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That's pretty much the idea behind DCC's "funnel" thing (and Funnel World for DW). You start with a handful of 0-level commoners each, and you go through an introductory adventure. The ones who live become 1st-level characters and get a character class and such.
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Dec 24, 2014 22:42
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Bob Quixote posted:Do you remember how it worked? I've heard some good things about that game but I'm not sure it was even in print when I was old enough to read, so I haven't had a chance to check out the rules for it. As you can probably tell I'm of a more grognard bent. I believe in simple game rules and mechanics. I don't hedge players in with mechanical abilities, because I think it can actually restrict creativity and choice among more experienced players. My games emphasize player skill rather than character skill. But just because I don't have special abilities hard coded to each class doesn't mean players can't take actions like throwing a goblin into a bunch of orcs or kill a bunch of monsters in a single stroke. I just have to make a ruling on the fly for nonstandard actions. CountingWizard fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 23:34
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CountingWizard posted:Breakdown of the Empire of Petal Throne protocleave: here That's kind of a cool idea - though I really don't like charts all in all. Having to stop and consult how many dice the Fighter gets to throw per attack sounds like sort of a hassle, and if the group encounters a group of mixed HD enemies then you could get some really weird game behavior. CountingWizard posted:As you can probably tell I'm of a more grognard bent. I believe in simple game rules and mechanics. I don't hedge players in with mechanical abilities, because I think it can actually restrict creativity and choice among more experienced players. My games emphasize player skill rather than character skill. But just because I don't have special abilities hard coded to each class doesn't mean players can't take actions like throwing a goblin into a bunch of orcs or kill a bunch of monsters in a single stroke. I just have to make a ruling on the fly for nonstandard actions. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about simple rules and such myself - one of the things that drew me to wanting to run an older/simpler version of the game (in this case a retroclone of B/X) was the fact that I don't like having a big hedge of rules to cover every specific corner case, or break down what the players are able to do into discrete little boxes of allowed moves. That being said, I don't think that any of the changes I'm wanting to do to the B/X Fighter are actually all that restricting. Giving a buff to damage based on their To-Hit bonus & allowing for bonus cleave attacks on a kill isn't quite in the same league as having them get locked into feat-trees or weapon specializations, or selecting out moves from a list. I figured if you are playing a Fighter, you probably want to do so because you want to play as a tough guy who wades into combat and hits stuff - so to me the ideal solution is to make it so your guy gets better at hitting stuff & becomes able to hit even more stuff every round as he grows stronger. There's also the fact that the Magic User, as written, exactly has special hard coded abilities for its class in the form of spells, and that their access to this expanding list of ever changing and more wondrous abilities as they level up while the standard B/X Fighter only gets +1 to hit every few levels and maybe a nice sword seems to be the cause of the whole Fighter vs. Wizard argument that gets brought up on every tradgames forum across the internet. I personally love letting players try to improvise cool tactics mid-fight, like having the fighter toss their cloak up in the orc warlords face to blind him while the thief comes in for the surprise backstab from behind - but those things all work on this kind of wishy-washy principle where a timid or obstinate DM might not be so inclined to let players do much outside of the standard rules. Unless you bake a General Maneuver rule into the combat system that lets players declare non-damaging attacks to gain advantage in a fight then its always going to come down to "mother may I?" for the melee classes while the casters can perform a variety of spectacular actions one after another without even needing to roll for success. Sorry - hope I didn't come off hostile or anything, that isn't my intent. Bob Quixote fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 01:21
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Yeah I would suggest looking at There's Always a Chance, like someone else suggested. For one thing the Fighter gets a d10 hit die. It gets Cleaving Attacks where any excess Melee Damage beyond killing an enemy is splashed over to another nearby enemy. They get a Battle Cry where they can try and intimidate an enemy, and can keep doing it to one enemy after another until an enemy succeeds on the Morale Check. Otherwise it is basically an encounter power. They get a Signature Weapon where as they level they get a bonus to to-hit/damage and Intimidate with their signature weapon. Few classes in that system get anything like that. They are one of the few classes that get Critical Hits on one number out of 20 on the d20. They eventually get even better crits on that same number and the weaker crit on a slightly larger range. Looks like they might be a little faster than some classes. And they even get a protective ability if they haven't used their action that lets them leap in front of an ally to take a hit, with a save to possibly take only have damage.
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Dec 25, 2014 01:39
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Ryuujin posted:Yeah I would suggest looking at There's Always a Chance, like someone else suggested. For one thing the Fighter gets a d10 hit die. It gets Cleaving Attacks where any excess Melee Damage beyond killing an enemy is splashed over to another nearby enemy. They get a Battle Cry where they can try and intimidate an enemy, and can keep doing it to one enemy after another until an enemy succeeds on the Morale Check. Otherwise it is basically an encounter power. They get a Signature Weapon where as they level they get a bonus to to-hit/damage and Intimidate with their signature weapon. Few classes in that system get anything like that. They are one of the few classes that get Critical Hits on one number out of 20 on the d20. They eventually get even better crits on that same number and the weaker crit on a slightly larger range. Looks like they might be a little faster than some classes. And they even get a protective ability if they haven't used their action that lets them leap in front of an ally to take a hit, with a save to possibly take only have damage. While that does sound like a good game, to be honest I'd prefer just trying to find fair ways simplify the MU over further increasing the complexity of the Fighter beyond those modest changes I mentioned earlier. I think limiting the MU to only a single casting of a given spell in a day would go a long way to evening things out between the classes, and maybe finding a way to incorporate the generic spell slots idea that OtspIII had would keep them interesting to play. They would still have more tricks available to them than the Fighter, but now they wouldn't be able to use all of them at once or just spam multiple instances of their most effective trick till the encounter collapses. EDIT Thinking of character classes like tools I would want the ideal Fighter to be like a hammer - sturdy, built for a particular job & if used right it can do that job better than any other tool in the box. The Magic User should be more like a Swiss-army knife - delicate, fiddly & full of useful tools for specific jobs but it should be absolutely terrible at anything related to putting nails into things. Bob Quixote fucked around with this message at 05:11 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 02:14
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In case it wasnt said recently - I would also give max HP at level 1.
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Dec 25, 2014 05:18
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Glad TAAC is getting some props! I beefed up the fighter with things like Cleaving Attack (which is always active and automatic) as a reaction to the Next playtest with the Caves of Chaos, where the 30 rats resulted in a TPK in the very first room.  I think I also specified that wizards only get one "copy" of a spell memorised at once, so no more Fireball x4.
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Dec 25, 2014 12:49
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Payndz posted:Glad TAAC is getting some props! I beefed up the fighter with things like Cleaving Attack (which is always active and automatic) as a reaction to the Next playtest with the Caves of Chaos, where the 30 rats resulted in a TPK in the very first room. Just read through your game and I really like the way you handled Wizards and the spell-lists between the different classes - actually there's just a ton of cool stuff in general in there.
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Dec 26, 2014 01:46
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Bob Quixote posted:Just read through your game and I really like the way you handled Wizards and the spell-lists between the different classes - actually there's just a ton of cool stuff in general in there. TAAC is really good as a retroclone that isn't just a rewrite of old D&D books and actually improves on the game in a lot of ways beyond one good Fantasy Heartbreaker idea that the author had.
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Dec 26, 2014 06:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:TAAC is really good as a retroclone that isn't just a rewrite of old D&D books and actually improves on the game in a lot of ways beyond one good Fantasy Heartbreaker idea that the author had. The one thing I wasn't really that big on was the idea of using Roll Under for everything - I like that it's elegant and has all of its mechanics run on the same base instead of having separate fiddly little subsystems for everything. People like rolling Big Numbers though, or at least the people I've gamed with in the past anyway. The way that TAAC uses AC as a negative modifier makes me think of a blog post I'd seen somewhere where the writer had suggested a way of using the Pre-3.0 descending AC system as a modifier on your roll to hit and aiming for a target number of 20+. So an attack roll would look like: 1d20+Modifiers (magic weapon, class bonus, etc.) +Target AC (9-0) > or = 20 is a Hit. I kind of liked the idea of using '20' as a target number - its simple enough, and with descending AC the numbers you add up don't really inflate too far. 1st Level Fighter vs AC 9 Kobold would be 1d20+1 (1st level Attack Bonus) +9 (Kobold AC) -> 10+ on the d20 would be enough to score a hit. Fighting a creature with AC 0 with only a +1 bonus would require a 19 or 20 to hit. Actually I think this is just THAC0 but without requiring a big table or anything - it would all be addition instead of subtraction so things would probably go a lot faster (even if Descending AC looks kind of screwy to people now since we intuitively think that bigger = better). I also started thinking that you could use '20' as a target number for pretty much any check actually: like instead of doing a Roll Under for Ability checks, just do "d20+Ability > or = 20 is a Success". It's mathematically identical. Ditto for Saving Throws - just invert the numbers on the tables and it works out to the same thing. I'm almost positive someones already thought of all of this though and maybe it didn't work out as easily as I think it would. Bob Quixote fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Dec 27, 2014 |
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Dec 27, 2014 04:21
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Bob Quixote posted:1d20+Modifiers (magic weapon, class bonus, etc.) +Target AC (9-0) > or = 20 is a Hit. Darker Dungeons does this and it works good.
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Dec 27, 2014 04:27
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Bob Quixote posted:The way that TAAC uses AC as a negative modifier makes me think of a blog post I'd seen somewhere where the writer had suggested a way of using the Pre-3.0 descending AC system as a modifier on your roll to hit and aiming for a target number of 20+. Yes! "Target 20" is a totally legit and awesome thing. [d20 + attack bonus + target's AC + other modifier] means you hit. It's mathematically the same as THAC0, except better because addition doesn't care what order you put the modifiers in. You still have to figure out your "attack bonus" manually from the hit matrix since D&D didn't use that concept until 3E, but otherwise yes it's cool. It only didn't catch on as much because it's a relatively new invention, but would definitely be the way I would do attack rolls in a retroclone if I wasn't using the hit matrix.
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Dec 27, 2014 04:37
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Dagon posted:Darker Dungeons does this and it works good. gradenko_2000 posted:Yes! "Target 20" is a totally legit and awesome thing. [d20 + attack bonus + target's AC + other modifier] means you hit. It's mathematically the same as THAC0, except better because addition doesn't care what order you put the modifiers in. You still have to figure out your "attack bonus" manually from the hit matrix since D&D didn't use that concept until 3E, but otherwise yes it's cool. Awesome! I'll be able to use monsters from older editions now without having to convert them to ascending AC like I thought I would. I think unifying all Saves, Attacks & Ability Checks to a single 20+ target number should prove a little useful when it comes to speeding things up in the game.
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Dec 27, 2014 05:12
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Attack bonus is 20 - THAC0 if that helps anything.
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Dec 27, 2014 05:22
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Bob Quixote posted:1st Level Fighter vs AC 9 Kobold would be 1d20+1 (1st level Attack Bonus) +9 (Kobold AC) -> 10+ on the d20 would be enough to score a hit.
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Dec 27, 2014 05:30
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I introduced my childhood friends to Basic D&D today over a 4 hour session of romping through some dungeon I made up on the fly and I wanted to share some random thoughts: * It ended up being a lot more like Dungeon World / World of Dungeons than anything else (and is probably the universe telling to just loving run that instead already). I'd ask them what they wanted to do, I'd make up a ruling on the spot. We still abided by the attack roll vs AC system, but if the Fighter wanted to do a whirlwind or a cleave I'd do something like give him a slight penalty on the roll. The thief had a bow and wanted to shoot all sorts of arrows and we made up rules for that too, whether it was an Explosive Arrow to collapse a ceiling to deal AOE damage to some skeletons, or a Seeking Arrow to exchange damage for higher attack. * Vancian spellcasting went out the window almost immediately. My friends are long-time WoW and CRPG players, so the Magic User of the group had no trouble coming up with Cone of Cold or Blizzard or a basic Frostbolt to think of slinging at enemies. I used attack rolls to adjudicate these, using a d4 damage die for anything AOEish and a d6 for single-target attacks. * I gave everyone an array of [18, 16, 16, 12, 10, 8] to make it fair and avoid gimped characters, but it does not really play all that well with a roll-under ability check mechanic because you're going to pass drat near everything in your wheelhouse unless you use so many circumstantial modifiers that the original stat barely means anything anymore. Either I use a lower-power array (but that has carry-on effects to combat), or use randomly rolled stats (same thing) or use a [d20+modifier vs DC] system to open up the chance of failure a little bit more. * The Cleric was another pain-point. He wanted to buff people, but if he casts Bless for +1 attack and +1 AC to everyone and I don't maintain Vancian casting rules, then he can have it up every fight. If I try to track round durations to oblige him to recast it, that's just effectively taking away his turns from him. At the moment I recognized the issue I just told him "you can cast buffs, but you can't use the same ones every time" and he came up with "okay, I'm going to turn the Fighter's shield into a Holy Shield, +3 AC, but it's just for him, and it's just for 2 rounds" which worked well enough, but felt a little awkward on reflection. Him being a healbot was also not cool, and I feel like I want to do something like: In order for you to generate buffs and cast heals, you have to hit people with your weapon. * Target 20 worked really well, as did not actually thinking about the total modifiers, instead only adding them in one by one until you hit 20. If a player rolls a 4, then don't bother looking up their attack bonus or the target's AC anymore. If the player rolls an 18, same thing. Just look outside the roll to "chase after the 20" if you got something like a 13. * Unless you're running ~that~ kind of game, I would recommend giving everyone HP equal to [CON score + hit die + CON modifier]. There was a big set-piece battle right at the end with 6 skeleton warriors and a Necromancer and it came down to the two Fighters just tanking everything down because d6 damage dice on mobs will still drop 8/8 HP Clerics, 8/8 HP Thieves and 6/6 HP Magic-Users way too quickly. There was no real sense of tension if a single hit could drop you either way. * TAAC's 3 suggested methods for improving B/X D&D's attack rolls in combat is sorely needed. On top of losing the interest of players halfway through the final setpiece because they were all down/knocked out, there was a lot of whiffing going on. * All that said, everyone had a great time and it really drove home the point that with a good group, you barely even need rules and can paper over drat near anything. Also, that certain flavors of TRPGing are not very serious at all and that's all right. Maybe a third or half the time was spent in pop culture references and in-jokes and laughing at D&D tropes.
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Dec 27, 2014 21:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:* The Cleric was another pain-point. He wanted to buff people, but if he casts Bless for +1 attack and +1 AC to everyone and I don't maintain Vancian casting rules, then he can have it up every fight. If I try to track round durations to oblige him to recast it, that's just effectively taking away his turns from him. At the moment I recognized the issue I just told him "you can cast buffs, but you can't use the same ones every time" and he came up with "okay, I'm going to turn the Fighter's shield into a Holy Shield, +3 AC, but it's just for him, and it's just for 2 rounds" which worked well enough, but felt a little awkward on reflection. Him being a healbot was also not cool, and I feel like I want to do something like: In order for you to generate buffs and cast heals, you have to hit people with your weapon. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the cleric should be eliminated alongside the thief, but you could do something interesting with this idea. Have the cleric declare an enemy as anathema. Killing/sufficiently damaging this enemy recharges casts. You could even tie HD of thing killed being a threshold for recharging higher level miracles. Maybe you could do something similar with the MU, but reflavor it to some kind of arcane drain.
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Dec 28, 2014 08:24
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TheSpookyDanger posted:I'm increasingly of the opinion that the cleric should be eliminated alongside the thief... I've messed around with this kind of thing but I can't find a super great way to do it. I have the vague idea that keeping some thief and cleric abilities around as something another class can dip into as they level might work.
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Dec 28, 2014 09:03
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Yeah, I'd also be super interested in an alternate way to handle healing/clerics.
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Dec 28, 2014 10:21
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The obvious thing to do with Clerics is to grant prayers to other classes in various ways. If you remove all the Cleric's non buff/heal stuff and just insert a flat "you can pray* to your god** for healing, protection, or buffs X often" into everything else, it would probably work out OK. You could make healing work per encounter, protections/buffs per day, and extra powers (eg, create food/water) as-needed-but-there's-a-price. Or something. * or ask telepathically, or do the ritual, or perform the dance, or activate the technomagic. * or your high-level patron, or your ancestors, or your animal totem, or your spaceship's computer.
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Dec 28, 2014 11:19
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Clerics/Priests are great in 2e cranked up with all the bells and whistles. (In FR or PS the various specialty priests/crusaders/monks and the churches/temples/gods add lots of variety, intrigue, and story hooks.) In B/X ... I dont know. Mainly some people just love playing the healer. Like really actively love it. For them its great.
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Dec 28, 2014 12:44
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To most people who like cleric, it's not really the healing other people thing that appeals. That's useful, but there's also healing yourself, buffs, good toe-to-toe fighting capability (even without those first two things), and generally having a comparable or better spell selection to the wizard. It's essentially the "master race" class because they never figured out where it should have real limitations. AD&D has a Forgotten Realms book called Faiths & Avatars that is essentially just "do literally anything with a cleric." In 3E it got even worse, you can run a game with nothing but clerics quite handily. In fact you might consider just giving everyone access to magic or sticking everyone on a cleric chassis in your D&D game to effectively "eliminate" the cleric. Name Change fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 12:52
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FRINGE posted:In B/X ... I dont know. Mainly some people just love playing the healer. Like really actively love it. For them its great. I've heard these people exist, but only from people who like to do things other than heal. I've seen people in WoW and other computer games that like to play the healer. I've never ever met anyone who wants to play D&D as the healer. The Cleric with undead turning and combat spells and stuff, sure, but nobody wants to be the slightly worse fighter who memorises cure wounds and remove poison in all their slots. That's from a BECMI perspective, I guess. I loved playing heal/buff focused Cleric and Warlord in 4e.
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Dec 28, 2014 14:25
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:In fact you might consider just giving everyone access to magic or sticking everyone on a cleric chassis in your D&D game to effectively "eliminate" the cleric. Frankly, RQ6 has so much cruft bolted on it, that a RQ OSR is seriously needed, and exists in the form of OpenQuest.
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Dec 28, 2014 14:28
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OtspIII posted:Yeah, I'd also be super interested in an alternate way to handle healing/clerics. I have a pdf here called "D&D: Greatest Hits" that I don't know where I got it from anymore, but the Cleric's ability there is "Select an ally. On your next turn, they gain 1d6 + level HP, unless spoiled by you taking damage" and it doesn't consume their action for the turn. Higher levels will prevent 'spoilage' unless the Cleric takes more than 5 + level damage, and even later the Cleric will get to select two targets to heal. TheSpookyDanger posted:I'm increasingly of the opinion that the cleric should be eliminated alongside the thief, but you could do something interesting with this idea. Have the cleric declare an enemy as anathema. Killing/sufficiently damaging this enemy recharges casts. You could even tie HD of thing killed being a threshold for recharging higher level miracles. Maybe you could do something similar with the MU, but reflavor it to some kind of arcane drain. One could take this to its logical extreme and have everyone play Fighters on the back-end. d12 hit dice and Fighter attack progression, and players are just picking a theme for their attacks, a choice between melee and ranged and just roleplaying why Bob's d6 ranged attack is actually a Magic Missile while Tom's d6 ranged attack is a Holy Smite. And maybe one of them has Chain Mail and therefore 2 worse AC because they want to play as a Cleric. I mean, it only makes sense that in a game of going through dungeons and killing dragons, the feature of "being really good at fighting" should really be something that all classes should have.
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Dec 28, 2014 16:44
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OtspIII posted:Yeah, I'd also be super interested in an alternate way to handle healing/clerics. Maybe go more into the whole "HP does not directly equal physical injury" idea and let the party take a short uninterrupted rest after combat to heal 1HD + CON bonus in damage (maybe with the caveat thrown in that a resting character can't recover more HP than they had at the start of the fight)? Or maybe you could give the Cleric's heal spells to the MU (or combine it with the Rest option above & re-fluff the spells to "Revitalize" instead of "Cure Wounds")?
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Dec 28, 2014 16:47
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Back when I was still fooling with 3.x/PF I had the idea of removing clerics and paladins but making it so that anyone could take feats to gain similar abilities. I know feats aren't a thing for most OSR folks, but I honestly think it's more interesting to not have cleric as a class. I'd like to see a holy warrior focus more on being a warrior or more on being holy, which I guess puts things in the swordsperson/sorcerer dichotomy of S&S. Maybe you could do them up like milestones or compendium classes a la Dungeon World. When a character does something in the fiction suited toward being the champion of a particular belief system, give them some kind of power/benefit. What are the chief supernatural things that a cleric does qua cleric? * conjurations, e.g. food and water * heal (maybe this is why later stuff calls healing conjuration) * buff * debuff * turn/command undead * social stuff to some degree (related to converting people or benefiting them when they believe as you do) * alignment magic (includes sensing and dimensional stuff) * holy magic (might fall under alignment, might not) Maybe there's some other stuff I missed there.
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Dec 28, 2014 17:07
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AlphaDog posted:I've heard these people exist, but only from people who like to do things other than heal. I've seen people in WoW and other computer games that like to play the healer. I've never ever met anyone who wants to play D&D as the healer. The Cleric with undead turning and combat spells and stuff, sure, but nobody wants to be the slightly worse fighter who memorises cure wounds and remove poison in all their slots. Yeah, healers didn't really become fun to play until 4e, partially because they got a bunch of abilities that were of the "main effect plus side benefit for someone else" but mainly because they made healing a minor action instead of your whole turn.
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Dec 28, 2014 18:27
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Oh, I just had an idea on how to make clerics/thieves interesting while keeping the BECMI mold. Basically, give every class a Fighter-like Mastery system. So instead of every character being a cookie-cutter version of their class, the cleric (for example) could have the following general masteries based off Gasperkun's list: * Divine Spells * Healing * Turning/Controlling undead * Belief and Followers * Buffs & Debuffs * Holy/Alignment magic When you buy (say) Healing as the Basic Mastery level, then you can heal one person for XdY hit points as a side action on top of something else, maybe limited to twice a combat. Then at Skilled you heal more HP or can heal two people at once. Then at Expert you can cure a disease. And so on and so on.
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Dec 28, 2014 18:39
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:AD&D has a Forgotten Realms book called Faiths & Avatars that is essentially just "do literally anything with a cleric." OneThousandMonkeys posted:3E it got even worse, you can run a game with nothing but clerics quite handily. AlphaDog posted:I've heard these people exist, but only from people who like to do things other than heal.  ) They wanted to explore and talk and support their team. Obviously a much different player than the career-long weapon master or fireball platform.I think the drive to remove both thief and cleric is going to leave a less-rich game. Its better to tune them a bit (or more than a bit for the old-style thief) and keep the theme alive IMO. If you push to have a group of all fighters and combat mages you will (without meaning to) narrow the focus of the players creativity and RP a lot. If you want an all-tactics kill-everything game then thats not a big problem, but its definitely different. I rarely ran "kill em all" crawls so my opinions are from a different perspective than that. In 2e my last move for rogue was to put them on the fighter hitdice/xp tables and let them have their abilities from rogue instead of access to specializations. It gave them the sneaky/backstab/burglar abilities but kept their ability to fight moving along with the group. "Real" fighters got the huge weapon skills, "rogues" got sneak attacks and tricks. (I was non-strict with nonweapon skills as long as it fit a narrative, so people could adapt those in to support whatever they were trying to be.)
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Dec 28, 2014 20:39
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FRINGE posted:I think the drive to remove both thief and cleric is going to leave a less-rich game. Its better to tune them a bit (or more than a bit for the old-style thief) and keep the theme alive IMO. If you push to have a group of all fighters and combat mages you will (without meaning to) narrow the focus of the players creativity and RP a lot. If you want an all-tactics kill-everything game then thats not a big problem, but its definitely different. I rarely ran "kill em all" crawls so my opinions are from a different perspective than that. I'm not seeing how it would be made less rich honestly- you could still play a character who is a thief by profession without needing to have Thief written on a character sheet. Removing the percentile Thief skill system just means using ability checks to do thief stuff (or magic). Ditto for clerics - in terms of roleplaying potential being able to heal someone doesn't add much to a characters personality, and your average Fighter or Mage could still be a devout worshiper of their particular god without it having to be their big class thing. I like to think of character class as being what they DO but the characters personality as being what they ARE. Evil Mastermind posted:Oh, I just had an idea on how to make clerics/thieves interesting while keeping the BECMI mold. That sounds pretty cool - would these abilities have a cooldown linked to them (Grandmaster Healer may use this ability X times/day) or would they be encounter action based? Which actions would you link their abilities to? I could see Turning undead easily linking to an attack against an undead creature (and Buffs/Debuffs follow easily from that as bolstering your allies faith when you strike down an enemy), but it's the healing one that kind of puzzles me conceptually. Maybe it would be healing as them getting inspired by your zeal? Though that also ties back into the Buffs/Debuffs thing... -- I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the Magic User myself - I don't hate Vancian casting or anything, but I just want there to be a simpler/more elegant system to use for spell-casting. I still like the preparing spells mechanic as opposed to spontaneous casting, and I think the less bookkeeping required in a class the better it is overall since it means less confusion and quicker play. I keep going back to Spell Points since I can't find any way to make Generic Spell Slots work without either being too stingy with them or finding ways to prevent players from just loading up every slot with their highest powered spell(s), but the numbers for the Spell Point systems I've seen online get ridiculously inflated at high levels to the point where they require just as much fiddly book-keeping as Vancian casting (or maybe more). I saw one hybrid casting scheme online where the MU had spell-points equal to their level & had to prepare/memorize their spells beforehand, BUT they were allowed to try and cast spells straight from their spellbooks as well in the form of much slower rituals (making them unable to be spammed in combat). So a 12th level MU could prepare 12 points worth of spell (three 4th level, or six 2nd level, etc.) & then if they needed to perform a utility spell later they would make an Intelligence check (with a penalty equal to the spell level) and cast it straight from the book, but it took about 10 minutes per spell level to do so (so casting a 6th level spell takes an hour when done from the book). Would that go too far and end up severely under-powering the MU compared to the Fighter? Bob Quixote fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 20:58
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Bob Quixote posted:I'm still trying to figure out what to do with the Magic User myself - I don't hate Vancian casting or anything, but I just want there to be a simpler/more elegant system to use for spell-casting. Bob Quixote posted:Ditto for clerics - in terms of roleplaying potential being able to heal someone doesn't add much to a characters personality We also used the rules that allowed priests/clerics to call on spells from their allowed lists without memorization, whereas mages had to prepare and memorize spells. Mages would have bigger lists, priests had more access to their list per day. Contrasted the "I call on my god" vs "I plan for myself".
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Dec 28, 2014 21:20
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FRINGE posted:Keep the vancian for the "leveled" spells and let them have a permanent at-will 2e Cantrip for every level (or two) gained? (I wold abstract them so that "creak" "groan" and "footfall" (or whatever they were called) all became "create small noises" etc...) The ability to light fires at will, move small objects, change the color of things, makes noises, etc gives a lot of creative utility without impacting the combat stuff. If you turned up the spark/fire ones from a fixed 1 damage to 1-2 or 1-3 then they have a permanent short range weapon. At-will cantrips would probably take the sting out of running out of slots/points for low level characters - especially if creative uses could be found for them as you said. Letting the MU do more magic without actually granting more combat spells sounds like it would keep them flavorful, but not at the expense of other classes.
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Dec 28, 2014 21:30
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I actually play (well, maybe played--the character started out as a Cleric of Wounds & Healing and then kind of sold his soul to Umberly to keep from drowning, then got super super demon possessed and is currently a cannibal demon shark man living on the bottom of the ocean) a cleric in my regular game, and the heal-bot stuff actually never comes up with a few of the things recently mentioned in the thread. Basically, if you just only let people cast one spell of a type per day it turns Cure Light Wounds into much more of a "well, you're pretty hurt, so let's get you out of 'one hit from death' zone and take you off the front lines" spell than anything else. Most healing in our group comes from potions and a Staff of Healing we found (which is really almost as vital an item as a Bag of Holding, but mostly just got use in downtime rather than mid-combat). Clerics are pretty absurd, though. Hold Person doesn't have a HD cap the way that Sleep does, you get Finger of Death and Dispel Evil relatively early, and can still serve on the front lines pretty well in a pinch. You don't have the damage dealing potential that MUs do, and your crowd control tends to be single-target, but you're even better than the MU at just utterly ruining super dangerous single targets.
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Dec 28, 2014 21:34
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:AD&D has a Forgotten Realms book called Faiths & Avatars that is essentially just "do literally anything with a cleric." This isn't true. Faiths and Avatars (and was pointed out, its companion volumes of Demihuman Deities and Powers and Pantheons) aren't "do anything with a cleric." Quite to the contrary, the writers spend a lot of time digging into what each priesthood can and can't do, bringing in and connecting a lot of disparate Realmslore to flesh out each deity and their faith's concerns, duties, and powers. What comes off as "do literally anything with a cleric" is the Realms' basis in faith brought to the forefront as it should be. Azuth's magistrati can cast wizard spells because Azuth is the god of wizardry - all wizardry is in his portfolio (in contrast to other ways of accessing the Weave through Mystra) and it only makes sense that his faithful can bring his power into bear. If you take a really myopic view and only consider Azuth out of context this seems really unbalancing. But Azuth submissive to Mystra, fighting with other deities, et cetera, is far more interesting. It's worth remembering that core Realms design stretching back to the Campaign Set in 1987 has always focused on the sandbox and intrigue-filled model of Realmsplay Ed proposed; in that sort of model, trade and politics have a lot more importance than in many other D&D games. A magistrati may be unusual in an adventuring party, but are they really more helpful than a good priest of Waukeen in sorting out your little town? Stuff like that.
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Dec 28, 2014 21:37
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Bob Quixote posted:That sounds pretty cool - would these abilities have a cooldown linked to them (Grandmaster Healer may use this ability X times/day) or would they be encounter action based? quote:Which actions would you link their abilities to? I could see Turning undead easily linking to an attack against an undead creature (and Buffs/Debuffs follow easily from that as bolstering your allies faith when you strike down an enemy), but it's the healing one that kind of puzzles me conceptually. Mastery isn't so much about being tied to stats as it is a case of "each level of mastery improves your existing abilities or gives you a new one". For example, here's how Mastery works for a fighter: Bob the fighter take a Basic level of Mastery for longsword. This sets his longsword damage to 1d8. Then he moves up to Skilled, and now he's doing 1d12 damage, but he also gains the ability to get -2 to his AC against one hand/thrown weapon attack each round as well as a chance to deflect an attack or disarm someone. At Expert, he gains the ability to throw his sword (not far), his damage increases to 2d8, and he can improve his AC against two attacks instead of one. And so on. As he advances, he gets bonus attacks and more uses of abilities per round. Each weapon has its own abilities (axes can daze, hammer can lower a target's AC, and so on).
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Dec 28, 2014 21:40
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OtspIII posted:I actually play (well, maybe played--the character started out as a Cleric of Wounds & Healing and then kind of sold his soul to Umberly to keep from drowning, then got super super demon possessed and is currently a cannibal demon shark man living on the bottom of the ocean) OtspIII posted:the heal-bot stuff actually never comes up with a few of the things recently mentioned in the thread. Basically, if you just only let people cast one spell of a type per day it turns Cure Light Wounds into much more of a "well, you're pretty hurt, so let's get you out of 'one hit from death' zone and take you off the front lines" spell than anything else Arivia posted:back to the Campaign Set in 1987 has always focused on the sandbox and intrigue-filled model of Realmsplay Ed proposed; in that sort of model, trade and politics have a lot more importance (Well I kind of like the idea of the spellplague, I just have no interest in the system change.) FRINGE fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Dec 28, 2014 |
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Dec 28, 2014 21:47
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Fascinating article on how TSR used to make Modules https://medium.com/@increment/quagmire-the-making-of-a-1980s-d-d-module-c30e788ea5f2
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Dec 30, 2014 22:08
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Fascinating article on how TSR used to make Modules I was seconds from posting this with almost exactly that wording, so I'll just add my voice to the chorus of recommendations for the author's book Playing at the World. Peterson's research acumen is bananas.
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Dec 30, 2014 22:20
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Evil Mastermind posted:Mastery isn't so much about being tied to stats as it is a case of "each level of mastery improves your existing abilities or gives you a new one". I loved a lot of stuff about Mastery when I read through Dark Dungeons, but the thing that kind of annoys me about it is that it really ties your Fighter to just one or two weapons that he is absolutely amazing with & with anything else he rolls for base damage. I like the fact that you gain all these really cool abilities beyond "swing for damage", but they sort of force you to pick your fighting style early on and just stick with it through many levels in order to reap the benefits of your weapon choice. I sort of like the idea of giving Fighters universal bonuses that don't tie to a particular weapon, but then having weapons of different types/categories that provide their own unique tricks or gimmicks independent of any resource investment by the player (but only when used by the Fighter). I guess it might not be as 'realistic' if the Fighter who's never seen a weighted chain before in his life can pick it up and then immediately use it to make trips and disarms at a bonus, but it would give them versatility and remove any situation of "that DM" who destroys/steals the players chosen weapon or randomly rolls for the treasure and the Longsword Master has to sigh and add another +2 Mace to the pile of poo poo to sell when they get back home.
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Dec 31, 2014 02:11
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