A couple of quick notes:
First off, I can see how the Color Spray + Healing mercurial could get to be a problem, although I am not at all certain, if the caster is using two spells per round, one on 1d20 and one on 1d16, why corruption and/or misfire hasn't caught up with him yet. Does he never accidentally blind himself or his party members? The odds would seem to be against such fantastic luck....?
As for the healing, I am assuming that the character's foes are also gaining the benefit aka "Breath of life. Casting this spell imbues the caster and those around him with beneficial energies. All within 15’ of the caster (both friend and foe) are healed 1d6 points of damage for every level of the spell (i.e., a level 3 spell heals 3d6 damage)." Does that never cause consternation for the characters, as the foes they have damaged are now healed? And is it always possible to keep the party within so tight a radius? In my games, the PCs tend to spread out in order to better deal with their foes and avoid area effects. Of course, that 2d6 per round is going to encourage the PCs to clump......
I get that some people do not want to have to tailor individual encounters to "defeat" killer combos (even if those combos only occur by freak chance). The game as written seems to encourage arcs based on the needs of individual characters, but that is not the same thing as designing encounters to nerf particular characters.
I guess I don't have enough information to get any more specific here, but area effects that spread the party out, time-based reasons to try to cut across a location so as to force movement, monsters that are immune to particular types of attacks (or all attacks!), traps, and other hazards are found throughout the DCC modules, both the GG ones and 3pp ones, and they are not there simply to nerf specific combos. Likewise creatures or effects that target ability scores. +1d6 hp is nice, but it won't stop you from drowning. After all, the party on Page 11 is grouped together, and that doesn't seem to be making the encounter too easy for them.
You can always bend the rules to meet the needs of your game - indeed, you should! - but I have found the Spellburn table and the effects of rolling a "1" to be powerful limitations on magic in the game. This is not to say that anyone is "doing it wrong" or that my way is better, or anything like that. Nor have I had to deal with this particular combo. I'll be running an 8th level game of
Colossus, Arise! starting tonight, though, and I'll be more than happy to indicate how that went. Our group will probably take 3-4 weekly sessions to complete the module.
Anecdote about the Spellburn table: In an online game, I had an elf decide to Spellburn the hell out of Patron Bond. After all, what could go wrong, right? The result was, "The wizard develops a bleeding sore that will not heal until he pays back the aid of the power that assisted him." Suddenly, the character has to go out and adventure to pay a debt
before the spellburn has healed. Another result offers a similar problem: "The wizard swears an oath to a minor demi-god, who aids him in his time of need but curses him with weakness until the oath is fulfilled." There is, effectively, a 1 in 12 chance that using a massive amount of spellburn will result in your attempting to perform some task to begin the healing process. This is a serious hazard, IME, of using spellburn indiscriminately.
Skyscraper wrote:Raven_Crowking wrote:
Avoiding using powerful magic when it isn't needed is all over the Appendix N literature, and largely because it draws attention to oneself. Hell, in LotR Gandalf is worried about so little an act as lighting a fire lest the Fellowship's enemies learn thereby that "Gandalf is here!"
This is the most persuasive argument I get from this thread. But to get there, Gandalf probably had to experience it first. He used his powers many times, and after being hit by hit squads, he came to the conclusion that he musn't. Thus: time of the game spent on dealing with it.
I can't disagree here.....time in the game must be spent dealing with the consequences of actions in order to make those consequences occur (or have real meaning) within the context of the game. Personally, I would imagine more in-game time would end up being spent looking for new spells or dealing with clerical disapproval.
For me, this is a feature, not a bug. If it is a bug for you, rather than a feature, you are right to change it.
other stuff from RC
The rest again pertains to options of how to bend the story around the mechanic. It's not that I cannot think about ways to do it in game. Again: I don't like that this mechanic be the decisive factor in what the game will be about; and that in waiting for it to be dealt with, the entire group needs to suffer through it.
Again, clerical disapproval springs immediately to mind as an example where DCC goes out of its way to bend the story around the mechanic. That is the nature of the beast as it is written. "Quest For It" is a strong injunction to bend the story in order to gain a desired mechanical benefit. I don't think of this as a flaw, but I do encourage you to change the game however you like to make it suit your needs.
It's not the same thing as the warrior slaying the duke's men in my mind. Slaying the duke's men is, firstly, most probably a group decision. (If not, then it's another question.) While using the superpower is working towards the group's goals (presumably), but using one particularly powerful means to achieve that group goal, that allows you to outclass everyone else. And then the judge deciding that using superpowers is a sin according to XYZ Power from Beyond and the wizard should be dealt with.
IME, the warrior slaying the duke's men is not always a group decision, nor is the thief's attempt to burgle the Lord Mayor's house. In DCC, the cleric may be sent on a mission to heal the ill whether the party likes it or no.
The example of the warrior always blinding opponents is interesting, but of limited applicability. You can simply say "hey, think about other ways that your deed can be used to similar impact". Whereas the wizard with the +10 healing color spray doesn't have another power of similar impact. Nor does anyone else. (And, honestly, one blinded opponent is not like 5 blinded opponents and 5 healed allies, is it?)
My point, though, is that the impact of that +10 healing color spray should not always be the greatest impact available to the group as a whole...or even to the wizard. The problem, from my POV, is not that the wizard is overly powerful, but that meaningful decision-making doesn't occur when the optimal solution is always the same. I assume that a 6th level warrior with his +6 Initiative bonus is going to go before the wizard lots of times, sometimes defeating foes before a spell passes the wizard's lips. I assume that the thief will have a chance to sneak and deal with traps or locks. I assume that the cleric's ability to Turn the Unholy, Lay Hands (because even with "heal spray", the group must deal with things like poison, disease, and broken bones), and cast divine spells will be of importance. Banish has proved particularly effective for one cleric in our group, for example, but that does not mean that banish becomes the solution to all problems.
I do think that "And then the judge deciding that using superpowers is a sin according to XYZ Power from Beyond and the wizard should be dealt with" is a misrepresentation of position. The judge, in determining the reactions of the world to the actions of the characters, should in all cases make those determinations based upon genre expectations and rational extrapolations. What those expectations are can be found throughout the Appendix N stories, and they can also be found in the rule book. This is not capriciousness on the part of the judge, this is not out-of-the-blue punishment, this is the world responding as it should (and as it does in Appendix N literature).
The sooner genre expectations are communicated in-game, the less time one has to spend on dealing with the consequences of indiscriminate magic use. A good early example is the
band of fire in
Sailors on the Starless Sea - you are told immediately that others will come after it if they learn the PCs have it.
One blinded opponent is like 5 blinded opponents and 5 healed allies in one important respect - if that is always the optimal solution, that is always what will happen. I want the warrior to be able to blind opponents, but I do not want the warrior to
always choose that option. I don't have to discuss it with the warrior's player, because I use a wide variety of encounters, many of which have circumstances that make blinding sub-optimal (or impossible) and others which include options that are clearly superior to blinding.
Likewise, even if I ran nothing but DCC modules (GG and 3pp), and/or converted modules from AD&D 1e, 3e, and 4e, there would be sufficient reasons not to merely clump together, and not to use healing color spray as the option of choice. We don't know what other options the 6th level wizard in question has, so we can't determine how this applies to him specifically, but I can say that I have run enough adventures with this system where that would not be an optimal choice (without designing any against that specific choice) that while I see why the combo is powerful, I still don't see why this is making the wizard so overwhelming in the vast majority of situations. I can certainly see the advantages of using the combo, but I can see the downside, too. I can think of low-level adventures, even, where there would be little advantage gained, if any, from having the wizard along unless he had other tricks up his sleeve.
(So much for a short post. Sorry.)