Replacing xp costs.

[Draco_Argentum]

I can't imagine that anyone here actually likes these things. The flavour text sucks since you need to bring metagame stuff into the actual game. The mechanics are bad (in 3.0) or really stupid (in 3.5).

Unfortunately I haven't seen a better idea posted. Whatever it is needs to actually deter people from doing whatever the action is. But it can't make your character permanently worse. In a few cases even a temporary setback would be pointless. Magic items being the main example, if you're taking enough time off to make one you can take a little more off to recover from a temporary effect.

For short duration effects the WW willpower pool is the least sucky thing I can think of. It works basically like spell points but you don't get the points back especially fast.

Does anyone elsee have any ideas?

[Username17]

Well, it would certainly have to have different mechanics than the WW Willpower Pool. I mean, you could always choose your nature as "Survivor" in Vampire or "Dreamer" in Mage, or whatever that miserable one was in Wraith - and then just happily fill up your Willpower Pool every time you did anything, while the rest of the party had to wait until the end of the story arc.

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That being said, I don't think that magic items should cost you anything except your ability to make magic items. That is, we want people to make no more than a certain total number and power of magic items at any particular level - so rather than trying to come up with some secondary limitation that does that, we should just do that. You can only make a certain number of magic items at a time, like you were in Thieve's World, or in Middle Earth.

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Permanent modifications to yourself, such as Darkvision and the like, shouldn't be handled as a spell and a permanency. They should just be available by the same method available for getting any other permanent ability. Having more than one method of gaining a permanent ability is broken by definition, especially if one of those methods is only available to some characters.

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Permanent static effects, such as permanent Walls of Fire shouldn't have any lasting cost at all. Making a permanent wall of fire is awesome, and imprisoning Bunhild in flame rather than stone is in no way ungamebalanced.

-Username17

[User3]

Making everyone have a limit on the items they could have would mean that you would never care about finding items or care about the enemy's sword("Oh no, I can't afford a +4 Sword! I'm only 10th level! Oh well, put it on the stack and I'll come back in a few levels.)

A time or quest requirement might work better. If a +1 Sword took like a 3 months to create by a 4th level caster, the game would not be unbalanced. Sure, he could spend his entire life, cranking out 4 swords a year, and over the course of a lifetime he could make 200 +1 swords.

And I wouldn't care.

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Quest requirements could be like "any sword used to kill a Fire creature can be enchanted as a Flaming or Flaming Burst weapon at no extra cost in time." or "Any weapon or armor that was part of a ghost can become a Ghost Touch item.) That's flavorful, and neat, and it puts some DM control into the mix, but not too much.

As long as creatures no longer have a swag list for their organs, it could be balanced.

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Consumable items should work like the leadership feat though. There is no reason why you can't be a Potion Mage and just have some potions, or take a feat to just have a few scrolls on you, or be a wand mage.
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Wands should be changed to a "casts this one spell X times per day times" items, and not the crazy "And then I used my Death Knell wand to kill 50 cows and get a +50 caster level for my spell." or "And then I flew around after casting Improved Invisibility and Fly from a scroll and smashed the army with one Wand of Fireballs. First level is so cool."
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Permanent spells should just be handled in the Thieves World way (only a certain number of permanent spells at one time).

[Username17]

Making everyone have a limit on the items they could have would mean that you would never care about finding items or care about the enemy's sword("Oh no, I can't afford a +4 Sword! I'm only 10th level! Oh well, put it on the stack and I'll come back in a few levels.)

Granted, but I was talking about a limit on the items you could make, as evidenced by the fact that this is a discussion on replacing XP costs. We haven't even gotten in to whether found items should have a cost - that's a whole different debate.

A time or quest requirement might work better.

No it wouldn't. There are parties of elves, parties of humans, and mixed parties. If the elven artificer is balanced taking 50 years off and outfitting the entire band with magical swag, how could he be balanced in a mixed human and elf party where he can't do that?

Time requirements don't mean the same thing to different characters because of backstory crap. So they can't limit your actual power in a meaningful way.

Consumable items should work like the leadership feat though. There is no reason why you can't be a Potion Mage and just have some potions, or take a feat to just have a few scrolls on you, or be a wand mage.
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Permanent spells should just be handled in the Thieves World way (only a certain number of permanent spells at one time).

And this wouldn't work for magic swords because... ????

-Username17

[User3]

Mmm, didn't think about elves. Well, if they are a more magical people, then tthat not a terrible thing, but for a game I see how that can't work....

Until the found items/made items debate is handled, making your "permanent made items" limited is not good. Your mage would be like "No, I am not going to make you a magic sword because my power is limited and I need to spend it on a wand." That's bad for the party. Giving everyone a limit is doable, but strange and mechanically complex when added to found items.

Scrolls and Potions are flavorless, so making them easy disposable items no harship. They can have a time and money requirement.

Making items based on some kind of in-campaign thing is needed. Each item should be special.

You know, only XP is special enough. Remove the rules where swag can be melted down for material for swag, and it still feels more balanced than any alternative.

Yes, sometimes people will not gain a level because the power of an item is better than a level, but I'm Ok with that. It makes the items all the more precious.

I dunno. Its a hard thing to treat them as a thing between a plot device and technolgy.

[Draco_Argentum]

Quest requirements are fine with me. They give some nice flavour text. What they don't give is balence.

I wouldn't suggest a direct port of the willpower pool, the recovery mechanisms are massively campaign dependent. Possibly the Exalted version is mostly useable (limit breaks have to go for starters). This would cover stuff like limited wish where it probalby shouldn't get cast as regularly as a normal spell.

You're suggesting making people take a feat to gain the benefit of a permanent spell, right? Or do you mean it to take up a magic item slot?

For permanent static effects you're right. You can't use them to up your combat power unless you're in your home base. Since D&D could stand to have defense strengthened this isn't a problem IMO. I would make the cast time long enough that you can't do it in combat, it can just become a ritual.

For items, do we actually want to limit them to a number and power at created at any given level? If all you can make is +1 swords there is a natural limit to how many its worth making. Scrolls and potions should probably be something that can be made in large numbers anyway. Wands have such lame flavour text that I'm quite happy to simply remove them from the game.

IMO its mainly slotless items that present a problem in a "make as many as you want" system. I've already suggested making s"slotless" items require slots before. There goes the problem with anything other than handheld stuff.

[Draco_Argentum]

I think we can all agree that if a spell lets you replicate another you should have to pay any cost assotiated with the replicated spell. Includeing long casting times.

[Username17]

I'm not at all familiar with the Exalted Willpower mechanic.

I am familiar with the Vampire/Mage/Wraith/Werewolf/Changeliung Willpower Mechanic(s), in which Willpower gives a set number of charges to do something generically awesome or power an otherwise overpowered (or overcosted) ability. Then you don't get your charges back until the end of the story arc, except each character chooses an event which restores Willpower.

Unfortunately, the events can range anywhere from "saves children from certain death" (an event which may or may not happen like once in an entire story arc, and probably near the end anyway) to "uses absolutely any of the character's other powers" (an event which happens every few minutes of play time.

It's going to be kind of whacky, since D&D often does not have "story arcs" and instead is a series of incidents with no over-plot worth mentioning. And of course, the entire character driven recharge mechanic has simply got to go. There's just no excuse for getting back all of the uses of your once/combat powers every time you enter combat (which was what one of the nature choices actually did).

D&D is split into "days", which already don't mean dick if the players are at all willing to scam it. I'd like to introduce some kind of time increment limitation, but honestly it's not going to fit into D&D well as conceived. You'd have to do major structural reconfigurations on the basic concept. Diablo II is split into Acts, but D&D by default is not. The system will groan under such pressure.

Which is not to say that's bad - the rigid timeframe in an amorphous goal system that D&D is currently saddled with sucks my giant donkey balls - but just keep in mind the scope of the change you are seemingly proposing.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

For anyone who dosen't know what Exalted is its like the revision of D&D. Except that there are actual improvements.

In Exalted you get willpower back the same as Vampire except for stunts and limit breaks, neither of which are applicable to D&D. The old storyteller's option of gaining a point when you wake up is replaced by rolling your conviction virtue. (Not the same as the virtue of that name in Vampire.)

The point is removing the dodgy parts, which is all of the recovery mechanisms except for once a day, and useing that for any effect that should be kept on a tight leash. This is a last resort though, extra mechanics are best avoided when possible. So far theres good ideas here for most situations.

[Username17]

So your solution is to give people a single bankable spell slot every day that is only usable for their most broken abilties?

And then every time the wizard goes into combat he flushes all of his limited wishes, plane shifts to the far realm, sleeps for a week and a half, rebanks all his wishes, and planeshifts back into the fray...

I fail to see how that's all that much of an improvement. The uses/day abilities are pretty sketchy, and the bankable uses/day abilities are extremely sketchy. Just the fact that there's no practical reason why you should adventure every day instead of 3 times a month means that the difference between players having one Willpower per day and players having 10 Willpower per day is mostly a cosmetic one of whether or not the PCs feel the need to roleplay in having constant downtime or not - an entirely cosmetic change.

Rationing power based on how many days you arbitrarily announce go by when the subtitles come on and say time passed is a stupid idea. You can write in any number on those subtitles - you shouldn't get anything for writing down larger numbers.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

The idea is to take things like that into account when writeing rules. I don't care if you want to cast as many as possible of your best spells in an encounter, as long as doing so is balenced.

I also don't care about people not adventuring every day of the month, IMO that'd be an improvement. Planes with different time flow bother me even less. I wouldn't use them anyway despite the mythological precedent.

[Username17]

The point is that "usable ten times if you haven't used it for ten days" is something which is of radically different power in games where time is running out and you have to stop the darklord vs. games where you have heard rumours of an ancient tomb left undisturbed for thousands of years.

Both are perfectly fine adventures, except that in one you get to blow your whole ten shots every scene and in the other you don't get to use them at all really until the final battle.

Abilities which increase or decrease in absolute power by a factor of ten based on story mcguffin are generally bad. Absolute time costs is a shit mechanic when some of the races have the flavor text ability that they don't even age.

"per combat" is meaningful, "at one time" is meaningful, but "per day" doesn't mean dick. I mean seriously, while it is a limitation, it doesn't actually have any specific meaning. In player directed games the players simply choose how often they can use it, and in heavily DM directed games the DM chooses how often they can use it.

Any mechanic which is "The DM can let you use this ability some number of times, or not. You know, whatever." is not even a mechanic. That's just the DM fucking around. Enshrining that in law is bullshit.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Oddly enough I like it like that. Stop the darklord NOW!!! games are going to have power husbanding, thats part of the point. Lets loot that anchient place because everyone knows they had better tech/magic back then games are all about getting as prepared as possible by default.

What forceing people to care about what they cast yesterday does is hamper the urge for powerful people to go blow their wad all over their enemies ASAP. That has good implication for setting consistancy.

[Username17]

What forceing people to care about what they cast yesterday does is hamper the urge for powerful people to go blow their wad all over their enemies ASAP.

No it doesn't. That tap dancing fool is going to get a whole fistfull of new asspennies tomorrow if you don't core him like an apple and hurl him down the corridor streaming intestines behind him right now.

Until you hold his bloody sphincter in your hands he's just going to be spending those damn things every day, chipping away at you like a squirrel on the acorn of your contentment. There's no holding back at that point - just the fact that he's getting a new bankable charge every day means that you are going to have to stick a piece of rebar through his kidneys like yesterday or you're going to get a fistful of whuppass with your morning paper.

I can't handle that shit, so I'm going to turn him over in the grease trap of my discontent a few times to get him nice and flamable before I use him for a candle. And that's me being pretty laid back about it, I think. Not only are those resources in use it or lose it land - but if you don't do unto your enemies faces a few times they are going to use it or lose it all over your brand new carpet.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

But if you expend yourself now on some git then you'll be spent later when the tentacle beast shows up. As long as there are multiple adversarial parties you have to care about being out of juice.

[User3]

I agree with Frank, "per day" stuff really isn't a limitation of any kind except in specific time requirement games. NOt everyone runs games like that, nor is D&D always designed for either type of game. For spellcasters to work, they have to have a real limitation that is in place all the time.

When you're doing the typical plotless dungeon crawl, you don't have to worry about getting jumped when you're sleeping at the inn or in your rope trick. You don't have to worry about time running out. You can take forever and a day and nobody will care, so limitations relying on that are bad. So long as I can teleport or rope trick, multiple adversaries mean absolutely nothing.

[Draco_Argentum]

Add the plotless dungeon crawl to the list of things I don't care about.

[Username17]

1086665858[/unixtime]]Add the plotless dungeon crawl to the list of things I don't care about.

That's going to make talking about D&D balance extremely difficult. Regardless, how do you feel about open-ended player-generated stories?

They can be very rewarding from an RP point of view, and of course they follow the same game mechanics for time as do the plotless dungeon crawls. Requiring a time critical DM generated plot for game balance to function is a bad idea - I mean if game balance falls apart if things are not scripted, why don't we just play Final Fantasy at that point?

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

I'd imagine those working slightly differently seeing I assume they take place in a dynamic world. The plotless dungeon crawl basically assumes that the PCs can do whatever they want and the monsters won't do anything intelligent about it.

[User3]

Even in a dynamic world, time won't always be a factor, unless you're constantly creating contrived scripted plots. If the PCs seek an ancient sword stored in some old ruin, it's not fair if everytime they do that, they have to rush before some other NPC party finds it. You can't always be fighting the clock. It just makes no sense and it certainly shouldn't be required to maintain game balance.

[Draco_Argentum]

Time isn't the only thing that matters in a dynamic world. More to the point this is the same as ammunition capacity limits in an FPS. You get scads of rounds for your assault rifle and a few for the grenade launcher. The idea is to make it balenced if a PC uses all his grenades in one fight. If that is done time pressure isn't necessary for balence.

[Username17]

More to the point this is the same as ammunition capacity limits in an FPS. You get scads of rounds for your assault rifle and a few for the grenade launcher.

No it isn't. In an FPS you don't usually get grenade launcher shots back if you walk away from the computer for a while. So consider it like this: you get grenade launcher shots back every couple of minutes, some levels are timed, some are not. Why wouldn't you just walk away from the computer and have a beer every so often?

Sometimes you are going to be playing the game, sometimes not, but you shouldn't gain solid bonuses for leaving the computer on while you do other things. And in a role playing game, you don't even have to leave the computer. You can just sit down and say "alright, three days pass" - and if game balance falls apart whenever you do that you have no game balance, because you really can do that whenever you want.

-Username17

[Crissa]

I really don't mind some x/day balance... If a creature needs to sleep normally, and the ability comes from their needing to rest, sure. Magical creature with this I'm totally okay with. Sorcerors... Sure, why not?

But most abilities make no sense that way and there's no penalty to the fighter for staying up all night. Or the whole next week...

...And that's really the other weak part of x/day abilities. No one else is constrained by fatigue.

-Crissa

[Draco_Argentum]

1086711747[/unixtime]] Why wouldn't you just walk away from the computer and have a beer every so often?

Because cheap-ass people like me shoot you even if you're in the can and therefore aren't dodging.

I just went through my 3.0 PHB looking for spells with an xp cost that would work with WP. There aren't any, all of them are either ugly broken or covered by other suggestions. There simply aren't any short duration effects with xp costs that deserve to remain in the game. No need for WP then.