Looking for help on retuning (A)D&D3

[DracoDruid]

Hey everybody.

I am messing around with 3rd Edition for quite some time now, and I came to the point where I would like to have some like-minded people to brainstorm ideas.

What I am doing:

I am trying a rather unliked thing I guess, since I try to take D&D one (or maybe two) steps back from combat and back to a more well rounded game.
Since stuff like heavy dice rolling combat stuff (like Sneak Attack) will eventuelly die on the course of redesign most people won't like it.
But since I am not planning in selling it (but would be happy to give it out for free once done),
I wouldn't mind if there are but only a few of you who like this approach and are willing to help and participate with constructive discussion and solid ideas.

Hopefully awaiting,


- DD

[Calibron]

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=48578&start=0

[CatharzGodfoot]

To be fair, a big focus of the 1SB2SF thread was balancing combat, which does not seem to be the OP's focus.



There have been a number of interesting social interaction and skill rule redesigns that might be worth looking at. Good rules for social interaction are probably the most difficult part of RPG design. I'd be interested in seeing more in that vein.

[DracoDruid]

Well one part of the retuning will surely be the (complete) redesign of most (all) classes.

Right now, I am planning to use 8 core classes. 2 "variants" for each of the 4 basic classes (warrior, mage, priest and thief).

Warrior
******
Fighter - Combat/Enemy controll, weapon training, discipline
Berserk - Sheer power, brute force, unstoppable

Mage
****
Wizard - logical/scientific approach to magic
??? (Sorcerer would fit as a good opposite but not sure yet)

Priest
*****
Cleric - "military" champion of faith (mixture of old paladin and cleric)
Priest - spiritual leader and mystic oracle

Expert
*****
Rogue - Scoundrel, Thief, Agent/Spy, Con-artist (City character)
Scout - Explorer, (bounty-) hunter, pathfinder ("nature-guy")


Basic Combat changes:
- DEX for all attack rolls
- BAB on defense score
- Armor bonus as DR


Things I am not sure with:
- changing the mental abilities to: Intelligence, Awareness and Psyche
- Hit points or wound system
- Old spell lists or generic spells (ala True20)

[Username17]

If you want to get away from combat shenanigans and the modern fantasy tactical genre and into a more problem-solving sphere, I suggest going classless. Classes and levels have a place, and that place is keeping people on the random number generator together and making sure that people have "level appropriate" actions to take. It is in short, a tactical minigame concern that classes address. If you want people to treat characters as story characters first and playing pieces on a battle map second or not at all, you probably want to ditch the concept.

As to the attributes that you want to use, it is a profound tradeoff. Using abilities that are in common use makes established gamers accept those stats easier. Admit it, whenever you see a game call "Constitution" something like "Health" or "Physical Endurance" a little part of you rebels and thinks "That's stupid." The fact is that quantifying adjectives about story characters is a clumsy and inane exercise and if we didn't have to do it, we wouldn't. On the flip side, people have expectations about attributes like Charisma and Wisdom which are frankly retarded. Calling your stats something new and different gets people away from the preconceptions that haunt those stats like a pirate ghost.

I'm fond of ditching Charisma and Wisdom altogether and just having Willpower. Let people be as pretty as they want, and leave the question of how scary you look up to Strength. Five stats may be plenty for you. Some games also like to pump things up to nine or do away with attributes completely and just subsume the concepts into skills.

Different genres have different needs for attributes. In a Western, the gun is king. Speed and Accuracy are so important that they can be split into two attributes while all other aspects of physicality can be lumped together into a single brawn stat (called Strength, Health, Body, Physicality, or whatever). In a Cthulhu Mythos game the cerebral pursuits are so important that you can seriously divide up Perception, Sciencing, Willpower, and Magic up into different stats before you even looked at physical or social attributes. In a gothic horror game, the needs of physical, mental, and social are roughly equivalent (at least in potential), and thus you could plausibly have six stats with Brawn/Agility, Intuition/Logic, and Willpower/Smarm (or whatever you wanted to call them) and be happy.

The fact that people are running around in a fantasy setting implies that people will have swords, but that doesn't in any way indicate that there's any need to distinguish between toughness and strength - I've always found that to be kind of silly. If you want to shift the focus to something else besides the sword swinging, you should decide what the focus should be on.

---

Another problem is that in order to get people to play any kind of real investigative game, you have to get people on the same page as to what the fuck it is that magic does. And that means that you're going to have to toss the D&D concept of allowing magic to work like an unbounded M:tG cardset. because that is bullshit. As long as magic can do "pretty much anything" the setting can't really tell any stories. Before your setting can have anything in it, it has to not have everything else.

And if people aren't going to be coming to the table to move their bishops around and take knights and pawns, they have to interact with a setting. And that means that you'll have to put your foot down repeatedly and crush a lot of sacred bovines.

-Username17

[K]

The problem is that sacred cows make DnD. It's one of the reason 4e sucks so hard.

I mean, if I don't want to play DnD I can just play WoD or Shadowrun or Champions or one of the other decently playable games.

When I play DnD, I want Vancian spellcasting, six stats, saves, and a host of other conventions that are recognizable from the Red Box of my youth. The things that I'll accept as changes are:

1. Things that make it faster to play. So yes, less dice is good, and I completely accepted that 3e turned all the saves in three saves.

2. Things that allow for more options. 3e's multiclassing and class choices and feat system was a savior, and even LA was welcome compared to 2e's "no monsters as PC races" rule.

3. Fundamental balance changes. Fighters have gotten batter and better as the game has progressed. I assume that someday they'll be as interesting as spellcasters.

[DracoDruid]

First things first. Thanks for your input. I really appreciate it.

But don't get me wrong. I don't want D&D become some sort of non-combat game.
The fighting of monsters is just too essential to drop it entirely.
The thing I am about to change is that ALL classes in D3 have ALL (ok, most) their abilites tinkered for combat and that SUCKS.

The rogue is my favorite example. The rogue SHOULD (in my POV) be the most skilled and (skill) versatile class.
Back in the AD&D2nd Edition, the rogue was the only one with those special skills.
D&D opened up the skills to all classes what is very good, but they left the rogue with "only" the most skill points. All class ABILITIES where combat, combat, combat.
The most disappointing was the change of backstab to Sneak Attack. Tons of extra damage dice dished out at nearly every other situation (when flanking, no limit per round f.e.). While it might provide the rogue with a decent combat role it is just 1) not the role of the rogue and 2) WAY to much.

So to come back to your posts:

- I will keep classes since it has to remain D&D but I will change them as I see needed.
- Combat will remain an (but not the most) important part, but will be made (a bit) quicker and less dice excesses.
- While I like my set of mental abilities it might be just what makes my game not D&D anymore. So that's why I am still not sure about it.


EDIT:

Oh and: "Hi Frank!" I think we knew each other from Paizo/Pathfinder. What happend man?

[Ice9]

The problem with having some classes being "skill" classes and others be "combat" classes, is that in the current system, or anything resembling it, skill challenges and combat challenges are hugely asymmetrical.
* A combat challenge (fighting a dragon, for instance), takes a relatively large amount of time, involves a large number of subsystems, has the capacity to support complex tactics and strategy, and involves lots of interplay and exciting events.
* A skill challenge (disarming a trap, for instance), takes 1-3 die rolls and is over in about a minute, or less.
* Social interaction is often mentioned as a skill challenge that takes significant real-time. However, the amount of real-time this takes is completely separate from how skilled the characters are. A character with lousy Diplomacy can spend just as long talking to the prince as a Diplomancer. And the actual skill-based part is still just a couple die rolls.


For this reason, "good at combat" vs "good at skills" is not a viable trade-off. It's being useful for up to 75% of the time, vs being useful for 5% of the time (real-time, not game-time, because that's what matters).

If you do want it to be viable, you need significant system changes - where skill challenges expand to 4E-style and beyond, and combat gets simplified and shortened to some extent.

[DracoDruid]

Hey guys, you can try in helping on something out.
It's not quite urgent but I would like to make it fix:

You know, my plan right now is to make 4x2 core classes.
Those 2 variants per basic class (warrior, mage, priest, rogue) should have the same "main aspect" but should achieve that on different/opposite parts.

Example:

WARRIOR - Martial Artist, Master of Combat
Barbarian - Sheer Power, Brute force, Overwhelming Offense
Fighter - Cunning and finesse, disciplined, tactical combat

MAGE - Arcane Power
Sorcerer - Innate Magic, unreliable effects and power
Wizard - Study, Logic, fundamental laws of magic

PRIEST - Faith as fundamental Power source
Cleric - Faith into a higher purpose/being/force, divine guidance
??? - HERE I NEED YOUR HELP!

ROGUE - Skillful and cunning experts
Rogue - Master of the City, Scoundrel, Swashbuckler, Agent/Spy, Con-Artist
Scout - Explorer, (Bounty-) Hunter, Pathfinder, Animal Tamer


Ok so you see my approach. I am actually not quite sure about MOST those class guidelines, but I think its a good start.
But especially the Priest classes make my head ache. The two priest variants should vary in there approach to faith and divine power.
I thought about this one:

Paragon - While the Priest prays to a higher might than himself, the Paragon believes in the divine inside himself. He constantly tries to break the boundaries of his own existence and eventually reaches transcendency.

[Calibron]

For the second "priest" spot you could have something along the lines of a Knight Templar which works a lot like a Paladin, except it's dedicated to any cause and gets a lot of social bonuses with the church hierarchy(or similar) and anyone dependent or extremely friendly with the church. You could also name them something like Zealot, Missionary, or Dedicated.

[Aktariel]

Basically, with the priest/cleric distinction, you're running into the wizard/sorcerer attempted distinction. While the latter can be explained - logical vs innate magic, the former is not as easy.

Why?

For the simple reason that they both wield divine power. You know, as in, power that comes from believing in something greater than oneself. You could, I suppose, basically make it into a bullshit law/chaos distinction, controlled prayer vs power channel, Catholic Inquisitor vs Hair-Shirted hermit, but I don't know how it will work. At the very least, it will be a fine line to walk.

Bottom line is, you can't really have "innate divine power."

[Iaimeki]

If I were doing it, I'd divide it based on one of the more common distinctions between religious orders in the real world, temporal versus clerical authority, and whether to be in the world or to try to escape from it.

Paladins are holy warriors fighting for leaders who rule by divine right; they're active in the world and at all inclined to withdraw from it, and view themselves as leading by example and meeting tests of their virtue as challenges when pursuing their holy duties. Clerics cleanse themselves through asceticism and cloistering, trying to achieve higher standards of purity and so thereby bring themselves closer to the divinity they serve. They disdain politics and if they recognize any ruler at all, it's only holier members of their own order.

[Username17]

If 4e D&D has taught us anything, it is that if you are going to rigidly define roles and only have 8 character classes, that you should have a damn good idea of what those roles actually are. The 4e roles of guy who stands in front, guy who does more damage, guy who buffs and heals the party, and guy who does damage to groups of enemies standing close together is bullshit, but it's at least an attempt at methodology.

It looks like you have four "power sources" to use corny 4e lingo:

• Faith/divine power
• Training: Martial
• Training: Magical
• Training: Commoner

And that's fine, but you have to come to grips with the fact that this in no way actually tells us what any of these characters do. Also, you'll have to come to grips with the fact that one of these things is not like the other because while a Knight, a Priest, and a Guilder are all entitled to food and equipment in a medieval setting, a Commoner is not. One of these guys is entitled to just a 1000 Calories a day and a stick, while the rest of them get to eat chicken and use steel.

But seriously, what actual roles do you intend? Your character classes seem to be largely divided into whether they are big risks/big rewards or slow and steady. And that's not really a terribly good idea. Big Risks/Big Rewards classes generally speaking outperform every other class unless and until they get everyone killed by repeatedly failing on their super smack downs.

---

A possible set of roles might be something like this:

• Controller
• Killer
• Responder

The idea is that at this point a Controller keeps bad things from happening to the team by juggling enemies and manipulating terrain. The Killer puts up numbers and threatens things in a direct fashion. The Responder patches holes, solves problems, and heals team members. So a Controller slows down enemy accomplishments or speeds up team accomplishments; a Killer is easy to play and gets a lot done towards accomplishing things; and the Responder resets situations so that the team can still accomplish things before they run out of second chances. A team with more Killers proceeds to victory or defeat faster, a team with more Responders proceeds to victory or defeat slower, and Controllers can go either way depending upon their choices.

Then you can put in your four power sources, which I suggest to be estate derivative:

• Temporal Power: Martial Training
• Divine Authority: Sacred Training
• Guild Authority: Secret Training
• Magical Power: Arcane Training

Then you can split things up so that things are a little bit varied:

• Swashbuckler (Martial Controller)
• Warrior (Martial Killer)
• Cleric (Divine Responder)
• Inquisitor (Divine Killer)
• Guild Enforcer (Secret Killer)
• Gadgeteer (Secret Controller)
• Elementalist (Magical Responder
• Illusionist (Magical Controller)

That would work. But you should have an eye for what you want the classes to do in addition to just throwing around parity for parity's sake.

-Username17