The spell control undead: “This spell enables to you to command undead creatures for a short period of time.”

The spell command undead: “This spell allows you some degree of control over an undead creature.”

… yeah, that’s not confusing at all.

The spell command undead, by the way, is a really great exploit that I rarely see people talking about. It’s a 2nd-level spell that lasts for 1 day per level and has no saving throw when used against mindless undead.

To put this in perspective, a cloud giant skeleton is a CR 7 creature with 110 hp and dealing 4d6+18 on a successful hit.

Even more significantly, however, command undead — unlike the 7th-level control undead — has no HD limit. And since it’s a 2nd-level spell, it can be put in a wand.

This spell can be very easily used to turn that undead-infested tomb the DM was planning to hit you with into nothing more than a recruiting ground.

By design, command undead is supposed to be the undead equivalent of charm person. But the longer duration (charm person is only 1 hour/ per level), lack of saving throw, and more powerful effect when dealing with mindless undead make it unduly powerful.

I’ve spent the past our or so browsing through Traps & Treachery, Grimtooth’s Traps, and the Book of Challenges for inspiration in designing a trap-laden dungeon of doom.

While reading the last of these, a supplement published by WotC during the early days of 3rd Edition, I was struck by the following piece of advice for the neophyte DM:

Make Them Dig Deep: In a lair of cold creatures, only the sorcerers will be able to muster enough fire spells to win. Using many of the same type of creatures drains a subset of the party’s resources while never tapping into another subset. The heroes need to ration resources, and that benefits those on the receiving end of the PCs’ wrath.

This advice is not given as a “one true way” of doing things. It’s instead offered on a platter of several different ways of mixing things up and structuring encounters and adventures in way that makes things just a little bit tougher for the PCs than they would normally be.

But if you’re ever looking for a concrete example of the difference between the design ethos of 3rd Edition and the design ethos of 4th Edition, that quote isn’t a bad place to start. Because any 4th Edition designer would consider that quote to be anathema: It violates two of the core principles of 4th Edition gaming (“all characters should participate in all encounters” and “strategic resource management is bad”).

A couple of days ago I mentioned in the comments that, in my opinion, “the narrow range of options that results from this design ethos is bland and boring”. It was particularly because that comment was fresh in my mind that this quote jumped out at me while I was reading. It’s a perfect example of the type of gameplay that was unceremoniously stripped out of 4th Edition.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

CHARACTER BACKGROUND: DOMINIC TROYA

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IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

Character Background: Dominic Troya

With the first prelude concluded, we now move on to introducing the rest of the main characters for In the Shadow of the Spire, starting with an Imperial priest named Dominic Troya.

But while you’re reading that, I’m going to back up and continue talking about the first prelude featuring Tee and Agnarr. This prelude was a modified version of The Lost Vault of Tsathzar Rho, an adventure by Mike Mearls.

One of the issues I faced in designing the prelude was the non-standard party composition: Agnarr was a 1st-level barbarian and Tee was a 1st-level rogue. A barbarian is obviously pretty interchangeable with a fighter, but that still left two of the four core roles — cleric and wizard — unfilled.

But, truth be told, I find the typical hand-wringing over the need for a “standard party” to be a trifle overwrought. I’ve played with lots of odd-sized and odd-classed parties in D&D before, and I’ve virtually never found it to be a problem.

The one exception I’ve found is the mostly immutable need for some form of magical healing. Combat in D&D is strongly designed around the hit-and-heal cycle: The game assumes that you’re going to get hit and that you will then be healed.

Everything else, in my experience, is negotiable. Yes, if you’re missing other key roles in the party they will be missed. Without the consistency of a fighter, adventuring days will probably be shorter. Without the firepower of an arcanist, more powerful enemies will need to be avoided. Without a rogue, traps will become far more dangerous. And so forth. But, as I talked about in Fetishizing Balance, this is just a matter of adjusting the difficulty of encounters and the style of gameplay to suit the characters that the players want to play.

In fact, I’ve even played in a couple of short adventures without magical healing. This isn’t so much impossible as it is radically different. Without magical healing, combat in D&D almost instantly turns into a grim ‘n gritty exercise. Wounds take days or weeks to heal and any kind of serious injury — which can be almost trivial to receive — will force the party into rehabilitation. Hit point inflation still makes it possible for higher level characters to pull off some amazing things, but they’ll suffer for it.

In the case of the prelude, however, this grim ‘n gritty environment wasn’t what I was shooting for. (In no small part because I was using a published adventure as a foundation and I would have had to pretty much toss out the whole thing.) So I targeted the party’s shortcoming — magical healing — and provided a healing totem that had been given to Agnarr by the shamans of his tribe.

Mechanically this was basically just a wand of cure light wounds that worked with a command word instead of a spell trigger (so that it could be used without having a cleric in the party). And, if you’ll pardon the pun, it worked like a charm. Several encounters still needed to be adjusted due to the smaller group size, but with a large supply of magical healing available to them the barbarian and the rogue were still able to enjoy traditional-style romp through a dungeon crawl.

IN THE SHADOW OF THE SPIRE

PRELUDE 1B: THE LOST VAULTS CONTINUED

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