Well, whatever works is good. So it relies on you having prepared lots of scrolls. This won't be possible in FWE.
Which was one of the main reasons I always thought Dominate Monster was so good. The change to not being able to craft your own things should be good though.
On the subject of using Wall of Stone to create narrow openings, do you think monsters should always be able to go through an opening no matter their size (by squeezing)? I don't much like the idea of a monster not being able to reach the PCs just because it's too big.
If possible, I would probably make the Wall of Stone such, that it can be damaged and broken. So, a dragon would break the wall and then enter.
As for "natural"(made by the creator of the module) walls and such, I suppose being able to squeeze through would make many fights less about abusing the poor monsters lack of abilities. Just moving your party to a spot that'd be too small for the monster to enter, while it would be good tactics, would be game mechanically quite annoying if the monster can do nothing at all. Squeezing through would be a solution, however I think it should incur penalties for the monster. If it's in space that's far too small for it, it should get minuses to attack and AC for being "stuck". Of course, there could be monsters that would be immune to this condition, like slimes or snakes. Perhaps -2 to AC and attacks per size category it's too big for the square? (A huge creature in a single square would get -4 to AC and attacks.)
This way it wouldn't be possible to abuse it, but it would still be a tactically viable choice.(And fairly realistic in it's own way).
BlueSalamander wrote:
Okay. This is interesting. Do you not think that the full-round casting, and short duration, compensate for the high effectiveness?
It's really hard to tell in this case without trying it out in practice. It all depends on how many enemies there are in a given encounter, how long they tend to be, how far the distances are, and so on. Though I suppose it's quite fine as it is at the moment, assuming you change Mass Hold Monster to 20 feet and Weird to 25 feet.
I think the 9th spells are now quite balanced, in my opinion. As I said earlier, since the other spells have different saves and uses, they don't "compete" with Dominate Monster and as such are okay as they are.