MC caster fix, Frank style

[Draco_Argentum]

Does anyone find it unbalenced for a 19/1 ftr/wiz to do 20d6 damage single target, close range, save for half with his 1st level spells? (DC = 10 + 1/2 HD + int)

What if a 20 wiz can do the same thing about 10 times per day?

What about a 20 psion doing it at least 343 times per day?

[User3]

20d6 is, on average, 70 points of damage. 35 if whatever it is saves. Less, if it happens to have some kind of energy resistance.

Call me crazy, but I'm just not all that jazzed about the ability to do 70 points of damage 10 times a day, when an even lazily built fighter of the same character level is probably capable of doing as much or more, with no saving throw, any time he can get off a full attack. Probably even that caveat isn't necessary if he has a speed weapon or is hasted. Meanwhile, the real 20th level spellcasters have better things to blow their actions on than this.

The psion is a weird case, because even actual 20th level psions under the current rules have to pay extra power points to do additional damage dice with level 1 spells, unlike other casters, who get damage upgrades free with each additional caster level. So, unless these new multiclass rules get written by a complete idiot (not something I'd be prepared to rule out if WotC ended up writing them), the "343 20d6 spells a day" thing just won't happen.

[User3]

Or you could pretend I was awake when I wrote that haste and speed weapon thing. Playing in a 3.0 game does that to me.

[Josh_Kablack]

Straight-up, no cheese, conservative gear estimate 19th level fighter.

To hit: +34/+29/+24/+19 (+19 BAB, +5 weapon, +8 for 26 Str, +1 For Weapon Focus, +1 for Greater Weapon focus)

Damage: 1d10+17 (+5 Bastard Sword, +8 for Str, +2 For Weapon Specialization, +2 For Greater Weapon Specialization)

[Username17]

I don't believe that charge limitations are meaningful. I also don't believe that mana points are meaningful, because they are just charges with an even more annoying accounting system.

The entire spell slots system was devised for magic users who were units on a battlefield. Where like Warhammer, the battle would go for a certain number of turns before it was over. All attempts to fit that system into an RPG have been an unmitigated failure for decades.

343 isn't really different from 10, it isn't even different from six except in extremely contrived situations. Most of the time it isn't even different from three. Spellcasting isn't ever going to be satisfactory until it goes off a drain system or a skill system or an activation time system. Unless the drawback of spellcasting is built into the action itself and penalizes you within the context of the actual battle in which you use it - there are going to be people who for whatever reason just don't care about it.

Now, spellcasting limitations aside, 20 dice of damage at 20th level is no big deal. 20th level characters wouldn't wipe their asses with it, so I have no idea why it should be limited in its uses at all.

---

If spellcasting is going to be limited in any way, it needs to be bigger than what you could be doing instead. If it's going to be bigger, it also has to have meaningful limitations. Here are some meaningful limitations:

* Drain (character suffers penalties after casting magic, essentially trading later effectiveness for current effectiveness).

* Casting Time (character takes more than one action to get spell off, trading current effectiveness and certainty for later power).

* Randomness (character may not get any effect out of spell at all, and thus is essentially gambling for a higher potential yield out of his actions).

* One Use (character can only use the effect a limited number of times. Since battles are sometimes over in only 2 rounds, for this to be at all meaningful or true, that limited number has to be one).

Now, the spell effect you are talking about is the opposite, it is less random than swinging a sword. A sword, even at +34 to-hit, can still miss. The 20 die laser beam actually does a minimum of 10 dice even if they succeed (approximately the equivalent of hitting one and a half times out of 4), so it can afford to do less damage.

More reliability is balanced by having a lesser effect. Now, the 20th level spell is seen here toggling between being about 3 hits and about 1.5 hits off of the Fighter's attack, depending upon save result (while the full attack is toggling between as many as four hits and as little as zero hits) - so that looks good.

But there's a problem. The Fighter in Josh's example sucks ass. He's a 19th level Fighter with "conservative" gear. And by conservative we mean that he is using less than 20% of his allowed wealth. He probably also has a lot of defensive crap and such, but still that's less than 20%. He's also 19th level and is actually using zero of his normal levelling feats and only five levels worth of class features (less than that if he's a human or a dwarf). So he has 14 levels and seven normal feats apparently dedicated to not doing a god damned thing.

So this attack is coming out balanced against somebody who didn't spend 14 levels worth of class features and is an entire level lower. Do you see a problem with this? I do.

-Username17

[User3]

I don’t see how a drain system or a spell points system is any different from a spell slots system. With drain and points, you still cast a certain number of spells per day and then are forced to stop by a lack of points or fatal levels of drain. You cast small spells for small drain/points lost, and big spells for big drain/points lost, and you look for an econmy of force and so use a combo of big spells and small ones.

How is this different from slots in any way?

[Josh_Kablack]

Yes, that is a suck-ass fighter.

Yes, most real 19th level fighters will do about additional dice of elemental damage with their primary weapon, crit often enough to be significant, get an extra attack or two in their full attack sequence, maximize the effectiveness of Power Attack, be able to Rage, smite/ and or deal 2 more points of damage against their favored enemy and so forth

However, I think we can all agree that just about nobody is going to have a 19th level fighter whose big attack is any worse than that.

Furthermore I really don't think most 20th level wizards are throwing 20d6 single-target attack spells either.

[Username17]

I don’t see how a drain system or a spell points system is any different from a spell slots system.

Spell slots and spell points are not different, and I didn't say they were.

A drain system is very different. Casting spells causes you penalties, which means that your second action is going to be smaller than it would have been if your first action hadn't been casting a spell. That's what a drain system is, your effectiveness literally drains out as your progress through a battle.

Sometimes spellpoints systems are called "drain", but as long as you just have some finite number of points/slots you can expend before anything weird happens it's just a spell slot system by a different name. Game systems all come up with their own nomenclature, and trying to include all of it when talking about games in the abstract is an exercise in futility.

Heck, there are games in which you have spell points but the ffect of your spells is determined by how many points you have left - which is called a "spell point system" but is really a "drain system".

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

1086171310[/unixtime]]The psion is a weird case, because even actual 20th level psions under the current rules have to pay extra power points to do additional damage dice with level 1 spells, unlike other casters, who get damage upgrades free with each additional caster level.

You mustn't be familiar with any of Frank's thoughts on MC casters. If you make people pay to augment damage or DC then you are putting the shaft way up into MC types.

Its nice to see no-one try to prove this would be overpowered. In this case the limitation is that you have to spend an action doing it, not a spell slot cost.

Makes you wonder about the people who get their knickers in a knot about class abilities that let you do 10d6 once a day.

Moving on, nondamaging effects. I assume nobody has a problem with sleep/colour spray etc in similar circumstances. (The HD limits will have to scale with level too.)

[Sma]

Well sleep, color spray, as they are written now, are effectively save or dies, so if they take (pulling numbers out of my shiny behind) 3 turns to get off, while hacking monsters to pieces with a sword will take 5 turns, there is no problem. You might get away with it and save yourself 2 turns of combat, but you´re paying for that with the chance that the monster makes it´s save and you´ll have blown 3 turns.

How are you thinking of implementing the whole system ?
It´s kind of hard to give an meaningful opinion on the system, if youu know so little about it.

Sma

[Draco_Argentum]

1086228787[/unixtime]]How are you thinking of implementing the whole system ?
It´s kind of hard to give an meaningful opinion on the system, if youu know so little about it.

The general idea is that save DCs, damage and a few other things scale with character level, an idea thats totally stolen from stuff Frank posted.

[Username17]

Well sleep, color spray, as they are written now, are effectively save or dies, so if they take (pulling numbers out of my shiny behind) 3 turns to get off, while hacking monsters to pieces with a sword will take 5 turns, there is no problem.

Sleep is an overpowered legacy monstrosity which eventually goes into uselesness. If its hit die limit scaled with level, it would just be an overpowered monstrosity at all levels.

Which if you are running on the idea of long casting times - is perfectly fine. If something takes two entire rounds to get off, it had better be a lot better than the combination of things you could do in two rounds one round at a time. Not only are you effectively investing your time (and thus reasonably expecting to get interest on it and receive a higher dividend in the end), but you are also running a much higher risk - your spell might not go off at all. Your allies may have dispatched the monster by then, your enemy may have simply left, or you may have been taken down in that time.

So a two round casting time has to have huge dividends over attacking for two rounds to make it worthwhile. So if you are taking down one goblin a round with your sword, your 2 round sleep spell had better take down 4-6 of them to pay itself off (because you are giving up a much higher risk, as well as the goblins getting a total of 3 extra attacks on your side before your spell goes off).

Now, the quandary of higher level attack spells is a big one. At first level you get access to the basic kill spell (sleep) and the basic damage spell (burning hands), and if you look through the game - that's all there ever is. Noone gets higher level melee attacks, and the insistance on higher level spell attacks is therefore pretty mysterious.

I honestly can't think of anything for higher level attack spells to do. You can cast an immediate reliable spell that does less damage than the warrior but always hits or you can take extra time to drop a tremendous boom partway through combat - what else is there? I mean, you can become better, but I don't see how your attack spells could.

-Username17

[User3]

1086227307[/unixtime]]
You mustn't be familiar with any of Frank's thoughts on MC casters. If you make people pay to augment damage or DC then you are putting the shaft way up into MC types.

What I'm getting at here is not that the present psionics model would get folded directly into the "new" multiclass caster system, payment for increase and all, but just the opposite -- there'd have to be some adjustments made to the psionics model to make it play nicely with the rest of the universe.

About nondamaging effects: I don't like them.

Giving one class the possibility to win a combat with one action, and not giving other classes that, is troubling, balance-wise. Of course I guess we could give out similar effects to nonspellcasters.

This is probably going to sound crazy, but I'm not sure it wouldn't be reasonable to just treat "nondamaging" spells as a special effect of damaging spells. The D&D damage system is abstract enough that this is a possibility. You cast "Stone to Flesh" on someone, and rather than either turning them to stone or having no effect whatsoever, it does some damage. If it does enough to down them, the special effect is that they're petrified.

Maybe too vague, maybe too flavorless. I've never been completely satisfied with the way D&D divides up magical effects into "save or die" versus "save or damage" -- it's arbitrary and confusing. There's not really any good reason why a column of holy fire roaring down from the sky couldn't just plain kill you if you fail to get out of the way of it, considering the way hit points work in the game. But it does hit point damage, because that's what it's always done, while, across the road, something like Slay Living is exactly the reverse.

[MrWaeseL]

1086231175[/unixtime]]The general idea is that save DCs, damage and a few other things scale with character level, an idea thats totally stolen from stuff Frank posted.

Heh, I've been toying with this too. It's hard, though.

[Essence]

Not really. I've been playing this way ever since Frank started posting about it on Nifty, and it's been one of the best changes I've made in my game. When the only thing dependent on caster level is your spells known and spells per day, it makes people a lot more willing to be a BeatStick 15/Wizard 5, because their spells still last all day/do all their damage/save at a reasonable DC, and being able to toss a Hold Person on a foe who seems all too able to avoid your blade is worth missing out on 3 points of BAB for quite a few people.

[Draco_Argentum]

1086329724[/unixtime]]Not really. I've been playing this way ever since Frank started posting about it on Nifty, and it's been one of the best changes I've made in my game. When the only thing dependent on caster level is your spells known and spells per day, it makes people a lot more willing to be a BeatStick 15/Wizard 5, because their spells still last all day/do all their damage/save at a reasonable DC, and being able to toss a Hold Person on a foe who seems all too able to avoid your blade is worth missing out on 3 points of BAB for quite a few people.

Thats the idea. Part B is making non-combat magic not take spell slots and removing material components from combat spells. Not that that has a great deal to do with MC casters.

Should defensive spells scale too, mage armour for example?

[Maj]

The only time Ess has ever emphasized a material component in game was when my character was playing some equivalent of Jeopardy and was asked to name a spell crushed diamonds were required for. So, I guess Essence has worked on part B (removing material components). I don't think either of us is sold on the non-combat magic not taking spell slots, though.

And yes, I think that spells like Mage Armor should have a scaling component. The 3.5 Shield ought to, as well.

[Username17]

I don't think either of us is sold on the non-combat magic not taking spell slots, though.

Neither am I entirely. I think that combat magic shouldn't require spell slots, not the other way around.

In combat, the spell slots thing is pretty much meaningless, especially in games which only have one fight per day or which take place at high level (which collectively, is most games). Out of combat, you have pretty much all day to dick around and find uses for all your spells. That's where spell slots are actually a limitation that effects game balance.

When you are talking about having to prepare identification spells over charms, that's meaningful. Further, having unlimited amounts of either is potentially unbalancing (especiall the charms).

Different games will spend different amounts of time in combat in a day. Combats last maybe 1-12 rounds on the outside, and people have between one and eight of them, round about. But while that's a huge difference in combat rounds spent (differing by a factor of 100), the amount of time spent out of combat is pretty much the same in all cases - twenty three hours, fifty nine minutes and fifty four seconds of non-combat time is very similar to twenty three hours, fifty one minutes, and twenty four seconds.

So while a combat spell charge limitation designed for a high-combat game is humerously non-hindering in a low-combat time game, a non-combat charge system is virtually identical in net effect no matter how long or often your combats are.

What I am damn sure of, of course, is that characters should not be able to spend combat spell charges on non-combat effects and vice versa - it's like letting people spend their skill points on iajitsu focus.

-Username17

[User3]

Have you considered Monte's Arcana Unearthed spellcasters who are like sorcerers who can learn spells, but only prep a number of spells per level to "know" for the day? In that way, you can have a range of combat and non-combat spells, but overall your spells are limited.

------------------
Combat limits on spells is laughable, because most combats only last 3-4 rounds, meaning after 5th level you can do 3 combats a day and still have spells to cast. But, we all agree that the mage who walks around town whipping on everyone all day is pretty lame. Just as the fighters runs out of HP eventually, so must the spellcaster run our of juice. Allowing combat and non-combat spells to draw from the same pool is the simplest solution(rather than having two pools.

The best tests of a system are:

A. Is is simple?
B. Is it fun?

I mean, some horribly complicated drain system(like Shadowrun's, which is like getting into combat every time you cast a spell) would not solve the problem, and it would be complicated, and it would not be as fun as the fire and forget nature of spell slots.

[Username17]

Have you considered Monte's Arcana Unearthed spellcasters who are like sorcerers who can learn spells, but only prep a number of spells per level to "know" for the day? In that way, you can have a range of combat and non-combat spells, but overall your spells are limited.

Yes, it still has the same problem. Games where people play more combats per day (an essentially stylistic choice, which should not affect game balance over much) will deplete total spell slots per day faster.

So if a character is in a game where they play two combats per game and is balanced using the remaining spell slots as charms and overland movement and such, how the hell are they spposed to be balanced if you switch to having three combats a day or only one?

Allowing combat and non-combat spells to draw from the same pool is the simplest solution(rather than having two pools.

It's simple, but it's not a solution. Not even close.

I mean, some horribly complicated drain system(like Shadowrun's, which is like getting into combat every time you cast a spell) would not solve the problem, and it would be complicated, and it would not be as fun as the fire and forget nature of spell slots.

Actually, the most common complaint about D&D magic is that most people feel that messing around with spell slots is like doing your taxes. I personally don't have a problem with it, but the vast majority of people really find screwing around with spell slots to be far too complicated and not fun.

Doing away with the whole concept of spell slots would make a whole lot more people glad than mad.

-Username17

[Sir Neil]

...save at a reasonable DC...

Ah, 10+1/2 character level +key ability, IIRC.

[Essence]

That's correct, Sir Neil.


I don't think it's possible to split up spells into combat and noncombat spell slots. Fireball has noncombat uses, and Open/Close has combat uses.

I think the best way to accomplish Frank's goal is to halve each caster's spell slots, then give each caster an ability like this:

Focus Energy (Ex): Four times per day, a <class> can, as a free action on their turn, enter a state of extreme focus, allowing the <class> to cast spells without spending spell slots to do so. This focus lasts for one round per class level, or until the encounter ends (whichever applies). After the focus ends, the <class> is fatigued and cannot cast spells for one minute.


This prevents us from having to split up the spell list, but still allows for a very slim allowance of spell slots and a free-for-all spellfest in combat situations.

[Draco_Argentum]

I still call charm a combat spell. Obviously it has lots of good uses outside combat too.

What I mean by non-combat is stuff like:
Animal messenger
animate dead (big cast time increase to suit me anyway)
raise dead etc
curse water
divination
hero's feast
planar ally/binding

In general I'm talking about spells where I don't care how many times you do it per day as long as you're willing to spend a few minutes casting it.

Back to combat effects, direct damage and defense scaling seems to be fine. SoDs got the usual complaints. Thats more to do with their nature than anything else. What about buffs, they need to scale or they probably suck. Probably not as much as divine favour though.

[Username17]

The current model is that you get scalingly more stackable buffs as you go up in level, and that as such none of them need to scale, because they are scaling anyway because they layer.

If you wanted to have a different system in which people benefitted from just a couple bonuses which scaled, that would require a complete overhaul of the buff spell system as we know it.

---

The spell system makes me very unhappy on many levels. Right now, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever that you can get that would be worth giving up spellcasting, because spellcasting does anything else you'd want to to better, and it's modular each day instead of being modular on level up or simply fixed like all other abilities.

And the way things are run, you can't fix that by jacking up the bonuses other things give or nerfing magic. Even if non-spellcasting options are somehow as good as spellcasting options, they still aren't as good because you can prep different spells tomorrow and be an entirely different character if you decide that's a better plan.

And even if you found a way around that, which isn't likely until people start being able to prepare feats at the beginning of the day, it still isn't good enough - because spells are held to a different standard of realism than other actions.

---

Consider: You've got an evil guard who is standing in a door way, looking right down the hallway. There are a couple of crosswise halls that run across that hall that the guard is looking down. The players are on the far hall, and need to be going down the hallway that crosses right in front of the guard.

OK, you you've got a Rogue, and he's invested some class features, and maybe skill focus, you know, whatever, into getting a total bonus of like +22 in Hide. And he wants to walk towards the guard down the hallway and turn onto the hallway he wants to be on right in front of the alert guard without being seen. You're the DM, are you going to let him do it?

Probably not! And if you let him even make the attempt, you can bet your sweet ass that there will be hefty penalties involved.

Now consider exactly the same situation, except you've got a Wizard with a 14 dex and invisibility cast on himself. Are you going to let him do it? Heck, why wouldn't you let him do it? I mean, he's invisibile for crying out loud,

Do you see the problem here? Invisibility provides a +20 bonus to Hide. Theoretically the numeric bonuses on the skill and the spell are the same. But from an actual roleplaying perspective, you need to justify any non-magical action and you don't need to justify a magical one. Even if the non-magical pile of bonuses were larger, they'd still be smaller in actual play because the burden of proof and the ad-hoc penalties are always going to be pointing the other way if you aren't using "magic".

And that being the case, I'm not sure that the D&D magic system can be balanced. It's not like Shadowrun, where the magic is very rule bound and everyone has superscience anyway (which basically follows magic rules for storytelling). It's not like Champions where noone is held to any standard of realism because they are superheroes.

No. The wizards get to write their own story and everyone else is a fuck all meat shield who has their story told to them by the DM. That paradigm can't ever be balanced, no matter how big the numbers get.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

I like XPH psions as a base. At least you don't get an arbitrary number of spells to prep.