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An idea for clearing webs etc.


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#1 temnix

temnix
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Posted 18 November 2017 - 06:55 PM

A couple of weeks ago I read a little AD&D adventure module. It was a collection of vignettes, opportunities for characters. One of them sent the party to look for herbs for a druid, and the forest path led them to an old wooden keep, originally built by elves, but now thickly webbed through and around. Inside they could find some nice treasure beneath the floor as well as a few huge spiders lurking by the ceiling. Before long, the masters of the place, ettercaps, arrived and tried to seal the party inside, spreading webs over all doors and windows to starve them in a giant cocoon. For breaking out, the author of this adventure did not omit the most immediate solution to spring to certain Homers' minds: fire! If the characters tried to set fire to the webs, they would all die a horrible death and the treasure would melt in the flames.

 

That was all good fun to imagine playing, and there was no good vs. evil terrible fate all-important protagonist stuff there, what a relief! But coming back here, under the cloud of doom and grandiosity, it would be nice to have some of those burning mechanics - for players to use fireballs and burning hands to free each other from webs, stinking clouds and cloudkills (which should work, physically speaking). But how? We could introduce a Zone of Sweet Air effect to fire magic, but that effect has no range limit - any fireball cast anywhere would eliminate all webs and clouds on the map. What I suggest we do instead is to use the Zone against the additional projectiles that do the job for some of the spells. For instance, the projectile of Web is WEB.PRO, but this is only a repeating mothership emitter of WEBTRAV.PRO, which is what binds characters hand-and-foot. If we include a Zone for WEBTRAV in fire spells (to Preset target), plus an immunity for a couple of seconds, characters will be freed and WEB will launch more of these projectiles before we can notice. The party will be freed, but at least one person will have to be singed... The clouds (and Entangle) can be made to use similar custom PROs as well instead of Invisible Traveling. We clear the effective projectiles.

 

There might be a problem if the party figures to burn some kind of summoned wolf who isn't even in the web, and suddenly everyone caught will be free. But we can add a custom spell state to Web's effects and condition the Zone in fire spells on that state.

 

What say you?


Edited by temnix, 18 November 2017 - 06:55 PM.