Changes

Jump to: navigation, search

Dungeonomicon (3.5e Sourcebook)/Maginomicon

46 bytes added, 19:45, 17 December 2017
m
Material Components: A Joke Gone Way Out of Hand: Grammar check
== Material Components: A Joke Gone ''Way'' Out of Hand ==
Material components are a joke. I'm not saying that they are metaphorically a joke in that they don't act as a consistent or adequate limiting factor to spellcasting, I mean that they are ''actually a joke''. Material components are supposed to be "ha ha" funny. The fact that even after having this brought to your attention, you still aren't laughing, indicates that this is a failed attempt at humor. Most material components are based on technological gags, : when you cast ''scrying'' , you are literally supposed to grab yourself a "specially treated" mirror, some wire, and some lemons – which is to say that you make a TV set to watch your target on and then power it with an archaic battery. When you cast ''see invisibility'' , you literally blow talc all over the place – which of course reveals invisible foes. Casting ''lightning bolt'' requires you to generate a static charge with an amber rod and some fur, ''tongues '' requires that you build a little Tower of Babel, and of course ''fireball'' requires that you whip up some actual gunpowder. Get it? You're making the effects MacGuyver style and then claiming that it's "magic" after the fact. Are you laughing yet? Of course not, because that joke is incredibly lame and there's no way for it to hold your attention for several months of a continuous campaign.
Of course not, because that joke is incredibly lame and there's no way for it to hold your attention for several months of a continuous campaign.
== Some Spells Don't Work ==
=== Polymorph Version 1: Character Replacement ===
If you take part of your character – ''any'' part of your character – and part of a monster from one of the many monster books in <u>D&D</u>, and you put them together into a single <u>Voltron</u>-like body, you have broken <u>D&D</u>. That should be obvious, but since we are over six years into the ridiculous circus that is ''[[SRD:Polymorph|polymorph]]'' in 3rd edition <u>Dungeons and Dragons</u>, apparently it isn't. If it is important to you that you be allowed to dumpster dive through the monster books and find an appropriate monster to transform into, it is important to <u>D&D </u> that absolutely no part of your character be mixed and matched during that period. If you want to truly become a monster, you have to ''actually'' become that monster. Not "the monster with all my spell effects running", not "the monster with my formidable mental attributes. No. You need to become the monster ''exactly'' as it appears in the monster book or there's no chance of you getting a balanced result. Some people are going to end up as mediocre monsters with carry-over abilities that happen to synergize well and become tremendously powerful while other people are just as unbalanced in the other direction when they find that drawbacks of their character are carried over and overwrite the abilities of a monster that are supposed to make them any good at all.
And this isn't just hyperbole or doomsday predictions, this is established fact. We've all played with some of the multitude of different versions of Polymorph errata and "fixes", and the abject horror caused by every single iteration. The ''idea'' doesn't work. If you're going to replace any part of the character, you have to replace it all. So here's a version of ''polymorph'' that won't make us cry. This ain't rocket science, it just takes a little bit of discipline:
{{:Mass Polymorph, Tome (3.5e Spell)}}
 
=== Polymorph Version 2: Fixed Forms ===
9,687
edits

Navigation menu