Shattered Kingdoms

Yes. Also get rid of final strike.


Yes, it is, and you’re mentally ill (like someone addicted to slot machine gambling, for example), if you think otherwise.

Achernar's made his post on the second page of this thread, I was really wondering if any headway was being made towards it, as I'd heard rumors from other players that it had. While I don't think it solves all the problems of charm person (The casting time really needs to be lengthened too in my opinion to even it out completely) it does solve a lot of problems and should be easy to implement: It's what Algon was trying to get done (albeit the wrong way) with Emet.

It does make me sad that rogues/bards/priests won't be able to utilize the NPC uses of charm person, but I think the only person who was ever planning on doing that was me anyway.

That is amazingly fun, and it's a pity that has to be collateral damage because of charm's blatantly overpowered nature. I'd much rather see that only lvl 45 PCs are able to be charmed.

I fondly remember charming some tribunal NPC from Ayamao with Caerbannog and ordering it to yell to lure tribunal members to come to its assistance.

Now, back to the argument for nerfing charm person:
The argument goes:
1) Overpowered things are bad for the game.
2) Charm person is overpowered.
3) Charm person is bad for the game.

The form of the argument is clearly valid. In order to disagree with the conclusion, you must disagree with one of the two premises. Let’s examine how people have attempted to contradict the premises so far:

“Overpowered things aren’t bad for the game.”
1) Parnys’ argument: “SK is based around overpowered things canceling each other out.”
The examples you gave of other OP things are, for the most part, not actually OP, or at least not as OP as charm person.
2) Stratford’s argument: “Ultrabalance is overdone. And boring.
I have trouble taking this argument seriously.
3) Jeckel’s argument: “There is always going to be a spell that is better than others.”
The best spell in the game should belong to a class that is otherwise [REDACTED] – like warlocks. Sorcs are already very good.

“Charm person is not overpowered.”

1) The furtive_death/Juggernaut argument: “There are still many ways to avoid/negate a charm.”
No, there aren’t. This argument has been discussed back and forth. Every tactic mentioned has been shown to be less than reliable, and actually easily countered by the sorc. Even skirmish requires a lot of skill and a bit of luck. I would say the only way to be more or less immune to charm person would be to have a lot of MR and spell ward.

2) The_me’s argument: “charm CAN be beat... just isn’t easy.”
A skilled player –might- be able to give an effective counter to charm person, but that doesn’t mean charm person is great the way it is. Nobody is saying that charm person is the equivalent of the slay command. Merely that it is very, very difficult to resist, has a very low casting time, is cast with minimal risk to the caster, and completely screws you if it lands.

Baldric, for all your cunning, you have neglected one critical postulate from your proof, forgetting the link between your argument and your point. This all hinges on the unstated claim that Bad Things For the Game should be Changed. Without that, your argument does nothing for your first proposal.

Also, to negate this argument as it stands, the simplest method would be to take a step up in complexity and operate on predicate claims: to introduce universal and existential properties.

ALL Overpowered things are Bad for the Game.
ALL of Charm Person is Overpowered.

Thus, ALL of Charm Person is Bad for the Game.

There are several avenues of attack, here. The simplest are our universal negations: we must show some aspect of Charm Person that is not overpowered or some overpowered thing that is not bad for the game.

The most elegant is to assume the next response from you would be an adjustment of the argument to function off of an existential claim:

ALL Overpowered things are Bad for the Game.
ASPECTS of Charm Person are Overpowered.

Thus, SOME of Charm Person is Bad for the Game.

Here, we would assume an aspect of charm person to be bad for the game. If we can assume this and conclude some sort of logical absurdity, we can safely negate one of our claims.

If we were to make both statements existential claims, the transitive property would not logically follow. Sorry to rain on your parade.

:monocle:

1) Things that are overpowered are bad for the game.
2) Things that are bad for the game should be changed.
3) A certain aspect of charm person (namely, its application in pk against other pcs) is overpowered.
4) A certain aspect of charm person (namely, its application in pk against other pcs) is bad for the game.
5) A certain aspect of charm person (namely, its application in pk against other pcs), should be changed.


Everyone knew we were talking about one aspect of charm person. That's been stated repeatedly in this thread. And yes, I had left it unsaid that things that are bad for the game should be changed. I was attempting to focus the discussion, and the objections to nerfing charm person thus far could be boiled down to arguments against the two premises I used before.
Now, go make a hellion and show us how sweet domination is.

Hey now, don't hate 'cuz I know how to put things together but don't have anything to work with. I was merely approaching with my lantern, looking for an honest man.

What I'm saying here is that your bridge of reason is covering more than one assumption people could work against. Parnys demonstrated a good example, and you can see it in places like RIFTS, which SK seems to heavily borrow from in both substance and form. They call it "power creep," where nothing is nerfed, there's just a steady flood of bigger and bigger buffs to balance out the last really OP option given to players.

If you are right, your point is valid.

But if Parnys is right, the counterpoint is equally sound.

That being said, I don't like being charmed, so I'm all for nerfing it. Your OP's tongue-in-cheek mention of the fact that you bring this up only after you are playing a character who wields this power less is not lost on me. I suppose its like how lawbreakers were not really interested in our RAP Sheet brainchild.

The old system design standby serves us well in this situation though: "If you are stupid for not having it, it is probably overpowered."

When you drop to silly levels of logic, you open yourself up to silly logical retorts.

Not to try and do too much logic here but how can you have two equally sound yet opposing arguments?

A SOUND argument is logically concise and contains no fallacy.

A VALID argument is true.

You can have one or none.

Or, heck, both, ideally.

Unless you're in mathematics, in which case, Gödel owned you years ago.

Did you know that the first MUD was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why Shattered Kingdoms was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.