but at no point is it dependent on the spells people cast. It's dependent of getting to use the Trap or Custom Magic Item creation rules to make self-resetting traps of create food and water, fabricate, and other spells so that society passively produces everything it needs. The actual spells people actually cast and the difficult of preparing them enters into the equation precisely never.

So no, we do not need Old School D&D's crappy game mechanics for magic to work.

That's an opinion. In mine, 3e's overly easy magic mechanics, among other things, changed the balance of the game and altered the nature of the implied genre and the type of challenges that is reasonable. 3e is for a different sort of world and game than AD&D, and the magic mechanics are a big part of describing that.

I don't really care about the actual Tippyverse, I was just using the phrase as a catch-all for magitech worlds where wizards are all-powerful and magic is common and easily accessible. Purchasing magic items, easy and cheap spell scrolls and wands, spell casting times so short and lenient that there is basically no chance of being interrupted. It may not be actual "tippyverse", but it's very different than the old D&D setting.

It's perfectly valid for a game to have a design which expects or requires characters that fulfill different roles. In terms of strategy, a smart group of players will want to have a cross section of abilities at their disposal, and in older D&D that means having a variety of character classes. It isn't a "bad game" because some team composition strategies are better than others for success. In 3e and later, there are so many options available, not the least of which is basically unrestricted multi-classing, that any character can fulfill a wide range of roles; each class means less than it did in the older game.

3e is good if you want the type of world 3e creates with its mechanics. Older D&D is good if you want a different type of world. Many retro-clone games have attempted to take what D&D started to different conclusions than those reached by 3e and also clean up things that didn't work or were disorganized. In many of those, spell casting and access to magic items remains far more limited than is found in 3e. They use old D&D's mechanics, for the most part, because they want magic to work a certain way.

[Knaight]

3e is good if you want the type of world 3e creates with its mechanics. Older D&D is good if you want a different type of world. Many retro-clone games have attempted to take what D&D started to different conclusions than those reached by 3e and also clean up things that didn't work or were disorganized. In many of those, spell casting and access to magic items remains far more limited than is found in 3e. They use old D&D's mechanics, for the most part, because they want magic to work a certain way.

Older D&D still has a plethora of extremely powerful spells cast and recovered quickly, particularly when compared to the genre literature. The difference between it and 3e are honestly not that big, particularly in regards to options closed and opened by the magic system.

[Cosi]

Purchasing magic items, easy and cheap spell scrolls and wands, spell casting times so short and lenient that there is basically no chance of being interrupted.

How does any of that change the setting? The setting changing spells are ones you can cast in your house, during downtime, where there is no chance of being disrupted. fabricate, true creation, and planar binding all have long casting times even in 3e, so clearly the change to make casting easier to pull off didn't lead to setting changes.

It isn't a "bad game" because some team composition strategies are better than others for success.

Yes it is. The point of the game is to have fun. People have fun by playing different classes. The classes four people will maximally enjoy do not always map to the classes that designers decided were required for the game to work. As such, having hard-coded class requirements makes the game less fun.

Some degree of reward for specific party compositions is inevitable (lockdown + DoT is better than blasting + DoT), but there's no reason to hard-code it into the game.

In many of those, spell casting and access to magic items remains far more limited than is found in 3e. They use old D&D's mechanics, for the most part, because they want magic to work a certain way.

They use old D&D mechanics because the people who make them are trying to capture the feel of old D&D by making games that are mechanically like old D&D, rather than thinking about the design goals of old D&D and making a game using modern game design to meet those goals.

[Knaight]

They use old D&D mechanics because the people who make them are trying to capture the feel of old D&D by making games that are mechanically like old D&D, rather than thinking about the design goals of old D&D and making a game using modern game design to meet those goals.

A lot of them are more just making old D&D available again at all via the use of SRD terminology, and not about making new games at all. There are games which go design goal first, and they look very different - take Torchbearer.

[Thrudd]

How does any of that change the setting? The setting changing spells are ones you can cast in your house, during downtime, where there is no chance of being disrupted. fabricate, true creation, and planar binding all have long casting times even in 3e, so clearly the change to make casting easier to pull off didn't lead to setting changes.



Yes it is. The point of the game is to have fun. People have fun by playing different classes. The classes four people will maximally enjoy do not always map to the classes that designers decided were required for the game to work. As such, having hard-coded class requirements makes the game less fun.

Some degree of reward for specific party compositions is inevitable (lockdown + DoT is better than blasting + DoT), but there's no reason to hard-code it into the game.



They use old D&D mechanics because the people who make them are trying to capture the feel of old D&D by making games that are mechanically like old D&D, rather than thinking about the design goals of old D&D and making a game using modern game design to meet those goals.

If you don't see how easy fabrication of magic items and easy access to them makes a difference in the setting, I don't know what to say.

I get that you like 3e and think it is fun. I did, too, when I played it. But older D&D is also fun, it just works differently. There are different ways to have fun, and different people think different things are fun sometimes. That's why there are now hundreds of different role playing games with all sorts of rules simulating all sorts of genres. All of them are somebody's idea of fun.

Some retro-clones are just literally clones of old D&D, with the intent of making the old D&D rules available to everyone again. That is true. But other retro-clones/OSR games have made specific design choices, in-line with old D&D mechanics, in order to create a game with a certain feel or genre that they believe recent editions fail to provide.

Also: The game works just fine with all the players choosing whatever class they want. It is just harder. There's nothing wrong with that, either. This is still the case in 3e, as well. A group of 1st level wizards, adventuring alone, with no special advantages granted and without encounters tailored for them to survive, will have a rough time of things, I wouldn't expect them all to survive to level 2.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Only in the same sense that shields prove that including swords was a mistake, or having dispel magic proves that magic was a mistake.

False analogy. Shields and dispel magic are far from perfect defenses against swords and magic, due to incompleteness of defense and the fact that the enemy almost certainly has more spells than you can reasonably dispel (unless that's all you do). An undetectable alignment spell or like just turns off detect evil and the like.

B. Only three out of fifty? One of my villains was living in the middle of the Thieves section of the city. Another was at court. Watch Game of Thrones, and tell us how useful it would be to detect alignment.

Detect [alignment] spells don't work in a Westeros-esque world. No one is really good or evil. Take Tyrion—he's a pragmatic hedonist, but he acts out of love for his family and honestly tries to make life in King's Landing as un-miserable as possible for the common folk. Or take Danaerys—she seems good at heart, but her actions end up destroying countless lives, and she even has one man melted by dragonfire. Black-and-white morality like what D&D assumes requires a more idealistic view of things, and few views sufficiently idealistic also have a large number of people being Evil, particularly when you consider that evil people have a disproportionately high chance of premature death due to working for (or being) evil overlords and hence getting killed by adventurers, rival gangs, and the like.

Any tactic leads to a counter-tactic. That's how the game works.

Most counter-tactics are more nuanced than "use the phlebotinum that turns off the plot-breaking effect".

Most of the spells that really alter the way players approach dungeons and adventures are on the higher end of the level scale. I think that changing the game in radical ways once your players hit those levels is a feature, not a bug. Ten feet poles and ladders and ropes and rations are for levels one and two and maybe three, as far as I'm concerned.

So, are you fine with many mundane concerns simply not existing for most of the game, or do you only ever play the first few levels?

I honestly don't have a problem with these spells. It means that things that were challenging at lower levels aren't at higher - that's it. One may as well complain that a bunch of goblins straight out of the MM aren't challenging at higher levels.

False analogy. 1st-level goblin warriors can be replaced by ogres, giants, golems, undead, and high-level goblins without fundamentally changing how they play. That's a difference in scale.
The things we're discussing are cutting out not certain scales of challenges, but certain kinds. Once you can teleport, travel—no matter the scale—is trivialized (barring a Cloister spell or similar, and unless you manage to cover several miles with it, it won't be much of a challenge.
The same plot can always survive differences of scale unimpeded. Differences of kind are not always so simple.

And in a 3rd edition game, I believe that a lot of people would come up with the brilliant idea that such magic are regulated by the authority. If every wizard in the street can potentially cast a spell that interfere the judicial investigation, and many would be happy to be hired to do that, why would the authority be blind enough to allow them do it with impunity?

You're making a lot of assumptions there.
1. The campaign takes place in a nation with values close enough to those of modern First World nations to produce similar judicial procedures and standards.
2. Said procedures and standards are not adapted to the existence of divinations.
3. There is a sufficient number of magical individuals for magic to produce a meaningful impact on the world...
4. ...and the campaign generally takes such impacts into account.

Or just not have alignment. If you can't use spells to get information about alignment, what's the point of having alignment at all?

A roleplaying crutch that gets in the way as often as it helps, and sets the world into a mechanically-enforced state of black-and-white morality?

You can get trapped. You just can't get trapped on your home plane. If you're in hell, or an Escherian hypercube, or any other extradimensional location, teleport doesn't do much. You can't do Lost, but you can totally do Lost in Space.

How would a party get to that other plane in the first place? I'm having trouble thinking of a way that doesn't smack of railroading.

Exactly this. If high level doesn't work differently from low level, why have levels at all? If I just wanted to get bigger and bigger numbers, I could play Runescape or World of Warcraft.

Ideally, this would manifest by higher levels giving you the ability to attempt things you could never do before (conquer nations, invade Hell, etc), rather than simply making interesting obstacles and potential challenges meaningless.

Depending on the edition, even these powerful spells don't automatically mean all obstacles are obsolete. The number of spells known and able to be cast each day are quite low, especially the higher level ones. Sure, the wizard could dedicate one fifth level slot to a teleport spell every day as a contingency, passing up stuff like conjure elemental, wall of force, cone of cold, and many other super useful spells. It lets them teleport 250 lbs, plus an extra 150 lbs per level over 10th, so we're talking about, most likely one member of the party at level 9 and 10, with their gear and loot, or two at most if they are small, like elves or halflings and without much gear. Everyone else, henchmen, hirelings, the dragon hoard, left behind, until the caster is extremely high level. And there's a non-zero chance that the spell could result in the death of everyone teleported. I'd say it's not really an adventure breaking spell, it's a one-off "hail mary/save your own skin" spell, until you are such high level that the party is probably fighting demons in the abyss, or entire colonies of mind flayers and beholders anyway.

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

You can bring along objects as long as their weight doesn’t exceed your maximum load. You may also bring one additional willing Medium or smaller creature (carrying gear or objects up to its maximum load) or its equivalent (see below) per three caster levels.

(Citation)
You can take your whole party with you at 9th level. And while a wizard only gets a couple of base 5th-level spells per day until high levels, he also gets a bonus spell if his Intelligence is at least 20 (and it should, if I'm recalling correctly and permanent enhancement bonuses apply), plus a likely bonus spell from specialization, plus—likely most importantly—magic items.
Any wizard who knows teleport can make a scroll for about 560 gp (out of ~36k; not nothing, but not a lot when most wizards are going to have daggers or staves costing four times as much) and 45 XP (chump change; the wizard will get that fifteen times over after a typical combat), and half a day. Spending these resources means the wizard can have a teleport ready whenever they need it.

The fly spell affects exactly one person, for a limited time. It's not a "party ignores all ground-based obstacles" spell.

Unless you use some gamey tactic like having your strongest party member carry the others one by one, or tying a rope to the top, or something. Oh, it requires a little ingenuity for some obstacles, but not much.

I see these spells as possible solutions to a single obstacle or contingency in the course of an adventure. They don't negate all barriers nor require restructuring of the entire game world to counter the PC spell caster. 1e and earlier have enough limits on spell casting that it isn't a big deal.

No one has said that they do, but with a bare minimum of planning, they can be used to greatly cut down on the variety of non-combat challenges a DM can offer (unless he simply slaps down some arbitrary anti-phlebotinum measures, which just doesn't feel nice for anyone).
And as for 1st edition...Grod's Law comes into play.

You cannot and should not balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use.

A player who is interested in using fly to bypass an obstacle is almost guaranteed to find a way to do so, no matter how much this way disrupts play.

The implication of the setting is, in fact, that all wizards gained their power from recovering lost knowledge from dangerous places.

I read the core rulebooks repeatedly in middle school (don't judge me), and I don't remember once coming across anything that suggested that. Not in the least that wizards could learn any spell they wanted on level-up, or how no reference was ever made to that. You're pulling explanations out of your colon to justify your assumptions; I don't know what kind of fallacy that is, but it's a bad one.

Also: The game works just fine with all the players choosing whatever class they want. It is just harder. There's nothing wrong with that, either.

If the optimal party and the party the game designers intended are so radically out of whack as they are, it's a sign of bad game design, and throws everything out of balance if players start experimenting to find the most effective party compositions.

[Sith_Happens]

That's not true. Like, at all. The Tippyverse is stupid (on a lot of levels) but at no point is it dependent on the spells people cast. It's dependent of getting to use the Trap or Custom Magic Item creation rules to make self-resetting traps of create food and water, fabricate, and other spells so that society passively produces everything it needs. The actual spells people actually cast and the difficult of preparing them enters into the equation precisely never.

Actually the critical feature that makes a Tippyverse happen is Permanancied Teleportation Circles, which if allowed to proliferate make holding large swaths of territory against hostile troops impossible and thereby encourage people to crowd into heavily-defended city-states. All the other stuff is just a hypothetical answer to "What happens after that?"

[Thrudd]

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

(Citation)
You can take your whole party with you at 9th level. And while a wizard only gets a couple of base 5th-level spells per day until high levels, he also gets a bonus spell if his Intelligence is at least 20 (and it should, if I'm recalling correctly and permanent enhancement bonuses apply), plus a likely bonus spell from specialization, plus—likely most importantly—magic items.
Any wizard who knows teleport can make a scroll for about 560 gp (out of ~36k; not nothing, but not a lot when most wizards are going to have daggers or staves costing four times as much) and 45 XP (chump change; the wizard will get that fifteen times over after a typical combat), and half a day. Spending these resources means the wizard can have a teleport ready whenever they need it.


Unless you use some gamey tactic like having your strongest party member carry the others one by one, or tying a rope to the top, or something. Oh, it requires a little ingenuity for some obstacles, but not much.


No one has said that they do, but with a bare minimum of planning, they can be used to greatly cut down on the variety of non-combat challenges a DM can offer (unless he simply slaps down some arbitrary anti-phlebotinum measures, which just doesn't feel nice for anyone).
And as for 1st edition...Grod's Law comes into play.

A player who is interested in using fly to bypass an obstacle is almost guaranteed to find a way to do so, no matter how much this way disrupts play.


I read the core rulebooks repeatedly in middle school (don't judge me), and I don't remember once coming across anything that suggested that. Not in the least that wizards could learn any spell they wanted on level-up, or how no reference was ever made to that. You're pulling explanations out of your colon to justify your assumptions; I don't know what kind of fallacy that is, but it's a bad one.


If the optimal party and the party the game designers intended are so radically out of whack as they are, it's a sign of bad game design, and throws everything out of balance if players start experimenting to find the most effective party compositions.

You are referencing the 3e SRD, I am talking about 1e. Yes, the 3e spells are much more lenient. In 1e, magic users do not get extra spells, outside of rare magic items. There is no easy way to scribe scrolls or craft any magic items. And what I quoted for teleport and fly are accurate for 1e.

My reference to the manner in which wizards gain their power is based on the assumptions of 1e and earlier, where xp and therefore levels comes from recovering treasure, and the vast majority of a magic user's spells must be found in adventures. The DMG gives guidance to the DM that NPCs should in no way be willing to share their spells with the players without asking for spells or magic items of higher value in return. This is because all magic in this setting (AD&D) is meant to be hard won and precious. Yes, they get one spell at level up. Just one. And they still have to roll to see if they can understand whatever spell it is they want to add to the spell book, so no guarantees. Without adventuring, the spellbook would be very light, even if they somehow gained levels.

Spells should be a way to overcome obstacles, that's what they are for. But getting a specific spell does not need to be something that permanently overcomes all such obstacles, if spells are still a limited resource. That's what this is about. In 3e, once you learn teleport, there is little to stop the party from teleporting all over the place. In 1e, the spell can't teleport the whole party until you are extremely high level. Like "epic", we're practically gods high level.

Grod's Law doesn't apply to this. 1e's version is the original version of the spell and didn't result in a "broken "game. 3e's changes made it powerful enough to require "fixing" or else alter the tone of the game once it becomes accessible.

The optimal party and that which the designers intended isn't out of whack at all, at least not in older D&D. They are identical: a mix of character classes to provide various skills and address different challenges. Fighter (maybe more than one), at least one each cleric, magic user, and thief. There is nothing stopping players going with different composition, but they might have a more difficult game.

[Emperor Tippy]

That's not true. Like, at all. The Tippyverse is stupid (on a lot of levels) but at no point is it dependent on the spells people cast. It's dependent of getting to use the Trap or Custom Magic Item creation rules to make self-resetting traps of create food and water, fabricate, and other spells so that society passively produces everything it needs. The actual spells people actually cast and the difficult of preparing them enters into the equation precisely never.

So no, we do not need Old School D&D's crappy game mechanics for magic to work.

The top response when you Google "Tippyverse" is "The Definitive Guide to the Tippverse, By Emperor Tippy".

---
The Tippyverse arose entirely out of the question of "what are the effects of permanent teleportation circles on the world?"

My initial versions made zero use of the trap rules or any other magic item creation rules. Instead you had farms located in the most fertile of areas and worked by cheap labor with the food being transported to the parent city via teleportaion circles.