Circle Magic

[Endarire]

Circle Magic is just... nuts.  The Red Wizard of Thay includes Circle Magic in the Dungeon Master's Guide, and a Hathran (Player's Guide to Faerun) and a Halruaan Elder (Shining South) can also do it.

Circle Magic requires an hour with a Circle Leader and at least 2 minions.  The minions cast spells into the 'circle' to fuel the Circle Leader's magic.  You can either boost a small number of spells with Empower, Maximize, and Heighten (up to level 20), or just boost all your spells up to caster level 40.  (The example of Hauth Var implies that this CL bonus applies to all his spells during the day.)

Let's assume you're a level 10-12 character and your spells are now all cast at CL40 before other bonuses due to Reserves of Strength and so on.

As a GM, how do you challenge such a character?  The best answers I've found are antimagic and other Circle Mages.  Antimagic is a total shutdown (unless the character is, say, a Cleric/Hathran with Initiate of Mystra) and other Circle Mages just scream, "Rocket tag!"  There's also the implicit, "Don't let them use Circle Magic!" but that's too binary for me.

If we restrict this tech only to NPCs, Circle Mages still seem nuts.  Even in Faerun, where there seems to be an epic caster in every nation, a small cabal of Red Wizards could do serious damage with caster level 40+ effects, all day every day, assuming they could keep Circle Magic up.

I also don't know why Circle Magic was printed as-is.  It isn't Evulz only (Red Wizards can be Neutral, Hathrans can be LN/LG/NG, and Halruaan Elders have no alignment restriction) and it doesn't seem that stretchy of logic to take Leadership or have other minions contribute as much magic as possible to the circle every day to fuel the leader!

As a GM, how do you handle Circle Magic if you allow it?  Why do you think Circle Magic was printed as-is, in core, even?

[Unbeliever]

As a GM, how do you handle Circle Magic if you allow it?  Why do you think Circle Magic was printed as-is, in core, even?

I can't remember the last time I've seen it in actual game.  So, I guess I/we don't allow it implicitly.  It seems like it should be relegated to a plot device type thingy.  I'd much prefer something like the Mage of the Arcane Order's abilities or a Hathran's spontaneous casting trick to be the result of Circle Magic-type effects rather than the way it's written in the rules. 

[Concerned Ninja Citizen]

Given the number of problematic or outright borked rules/classes/abilities/items etc in 3.x I'm pretty secure in saying that Circle Magic was printed the way it was because the designers didn't realize how stupid it could be.

They may have focused on the "put a couple of limited metamagic feats on spells for free" part and tossed the CL bit on as an afterthought, never expecting anyone to boost all their spells to CL 40 and then break level caps with Reserves of Strength and suchlike.

Alternatively, they may have realized that CM was stupid powerful but assumed that DMs would prevent their players from putting together a circle large enough to properly exploit it, leaving the really powerful stuff in the hands of NPCs.

Personally, I am inclined to treat CM as theoretical optimization like Pun Pun and stupid Genesis tricks. Sure you could use any of those things to stomp all over most games but how would that be fun?

[FlaminCows]

Like Unbeliever, I've never seen anybody actually use it, not even when players are all powergaming in an agreed-upon optimised competitive game. It isn't that it was forbidden: nobody asked. Circle Magic is too obvious, too easy, and too boring. The most it has been interacted with is somebody pointing out, saying its broken, the other guy checking it, agreeing that it is broken, and it is never discussed again.

I suspect that it was there due to something carried over from previous editions.

[Mithril Leaf]

Circle Magic also fills in that awkward middle ground of really broken but also somewhat tedious to use and find. Things like Icantatrix are easy low hanging fruit. Red Wizard is really broken, but you need to do a lot of work finding trustworthy members and setting everything up and getting your DM to agree to it, and if you want to get your DM to let you play broken things, why not go even further and just be a beholder mage / ur-priest with duel nines?

[Empirate]

Seeing as how the Red Wizard is in Core, it isn't really that hard to find. It isn't setting specific (anymore), it's in the DMG... many inexperienced DMs might just let it pass without giving it a second glance. Low-hanging fruit indeed, and lower than the Incantatrix. Also, being a Red Wizard and abusing circle magic both don't require you to jump through too many loops: the prereqs are easy-fabreezy, and giving up another school of magic on top of specializing doesn't outweigh the benefits. As for using circle magic efficiently: Leadership is a core feat. Simulacrum likewise is a core spell.

I've had a player who picked up the Red Wizard PrC and was looking forward to using circle magic. There was a gentlemen's agreement he wouldn't go nuts with it. Level-cap-breaking stuff wasn't around in the books we owned. Furthermore, the PC was a Necromancer, there's not too much you can do with sky-high CL in that school. Anyway, the player dropped out due to time constraints before ever getting to circle magic, so problems never materialized. But it was a pretty silly campaign anyway - one of the PCs was an Ur-Priest, actually.

[Nunkuruji]

Given simply Core, and dividing spell casting & progression up into 3 tiers "E6" (1st-3rd), "E12" (4th-6th), "E18" (7th-9th)

Circle Magic obtainable in E12 breaks that tier, however is mitigated by Leadership requiring DM approval.

Circle Magic obtainable in E18 can easily be fueled by Simulacrum.

However, E18 already struggles with balance in its own right, easily due to things like uncapped spells, and pretty much requires a gentleman's agreement in the first place.

Never had to deal with Circle Magic from a PC.

[ksbsnowowl]

Hathran and Halruaan Elders play an important part in my homebrew game (Rashemi culture dropped into a gestalt Viking setting; Roman-like empire ruled by a Halruaan Elder senate).  If one of my PC's wanted to be a member of one of those orders, I'd have no issue with it, but none of them are.

Right now the PC's are helping defend the Hathran, who are utilizing circle magic-boosted heightened spells to perform an important ritual to seal a planar rift.

In the near future they will run up against a Gish squad of Halruaan Elders (one able to lead circle magic, five subordinates).  They aren't meant to fight this squad, per se, but I can foresee them trying to do so, and getting smacked down, hard.

The leader has the Acidic Splatter [Reserve] feat, and has an acid spell heightened to 20th level = 20d6 acid touch attack (100 ft range) all day long.  He also boosts his CL to 20 every day, and uses a chained Greater Magic Weapon to give the whole squad +5 weapons.

It is interesting to note that in 3.0, circle magic had the caster level boost split into two parts, which had to be boosted up separately.  One half boosted your CL for spell effects, the other half boosted your CL for caster level checks (dispelling, overcoming SR).  In 3.5 they merged the two of those into a single caster level.  One way to help moderate its power would be to split those two abilities once again.

[McPoyo]

I've used, and had it used against me, several times in non-pbp games.

It's tedious to use unless you're abusing accelerated time trait things, and even then it's got a limited lifespan before you have to start over again (1 day before it reverts under the 3.5 rewrite). If you're willing to sink several hours a day into maxing out all the shenanigans, then more power to you, but as a PC, or in a "real" game, that's a lot of time investment that can be easily messed with. Either you don't participate in a lot of things because you spent hours "powering up" while everyone else was dealing with things, or you have one or two tricks instead, like KSB's gish squad. More power in that case? Not particularly, since you could just mailman the hell out of everything for the same investment, or use any other number of persist shenanigans to get around it, it's just a lot more resource efficient. It's more effective in the hands of NPCs in that regard, unless the PCs are leading the attack and get to set the time table by their terms. To be honest, at the level it starts becoming "problematic", the foes the PCs can reliably expect to go against can either interrupt a super-powering session, or they aren't remotely a challenge in the first place.

In a PbP game where time really has no meaning, it's a lot more "effective", since you can take a day or more to plan everything out as situations change.

edit: Also, the rocket tag issue is why it's not particularly abused. It results in a Cold War-esque mutually-assured-destruction issue, where anyone who DOES use it is just as likely to end up screwed or extinct as well if they use it for offense instead of defense. It's why Rashemen and Thay haven't ever successfully wiped each other off the map.

If you want to see true ridiculousness, combine it with Node abuse shenanigans.

[ksbsnowowl]

If you want to see true ridiculousness, combine it with Node abuse shenanigans.

Now why you gotta give me ideas like that?

More than anything, Circle Magic is useful to a DM in making certain plot elements believable and workable beyond mere DM hand-waving. 

For example, my world has demons trapped in stone henge rings dotted around the world.  These demons have been trapped there for several thousand years.  Each is the result of a Binding spell cast at CL 40 (thanks to circle magic), but Binding also has caster level boosters within the spell (six assistants, each that casts suggestion adds +1 to your CL; each that casts dominate monster adds 1/3 their caster level to your caster level for Binding [and thanks to circle magic they each have a CL of 39]), so each of these Binding hedged prisons could have a caster level as high as 124.  Since Binding has a duration of permanent, making it resistant to dispelling is important. (Granted, it doesn't need to be as high as 124, but you get the point).

Thus, world-building plot element is made possible, all because of Circle Magic.

One other thing I've seen mentioned, but haven't looked into myself, is using Arcane Manipulation from Lost Empires of Faerun to take your CM-Heightened spells to make multiple 9th level spell slots.  I'm not sure it actually works though (due to the feat's use of the word "slot.")

[Unbeliever]

If you want to see true ridiculousness, combine it with Node abuse shenanigans.

For what it's worth, while I've never used Circle Magic, I have used Node magic.  In part, b/c I find the latter more interesting and less of a level commitment.  Also, Node Magic is a bit more flexible:  I think metamagic is one of those cool ideas with poor implementation, so if I can use op-fu to get a good implementation of it, then I'm happy.  Circle Magic does something similar, but in a much more limited way (restricted MM feats it can apply to). 

@ksbsnowowl:  I don't really worry about using mechanics in my world-building.  I would be very happy (on either side of the ring) with "ancient wizards have bound demons to stone rings dotted throughout the world." 

[ksbsnowowl]

@ksbsnowowl:  I don't really worry about using mechanics in my world-building.  I would be very happy (on either side of the ring) with "ancient wizards have bound demons to stone rings dotted throughout the world."

Different strokes for different folks.  I like it when the rules back up the story.