My Stupid House Rules - advice and feedback sought

[pfooti]

Here's a list of the house rules I'm considering for an upcoming D&D campaign. The game would be pretty much 3.5 ed, all sources allowed. I like giving my players freedom to choose among many options, and I don't like artificially restricting things by sourcebook. So:

• No character can do more than Level * 10 damage in a round, total. If you would have done more than this (some huge fireball that's empowered, maximized, searing, scorching, fiery, etc, or just fifty sneak attacks), the damage caps. When damage comes from buffs provided by other players, such as bard songs, the total is attributed to the buff-giver, not the buff receiver.
• Dead is dead. No rezzing.
• -10 HP is NOT dead. Instead, any time the PC drops below 0 HP, they fall unconscious - effectively dead. Clerical healing will save them from death, but they will not regain consciousness until takes a 10-minute action, requiring a heal check with a DC equal to the amount of negative damage the PC received. Failed checks give a +1 stacking bonus to subsequent checks. When restored to consciousness, the PC suffers from a negative level until the PC can spend a few days doing nothing but resting. If an unconscious PC is attacked with intent to kill - which doesn't have to be a coup de grace - they die for real.
• Teleport and related spells are out. Dimension door is fine, but if you want to travel long distances, you've got to actually schlep.
• "Disenchanting", in a 4e-style creation of residuum (or like WoW) of unwanted magic items, is in.

Clearly, I've got some axes to grind here. On a simple basis, I dislike what Teleport does to the game. It trivializes overland travel, which (in my opinion) should NEVER be trivial in a swords & sorcery game - consider how much of LotR was about getting from point a to point b, actually consider how much of so many adventure stories are about that.

If you can't travel instantaneously, though, and we're still doing stuff with more-or-less 3.5 balance and itemization strategies, PCs will really want to make their own stuff. Hence disenchanting.

I feel that the 3.5e rules, and the 4e rules even more so, devalue character death and trivialize the Heal skill (nobody needs Heal, really, if they can cast level 0 orisons). These new rules are an attempt to address that.

I also feel that PCs have the potential to do too much damage in a round. Whether it's crazy metamagic abuse with arcane thesis disintegrates, anarchic initiate psions, or just vanilla TWF rogues, it's totally possible to do too much damage. By too much damage, what I mean is: the PCs can do so much damage that they'd one-shot another PC. So if I, as the DM, were to employ those tactics, I'd TPK the party on a surprise round. But if I don't, the PCs trivialize many combats. I cannot simply embeefinate the defenses of the NPCs, since then the PCs would use the same defensive strategies, leaving me in even worse straits. One answer would be to ban certain practices on a case-by-case basis. This strategy is to simply inflict a blanket damage cap. I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not.

All these things have a varying impact on the game. Death rules don't come into play all that often, and I feel like mine are a reasonable replacement. If you know ahead of time that you'll never get to teleport, you can plan accordingly. The damage cap, however, is a really funky change to game mechanics and without playtesting it, I have to rely on feedback from other critical eyes before I try and inflict it on my (hypothetical at this point, as my gaming group has two concurrent campaigns running and I might not be DMing any time before 2009) players.

[woodenbandman]

If you don't like Teleport, use Dimensional Anchor to discorage it.

And that damage cap is bull, seeing as how A) Even a lowly Barbarian can do more than 200 damage in a round total, if they take Frenzied Berserker and shock trooper, B) Save or Die, , C) what if your fireball deals 15 damage to 4 enemies, at level 5? Does the damage cap lower the damage then? and D) Why, instead of upping the monster's level, are you gimping the PCs? The only circumstance under which a PC should be gimped is to even his power level out with the rest of the PCs. Basically you're writing your beliefs into law, which are that the PCs shouldn't be able to do things that are the point of playing the game to do, namely kill things. I fully disagree with this ever happening. I think it's bad, and that PC power level should be addressed on a case-by-case basis.

Instead of being so heavy handed, talk to the players before game start. Explain to them that you want a low-power game, so the first start to that is a 25 point-buy generation method. Then, explain to them that you don't want to deal with a lot of optimization, and that you'd rather run a game more based on story development (If you don't want to do these things then you shouldn't be DMing, because if you believe that these rules allow for any degree of satisfaction to be gained from combat, you're dead wrong.)

If you don't like the PCs "trivializing your combats," the fault is yours for making bad combats. I speak from experience on this one. If the party contains a DMM cleric and a Shadowcraft Mage and a Warblade/Swordsage/Master of 9 or whatever, you need to look at their character sheets, figure out their weaknesses, and stab them in those weaknesses. Not too much, just enough so that they get the sense that they're in danger, so that, when you take the gloves off for real, they will weep. Don't like sneak attack? Throw out some fortified warriors, or Barbarians with improved uncanny dodge. Don't like spellcasters? For the most part, Golems will do pretty well, or even throw some enemy spellcasters. Don't look only to the monster manual; look to the PHB, or the Eberron Campaign Setting, or the Book of Erotic Fantasy, for ideas to challenge the players. In fact, that last one's probably actually a good choice. Nothing harder (lol) than fighting someone who's good at that sort of thing during coitus.

That death rule is kind of cool, but on the off chance that someone falls "unconscious" and are then attacked by, let's say, a nearby wizard, they'll be righteously pissed off. You should keep rezzing in. The ability to bring someone back is enough incentive for them to try it rather than just paying for what they can get for essentially free under this rule.

That's my response. Love it, hate it, but please consider it.

[ZeroSum]

No character can do more than Level * 10 damage in a round, total. If you would have done more than this (some huge fireball that's empowered, maximized, searing, scorching, fiery, etc, or just fifty sneak attacks), the damage caps. When damage comes from buffs provided by other players, such as bard songs, the total is attributed to the buff-giver, not the buff receiver.

This just nerfs the classes that rely on straight damage (melee) while allowing Save-or-Dies and Save-or-Sucks (caster) to still be fully powerful.

Dead is dead. No rezzing.

As long as your PCs understand and agree with this one there's no real issue.  However, D&D does assume that people die sometimes and that revivification is available.

-10 HP is NOT dead. Instead, any time the PC drops below 0 HP, they fall unconscious - effectively dead. Clerical healing will save them from death, but they will not regain consciousness until takes a 10-minute action, requiring a heal check with a DC equal to the amount of negative damage the PC received. Failed checks give a +1 stacking bonus to subsequent checks. When restored to consciousness, the PC suffers from a negative level until the PC can spend a few days doing nothing but resting. If an unconscious PC is attacked with intent to kill - which doesn't have to be a coup de grace - they die for real.

I say make it coup-de-grace to kill off someone since your penalties for death are so harsh it should require some serious killification to invoke.  (CDG costs the enemy a round of actions.  Killing someone already unconscious with your last iterative is a no-brainer.  Using a Fireball on the area is even more of a no-brainer if the enemy has a caster.)

Teleport and related spells are out. Dimension door is fine, but if you want to travel long distances, you've got to actually schlep.

So long as your players are cool with that this is fair enough.  It does mean that the PCs can't act at a fast response speed and gives more power to people who can take the time to plan, which the PCs usually don't have.

"Disenchanting", in a 4e-style creation of residuum (or like WoW) of unwanted magic items, is in.

Not familiar, but I'm guessing it's a way of moving magic from useless items to useful ones?  I guess anything works, but wealth-by-level is a fairly good guideline anyway.

Clearly, I've got some axes to grind here. On a simple basis, I dislike what Teleport does to the game. It trivializes overland travel, which (in my opinion) should NEVER be trivial in a swords & sorcery game - consider how much of LotR was about getting from point a to point b, actually consider how much of so many adventure stories are about that.

That's fair enough if your players are up for that flavor.

If you can't travel instantaneously, though, and we're still doing stuff with more-or-less 3.5 balance and itemization strategies, PCs will really want to make their own stuff. Hence disenchanting.

Again, there are plenty of ways to keep this balanced so it shouldn't be so problematic.

I feel that the 3.5e rules, and the 4e rules even more so, devalue character death and trivialize the Heal skill (nobody needs Heal, really, if they can cast level 0 orisons). These new rules are an attempt to address that.

I don't see how this makes the Heal skill useful -- can't the Cleric just cast Cure spells until the PC is back in the black and use an untrained heal to revive him?  Even if you can't there's a maximum negative of about -10*LVL (monster HD ~ Level) which means something like two hours per level to succeed untrained, not including any bonuses.  Also, since skill checks are somewhere around 1-2x level if not optimized for it the maximum check needed to revive someone can still vastly outstrip their skill bonus reducing the use of heal anyway.

I also feel that PCs have the potential to do too much damage in a round. Whether it's crazy metamagic abuse with arcane thesis disintegrates, anarchic initiate psions, or just vanilla TWF rogues, it's totally possible to do too much damage. By too much damage, what I mean is: the PCs can do so much damage that they'd one-shot another PC. So if I, as the DM, were to employ those tactics, I'd TPK the party on a surprise round. But if I don't, the PCs trivialize many combats. I cannot simply embeefinate the defenses of the NPCs, since then the PCs would use the same defensive strategies, leaving me in even worse straits. One answer would be to ban certain practices on a case-by-case basis. This strategy is to simply inflict a blanket damage cap. I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not.

It's not.  All your melees have is damage, really.  Casters just SoD instead.  I understand the desire to reduce the amount of rocket tag but primarily nerfing fighters is not the right way to do it.  There's currently no fully fleshed out system that works nicely so I can't really suggest a great alternative.  However, players and monsters alike should have DR, energy resistance and save bonuses from various sources that should reduce the amount of rocket tag in use.  There are still ways to overcome that but these are a start.

All these things have a varying impact on the game. Death rules don't come into play all that often, and I feel like mine are a reasonable replacement.

Again, as long as everyone understands that this makes it a hardcore game where the assumption was previously that death was an inconvenience not an end.

If you know ahead of time that you'll never get to teleport, you can plan accordingly.

But remember that the PCs, being a small group, need to react quickly to changing circumstances and this reduces that ability.  Are you planning on keeping Overland Flight and Shadow Walking in?

The damage cap, however, is a really funky change to game mechanics and without playtesting it, I have to rely on feedback from other critical eyes before I try and inflict it on my (hypothetical at this point, as my gaming group has two concurrent campaigns running and I might not be DMing any time before 2009) players.

This is the one I'd fear the most.  Some classes rely on dealing a crapton of damage each round.  These classes are being nerfed.  Some classes don't care if they deal any damage each round.  These classes are being buffed.  Are you sure you're nerfing and buffing the right classes here?

[Ieniemienie]

lvl *10?  human fighter with greatsword at lvl 1 = 2d6 + 2*str = easily above 10, that gets capped as well?

[pfooti]

First, thanks for all the responses. On a less-argumentative side, I think requiring a CdG to actually kill someone is a good idea for the reasons pointed out. Player death should be a BIG deal. Given that I usually use point-buy characters anyway, if someone REALLY wanted their character rezzed, they could just make a nearly-identical new one to bring in later, anyway. There's a bit in the Beerfest movie which kind of pokes at that (Landfill dies, and his brother who looks just like him takes his place).

As far as dimensional anchoring goes, that is a change to the tactical use of teleports - to get out of combat or whatever. What I want is a change to the strategic, long-term use of teleports. I don't want my PCs teleporting back to the batcave at the end of each session to rest safely without setting guards, and back to the Biggest City On The Planet every week or so to sell their loots. I'm actually planning a reasonable in-game explanation for the lack of teleports. It it takes place after the fall of a civilization that had relied on semi-automated teleportation to sustain far-flung settlements, up until some apocralypse made long-distance teleports unavailable. Civilization collapses overnight, and we see the rise of an airship-based merchant class. The campaign is based on the airships, which is why I'm especially opposed to teleport use in this particular homebrew.

Of all the ideas, I think the damage cap is the biggest issue. I decided that it might be necessary after playing in a one-off game with a swift hunter barbarian. He was a scout 4 / ranger 7 / barbarian 1, with pounce and TWF. He wasn't anywhere near optimal, and he was doing 300 points of damage in a charge, with a pretty reasonable chance to hit just about anything. Unlike sneak attacks, he didn't need a flanking friend, and he could do that to just about anything, as long as his favored enemies are things like oozes, constructs, elementals, etc.

Don't get me started on Save or Dies, either. They're next on the list. Of course, clever monsters can help account for casters anyway. I can design encounters that challenge casters (especially with the Mage Slayer feat) most of the time, giving them a chance to get off a SoD or two, but making them pay for it. That's fine. Because casters are (typically) relatively frail in melee, they can be controlled in a number of ways: grapples, entagles, areas of silence, and flat-out hit point damage. Plus monks. Stunning fist has to work somewhere!

If I decide to allow that kind of stuff from the players, they can 1-shot most of my big monsters. Of course, I can design combat to stymie their particular style of attacks, but it's pretty hard to actually do that. Deathstrike bracers and the Dungeonscape rogue ACF make it pretty easy to apply precision damage to lots of attacks. Even if I DO pull that off, I end up drastically changing my own encounter design to counteract the PCs strengths, which is unsatisfying. If I focus my PC on being good at tripping, I don't want to face a campaign full of oozes, quadrupeds, and flying creatures just because my DM gets annoyed when I trip people.

Another option is something along the lines of a gentleman's agreement with respect to these characters. The Black Whirlwind can be an NPC just as easily as a PC, and I can shoot him at whomever I want as a scout/ranger, he can hide pretty well, sneak up on the cleric or barbarian or whatever, and simply pulverize them. That's about as satisfying as "rocks fall, everybody dies", or "it's a dungeon full of golems! it's an antimagic field! no magic tonight!"

I guess that this is the design principle I want to shoot for: I want combats to be challenging and hard-fought. I don't want combat to come down to "who wins initiative", or "who has the most clever technique for generating huge damage on a charge". Because when everybody hits hard enough to kill somebody each round, the PCs lose out in the end - I've got a limitless supply of NPCs, and there's just five of them.

Any other suggestions to replace the damage cap are welcome.

[InnaBinder]

<snip>

I guess that this is the design principle I want to shoot for: I want combats to be challenging and hard-fought. I don't want combat to come down to "who wins initiative", or "who has the most clever technique for generating huge damage on a charge". Because when everybody hits hard enough to kill somebody each round, the PCs lose out in the end - I've got a limitless supply of NPCs, and there's just five of them.

Any other suggestions to replace the damage cap are welcome.

  As has been pointed out, camage cap as put forth seems a Bad Idea ^TM, because it encourages everyone to make characters based on SoD or, at it's lowest iteration, encourages characters that can reliably bounce against that damage cap on a minimal result - effectively giving themselves the Maximize Feat for free.  SoD is worse, obviously, because a party specialized to that end can fill every niche and still turn the game into 'Did we win initiative?  Good, it's dead.'  An alternate, off-the-cuff solution might be 1) banning Persistent Spell to minimize DMM Gawdhood, 2) requiring PrC (which nobody is likely to complain about) and eliminating full caster-class PrC options, and 3) turning back the clock on Power Attack to its 3.0 incarnation, where the THW wasn't quite as uber in the hands of a charge-monkey.

[pfooti]

Another change I was considering was allowing precision damage to only count once per full attack per target. It's a really hard line to balance, though - sneak attackers are just weird. 25% of the time, they do negligable damage (no SA), 50% of the time they do a good amount of damage (one attack with SA), and 25% of the time they do a ridiculous amount of damage (full, twf, hasted attack with SA). It's the top end that is the problem, since there are lots of ways to work around the original design constraints on rogues. With creative classing or use of UMD wands, rogues can have SA active almost all the time (imp invis wand as a trivial example, island of blades stance, etc) and can get either true pounce (lion barbarian) or pounce-esque powers (anklet of translocation, chronocharm, travel devotion), but something that gives them the ability to approach an enemy and get a full attack right away, before giving that enemy a round to readjust or take their own pre-emptive full attack.

Maybe that's the primary issue I need to worry about: pouncing. If I removed Pounce and friends from the reach of PCs and only used it relatively sparingly on NPCs, I could probably work around everything else. When you want to take a full attack action, you need to give the enemy a chance to attack you first (in the original game design). Easy access to pounce removes that critical condition, and is especially helpful to characters with lots of on-hit damage (precision, dragonfire inspiration, etc).

Hmm.

[ZeroSum]

Please don't nerf rogues.  They have 3/4 BAB, d6 HD and need to keep up on Dex and Cha as is.

So at, for example, level 11, Fighters get three iterative attacks at +11/+6/+1 which they can do TWF with (if they're silly) or just THF with a Greatsword for something like 2d6+10 at +20 to hit with the ability to power attack for up to -3 or so to keep a similar hit count as the rogue, yielding 2d6+16 (23) or so damage per hit.  If they don't really try to optimize at all.

A level 11 Rogue, however, has two shortswords after investing all his feats in TWF, 8 BAB for iteratives of +8/+3 which he can attack with TWF for something like +15/+15/+10 for 1d6+3+6d6 (27.5) or so damage per hit.

The difference?  The Fighter has one feat: Power Attack.  He has 4 General and 5 Fighter feats open.
The Rogue has two feats: Weapon Finesse and Two-Weapon Fighting.  He has 3 General feats open.

What can the fighter do?  Shock Trooper, Leap Attack, hell, even Weapon Focus and Spec are pushing him far higher than the Rogue's damage level.

So sure, if a d6 HD class specializes in maxing out his damage dealt and can get into a flanking position he can approach the damage level of a straight Fighter which is known to be a sucky class anyway if the Fighter utterly fails at attempting to do damage.

And a Greater Invisibility wand would cost 27,000 gp.  That's available to PCs somewhere around level 8 if the PC buys nothing but that one wand.

Meanwhile, the Wizard 11 is casting Circle of Death, Disintegrate, Phantasmal Killer, Planar Binding, and Dominate Person.

Do you really feel the need to reduce the amount of damage that a Rogue does at level 11 when he can happen to sneak attack something?

[pfooti]

Do you really feel the need to reduce the amount of damage that a Rogue does at level 11 when he can happen to sneak attack something?

No, I feel that I need to nerf the amount of damage that a Rogue can do during a full attack, if the rogue hasn't invested in getting the attack off. Meaning: your rogue has paid the price of a lower BAB, wand of invisibility, and several rounds getting positioned to make the full attack. The rogue (and barbarian, and fighter, and everybody) that I'm worried about simply charge into position.

It's not the straight (and under-optimized) rogue in your example that I worry about. It's the one that knows to buy gloves of the balanced hand (free feats!) and deathstrike bracers, so they can sneak attack just about everybody. The one who uses the MIC item stacking rules to add Shadow Hands to the GotBH (or just takes a swordsage dip) to get the Cloak of Shadows maneuver (greater invis for a round, on the VERY cheap), or buys a half-charged wand on the cheap, or talks a caster into buffing him, or uses one of many tricks available to make sneak attack active much more often.

Let's say the rogue has about 5d6 of sneak attack dice. That lets them dip 2 levels elsewhere - I suggest at least barbarian-1 for the pounce. Toss in swordsage-1 as well for further buffs. That's -1 BAB off of a normal rogue progression, but probably results in someone who has DEX to damage, flanks all the time, has greater invis as a swift action, and pounce. They get 3 main hand attacks, 2 off hand attacks (TWF feat, plus ITWF from gloves of the balanced hand), a haste attack and a flurry attack (whirling frenzy barbarian). That's seven attacks, five of which are at a relatively decent attack bonus, and all of which get 5d6 sneak. A ranger/scout/barbarian swift hunter is worse here, since with greater skirmish (feat), they can also get 5d6 precision damage and have a better BAB. That's something like 20d6 to 35d6 in precision damage each time they take a full attack. That's great if full attacks are hard to come by, but ridiculous if you have pounce.

In general, rogue damage scales well in comparison to other more strictly damaging types. Rogues get about 3.5 damage every 2 levels, or 1.75 per level. A greatsword-wielding fighter gets less, actually, since his damage only goes up with power attack overflow, and mathematical analysis of power attack shows that PA is actually self-limiting (although full-BAB classes have a much better chance to hit with iteratives). Either way, it ends up scaling relatively evenly, even if the rogue isn't dual-wielding. The rogue has worse AC and HP, but has a ton of skill points and out-of-combat utility.

So yeah - I'm not really talking about nerfing rogues. What I'm advocating (now, instead of a damage cap) is nerfing POUNCE. I used to think that pounce was required in order to give melee types interesting options at higher levels when the wizards are casting crazy spells (and I'm frankly not worried about disintegrate (fort save? pfft), phantasmal killer (two saves? pfft), planar binding (banned), or circle of death (mook-killer), although dominate is a huge deal. Actually, I'm more worried about Tasha's Laughter and Glitterdust - will save targeting SoDs available VERY early on, but I digress).

But right now, my posiiton is that melee types need something like the Tome of Battle, perhaps minus a few clearly unbalancing maneuvers, instead of pounce. What they need is interesting things to do with a standard action, so they can move into position and attack, and so that there's a real trade-off and opportunity cost: "do I take a full attack, or do I take one attack and get some interesting secondary effect?" That's much better than pounce.

[ZeroSum]

So then... You're not talking about precision damage at all, which was the first line of that last post.

So you're not talking about nerfing damage at all anymore, which is all I had left against your house rules.

[InnaBinder]

With those additional thoughts:

Houserule Pounce to require BAB +12 in addition to any other prereqs it has based on method of arrival.  Eliminate the Alchemist Fire tossin' Rogue monstrosity that  (IIRC) ubernoob has mentioned through item limitation or some other houserule.

[veekie]

Since others already addressed most of the stuff, I'll just offer suggestions on the long distance teleport, add a mishap factor to long range teleportation rather than banning it outright. Having good odds of appearing off target by a few hundred miles should take care of players using teleport too often, and add the opportunity for interesting side trips to boot.

[jcm]

I agree with you on disliking teleport. But what I really dislike isn't teleport, it's casual teleport without error that ruins the feel of space in a game. Teleporting itself is pretty darn cool - hence the reason all those golden civilizations keep blowing themselves up with the invoked fiery death of nasty doom and leaving nothing but teleport portals behind to remind us how awesome they were.

[EjoThims]

consider how much of LotR was about getting from point a to point b, actually consider how much of so many adventure stories are about that.

Well the hell too much. And 90% of it it did nothing for the story.

Books would have been a lot better with a lot more "They travelled for 5 days to X, upon arrival Y."

Teleporting yourself right to your goal on the deepest level of the enemy fortress to kill the real power behind the throne without going through the guards and such?

Bad.

Teleporting yourself cross country cause otherwise it's just gonna cost .02% of your GP and some time?

Good. Saves my time. Saves your time. And honestly, by the time everyone (NPCs included) can do it, who cares?

Because even if you're seriously running a campaign where CR13+ encounters are roaming the countryside, you can bet teleportation would be the preferred method of travel.

[jcm]

Teleporting yourself cross country cause otherwise it's just gonna cost .02% of your GP and some time?

To me the problem with reliable teleport is that it fails a minimal consistency check. Many low level adventures center around travel - guarding a caravan across a desert, carrying a message through the wilderness between two cities, looking for the lost party into the nasty orc infested mountains, whatever. It bothers me when game worlds with reliable teleportation still have travel adventures. And it's such a basic hook that it's often used anyway.

I actually like the way teleport is used in the Nightrunner series. It's very rare, it's slightly dangerous, and there is no reason at all to think it could be used on a wide scale.

[EjoThims]

To me the problem with reliable teleport is that it fails a minimal consistency check. Many low level adventures center around travel - guarding a caravan across a desert, carrying a message through the wilderness between two cities, looking for the lost party into the nasty orc infested mountains, whatever. It bothers me when game worlds with reliable teleportation still have travel adventures. And it's such a basic hook that it's often used anyway.

The overuse of teleportation is exactly why low level cross country adventures are worthwhile.

The roads aren't safe because the kings and dukes and everyone with any cash doesn't care to keep them safe because they can teleport around.

Meanwhile all the middle and lower class slobs have to fight through orcs and goblins and ankhegs just to get their crops to market.

A little creativity goes a long way. 

[pfooti]

So then... You're not talking about precision damage at all, which was the first line of that last post.

So you're not talking about nerfing damage at all anymore, which is all I had left against your house rules.

Yeah, my posts in this thread seem to be long and rambly - that's because I'm thinking out loud (or in textual form) about some of the issues that remain in 3e. I think making pounce much harder to acquire is pretty much the only real house rule I need in the long run. Some kind of rule that states: "you can only make a full attack if you have moved 5' or less since the end of your previous turn" would work around both pounce and Travel Devotion abuse. It would make certain spells and powers totally useless, but them's the breaks I think.

I think also, based on a lot of these thoughtful responses, that my issue with teleportation is actually a bigger issue with (a) travel and (b) resource availability. Regardless of party level, I want people who are out Adventuring to be actually Out. Not just off for a few hours, exploring a dungeon 1000 miles away, but teleporting home to the batcave for dinner (and not having to worry about what the bad guys are doing in response to your incursion).

Instead of just outright banning the spell, I could discourage it by using things like larger chance for error (explaining why it's not in wide use for things like moving food across the countryside), and smart bad guys who ward their lair with lethal derivatives of Anticipate Teleportation.

[jcm]

The overuse of teleportation is exactly why low level cross country adventures are worthwhile.

That's an interesting take on it I may swipe if I run D&D again.

[EjoThims]

That's an interesting take on it I may swipe if I run D&D again.

 

[RobbyPants]

• No character can do more than Level * 10 damage in a round, total. If you would have done more than this (some huge fireball that's empowered, maximized, searing, scorching, fiery, etc, or just fifty sneak attacks), the damage caps. When damage comes from buffs provided by other players, such as bard songs, the total is attributed to the buff-giver, not the buff receiver.

I see what you're trying to do here, but as others have pointed out, this only fixes part of your problem.

• Dead is dead. No rezzing.

That's fine.  It makes death something to fear.

• -10 HP is NOT dead. Instead, any time the PC drops below 0 HP, they fall unconscious - effectively dead. Clerical healing will save them from death, but they will not regain consciousness until takes a 10-minute action, requiring a heal check with a DC equal to the amount of negative damage the PC received. Failed checks give a +1 stacking bonus to subsequent checks. When restored to consciousness, the PC suffers from a negative level until the PC can spend a few days doing nothing but resting. If an unconscious PC is attacked with intent to kill - which doesn't have to be a coup de grace - they die for real.

Seems reasonable enough.

• Teleport and related spells are out. Dimension door is fine, but if you want to travel long distances, you've got to actually schlep.

What about spells like Overland Flight?  Flying Carpets?  Flying mounts?  All in all I see where you're coming from here.  I don't think the general idea of this  change is a problem.  Just make sure you look at all the angles, so the problem's not transfered.

• "Disenchanting", in a 4e-style creation of residuum (or like WoW) of unwanted magic items, is in.

No thoughts here.  I haven't played 4E.

Don't get me started on Save or Dies, either. They're next on the list. Of course, clever monsters can help account for casters anyway. I can design encounters that challenge casters (especially with the Mage Slayer feat) most of the time, giving them a chance to get off a SoD or two, but making them pay for it. That's fine. Because casters are (typically) relatively frail in melee, they can be controlled in a number of ways: grapples, entagles, areas of silence, and flat-out hit point damage. Plus monks. Stunning fist has to work somewhere!

Something to consider on SoDs: if you make them take an entire round to cast (not a full-round action), it makes it more of a tactical decision, and less of an insta-kill.  Now, player and monster alike have time to react to the impending doom.