Weaning people off of the Martial power source.

[K]

The DnD iconic trope of "magic is a technology that anyone can use" has got to go.

At this point there are two different, plausible, and completely incompatible plans on the table:

• Chakras: Every character gets slots and they can prepare magic powers into them. Wizards need tomes, orbs, or dragon shards to prepare the more powerful "spells" into their slots. Fighters need fire swords and shadow cloaks to prepare the more powerful "exploits" into their slots. Everyone is essentially a Wizard and has to buy or loot equipment to successfully use their high end magic.
• Transformation: Low level magic characters run around with magic that is unreliable and/or limited in scope and there are other characters who straight up don't have any magic. And they get to play the same game because the magic characters are still in the action-hero motif and haven't left the sword heroes in the dust. And when the magic PCs graduate to pulling epic shit, the sword heroes graduate into being angel knights and vampire lords that get enough magic stapled onto their warrior chassis that they can still compete in that environment.

Neither one is a system I'm proposing.

It works like this:

You have levels. Each level gets you higher level slots to put abilities into. If you choose a "magic" ability, you pay a thematic cost. Get enough abilities of one type and you get a "class" and some flavor abilities.

That thematic cost is some magical thing that lets you do magic. Maybe its a sword that your father brought back from the war with the shades. Maybe you are the bhaalspawn of Bhaal the Lord of Murder. Maybe you were anointed in a nymph's pool. Maybe you studied a magical tradition. Whatever.

Sample: Jax and Tomas are both interested in playing warrior types. They choose some fighting abilities, and both choose enough to qualify for Warrior.

However, both are interested in the magic ability Flame Wave.

Jax decides that he has the blood of dragons flowing in his veins after he drank dragon blood at the Battle of Falling Tears. He picks the trait Dragon-tainted and gets the ability to talk to dragons but he becomes a strict carnivore (this is a Trait, a minor flavor alteration to your character).

Tomas decides that his adventures started when he stole a Flame Ring. this item makes you vulnerable to cold and resistant to fire (this is one of his starting magic items).

Jax casts Flame Wave from his mouth like a dragon, and Tomas from his Flame Ring.

Several levels later, both have gained a pile of slots. Jax has chosen more magic abilities, so he now qualifies for Wizard as well as Warrior and he can cast use magic with material components (a benefit of Wizard which gives the ability to modify the magic).

Tomas has chosen mostly martial abilities so he could qualify for Pit Fighter, but he did chose a few more fire magics. He casts them out of his Flame Ring.

-----

And that's it. The thematic cost you pay can seriously be a thing you start your character with.

Here are some ideas:

-a magic item.
-some heritage
-an NPC who follows you around to use the ability, and otherwise stays out of the fray. Think of every character in Inuyasha that is not Inuyasha or a BBEG.
-study of a magical tradition
-some investment of power from a supernatural
-monster organ grafted onto you.

Each thematic cost has minor flavor abilities and penalties associated with it, and opens up different kinds of magic.

This means that sometimes people will want to pick up several magic items because maybe they want to use a [Fire] power, an [Illusion] power, and a [Astra] power. Maybe you go fight some Crystal Mages and really like the idea of Astral Fires so you take their Dream Robes (which are [Astral], and keep you from needing to sleep) so you can use the power.

Maybe they will mix and match. Shen the Healer follows Tomas around to provide Healing Touch, and Tomas has a Ring of Fire for Flame Wave and a demon hand grafted onto his for Fist of Doom.

The idea is that this stuff is all around you all the time, so there is no need for a magic item economy or planning out wealth by level or shopping mechanics or anything. Some can be literally handwaved (a henchman show up to offer his services, or you find out your mom was a roper) and others can be part of adventures (you decide to drink the blood of the vampire lord you just killed so you can take Undead abilities).

[Lokathor]

But that's the same as as the "chakras" plan. Rather, it is a subtype of the chakras plan (some chakra systems may have easily swapable choices, but yours doesn't seem to).

So, everyone is generic to start out? or do you still pick a starting class that assigns some of your initial abilities?

[Ice9]

I think the Chakra system can actually encompass both transforming and non-transforming options, with the proviso that not all Chakra abilities have to be item-based. I'm seeing basically three categories:

Inherent
Obtained: By a feat, probably.
Pros: Can't be taken away, easy to use.
Cons: Not swappable.

Technique
Obtained: Class ability.
Pros: Can't be taken away, can learn many techniques and prepare whichever are best suited.
Cons: Have components, and has the highest opportunity cost.

Item
Obtained: By killing things and taking their stuff.
Pros: Can horde them and swap them.
Cons: Can be lost, harder to collect than techniques.

NOTE: A legacy item that you never lose or swap for a shinier one would actually fall under the Inherent category.


So then for high-level pure warriors, you can go whichever way suits you:
* Anime-style sword magic - mostly Techniques
* Cuchulain-style legendary feats - mostly Inherents
*"Normal guy" with a vorpal sword - mostly Items

[Mask_De_H]

Yeah, K, that's the Chakra setup without purchases involved. What you're talking about is going to be used in Black Forest and was used in the 4uccess project. It makes powers purely mechanical and adds the fluff based on whatever the player wants it to be. The only difference here is that you want to give minor fluff tweaks with the different skins of the same power.

[K]

Yeah, K, that's the Chakra setup without purchases involved. What you're talking about is going to be used in Black Forest and was used in the 4uccess project. It makes powers purely mechanical and adds the fluff based on whatever the player wants it to be. The only difference here is that you want to give minor fluff tweaks with the different skins of the same power.

Considering that only 2 of the 4 sentences under the "Chakra" section of Frank's summary are the same as the idea I'm working on, I beg to disagree.

[Lokathor]

You're using character slots that you load up with arbitrary effects. That's exactly what chakras are.

[TavishArtair]

You even explicitly include both characters looting equipment (in one case, dragon's blood, in the other, Narya) and then explicitly declaring they will alloy that equipment with their character slots, more or less making that identical to a chakra system. If you have arbitrary character slots, and you have arbitrary items, and you use one to turn the other on, it doesn't matter where the ability is necessarily located except for thematics, it's now somewhere on your character sheet so you can use it. The only truly palpable difference I can read is how swappable those abilities might be, which is, again, largely an issue of thematics.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So if the vast majority of Fighters' special effects are going to come from equipment, why even have a 'Fighter'? Why not just call the class 'Gadget Knight' or 'Artificer'?

[Lokathor]

Legacy. Imagery.

An artificer uses items that are more like just random seeming items. They also probably build the items themselves. A fighter uses items that are weapons and armor, and they usually don't build the items themselves.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So fighters are just like Artificers except that they're incompetent and lazy since can't acquire their own class features without outside help some way in the chain?

Sounds like a boring character to play. We got rid of NPC classes, why not get rid of Artificer-But-Gimped?

[Lokathor]

Not every power comes from an item though. Barbarian rage is probably the most iconic example. The trouble comes when you have to select a set of powers and get a balanced set. Rage is very low powered later on when melee attacks don't matter. Those kinds of problems are whats being addressed.

[Mask_De_H]

Yeah, K, that's the Chakra setup without purchases involved. What you're talking about is going to be used in Black Forest and was used in the 4uccess project. It makes powers purely mechanical and adds the fluff based on whatever the player wants it to be. The only difference here is that you want to give minor fluff tweaks with the different skins of the same power.

Considering that only 2 of the 4 sentences under the "Chakra" section of Frank's summary are the same as the idea I'm working on, I beg to disagree.

And I beg to disagree with your disagreement.

Your system seems to be like Frank's Chakra system only the fire swords, shadow cloaks, and dragon semen are the how instead of the what. As a function of your character's ability, you get the item/cohort/whatever whereas with Frank's, to get the ability, you need to get the item/cohort/whatever.

Both systems require ganking stuff from other characters for advancement: with Frank it's vertical, with yours it's horizontal and/or vertical.

[MartinHarper]

So fighters are just like Artificers except that they're incompetent and lazy since can't acquire their own class features without outside help some way in the chain?

The guy who makes the fighter's stuff is one of his class features. For example, Q and MI5 are part of James Bond's class features.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The guy who makes the fighter's stuff is one of his class features. For example, Q and MI5 are part of James Bond's class features.

Which still makes them incompetent and lazy. That's no better than having a gift card at the Magick-Mart. I guess the people who run the Magick-Mart are laughing their asses off at the snipe hunts they keep sending their clotheshorse on.

[K]

.

Both systems require ganking stuff from other characters for advancement: with Frank it's vertical, with yours it's horizontal and/or vertical.

Yeh, that's where you are wrong. Under my system, you can do it all with starting equipment or traits you acquire at character creation (or can be added to a character later by "discovering" you have some heritage). Sure, you have the opportunity to incorporate equipment you find into your character, but that is completely different from needing to gank people for power. Under my system, you literally never need to touch a magic item or loot a corpse at any point in the campaign.

Frank's system has a magic item economy, needs a treasure distribution system, and/or forces DMs to seed adventures with equipment the players need. Mine does not, making it play entirely differently AND putting character advancement completely in the hands of the character.

Simply put, its less efficient from a storytelling and a gameplay standpoint to make people worry about treasure. Forcing people to have some story-based reason to have magic powers just reinforces the setting, but forcing them to play a "loot mini-game" is just taking time away from playing the real game.

[Ice9]

Unless they want to be looting things, of course. It really comes down to preference - many people won't care about looting or will actively dislike it, but there are a number of people who want to loot things and want the loot to have a meaningful effect on the character. I'm not really sure you can accommodate both types in the same campaign, so this is probably something to be decided up front for each group.

However:

Simply put, its less efficient from a storytelling and a gameplay standpoint to make people worry about treasure.

(bolding mine). This is just wrong - looting, and appropriate use of loot, is a legitimate type of gameplay. Maybe not one you're interested in, but still valid.

[God_of_Awesome]

Yeah, we may have to just dump the Fighter class and concentrate on obviously magic classes. Unless we make Fighter obviously magic itself.

[Lokathor]

No more Easter Egg Class Features?

But yeah, finding cool loot is one of the most important parts of 3e to me. Lack of cool things to find is one of the big reasons 4e fails like it does. You can make a game without loot to find, but it's not really very close to DnD any more, so you don't need to have included Martial anyways.

[Leress]

K, is not saying that there will be no loot to find, it just won't be necessary to have to stay "level appropriate" in the game. So if someone be a badass who just wears simple clothes then so be it. If that person wants weapons that give him/her cool options they can have those too.

[Lokathor]

I suppose it works out if your "magic item slots" are filled by feats/items, and then your "Class ability slots" are filled by class/story. The difference is that the two slot categories still have a "general" section and a "class specific section".

Otherwise you've gotten rid of both actual classes and a reason to kill people and loot their stuff. That's some game that might be fun, but it's not very close to being the same game you started with.

[K]

Here's the thing: making people need magic items is bad. Frank can tell you about the game where he and I literally had to convince the DM and the other players that we didn't want to sell all the loot and split it evenly and instead give the loot to the people that needed it. Then we proceeded to pile loot onto the fighters so they didn't suck too much (Frank was a Rogue and I was a Sorcerer, btw).

The ideal system looks like this:

-You can actually run the "and now we break out of prison" adventure where you take swords from the guards and fight your way out.

-People win battles and stuff their pockets with gold and gems and sometimes pick up a magic item and say "and this is the sword Dragonwhisper that I took from the Red Duke of Nightblack Reach."

-People actually use gold for things like buying ships and bribes and castles so you can have cool adventures, and don't whine "hey, we can't buy a ship.... I need that gold for another +2 to my Cloak of Resistance!"

-Your next adventure is NOT held off for several RL hours while the players decide how to get the obsidian statue of a giant frog out of the underwater temple.



To accomplish that, you need to do this:
-make sure that character power comes all from the character.

-make magic items into props that are useful in the same way that 50' rope and pitons are useful, but not powerful like class features. Sure, you can have some items as good as class features, but they need to be limited in use with drawbacks for carrying around, otherwise people will literally get a magical container as big as a New York economy apartment to carry all their crap in the event they might need it during an adventure.

-make sure that loot doesn't do anything with your character's power and people are allowed the option to tell the dirt farmers to keep their gold. You do this with an alternate reward system.

[Crissa]

You can't have loot-based and xp-based advancement in the same game.

It just doesn't work, time and again.

-Crissa

[Username17]

K, you're contradicting yourself all to hell and gone. You said that Fighters would need a Fire Sword to be level appropriate earlier, and now you're saying that no magic items ever need to be touched. Make up your damn mind.

This isn't hyperbole on my part, this is you not making any sense. Care to reconcile:

People need to pay class features for powers as good as class features. This means that at X level when a Wizard chooses a new spell like Fireball, some other character like a fighter needs to choose how to make his Flame Sword create Fire Waves.

Then you put magic items everywhere. Fire Swords are literally sold in high-end shops and in the hands of bandit leaders, BUT only powerful heroes can make those Fire Swords do anything more interesting than being a light source and easy way to light campfires.

with:

Frank's system has a magic item economy, needs a treasure distribution system, and/or forces DMs to seed adventures with equipment the players need. Mine does not, making it play entirely differently AND putting character advancement completely in the hands of the character.

Simply put, its less efficient from a storytelling and a gameplay standpoint to make people worry about treasure. Forcing people to have some story-based reason to have magic powers just reinforces the setting, but forcing them to play a "loot mini-game" is just taking time away from playing the real game.

Both of those systems can work, but they are not recognizable as the same system. Like, not even a little bit. Either the Fighter can use his fire waves technique with any sword (or even no sword), or he needs to get a fire sword to do that. And that's totally an exclusive Or right there.

It is a perfectly reasonable design goal to demand that the players have lightning spears or soul gems before they can rip a hole in the universe. And it's a perfectly reasonable design goal to allow characters to fill their awesome ability slots with whatever regardless of what equipment they happen to have. And it's a perfectly reasonable design goal to allow each character a number of ability slots that are equipment independent and then give them another set of equipment slots that require swag. But it's at least wrong and potentially disingenuous to argue what you are arguing: that Fighters both need and do not need to have a fire sword in order to use a fire blast. Those two statements are completely irreconcilable.

-Username17

[Orion]

Actually, I'm pretty sure K's thing is consistent.

You can take whatever abilities you want. When you take them, you explain how you got them. This can be training, an item, ancestry, or some sort of transformation that's been done to you.

It's unclear whether the GM is supposed to seed a bunch of items, or whether the player is allowed to arbitrarily declare that the last session's loot included a fire sword. But it doesn't matter because he can just as easily declare that he's suddenly re-discovered his Efreeti ancestry, or that he's taken vows to serve the God of Fire, or whatever.

[K]

K, you're contradicting yourself all to hell and gone. You said that Fighters would need a Fire Sword to be level appropriate earlier, and now you're saying that no magic items ever need to be touched. Make up your damn mind.

This isn't hyperbole on my part, this is you not making any sense. Care to reconcile:

Dude, I think you missed a page of posts or something. Here is me quoting myself.

And that's it. The thematic cost you pay can seriously be a thing you start your character with.

Here are some ideas:

-a magic item.
-some heritage
-an NPC who follows you around to use the ability, and otherwise stays out of the fray. Think of every character in Inuyasha that is not Inuyasha or a BBEG.
-study of a magical tradition
-some investment of power from a supernatural
-monster organ grafted onto you.

Its not a hard concept to grok, but people seem to be flipping out.

You pick your powers as you level. When you do that, you pick a source for your "magic" powers. Some people use lightning powers because they studied at the Inverted Tower and use them as spells, some people have a lightning sword and shoot them out of a sword, and some people are the direct male descendants of djinn and breath them out. Whatever.

Done.