Scaling of Turning

Turning undead has been a long standing part of D&D, but does it really make sense in 3rd edition D&D? Does it scale well so that it is useful at all levels? How is it actually used?

Let's consider 3 situations: a 1st cleric with a 12 charisma turns a zombie (CR 1/2) and 2 skeletons (1/3); a 10th level cleric with a 14 charisma turns 2 bodaks (CR 8) and a devourer (CR 11); and a 20th level cleric with an 18 charisma turns 4 nightwalkers (CR 16) and 1 nightcrawler (CR 18).

1st level: a roll of 9 is required to affect the skeleton and a roll of 12 is required to affect the zombie. The turn effect roll is 2d6+1 so the cleric is guaranteed to be able to turn all the undead!

10th level: a roll of 5 is required to affect the bodak and a roll of 14 is needed on the devourer. This greater range is because of the hit dice. But if the hit dice of the undead is roughly even with it's challenge rating this seems to scale. So the turn effect is 2d6+12. Worst luck is 1 bodak. Best luck is 2 bodaks and not the devourer. This seems less effective than at first level, but it still seems very good.

20th level: a roll of 9 is required to affect the walkers, the nightcrawler can not be turned. The effect is 2d6+24. Worst luck turns 1 nightwalker, best luck turns 2 nightwalkers.

So turning does seem to get less effective, but it is not useless at high levels. The two primary factors that affect scaling is the 2d6 part of the turning effect that makes turning better at low levels. The other factor is the ratio between hit dice and challenge rating. For high levels the hit dice creep ahead of the CR, but not so much that turning becomes ineffective.

But I rarely see turning during the game. I've mainly seen it used against low level undead the are a nuisance. I think there are two reasons for this. One is that players want to kill things rather than have them flee away. Having undead flee away prolongs combat, and does not necessarily defeat the undead. The other reason is that many splatbooks have introduced feats that allow you to do much better things with your turning attempts.

So after taking a look at this I do think turning is still useful at 20th level although it is definitely not as good as it was at first level. But also at 20th level a cleric has many more options and so using turning goes down on the list of things to do. Also a feat might make them lean towards using turning for other things.

Missing Characters and Messy Character Sheets

One decision I have made in the past that I am reconsidering is what to do when players are absent. In the past my call was that if possible the character belonging to that player does not appear. If in combat or in a situation where they wouldn't normally expect to leave they stick around, but if possible they aren't involved in the adventure.

Their are multiple reasons for this. One is a particularly painful memory where I missed a session and my character died. The other players apparently used my character as bait for a red dragon and when I returned the next session I found that I had been reduced to ashes. Especially painful was that this was a character who only died twice in his career. Another reason is that I just generally don't like it when you come back to a game and people say "Oh, your character did this" or "This happened to you". I also prefer to have players focus on their own characters instead of spreading their attention to multiple characters.

I also find that when other people play your character, they never do a very good job. With complex characters it is often hard to figure out how to utilize them. I have had players basically have other characters they were controlling do very little because they didn't know how to use them. One of the reasons behind this is the character sheet is often hard to understand.

I have seen many different ways to represent character information. I have seen pencil writing on a variety on pritned out sheets. I have seen handwritten pages with various formats. I have seen single page custom printouts that get updated with pencil scribblings, and printed characters sheets spaced out over more than five pages. It turns out that character sheets can be hard to read. Even if they were easy to read it would still be hard to know the spells and tactics of another character well enough to play them effectively, but making character sheets easy to read would be a big step.

Having a single type of character sheet that is easy to understand and complete would probably make a big difference. In my current game the players have copies of their character on the game wiki. I could enforce more standardization in their notation and ask them to make sure things are updated, but I suspect this would require harassing and I am not sure how well it would work.

The reason I am reconsidering my decision is that increasingly at high levels the presence or absence of a single character makes a huge deal. Encounters that would be easy for five become hard for four, or encounters hard for five become impossible for four. It becomes difficult to balance things as a DM since the party strength swings rapidly. For basic survivability the players need every single character.

So fourth edition eases this problem since they have a strong format for character statistics and the game itself is much simpler with fewer interacting abilities. Third edition also has a standard representation, but it is a poor one and it is also one that players don't tend to find appealing.

Number of Characters

So one assumption that has kind of changed over time is the number of characters in play. Originally a much larger number of players was expected. Convention games often had eight or more players assumed. In the rules the notion of hirelings and henchmen was spelled out so that one player might control several characters. Of course, this notion began to fade as the game became more story and less tactically oriented. So each player focused on playing a single character. And the reality was that many gaming groups were around four or five and not seven or eight.

So what assumptions were made using the model of many characters. One is "save or die" mechanics. When you have eight characters on the field and you lose one to a "save or die" then you have lost an eighth or your capability. When you have four characters you lose one fourth of your capability. And in this situation you also have a greater chance of losing some critical ability.

In a recent battle my players fought four medusa. This meant four fortitude saves every round. My players had good saves and every one of them has a +5 Resistence item, but regardless they would have all been turned to stone simply because the odds that they role in the low single digits at least once are pretty high. If there had been eight of them they would have been more insulated against a couple bad rolls, but on the other hand they would have required more medusae (plural of medusa?) to challenge them. 

Defeating Rogues

So Third Edition Rogues can do a lot of damage. With an extra +1d6 for every two levels on every attack. If you are attacked by a band of rogues things get bad since they can easily flank you. So how do you fight rogues?

The second level spell Darkness or third level spell Deeper Darkness totally neutralizes sneak attack because it gives everyone in the area concealment and concealment negates sneak attack. One handy attribute of these spells is that if the object the darkness spell is cast on is inside another object the light isn't radiated. So you can carry around a "Darkness Stone" in your pocket and pull it out when confronted by rogues. Another handy fact is that "Deeper Darkness" has a duration of 1 day per level. This means that you only have to cast this spell at most once every 5 days to essentially neutralize rogues.

Ease of Play: Players vs. Game Masters

Ok, in a typical battle scenario you have a band of players. Each player controls a single character. On the other side is the GM. He controls some number of characters. This number could be one or it could be two or three times the number of players. One of the consequences of this is that players often have much better tactics and use their powers much better. The players are very familiar with what they can do and have more time to consider their actions. GMs switch the characters they are controlling every combat and can rarely fully utilize these characters in the same way players can.

So it is four to six minds using tools they know well versus a single mind using tools he has never used before. This tends to be one of the key reasons players win, and that isn't a bad thing, but this notion should impact game design. Games should support player characters that have many options and have some level of complexity to play, but at the same time, should have non-player characters who are easy to play and don't have the same array of options, although they should be able to match the PCs in terms of power. In most games there ends up being little difference in difficulty of control between players and non-players. And this is generally a flaw. I will briefly touch on a couple games where this is not the case.

World of Warcraft is admittedly a computer game with human intelligences matched against a simple AI. Because of this design, the human intelligences are given a wide array of options, while the simple AIs have a greatly reduced set of abilities. A human might have twenty powers to pick from while an AI opponent has maybe three.

Fourth edition D&D makes everyone simpler to play, but does it do it evenly? Well non-players tend to have fewer power options. One notable example of this in non-player classes like mages. Instead of having the eight or nine powers that a player might have they have maybe three. The very mechanics used by players and non-players is different. Players have powers that are either always on, usable once per encounter, or usable once per day. Non-players don't really have once per day powers since it is assumed they will only show up for one battle. But hey do have some other powers. They have abilities that kick in or recharge when 'Bloodied'. They have abilities that recharge based on a die roll. This is great because it allows to to create interesting encounters, but it is also strange that non-players have more power mechanics than players.

In short, as a DM I really appreciate the ease of play of the non-players in fourth edition. In general fourth edition makes encounter creation much easier. But as a player the lack of options grates on me. The DM may not have the extra mental cycles to manage complex abilities and resources, but the player surely does. Part of the 'skill' of D&D is figuring out how to get a lot out of your character, but this has been reduced in fourth edition.

The Arms Race

One of the perpetual problems of many role playing games, notably felt in third edition D&D, is the arms race effect. Initially the game comes out and their is a certain level of balance. But to make money and produce content supplements are added. These supplements seem to always end up offering better powers and characters built with these new powers tend to be superior to those without them.

I have a lot of anecdotes about this kind of thing. I will only relate a few. I remember talking to someone about Car Wars and they were telling me how they had these awesome new features on their cars. Then they went on to say how it was a huge advantage because the people he was playing against didn't have these features because they had not bought the supplement that the features were listed in.

Another time, I was a player in a cyberpunk campaign. We ended up battling some enemy mercenaries who had armor that was totally superior to ours. Their skin-tight armor was somehow much more effective than our bulky suits. When I questioned this, the GM simply responded that he had bought that latest supplement Chrome, and outfitted the mercenaries with equipment from it.

In my current game I am pretty lenient in allowing stuff to my players. A lot of them have invested significant amount of monies in supplements and I want to allow them to use the neat stuff they find because that is fun. However, they do realize what this means and I have one player will go through the supplements specifically searching for things he thinks are imbalanced and will state that that is what he is doing.

In Paizo's 3.75 D&D, they acknowledged this trend and specifically set out to power up the base classes that had been left behind in terms of power level. In World of Warcraft the classes have gotten more and more powerful over time since more power makes people happy and less power makes people complain.

So what the hell is going on? Well, it is simple. Companies know this happens. In many cases it is lilke the Warcraft case. Companies want to make it's customers happy and people are happier when they get more powerful and not less. Also if they have to shell out cash for a new supplement to make themselves more powerful then the company gets money and the player gets more powerful. So this really isn't just an accident, but a marketing strategy.

So is this a problem? What are the game effects of the powering up? Well it generates uneven power levels. There are two ways this manifests, player to player, and player to game master. Player to player power imbalances can often shift focus to certain players. This can be countered by DMs who can manipulate things to shift the focus back, but it requires work and in many cases a player who has 'spent more' has a lot more chances to shine. In terms of player versus DM, well the players outpace the challenges and the DM needs to adjust. This can be a lot of work for the DM and also be difficult since some games, notably high-level D&D, get very hard to accurately balance.

So rules that increasingly cause power imbalances force the DM to either modify things to rebalance the game or to let some players steal the focus and for adventures to become easy and head towards being boring.

One solution is to just do the work. You do a little extra to make the characters who didn't go crazy searching for powerful combos shine. You do a little extra to make the encounters more challenging and so on. Another solution is to just allow the vanilla rules. This removes a lot of work, but it can also be limiting and reduces the fun of character building.

Personally I like to allow these options and you just really have to accept that the nature of these games lends itself to this perpetual arms race.

Cleric Requirements

In 3.5 D&D there are multiple negative conditions such as negative levels, poisons, ability score damage, diseases, curses, and so on. One of the major problems is that to deal with these you need a cleric. This forces most serious parties to have a cleric. Those without will soon run into issues.

One thing they did in 4.0 was to remove this 'needed' class role. They did so in two main ways. The first was simply removing the vast majority of these conditions. Negative effects tend to go away with a save and healing powers just have a generic bonus to saves. Also these negative effects don't stay around between encounters because they moved towards the model of each encounter being an event instead of a set of encounters designed to wear you down. The other way they handled this was Rituals. Vital out of combat spells are no longer limited to a Wizard or Cleric. You need your Fighter to be able to teleport the party? No problem. A couple of feats and he can. So all of the special healing tasks can essentially be performed by anybody.

I am briefly going to describe how these things work in World of Warcraft. In Warcraft there are basically 5 types of debuffs: Curses, Poisons, Diseases, Magic, and Untyped. Untyped debuffs can not be removed by players but the other types can all be removed by various healing classes and one non-healing class. Each class can remove from 2 to 3 of these types with a single non healing class able to remove 1. I like this approach because it makes each class able to do a lot in terms of debuffs, but it leaves things that they can not do. But WoW benefits from the same model of encounter battles as 4.0 D&D. Effects do not persist between encounters.

So if you were a player, how would you handle the lack of a cleric. You would have to purchase magic items such as Wands of Cure Light Wounds and Lesser Restoration along with a couple scrolls in order to make up for the lack of cleric. This forces you to have these items readily available for sale which you might not really want for campaign feel.

So how could you change 3.5 to reduce the need for a cleric. You could add spells to the paladin, druid, and even wizard spell lists. You could allow negative effects to be treated with the Healing skill, although this kind of reduces the dire feeling of negative effects if they can be simply removed by non-magical means. Or you could add Rituals. Spells that people could get that removed negative effects, but that could only be used outside of combat and possibly required expensive materials. This would help you get by without a cleric, but it would also move 3.5 D&D away from an attrition model. But in my mind that is a good thing.