Spell Points vs Vancian vs alternatives. What is the best?

[saithorthepyro]

Decided to start this up after reading through the Psionics 4e preview thread, or more accurately as it should have been called, Psionic Points vs Vancian Spellcasting, which is better?

In it, the main argument against psionic power points was that it's method of scaling gave incentive to us novas and using as high PP costing abilities as possible over and over again. Presumably the same counts if someone used the same system, adjusted to be used by wizards and sorcerers and so on. So I have a couple questions regarding this.

1. What changes would need to be made to the system to make it equivalent to Vancian Casting, if that is possible?

2. Are there other spell systems that are superior to either spell/power points or Vancian casting?

[Schleiermacher]

Well, those questions need to be a bit more spesific to be answerable because the differences between resource management mechanics are rarely, if ever as simple as "good" vs. "bad". Magic points could be best, spell slots could be, or some third system could be better than either. It depends on what you want your resource management system to do.

Now in general, vancian casting is a more versatile system than magic points because magic points very easily hit one of many failure states if you're not very mindful of what kind of abilities you design, while vancian casting can work with a wider variety of abilities. Magic points are really only the best tool for the job when you want characters to use multiple versions of basically the same abilities at different strengths, such as Cure/Cure2/Mass Cure/Cure3, and the core resource management issue is how to get the best mix of efficiency and immediate relief. When you give out qualitiatively different abilities like Cure/Neutralize Poison/Remove Fear/Revive it doesn't really serve that function anymore and you end up with basically spamming whatever powers are relevant in the situation. Vancian casting where the challenge is to prepare as well as you can for the challenges you think you'll face, and keep some flexibility for the unexpected, would be a better fit then.

But before I can say whether other systems could be superior to both, or what spell slots and magic points being equivalent would even mean, let alone whether it's possible... you'd have to tell me what your design goals are and what kind of abilities you want people to use with these systems.

[Blicero]

I think magic points are better than Vancian for modeling buff spells. In Dragon Age: Origins, for example, while they are active, buff spells reduce a caster's total available spell points. Attack spells have a one-time spell point cost as normal. All spells also have cooldowns, which prevent casters from using the same attack over and over again.

The style of Vancian I enjoy most is a combination of wizard and sorcerer casting. Each day, you prepare a fairly small number of spells out of a large set. Once you've chosen those spells, you cast them spontaneously. This accomplishes the Vancian goal of forcing casters to vary what they use, but it gives them a bit more flexibility than base Vancian. So you are encouraged to prepare rare-use spells.

[Ancient History]

The main advantages of traditional Vancian casting are flexibility and flavor. Because you can prepare whatever spells you have available up to your limits, and there are limits so you can have only a limited number of effects "on line" at any time, and because those spells are in no way bound to any stringent requirements (in most systems) they can be as simple or complex as you want. Good examples of these systems are Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Earthdawn, the latter of which used a highly modified system to achieve more-or-less the same effect only without the fire-and-forget component (and with later bells and whistles added). Ironically, Shadowrun's hacking system in its early incarnations is highly reminiscent of Vancian spellcasting, because you only have a limited amount of memory to run programs at a given time.

Flavor by itself is a vice: Call of Cthulhu runs entirely on flavorful spells that do whatever for whatever reason and interact with each other irregularly. Each spell ends up being its own unique entity, which some players like but from a game design standpoint is wasteful, inelegant, and costly in terms of having to basically create every spell from scratch. On the other hand, you don't have to memorize-and-forget CoC spells, so once a spell is in your arsenal, it's there forever.

The opposite end of the design spectrum is Shadowrun, which like CoC is a memorize-forever system, but with a very strong spell design system and philosophy in place: spells, effects, and costs are highly streamlined and efficient, making it easy to generate new spells and modify old ones, with clear boundaries on what Sorcery can and cannot do - there's a lot to recommend it, even if boiling down a Fireball to the same statline as a machine gun lacks a little flavor. Early SR editions had spells as basically individual skills, similar to the GURPS approach.

Unlike Vancian systems, SR and GURPS spells draw on other resources (damage or fatigue), to prevent them from being spammed over and over; COC sometimes has this, but the costs for each spell is individual, idiosyncratic, and not standardized in the least. It's also very discrete from straight-up spell point systems like D&D's various flavors of Psionics: you don't take X damage and deal X+Y damage, the math is a little more complicated than that by design.

Then there's World of Darkness, which bundled nominally related effects into tiers or groups (Disciplines or Paths for Vampires and Sorcerers); this is a bit of a bad marriage between the Shadowrun and the more flavorful spells of CoC or Vancian spellcasting: each individual spell or power is basically it's own unique subsystem (generally), with no organized way to generate new effects/paths/etc., but you're still looking at a magician character with a limited bag of effects. Like with Shadowrun/GURPS, to offset the continual availability, these powers have a cost (usually blood points or Willpower), although like CoC this isn't standardized in the least. Other characters have their own bundles of magical effects, usually with even less organization, and on top of that magician characters tend to get rituals (similar to CoC-style spells, but arranged in D&D-style levels to limit access). "Unholy mismatch" is the best term I've got for it.

Which brings us to the "wild grab bag of effects" for games like Mage and Unknown Armies - while some individual powers might be defined (rotes for Mage), for the most part these "systems" are so incredibly porous that they consist entirely of general guidelines for hosting your own magic tea party rather than any kind of discrete system. Limits on magicians tend to be nominal, since there are very few definitions of what they can accomplish or how they can accomplish that, or how often they can do those things they can do. Paradox/etc. can sometimes often at least a nominal cost, but nothing as structured as Shadowrun's Drain mechanic.

[hogarth]

I haven't found spell points vs. spell slots* to be any different in terms of "nova-ing"; if you're using spell slots, you're just "nova-ing" your high level spell slots instead of generic spell points.

What I dislike are X/day abilities. The start-stop-start-stop style of gameplay they encourage is lame, in my opinion.


* I prefer to reserve the term "Vancian" to refer to picking spells at the beginning of the day, which could be done with spell points or spell slots.

[saithorthepyro]

Well, those questions need to be a bit more spesific to be answerable because the differences between resource management mechanics are rarely, if ever as simple as "good" vs. "bad". Magic points could be best, spell slots could be, or some third system could be better than either. It depends on what you want your resource management system to do.

Now in general, vancian casting is a more versatile system than magic points because magic points very easily hit one of many failure states if you're not very mindful of what kind of abilities you design, while vancian casting can work with a wider variety of abilities. Magic points are really only the best tool for the job when you want characters to use multiple versions of basically the same abilities at different strengths, such as Cure/Cure2/Mass Cure/Cure3, and the core resource management issue is how to get the best mix of efficiency and immediate relief. When you give out qualitiatively different abilities like Cure/Neutralize Poison/Remove Fear/Revive it doesn't really serve that function anymore and you end up with basically spamming whatever powers are relevant in the situation. Vancian casting where the challenge is to prepare as well as you can for the challenges you think you'll face, and keep some flexibility for the unexpected, would be a better fit then.

But before I can say whether other systems could be superior to both, or what spell slots and magic points being equivalent would even mean, let alone whether it's possible... you'd have to tell me what your design goals are and what kind of abilities you want people to use with these systems.

Maybe putting it as superior is the wrong way, but I was toying with a spell points system for PF that didn't suck, and though Psionics would be a good place to start, but after reading through the thread mentioned in the OP, decided to seek more information. For other systems, I just like expanding my knowledge via the Den when possible.

[jt]

Definitely depends on what you want to do. If possible, nail down exactly what you want the system to do first. Do wizards cast spells all day? Why not? Because they get tired? Because the flow of mystic energies isn't quite right to cast that spell here? Because you can't cast the same kind of magic too many times in a row? If you have a good answer for this, consider implementing that directly.

One thing I like about Vancian magic is that it can produce situations where you still have spells, but they're not quite the ones you want - you'd rather use Knock but that door is wood so Scorching Ray will have to do. Generating situations where you have to use your resources in new ways is the best output a resource management system can give you. One downside of Vancian magic is that, to do that, it requires all spells to be roughly equally versatile. You could make spells like Polymorph or Wish take up double spell slots, but then it starts blurring the line into spell points.

One thing I like about spell points is the simplicity in tracking them. I find spending extra spell points to configure the parameters of an effect to be a good way to slow the game down though, so I'm not a huge fan of that.

I think it's worth considering new mechanics for spells; the tried-and-true list of spell points, daily, vancian, wild magic, corrupting magic, and ambient mana levels is a pretty small palette that we've had for ages and contains some real stinkers. And there's no reason magic - something entirely made up - can't have any other rules you like. To pull an example out of my ass, you can't cast any spells that share tags with any spells you've cast in the last hour. Knowing a wider range of magic thus improves your casting rate, but you can also get specialist knowledge that lets you distinguish Bone and Blood from just Necromancy. (With no comment on whether that's a good idea - just to show that it's easy to make up new ways to rate limit magic.)

[Username17]

Power Points only have advantages over slots if they provide some additional functionality. If they are limited over the same period and you spend them on the same things, power points are just a math problem to figure out how many slots you have. To the extent that they are different at all, it's that it allows you to do two things that heterogenous slots would not allow:

• Decide what the "best" power is and then manifest it over and over again for every action.
• Cash in all your weaker powers to nova harder and then have literally nothing to do with your powers for the rest of the limited power period.

Generally speaking, both of those are bad. It's more interesting to have a character use some 4th level slots, some 3rd level slots, and some 2nd level slots than it is for the same character to spam a 3rd level power for every action or to use a few more 4th level powers and then go sit in the corner with his dick in his hand. The "options" opened up by having powers be divided up into slots by the player buying the slots with power points are not good for the game. We are better off if people don't do that.

Where Power Points can sell themselves is when they actually do something other than get chunked into slots. Continuous refresh is a good one for that. In Champions you get Endurance back whenever you take a Recovery action, and you get a free Recovery after Segment 12. In Final Fantasy XI your mana regenerates a noticeable amount during raids, prompting questions of use rate. Another is non-power slot expenditures. The original PSP got drained some amount when you got attacked, causing there to be a dynamic where you were spending a hit point analog to use bigger effects. Again in Champions, you also spend Endurance to sustain some effects like Flight or Force Fields as well as small amounts to run or dodge.

If you're just going to have a fixed number of power points over a period and allow players to spend those points to buy power activations, you should probably just divide that up into slots and have the player play power cards. If you want to take advantage of the flexibility of power points with dynamic power refresh and sustaining costs and shit, then replacing with simple power slots isn't even an option.

Power points are better if you take advantage of the traits that power points have. Power points are worse if you don't. This is ultimately the answer you're going to get for pretty much any resource management system, including "all abilities usable at-will" that people might reasonably call "no resource management system."

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

I like the idea of having a spell slot that does at-will stuff, but can then be expended for a big effect that then requires rest to recharge.

Vancian magic... I feel it makes more 'sense' if you've actually spent some time physically creating talisman strips, vials, etc. that are then physically manipulated to activate. Like throwing a vial that breaks and summons a flame spirit, throwing a strip of paper that wraps around the undead's head and paralyzes them, etc.

Or shooting magic bullets outta a spell gun.

As I've spent 1000x more time reading about RPG's, settings, doing some fanciful designs, than actually playing, I'm more interested in what your spell system tells me about world building than what it means mechanically. I enjoy how Shadowrun fits in spirits and sorcery and drain. I understand D&D's a kitchen sink to do everything, but it does bug me that all these magical mechanics have no coherency and usually mutually exclusive despite role playing being focused on immersion of setting.

[Chamomile]

Power points crop up in video games a lot because they are significantly easier to program. It's unsurprising that they crop up in TTRPGs only as failed experiments inspired by video games, because the primary motive for using them in video games doesn't apply.

[Omegonthesane]

D&D has shit for world building and doesn't admit that its mechanics generate a specific setting, news at 11.

While I can see where you're coming from, if you're designing full RPGs and you're thinking in terms of what story the mechanics evoke instead of what mechanics will evoke the stories you want to tell, you're putting the cart before the horse unless you're several iterations in and the mechanics are set in stone for the broad strokes of what you wanted to tell.

(at which point you should be bending the fine details of the setting to fit the fine details of the mechanics, which hopefully already match the headlines of the setting. A bar which I hear D&D falls well short of with its attacker-wins rocket launcher tag combat in a world of wizards plotting in heavily defended fortresses.)

I suspect most stories that don't have explicit spell slots as part of the world mechanics would be better represented by "you have these at-will effects so long as one of your spell slots hasn't yet been used" than by power points. Professor X isn't meant to be out of juice after any amount of surface tier mind reading, only if he's dramatically thrown the boat out operating Cerebro or something.

[rasmuswagner]

I like the idea of having a spell slot that does at-will stuff, but can then be expended for a big effect that then requires rest to recharge.

In the fantasy heartbreaker in my head, wizards memorize a handful of spells, then let it just a little bit off the leash to produce smaller effects. To much, too soon and the spell might slip loose. And spells are big, hungry, unpredictable things.

[Thaluikhain]

Dragon Warriors had different classes work things differently, it started out with Sorcerers and Mystics as the 2 magic users (out of 4 classes in total) in the first 3 books. Sorcerers have about 4 magic points per level (or rank, because they don't call everything a "level" in DW) per day, and it costs a spell's level in MPs to cast.

In book 4, high level Sorcerers could make wands, to allow them to use the wand's magic to cast spells from one of a number of (small) lists, depending on type of wand. The wand gets 1.5MPs for every 1MP you sacrifice permanently when making it. Also a slight chance of miscasting any time you use a spell not on the list, which seemed a bad idea.

Later, book 5 introduced Elementalists, which worked much the same, except they got 3 MPs per rank in their primary element, and 1 MPs per rank in one of their two secondary elements. You also needed an special item depending on your element or pay twice as many MPs, and the items varied in price a lot, which seemed a bad idea. They had "Darkness" elementalists, which I suspect were intended as NPC only, and only for use in the scenario that was most of book 5. Each spell only used one type of MP, so no Magic the Gathering type spells.

Book 6 had warlocks, whose magic worked much the same as sorcerers, with less MPs per rank and the option of casting certain spells at the same time as one action. They made up for less than Sorcerer magic ability by also getting less than Knight fighting ability.

And, you also had the Mystic, which had a totally different way of managing magic. You cast a spell, then roll 1d20, and if you don't get less than 13 - spell level + your rank (20 auto fails), that's it, you don't get any more spells that day. Which always seemed a terrible idea to me. Unusual, not seen that elsewhere myself, probably because it looks terrible. Though, they are better at fighting than Sorcerers to make up a bit.

Vancian magic... I feel it makes more 'sense' if you've actually spent some time physically creating talisman strips, vials, etc. that are then physically manipulated to activate. Like throwing a vial that breaks and summons a flame spirit, throwing a strip of paper that wraps around the undead's head and paralyzes them, etc.

Seems a bit like making single-use potions or scrolls, except with upper limits of carrying them and easier to make.

[hogarth]

Vancian magic... I feel it makes more 'sense' if you've actually spent some time physically creating talisman strips, vials, etc. that are then physically manipulated to activate.

And you can only make those strips and vials exactly once every 24 hours because...they all require a specific flower that only blooms at midnight?

[saithorthepyro]

On the setting I have been trying to develop a magic system for, the first main concept is that magic happens because the planet was host to a battle between various gods who operated on a galactic scale in the middle of a war. They ended up mostly killing each other, and their death permanently changed the planet, changing the geometry, causing portals to randomly open up leading to different worlds, and also causing various minerals, plants, animals, etc. to be magically empowered.

While people with in-born magic talent exist, you can practice magic as long as you know the method and have some fuel for the spell, any of the materials empowered by the gods death, called Arcanium as a placeholder until I can think of a different name. In-born is better at it of course. The two main types of casting are ritualism and (again, can't think of a name. I suck at them). Ritualism is the older style of magic, in fluff capable of harnessing greater power but at the cost of time. The greater force of magic controlled is handled through totems and talisman specific to each caster, the force kept in check through the structure of the ritual. The other form is more weaker, but faster, doesn't require the miscellaneous and is much more tied to technology than the other form. I was going memorize forever, and so I am looking for something to limit magic spam. I have been looking at Shadowrun's drain, but it doesn't really work for Ritualism fluff-wise.

As a final note, the setting is dieselpunk, not a medieval fantasy setting.

[Kaelik]

Vancian magic... I feel it makes more 'sense' if you've actually spent some time physically creating talisman strips, vials, etc. that are then physically manipulated to activate.

And you can only make those strips and vials exactly once every 24 hours because...they all require a specific flower that only blooms at midnight?

I mean, they can have a 8 hour brew time where they can't be moved. Wizards already can prepare new spells every 8 hours of rest and cast 3 times a day, and that doesn't hurt anything.

[Omegonthesane]

Vancian magic... I feel it makes more 'sense' if you've actually spent some time physically creating talisman strips, vials, etc. that are then physically manipulated to activate.

And you can only make those strips and vials exactly once every 24 hours because...they all require a specific flower that only blooms at midnight?

I mean, they can have a 8 hour brew time where they can't be moved. Wizards already can prepare new spells every 8 hours of rest and cast 3 times a day, and that doesn't hurt anything.

It's closer to 2.9 times a day since the wizards then have to spend 15 minutes preparing and then presumably between 1 and 2 minutes shooting their wad before loading the cannon for the next shot, but who's counting, point is the world doesn't get hurt that much if there isn't a hard-coded "exactly once per 24 hours" spellcasting limit.

[Emerald]

Vancian magic... I feel it makes more 'sense' if you've actually spent some time physically creating talisman strips, vials, etc. that are then physically manipulated to activate. Like throwing a vial that breaks and summons a flame spirit, throwing a strip of paper that wraps around the undead's head and paralyzes them, etc.

The actual flavor for Vancian is that preparing a spell involves performing a minor ritual that casts 99% of the spell, leaving the last bit "hanging" to be completed later at which point the spell takes effect. You're still creating distinct things to cast distinct spells, it's just that those things are mental constructs instead of physical items.

And of course if you want to flavor spells' material components as being imbued with the spell's power and used in the way you describe rather than being consumed by the spell, that's an easy change to make.

[virgil]

Power Points only have advantages over slots if they provide some additional functionality. If they are limited over the same period and you spend them on the same things, power points are just a math problem to figure out how many slots you have. To the extent that they are different at all, it's that it allows you to do two things that heterogenous slots would not allow:

• Decide what the "best" power is and then manifest it over and over again for every action.
• Cash in all your weaker powers to nova harder and then have literally nothing to do with your powers for the rest of the limited power period.

Generally speaking, both of those are bad.

I'm paraphrasing a friend here, who doesn't have an account here.

• If the 'best' spell is always the same, the encounter designs are bad. And that would never happen in a real game session. There is never one best spell. It's the same reason a caster that's fully optimized for maximized scorching ray (or whatever) is really easy to defeat.
• Maybe I don't understand nova fully. If there were a class that worked like this, couldn't the GM just handle them the same way as they'd handle a wizard? Alternatively, wouldn't that class' gameplay then become interesting/challenging partly from cost/benefit analyses of how much of their power to expend in any given combat? As long as you care about depletion, how exactly are you going to completely get away from this kind of thought in your gameplay?

What if you made the costs more extreme? A 5th level spell for a level 10 caster costs roughly a third of their max spell points, but nearly two dozen plus 1st level spells can be cast for the same amount of spell points. This is off the top of my head, it would definitely need to be tabled out and tweaked, but it would bring psions more in line with the classes they're likely to be compared to, and get the players of psions thinking a little harder about what they can get out of undercasting, and the cost of one action taken at maximum intensity is actually more than what it would be for a comparable wizard. In a system with these ratios, are novas more broken, or less?

So what? My attempted point here is this: As long as the spell list stays the same, and as long as it's not the spell list that is broken, we should be able to subject it to various mathy analyses and come out with something that compares fairly.

[Ancient History]

For an example, your go-to 5th level Psion power is Psychic Crush. If it succeeds, target is reduced to -1 hp; if it fails, they still take 3d6 damage - and you can pump that up, more if you have the right feats.

There's not a lot of other damage-dealing powers at that level, and you don't get many powers to begin with, so for a Psion, there's a good chance that might be your single best attack. Provided you aren't facing enemies that are immune to it, there's no reason not to spam Psychic Crush until the enemies' brains are leaking out of their ears or you run out of juice.

That's the way D&D psions are set up: you have the same cards in your hand every turn, a single mana pool to deplete, and maybe one action. So while you theoretically have a lot of potential options, your optimal course of play is very obvious unless you have multiple competing equivalent options. Now, one of the niceties of having built-in upgrades is that it means lower-level powers aren't automatically obsolete - Crystal Shard can scale with the amount of points you pump into it - but you're still looking at "I deal a respectable amount of damage" vs. "I crush your brain."

It's like having a fighter with a half-dozen magic swords. They could potentially switch up and use different swords each round, but can you blame them if they just use the biggest and most powerful sword round after round, unless some situation comes up where they can't or it's tactically better to break out the flaming burst?

[Emerald]

I'm paraphrasing a friend here, who doesn't have an account here.

• If the 'best' spell is always the same, the encounter designs are bad. And that would never happen in a real game session. There is never one best spell. It's the same reason a caster that's fully optimized for maximized scorching ray (or whatever) is really easy to defeat.

On top of Ancient History's point about figuring out close-enough-to-optimal attacks, a points-based system in general and 3e psionics in particular encourages you to diversify your powers known to the point that paradoxically you may have fewer power options for any given application.

A wizard who wants to be able to blast things halfway decently is going to have to learn a bunch of different blasting spells for a couple reasons, primarily that he'll need access to various different areas/targets, energy types, and so forth and that he'll need blasting spells of various levels because the save DC formula is level-based and spells have level-based damage dice caps.

In contrast, a psion who doesn't want to focus on blasting can take a single blasting power and be pretty okay with it. Psionics blasting gives every energy X power a choice of four damage types, the damage dice are only capped by PP expended rather by power level, and almost every power's DC scales with augmentation. A similar condensation of multiple spell effects into one psionic power can be seen with non-blasting powers, and most systems that put things on a point-pool system do the same thing so that your scaling comes from the amount of points spent on a given ability rather than your choice of ability.

So it's entirely possible that where a wizard might want to pick up burning hands, Melf's acid arrow, lightning bolt, cone of cold, and so on, and can afford to do so because he can just keep scribing a bunch of extra spells known as needed, a psion might very well just pick up energy ray and call it a day. This saves the psion a lot of power selections, but it means that if the party happens to run into a monster with high touch AC, or groups of smaller monsters that call for AoEs, or the like, the wizard will have some Ref-save-based AoE options purely by virtue of the fact that the standard core lightning and cold blasting spells are AoEs, but the psion only has his one single-target damage spell and is out of luck.

• Maybe I don't understand nova fully. If there were a class that worked like this, couldn't the GM just handle them the same way as they'd handle a wizard? Alternatively, wouldn't that class' gameplay then become interesting/challenging partly from cost/benefit analyses of how much of their power to expend in any given combat? As long as you care about depletion, how exactly are you going to completely get away from this kind of thought in your gameplay?

There are three issues with psionics novas. Firstly, there's the action economy issue, which is that you generally want to be doing the most effective thing with your action every round. If a party runs into a given monster, it's highly unlikely that a 9th-level wizard is going to have all of his 5th-, 4th-, and 3rd-level spells be especially relevant to dealing with that particular monster (unless the party specifically went red dragon hunting and the wizard prepped a bunch of cold spells, or something), so he's not going to necessarily want to run through all his 5ths, then all his 4ths, and so on against said monster.

A psion, however, only needs to have one particularly relevant power, in which case he can spam it at full effect round after round--and unless you're already low on PP or expect a lot more encounters later, there's no good reason to hold back from max-augmented powers, in the same way that there's no pressing reason for a 9th-level wizard to start off a fight with 3rd-level offensive spells if his 5th- and 4th-level spells are effective against the enemy. That's the whole point of having level-appropriate abilities, after all.

Secondly, there's the issue that powers scale by points spent, they don't scale by ML the way spells scale by CL. A fireball does 5d6 damage at CL 5 and 10d6 at CL 10 for the same 3rd-level slot, but an energy burst still does 5d6 at ML 10 and doesn't do 10d6 unless you spend 10 PP, equivalent to a 5th-level slot. Other powers don't always need maximum augmentation for maximum effect, but you still need more PP for higher save DCs so that applies to everything.

Thirdly, the one thing that psionics does better than any other form of magic is manipulating the action economy. Schism, temporal acceleration, synchronicity, anticipatory strike...there are bunches of powers to let you act first, act more often, or both. And where a wizard would really love to unload a ton of spells with Quicken or 3.0 haste but is limited by fewer highest-level spells and fewer spells that apply to a given situation, if a psion has one appropriate high-level spell he has a dozen copies of it to spam with those powers. And of course those powers cost PP themselves, exacerbating the issue.

So psions are encouraged to use their most appropriate power for the situation both by their limited power selection and the same impetus everyone has to use level-appropriate abilities, discouraged from using powers at an un-augmented level due to a lack of scaling, and enabled and encouraged to go through PP at a dizzying rate because it's one of the killer apps that makes you want to play a psion in the first place. Sure, there's still a cost/benefit analysis there, but it's heavily stacked in favor of novas.


And increasing costs as you suggest just makes things worse. If you actually do need to use max-augmented and/or high-level powers (because it's the only applicable power you have, because you're fighting the boss and he has high saves, etc.), the higher costs just mean that you have fewer lower-level uses available, which encourages you to rest more often...which encourages you to nova, since you're going to have to rest anyway so there's no incentive to save up PP for later.

And in cases where you don't need to use those higher-level max-augmented powers, the player is incentivized to rely on low-level un-augmented powers as much as possible, but that means using non-level appropriate powers most of the time. It's like if wizards only got 0 spells of their highest level and had to rely on bonus spells to get 1 slot of that level: except for 1 round per day, they're doing things that were level-appropriate 2 levels ago, and they probably don't have many near-highest slots either so doing level-appropriate-4-levels-ago things is more likely.

However you slice it, the system encourages nova-ing and there's no easy way to mathhammer a fix.

[OgreBattle]

DND encourages golf bag hyper specific solutions with spells and weaponry, but a lot of popular fiction involves the guy with ice powers using ice to solve many things, and the guy who can make zipper portals also able to increase his speed by zipper riding

Something I’ve mulled on for over a decade is a core mechanic like MtG land mana, where at-will is tapping but then a ‘requires rest’ burns up use of that ‘mana’. Maybe flavored as spiritual energy, bodily stamina, mental focus.

Going on a tangent, perhaps player can ‘play lands’ OR tap lands for actions, and then party members can use that ‘land’ for effects like “I have the high ground so I can power up my attack action”

[Username17]

[*]If the 'best' spell is always the same, the encounter designs are bad. And that would never happen in a real game session. There is never one best spell. It's the same reason a caster that's fully optimized for maximized scorching ray (or whatever) is really easy to defeat.
[*]Maybe I don't understand nova fully. If there were a class that worked like this, couldn't the GM just handle them the same way as they'd handle a wizard? Alternatively, wouldn't that class' gameplay then become interesting/challenging partly from cost/benefit analyses of how much of their power to expend in any given combat? As long as you care about depletion, how exactly are you going to completely get away from this kind of thought in your gameplay?

Unlike AncientHistory and Emerald, I'm going to try to avoid getting lost in the weeds of how 3e Psionics actually worked in the various versions (PsHB, XPsH, etc.) because I kind of feel like I'm about to get No True Scotsmaned. So I'm just going to pre-emptively concede that D&D Psionics in every edition have been pretty poorly designed and you could probably do better and go way more general with my power point critique.

First of all, imagine that you had a diverse set of powers that were of varying utility and that you could accurately predict how long the combat was going to be and that you knew what your most effective power usage was going to be in the encounter. That is, since power activations are being purchased with currency that we will assume what economists call "perfect information" and that the character activating these powers will be making rational and informed decisions.

Secondly, let's assume that the "better" powers cost more, and that the number of power points are meaningfully finite.

The conclusion is that there will be an optimal amount of power points to spend in any particular encounter. And in most cases the optimal spending pattern will be to take your best power for the situation and manifest it until you can't anymore.

So imagine that you have 6 power points and have a three round combat and have powers that cost 1, 2, and 3 power points. In a "slots" system, you simply have column 1, column 2, and column 3 and you use one from each of the columns during the 3 round conflict. What a power point system opens up is the opportunity to instead go 2, 2, 2 or 3, 3, 0.

Now the exact nature of the game is going to determine whether 2, 2, 2 or 3, 3, 0 is better, or whether either of them is actually better than the 3, 2, 1 that slots enforces. But whatever the tradeoffs are that exist in your game, one of those is going to be the go-to plan in a power points scenario and both 2, 2, 2 and 3, 3, 0 are less interesting than 3, 2, 1. By a pretty substantial margin.

So power points, absent some additional system about dynamic refresh or incidental defense costs or whatever is offering flexibility where the flexibility is that it allows boring move spam that would otherwise not be possible. And you really have to ask why you'd want to enable that kind of shit.

-Username17

[Axebird]

So power points, absent some additional system about dynamic refresh or incidental defense costs or whatever is offering flexibility where the flexibility is that it allows boring move spam that would otherwise not be possible. And you really have to ask why you'd want to enable that kind of shit.

Unfortunately, you kind've have to look past expecting players to be rational actors. I've had a lot of people no-shit insist on implementing some form of power points either because they want playing their mage to feel more like playing Final Fantasy and having mp does it for them, or they like having one big number more than an array of slots.

They don't care if their system of choice is encouraging move spam, they just really want to have a mana bar, and if your system doesn't handle that (even in a mediocre way, like PF psionics) those players will feel put out by it.

[Dean]

Frank I've heard you make the "Power points makes you find the best power and spam it" argument many times and I don't think it has any legitimacy. Vancian magic has, if anything, more incentives to create a structure where you just select your best power as many times as possible. That a psionicist can look at their entire spell list and decide what the best power is right now makes them more likely to choose different spells than if they had to fill their slots with what was the most generically useful and powerful spells they know the day before adventuring. If you assume the existence of some kind of power that's always the best that psionicists would endlessly spam then Vancian would get an almost exactly identical problem with that power. The Vancian caster would fill every spell slot with that power they could and then do the same for the next best power in the slots they couldn't.