Everyone is Magic - Magic Level Progression

[Harshax]

I've toyed with this idea over the years, but haven't played a game of d20/OGL in quite some time. The recent thread on magic universities has me thinking about the best way to maintain character differentiation when everyone is seemingly playing a magic user.

In short: I've never understood why Caster Level wasn't calculated like BAB.

The game assumes that regardless of class, a character's BAB improved even if they were a commoner or a wizard. This smacks of the same egotism that suggests just because you're good at programming Python, you're also good at carpentry, which is completely false, stupid, and insulting to members of both professions that study those trades.

Even so, a wizard (and commoners) gets better at fighting even though they spend absolutely zero time studying martial arts, whereas a fighter who dabbles in magic only gets better at magic if they continue to study magic.

My proposal is to base Caster Level on the inverse of BAB. If you have a Poor BAB (half character level, rounded down), you have a Good CL.

A 19/1 Wizard/Fighter has a BAB of +10 and a CL of +19.
A 19/1 Fighter/Wizard has a BAB of +19 and a CL of +10.
A 20th Level Cleric has a BAB and CL of +15.
A 20 Barbarian has a BAB of +20 and a CL of +10 too. But he doesn't know any spells. If he finds an item that let's him cast a Druid spell at his CL, then the spell will work as if cast at a 10th Level of potency.

Calculating ML in this way nerfs the cleric in a way that harkens back to earlier editions of D&D in that if the character remains a cleric throughout her career, her spell level caps at 8th Level. If Clerics didn't get spells at 1st level, their progressions would cap at 7th Level just like prior editions. Since they're the original Fighter/Magic-User, this makes a lot of sense to me.

That may not jive with people who don't see anything wrong with the Cleric as is. A lot of justification for Clerics has been that their Power comes from the Gawds or whatever. This allowed them to be decent warriors, with decent hitpoints and awesome spells, because some Almighty was channeling through them. Ok, fine. But this justification also made Clerics the best class at everything and horribly unbalanced. Nerfing Clerics this way could just as well be justified with the idea that part of your discipline involves the kind of training and dedication that proves you're a worthy vessel for a deity's might in the first place.

This solution also trues up the value of martial classes in general, by making the dip in a magic class continue to pay off dividends throughout the characters lifetime. Dipping into the Fighter class gave you access to all the armor, most all the weapons, a feat and a bump in BAB right off the bat. That dip continues to reap benefits at later levels because you will forever more have access to Fighter specific magic items and a reason to buy armor that doesn't interfere with spellcasting.

There's no reason Magic Use shouldn't work the same way. Everyone is magic in D&D, because there is no RAW that prevents anyone from becoming a Wizard or Cleric or other spell casting class at any time during their career, so the idea that your POW or Elan or Magicalness is tied to the Heroic-ness of your character (level) doesn't seem absurd at all.

Apologies in advance if this is old hat or exists in some 3rd party product.

[erik]

In the tome set of house rules character level = caster level.

[Harshax]

In the tome set of house rules character level = caster level.

On a board visited by so many industry people, this doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

[Judging__Eagle]

You might also want to look up Kaelik's Errata for [Tome] on the "It's My Own Invention" forum's stickied post regarding collective [Tome] material.

While the majority of [Tome] talks around certain issues w/ spellcasters; Kaelik addresses certain edge-case issues that penalize full spellcasters, while also not making them any more interesting.

Notable changes:

Spell Save DCs scale to caster level + attribute; not spell level + attribute {making 1st level spells just as potent; even if tactically/ operationally/ strategically weaker than highest level spells}

Reworked Metamagic feats enough that I won't cry when a newbie spellcaster player has to use them.

Imposed a hard cap on number of simultaneously active buffs a creature can have. Borrowing from the Book of Gears notion of there having to be a cap on magical gear that isn't "lol; whatever you can get away with".

[Harshax]

Those notable changes also make sense to me. Some other facets that have come to mind:

BAB should be expanded in definition as a general indication of exceptional and extraordinary training in mundane (I forget the actual distinction) skills, with the possible exception of Knowledge Skills. Alternatively, there is no cross class penalty, class skills use a Max Rank equal to Level, and everything else uses BAB.

Pure magician types just spend more time learning how to grow gills and fins, transform wholey into fish, or manipulating the surface tension of water so they can walk across the top of it instead of learning how to actually swim.

BAB v CL as a sliding scale between the mundane and the supernatural also allows for the introduction of a Forsaken type class ... a class who is the anathema to magic in every way. Like a Barbarian class without all the imperialist racism against tribal cultures. The Forsaken (a name I borrowed from the Rogue variant ToME) exudes antimagic. Their BAB would be Spell Resistance against all magic, passive, harmful or beneficial, and it could scale from 1 at first Level to 30 at 20th Level and their BAB and Max Skill would cap at the same rate. A 20th Level Forsake would have a BAB of +30/+25/+20/+15/+10/+5 and a Zero CL through-out. A Forsake who tried to dabble in magic would have to constant overcome their own SR to cast spells and would be an absolutely foolish multi-class choice.

I know this BAB/CL concept makes lots of classes redundant. Rogues as skill monkeys can be easily mimicked by exceptionally intelligence fighters, except their specialized attack options make up for the generalized combat superiority of the Fighter. I'm cool with this, because D&D's Fighters and Thieves made it very difficult to imitate classic Sword & Sorcery archetypes. I'd probably just rename Rogue to Assassin or Sniper too.

[Mask_De_H]

Harsh that Forsaken idea is super fucking terrible. Using BAB as a balancing point for jack and/or shit is also terrible, but keeping it in was necessary in Tome for backwards compatibility purposes. Your ideas are bad and you should feel bad for them.

If you want to meaningfully differentiate people, give them meaningfully different abilities. Full Stop.

[deaddmwalking]

Giving all characters access to magic is not a bad thing. Now, obviously a character with spells of half the level of the wizard's spells isn't getting 'level appropriate abilities', but they are adding bunches of problem solving options, so it's cetainly a net benefit.

Practically, you have to decide if characters need a casting stat of 10+spell level and/or whether they get to pick.

It doesn't solve underlying problems, but it clearly mitigates them to an extent.

Edit - But yeah - Forsaken isn't worth the conceptual space. BAB as skills isn't worthwhile either.

[Harshax]

An anti-magic character would have a lot of problems and require a significant number of abilities to deal with all the indirect ways people could fuck them with magic.

No harm trying to see a mechanic to its breaking point.

Your ideas are bad and you should feel bad for them.

Haha. Good old MDH. When he stops insulting, that's when I worry!

Using BAB as a balancing point for jack and/or shit is also terrible, but keeping it in was necessary in Tome for backwards compatibility purposes.

BAB is currency. It has been used as justification for Fighters dominance when the rest of the game didn't support that dominance yet magic-users get it for reasons. It isn't the most sound basis for a leveling economy, but to ignore it adds to the exponential equation of the quadratic wizard.

Lamentation of the Flame Princess doesn't give Magic-Users any increase To-Hit probability and I think that's a sound design decision. I also think Hit Points are another thing that is given away in D&D. For all the dumb-dumb reasons HP increases with Level, none of them justify why a wizard gets more.

[Voss]

BAB (or level) as skills is a net loss, even for people with max BAB. It is downright baffling.

Forsaken is terrible and just fucks the math into giving up and crying.

The BAB+CL = 30 idea is...vague at best. Caster level is rarely the problem, spell access is. Truthfully, this doesn't fix a damn thing at levels that matter. Sure someone can fuck around and be slightly worse at 19th or 20th level...but that almost never matters, and certainly doesn't matter at 3rd-10th level when you can exploit the hell out of this 'system.'

The problem with clerics isn't that they're god-botherers. It is that they're good at everything and can easily be better than specialists in their off-areas. Your system actually doubles down and insists that this is the place where everyone wants to be, and every character should be designed with painstaking multi-classing to exploit the system.

BAB is currency. It has been used as justification for Fighters dominance when the rest of the game didn't support that dominance yet magic-users get it for reasons. It isn't the most sound basis for a leveling economy, but to ignore it adds to the exponential equation of the quadratic wizard.

No... BAB is part of the math that allows characters to function in a level appropriate way. Fucking with it produces 5e results where murder squads consist of hiring 1/4 CR npcs with multiple attacks.

No one sane suggests BAB is a justification for fighter dominance. That doesn't even make sense given that fighters are shit.
BAB is not the problem. It isn't even tangentially related to the problem. Not being able to contribute to things that aren't fights (and at higher levels, not contributing to fights) is the problem.

Lamentation of the Flame Princess doesn't give Magic-Users any increase To-Hit probability and I think that's a sound design decision. I also think Hit Points are another thing that is given away in D&D. For all the dumb-dumb reasons HP increases with Level, none of them justify why a wizard gets more.

Again, the math of the system requires HP progression. If wizards don't get hit points, they die to trivial, non-level appropriate crap. If some classes are on the progression train and others don't progress, shit just falls apart. Not only does every encounter turn into a fuck-fest where aspiring wizards just die, but the first wizard to fireball wins wizarding forever.

As for Snivelling of Immolated Heiresses, .. no idea. It depends how the other mechanics shake out. If they never make attack rolls, it doesn't fucking matter if they get hit progression. You can totally make wizards (or clerics) like that in D&D (at least 3e or before), and have -20 or +50 BAB make no damn difference in their lives.

[Harshax]

Your system actually doubles down and insists that this is the place where everyone wants to be, and every character should be designed with painstaking multi-classing to exploit the system.

I can't argue here. In a world where a player can multiclass at will and magic and the will of gods are real its hard to imagine anyone that could maintain a reality tunnel devoid on anything supernatural. It just seems impossible that anyone could or would avoid magic at all costs. There are tons of spells that mesh incredibly well with mundane endeavors. 3rd-ish D&D should run a lot like Glorantha in my opinion.

EDIT: I've forgotten that CL means the effective level that a spell is cast. I was going a tad further with the definition and was implying that CL was also spell access. I see my mistake now.

[RobbyPants]

BAB is currency. It has been used as justification for Fighters dominance when the rest of the game didn't support that dominance yet magic-users get it for reasons. It isn't the most sound basis for a leveling economy, but to ignore it adds to the exponential equation of the quadratic wizard.

Unless you have BAB do something or grant access to things that are good, it really isn't a currency of note.

Doling out things like Tome [combat] feats or using Tome edge mechanics is a way to make people care more about BAB, but spells are still superior and are what casters actually care about.

You could make a standard PHB wizard full BAB and it wouldn't really matter that much; what they care about is their full casting progression and the spells they get. So, worrying that they get 1/2 BAB "for free" seems to be missing the mark. So long as casters get good class features that define the playspace at their level and BAB doesn't grant those abilities, this seems like a moot point.

[Voss]

Your system actually doubles down and insists that this is the place where everyone wants to be, and every character should be designed with painstaking multi-classing to exploit the system.

I can't argue here. In a world where a player can multiclass at will and magic and the will of gods are real its hard to imagine anyone that could maintain a reality tunnel devoid on anything supernatural. It just seems impossible that anyone could or would avoid magic at all costs. There are tons of spells that mesh incredibly well with mundane endeavors. 3rd-ish D&D should run a lot like Glorantha in my opinion.

Then don't make a fucking argument. D&D spells don't mesh at all with mundane endeavors. They replace them.

[Harshax]

Agreed.

Problems with spell access and CL have always been for the players who don't want to be straight wizards.

So, one suggestion; untested; was that BAB was also your max skill rank. It forces magic-users to solve all their problems with magic. This impacts how much power a wizard can devote to going nova. A 20th Level wizard can only succeed at a DC30 skill check 5% of the time. A 20th Level Fighter has a 50%. Obviously this doesn't take into account items. But even then, magic-items also cap with level, so you have to decide whether you want to have a very high general Athletic Skill, Fly or Swim or Waterbreathing as a spell, or some magic item that counts against the sum of magic you should have for your experience level. But the choice between using magic or using expertise is one that counts against a limit defined entirely by Level.

I've read a little of TOME and either I shouldn't post or you shouldn't argue with me until I've read the entirety of it and more carefully measured the comments I want to make on this board. What I've read of TOME piles on more of the things that eventually drove me away from d20. There's too many options (for me).

My comments should only be in the context of a game where everyone is to some degree a spell caster. Personally, I think D&D is that game by default, but for argument sake I'm only talking about a Harry Potter themed setting.

[Voss]

I wasn't referencing TOME. I don't actually care about it at all. I'm referencing the straight-up out of the book system.

And your untested suggestion is still awful. Blatantly so.
For one, BAB as max skill rank is a reduction in max skill rank, even for people with max BAB. (as by the book it is level+3)

Two, it affects novaing not at all, because scrolls and wands exist, and that is where you stick utility shit.

Three, those numbers should be blatantly and obviously terrible to everyone. 50% skill success rate is a shitty and terrible thing. Think of a carpenter or Python programmer (or both, because that isn't a particularly absurd skill combination) that throws out half of what they do. Ridiculous. Meanwhile, the spellcaster just says fuck it and succeeds 100% of the time on everything skill related... because that is what replacing skills with spells does.

That is one of the problems with the D&D library of spells, and it has nothing at all to with skills or BAB, so fucking around with them to fix the problem does nothing at all.

Fourth, fucking around with 'what happens at 20th level' is meaningless and irrelevant. Game's over, go home. Mess around with all the stuff that happens until that point.

If you want to focus on more magic and abilities that matter, toss the base classes, pre-reqs and just let people wander into prestige classes at first level and get capstone abilities at 5th. Then people can play what they signed up for for the majority of the campaign and not waste time with theoretical shit that doesn't matter at level cap.

[Harshax]

I know you're not trying to prove my point Voss, but you are. The chance of failure, even at an even 50%, is precisely why you're rolling dice in the first place. If your solution to facing failure half the time is to blow a kleenex worth of your load from a limited selection of spells and magic items, then I have succeeded at calling your bluff and challenged you, coward. That probability doesn't even take into account general ability score increases, skill focus feats, cross-skill synergies, aid-another or taking ten, just to name a handful of ways the game lets you accomplish shit without magic. You're character isn't an adventurer, he's an accountant and he's played by an actuary.

[deaddmwalking]

It doesn't matter if martials and casters are equally good at skills (at least not in a bad way) because skills tend to stop mattering. Balance ceases to matter when you learn to fly . There's no benefit to reducing access to skills. If anything, go the opposite direction. Give everyone 8+Int skill points per level and forget about class skills, and your game will only improve.

[Harshax]

A lot to think about. For sure. But on paper, their is a limited number of times you can cast Fly. Every time you choose fly, you don't memorize Fireball or Dispel Magic. I'm struggling with how to make those decision meaningful without cranking all the non-magic aspects of the game up to 11.

[deaddmwalking]

If fighters can cast fly (but at a later level than wizards) they will pull their weight better. The party will end up with more diversified 'utility' spells.

[GâtFromKI]

A lot to think about. For sure. But on paper, their is a limited number of times you can cast Fly. Every time you choose fly, you don't memorize Fireball or Dispel Magic. I'm struggling with how to make those decision meaningful without cranking all the non-magic aspects of the game up to 11.

Since skills don't allow to remove magic or create an explosion, you're enforcing deaddm's point: skill/magic balance cease to exist at the moment magic begin to do stuff skill can't.

When the wizard can chose between water breathing, fly and dispel magic, the skilled character should have the choice between succeeding every climb check ever, holding his breath during 1 day, or being able to break magic with his bare hands. At that point, choosing between +5% swim or +5% climb isn't even a thing.

[OgreBattle]

How about Fighters get slots to equip buff spells that are always on and count as supernatural, so they are functionally cleric archers but without so much book keeping

[Harshax]

From the responses I've read, I understand better that Magic is really Player Fiat or the three-fingered-salute to conflict resolution. Never thought about it that way, but it is true. I agree that magic and skills aren't even on the same plane of existence and that there doesn't seem to be a paradigm where they can exist along the same axis.

Looking at my 3.5 PH, 160 pages of the rules focus on creating characters, earning feats, using skills, engaging in combat and overcoming conflicts with those attributes. These are all rules to model the world and interact with it in a mundane way. Then they introduce magic which circumvents standard conflict resolution by making the conflict cease to exist.

The problem with wizards then, is they get a free dip in the pool of being treated fairly by skills and rules and then they get a heaping dose of magic that says "fuck you rules". So the only thing that makes sense to balance Fighters and Wizards is for Wizard Levels to only count toward increasing spell casting prowess. That's it. They don't get skill points, feats, hit points, saves ... nothing. Magic is the anathema of mundane or mortal interaction with the world, so the pursuit of magic shouldn't make you better at resolving conflicts in mundane ways. Which is counter-intuitive because you can get better at picking locks by killing ogres, I know.

Trying to change the rules is going to make a lot of people's faces melt in rage. People don't want to play squishy wizards that can only do one thing a day. That was a huge design requirement in the early days of 3E. That experiment seems to have broken the game or made it more broken depending on what you thought of magic-users from previous editions. It also makes it seemingly impossible to create a 1st Level Wizard because you don't get zip to build your character. Maybe 1st Level Wizards are by-the-book and subsequent levels in wizard have only spell casting benefits and nothing more. I don't know ... I'm just riffing right now.

Making Magic Progression work this way makes players choose how much they want to invest in infinite-rule-breaking-power and how much they want to be able to play by the rules and mitigate conflict and risk just like everybody else. It also makes getting to 9th Level Spells take the same amount of time or longer depending on player skill and adversity to risk. Most likely, the latter. Running around without many Hit Points or no extra feats is challenging, but the reward is that you can ignore a lot of problems very quickly. More than likely, characters are going to multiclass between classes that give the character a certain level of sustainability and wizard until they have enough magic to circumvent all DM conflict. No idea what that will look like but maybe this solution will smooth out the power curve so that linear fighters can stay abreast.

I think this also requires going back to the drawing board about the definition of Hit Points. There are some really old The Dragon articles or modules that suggesting doling out Hit Point damage as a way of depleting a character's resolve instead of ignoring failure or having failure equate to finality. I need to find one as an example. I think maybe I need to go back to that concept and introduce a new way to handle conflict and mitigate failure.

For example ...
I decide a gorge separates the characters from their goal. There are a couple ways to get past the gorge. Ignoring magic for a moment: You can climb down to the bottom and then back up. Depending on width you might be able to jump across it. Local materials might be available to let you build a bridge. A rope and a well placed arrow might let you navigate using equipment you've brought with you. All of these options have a Difficulty Class or guidelines for how to set the DC.

If your skill check fails, then what? It's a waste of everyone's time and doubly mine if I stop the adventure there and say you don't cross the gorge. We all go home unhappy and nobody comes back because dead-end adventures are a waste of everyone's fucking time. It's also pointless and breaks suspension of disbelief if you just keep rolling until you succeed. The way to handle conflict failure then is to associate Hit Point damage with failure based on how badly you botch your roll, but then continue on.

So if a player fails to jump the gorge, they don't just die, they get dinged up, scratched, crash into the side of the cliff and take some damage but scramble up the other side so we can all move forward with the adventure. Maybe they take so much damage that they do die or maybe they're incapacitated and suffer a persistent penalty for the rest of the session - all depends on how you and your players want to handle it. The point is, I can use Hit Points to mitigate failure.

So maybe I need to use the SW/Modern concept of Hit Points and Injury Points. Where Resolve (Hit Points) are the tokens you spend because you botched a skill attempt. Resolve can then be spent while wasting energy doing something as simple as trying to find a secret door, slipping into a gorge, or being bruised by a goblin attack. These are the points that refresh quickly and keep the game moving. Maybe they make up your session pool and when you've expended them due to stupid decisions or bad luck, that's when your character is in danger of losing the game (dying). Injury points are mortal wounds that take a while to heal and really indicate whether you're near Death's door.

Then way way over here is magic. Magic says, "Fuck you DM". I'm flying over the chasm.

I know I've completely ended up on the opposite end of this thread's subject line, but if you've made it this far, thanks for reading.

[deaddmwalking]

It's funny, because I took it from the title and the first post that 'everyone gets magic'. Which is actually a decent place to start.

You know how Rangers get an Animal Companion like a Druid 4 levels higher?

If you let every class pick up spells like their favorite spell casting class, just 4 levels lower, your game will work just fine.

That would mean every 5th level Fighter could choose to cast 1st level spells like a Wizard or a Druid or a Cleric. And you know what - that's cool. Suddenly your Fighter gets True Strike or Cure Light Wounds, so they're not entirely dependent on others to give them the things they need.

[Voss]

I know you're not trying to prove my point Voss, but you are. The chance of failure, even at an even 50%, is precisely why you're rolling dice in the first place. If your solution to facing failure half the time is to blow a kleenex worth of your load from a limited selection of spells and magic items, then I have succeeded at calling your bluff and challenged you, coward. That probability doesn't even take into account general ability score increases, skill focus feats, cross-skill synergies, aid-another or taking ten, just to name a handful of ways the game lets you accomplish shit without magic. You're character isn't an adventurer, he's an accountant and he's played by an actuary.

I don't know if you are willfully misunderstanding things or ran things through google translate first. By I wasn't advocating anything, let alone rolling or not rolling dice. I was explaining how the game worked, since you seemed confused on the basics, like math and how skill points work.

Futher, it actually seems to be what you wanted, since it is your proposal to give everybody caster levels and spell access so they can blow past skills rather than be stuck as mundanes as they level. This is the result of everyone being spellcasters: they get to say 'fuck it' to more and more challenges.

Sure it is more balanced, because instead of half the party, every member of the party can eventually take a shit on challenges as they come up (though many will remain woefully behind), but it explicitly encourages everyone to take a shit on that gorge to cross, wall to climb or person to bluff.

[deaddmwalking]

Voss appears to be of the opinion that planeswalkers should consider a ravine a challenge worthy of table time. That's barely true at level 1.

[Neurosis]

Something occurred to me recently, just a basic thought about full casters being the ubermentschen to the untermentschen of the DMF et al.

The thing that occurred to me is that the game has always been this way--except for 4E, which shat the bed and made everyone equally useless.

Bigby, Evard, Heward, Drawmiji, Mordenkainen, Murlynd, Otto, Rary, Tenser, these wizards with spells/magic items named after them are all PCs of people Gary actually played with. This is like...historical fact that you can look up. Now I have no doubt that in the course of inventing the game of D&D and the meta-genre of roleplaying game Gary DM'd a lot of games for a LOT of people.

But out of the LARGE bullpen of players that ol' Gary (RIP Gary) was fortunate enough to have, the fact that LIKE NINE of them opted to be Magic Users should have told Gary he had a problem from the beginning.

tl;dr the problem of "irrelevant fighters, unstoppable wizards" seems to go back to the very beginnings of the game Dungeons & Dragons. you might be all like "that is not actually news, Neurosis" which is fine, but it is something I just figured out.

Gary, if your ancestor spirit is looking down on me and listening, and I hope it is: if you are playing Smash with your friends and everyone picks Metaknight, you should immediately rethink Metaknight. Thanks for the dungeons and the dragons, and rest in peace you magnificent asshole.