dr4b | Wednesday

Wednesday - D&D

Tonight we had our first session of our new D&D campaign at Josh and Megan's house. Justin is running the City of the Spider Queen.

I felt really bad because my character wasn't ready before I went over... but then I got there and nobody else's characters were ready either :)

Things are stabilized -- Cory is playing a rogue (with 2 levels of rangers), Mike is playing a half-orc monk (no joke), Josh is a badass fighter/cleric of strength&war, and I'm an eldritch knight. This is gonna be a great character because I have to figure out my instincts of wizard vs. fighter. In today's session I did a little of both... I mean I'm going around with essentially Greyhawk-Janthina's stats and equipment, down to the longbow and longsword and +2 elven chain. I was joking I should just name this character Janthina actually, but eh, that'd be silly. By my naming trend I think this character has to be Faustine because it's the most elven-warrior-sounding but I haven't quite decided. (So far used for characters: Calandra, Hannah, Janthina. Unused: Abigail, Faustine, Gardenia. If you know why, I will give you a cookie.)

Anyway we basically kinda just had the characters start off and we got into a fight against an undead wizard dude who basically cast improved invisibility and then we took 1.5 hours to defeat him. It got kinda ridiculous. I started off the battle shooting arrows, then went into combat casting mode and started counterspelling stuff. See, the undead dude kept casting lightning bolts and I had a few memorized so I was like "harr.. COUNTERSPELL!" Justin wasn't expecting that, but it worked really well, I countered the guy's lightning bolt and haste and TRIED to counter improved invis with a dispel magic but failed. Ah well. Still it was interesting to walk in as a fighter and walk out as a wizard. I may do that a lot.

I decided to specialize in Evocation, go figure (

platypuslord would probly like this character really), nuking Enchantment and Necromancy. I haven't fleshed out my character's entire spellbook yet, but to give you an idea of her style, besides that she walks into a room in armor and carries a mighty composite longbow +2 and a longsword and looks like an elven army sergeant, my memorized spells were: 1 - (E) Burning Hands, Magic Missile, Feather Fall, Identify, Grease, Shocking Grasp 2 - (E) Scorching Ray, Invisibility, Levitate, Darkvision, Bull's Strength 3 - (E) Fireball, Lightning Bolt, Haste, Dispel Magic, Fireball 4 - (E) Ice Storm, Dimension Door, Lesser Globe of Invulnerability, Shout. Seriously... I'm telling you, this character likes to go out and blow shit up. If only they hadn't nerfed Spell Focus so it's only a +1... ah well. I'm thinking her alignment will be True Neutral, tending towards Chaotic Neutral. These guys have only seen me roleplay my wussy lawful good druid last campaign so it'll be a nice change. :)

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But druids can't be lawful good!

Errr, my whatever goody two shoes druid. Forgive me, it was 6am when I was posting.

I haven't read 3rd ed. How does counterspell work?

Basically, if you have the spell being cast memorized, you can blow your spell slot and counter the one being cast. Either that, or use dispel magic for the same purpose (of course, dispel magic still works after the fact, too).

I think there's something with timing in there -- you have to be prepared to cast the counterspell, so you're basically waiting for the opposing mage to start casting, then you make a spellcraft check to see if you can figure out what he's casting, then if you have that spell in memory you can use it as a counterspell. I'm not sure if there's an opposed roll to counterspell... might be automatic. My only mage character is a gnome illusionist/loremaster who is *not* a combat caster (I tossed evocation as being severely our of character) so I've never worried about it.

If you have the same spell the person is casting ready (or the opposite spell, like haste/slow), the counter is automatic. If you're using dispel magic, you have to make opposed caster checks (but you don't need to identify the spell as it's being cast, either).

How many spells have opposites? It seems odd that you have to know the spell in question in order to counter it.

A handful. It's mostly the obvious ones (haste/slow, daylight/darkness, etc.).

Think of it like destructive interference. You can completely cancel out a spell, but to do so, you first have to know what "frequency" it's going to be.

Yes, that's why it doesn't make sense to me. Someone from an opposition school should be able particularly suited for cancelling a spell even though (especially!) because they can't learn anything in the school.

I guess I'm just used to opposites cancelling each other out, not ignoring each other.

...except that there are no obviously opposite-in-effect schools. Maybe Illusion (falsehood) could be considered the opposite of Divination (truth), but any other pair is really stretching it. Does Abjuration become the opposite of all other schools because it contains dispel magic and almost all of the preventative spells?

Under Second Edition, where they had the opposing-schools system, the "opposite" of Divination was Necromancy, which makes no sense whatsoever. They were apparently using "opposite" to mean "most different from", which is a rather unintuitive thing.

Sounds like a fun campaign. ^_^ Good description of the fight, even if it was ridiculously long....

Though... just to nitpick... I think you have to loose divination in addition to necromancy and one other spell group, to get evocation or one of the other 'biggies' among the spell types...? ^_^;;

In 3.5, to specialize you have to pick two (no more or less) opposition schools, and you can never pick divination (as it now includes essentials like detect magic).

Ah... roight. My local campaign has only made the switch to 3.5 in limited cases, like the ranger. In general magic is per 3rd edition, so that's where I'm thinking differently.

Seems kinda stupid to not allow skipping divination. Okay, fine, it can hose your character, but if you want to why not allow it?? ~shrug~ Though of course you can play however you want.

Incorrect. Detect Mag is Universal. Dropping Div is usually part of a "we know this school is the most useless from a PG standpoint" set, where they say "drop Div and these two schools, two schools that AREN'T (Divination and Necromancy, I think), or Evocation." At least, that's what my 3.5 handbook said. If you drop Evo, you don't have to drop anything else because Evo is HUGE. Certain schools require you to drop less; for instance to spec Divination you can drop any one other school for the same reason that you can't just drop it and one other for other schools.

I'll look it up but I believe these rules are still in effect as of 3.5.

Whaaa? No, it just says "you drop any two other schools to specialize in one school; you can't drop Divination; Universal is not a school".

I have no idea why anyone wouldn't want to drop enchantment and necromancy anyway. Ooh, I come up to a bunch of things and SLEEP them! Woo!

No no no... you Sleep them, and then you Enervate them. :)

Enchantment got a lot better in 3.5, but really, they should just merge Enchantment and Illusion and get it over with already. :) The crossover between those two schools is pretty bad.

Detect Mag is Universal
Not according to my 3.5 Player's Handbook here, which lists it as a divination.
Divination makes more sense for this spell anyway--I'm pretty sure the only reason it was Universal was to prevent 3.0 specialist wizards from screwing themselves over if they drop Diviniation.

I regularly drop Enchantment, because almost every single spell in the school has a will save-for-cancellation. At least the Evoc spells are mostly save-for-half.

You took Haste even under 3.5 rules? Huh. It's a useful spell, though it would be more useful personally if my wizard had higher initiative and could cast it on everyone before half of them charge ahead and get out of range. :) I'm kind of surprised that you learned Invisibility, considering how long it's likely to last when cast on you personally...

As for your character names, Google knows all. :)

Yeah, I sort of meant WITHOUT GOOGLE, although I did mention once a really long time ago a few of my sources for names.

I took Haste because a) I can counterspell it and b) It'll be great to cast it on our monk and watch his flurry of blows have yet another blow. Also being a fighter I can get an extra attack per round.

Invisibility for our rogue really.

I forget, Alten's an abjurer?

Yeah. Specialized Abjuration and dropped Enchantment/Necromancy. I've really been trying recently to get him to be less of an abjurer and more of an air mage, since that's more fun. He's finally got a familiar now, though it, being a small air elemental, is just as large as he is...

I should probly talk to you more about wizardly things sometime actually. This'll be my first full-fledged D&D 3E wizard at all...

"a half-orc monk"

If they had started with one level of barbarian, they would be a 100% unstoppable killing machine. Rage + Flurry of Blows = Pile of bloody goo.

We had a campaign (still do if we keep it going) with a Paladin and three specialist wizards, none of which did evocation.

Nothing like a Diviner, an Enchantress and an Abjurer who have -one- direct damage spell among them.

"you're being attacked by four archers"

Ohh! Ohh! I'll cast "Mage Shield!"
I'll cast Blur
Um....Sleep?

That sounds like a pretty cool party, actually. ^_^ Evocation spells can be fun at times, but I much prefer the (usually) more subtle approach required when you don't have 'em.

Like using a scroll of transmute rock to mud to drop a cavern roof on the heads of 150+ orcs & ogres... the GM forgot I'd picked up that scroll, too... though I certainly hadn't been planning to use it to kill anyone! Desperate times, desperate measures....

(Okay, no, that's not subtle. Though some of the illusions I did when we were being chased and harried through the tunnels were....)

hopefully you had better aim than I did as I dropped the mud on the party too.

Oooohh, yes. Let's just say between that and the cloudkill (also off a scroll) I got about 80% of the party's kills... well over 200 just for Doren (my character), and most of the orcs had some levels of warrior (they were 'elite' troops). Doren had never actually killed anyone directly before, which led to some fun role-playing... especially since the party did *not* actually get away and were captured after running into the elite *bodyguard* after most of my magic was depleted... 6 6th level fighters and 2 8th level, I think, when our 7-person party average was around 10. Not a problem if we were fresh; as battered as we were, we did well in taking out the 6, but they took out half the group in process and the other 2 played clean-up... it was a grand, harrowing time.

We'd been warned not to bother the orcs, advice which some in the group just didn't take to heart... people really, really, REALLY ought to listen to the GM sometimes.

Hmm... sorry, didn't mean to go on about another DnD game, but hey, it's fun. ^_^ Might need to post more of that on my LJ, though I somewhat dread getting down the background... the GM did a *lot* of work on that, and it's great to discover, but there's sooooo much detail that I can get into now.... ^_^;;

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Wednesday - D&D

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