Multiclassing and resource management systems.

[Mask_De_H]

Okay, let's make this simple.

Monks are something that (one would assume) humanoid bipeds train to be.
Mind Flayers are humanoid bipeds.
Therefore, Mind Flayers can train to be Monks.

What you have is "a Mind Flayer can't be a Monk because reasons" when those reasons are dumb unless you are baking in alignment restrictions or something. It also raises questions with how being a Monk interacts with other badtouched (or goodtouched) races and/or how other Disciplines (like Necromancer or Psion or Cleric, off the top of my head) will interact with those kinds of races.

It's a problem you run into when you arbitrarily separate the Job titles from the Subjob titles in an attempt to make shitfarmers and heroes still play the same game.

[sabs]

Why wouldn't you have Monk Mindflayers? If Monks were actually the supernatural equivalent of what Monks are today, instead of bad-touch fighters. Mind flayers are incredibly intelligent and psionic. Monks are about Mind over Matter. That seems like a perfect fit.

[Orion]

A Mind Flayer spends his life learning how to refine and control his own inherent psychic powers, which is a Discipline in its own right. And since some of those powers are things like "stay alive despite having nonsense biology and not eating food" that's pretty much non-optional. Monks are psychic, and Mind Flayers are already psychic, so they can't and don't need to become Monks. They're both expressions of the power of Mind, but not the same kind of mind. The types of cognition, emotion, perception each requires leads devotees down incompatible roads. A Mind Flayer could potentially give up his natural psychic powers and refocus that energy into a monk's discipline. And, assuming Monks don't have to eat, that's probably the best bet for a young 'flayer who doesn't want to eat brains. But at that point he's mechanically just a Monk, not a Monk/Flayer.

[TarkisFlux]

Orion's suggestion would break up monsters along a "mook" / "elite" split based on type. Most monsters would only have NPC classes, or subclases. They'd be weak enough to show up in groups and get knocked around, and hence mooks. Other monsters would have a racial class, or real class, and possibly a subclass on top of that. Which puts them near PC strength for a given level, and thus elite. Star spawn would fall into the latter category, and be Spawn / X maybe. So you could have a Spawn / Brute, or a Spawn / Lurker, but not a Spawn / Illusionist or a Spawn / Monk for all of the same reasons that you can't have a Monk / Illusionist under such a scheme.

That doesn't seem like bullshit to me at all. I'm not sure I like it or that it covers all the themes I care about, but it looks workable. It also has the benefit of letting PCs take monster classes as subclasses, so there's never a time when a creature uses a power that a PC can't unless that power comes from type or species stuff. And I think most players are ok with that sort of power acquisition limit.

[OgreBattle]

with the idea that monsters have their own classes... wouldn't that cause a problem of "The Drow Ranger did a thing with swords that my ranger can't"?

[Username17]

In Disgaea, a Succubus, Vampire, or Cat Girl can't be a Monk. The Cat Girl specializes in unarmed combat and totally kicks people, but she can't be a monk because she already has a character class by virtue of being a Cat. But that's just game mechanics. If you made a game where the classes and races individually had less impact, there's no thematic reason you couldn't have one of each.

with the idea that monsters have their own classes... wouldn't that cause a problem of "The Drow Ranger did a thing with swords that my ranger can't"?

Well, Drow is probably an example of a character race that would be minor enough not to get its own class at all.

-Username17

[Dean]

This is also a problem you could solve by having big and small version of monsters if you care this much. So there would be a Mind Flayer class and a Mind Flayer subclass which gives you a smaller portion of Mind Flayer goodies. Then you could have Monk/Mind Flayers and Mind Flayer/Monks.

[Korgan0]

with the idea that monsters have their own classes... wouldn't that cause a problem of "The Drow Ranger did a thing with swords that my ranger can't"?

Well, there are two possibilites: either the thing they do is thematically related to being Drow (like create a patch of darkness then leap out or whatever) or it's just segregated by setting boundaries, wherein the ranger has to go to menzowhatever and learn from the drow masters, both of which are allowable.

[Emerald]

This is also a problem you could solve by having big and small version of monsters if you care this much. So there would be a Mind Flayer class and a Mind Flayer subclass which gives you a smaller portion of Mind Flayer goodies. Then you could have Monk/Mind Flayers and Mind Flayer/Monks.

That's basically how the 3e mindflayer works already: you have all the mindflayer racial stuff, and then either a bunch of SLAs or telepath manifesting depending on whether you're using the MM or XPH version. Let the mind flayer (and other monsters with inherent casting) swap out manifesting for monk stuff and voila, an easy mind flayer/monk.

[OgreBattle]

What does it take to balance these resource subsystems against each other? Say the ones Frank listed on page 1...

For example, you could have:

Assassin

Warm up is the name of the game here. You have various abilities, but they require time to activate. You can do your basic super crossbow shot by giving up movement for the turn, but if you want to do your death strike, you have to give up an entire turn.

Berserker

Someone gets to have a Rage Bar, and the Berserker is a good obvious fit for that. Power up your super moves by hitting people and taking damage. You could institute a limit on sacrificing chickens to the Berserker by having fatigue set in a certain amount of time after the ragebar starts up.

Druid

Druids have always been way overcrowded conceptually, being everything from spirit shamans to nature priests to lycanthropic fighting machines. Here, we're going for the more "deals with nature spirits" end of things and less with the "bear warrior". You have a number of spirits that can aid you and at any given moment one of them is available. This is like a Green Arrow WoF setup, where you randomly determine which spirit you get to use each round and that spirit comes with a fixed set of options. So if you get Thunder Spirit this round you can use any of the Thunder Spirit powers, and if you get the Oak Spirit or Wave Spirit instead, you get a different set of powers to choose from.

Hero

Someone is going to want a "simple" character where they can spam the same attacks over and over again if that is what they want to do. There does need to be an "everything at will" class, and I think the Hero is it.

Monk

Magical martial arts are based on the linking of stances and maneuvers. That is, you can spend an action to change to a new stance, which will give you a new list of maneuvers you can use. Kind of like a warblade, but the maneuvers you get each time you refresh are fixed to short lists, in order to make the mid-battle resculpts take less table-time.

Necromancer

Incarnum was terrible, but many of the underlying concepts were not bad. Necromancers get a certain amount of Life Essence that they can route to various things. Basically this means that the army you can have gets bigger (and if you go for a big Diablo 2 style golem instead, that can be bigger) as you go up in level, and also that as your army (or bodyguard) gets more powerful you drain off your own ability to shoot black beams that kill people. Most importantly of all, it gives a solid in-character reason why your personal attacks are less level appropriate than those of the other characters when you have a skeleton army going.

Paladin

The new improved Paladin is basically a Crusader with more healing and protection wards. So you get a small deck-based WoF. Divine inspiration gives you a couple of choices each turn and you do whatever seems most useful at the time.

Psion

I am not a fan of spell point systems, but many people are. The Psion would get power points and use them to power their abilities. In essence, everything is available all the time, but there's a pretty short battery per encounter. Power Points would come back quickly with meditation. To balance this with the Wizard (see below), you'd give them less powers known and also give them few enough power points (and a steep enough cost curve) that they want to use their smaller powers sometimes.

Rogue

The Rogue is also nominally an "everything at will" class, except that all their tricks have trigger conditions (like Sneak Attacks requiring enemies to be flanked or denied their dex bonus). This means that while all of your tricks are theoretically unlimited, the actual class is fairly complex to play because you have to set up special conditions to use your stuff.

Warlock

You have big powers and small powers. The big powers all have Drain of various kinds, which makes you want to use them as close to the end of battles as possible. But you still have your eldritch blasts.

Wizard

The idea here is to do spell preparation, but to do so in a way that is less annoying than 3e's "prepare 30 spells and tough it out all day" version. With this you get a small pile of spell slots to prepare into, but you can prepare new spells between encounters. So it's like 4e in that you have what are essentially encounter powers, but unlike 4e in that that is all you have and that you can trade those out in a few minutes. When you run out of prepared spells, you can fallback on your cantrips and reserve spells.

-Username17

It's already been said that a powerful effect on the 1st turn is more valuable than on following turns

But then the "at-will Hero", as his power is steady from first to last, what would be a rough guide to how strong their at-will attacks should be?

[Mask_De_H]

That depends on how long you want combats to be and what needs to be done to make 50/50 or better on your SGT.

[Username17]

Also remember that some things get a lot stronger if they are at-will than other things. For example: an at-will stunlock is essentially infinite damage in a one on one battle, while a once-per-encounter stunlock is just a modest one-time damage boost.

-Username17

[tussock]

I'd suggest a starting point, using a simplistic measure of "just fucking kill things", you want at-will attacks being about 80% of the peak-early ranged-spell casters capacity for extreme violence.

That's if they're archers who can choose their targets and concentrate fire, and thus kill things. If it's at-will melee and you have to take a round to get into melee and then sometimes get out-manouvered and stuff you need more like 120% of peak-early casters, higher the less mobile you are.

So if a set of 3 encounter spells can instantly drop 2-3 mobs each (less on the last one), something like 3.5 Colour Spray or Sleep with easy saves, then Archer-Fighters need to drop 2 a round on average, and Melee-Fighters drop 3 a round on average, and your fights need to be against about 10 mobs per PC. Say everyone can drop 1 a round even if they're out of spells or otherwise disabled. Same sort of ratios for the monsters.

Then in five rounds your Wizard's dropped 8, Archer 10, and Melee guy 12, and all contributed about as much to reducing the threat of the monsters toward zero (and work better together than they do in monochrome teams). If archery stops working, they still need to drop two per round in melee or whatever.

Melee guy is better against more Orcs, and Wizard better against less, but's that's partially self-correcting with the limit on how long you can stand in melee and the need for enough targets to make the spells work out best.

If your melee action needs a further wind-up period where the monsters might not cooperate or something, like Whirlwind Attack where they have to surround you on their turn, it needs to drop at least 5 Orcs. Or a lot more if we consider you just increased the threat presented by the monsters by standing in the middle of them, but let's assume melee characters won't be as threatened by melee monsters to counter that.

[*] Measures of "kills" do not always translate trivially to direct damage, though it's a fair starting point. If the melee guy can likely be overwhelmed by damage, grappling, disarming, or whatever his own kill rate has to skyrocket while his short mid-combat burst (or late-combat recovery) lasts.

[*] If you're fighting 3 elite giants and a Wizard stunlocks one of them immediately, that does more to help the party than everything everyone else added together can do in the whole fight. Solo and Elite monsters need to permanently self-unlock, minor or standard action respectively. Same for PCs, really, should similar powers become routine for monsters (grappling or stunning in 3e).

[*] A lot of classic Wizard spells don't remove the threat of the monsters at all, only reduce it or help others kill them later. Those spells need to hit way more targets, and do way more damage in total if it's spread around lots of monsters.

[*] Curses need to be huge! Not killing things means the fight lasts longer, against those extra foes, and that is very bad. Still, delaying or action denial works. Even forcing them to take two rounds out is worth nearly half as much as killing something in a five-round fight.

[*] If Wizard spells will often be interrupted (or any similar failure rate for other characters), they need to be a lot stronger. Not only are they often doing nothing, but they're often working later in the fight when they do work.

Fighting two mobs each, the whole early-burst concept works better as subtle or temporary threat-reduction or very short action denial across all the monsters, or moderate area-damage that brings up everyone else's kill rate and shortens the fight to ~3 rounds instead of 5.

Fighting a single target you want a shorter fight, 3 rounds or so, and everyone does similar damage outputs over that time, give or take, assuming designed solos get increased protection against early-burst characters.

[Kaelik]

I'd suggest a starting point, using a simplistic measure of "just fucking kill things", you want at-will attacks being about 80% of the peak-early ranged-spell casters capacity for extreme violence.

That's if they're archers who can choose their targets and concentrate fire, and thus kill things. If it's at-will melee and you have to take a round to get into melee and then sometimes get out-manouvered and stuff you need more like 120% of peak-early casters, higher the less mobile you are.

Wow, you are even more boring than 4e.

Because you know, all possible powers should just being damage or a direct conversion to damage is totally a fun game worth playing.

[OgreBattle]

Because you know, all possible powers should just being damage or a direct conversion to damage is totally a fun game worth playing.

When I played AdventurerConquererKing, the joy of smashing skeletons and bandits and the thrill of almost dying from skeletons and bandits was really fun...

...because our main goal was trying to haul loot away without provoking skeletons and bandits so the combat portions were brief, thrilling, and the fatality was a little offset by hiring mooks.

But yeah, effects like SLEEP were... could you consider it a damaging effect when the effect is "target will have their throats slit at the end of the encounter"?

[rampaging-poet]

I'd suggest a starting point, using a simplistic measure of "just fucking kill things", you want at-will attacks being about 80% of the peak-early ranged-spell casters capacity for extreme violence.

That's if they're archers who can choose their targets and concentrate fire, and thus kill things. If it's at-will melee and you have to take a round to get into melee and then sometimes get out-manouvered and stuff you need more like 120% of peak-early casters, higher the less mobile you are.

Wow, you are even more boring than 4e.

Because you know, all possible powers should just being damage or a direct conversion to damage is totally a fun game worth playing.

He didn't say his starting point was "dealing damage", he said his starting point was removing things from combat entirely. In addition to stabbing fools in the face, this includes putting them to sleep, trapping them behind walls of stone, banishing them to other planes, and every other save-or-die or DNS spell currently extant. Any battlefield control spell that removes an enemy from combat long enough to finish the fight also counts.
Thinking in terms of threats removed per round also means balancing short-duration stunning and character removal (solid fog, maze against high-intelligence creatures, etc.) automatically balances fights with reinforcements for free and vice-versa. Stopping a frost giant with solid fog for two rounds is almost identical to killing him and having another one show up two rounds later.

[tussock]

Yeh, sleep in ACKS is huge like all the oldschool games, and was my weaker 3.5 example of JFK things.

Threat reduction, name of the game. Minimising the total attacks the bad guys can make across the whole fight, by whatever means. The longer you take to have any effect on that, the more you have to do to make up for it. The monsters have already attacked, it's too late.

Delays are interesting, in that someone has to actually be killing monsters in the meantime, and be capable of still killing monsters later in the fight. It's a boon to the at-will guys to spread the fight out like that. If you have that, then delaying 2 monsters is roughly as good as killing 1. Also, terrain choice can act as a good delay, like flight can act as infinite damage.