Behold the power of first level spells!
Lateralus
Member Posts: 903
Xan successfully enchanted Tranzig with a Charm Person spell. Told him to go stand in the corner of the room. And cast Lightning Bolt on himself.
Toast!
Toast!
7
Comments
Usually i would agree with you, but this party was in grave danger of getting slaughtered by tranzig if I didn't think of something. I'll spare you all the details but I should mention that I breezed through Nashkel and nobody had 2nd level spells and nobody had a very good chance of hitting him if he got that Ghost Armor spell off. If Charm didn't work I had a pretty good back up plan but far riskier.
It's a another great one but one time a mage was able to cast Confusion on my party while blinded! Surprised the hell out of me.
- Scales with level (check)
- No save (check)
- No hit roll (check)
- Ranged (check)
- Low speed factor (check)
The best spell ever to disrupt any caster.
Cons:Blocked by the shield spell, which every enemy mage in scs (unless kitted as an enchanter) has as a prebuff. Works well in the vanilla game, though.
Also, since charm person has +3 to save, enemy mages are very difficult to charm as they have good save vs spells. The op was lucky to have it land.
it also hits multiple times each of which has a separate chance of disrupting casting if I remember correctly.
Why?
- 50 % of baldurs gate 1 content cleared with out any trouble (check)
For baldurs gate 2 spook and magic missle are my favorites
Blinding yourself or the enemy ? (you can enter stealth as long as no enemy is in sight, easy when you're blind)
Ironic name for the spell because it makes the game boring. I try to reserve it for OH CRAP moments (like being surrounding by poisonous spiders, bandit ambush, sirens, etc.).
I really don't like it. Wish there was just a hit roll, like in PnP (and the effects are much more deadly too).
Its only +1 since Xan is an enchanter. That said for whatever reason Tranzig has a save vs spell of 4 (this has been the case since the original game). So you'd be lucky to get any spell that requires a save vs spell to work on him.
I agree with him. First, Sleep, Charm Person, and Ray of Enfeeblement is a great volley of spells for three first-level wizards to use, if they were charged with taking out a heavily armed and armored party of six.
This reminds me of SCS's "darkside kobolds" component for BG. Every party of kobolds in the Nashkel dungeon has one or two kobold shamans, who are scripted to cast Sleep on sight of the party. This is an instant party wipe for any party lower than fifth level, and there is no defense. So, in a no-reload, you have to wait for fifth level before going to the Nashkel Mines safely, unless you want to risk trying a thief strategy of stealth or invisibility and getting those kobold shamans backstabbed to death before they can cast.
Second, I agree with him that if there is no chance for a player to die, the game is no fun. I can't believe the RPGA kicked him out because he changed the three spells from three useless first level Magic Missiles into an actually useful spell selection. Also, he wasn't trying to kill players with an unwinnable encounter. The dice rolls just went really badly for the players, which is a thing that happens in D&D.
If they really have a rule that players cannot die, they should openly state that, and warn new DM's that they are not allowed to have players die in their games.
The way my high school DM handled this was one of the reasons our games were so exciting. We had a house rule using the "unconscious at 0 hp, dead at -10 hp" system. We fell at 0 hp, and that blow rarely took us all the way down to -10. Since we were teens having a house party at his house, those of us who fell in the game often went upstairs and watched TV and socialized with other players who had fallen. (We usually had 6-8 players present, and when things started going badly in the game, there were usually more than one of us in the "waiting room". )
After the remaining players defeated the bad guys, they'd find a way quickly to get us priority healing. Then, we'd be called back to the gaming table, which was downstairs in the basement of the house.
That still didn't mean players never died. One of my friends had a character he'd been playing for two years mouth off to a trio of hobgoblins, after we'd been defeated and captured, needing to find a way out of the predicament. They all snarled and stabbed him at once, making their to hits, and getting high damage rolls. He died. He was devastated, and he actually mourned the loss of that character for weeks after. The DM was his brother, and he said later that his brother had thought he had full hit points and would probably survive the blows. He didn't realize the poor guy had already been hit and was down on hit points.
Incidentally, this is also why I find claims of the weakness of low-level mages in early editions to be patently ridiculous. Yes, you die in one hit. Yes, you only get one spell. But if it's sleep, that one spell is more powerful than everything the entire rest of the party can do put together, so cry me a river.
Then the very savvy DM starting throwing encounters at our first and second level party with mobs of 8-16 goblins and hobgoblins, sometimes with 1-2 worgs. Every time this happened, the other min-maxing multi-classed party members would all get down to their last couple of hit points pretty fast. I'd say innocently, "Umm, should I maybe cast my Sleep spell now?" And they'd all start shouting "Yes, cast it! Cast it NOW!" So I would, the whole mob of bad guys would fall, and I'd suddenly be the hero of the party for the session. I found this quite satisfying about playing the party mage.
This same group of friends, being teens, a couple of whom were still in middle school, just loved to suddenly break down into pvp during our sessions. That is, they fought all the time, and took the fight into our game. I hated it when they did this, so one time, I cast my Sleep on the party. It got ALL of them, including the elf thief for whom the DM rolled a 97 against his 95 percent resistance. Boy, was HE upset! He argued and argued with the DM, who finally said, "I ROLLED for your resistance. I got 97. It's still back here, do you want to come around and see it? Now, all of you shut up, because your characters are all unconscious."
I think he was secretly relieved that I'd stopped the bickering. And, by the time he let them wake up, they had all cooled off, all was forgiven, and we just got back to our game. For a while.
Then, they broke down into pvp *again*, and some of us went into a separate room (our characters had left the party), so the DM could run a split game for the rest of the session. This time, my group was lying prone in some riverbank bushes, watching the other side of the party sailing downstream on a makeshift raft they'd constructed.
He came in and said, "I need to know right now if you're going to stand up and cast that Sleep spell again." I hesitated, had a bad feeling about it, and said no.
It turns out, they had arrows notched and had told him "If we see a man in robes on either bank waving his hands around and chanting, we fire!" They were going to turn me into a dead pincushion the second time I tried that. So I made the right decision.
Next session, everybody had cooled off and made friends with each other again, so we came back together as a party and continued on having fun.
But several of them told me later that I was one of the best roleplayers they had ever met in their D&D sessions, and they always respected the mage class after I showed them how to play one.
Anyway, we were supposed to get a gem, or something like that, from a monster, but all of us were down on HP. I forget what the monster was, but there is no way we could have prevailed, wounded as we were. So my solution was to cast Sleep, so the DM rolled a save for the monster, failed, and cursed in anger. My Thief then snuck up and took the item and we ran off. The DM was actually angered that I defeated the encounter so easily, so had a bunch of monsters chase after us (I don't remember what happened after that).
I was disappointed that the DM didn't like the fact that I used a non-combat solution to the situation. If anything, my Sorcerer should have gotten bonus XP.
Roll a D20 and I'll give you the answer.