Warlock, 3rd Edition (okay, let's make TOME a complete game)

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 5:47 pm

ishy wrote:Personally I don't like either the hero or champion name, but champion is slightly better.

Personally, I like the Hero as a term better, because for some reason the term "Champion" implies to me that they aren't good at Stealth. And the Conan stand-in really needs to be good at Stealth. In fact, all non-magical classes need to have at least a minor in stealth.

You cannot be an effective sword and sorcery protagonist without the ability to sneak into the throne room.

Don't really see what you'd call the cure and magic circle wizard a magus either tbh.

Because that is what the 3 Wisemen are called.

-Username17

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 5:51 pm

Must there be some sort of balance between "magic" and "martial"? I think part of 3e's success was that there were actually a lot more stealth options via wizard/sorcerer as a different spell selection practically makes the wizard into a nest of many different classes.

Ideally at some point everyone is going to be supernatural and blurring the lines between magic and martial anyway.

I guess I could understand not wanting to rock the grognard boat by having it start out with many more casters than martialists, but really I think that is where the more interesting room for class expansion. I dunno, I guess that once you start giving super powers to martial folks then there isn't much of a difference and thus not much harm in the casters eventually out-numbering the rest.

Ah well, with that in mind, here's a bunch of classes that I like starting with.

• Berserker (melee, hulk-out)
• Paladin (wards, heals)
• Scout (wilderness mastery, archery focused)
• Soldier (archer and melee, able to protect allies)
• Swashbuckler (superior parrying instead of armored, mobility tricks)

• Conjurer (an illusionist who makes temporary quasi-real objects as well)
• Enchanter (temporarily beguiles and charms people, binds monsters which can be summoned)
• Gadgeteer (create items, fireball wands/grenades, clockwork golems)
• Necromancer (undead minions, become a lich, fear effects)
• Warden (animal companion, control nature spirits)

Classes that could be included later:

• Demon Binder (demon familiar and summon/swap out for major demon in fights)
• Pyromancer (burninate the country side)
• Seer (see a few seconds into the future)
• Earth Binder (manipulate earthen environment, pet elemental)
• Shadow Walker (shadow mage, hide, flip out, stab people)
• Alchemist (transmute objects, make explosives and walls)
• Ice Mage (freezinate the country side)
• Flesh Sculptor (create flesh golems, alters own body)
• Storm Mage (majority air-force manipulation, bit of water/electricity powers)
• Runebound (tattooed monk)

I could see a couple of those being thrown into the starter group. Shadow Walker and Runebound could move up to make 12 classes to give more of a martial bent.

echoVanguard · Post by **echoVanguard** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 7:26 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:At a bare minimum, a new fantasy heartbreaker with classes needs to drop with at least 12 classes. Because if it doesn't have more classes than 3e, why not play 3e? Yes, I know that several of the classes in 3e are traps (most especially the Monk), but one of the biggest sticking points of 4e was that it had less classes, it made people reluctant to even investigate it to find out how lacking it was in other ways.

So a simple "4 Martial Classes, 4 Hybrid Classes, 4 Magic Classes" would do fine for me.

Amusingly, this is pretty close to the class loadout Nemesis Age uses.

Military Classes: Soldier, Agent, Scout, Engineer
Spellcasting Classes: Scholar, Witch Doctor, Mystic
Civilian Classes: Rake, Brawler, Physician

However, Nemesis Age's perspective on magic is a little different than most games, since technically all classes are magic-using classes. Even characters that take the Null Magic trait have access to magic-themed abilities (like Counterspelling and Null Field). It's possible to build a character that has only mundane powers, but you generally wouldn't want to.

echo

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 7:33 pm

Enchanter is a problematic term, since people expect enchanters to make magic items. Enchantress, for whatever reason, is not.

Warlock (Necromancy, demon pet and evil magic)
Enchantress (Plants, Illusions and Enchantment)
Mangus (Healing, Turn Undead and Abjuration)
Elementalist (All the flavours of blasting plus elemental summons*)
Summoner (Monster Summonings plus the "ask a question" divinations)
Psion (Everything we keep from psionics, and anything that starts with tele-)

*The Elementalist class gets access to all of the elements, but can pick powers all from a single element if they want.

Also add Bard (sonic "element", some enchantments, mostly swashbuckling) to the Hybrid list and Knight (heavy armour zone of control and horses guy) to the Martial list.

DrPraetor · Post by **DrPraetor** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 7:50 pm

FWIW, and I know this is odd b/c I started the thread, I would also prefer to work on Assymetric Threat. But some kind of KSF alternative is timely given the sorry, sorry state of D&D. I agree with Kaelik - we should continue calling it Tome just to watch him writhe.

Various and sundry. Sword and Sorcery Heroes:
Class A wants to be Conan, Fafhrd, Lancelot, Captain Kirk. Class A sneaks into the throne room, is a two-fisted master of manly personal combat, and can also bluff/trick/seduce his way out of any trouble.
Class B wants to be King Arthur, Prince Valiant, Captain Picard (well sorta). Class B can sneak into the throne room with flunkies, is a two-fisted master of many personal combat, and characteristically has people to lead around and/or inspire, but isn't particularly good at bluffing/tricking/seducing.
Class C wants to be The Grey Mouser, Robinhood... er... Spock? Sherlock Holmes! The Star Trek examples are not holding up well past Captain Kirk (who is Conan.) Class C could sneak into the throne room but doesn't bother because he's already in the throne room disguised as a censer bearer. Class C (and I stand by this assertion for the Grey Mouser vs. Fafhrd) is slightly less bad-ass than Class A or Class B in exchange for which is somewhat more universally clever and tricky.

I really think that has your purely-non-magical Sword & Sorcery protagonists covered well. What you call these classes is pretty arbitrary, but I think "Soldier" is bad because a "Soldier" could be any of these people, although it fits Class B best.

Why Mage = White Mage:
The Magus is also this guy if he has magic powers. The White Mage costumes from Final Fantasy are actual religious attire and the people who wear them are Zoroastrian.

I still think Necromancers should get "Command" and stuff, because it solidifies the link to vampires.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 8:29 pm

Your sword and sorcery categories make no sense at all. Class B is pretty much just better than Class A, with the exception that they are supposed to be leaders who are bad at _talking_. Which none of your examples actually are.

Not sure why C is 'less bad-ass.' Cleverness and Trickery are what makes the Grey Mouser the equal of Fafhrd. It isn't something he gets instead of badassery, it is the descriptive element of his ability. You are confusing the window dressing description for the actual thing. The two are equal partners with fundamentally equal abilities. The fact that Fafhrd takes the lead in mountain climbing sequences and the Grey Mouser takes the lead in sneaking sequences doesn't mean that they don't both climb mountains and sneak (and in point of fact they do both quite a bit).

You've fundamentally described one type of non-magical hero and dumped everybody in it, then carved it up in a way that makes no sense.

Upon reflection the worst part is that you've made talking and being clever restricted skillsets that only belong to specific classes, and that makes me want to dump a barrel of rotting cocks on your head.

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 8:32 pm

Soldier (archer and melee, able to protect allies)

Moreso the ability to, survive and move around in horrid terrains, endure fucked off elements. Ignore largely many a debuff, and status condidtions.

In my head the CHAMPION is implicitly the "CHAMPION" of a cause. Powered by faith or whatever magical effect empowers people like that.
Specifically Champion = Paladin = Crusader and things of the such. Including both of them is a redundancy.

See my thing when it comes to the naming conventions is whatever chosen can reasonably visualized when you think of thing.
Champions go about "Championing actual Causes/systems/belief/places"

I can't think of anything specific when you say "hero" thats all. It sure as doesn't say "Melee guy" by any means.

Magic is harder in many ways because its likely best to do the same thing.
Since we have a base in the tome, and D&D what 4 full caster types would be auto included in the main book...
The problem is that the "Wizard" is such a wopping fuck thing in D&D that really peoples answer is to make it a "single class for each school of magic". There's something horribly wrong with that, also its untenable from the specifics of a base book.

Better to use THIS >>>

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52759
or this:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52759

or something in between for the base book . . allowing them to be generically a mage and figure out what the best methodology for them to specialize in a school would be.

Or you have the idea of saying: 1 class for each school of magic. I'm pretty sure that happens quite a bit, but again its untenable for doing any real work.
Thoughts?

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 1:44 pm

I vote for working on KSF. There's a paucity of good fantasy RPGs right now and the sheer number of Fantasy Heartbreakers floating around out there is a fairly good indication of the sustained demand for this sort of thing. I'm not an awesome writer/game designer like Frank or K or Koumei, but I'd be willing to help out with KSF any way that I could.

erik · Post by **erik** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 3:05 pm

Midnight, when I think of "champion," my first association is someone who literally fights as a warrior (especially acting as someone's proxy in a fight). Not antithetical to fighting for a cause, but not exactly the same. I suppose champions are often paired with arenas, which might be why Frank has a subconscious dissociation of Champion-Stealth, but there's no reason to make that dissociation hard-coded into a system. Conan occasionally (often) was a champion to some person in distress.

I kind of want to clarify my previous post. I don't think these 3 beliefs are compatible:

• There ought be roughly a dozen classes.
• There must be no more caster classes than martial/hybrids.
• Wizards would benefit by being subdivided potentially at least 8 ways.

Additionally, I do not see the value of hybrid classification in a system where hopefully the objective is that they can all compete in a magical environment. Assassin, Monk, Paladin, and Ranger all could be Martial. But that doesn't mean that they, nor Soldiers, Berserkers, Champions, and Scouts should not be able to effectively cast spells.

I suppose a combat skill and a combat casting skill, and there's no exclusion against any class or character having both. The casty classes could swing around a sword if they like without utterly embarrassing themselves, and a soldier may know some universal combat spells to sling without looking like a noob. The difference in classes will be extra abilities unique to a particular class.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 5:18 pm

Erik wrote:Additionally, I do not see the value of hybrid classification in a system where hopefully the objective is that they can all compete in a magical environment. Assassin, Monk, Paladin, and Ranger all could be Martial.

The archetypical Ninja character, whether he's Naruto, Black Star, or Goku, does most of his phlebtonium by dint of martial badassery, and still has a distinct and palpable set of magic skills on top of that. These characters are indispensable.

-Username17

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 8:28 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:So a simple "4 Martial Classes, 4 Hybrid Classes, 4 Magic Classes" would do fine for me. That would, I think, be a fair minimum effort for KSF. And for that, a class list of:

Hero (or Champion)

Berserker

Soldier

Scout

Assassin

Monk

Paladin

Ranger

Conjurer (Creation and Summon Monster)

Illusionist (Color Spray and Invisibility)

Magus (Cure and Magic Circle)

Warlock (Fireball and Demon Pet)

This seems like an excellent selection of Core Classes for a new system. But I have some questions!

1) What are the schticks going to be for the Scout and Ranger? How do they compare and contrast with one another?
2) What is the intended level of overall power for the game?
3) What kind of resource allocation systems should be implemented?
4) Is it feasible or even desirable to have a discrete resource system for each class?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 9:29 pm

1) What are the schticks going to be for the Scout and Ranger? How do they compare and contrast with one another?

The Ranger has limited Enchantment abilities. This allows him to shoot glowing arrows, get his pet to talk, and talk to to trees. The Scout has martial phlebtonium for super senses, harrying, and flanking. So the Scout operates more like a highly mobile 3e Rogue and the Ranger is more like a Diablo II Amazon (or like how people thought a 3e Arcane Archer was supposed to be).

2) What is the intended level of overall power for the game?

Tiered. The standard assumption is that the characters are in the "Heroic" Tier. Heroic Tier characters take on giants that are like Andre the Giant at low level and fight X-Men villains at high level. Low level Heroic characters worry about an encounter with half a dozen orc warriors, and at high levels they take on a hundred orc warriors backed up by some trolls and a necromancer.

Other Tiers don't need as much focus. At the Civilian Tier you can worry about a single goblin kidnapper or something. And at the Epic Tier you get to worry about "armies of demons" and monsters that are literally walking mountains with dragons perched on their head. The Civilian Tier introduces rules for speed and precision in mundane crafting, as well as rules for being a child or geriatric; the Epic Tier introduces rules for fighting monsters that are also the battlefield, and "aggregate spellcasting effects".

3) What kind of resource allocation systems should be implemented?

I really like Preparation's ability to keep things level appropriate without harming verisimilitude by forcing people to "forget" low level abilities. But there are a lot of ways to do preparation. There's preparing charges, there's preparing options that you expend charges to use, there's preparing options that you expend mana to use, there's preparing a WoF deck or chart, there's preparing options that you can risk penalty conditions for using, and so on and so on.

The key is that regardless of what resource management system people are using, they shouldn't be forced to select from a very large number of abilities during combat turns, and their abilities should be roughly level appropriate. Those are the holy grails of resource management systems, but honestly they also aren't that hard to accomplish as long as you remember that that is what you are doing.

4) Is it feasible or even desirable to have a discrete resource system for each class?

Feasible: definitely. I don't think it's desirable however. You're including mana costs because people like them for entirely non-math, non-functional reasons. They like them simply because they "feel like fatigue". But the people who are attracted to MP may be attracted to Might or Magic. The Berserker can get a pile of Endurance when he goes full crazy and spend the points on a round by round basis to stay in frenzy and spend extra to activate totemic super moves. The Magus can have a wad of traditional MP that he can trade in for people regaining HP. Repeating resource systems increases the accessibility of the game and even throws a wider net for potential players by letting players gravitate to the Resource Management system they like the best with the type of character skin they like the best.

-Username17

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 9:55 pm

Further questions:

1) Are Prestige Classes going to be implemented in the system? Is that the primary mechanic that will be used to demarcate when heroic level play ends and epic level play begins?

2) So in terns of resource management, would all classes basically be using Vancoan casting schedules, but with different abilities? Or would there be multiple preparation systems in play?

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 10:33 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:But I'm not sure that really any of the summon shticks have a terribly good fit with the character who wants to spend their combats laying down force fields and healing allies.

King Solomon. The class that gets Magic Circle should have access to a big-single-cast summoner build. Devils and djinni and shit. Also, lantern archons (or some visually similar creature that won't become the instant delivery boy of the Tippyverse). According to videogames, people really like glowy spherical bullshits that orbit their bodies and fire helpful lasers.

Obviously the magus shouldn't be the summoner, but it should have a build to be a summoner. (Really every caster class I can think of should. Even the transmuter has golems and animated objects.)

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 10:49 pm

I'd take it one further: Every single class should have access to minions. Warriors should get little fighting men to send marching, necromancers should get skeletons, the Mangus should be binding stuff in his magic circle and so forth. But nobody should be "The summoner guy" who gets all the best summons. Like stealth, bossing people around is something that everyone should get.

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Thu Jun 07, 2012 11:59 pm

A laudable idea. But if every class has access to minions, you NEED a simplified system for resolving the actions of bunches of minions. Otherwise, combat takes forever to resolve, and everyone gets bored.

Midnight_v · Post by **Midnight_v** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 12:35 am

Endovior wrote:A laudable idea. But if every class has access to minions, you NEED a simplified system for resolving the actions of bunches of minions. Otherwise, combat takes forever to resolve, and everyone gets bored.

...and really thats a polite way to put it. Some people thematically aren't leading/summoning anything. Others are and really that becomes an issue of managing the action issue et al.

Do we really want to make it a nother situation that boils down to action advantage. Or is that an inescapable consequence of TTRPGs? Everyone having Minons is a bad idea. Hell "1" person with an undead army is a pain in the ass enough, from the dm screen. Everyone having "pets" is logistical clogging.
Also... maybe kaelik's bitching has gotten to me, but what are we taking from the tome exactly? Is this nothing more than the New Edtion part X?

If we could take a minimum number of classes from the tome and port them into this... it might help with other things to start with a completed piece.

... or is this something else all together, in truth?

Endovior · Post by **Endovior** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 1:40 am

Well, it depends.

Take the Assassin. He probably doesn't want minions following him around while he's working; they're less good at sneaking then he is, and there's more of them, so more noise is guaranteed. That said, he could probably appreciate a few thugs causing a diversion... especially if they're the sort of reasonably competent thugs that know how to create a good diversion (read: a diversion that looks neither like an attack nor a diversion, yet is still urgent enough to draw the attention of the guards).

In that spirit, I'd suggest that, as much as possible, you make minions less like having a bunch of characters following you around, and more like having an ability. I mean, sure, you technically have guys following you around and such, and there'll be some rules around to figure out how many die per round if they come under serious attack... but mostly they'll be there to do things like 'engage the enemy mooks' or 'provide covering fire', and that kind of thing you can pretty much just assume is going on in the background, maybe make a die roll or two to determine how well that's going on a round-to-round basis, but by and large focus on what the PCs are doing.

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 1:53 am

Endovior wrote:A laudable idea. But if every class has access to minions, you NEED a simplified system for resolving the actions of bunches of minions. Otherwise, combat takes forever to resolve, and everyone gets bored.

Just because everyone can have pets doesn't mean they will. In 3e, 7 / 11 classes have either summons or class feature pets (and anyone can take Leadership if it's not banned) but you don't often see more than 1-2 people actually using them in any given combat.

The point is that the illusionist can choose to take Shadow Monster and Nemesis. That doesn't necessarily mean he has to, or that he's a chump for taking something else instead.

(E - Missed your post above): Also, you're thinking about this as a platoon of individually weak dudes following you around, which is the worst case for pets slowing down combat. Fortunately that's not something people often want. Usually PCs would rather have one big cohort that synergizes with their abilities than a bunch of little ones. A nightmare or dragon cohort gets the fighter to where monsters are, a platoon of lv1 archers just gets fireballed.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:00 am

Endovior got it in one. There's no reason for you to ever be rolling for the individual actions of individual mooks. Your minions either give you a power (the assassin orders his thugs to go distract the guards for him, or the ranger orders his beast to track someone down by scent) or, at high levels, as an area of effect damage/hindering effect dispellable by sword blows (druid orders a murder of crows to attack a foe, or the necromancer has his undead army hinder the dragon's advance)

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:13 am

I'm tired of your animal companion tracking me, so I attack it. It, specifically, not you, not your minion cloud. What happens?

Mask_De_H · Post by **Mask_De_H** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 2:13 am

I'd personally like to see Asymmetric Threat or Black Forest first because there aren't a lot of systems like that and I'm making a heartbreaker based off of KSF anyway, but would be down to help on anything.

Grek · Post by **Grek** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 4:35 am

ModelCitizen wrote:I'm tired of your animal companion tracking me, so I attack it. It, specifically, not you, not your minion cloud. What happens?

Either "you" are a named character, in which case you interact with other character's minions using the named-character-fighting-minions rules, or "you" are a minion yourself and use the much more abstract minion-on-minion combat rules, because we don't care about what you're doing specifically to foil the tracking attempt.

Assuming the former case, those rules for using that minion would probably look kinda like "Your hound has X hitpoints and can be evaded by the enemy making a DC Y Foo check. As long as it remains on the trail, you get Bar information about the target."

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 6:24 am

Ok, it sounds like you want to have special rules for abstracting pet actions when they're offscreen, that makes sense. What are you proposing the PC-vs-minion rules should be? Obviously we don't have numbers, but how if at all would they differ from PC-vs-any-other-monster?

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Fri Jun 08, 2012 6:34 am

I would prefer to see Asymmetric Threat done first, because that project seems to have a fairly coherent design vision, which means it's actually likely to get finished. No one seems to know what D&D should really be like, even with the design specifications that Frank and Dr. P have already stated. This seems to suggest that lengthy discussions of abstract game mechanics would take precedence over actually writing the game, like what happened with TNE. In contrast, aWoD/AS was written in a fairly prompt manner, probably because there was never all that much question as to what sort of game it actually should be. And Asymmetric Threat seems to have much more in common with AS than with KSF.

That being said, I have fairly minimal experience with Shadowrun, so I would not be able to help out all that much with AT. (But like Mask, I'm surprisingly far into writing my own heartbreaker based on KSF, TNE, and Legend.)