I routinely play a Dungeons and Dragons variant called Warlock. It is somewhat derived from pre-first edition stuff and has a somewhat different slant from most traditional DandD stuff. Although the discussion of such differences could easily fill an entire post, instead I'm going to talk about an experience from last night's game. I run two characters in this game: a thief specializing in bows and a mage who mostly does fire magic.

In this system, there is a rather large set of spells. As with most variants of DandD, there is an Invisibility spell. Also like most variants of DandD, it is mostly useless. Most enemies who you would want to not be seen by can see invisible anyway making the spell a useless useful spell. There is, however, another higher level spell called Indetectibility. This spell grants all the same benefits of inivisibility, but can only be pierced by someone using Detect Life. Although Detect Life is common among the undead, it is quite uncommon elsewhere. Given the long duration of Indetectibility (until dispelled or the character commits a hostile action) and the high utility, I researched the spell and have been having the character routinely have the spell up at all times when adventuring.

So far, I've had a couple of instances of the spell failing me. Once, we ran into some pseudo undead (apparently inspired by the Necrons). Most couldn't see me, but I'd been scouting ahead behind enemy lines while fighting types were engaging some of theirs and almost got caught. Luckily, our side broke their lines before any of them could engage me. A later time, in another player's universe, I ended up inside an enemy cone spell that caused instant death and failed my saving through. This left me dead and indetectible, though eventually the party figured it out and carpet bombed the room with dispel magic until they found my corpse to raise me.

Both of these previous instances were troublesome, but neither of them were especially unexpected. Last night, however, another of the players ran who hadn't been around much since I started doing this constant indetectibility plan. We ended up doing a quest where we went into a Norse-mythology themed area. After making our way there, we basically did a sort of "prove our worth" battle against some trolls and after succeeding were given the opportunity to challenge some of the "Valhallans" while some of the lower Norse Gods looked on for amusement. Essentially, it was an exhibition match. Before the match, there was some feasting and healing from our previous encounter, and one of the god NPCs told me mage (who was still indetectible) that fighting while indetectible was very dishonorable. I thanked the NPC for their advice, but explained that I liked staying alive and that being indetectible was generally helpful in that regard.

So then there was fighting. The opposing side had a few magic casters as did we, but during the initial phase of combat, something unfortunate happened. Apparently, one of the gods had cursed my mage by placing a marker over her location and making it so that she was incapable of saving against magical effects (generally in this system, saving against magic prevents non-damaging effects from working or halves the damage of spells). Combat began by my mage then taking two lighting bolts and being at more or less the center of a Sensory Deprivation spell. Essentially, for using a strategy that has been used against our own party repeatedly, I was punished severely by the night's GM.

Due to these effects, my mage--one of the highest level characters in the party--did a grand total of one point of damage over the course of the entire encounter. Since I was forced to use a Dispel Magic to get out of the effect that I was in, I was unable to cast any sort of damage dealing spells to help the party (mages must wait six phases between castings but movement, melee, and archery can happen every phase). We survived the encounter, barely, but with a much greater expendature of resources and with only two of ten PCs standing. The entire thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

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