Showing posts with label Antimagic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Antimagic. Show all posts

Saturday, 24 March 2012

Antimagic and 4e: King Duncan

Dominic Matte

The last stat block is King Duncan himself, leading the campaign to purge magic from the country. He's not the kind of king who has others fight for him -- as a solo soldier he's tough all around and exerts some control over his enemies' movement and abilities. He's also an expert wielder of antimagic, able to disrupt his enemies' connection to the very source of their power and take advantage of their weakness.

Read on for stats.

Friday, 23 March 2012

Antimagic and 4e: AM Grenades

Dominic Matte

Looking for a fast and dirty way to test out antimagic in your 4th edition game? Try throwing this power onto one or two monsters in an encounter, or simply using the hazard:

Antimagic Grenades (3/encounter, standard action)                     
Choose a square within 10 squares of this creature. Those squares and each adjacent square become antimagic zones until the end of the encounter.

Antimagic Zone
Creatures within the zone cannot use powers with the Arcane / Divine / Primal / Psionic / Shadow  keywords. *

Continue reading after the break for tips on how to use them effectively.

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

Antimagic and 4e: Brigadier Hazen


Dominic Matte

Brigadier Hazen is another ranking officer of King Duncan's military and antimagic specialist. He would prefer to work alone, but as a sniper he's vulnerable and reluctantly keeps a spotting team and guard. Hazen has several large antennae strapped to his back, designed to collect magical energy and funnel it into his rifle (or crossbow if you don't like guns in your D&D).

Read on for stats.

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

Antimagic and 4e: Brigadier Hawkeye

Dominic Matte

Brigadier Hawkeye is the first major enemy I designed as an antimagic specialist for 4th edition. He's a high-ranking officer in King Duncan's military, in charge of a small black ops unit that assassinates key magical targets. Not only is he an elite soldier with some leadership ability, he's also slightly psionic and trained to counter users of arcane and divine magic.

Let's take a look at his stats.

Monday, 19 March 2012

Antimagic and 4e: Beyond No-Magic Zones

Dominic Matte

Articles in This Series:
1: Antimagic and 4e
2: Beyond No Magic Zones
3: Brigadier Hawkeye
4: Brigadier Hazen
5: Antimagic grenades
6: King Duncan

The response to my first article on antimagic in 4e has been overwhelmingly against the mechanic (although I'm hoping that's because people commented on the idea of antimagic without reading the article) so I'd like to explore some more specific reasons for using it, and how I used it.

First off, I didn't decide to try antimagic in 4e just for fun. A war against magic and magic-users was the major plot arc of the game in which I used antimagic in 4e. If the king makes it his mission to purge all magic from the land, you can bet he's got a few tricks up his sleeve to deal with spellcasters. He's not going to throw wave after wave of soldiers at the archmage in the hope that maybe some of the army will survive the fight; he's going to send in a small assassination squad that's specifically trained to break wards and resist magical assault. 

Second, I never used traditional antimagic fields that block all magic. Not once. Over the entire campaign, only three specific encounters contained an antimagic specialist, and two of those couldn't stop casters from casting if they'd wanted to. I would never ever EVER run a combat entirely within an antimagic field because that's frustrating for everyone.

Starting with Monster Manual 3, Wizards drastically reduced the number of monsters with resistances, because it's no fun for a player built around fire attacks to come up against a monster that's highly resistant (or worse, immune) to fire. Instead, fire monsters have traits or abilities that activate or become more powerful when they're hit with fire. Instead of feeling useless, the player deals full damage and is faced with the tactical decision of when to use fire-based attacks. 

This is the approach I was aiming for when I built my antimagic specialists. In the next few days I'll be posting the three stat blocks to give you a better idea of exactly what I mean.

Antimagic and 4e

Dominic Matte
Articles in This Series:

Remember antimagic back in the older editions? I had a lot of fun with antimagic as a DM, until I realized that not letting the wizard cast spells is less of a suspenseful combat situation and more of a "go away until the encounter is over".

While antimagic could be used to create unexpected tactical situations, it did more harm than good. Plus, the rules didn't always make clear distinctions as to what was magic and what wasn't. It's obvious that you can't cast spells in an antimagic field, but can a dragon disciple use his breath weapon? Are psionics magic, or something else? What happens to magical constructs like familiars?

D&D 4e got rid of antimagic, and that was a good design choice. But when I wanted to adapt an old campaign up to 4e and realized that my story about a king trying to destroy all magic relied heavily on antimagic, I had to make a choice: radically alter the story and game world, or find a way to make antimagic work in 4e. 

I chose the latter.