Dungeons & Dragons Online Forum News (Nov. 5, 04)

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Here are today's Dungeons & Dragons Online forum highlights, collected from Dungeons & Dragons Online forums. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Xundau, Community Relations

Spellbook Sharing in DDO

I talked to the designers about this, and the current plan is to not allow spellbook sharing. The main reason for this is that we want to keep some spells rare, or at least difficult to attain -- you won't just be able to walk into a spell store and buy a copy of any spell in the game.

Of course, this is usually the case in PnP campaigns, so why the rule change? Well, as others have pointed out, the PnP rules are designed for small parties of characters; if there are two wizards in the party, it's probably not an issue for them to share spells. And NPC wizards are not likely to make their spellbooks available to PCs without some kind of persuasion (friendly or otherwise).

However, if you have a legion of Wizard PCs running around, and spellbook sharing is turned on, it won't be long before every Wizard has access to just about every spell they can cast. We don't want this -- we want Wizards to have to earn their spells, and this is why we probably won't have spellbook sharing.

That being said, some of the other ideas here, such as spell swapping/trading, sound pretty interesting. I'll make sure the designers get a look at this thread.

What is your favorite weapon or tactic?

You know, I've always liked the spiked chain, and I tried a Fighter/Rogue with it in some of our house games earlier this year, but it didn't really work out the way I wanted it too ... maybe it was because the DM kept throwing large creatures at us.

I think a spiked chain might be even better in the hands of a Fighter/Barbarian without Weapon Finesse, with an 18 Str and 14 Dex -- this way you'd be doing 2d4+6 with each hit, and 2d4+9 when raging -- 2d4+11 with Weapon Specialization. It would also be nice to get Improved Trip on one of these.

The Eberron Campaign Setting has an interesting feat, Serpent Strike, which lets Monks try something similar -- they can use a longspear as a Monk weapon, which lets them do a flurry of blows out to 10 feet. Because they can still do an unarmed strike from 5 feet away, they would force opponents with a 5-foot reach to submit to an attack of opportunity if they want to close to melee range in one round.