The Gaming Den

The_Hanged_Man at [unixtime wrote:1095116124[/unixtime]]
However, the other side of this is that a Dispel Magic that worked would make all buffs suck.

Not really, because many of your opponents probably can't cast dispel, or even if they can, they may not given circumstances. All spells regardless of type should have situations where casting them isn't optimal.

Fireball won't help you against a red dragon, I have no real problem saying that buffing loses out against certain creatures who can dispel it, especially if we go with K's paradigm of running buffs as quickened actions.

Also, the more I think of it, the more I think the best suggestion for preventing the whole ambush thing is to simply say that buffs can't be cast out of combat, and that they end when the combat ends. That way you can't buff and teleport or do other kind of buff based delay tactics. If there isn't an enemy present then your buffs just go away, or you aren't on the battle screen, your buffs simply go away, just like in Final Fantasy.

That prevents any of the ambush argument and allows both sides to be more or less even buff wise. The attacker gaining a surprise round will be able to cast a single buff during that round, but it won't be overpowering.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1095125115[/unixtime]]

THM wrote:Buff spells can't be overpowered if "Save or Die spells" mean that dispelling those buffs is a useless action.

I don't see how that follows at all. If you can buff yourself up while in "quasi combat" and get some moderate bonuses, that's overpowered because it's something for nothing. It's not a real cost in time, because you couldn't be targetting your enemies anyway.

But when you go and dispel it, you're in combat. Not quasi combat, real combat. So it has a real cost. Even if it takes a quick action that's still a real cost in time.
-Username17

Frank, look at it as a simple economic model. You have three types of resources to spend - combat actions, spells, and hit points. Let's keep it simple. Normally, all three limit your ability to act in combat. You have so many actions you can take in a round, you only have so many spells, and if you run out of hit points you're done.

The way combat works right now, Combat Actions are more valuable than spells because combats last 10 rounds or less, IMX about 4 rounds, and you have looooooots of spells. Even a 3rd level cleric won't run out of spells in most combats, even without getting into scrolls or wands.

That means that spells are cheap once combat starts. Combat rounds OTOH are very expensive. HP are somewhere in the middle depending on what's going on.

Casting buffs before combat starts spends some resources - spells. A lot of them. But those spells are essentially free. You pay little or no cost if they are gone before combat starts b/c you have plenty of them. That's why pre-cast buffs are so valuable. It lets you trade something w/ little value (spells) for something w/ huge value (combat rounds).

And of course the buffs only matter b/c they either conserve your HP, or make the opponent spend their HP. So you also get to trade spells for HP at little cost.

Dispel Magic is supposed to make that tradeoff more even. If the other side has a lot of pre-cast buffs, Dispel Magic can alter things a lot. By spending one combat round, you can get rid of a lot of resources - spells. At the same time, you now make the opponent have to either spend a valuable resourse (combat rounds) just to get back to the starting point, or just give up on that advantage. You also end up even on the spell for HP trade, instead of gaining.

To sum up, a Dispel Magic that works would mean that you essentially trade all those buffs for one combat round. Maybe a worthwhile trade, maybe not - depending on how valuable spells are.

Dispel Magic currently doesn't do that. It makes you trade a combat round for doing basically nothing. You can either have a good chance of getting one buff off of everybody, or have a good chance of getting half the buffs off of one person. Consequently, that's a big part of why pre-combat buffs are so uber. You either make somebody suck it up and take massive damage and be unable to hit you at all, or make them blow a combat round to do basically nothing.

Looking at an average 11th level bufftastic cleric, say one that plans on 2 combats that day. That PC has one 2 RM, 2 DP, a few DM's, the all-day buffs, a few defense buffs. In a buff ambush, most of those spells are cast. If Dispel Magic got rid of all of those, plus wasted the Karma caster level bonus, Dispel Magic is an OK tactic. For the use of one combat round, you've blown a lot of the other sides resources.

Longwinded. Sorry. But I'm starting to think the problem w/ pre-cast buffs is a problem w/ Dispel Magic, not with pre-purchasing combat spells.

Frank on dispel magic wrote:
And it has a zero percent chance of killing anybody, so whatever the fvck it is that it's doing, it's a waste of your god damned time. As soon as you could be killing your opponents you should be, and anything else you are doing is an insult to your fellow players.

If Dispel Magic actually worked, this wouldn't be true. Say Dispel Magic got ride of all buffs one all opponents. And say you're fighting 4 bufftastic clerics in the low teens. Those buffs are adding a minimum of 50 points a round in damage. If those buffs are gone, you're in effect healing your party for 200 points of damage a round. It's like getting 2 free heal spells each round. Plus you get rid of all the defense buffs, meaning that those death spells get through and the insane AC's are gone.

Now let's assume that Cure spells and so on do suck b/c they only heal 40 points at most and blow a combat action. I still think that healing 200 points of damage a round would be considered pretty dang effective. Not even considering the other buffs, that's pretty good.

I think what THM means is that it doesn't matter what you've jacked your strength and AC up to when Johnny Wizard waltzes in and throws a huge DC save-or-die at you anyway.

-Desdan

Well, that was me, not THM, but yeah.

If your opponents are somehow coming up with buffs that give them +50 points of damage per round, you can kill them, isolate them, impede them, or debuff them.

Well, If you isolate them, say with a Wall of Stone or whatever, you just removed three opponents doing 50+ damage in buffs and whatever they are doing without buffs. You'll have to fcae them again eventually, but not until after you've killed Fred here.

If you just kill one or more of them, you've killed one of them. Go you.

If you impede them, by for instance blinding them - they'll be half as effective or less. That's pretty cool.

And finally, if you debuff them, you've removed whatever buff bonuses they have. Assuming that your opponents actually have some.

--

So for debuffing to be competitive, the buffs themselves have to be significantly better than the character. That is, the difference between that guy having his buffs and him not having his buffs has to be bigger than the difference between that guy having his friends. And that's not even taking into the opportunity cost of the occassional enemy who doesn't even have buffs up, against whom a debuff is worthless.

Buffs can be really good and have debuffs still suck my asshole. In fact, for debuffs to not suck my butt, the buffs would have to make characters like four times more powerful or more.

But for the buffs to be "overpowered" all they have to do is give you bonuses for costs you don't care about - such as "combat actions" when the enemy is around a corner or "spell slots" when you have like twelve times as many spell slots as combat turns in a rest period. Or both, because however many zero costs you add together it's still zero. It doesn't have to make you four times as good, it just has to give you a bonus you care about for a cost you don't.

-Username17

Here's the thing, save or dies don't always work. Under our paradigm, debuffs will always work.

So saying that you're better off killing the guy with a save or die than debuffing isn't quite true, because save or dies don't always work. You're really comparing a 25% or whatever chance of killing the guy versus a 100% chance of debuffing him.

And in that paradigm individual buffs really don't have to be all that great. Just debuffing divine power and righteous might with one dispel is probably worth it.

RC wrote:You're really comparing a 25% or whatever chance of killing the guy versus a 100% chance of debuffing him.

Alright then. One opponent, 25% chance of killing him with a kill spell, 100% chance of debuffing him (if he happens to have any buff spells up) with a debuff.

So the kill takes down the enemy and the buff. The debuff takes down just the buff. So the average enemy character (including the occassional buffless enemy) has to have buffs which are themselves worth 75% as much as the character without buffs or the debuff is a waste of time on the first action.

That's not even counting the fact that the debuff is guaranteed to be 100% useless on round two. Just to be worth doing on round one you'd have to have an enemy which is, on average:

1/4 Enemy + 1/4 Buffs = Buff

Good luck on that, since that's more powerful than people are generally willing to accept even out of Cleric Archers. And it doesn't address the fact that the debuff strategy is always useless on turn two and can't make you win.

It also assumes a lower standard of success than Save or Dies currently enjoy, but I assume you knew that. In total, you are asking for worse save or dies, better buffs, and the debuffs are still craptacular. Got that?

-Username17

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1095196599[/unixtime]]
1/4 Enemy + 1/4 Buffs = Buff

I have no clue where you got this from or what it's supposed to mean.

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1095197041[/unixtime]]

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1095196599[/unixtime]]
1/4 Enemy + 1/4 Buffs = Buff

I have no clue where you got this from or what it's supposed to mean.

If two actions are going to be equivalent, then the average result of the two actions has to accomplish roughly equal amounts on average. If one action is less likely to work, it has to porportionately be more effective when it does work. If it is more effective than proportionate to its lower chance of success it is too good. If it is less effective than its lwoer chance of success than it is crap.

So if you decide that a Save or Die effect should have a 75% chance of doing nothing and a 25% chance of killing your opponent and neutralizing all their buffs - then you are staing that you are looking for a balance point in which having a 25% chance of success proportionalizes against upping the ante from simply removing the buffs to removing the buffs and the opponent.

Which is to say that during round one, you are considering your opponent without buffs to be 75% of your opposition. If that is in fact true, your debuff that always works is balanced against a Kill spell that only works 25% of the time and accomplishes nothing if the opponent saves.

But during round two, the value of the debuff is always zero. That is, while the kill spell that failed can be repeated for credit if it didn't work (and hey, if it did work, you've already won) - the debuff can't. The debuff never kills your opponent so there's always a round two to consider, and the debuff by definition can't do anything during round two. And the relaly funny thing is that now that your enemy has been debuffed, your kill spell is reduced in value when you still have to go back to casting it on round two.

So in fact, there's still no reason to even know a debuff if all it's doing is giving you an even shake against the kill spell - because it's always a waste of your time in the long run.

That's what it means. It means that waving your hands around about consistency doesn't mean dick when your consistency can't ever add up to killing your enemy.

-Username17

Dispell magic isn't a very good debuff at all. If you want a working debuff you're going to need something more along the lines of a curse that is twice as effective against bonuses given by buffs.

That's a fairly ugly thing though, having to keep track of which bonuses get removed at which rate and not allowing for compatability when some asshat comes by and decides to come up with a new form of buff bonus type.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1095193022[/unixtime]]Well, that was me, not THM, but yeah.

If your opponents are somehow coming up with buffs that give them +50 points of damage per round, you can kill them, isolate them, impede them, or debuff them.

Actually, you're point was that Dispel Magic didn't matter b/c Save or Die just gets rid of the buffed guy. My point was that Save or Die means that buffs themselves don't matter.

You're kind of proving my point here. If Dispelling doesn't matter b/c you can do other stuff that makes the buffs worthless, then the buffs themselves don't matter. You can do other stuff that makes the buffs worthless. Assuming buffs matter, though, a Dispel Magic that worked effectively would be just as good as any other spell that limits an opponent.

Also, Save or Die spells are good, but essentially death=minimized Enervation, Harm, and loss of 50% of spells (and are hard to pull off on buffed casters). Plus a lost round for somebody else. I can't remember if the buffs end when somebody dies off the top of my head. If the buffs continue, I might rather die then lose my buffs.

In any event, I'm starting to think that the problem w/ pre-cast buffs isn't the free combat actions you can blow, but the lack of ability to do anything about it. If you fight a buffed guy, you're choices are (a) kill him, or (b) run away. Since (a) becomes very difficult, pre-combat buffs are overpowered.

THM wrote:You're kind of proving my point here. If Dispelling doesn't matter b/c you can do other stuff that makes the buffs worthless, then the buffs themselves don't matter. You can do other stuff that makes the buffs worthless. Assuming buffs matter, though, a Dispel Magic that worked effectively would be just as good as any other spell that limits an opponent.

No. Buffs mattering does not mean that the ability to get rid of peoples' buffs in combat matters. Buffs are a preventitive combat action - you take the action before combat, so they really don't have to matter very much to be extremely powerful. Debuffing is a combat action, it takes real time and has a real cost, it has to matter a whole lot just to make it not a fantastically asstastic waste of time.

That is, a +2 buff is fine and dandy, and if you are getting it for free it both matters and is overpowered relative to your other choice, which is nothing. But the ability to remove it in combat is a god damned joke - it's just a +2 and removing it doesn't really add up to killing your opponent - which is the whole damn goal of the affair.

Think of it like a game of Magic the Gathering, because that's really very similar to what's going on. If one side has the ability to automatically get a holy strength creature enchantment on all their guys - that's a really big deal. It's way overpowered, and instantly noticeable. But that doesn't mean that you want to pack Disenchants or even Tranquilities over it - you still just want to kill creatures because the Holy Strengths go away anyhow. And while playing a Tranquility would sort of be a big deal - the fact is that after you did it you're out 3 mana and a card and your oponent never spent anything.

Buffs cost nothing. They don't take time, they don't take spell slots, they don't take anything - because you don't have anything else to do with that time and those spell slots anyway. So since there's nothing else you can do, there's no opportunity cost.

But the Debuff has an opportunity cost. In order to use it you have to draw line of effect to your enemy - which means that now your spell slots and time have meaning.

---

The only way Debuffs could ever hope to be a balanced use of anything is if they not only always worked, but were set up before hand as contingencies. Debuffs need to cost less than the buffs they neutralize because they they inherently don't make you win and are limited in use to when your opponent is using buffs. Like using a move in Go. If your neutralization of your opponent's attack uses up the same number of moves you haven't gained anything and it is your opponent's turn. And heaven help you if you actually used more moves to stop an advance than your opponent used.

Buffs have no cost - to be competitve debuffs would have to cost less than that - which is difficult to even imagine.

-Username17

Why do you discount the spell slot a buff costs? You're basically ignoring the basic structure of 3.5 encounters. An even EL encounter should use up, what, 1/4 your resources? Something like that. And you're supposed to have 4 or so of them, so that you use up all your resources in a day.

If you pre-cast buffs, you're just using up those resources ahead of time. The main reason it's so effective is that it lets you wack so much ass that everybody else loses nothing in an important encounter. If those buffs disappear, you've lost those resources. If you didn't get anything from those resources except one combat round, you didn't get a lot out of it.

This is what the tradeoff is if Dispel Magic actually worked. Using my PC as an example, it pretty means that I can trade, at 13th level, 2 first level, 1 second level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, and 1 5th level spell to make the BBEG give up a 3rd level spell, and a standard actions. IOW, this is the same as if Clerics had the special ability as a free action to sacrifice 1/4 of their spells known to make a BBEG lose one spell and be slowed for a round.

I really don't see how that is "free."

edit - looks like less than 1/4. But I think i actually cast more spells than that. Can't remember offhand.

THM wrote:Why do you discount the spell slot a buff costs?

Because a really long combat might last as many as six combat rounds and a 7th level Wizard gets 19 non-cantrip spell slots.

That's why. Because even at 7th level you simply have more spell slots than you can use in all of your combats. And the reality is that the vast majority of games go for less combats rather than more, because it's less work to fight one BBEG than it is to draw up the board for eight little skirmishes.

-Username17

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1095200300[/unixtime]]
So in fact, there's still no reason to even know a debuff if all it's doing is giving you an even shake against the kill spell - because it's always a waste of your time in the long run.

Your problem is that you're looking at it from the point of view of the caster only. D&D is a party tactics game, it's not a game of one on ones. While it is true that debuffing is usually useless if you're a wizard fighting something, this is because buffs for the most part are designed to help against fighters. Debuffing someone can really give your fighters a huge boost, and you can let them take care of the encounter.

I mean lets consider a guy with divine power and righteous might. We're talking about a +10 to strength, a bunch of extra hp, a size increase, a BaB increase, and some DR. That alone is going to end up being about a 30% difference in if the guy hits you or not, a lowering of his damage and losing his previously unbreachable DR. That's a pretty big deal. Add in greater magic weapon and magic vestment and that becomes a huge deal. You'll be talking about roughly a 50% swing in hit percentage, and a big AC swing too.

And while you could fire off a save or die, the save or die might not work, and then your companions are in bad shape. The debuff may nearly take your foe out of the fight anyway, by reducing his effectiveness a great deal. And it always works. So you debuff him and your fighters chew him up. And it ends up being very worth it.

Debuffs aren't good if the guy has just one buff. They rise in value as the guy has more buffs active.

[The Great Fence Builder Speaks]
Insults deleted. If you guys want to keep discussing this, you have to keep it civil.
[/TGFBS]

But there are also buffs which make SoD's less likely to work (or even not at all), which means those have to be removed first.

To keep to the magic anlaogy, instead of holy strengths on all creatures, an enchanment that made them all untargetable by spells or effects.