Flighty
So there you are, running your no-nonsense game of gritty fantasy. Your players are miserable peasants and it’s amazing. They’ve got to choose between a hot meal and sleeping in an inn. Their horse is busted. Their weapons are scavenged pitchforks. Everyone is diseased, covered in shit, and can only dream of that distant day when they’re able to afford pants. In short, they might die from an encounter with a freaking cat, and everything is as it should be.
But then it happens. At long last, they’ve killed enough dire rats to hit third level. The wizard gets his invisibility spell, and now everything changes. The players can go wherever they want. They can sneak into the bandit king’s tent, the princess’s chambers, or the vaults of Ye Olde Banke. Soon their pockets are bulging with filthy lucre, and their swords are glowing with the blue light of a +1 enhancement bonus. A new way of playing the game has fallen at their feet.
Invisibility is, in my opinion, the first of three abilities that change the way the game is played. The third is of course teleportation, but we’ll cover that a few comics hence. You receive no points from guessing what the middle child is in this trio of paradigm shifts.
Flight is one of those abilities that your players have to have. At some point in a fantasy game, they WILL encounter harpies or winged demons or exceptionally mean canaries, and on that day they’re going to want a carpet/cape/cauldron/etc. of flying. After all, there’s nothing worse than straining your neck as you look skyward, watching as your buddies hog all the glory.
And so, because your players all can fly, you’re left sitting there as a GM with a pile of tear soaked campaign notes crumpled up on the table in front of you. All of a sudden you can’t put a mountain in their way, a pit trap, or a daring leap across a chasm. You can’t even give them ground-bound enemies sans projectile weapons. All of those game elements have gone away because the game space has acquired a third dimension. That’s what I mean when I say that flight changes the way the game is played. It’s a fundamental shift in adventure design and player capability. Plan accordingly.
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See this is why harpoons exists, get a good throw and BAM, that winged marauder is now a balloon your players can try to pull down if they can’t get up there.
This comic actually came about because of a recent fight with a dread wraith (Pathfinder). My buddy the paladin did a great job holding back, readying actions, and applying lay on hands to his guildmates. Since the wraith was spring attacking and flying back up, he just couldn’t find a way to close. He only found out later that he could have thrown his bonded weapon ability onto his mundane bow, making it magical and thus able to damage the smug floaty thing.
What I’m saying is yeah, I think you’re right. There’s almost always an option if you squeeze your character sheet hard enough.
And of course it’s a terrible headache to try and keep track of where people are in that third dimension. Especially if you’re not actually playing at a table.
I think those gamechanger spells are part of why it’s so hard to find GMs who want to start games at mid to high levels.
I’ll try to remember to take a pic of it later, but when the party got a flying carpet I actually built a model. I wound up using a chunk of foam for the base, but I glued a bit of plastic onto the side so the players could pencil in their altitude. I don’t think they ever have though, because dealing with that third dimension is still a pain in the ass.
For all its faults, I always liked that 4E acknowledged the different levels of play with the heroic/paragon/epic tier conceit. Here’s a pretty good explanation if you’re not familiar: http://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/7317/whats-with-this-tier-stuff-and-how-does-that-translate-to-levels
Yeah, 4E did a number of things well. And some things poorly. And some things a bit strangely. It may not have been everyone’s cup of tea, but I think we’re better off for it having existed.
All in all, my preferred edition is 5E. But it still has that same issue with those spell effects.
I always wonder why I see so many people still running 3.5 games and then I remember “Oh right, they didn’t personally know the guys who made the Wish and the Word and didn’t respond to that by joining another friend in figuring out how to make a duo that could take them down. They can actually look at the system and not be trapped in an existential crisis loop when presented with the idea of making a character in it.” =P
Wow. I’d read up on Pun-Pun before, but this is the first I’d heard of the Wish and the Word:
http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/The_Wish_and_the_Word_(3.5e_Optimized_Character_Build)
Did you ever beat them?
Well, I don’t believe they ever actually put the Wish and the Word in a real game (who would be mad enough to run that?). I also can’t really imagine a scenario where we would have been allowed to make characters for the sole purpose of killing other PCs.
We just did the theory crafting and ran the numbers on how the theoretical encounter would go. For the record that is “the encounter” as in, the Wish & the Word would have to not know about the existence of the characters/their capabilities beforehand.
The plan, as best I can recall, involved abusing the fact that the Wish would not have godly levels of Insight and thus having one member of the team seduce him into a compromising position while the duo were not together. And then at the same time (by which I mean the same round) the duo would have to strike with their weird soulstealing weapons (I forget the exact items). Even then, there was a good chance (under 50% though I believe) the Word would come out victorious. If either the Wish or the Word survived the round, they won. All in all, it involved a lot of incredibly absurd stuff on about the same level of likelyhood a GM would ever approve as the Wish and the Word and particular bits of 3.5 stuff I’d never even heard of before. And I think it’s telling that it hinged on approaching it from a non-combat angle.
Sounds to me like someone doesn’t realize how TALL mountains are. There’s a reason that Passes are valuable and fought-over locations, and it’s not because they’ve got pre-made pathways. It’s because they’re some of the few locations where you can go over a mountain range without going high enough to get oxygen deprived, or altitude sickness, or freeze to death in the cold. How well is your Warlock going to be able to ride that broom when the bristles are iced over and he’s fighting Exhaustion due to lack of air?