Classes/resource mechanics

[Username17]

Ddmw, we get your point. What we don't understand is how oblivious you seem to be about how stunningly self refuting your point is. You chose a number of resource schemes and assigned all your classes to them. That is fine. That is the way you do things. You happened to choose the number one, which is a perfectly acceptable number. And... that's it. There's nothing special about the number one or the number 17. Or any number in between.

And your continual refusal to ram it through your thick skull that you did literally exactly the same thing you are complaining about because it's absolutely definitely the way things are fucking done is by this point merely mysterious.

-Username17

[Voss]

Sometimes you can make something thematic with a simple name change. If you call mana 'chi' then all the combat stuff works just fine. As a game term, you can still use mana but just include a throwaway line that martial traditions often refer to it as 'chi' or 'ki' and you're golden.

Seriously, though, when has that ever worked? And not just dragged angry fanboys out of the woodwork because they feel like you've pissed in their faces?

[OgreBattle]

Sometimes you can make something thematic with a simple name change. If you call mana 'chi' then all the combat stuff works just fine. As a game term, you can still use mana but just include a throwaway line that martial traditions often refer to it as 'chi' or 'ki' and you're golden.

Seriously, though, when has that ever worked? And not just dragged angry fanboys out of the woodwork because they feel like you've pissed in their faces?

Paizo ninja can turn invisible with ki and throw exploding shuriken win ki because it's called ninja and not rogue.

[Leress]

Sometimes you can make something thematic with a simple name change. If you call mana 'chi' then all the combat stuff works just fine. As a game term, you can still use mana but just include a throwaway line that martial traditions often refer to it as 'chi' or 'ki' and you're golden.

Seriously, though, when has that ever worked? And not just dragged angry fanboys out of the woodwork because they feel like you've pissed in their faces?

Paizo ninja can turn invisible with ki and throw exploding shuriken win ki because it's called ninja and not rogue.

What's the rogue equivalent to ki?

[Voss]

Sometimes you can make something thematic with a simple name change. If you call mana 'chi' then all the combat stuff works just fine. As a game term, you can still use mana but just include a throwaway line that martial traditions often refer to it as 'chi' or 'ki' and you're golden.

Seriously, though, when has that ever worked? And not just dragged angry fanboys out of the woodwork because they feel like you've pissed in their faces?

Paizo ninja can turn invisible with ki and throw exploding shuriken win ki because it's called ninja and not rogue.

Uhuh. And Paizo rogues... don't turn invisible or throw exploding shuriken. Nor is there mana anywhere else in the PF system, let alone a line in the ninja (or monk) class that says 'this is mana or XXXX, but we're calling it ki just for these classes.'

This is pretty much exactly the opposite of being discussed- going full hog on the theme, rather than just painting over everything with a name change.* If you want to see that, go back some of the early 3.0/3.5 attempts at Samurai which was just a fighter with an ancestral weapon and the word fighter crossed out and samurai written in in crayon. People got awfully shirty about it.

*the PF ninja is still a less shitty variant of shitty class for weeaboo reasons, but it tries pretty hard to differentiate itself and stick to the theme. It isn't just a name change on a resource mechanic.

[Username17]

When I was thinking about diverse resource mechanics in D&D the wall I kept hitting was the incompatibility between "some class concepts are low level" and "no multiclassing". If a Swashbuckler is inherently a low level concept but locks you on rails until level 20, how do you square that circle?

Obviously you can't have classes that keep having levels past their sell by date. But you'll also note that there are very few concepts that scale from 'peasant hero' to 'conqueror of worlds' and those that do generally do so by being vaguely defined. The 'wizard' who can pull a rabbit out of a hat is not the same concept as the 'wizard' who can melt a city with tears of fire - it just happens to use the same word.

Now in a world where 3rd and 4th edition DnD already happened, this particular design problem has cleary been solved. You line up all the concepts you want to support at first level. Then you figure out which concept has the lowest expiration date. Then you announce that the level after that is the next tier and force everyone to get a prestige class or a paragon class or whatever the fuck you want to call it. And concepts that are still valid can jolly well show up in the next tier and those that are not can get fucked.

So 'mage' might be pretty similar conceptually to 'archmage' but swashbucklers have to go on and become moon champions or time knights or whatever.

It's a thorny design problem, but it's also a solved problem as long as you don't insist on trying to make 3e 'open' multiclassing work. I don't think there's any way to make taking the first level of swashbuckler be a valid life choice after you've graduated from giving a shot about swashes or buckles.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Since this is RobbyPost's thread, my question is why is he considering multiple resource mechanics. Is giving different classes a mechanical representation of that the only reason?

It started as me wanting to do something to address some of the classes, and when I saw this idea, it interested me. I looked at Frank's and DSM's lists, and went from there. I'm not ideologically opposed to two classes having the same mechanic, but my starting point is one-for-one. As it stands I have something like 16 classes I'm planning on doing, plus probably some ACFs to flesh out a few concepts.

I mean, yeah, I could probably take those same 16 classes and use something like four or five different mechanics between them because several are quite similar. Still, I like the differences some of them bring to the table. The berserker's rage bar is technically a point system, but it's one that starts at zero and counts up. The druid's, crusaders's, and elementalist's powers are all random, to an extent, but in different ways.

[Red_Rob]

Now in a world where 3rd and 4th edition DnD already happened, this particular design problem has cleary been solved. You line up all the concepts you want to support at first level. Then you figure out which concept has the lowest expiration date. Then you announce that the level after that is the next tier and force everyone to get a prestige class or a paragon class or whatever the fuck you want to call it. And concepts that are still valid can jolly well show up in the next tier and those that are not can get fucked.

So 'mage' might be pretty similar conceptually to 'archmage' but swashbucklers have to go on and become moon champions or time knights or whatever.

This was my problem, see if 'swashbuckler' uses a unique resource mechanic then by Prestige classing it seems you have to accept that your rage-bar class might suddenly gain WoF abilities.

Now, there are a few ways around this. You can hard-lock your Prestige Classes to one base class, as DSM suggested earlier, to ensure they use the same resource mechanic. This basically makes them alternate advancement options rather than a separate class, although the ability to layer on themes that justify high level abilities is handy. However, if you actually want players to have choices when tiering up this method is going to end up requiring a lot of content given you can't re-use Prestige Classes.

The second option is you work out which resource mechanics play nicely together and lock Prestige Classes to base classes with appropriate resource systems. This allows a little more flexibility than the previous system, however it creates a lot more playtesting headaches. Working out the viability of all the combinations of abilities increases the mental load considerably, which is only compounded when you look at multiple tiers and the possibility of jumping into a different resource system and then back again.

One option would be hard-tiering, where you effectively throw out your character and redesign them upon entering a new tier. If all you are keeping from your Barbarian past when you become a Witch King are a few flavour elements and a minor power or two it doesn't much matter what system your previous abilities ran off. However, I don't think players would accept such a jarring break when entering a new tier. One of the primary functions of RPG's is to tell a serial story using a set of characters as a through-line, and such a radical change would likely cause too much of a disconnect.

Another option I've looked at is having several base classes using the same basic resource system. Similar to the old 2e "class groups" you would have a number of classes with thematic and tactical differences but the same basic resource mechanic. You could then have "Prestige Classes" shared between these classes at each tier. This would alleviate the load somewhat, as each Prestige Class could then pull double or triple duty depending on the number of base classes. It does depend somewhat on how many thematically interesting and distinct classes you can squeeze out of each resource mechanic though.

Currently I'm leaning towards the second option coupled to a strongly tiered advancement system. Advancement would be fairly horizontal within a tier, then big power jumps would occur on tiering up. Access to new play arenas such as mass battles and kingdom management would occur at higher tiers. I'm toying with the idea of advancing tiers being a voluntary thing, so a party could stay at Adventurer tier for a while without automatically advancing into Heroic tier if they preferred.

[Username17]

I am not fond of the locked in prestige class options option. Firstly it's a terrible use of space. Not conceptual space, just physical space. If you pulled a 4e and wrote 6 paragon classes for 8 base classes you'd be presenting pretty minimal options to each player but you'd have written over fifty class blocks.

Secondly, I think that kind of distinct lines of development leads to larger class imbalances. There are an infinite number of potential power levels between any two power levels you care to mention. So the longer two characters are travelling on different tracks the more opportunity there is for the fighter to end up with twenty levels of linear bonuses while the wizard gets twenty levels of quadratic advancement. The 4e Rogue gets the Dagger Master paragon, and that entire class is not conceptually equal to a single thing that a Witch Queen would do.

As far as hard tiering goes, you can do that a couple ways. You could have the higher tier classes only grant powers that matter to higher tier minigames. So the Barbarian Witch King could get abilities from being a Witch King that affect kingdom management and longdistance travel, but you still stab people with your rage blade. I am leery of this version because it is easy for me to imagine classes giving skirmish combat abilities that simply aren't relavent against the kinds of enemies high level characters encounter even if their numbers keep pace.

Alternately, the Witch King class could give you powers which completely crowd out the abilities you get for being a Barbarian simply by being better. I acknowledge that this is going to be imperfect because there are going to be low level abilities you randomly end up caring about in high level fights no matter how much the paradigm says you aren't supposed to. I would point directly to the 3e Wizard's low level spell slots. Sure, you don't give no fucks about Flaming Sphere or Sleep at high level, you still end up tracking False Life and Resist Elements. So probably such a character is going to end up caring somewhat that they have a Barbarian's defensive roll and wilderness tracking even though they will literally never use a mighty cleave attack again once they get the Witch King's strictly better tyrannical smite. This seems quite appealing to me, and seems like a good balance of balance and story.

You could just outright take the Barbarian off the character sheet, and then it only matters that you've balanced Witch King against Storm Lord. Board games like Talisman have been doing this for decades, and it's obviously the easiest option to balance. But I don't think it passes the sniff test for roleplaying games. In an rpg you do need to have an answer to the question 'why can't my character do this thing?' And if their character lost the ability in question for game balance reasons that's not really a good answer.

-Username17

[DSMatticus]

I don't think locked-in prestiges are as difficult as they sound. Remember: the entire point of "locking in" is that the prestige classes serve as an extension of the base class. That's basically an upfront admission that a lot of shit is going to overlap, and if a lot of shit is going to overlap you can just factor it back into the base class and restrict yourself to writing about the ways being a demon-blooded sorcerer is different from being a dragon-blooded sorcerer (instead of writing two different sorcerers that are the same except for a few abilities).

So there's a sorcerer class and it goes from 1 to 20. It has a bunch of blank spaces on the class table labelled [archetype feature here]. At level 1, you choose an archetype from the "heroic" tier, and it fills in the blanks from 1-6 (or whatever). At level 7, you choose a new archetype from the "paragon" tier, and it fills in the blanks from 7-12. Etc, etc. You're basically writing pathfinder archetypes, except standardized and chopped into neat tiers. Pathfinder has a bajillion archetypes, so this does not seem particularly difficult.

But yes, the point is to very much avoid reinventing the wheel. It's not worth it writing two subtly different power lists for a master ninja and whatever the fuck you want to call a sneaky vampire, so just write that list once, let them both use it, and let a handful of class features distinguish the two.

[Username17]

As Kaelik told GnomeWorks, the fact that an implementation of an idea in 4e was bad does not make a strong argument that the idea couldn't work with a better implementation. That being said, it is obvious that the more moving parts you borrow from a known catastrfuck the more compelling the analogy to failure argument becomes. DSM, you are describing 4th edition classes. Like, literally exactly. And, well, 4th edition was quite bad on pretty much every level.

One of the many ways it was bad was the way classes hybridized between base and paragon classes. The entire reason that you're telling Swashbucklers that they are required by law to take a paragon class is that the swashbuckler character concept does not provide any real means of handling an inferno titan or a wraith army. So why are you still giving out 19th level Swashbuckler class features?

You can either make all your classes go the distance or you can admit that you can't and make everyone take prestige classes to get them through the higher level challenges. Attempting to do both is incoherent.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

But other than that, the point of the Essentia Necromancer is for actions to be overall equal to an at will hero. So if you take everything from defense and put it into attack you should be squishier than the knight and do more damage, but there's no reason that shouldn't be a thing you do turn after turn.

When you say this, do you literally mean that you'd just have broad categories like "attack" and "defense", or is this just thinking in abstract?

I started writing up powers of various sorts, and I realized that by having multiple attack and defense powers, it'd allow someone to max out any one given attack power and defense power at the same time (if they had enough total essentia). Sure, they'd be lacking versatility (as they hadn't invested in several attack or defense powers), but I'm still trying to figure out how to divide out the space.