Multiclassing and resource management systems.

[ishy]

One thing that I am simply unsure of is whether to proc gains in fury off of attacks or damage. If it procs off of attacks, the Berserker is slanted towards minion hunting, while it it procs off of damage, the Berserker is fairly agnostic to whether battles are against groups or bosses.
-Username17

Are / should you avoid the bag of rats for the berserker?

[BearsAreBrown]

@Frank and Rage Meter, why not both? Have some maneuvers that require zero Rage with ala Diablo, Charge/Leap, have a single target and multi target rage builder, Devastating Blow/Monstrous Cleave, then have your badass abilities scale with how much Rage is build up. And those build more Rage too.

[OgreBattle]

How about a shonen rager who gains rage if his allies are hurt?

Though in a 2-4 turn encounter the berserker can be ignored or stuck in a web.

[Lago PARANOIA]

How about a shonen rager who gains rage if his allies are hurt?

Bad idea, because it either encourages the berserker to hang back and wait for his buddies to be hit or it railroads the party into being DMFs.

Really, if you do Rage Meter the only way you can really make it work without blatant metagaming or DM intrusion is to make it trigger from player damage. Yes, this means that some barbarians will ritualistically cut themselves before entering combat. And that enemies who recognize that a particular foe is on a Rage Meter will seek to contain or ignore them until the other enemies are dealt with. That's not particularly a problem, because it's still A.) reasonably balanced in generic combat and B.) thematic.

[BearsAreBrown]

Really, if you do Rage Meter the only way you can really make it work without blatant metagaming or DM intrusion is to make it trigger from player damage. Yes, this means that some barbarians will ritualistically cut themselves before entering combat

Why's that?

Requires 0 Rage, grants 1 rage
-Gigantic Leap
-Barreling Charge
-Devastating Blow (hit hard)
-Cleaving Strike (hit wide)

Requires 1 Rage, grants 1 rage
-Hammer Stroke of Doom (knock down)
-Slaughter 'em like Sheep Attack (cleave-esque chain attack)
-Holy Shit I'm Mad Punch (hit really hard)

Requires 2 Rage, grants 1 rage
-Now I'm Really Angry (drop any status you want)
-Explosive Fury Chop (fire AoE something)

Each round you unlock a new tier of abilities, better, but exclusive, from the last. They aren't straight upgrades but they are better. Have some abilities that might grant two rage.

I'm not saying this is a better system but I don't understand why this isn't a workable Rage Mechanic.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, for one, despite the use of the word 'Rage' that's not actually a Rage Meter. It's a complicated Warm-Up system.

The basic idea behind a Rage Meter is that it's a resource management system that players do not (directly) control but is affected by common player actions. I think that calling this system Rage Meter was a mistake because it creates a fundamental misunderstanding in what it's supposed to do. Sort of like how we fucked up calling Winds of Fate Winds of Fate.

[BearsAreBrown]

Well, for one, despite the use of the word 'Rage' that's not actually a Rage Meter. It's a complicated Warm-Up system.

The basic idea behind a Rage Meter is that it's a resource management system that players do not (directly) control but is affected by common player actions. I think that calling this system Rage Meter was a mistake because it creates a fundamental misunderstanding in what it's supposed to do. Sort of like how we fucked up calling Winds of Fate Winds of Fate.

Can you show me what it should look like then? Just a thrown together mock up, I must be misunderstanding.

[Mask_De_H]

Well, for one, despite the use of the word 'Rage' that's not actually a Rage Meter. It's a complicated Warm-Up system.

The basic idea behind a Rage Meter is that it's a resource management system that players do not (directly) control but is affected by common player actions. I think that calling this system Rage Meter was a mistake because it creates a fundamental misunderstanding in what it's supposed to do. Sort of like how we fucked up calling Winds of Fate Winds of Fate.

Can you show me what it should look like then? Just a thrown together mock up, I must be misunderstanding.

Sure. Have you ever played Samurai Showdown? That's a Rage Meter.

Rage
"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

Your moves require Rage to work. When you hit or take damage, gain 1 Rage. Unless otherwise stated, using a move does not spend Rage. If you go three turns without hitting or taking damage, you lose all your Rage and are fatigued.

Masochist Strike
Rage 0
Make an attack. Deal 1 damage to yourself

Furybrand
Rage 1
You gain the Berserk status. Every turn you are Berserk, lose 1 Rage. Once you no longer have the Rage to activate this ability, you are no longer Berserk.

Armor of Anger
Rage 3
Spend an action. Ignore your current Rage in damage. Mark off the damage you ignore. Once your Rage hits 0, you take the damage you marked off.

Going Bear-serk!
Rage 4
You are now a bear. Every turn you are a bear, lose 1 Rage. Once you have 0 Rage, you are no longer a bear.

EDIT: You can also do things more like a fighting game character. Like so.

Rage
"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry."

When you hit or take damage, gain 1 Rage. To use a move that has "Rage X", spend X Rage. You start with 0 Rage, and have a maximum of 4 Rage. You cannot have negative Rage. If you go five minutes with 1 or more unspent Rage, you are fatigued until you spend all your Rage.

Fury Cutter
Rage 1
Make an attack that ignores armor.

EX Fury Cutter
Rage 2
Make an attack that ignores armor and hits through the target to an adjacent target.

Raging Storm
Rage 4
Hit everybody in close range for massive damage.

[MGuy]

How about a shonen rager who gains rage if his allies are hurt?

Bad idea, because it either encourages the berserker to hang back and wait for his buddies to be hit or it railroads the party into being DMFs.

Really, if you do Rage Meter the only way you can really make it work without blatant metagaming or DM intrusion is to make it trigger from player damage. Yes, this means that some barbarians will ritualistically cut themselves before entering combat. And that enemies who recognize that a particular foe is on a Rage Meter will seek to contain or ignore them until the other enemies are dealt with. That's not particularly a problem, because it's still A.) reasonably balanced in generic combat and B.) thematic.

You could have the ragers not rage-tastic abilities be aggro drawing abilities. That' what I did for the rage meter (Savage) class in my game. There's no reason to not just enable the rager to be able to put himself in positions that draw aggro or just have aggro drawing abilities that make it harder to ignore him.

[tussock]

@Frank. Fine, so you're really talking about how the action economy prevents certain things from stacking, and how overlapping cooldown/warmup cycles can negate the downsides of various power schemes for ultimate powa.

Which are both totally solvable problems and not unpredictable at all. My page-6 thing on threat reduction is true, that's your real value in combat. That's why casters dominate 3e, why at-will melee is too little, too late.

But you can totally .... 2A+2B = (A+B)+(A+B). That is true if you're careful to measure the threat reduction correctly. You just have to have some in-class stacking effects to ensure the single-class characters technically work best, so 2A > A+A, just a bit.

Read it again? Good. Synergies are fine, if 1st-round booms and mid-combat rage works well together it already works well with two characters doing it. A full barbarian needs to be getting more rage boost (relative to default output at that level) than two half-barbarians anyway, multiclassing or otherwise, it's part of what makes the full Barbarian useful compared to their single-class allies, that everyone's grown in scale.

Anti-synergies, where you can't get a first-round explosion twice in one character, is already a thing you had to solve for each single-class character who can do that. Your encounter-power guys are already going to be overflowing with encounter powers they can't use all at once. You have already solved that problem if you have an encounter-power class at all.

Stacking explosions? When you have an encounter-power fireball character stacking with a pre-encounter explosive zombie dog character, the solution for that is simply that ten picks of fireball is better than two guys with five picks of fireball each compared to the default output at level 10, and same for the Zombie dogs. The two different characters already stack, and that either breaks the game or it doesn't.

Yes, there's the remaining problem of some power schemes stacking correctly between two different characters but not in the one character. Weaknesses. They will need a patch to match the single-class folk, but it's easy enough to patch a rare flaw like that by providing a fake synergy later on (as 3e did for the Gish and various other class combos despite huge underlying class imbalance) than it is to power down something that's explosively good all by itself (as 3e did not for CoDzilla and full-casters in general).

[Kaelik]

You'll forgive me for assuming one would fix the fucking combat length when designing a new game, even push it out toward 6 or 7 rounds for typical combats if we maintain simple enough resolution and tracking systems.

...

Oh, please. You're making a new set of character powers, you don't want to include the bullshit high-level Rock-Paper-Scissors stuff, or if you do then you ensure all high level characters and monsters have a way around it. All of them, so GTFO spam effectively defaults to a delay in the action, rather than ending fights on round one.

If I wanted to play a game with too long boring combats and no meaningful abilities I would play 4e. I don't want to play 4e, so I do in fact want shorter combats and actual abilities.

[Mask_De_H]

tussock: It doesn't work. What you suggest doesn't fucking work.

Let me write it in big, eye catching letters for you.

It

Doesn't

FUCKING


WORK!


The parts which aren't fucking crazy have been done and they sucked (4e) or have been already talked about and with better solutions (multiclassing). You get nothing. Good day sir.

Go make your own thread like DrP or fuck off like PL did. Whatever you do, don't bring it here. For fuck's sake man, just stop.

[OgreBattle]

Samurai Showdown and Limit Breaks work for combats where you have multiple opportunities to hit and be hit, and you're the only target in a 1 on 1 fight anyways so you have to be struck. Not sure if it would really work for D&D.

How about 'rage' just builds up when "situations where you can't take 10 on a skill check" start up? You're pumped up to fight under the threat of real danger and it increases turn by turn.

In that way it's like the assassin's power of study, except it's based on being active instead of unseen.

And you just get a special bonus when you're Bloodied/reduced to 50%, so go and be reckless.


I don't think there needs to be over a dozen subsystems though... or rather I wouldn't want that many.

[Mask_De_H]

Samurai Showdown and Limit Breaks work for combats where you have multiple opportunities to hit and be hit, and you're the only target in a 1 on 1 fight anyways so you have to be struck. Not sure if it would really work for D&D.

How about 'rage' just builds up when "situations where you can't take 10 on a skill check" start up? You're pumped up to fight under the threat of real danger and it increases turn by turn.

In that way it's like the assassin's power of study, except it's based on being active instead of unseen.

And you just get a special bonus when you're Bloodied/reduced to 50%, so go and be reckless.

I don't think there needs to be over a dozen subsystems though... or rather I wouldn't want that many.

The Assassin's ability isn't predicated on being unseen, it's predicated on having time to burn actions on waiting around. Being unseen helps with that.

Also, the hell are you talking about "it wouldn't work for D&D"? If you make yourself a target of opportunity and are within charge/hitting distance of monsters, you are going to hit and be hit a lot in D&D. This isn't like a fail defender in 4e, this is like a Chargemonkey in 3.X. You want to be in the thick of things and not locked up in Turtle World. Unless you have shit for to-hit, are getting SoLed/Tekken Juggled or the dice hate you, in a combat you're gaining at least 1 Rage a turn.

Your idea is predicated on "taking 10" existing (which is weird) but a straight charge-up system is conspicuously absent. But more than a dozen subsystems to start with is kind of nuts, even you only have to keep track of one to five of them in the course of a game. Having a lot of subsystems does create more chances to attract players and create class loyalty, but it might be overwhelming to new players.

[tussock]

@tussock ... just stop.

You know there's an ignore button, eh.

If I wanted to play a game with too long boring combats and no meaningful abilities I would play 4e. I don't want to play 4e, so I do in fact want shorter combats and actual abilities.

Rocket-tag is also shit, I'm more of a classic D&D type guy. You can include automatic morale failures for mostly-dead bosses or half-nuked squads and shorten things by a few rounds (or just make sure all the late combat stuff runs extra quick), but deciding things that far in less than 3 rounds is not good.

Interestingly there, one of 4e's failure points is dragging out the tail-end of the fights, especially at low levels. Spend most of your time doing the least interesting stuff long after the fight is already decided by your few encounter powers.

That's why you want different power schemes, a character who kicks in later with big damage and finishes the fights before everyone gets bored.

Change the few encounter-power and cool-down characters to fight-splitters and crowd control so some of the monsters recover and the fight ramps up difficulty again as the delayed rage, warm-up, or combat buffing abilities of others come on line, that's got far more potential than 4e's power scheme. Pick-and-choose multiclassing lets any number of characters fill all the desired roles, lets anyone fill in a missing power without dedicating a whole character to it.

[Orion]

yes, if what you actually wanted was to play the extra archetypes that multiclassing allows, you could do that better by writing up a couple extra classes (really all people want from an archetype standpoint is an arcane warrior and an arcane sneaky guy, and that could just be the Psion and the Illusionist) or giving people build options or development points or whatever. However, I think that even though objectively the only thing multiclassing ever allowed was the Fighter/Magic User (which if our Psion was essentially a Jedi or the Enchanter ran around putting his runs on his shield and hammer would be covered), the Thief/Magic User (which sounds exactly like the Illusionist), the Fighter/Thief (which isn't thematically different from the Rogue in any case), the Fighter/Cleric (which is a Paladin and has always been a Paladin), the Cleric/Thief (which could jolly well be the Assassin if he gets some doctoring from his knowledge of poisons and maybe some dark magic), and the cleric/magic user (which is just a magic user with slightly different spells) - and thus objectively it's pretty much already covered without doing anything at all - people still want it. No matter how ridiculously good the Wizard spell list got, people still fapped to getting spells off some other list too. People want to have two lists, and having two lists is more important to them than actually being good at stuff (see: people playing True Necromancers even though they are objectively terrible).

I think you've very nearly got this right. There really are 2 to 4 "basic" classes. Fighter and Magic User for sure, and possibly Cleric and Thief depending on how you set everything up. And those classes are pretty much what people want to get out of multiclassing. But just offering those combos will fail for the same reason the Psion failed: because you're locking down people's graphics effects. Look, your game world is going to have a bunch of different types of magic that have different cultures and histories and different colored shiny lights. Let's say you have Elementalist, Necromancer, Illusionist, and Evoker. Guess what? People are going to demand to be a Fighter/Elementalist, Fighter/Evoker, Fighter/Illusionist, and Fighter/Necromancer. Similarly, let's say you have some cool and thematically distinct types of fighting mans. Let's go with a Monk, a Hero, a Berserker, and a Paladin. Guess what? Now people want not just a Mage/Hero, but also a Mage/Berserker, Mage/Monk, and Mage/Paladin. Yes, even if you point out that Paladin is already a kind of Mage.

I'm pretty sure that while a few people will grumble, you can get away with shutting down the combinations of two special flavors. You don't have to allow Monk/Elementalists and Berserker/Necromancers and Paladin/Illusionists and Hero/Evokers, and you probably shouldn't. That suggests to me that you want to be looking at Second Edition D&D, not AD&D, as your inspiration. In Second Edition you got to customize your main class with all kinds of kits and weapon specializations and specialty schools and racial substitution levels and whatnot. If you had a second class, you got the vanilla version. So you could play a Fighter/Mage, a Gladiator/Mage, or a Fighter/Illusionist but NOT a Gladiator/Illusionist. I think people were basically okay with that.

So if you want to do Class/Subclass, go ahead and do that, but make it easy on yourself and make two non-overlapping lists. You were already doing that with Monster classes. Mind Flayer is a Class, Giant is a subclass. I think that approach blends perfectly with this one. People will be happy to be a Mind Flayer Thief or a Giant Hero. They will not complain that they can't be a Mind Flayer Monk or a Giant Fighter. You can either do what 2E did and put classes into "class groups" to rule out illogical combos. Declared Hero, Monk, Assassin, Ranger, and Paladin to be "warriors" and say that warriors aren't allowed to have subclass: fighter. Or you can make the subclasses compatible with everything. I could certainly imagine people playing a Necromancer/Mage or Elementalist/Mage if it got them a smattering of out-of-theme utility spells. Let's say you have something like

Classes:
Hero, Ranger, Monk, Berserker, Paladin, Assassin, Bard, Evoker, Elementalist, Necromancer, Druid, Demon, Mind Flayer

Subclasses:
Swordsman, Administrator, Explorer, Initiate, Apprentice, Giant, Dragonkin, Tiefling, Wild Talent.

That's a route I could imagine going an not feeling bad about, but sometimes I think even that's unnecessarily. Sure, maybe people will demand to have two class names on their sheet, but I'm not convinced. To be reductive, I think what people really want basically boils down to a longsword, a lockpick,
cure light wounds and lightning bolt. I honestly think that as long as people can get any of those things onto a character of any class, they'll be happy, and I think we can hand that out during freeform minor ability customization without pretending that a sword is a character class.

[Mask_De_H]

But I want Fly, Planar Ally, Iron Heart Surge and Dimensional Cutter. Or Blade Barrier, a Lupin III disguise kit, Shadow Step and Telekinesis.

Being overly reductionist about what people want will make for a boring game, especially if you promise multiclassing. Never try to prescribe what people want without actually seeing what they do. From where I sit, it looks like people do want the ability to get crazy with the cheese whiz as much as the want to play straight up Derp the Fightan Mans. One of the things 4e players dug about it was the freedom of ability choice and kitbashing alternate classes together. People multiclassed into weird shit in 3e even if it didn't work.

[BearsAreBrown]

I do have a problem with the lack of Mind Flayer Monks and Giant Fighters. Why the fuck not? I'd rather play with anti-synergistic classes then arbitrary shit like that. That's one of the few cool things about 3.5, I really do feel like I can build whatever I want.

Granted, I am okay with allowing no multi-classing at all, and I'd rather that then half assed stuff.

[Orion]

You can't have a Mind Flayer Monk because Monks get their supernatural powers from traditions that don't exist among the mindflayers, from purity of body and spirit that are unattainable if you eat brains, and by releasing energy from chakras that mind flayers don't even have. You can't have a Giant Swordsman as a PC because that's neither of those is a "real class" and the result is a character who can't do anything good. They might exist as NPC. Speaking of which I was thinking about NPC and it convinced me that I was wrong about going freeform, and that serpate class and subclass lists are the way to go. Here's why:

Let's assume you want players to be able to pick from a bunch of mechanics. You write up Spirits and Rage and Essence and so on, and we assign one to each character class. Pretty quickly you realize that having Essence and Spirits on one character is insanity. People have discussed the balance problems at length, but I'd like to focus on basic playability. Is a Druid/Paladin going to roll on a table *and* shuffle a deck every turn just to find out what his options are? Is a Priest/Necromancer going to track cooldowns on all his prayers along with the status of all his minions? Is a Wizard/Illusionist going to sit down and leaf through two spellbooks, and weigh overlapping powers to see whether they should come in as Encounter powers or as At-Wills before every encounter? So you decide that people can't have more than one PC class. This much has been hashed out and rehashed at length.

But let's hop over to the GM screen for a minute. The MC also potentially has to deal with multiple mechanics. If he throws down an Evil Paladin and his Elementalist lackey, he is indeed going to be rolling on tables and shuffling dice every turn. The worst explosions in complexity are removed by having more actions, but of course the MC might be juggling more than 2 schedules. Or multiple instances of the same schedule, which can be almost as bad. (Incidentally, this put the nail in the coffin of full multiclassing in my opinion. If the BBEG and his Dragon are supposed to be a Priest/Paladin and an Elementalist/Warlock I'm crying myself to sleep.) There are ways to make groups of enemy humans work; you can insist that NPCs are almost all Heroes, Rogues, Wizards, and maybe occasionally Priests or Assassins. But the scene where you storm the Druid's Circle can never ever happen, even worse than it was in 3.5. In the end, I think it's simpler if we assume that NPCs mostly don't have access to any special resource. No spirits or backlash or styles or anything.

So we have a situation in which we want PC classes to have unique activation mechanics, to be one-only, and to be mostly unavailable to NPCs. What that suggests to me is that we really want to codify "PC classes" and "special resources" into the setting. Everyone should understand that the kind of magic that produces Backlash is only doable by a few tremendously gifted sorcerers, and that the process of bleeding your body into the astral world enough to make it even possible is inherently incompatible with becoming balanced enough to use Monk Styles or aware enough to commune with Nature Spirits. Everyone in the world knows you can only have one of these things, and if you have one at all you're automatically a pretty big deal. Let's call them Disciplines. It implies something learned, something you have to dedicate yourself to, something with profound impact on your life and overall worldview, and a canon of disciplines that varies over time and across cultures.

You realize you want a quick way to bang out NPC who don't have a Discipline. So you throw down some basic categories of NPC, like warriors, adepts, and so on. Let's go ahead and call these Classes, since that word is now free. Or you could go with Professions. Or even Backgrounds. Anyway that come in with level-appropriate weapon attacks (or not), a bunch of implied pathfinding/animal training/translation/diplomatic/administrative competencies, and some at-will nukes and utility spells. Anyway, the nice thing about this is that you can perform the MC/Player translation in reverse. We created the Classes because running too many characters with Disciplines was too hard for the MC. For the same reason we can staple more Classed NPCs onto an encounter, we can staple more Class abilities on a PC. I honestly believe that this will do most of what people want. I know that I personally want a Fighter/Necromancer, but I don't need a list of a dozen martial maneuvers to use each turn if my attention and energy is in moving and managing my minions. I really am fine with "I hit it with my sword" every turn. The main thing is that I want my necromancer to be a cursed king who joins his ghost minions on the front line, rather than a feeble guy with a wand. Similarly, my Elf Hero who knows magic does want a deck of maneuvers, but doesn't need a spellbook. I really just want to be able to summon light instead of carrying a torch and throw a Scorching Ray on that one round when I can't get into melee with anything.

You can additionally codify the difference between monsters that are Disciplines and monsters that are Classes into the setting. There are Super races like Angels and Mind Flayers where every single one of them has a discipline and is thus super hardcore. There are other races like Giants who aren't. Giants live a long time in dangerous climates and tend to be pretty high level, which is why they can show up in high-level adventures with numbers sufficient to damage the adventurers but writeups simple enough to appear in large groups. This also tells you the difference between "people" and "aliens" (outsiders, monsters, elders, whatever). You know which races are too alien to practice human disciplines, and which races can have meaningful cultural interchange. That's a lot of free emergent setting info.

[Ice9]

I like that idea. It's pretty much like the main class / subclass thing, but with the subclasses coming from an entirely different set. One question is - which part provides the "strategic scale" abilities, like having a spy network or followers or magic rituals? It could be a whole third component, for that matter, but that might be overcomplicating things.

[BearsAreBrown]

@Orion, the Monk part is bullshit but I like the rest. Thanks for explanation.

@Ice9, strategic abilities come into play mid-game and are possibly optional.

[Orion]

Classes hand out strategic abilities from levels 1-5, and Disciplines hand them out for levels 6-10. In the beginning, if you can boss around a bunch of tiny men or design and operate siege machinery, that has relatively little to do with your magic. It doesn't much matter if you're an Elementalist/Aristocrat or an Assassin/Aristocrat, you get the same city guards and spies either way. The fact that you personally can throw fire bolts around makes you personally badass but is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to imposing your will on anyone outside your line of sight. However, at as you rise in level, at some point you want the fact that you can bind demons or awaken the trees to become more important than the town militia.

As for ritual spells, you decide what level of tech you want "society" to have. You throw down a bunch of ritual spells that you can learn from Classes to do whatever you think should generally be doable in the economy like magic street lights or lie detection or making airships or curing disease or whatever. Maybe even going to other planes, or fixed-terminal teleports. Anyway, you now know what you can do by "being rich." Then you write up a bunch of spells that only come in with the Disciplines, so you know what sort of legendary magic actually makes people sit up and take notice. You don't bother writing rituals for Classes above level 5, because the general-access utility genuinely doesn't need to scale to infinity, and you don't bother writing Discipline rituals until level 6, because before then players are still happily collecting the first bunch. This also lets you put crazy Logistics & Dragons shit in with a clearly defined level cap for groups who don't want that.

[OgreBattle]

I like that idea. It's pretty much like the main class / subclass thing, but with the subclasses coming from an entirely different set. One question is - which part provides the "strategic scale" abilities, like having a spy network or followers or magic rituals? It could be a whole third component, for that matter, but that might be overcomplicating things.

Maybe as a 'Theme'?


Spymaster
Cultist
etc.

[Mask_De_H]

That monk example (and waiting until level 6 to get abilities from your real class) is bullshit, but yes, that's what we've been getting at, Orion. The ritual spell section would probably be a good way to do feats.

[Orion]

Okay, a jillion people have called me out on the Monk now. I'm not sure I understand what the problem is, though. Can someone explain it to me slowly, with small words? In other news, you're right, your Class-based rituals can probably top out at level 2 or 3. (Oh man! Can we write up "hiring a mercenary company" as a ritual? Because that would be hilariously elegant.)