User talk:Luigifan18/Agebreaker (3.5e Spell)

Humans Are Short-Lived
Even taking away the range doesn't really justify making a no-save disintegrate two levels lower. --Foxwarrior (talk) 20:14, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It's still a touch attack. And it doesn't actually disintegrate anything. --Luigifan18 (talk) 21:07, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It matches disintegrate in terms of damage/level at age 35. Which is much lower than the ages of most young adults. --Foxwarrior (talk) 22:02, 5 December 2012 (UTC)
 * But this spell doesn't scale with level. It's really just there so the DM has an excuse to smite the insufferable munchkin playing an 800-year-old wizard for +3 Intelligence - and to specifically make it so that his own powergaming blew up in his face. (The fact that it can drop dragons and liches with a single blow, thus making hilarity ensue, yet proves to be an insignificant scratch to a human fighter and literally will not harm an infant is a nice touch.)


 * Yeah, I don't like munchkins all that much. Brings back memories of the very first game I DM'ed, where one of the players sent the whole thing off the rails by trying to murder the rest of the party. --Luigifan18 (talk) 22:38, 5 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Ugh ugh ugh. That entire chain of thought is disgusting. The thought that a game designer should punish people for making the choices that the game is clearly written to reward is gross, the idea that you would patch a game by sneaking in a counter when DM monster choice rock-paper-scissors strategy is barely part of the game in the first place is gross, that you're very mad about a player sending things off the rails is a bit unsettling, and that you associate munchkinery with slaughtering party members seems farfetched.
 * And I didn't mean to imply that agebreaker scaled with level; I meant that at caster level 5, when you get it, the average damage of a 2d6/level spell is 35, which means that agebreaker matches that damage against characters who are 35 years old. --Foxwarrior (talk) 23:01, 5 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Making choices that the game rewards is one thing. Making choices that exploit the game, on the other hand...
 * To me, the defining quality of the munchkin is that he abuses the rules and that he pisses off everyone else at the game table, DM included. That sort of behavior should definitely be punished. For that matter, trying to kill off the rest of the party simply because you don't want to play the game anymore is also heavily frowned upon. (I really should have made that clear in the first place - the turncoat did that because, as far as I can tell, he got bored and wanted to shake things up or go out in a blaze of glory. "Blaze of dumbassery" is more like it... there were five other people in the party!)
 * Anyways, I went and upped the spell's level (for sorcerers and wizards, anyways - the others were left as is because one's a prestige class (blighter), one has a slow spellcasting progression (grim), and one is both of those (assassin)), and also halved the effect. So it should be less problematic now. --Luigifan18 (talk) 00:06, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
 * It is very marginally less problematic now. It's still a touch attack kill spell against the creatures you would choose to cast it on. Sure, it doesn't work on every possible creature, but neither do [mind-affecting] spells or [death] effects.
 * Also, your mechanism for punishment seems even more effective as a mechanism for helping misunderstandings make players hate each other. --Foxwarrior (talk) 00:34, 6 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Scaling according to a statistic that is often omitted from a monster's stat block entirely and is never free from arbitrary DM decisions isn't all that great either. --Foxwarrior (talk) 00:57, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Sandbox?
I think this one's time is up. --Ghostwheel (talk) 21:36, 6 May 2013 (UTC)