Heroes’ Feast
First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to one and all! I hope your heroes‘ feasts were as good as ours. Of course, the after-effects of such prodigious meals include fatigue, indigestion, and temporary immunity to fear. That’s all well and good as a sometime food, but if your parties are anything like mine, the hits just keep on coming. There you are at the dungeon entrance, stuffed to the gills already, when in comes the dessert tray with such tempting offerings as haste pie or a delectable blackberry and bless cobbler. You’ve run out of notches on your belt of giant strength, but you just keep cramming it in. How could you say no when everything looks so good?
Allow me to bring this tortured metaphor to a close by saying simply this: When it comes to buffing, it’s easy to go overboard.
Take my Pathfinder 1e occultist/magus. I loved the crap out of that character for his versatility, but by level 15 the self-enhancement was getting out of hand. Everything was groovy if the party was getting ambushed. I could simply rely on my all-day buffs in those scenarios, laying down a couple of quick round one spells before wading into melee. When you’re high level though, access to divination magic and disposable scouting minions is easy. More often than not, that party knew when danger was coming. And when we knew a fight lay behind the next door, I felt obliged to do the following:
- Activate legacy weapon
- Activate arcane pool
- Pop out a couple of necromantic servants
- Change my soulbound puppet’s archetype to protector
- Turn on sudden speed
- Drink a tasty bear’s endurance beverage
- Thank my pal the arcanist for haste and enlarge person
- Crank up my winged boots
- Cast anticipate peril
- Cast lead blades
- Cast mirror image
- Throw a battlemind link on me and the party brawler
It was like roleplaying a preflight checklist. I half expected my GM to wave me towards the combat with a pair of flash batons. And even when combat actually started, I still felt obliged to keep an eye on potential dangers so that I could react with situational immediate action buffs. All of this takes time and math, and if you let it get away from you then combat can drag to a crawl. That’s doubly true when other party members share in the general buffery.
Automatic character sheets like Hero Lab can be a big help here. However, I think this is more of a playstyle issue than a mechanical one. There comes a point when preparation is more trouble than it’s worth, and when kicking open the door and following in Leeroy’s footsteps is the only play left to make. Suffice it to say that I began to limit myself to three buffs per combat, and that my occultist felt much better for the self-imposed restriction.
So how about it, guys? Are you guilty of over-buffing? Or is there no such thing as “too prepared?” Let’s hear your tales of potion-pounding and heroes’ feasting in the comments!
REQUEST A SKETCH! So you know how we’ve got a sketch feed on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon? By default it’s full of Laurel’s warm up sketches, illustrations not posted elsewhere, design concepts for current and new characters, and the occasional pin-up shot. But inspiration is hard sometimes. That’s why we love it when patrons come to us with requests. So hit us up on the other side of the Patreon wall and tell us what you want to see!
By when I was playing a high-level 3.5 cleric, I walked into combats with up to 22 buff spells cast on myself, plus my potions of jump and expeditious retreat, plus various other miscellaneous potions. That was alright, though. The bad part was when enemies cast greater dispel magic on you. Then you would have to draw up a list of every buff spell active on you, write it in order, determine who cast the spell, and what their caster level is. That really, really slowed combat down.
And adding insult to the injury, the DM, through some strange magic, had a certain tendency with his dispel rolls; no matter how many buff spells you had going in, the dispel roll would leave you with only three to four, maybe five, spells still active. During the earlier days, back when we only had around six buff spells active? The DM would only dispel one or two spells. When we had fourteen buff spells? The DM would dispel ten or eleven. When we were surrounded by shimmering fields of twenty-two layers of magic? We would only have three or four afterwards.
Fortunately, I still had my trusty +1 cloak of resistance, with it’s single +1 bonus saving me countless times when my other magics fail.
You’re suggesting that this was a deliberate DM fiat situation? I can’t say I blame him. I can definitely understand the temptation to bring combat back to a manageable level. However, I would rather a DM in this situation say, “Hey guys, can we reign in the buffing a bit? It’s getting out of hand.”
Any tips or tricks for managing the math when you’re playing with that many variables?
No suggestion of DM fiat, he rolled the dice out in the open. I was referring to Luck, and the fact that there are some strings of rolls that seem to defy all rules of logic and probability. For example: Will Wheaton.
Him rolling the dice out in the open made it even worse, because it proved that something truly unnatural was going on.
Ah. Apologies for the misunderstanding. I know it irritates me when people online assume me or my group is “playing wrong.”
As for the luck, I can sympathize. Every group has one, and the strings of poor rolls for my group’s unlucky guy are truly legendary.
For the final battle of our old pathfinder high level campaign, we had just reached level 20 and were at a massive city with a shit ton of gold. To prepare for the battle, my magus bought enough first, second, and third level pearls of power to apply every relevant buff from the magus spell list for those levels. In the final battle, we first fought a giant golden money powered golem akin to lord genome’s mecha from gurren lagann, and then a heavily buffed up demon lord of greed who ended up being around cr25-27 with 3 balor minions. In that fight, we were so buffed up and powerful, the balors basically just spent all their time trying to remove all the buffs i placed with dispel magic, because it was more useful then anything else they could do. It was ridiculous and alot of fun, for me atleast, i think i might have exasperated the dm a tad.
You know what? If it’s the final fight, I say go nuts. The rules are a little different when the fate of the campaign is on the line.
Oh yeah, we all had fun woth it, dm included, it was the fun kind of exasperated, in which you just kind shake you head half laughing at what someone else had done.
I think I’m in a similar situation in my one high-level game. We have pretty big buffing potential, but we don’t get to do it a lot – since we’re usually either getting ambushed, or trying to resolve things peacefully.
There was this big fight once, where we fought the BBEG of a former arc. He was very much a gentleman and a drama queen, plus we all knew this fight was inevitable. So he set up a nice stage for it, had us take our places before curtain call, aka when the battle started. That was probably the one time we went to town with buffing.
That was also the fight in which I made probably the biggest blunder of my Pathfinder career – due to our buffed Inquisitor, the BBEG had to initiate plan B pretty early. So he became Ethereal and started walking towards the back room. Well, during that, my character had a turn, but I thought all I could do is follow him and try to stay close.
So, I guess you’re wondering what the blunder was. My character was a Magus. A Bladebound Magus. My black rapier was attuned to force damage at the time. I could have full-attacked the BBEG into oblivion, if only I had remembered that force effects affect ethereal creatures normally.
You see, the real fight wasn’t against the BBEG. It was against l’esprit d’escalier. Ironically, being an incorporeal spirit, that fucker is also vulnerable to force damage.
Thanks, that extra layer of irony really adds whole new depth to my embarrassment!
Thinking of the perfect answer to something a round later sure seems to be a recurring theme in my games. Just a week ago, my character went down to some electric worm things. A round later I remembered I had a ring of electricity resistance.
A buddy of mine took all 11 breath weapons from a pyrohydra last week. He died…until I reminded him of his fire resistant armor. I believe he went form 80+ damage to zero damage thanks to that reminder.
It happens. 🙂
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6dxICJHd518
Not to knock against GM’s or anything, but if you know what you’re getting yourself into you best be prepared for it, especially if you’re a higher level caster. Ye ain’t slaying goblins here; you need those buffs for a reason. Otherwise you’ll quickly get wrecked.
Back when I still bard’d for Pathfinder I’d pay top dollar just to have one turn to buff my allies, pop a haste and bardic performance if I could. But if we get the drop on the enemy and get to choose our fight? Then he’ll yeah everyone likes on buffs. Protection from evils, fly potions, weapon blanches, you name it. It’s not often the players get the option of picking their battles and only the foolish ones run into it without taking the chance to buff.
My only issue is that people need to remember their spell durations; some of the more powerful buffs only last a minute. And if you got six more spells, abilities, or potions you wanna chug, by the time you break down those doors you have four turns before your best buffs are gone. So like a full course meal buffs should be applied in specific orders, not haphazardly served by whatever seems best to pop off immediately.
All of what you say is true. It wasn’t much fun though.
Applying double digit buffs in specific orders got old for me after the third or fourth time. YMMV, and clearly does, but it definitely wasn’t my favorite.
It’s one of those things where it’s great when it’s rare, but get it too much and of course it becomes a chore. Usually in the games I play it’s not obvious when the next fight would be; could be in the next room, might not be until you leave the dungeon. Getting the chance to load up on buffs before fighting the bad guy is suppose to be a rare thing that players should get to capitalize on, but not all the time. That’s like slaying them in their sleep; it’s not something that should be happening often unless your party plans their tactic around it.
Now mind you, I’ve never played a caster above 10th level, so I can’t say I know how crazy you can get with the buff stacking. What I do know however is that divination magic gets shit on likely for the reason buff stacking can get boring; being able to know where all the enemies and traps are so you can plan ahead of time is certainly going to get boring after the first few delves. The threat of danger is gone unless your opponents have specific counter measures against divination, which isn’t often unless you’re up against wizards. Just as well unless you’re BBEG is rich enough to have an emergency scroll of anti-magic field on hand, they won’t be able to do much against all those nito magic enhancements you and your party have.
As with everything, balance is key. Like a successful assassination or a pregaming your buffs for the big fight, those are things you should have to work towards. If they’re a given, they loose their value because they e been over saturated in the game with how easy it is to do that sort of thing.
Even worse, a GM may begin to adjust encounter difficulty to account for the buffs. So then you’re obliged to keep up with the buffs. It’s a vicious circle of stacking bonuses.
The ‘flash batons’ metaphor reminds me of a stray thought I had the other day, about aircraft marshalling as done by peacock spiders…
I find myself nodding my head like, “Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.” lol
5E’s concentration mechanic really managed to rein in over-buffing, so I’m not too familiar with the experience.
This comic did remind me of a theoretical dungeon room I designed. Everything is modeled around sins, and this is the gluttony room. The wrath room right beforehand was a combat meatgrinder, so the players will be naturally wounded. The gluttony room contains a glorious spread. Nice quality Dwarven cooking, all of it smelling delicious. Everything the players eat provides some HP, but keep track of what they eat. When they leave the room they lose the HP they gained from it, and take the equivalent amount of damage.
It’s a cool idea, but make sure to design in some foreshadowing.
5e has done a pretty good job of preventing over-buffing, which I think is nice.
However, we recently took a quick break from our current campaign and over the course of a few long sessions played a level 20 game in which we had to fight against Asmodeous. I played a trickery domain cleric. It turns out that both clerics and wizards have several non-concentration buff spells, and most of the wizardly non-concentration buffs were on the trickery domain bonus spell list. So when the great battle against Asmodeous came, I waded into the fight layered with seven protective spells. Wile it wasn’t as crazy as 3.5, it was a nice nod to those days that added a bit of nostalgia to an already epic fight.
I hope that you get to use that theoretical dungeon room one day, with the bit of foreshadowing; dungeons truly are a nice place to let your imagination run lose, and to pen in whatever strange and wonderful ideas, like your one, that come into the mind.
Yeah… I stumbled across this list of non-concentration buffs while researching the comic:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells?filter-class=0&filter-search=&filter-tags=11&filter-verbal=&filter-somatic=&filter-material=&filter-concentration=2&filter-ritual=&filter-sub-class=
It’s nowhere near the 3.X level of shenanigans, but depending on the build and the circumstances you can still stack quite a bit.
That list is deceptive.
Not a buff: Catnap, Etherealness, Feign Death, Guiding Bolt, Hallow, Power Word Heal, remove curse, Soul Cage, Water Breathing, Wind Walk. (Things that are merely a means of conveyance but don’t help you in a fight don’t count)
Aid: The effect is so minor that it being non-Con is acceptable.
Armor of Agathys: Warlock exclusive, self-only. This means that you can’t do obscene layering since its’ 1hour duration will expire if you get the slot back. It also ends when you lose the HP granted by it.
Ceremony: You have to get hitched or Bar Mitzvah’d to use it, and you can only receive it once.
Darkvision: It’s the only way to make pathetic humans functional adventurers.
Death Ward: Once you pop it, it vanishes.
Fire Shield: Wizard exclusive, self-only. Most of its’ benefits require you to be in melee. If you’re a Wizard in melee something has gone wrong.
Foresight: This one is a legit non-con long-term buff, but for 9th level I’ll allow it.
Freedom of Movement: EU citizenship probably should require concentration as it an actually be stacked in obnoxious buff-mania, and the effect is quite good.
Heroes Feast: It’s a legit non-con, but it costs money and time.
Longstrider: 10 feet of movement doesn’t warrant concentration.
Mage Armor: This is the only way squishy mages don’t die, so I’ll accept it. Not as good as any medium/heavy armor, or unarmored defense. Self-only too.
Mind Blank: 8th level, and very specific, so I’m okay with it.
Protection from poison: I must admit this spell confuses me. Buffs are mostly for putting on your frontliner, and this does nothing for Dwarves.
Sanctuary: Has an in-spell end condition. It’s not really a buff, more a battlefield control spell.
Shillelagh: More of an attack cantrip.
Warding Bond: Has drawbacks to the caster, and has an end condition.
Wish: Do I even have to say it?
Fire Shield: Wizard exclusive, self-only. Most of its’ benefits require you to be in melee. If you’re a Wizard in melee something has gone wrong.
Fire shield can be used by Eldritch Knights, and as fighters those should be in meele.
If you do too many buffs the first ones will be wkrn off by the time you cast the last ones. A lot of them only last one round per level
By the time you have more than 10 rounds-per-level buffs in play, I think you’ve already crossed into “too many buffs” territory. That number is going to vary person to person, but for my money the duration is more of a theoretical than functional solution.
I always find buff spells to be a weird and torturous thing to deal with. They’re extremely inefficient to do while in combat. But typically you don’t normally know for sure which or how many are worth using before a fight.
In my experience you’re often much better off saving you spell slots and risking suffering more damage/negative conditions and using your spells that function properly mid-combat to deal with things.
On the other hand, buffs are often simply an appealing thing on a case by case basis or as part of a character concept.
I feel like the ideal solution to this conundrum would be to have wands or such that used a bonus action (or system equivalent) to cast buffs. Then you wouldn’t ever be risking wasting spell slots by trying and failing to predict their value before a fight and you wouldn’t be wasting your action mid-fight on a buff instead of ending the fight sooner/disabling the enemy. This way you’d still have a limited amount, but you’d get to use them as part of your adaptation to a fight. And you’d always have some but it’d be difficult to actually manage to put yourself in the situation of needing to keep track of a dozen different buffs.
I know that things like the Pathfinder warpriest and magus tend to function well in terms of the swift action buff solution. I feel for the people that like strategic pre-buffing as a playstyle though. I wonder if you could use a slotted system of some kind? Everyone can grab one “minor buff” which would be a bonus action, and one “major buff” which would be a standard cast with a longer duration. Certain classes and builds might be able to unlock more buff slots to accommodate people that like the pre-buff style, while keeping the total number of buffs down to a reasonable level.
Other player characters after so much prebuffing: see above
Meanwhile, my characters: http://i44.tinypic.com/viiaag.png
All of that said, I tend to prefer dungeon-long buffs like Extended Barkskin/Heroism, Mage Armor, and Greater Magic Fang. Buffed/debuffed/situational numbers that make your attack modifier more slippery than a greased up eel tend to overcook my brain and turn me into a four-panel math meme so I minimize them to save myself the time. Haste gets a pass, because haste is love and haste is life.
….and the image link suddenly goes to some crappy site. Should’ve used imgur.
Meanwhile, in my brain:
All across Handbook-World, every hero in a tavern and every villain in their lair pauses, climbs to their feet, and lays a solemn hand across their hearts.
“Haste is love and haste is life,” they intone. Then they return to their business as if nothing unusual happened.
Sometimes, you need not many buffs, but only one really strong buff. Case in point: One of my friends, Sam, had a character who would cast Armor of Agythys on himself using a very high-level spell slot, meaning he essentially cast Power Word Kill on anyone that touched him.
And I’m guessing you inflict the full 45 damage every time you take a hit, even if you’ve only got 1 temporary hp left. Sounds like fun.
I once died right at the start of a climactic boss fight, and immediately realized that I would have survived if I’d cast form of the dragon like I’d planned to. I decided against it specifically because I didn’t want to waste too much time on buffing.
Always turn into a dragon if you’ve got the option.
The medieval equivalent of Winston Zeddemore’s sage advice: http://comicattack.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/God.jpg