Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[Wiseman]

Does earth glide (and ice glide) allow you to to phase through stone/ice based attacks like you can phase through normal stone. Say someone shoots a sling bullet at an earth elemental? Would they be immune to it?

[Meikle641]

standard sling bullets are lead, at least IRL. The SRD even says that stones aren't as dense as bullets, so it fits.

"You can hurl ordinary stones with a sling, but stones are not as dense or as round as bullets. Thus, such an attack deals damage as if the weapon were designed for a creature one size category smaller than you and you take a –1 penalty on attack rolls."

[Wiseman]

Interesting fact, but doesn't actually answer my question. How about stones thrown by a giant? Or a stalagmite spell or something that uses what they can glide through to attack?

[Prak]

I think that's going to have to be DM MTP decision, I doubt there's a rule on that anywhere.

[Schleiermacher]

I think that's going to have to be DM MTP decision, I doubt there's a rule on that anywhere.

This. Or, strictly speaking the answer is "no" because abilities do what they say they do, and Earth Glide makes no mention of working as a defense, only for movement. Personally I'd rule that Earth Glide is an act of will (Elementals don't just fall through the ground after all) and an Elemental could ignore attacks from stone weapons by readying an action to do so.

[Prak]

Yeah, I'd probably say it's a move action to earth glide and it would require the elemental to ready that.

And then they could also just ready a move action to drop into the ground to avoid the attack.

[fectin]

There's reasonable rulings either way. I'd point out that a fly speed doesn't make you immune to an air elemental's slam attack, so movement modes don't by themselves make you immune to the medium they allow you to move through.

[Insomniac]

After reading the OSSR for Tome of Magic, I want to know what if anything could have been done to make a skill-based magical system work. Is that just a TOTAL non-starter in a level-based d20 system or could their be some way for it to be worthwhile?

[Ancient History]

Not really. To quote Frank from that thread:

See, any skill system it is possible to have is either going to have a 1:1 correspondence with level or it isn't. Those are literally the only two options. And if your skill system is exactly the same as levels, shifting spellcasting from level to skill is pointless. While if your skill system isn't exactly the same as levels, then setting spellcasting to “not levels” makes it broken. There's no middle ground possible. The Truename Magic was fucked from a conceptual level long before they handed it to C-listers to try (and fail) to make something out of.

To maybe illustrate the point better, depending on how your character is built their effective skill - with all appropriate bonuses and/or magic items - can be huge. Right off the RNG. This doesn't sound too bad from a min-maxing perspective, but it means that you can have characters who punch significantly above their weight class, because skills aren't particularly valued in d20 and skill boosts tend to be plentiful. There are psionic items which casually thrown around a +10 bonus, for example - that's effectively a five level boost.

So how do you keep PCs and NPCs from punching above their weight class? Well, you can set a level limit to their abilities - as Truenamers did, by limiting at what level they could get certain utterances and crap - but then you're effectively back to just having skill == level. Or you can fiddle with the DCs to account for the munchkindom, in which case you're again trying to set skill == level, you've just nerfed the DCs along an imaginary munchkin curve that may or may not conform to reality. Truenaming in ToM tried to do both, and ended up completely unable to achieve pretty much any of its aims.

[fectin]

Frank's specific argument there is bad though - spellcasting already has a non-1:1 relation with levels. It doesn't even have a k:1 relation; it's on some sort of curve. So, transitioning spellcasting to skill is not pointless as argued, and setting it to "not levels" is the status quo.

[Blicero]

Frank's specific argument there is bad though - spellcasting already has a non-1:1 relation with levels. It doesn't even have a k:1 relation; it's on some sort of curve. So, transitioning spellcasting to skill is not pointless as argued, and setting it to "not levels" is the status quo.

Frank seems to be talking about 1:1 correspondences in the sense of bijections, not in the sense of the identity function. For any given spellcasting class, there is a unique class level associated with gaining access to a given spell level. And nothing you do can change that.

[tussock]

The interesting trick you can pull off with non-level powers isn't really worth it.

You can cap all power chains by character level, and then people can choose to take less level-cap powers in exchange for lower-level stuff which is still somehow useful. Instead of 3 capped skills, you can take 2 capped, and ever more low level utility stuff, at your option. Mutants & Masterminds does that, IIRC.

That's got very little to do with the default d20 skill system though, which has both an unlimited number of skills per character and extremely friable caps. 3e Fighters and Monks also say that any number of low-level abilities are always going to end up being useless, so you can't let people trade out all their caps. Trading out any caps also makes you worse in almost all cases, but people enjoy trying, so there's your trick.


Alternately, just write up some skill stuff that's broken and ask people to play nicely, like GURPS does for various things. Flying, invisible, mind controller, just not that expensive, but it's also not much fun to win that hard.

[fectin]

Total spells available by level for a wizard, ignoring cantrips and intelligence:
1,2,3,5,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,34,36
Same, for a sorcerer:
3,4,5,9,10,14,16,20,22,26,28,32,34,38,40,44,46,50,52,54

Wizard is almost linear, if you ignore part of it, but sorcerer is not. Either way, there is no consistent correspondence with level. Same with total spell levels. Sorcerer again:
3,4,5,12,14,25,30,45,52, etc.

Highest spell level is almost plausible, but there, sorcerer is a level behind. (Which is disregarding that the thing it almost corresponds too is class level, while characters advance by character level). But that's a stupid measure anyway, because suggests that the Warlock is broken (gets power access on a tier system with sudden jumps at a few levels).

And that's the most favorable comparison. If you roll bards in, the whole thing is risibly false.

[John Magnum]

If your argument starts with the assumption that Sorceror is balanced with Wizard and concludes that being ahead or behind by a spell level is no big deal, something has badly derailed your train of thought.

Guess I'll start seriously considering some 7/10ths spellcasting PrCs!

[Reynard]

> But that's a stupid measure anyway, because suggests that the Warlock is broken
Well. That proves it then.

[fectin]

But the entire argument is a non-sequitur if you don't assume the system is balanced to start with. "Any changes are either no real difference or make things unbalanced" is semantically null unless "making things unbalanced" is a change. So, if you're really arguing that, I concede that the original argument could instead be bad in a different way.

[OgreBattle]

After reading the OSSR for Tome of Magic, I want to know what if anything could have been done to make a skill-based magical system work. Is that just a TOTAL non-starter in a level-based d20 system or could their be some way for it to be worthwhile?

Ain't the Tome of Prowess's skill-feats basically an example of "previously exclusively magical effects that interact with the skill system"?

As mentioned, the important part is that certain powers come online based on what skill rank you've achieved, which basically means what level you're at.

If your skill-magic system uses different skills for different spells though that at least uses the skill system as a way to limit what spells characters have access to.

[Username17]

But the entire argument is a non-sequitur if you don't assume the system is balanced to start with. "Any changes are either no real difference or make things unbalanced" is semantically null unless "making things unbalanced" is a change. So, if you're really arguing that, I concede that the original argument could instead be bad in a different way.

Things are balanced or unbalanced with respect to level. If you replace level in an equation with anything else, then you will at best have no difference at all. Any other possible result is that it will be less balanced with respect to level.

A skill based casting system is by definition less balanced to level than a level based casting system. I genuinely don't understand why this seems to be hard for you to grasp.

-Username17

[Prak]

The only way to make skill-based magic even vaguely balanced is if you tie skill mods directly to level, like I did with Midgard, and even then it's not really balanced because the people who want to be main casters will select "Binding-Focused" and have level+3 as their caster level and the people who just want a minor trick or something they don't really care much about will select "Deception-[tier 1]" will have a caster level of 1/4 character level. Their horizontal power relies on them putting skill points into knowing spell lists.

[Ice9]

Total spells available by level for a wizard, ignoring cantrips and intelligence:
1,2,3,5,6,8,10,12,14,16,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,34,36
...

I think you're talking about something entirely different. Spellcasting is 1:1 to level in that, for example, a Wizard gets 5th level spells at 9th level, not earlier or later. Not in that the progression is linear.

Skill bonus does not correspond to level. For example it's possible for one character to have a +23 bonus at 1st level, and for a different character not to have that until 20th level. So if you base spells off that, you have either a 1st level character that can throw out high level spells, or a 20th level character stuck to low level spells.

[fectin]

A skill based casting system is by definition less balanced to level than a level based casting system. I genuinely don't understand why this seems to be hard for you to grasp.

Because your claim is not obviously true, and your support for it is incoherent.
It's as though you've said that Grover Cleveland was the greatest US president, and when questioned followed up by defining greatness as being named "Grover."

I'm not at all clear what meaning of 'balanced' would cause you to claim that spells based on levels is balanced in any useful way that spells based on skills is not. There is no useful independently predictable performance across different classes, nor across character levels, nor from one level to the next of a given class (leaving aside that everyone sucks equally at level one). What balance are you even comparing?

On top of that, it's trivial to construct a counterexample.
Start with a Warlock, and modify as follows:
- Instead of making normal attack rolls for Eldritch Blast, make spellcraft checks and resolve as though the check result were the attack roll result.
- To use an invocation you must make a spellcraft check (DC10)
How is this less balanced than a normal warlock?

[OgreBattle]

Fantasy Craft attempts to apply MAD to casters, with spells known, spell power, and something else I forget tied to 3 different stats.

Are there any games systems where MAD works the way they intend though?
Where damage/accuracy/defense/stamina/etc. stats really do make for a variety of functional characters.

[Username17]

On top of that, it's trivial to construct a counterexample.
Start with a Warlock, and modify as follows:
- Instead of making normal attack rolls for Eldritch Blast

I'm going to stop you there, because that isn't a counter example of anything. The postulate is and was that balancing things was best accomplished by tying them to level. On the grounds that level is the measure of how powerful you are supposed to be, and it is fucking obvious that tying your power outputs to a measure of ideal character power is going to give you a better correspondence between ideal character power and actual character power than tying it to something else.

Your supposed counter example is to hypothesize replacing something which is already not tied to level (and indeed, one where the level dependent bonuses are not even the largest term) with some other non-level dependent tie. Is it somehow difficult for you to process how that's not a counterexample? How it looks like you're not even having this conversation? It's a total fucking nonsequitur, and it looks on repeated reviewings that you are either huffing paint or trolling the thread. Either way, stop it.

-Username17

[fbmf]

I'm not at all clear what meaning of 'balanced' would cause you to claim that spells based on levels is balanced in any useful way that spells based on skills is not.

Nobody holds a gun to your head and forces you to put max ranks in any skill, but your level is always the maximum number allowed by your experience total. Having a consistent number is more balanced than a variable number.

Game On,
fbmf

[fectin]

Having a consistent number is more balanced than a variable number.

See, I have a hard time accepting that as the claim, because it's facially incorrect. That theory says that Behilder Mage is a well-balanced class (regular, predictable progression). Not only that, but Beholder Mage is somehow more "balanced to level" than any possible skill-based system.