Spell Cards: Sleep, Force Shield

Oh, the ever lovin' Sleep spell. It steps into an Old School game at level 1 and forces a decision on the house-rules writer. Do you let it stand as written, or cut it down to the equal of its peers? Many a debate on forum and blog has weighed the imponderables of the situation.

Above is my current nerfing of the classic Sleep. I've waffled back and forth, at times going for the "up to 4 HD but save" approach, which makes it less all-powerful at low levels but preserves its utility well into the mid-levels. Perhaps I did the wrong thing - my 4th level party, finding it useless, traded it away at the Faerie Market for that divinational spell of most uncertain application, the Appeal to the Nine Worthy Elders (more on this later).

Probably the biggest balancing factor I applied was to make it only affect creatures that, you know, biologically sleep. This takes away its applicability to a lot of low-level pests, leaving only soldier-types, rats, and the miscellaneous animal.

The voluntary application is my attempt to make it useful for even high level parties. Restful sleep implies a higher healing rate, but also a deeper sleep from which to be awoken in case things happen in the night. You'll sleep as deeply as if you were in a safe inn, even camping in the dungeon.

Anyway, in spite of my doubts about Sleep, I'm on firmer ground with the blue spell, combining Shield, Floating Disc, and Hold Portal capabilities. Loading all three limited-use spells into one slot seems like a winning move to me.

Journey To Saddleback II: Wake-Up Rules

The last encounter of the session was an encounter with another human group, who I'd decided beforehand to be a rival group of the goat nomads.

via Arena Astral, photobucket.com

This encounter came at night, as the party camped in the badlands outside Saheedra's spire. They were taking one-person watches, and had camped in a hollow, concealing their fire from passers-by. The henchman on watch was alerted by two sling bullets whizzing by; he quickly raised the alarm as the intruders closed to fight. Nobody had time to put any armor on, but as the enemy swarmed the tents, the party wizard cast her Sleep spell and most of them (plus one henchman) went down. One ran into the dwarf's axe, and the militant struck to subdue the last one. Deciding on mercy, the party disarmed the attackers, tied them together, and ran them off.

All well and good, but there were still a few loose ends after that encounter.

1. Should there be less of a chance for encounters due to preparations such as hiding the fire? Or more of a chance for lack of such preparations? I think the latter, so on the d20 roll for static encounters while camping, figure -3 in flat ground, -2 in hills/mountains, or -1 in forest if the party is making visible smoke by day or fire by night, unless they take pains to hide it.

2. Should shouts be enough to wake the party in one round? Watches and waking are not really well treated in any of the old-school material I know of (I'm sure Wilderness Survival Guide from AD&D covers this but I am not familiar with it). In retroactive continuity, we can say that the holy influence from the lammasu spire made people miraculously alert to the shouting. But normally, I would say that physical kicking or shaking will also definitely wake people up, and any other alarm will wake people up if they make a Mind save (Spells if you're using that system). An unusual alarm device will give anywhere from +2 to +4 on that save.

3. All this argues for more people on watch, so that one or two can handle waking duty while the rest defend against attack. My party, maybe working off procedures from other games, posted only one watch person and disallowed the spellcasters from taking watch because they need to get sleep to recover spells.

But realistically, nights are 12 hours long (my world is flat so there's no procession of the sun; on a round planet with axial seasons, things get more complicated) and you only need to sleep 8 hours. With this in mind, it's not just a good idea to have watches consist of 1/3 of the party strength, it's actually more realistic, because what else are people going to do for those 4 hours?

In fact, before electric lighting, it was culturally accepted to have a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night. So even taking middle watch is an acceptable way to fit 8 hours of wakefulness into 12 hours of night. Even if spellcasters do need that sleep to be uninterrupted if they are to regain spells, they can still take first or (preferably) last watch.

4. All the same, this makes night monsters much more dangerous; they effectively get a couple of rounds even if you're not surprised and then you have to fight them in your PJ's.

I'm curious how the rest of you handle this kind of situation, given that it's not well described in any of the core rulebooks I know.

Designing Around Sleep

I'm designing a module for a one-shot session in the summer, likely using S&W or LotFP old school rules.

It's a low-level adventure, and with everything I put into it, I am constantly thinking "Sleep spell." And then I realize a few things that work against the broken power of old-school-clone Sleep:

* Splitting up groups of low level monsters into multiple encounters
* Having close quarters and enforcing a "friendly fire" rule
* Foes approach from many angles
* Not all foes can be slept

And more ideas in this discussion ranging from a full-on nerfing of Sleep (saving throws, fewer creatures affected) to a "D&D is right" approach. Given it's a one-shot I am not really inclined to accept answers that come down to "it will all wash out over time". And for a longer campaign I would much rather start from a balanced spell system that gave starting spellcasters two or more things to do. In fact, I think the time is right to start discussing magic systems.