One of many largest attracts of Vecna: Eve of Wreck, the ultimate marketing campaign within the decade-long run of fifth version Dungeons & Dragons, is the truth that you possibly can play as a high-level character. Most D&D campaigns finish round stage 10. Eve of Wreck begins there, after which proceeds to go as much as stage 20, the sport’s cap. Which means gamers will start the story with extraordinarily highly effective, probably game-breaking spells and skills. So how did the designers at Wizards of the Coast handle to maintain characters in line, stopping them from blowing up the complete narrative from the bounce? The reply is very, very rigorously.
Initially, the hazard right here is actual. Excessive-level magic customers can take a number of highly effective spells earlier than or at stage 10. These could possibly be used to rapidly reveal secrets and techniques that may spoil issues just like the true intentions of main characters, or the places of individuals or objects. Informal use of these talents, particularly early on, may spoil… properly, the whole lot actually. So designers have explicitly famous that some areas in Vecna: Eve of Wreck are completely different from others. That features the blanket use of Nondetection specifically places. It’s a spell within the Participant’s Handbook that ensures folks and objects “can’t be focused by any divination magic or perceived” by different magical means. Different nerfs aren’t so delicate.
Teleportation talents had been a very massive concern, it appears. Vecna: Eve of Wreck does loads of narrative hand-waving to tone them down or disrupt them utterly. As an example the hub location for the marketing campaign is Sigil, the Metropolis of Doorways within the Outlands. It’s a whole aircraft of the multiverse that may solely be entered or exited by way of a sequence of obscure portals. As soon as gamers depart the hub, there’s no technique to get again till the job is finished.
In different places, it’s merely famous within the “Regional Results” part of a given chapter that sure spells don’t work as supposed — together with teleportation and summoning spells, and spells that may in any other case permit revealing the placement of a creature or an object gamers may be on the lookout for.
The largest nerfs aren’t actually nerfs in any respect. They’re traits baked into the high-level monsters that gamers bump up in opposition to over the course of the marketing campaign. These embrace the common assortment of options that we’ve seen for a decade now, like response talents that set off when characters achieve the higher hand and potent resistances to sure kinds of injury. There’s additionally the catch-all “legendary resistance” function that’s been a part of this version from the very begin. Which means for some creatures in Vecna: Eve of Wreck, when a personality will get them good with a spell or different capability that requires them to roll a saving throw they usually fail, they’ll simply select to succeed as a substitute.
Savvy Dungeon Masters count on this stuff, in fact, and put together evocative in-fiction descriptions rather than merely saying “Nuh-uh, no you didn’t!” and studying the rule aloud.
There have been loads of occasions whereas taking part in D&D I’ve had my butt saved as a DM by some particular rule that designers thoughtfully included proper there within the textual content of the e book. That form of oversight is likely one of the advantages of operating a broadcast journey, in spite of everything. And it ought to come as no shock to gamers, both. In a sport the place the individual on the head of the desk can disguise their rolls behind a display and kind of legally misinform your face within the service of constructing the story extra thrilling, did you actually count on it to be every other approach?