Community

Warweaver wrote:

No rules for this.

basic knowledge of physics and page 42 ruling

For someone who hates crafting and thinks adventurers should only be doing "adventuring", this is an odd opinion. Fabricate does it a ton faster while still utilizing skills (admittedly it's the Craft checks you hate though), getting the party to the action sooner.

and i wouldnt need a crafting skill to do it, nature, perception, possibly insight, and endurance.

And it didn't, even in 3e. It's called spells per day, scrolls, and a limited spellbook. Even scroll-happy wizards who scribed every spell they could find ran into all kinds of things they couldn't just cast-past in a typical dungeon. Unless it was some kind of weird dungeon with only one or two kinds of traps/terrain/puzzle challenges throughout, I guess.

Magic was always the first solution scrolls are rediclously cheap to make in 3e. Wizards could have 20-30 scrolls ready very easily.

Assuming your DM used the rules on p.42, I'm pretty sure you would've done better just shooting it with your blast. Otherwise he made it up whole-cloth.

Nope did the high damage from the chart on page 42 almost did more damage then my encounter power.

Witchfire does not ignite unattended objects, unless I missed something. Of course I would certainly allow it in my game, and I think most people would - but all you can do is point to p. 42, and hope your DM is ok with it. And while "fire + oil" might come readily to most players, there are plenty of spell applications that either don't, or the DM would be too suspicious/worried of abuse to allow - in-spell descriptions help both of these.

I describe it as a cloud of faeries wielding faerie fire and flaming swords, dm ruled that i could ignite easily flamable things, ie oil pig grease things like that. Again 4e is more freeflowing and far less restrictive then 3e ever was.

Correct - in fact, some of them wouldn't even be your 4th or 5th solution. Seems like a waste of paper and ink to me.
[/quote
Some of them are highly useful even at low levels tensers floating disk is still great if you need to haul a lot of stuff around.

Because you could do more interesting things with them that way? An army won't make it across a Wall of Stone bridge in 5 minutes. You won't stop a pack of vicious krenshars from hunting you down later with a wall that lasts 5 minutes and you have to stand next to it. Mr. Evil BBEG won't be keeping anybody trapped in his lair if he has to come back every 5 minutes.

5 minutes is enough to bugger out, but making a power that makes a permanent wall is a little broken. Allowing wizards to do that kind of thing at will while not giving the fighter anything made 3e not worth playing.

Yes, so you can run around (well, walk around) invisible for up to 5 minutes as long as you do nothing else, or you can use it on your buddy if the enemies hate him but not you for some reason. Considering 3e had a longer duration (after level 5), w/o standard sustain, and could be used on objects (say, if you had to smuggle a weapon in, or they were looking for a particular item, or you just disarmed the BBEG, or...), yes I think there were many more creative options available.

I could still find a use for it very very easily, and for your information very few fantasy books have instant cast magic that has permanent effects. I see the magic in 4e as equivelent to the Dresden Files which is the best modern fantasy series out in my opinion.

Making a mechanic that sucks enough to be useless, when the point is to make something usable by all, is always a bad change. Hence, many of those rituals need to be fixed.

it sucks to you but me i like the way they did it same with alchemy, actually my warlock will be taking alchemy.

Warweaver wrote:

False. Barring a door physically is both free and faster. Casting Arcane Lock on the door is not free. It is unnecessary to make the price of even minor magic exorbitant, so long as it requires more of something (be it time, money, or specific circumstance) - otherwise, why are you playing a high fantasy game?

Wait, Arcane Lock costs 25 gp. That's exorbitant? It has a duration of "permanent", it alerts you when it is defeated, and it allows for password protection and/or other means to filter out who is allowed through. You can also get up to four helpers, making the Strength or Thievery check to defeat the barrier equal to your Arcana check +13. This means a level 4 caster who has just learned this spell and gets help from the rest of his party can expect, on average, to get a DC 34 or so.

I don't see how the 25 gp cost is so outrageous that it destroys the value of the ritual. It's even plausible for rich people in the game world to have Arcane Lock cast on all their doors and windows. The cost is certainly not trivial, but it's far from prohibitive.

Ignoring residuum gained by disenchanting items, a PC who has just hit level 4 should have 623 gp. Over the course of the next level, he will gain another 420 gold. Even if he has wasted his savings of 623 gp on rituals, potions, hookers, and slot machines, he will still be able to cast Arcane Lock 16 times in his journey from 4th to 5th level. This assumes that the rest of the party isn't contributing to the cost of rituals- perhaps our wizard is paranoid and feels compelled to protect his home from enemies. We should further keep in mind that gaining a level takes about 10 encounters, meaning that our caster would have to be using rituals at an extraordinary rate if he wanted to chip away at his savings.

A more realistic scenario has the party paying for rituals out of some group fund. Unless the mage actually is casting rituals on random stuff, the group should count ritual components as overhead, not as a deduction from the caster's personal wealth. This reduces the cost even further- the wizard is now paying 1/5 of the cost in a standard group.

If we repeat this analysis for higher-level rituals, I'm pretty confident that the results will be similar. Using cutting-edge magic has a noticeable effect on party wealth, but the cost is far from exorbitant by the standards of treasure gained.