Sunday, January 8, 2012

Why Sleep and Web Get Saving Throws When I DM...

...because you better damn well believe that I run adversary NPC Magic-Users like a goddamn shark. And if they had access to an "I Win" button they would use it.

Magic goes both ways, but even I'm not that cold-blooded.

Besides, my players love throwing sleep spells at opponents with too high a HD for sleep to affect or that otherwise are immune; why not preserve the confusion by giving the monsters a saving throw?

3 comments:

  1. Hah, I'm playing this the same way in my own campaign. Sleep-wielding magic-users are extremely rare due to the randomized start-up spells and the lethality of the campaign (not one magic-user above 1st level after 50 sessions, I think), but each time it's come up and we've checked out the LotFP spell lists (our first reference for spells, although not exclusive) we've decided to "fix" the spell by giving it a saving throw. This has perhaps been more of an advantage for the monsters (magic-users are rare opponents in the modules we've been running), but it makes so much sense with the specific fantasy color of the campaign that nobody's complaining.

    Curiously, my players also persist in using Sleep on gelatinous cubes, plant monsters and robots. This is probably simply because it's just about the only mechanically effective leverage they have, when they happen to have it. When you only have a hammer and all that.

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  2. I don't give sleep to NPC's and monsters. My players are pretty good at getting themselves killed already.

    I'll need to point them to the Fortress Eibon session reports the next time they bitch about how dangerous my dungeon is...

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