The Gaming Den

Pretending it actually matters, my opinion is that any TTRPG written for the sort of people who aren't likely to argue about it for 5 pages on the Den shouldn't have more than Two or Three distinct resource management systems. One of those should be At Will, another of which needs to be your Health and the third of which should be whatever funky thing you think you've invented.

More than that and you are likely confusing more players than you are intriguing.

MGuy wrote:If you can just cherry pick abilities, at any level you want what's the point of having classes?

It's less intimidating from a character design and development standpoint.
You can easily include a number of breakpoints, synergistic bonuses (not everything has to be free pick, just a few important things), features that accelerate your resource mechanic, and so on.

Basically what you laid down has already been discussed. You basically have it where people at whatever level can get whatever ability they want from whatever class.

No, it's a middle-ground between being given a single menu to choose from, and being given an unbounded menu to choose from.
Do I need to defend the statement, "sometimes you want to land in the middle ground?"

If you're just going to do that then what really is the difference between classes?

I'm going to write this up, but the plan is -
Classes do get a fixed progression of abilities, as well as some abilities to pick. So if you multi-class, you do fall behind schedule on that.

Or in other words are you screwing yourself by NOT multiclassing in your set up or not?

I have to assemble the abilities carefully so that an Assassin 6, a Sorcerer 6, and an Assassin 3/Sorcerer 3 are all reasonable characters. Obviously they aren't going to be perfectly balanced against one another; I'd prefer to err slightly on making the Ass 6 and Sor 6 better than the Ass 3/Sor 3, but as long as none of them ride the short bus I think it'll be good enough.

A lot of the time new resource management systems are made for the sake of making a new book stand out.

It's also done years apart from one another, so it's for people who want to try something new while still 'playing D&D'.

So part of it is just something that happens after your game has been up and around for a few years and you want to deliver something fresh to the audience.

Mask_De_H wrote:And the history of another of the biggest examples of multiple resourcing systems in table top RPGs (Shadowrun)

Basically everything else that comes in as "not the biggest" in RPGs is, well peanuts. Like your example. Shadowrun, which is an obscure RPG that appeals only to obscure players.

I'm sorry, it doesn't even come in a close second. We have Vampire/Werewolf/Mage etc for that, and just look at the cluster fuck of multi resource/distinct class mechanic bullshit THAT was.

And indeed for that matter, as little as I know about shadowrun what I DO know is that it's distinct class mechanics, both in the form of resources and distinct class minigames has always been one of its great downfalls as a system and what people crap on about endlessly as broken and problematic right here. On the rare occasions anyone says anything much about it they say something like "yeah but one of those spirity dudes can do the same thing only for free and infinitely with their differing resource management in their differing minigame for NO REASON!".

The history of your example (D&D in abstract but 3.X in the specific) tells us that people don't like playing things from expansion material

Not entirely correct. People frequently like playing things from their SPECIFIC favourite bit of expansion material. There are a LOT of psionics fans. There are a lot of warlock fans. There are a lot of weeaboo fightin magic fans. There are a lot of Beguiler fans. The point is those people are not the same fucking people. And also they generally tend to hate each other and their favourite toys.

and get really uncomfortable when Fighters get nice things

Which doesn't explain a thing when the weeaboo fightin magic fans get all pissed off at the asshole who tries to bring a Psion or a True Namer into their game.

They also don't like it when shit doesn't work or is nonsensical (like 2e Psionics), which is reasonable.

You write up 3 or more character action resource mechanics into the same game and SOMETHING is going to start not making sense... as has tended to happen every time someone has done that ever.

This also applies to the Shadowrun example, as the roles people tend to dislike (Decker/Rigger in 3e, anything Matrix-based in 4) are the ones with the most convoluted and nonsensical rules interactions.

Prime example. Why are you arguing the opposite point of your own example again???

What you say is unpopular is shit you don't like (you singling out WoF,

The point about WoF isn't that it's a divisive mechanic because I and basically everyone bar less than five of Franks biggest fan boys hate it.

But more that it is actually a divisive/exclusive mechanic by design and intent. It was MEANT to be a replacement. It NEEDS to be exclusive. It CLAIMS nothing else can do the things it can do, so therefore clearly nothing else can be run in parallel with it without breaking shit or being obviously inferior (or superior, depending on whether you believe the hype about player agency being the worst thing every for RPGs).

Phone Lobster wrote:I'm sorry, it doesn't even come in a close second. We have Vampire/Werewolf/Mage etc for that, and just look at the cluster fuck of multi resource/distinct class mechanic bullshit THAT was.

I'm sorry, wasn't your argument that no one liked multiple resource management systems and multiple resource management systems would never be popular? Because from where I'm sitting, the most popular RPGs in history (3e D&D, Masquerade, Pathfinder) are in fact by your own admission giant clusterfucks of distinct resource mechanics for different classes. It's like you're trying to undermine your argument. And you've succeeded!

Pathfinder is the biggest game right now. It has people with ki pools, and grit, and music reserves, and one-at-a-time mutagens, and arcane pools, and so on and so on. 4th edition D&D is fucking dead and it gave everyone the same power slots. If you simply discount everything except the biggest games in the RPG world as "unpopular", then the clear take-home message is that people want multiple resource systems super duper hard.

-Username17

To be fair, all of that shit (but Mutagen and music reserves) is the same power point system with different triggers. V:tM is pretty much the worst system to use for the argument that PL's trying to make, however.

Josh has a point, too, but people seem to grasp alternate resource mechanics in bushels when it's, say, BlazBlue or Guilty Gear. It is a different paradigm with a fighting game versus a TTRPG, but a little crossover wouldn't hurt. Something like four to eight mechanics would probably be the sweet spot for people, give that's the sweet spot for human memory anyway.

I would disagree that the Summoners Eidolon Evolution pool, Barbarian Rage pools and powers per day, Wizard Vancian casting, and Rogue's "Never-stop-sneak-attacking" are all the same power point system with different triggers. Say what you will about Pathfinder the classes definitely don't all operate the same.

Also PL writes about WoF like he has full blown autism

DrP wrote:- If an AM 3/DM 3 gets neither, then multiclassing is a lie. Refer to the SRD.
- If an AM 3/DM 3 gets both, then multiclassing is obligatory.

But this is not an impossible problem! The solution is pretty simple:
- An AM6 gets 3 GTFO/major abilities off of the level-appropriate air mage list, which needs to have at least 3 gems on it.
- A DM6 gets 3 GTFO/major abilities off of the level-appropriate dark mage list, likewise.
- A DM3/AM3 gets 1 ability off of each of the two lists (or a total of 2 abilities, which come from their choice of the two lists.)

Tada! The math to make this happen is not, in fact, especially hard. A proper and uniform distribution of gems takes a bit of work but is hardly impossible.

This is ridiculous. Let's consider some normal 3rd edition classes that all have "War" in the name: Warlock, Warblade, Warmage, and only slightly cheating: War Wizard of Cormyr.

Class	Limited Access to Known Powers	Limited Access to Uses per Day
Warlock	No	No
Warblade	Yes	No
Warmage	No	Yes
War Wizard	Yes	Yes

No obviously, if you only have access to some portion of the abilities you know at any given time you are probably going to want to know more abilities than if you don't. If you have a limit on how many powers you can use a {time period}, you're going to need more choices or power or both to compensate for that.

Blithely assuming that everything is going to work out alright if you give everyone the same number of powers is wrong on first principles. Because how people access their powers has a huge impact on how powerful those powers are and how many they need to have.

-Username17

deanruel87 wrote:Also PL writes about WoF like he has full blown autism

I think you may be projecting a little there.

WoF is a concept steeped in autism flavors. The reasons given for its existence the attempts to defend it's flaws and the basic description of its function are all fundamentally about an obsession with replacing human choice with nice meaningless random numbers.

But really again. It is terribly unpopular and in addition do I need to point out for the third or fourth time without anyone giving one damn defense of this.

WoF very specifically was designed and presented as a full blown replacement system. In its design and presentation ALL alternatives were criticised by WoFs 2 supporters as basically utterly incapable of producing the same results as WoF.

How the fuck then is WoF supposed to coexist with these "inferior" alternative systems that supposedly cannot function in the same way and present comparable results in the basic goals of managing the dread jabberwocky of player choice and bringing about the prophesied paradise of randomised unpredictable actions free of the duel iron fists of optimal actions and potential attack combos?

And in a more abstract respect. Assuming you sat down and made an awesome action resource management system that met the very important game play goals you had identified and worked towards. You are now going to sit down and write how many more and still expect to meet those goals with each and every one? Without undermining the other systems attempts to meet those goals? Really?

PL: WoF allows you to have more powers on the known list while still having a manageable number of abilities on the usable list this turn. That's what it does. It does that well. There are other systems that do that, but they have other costs. For example, Spell Prep requires that you spend a fair amount of "down time" fucking around with your preparation slots, which is something that you specifically have condemned.

You are the person who announced that in order to get rid of the heinous acts of catalog shopping during downtime and the great amount of time that took up, that the MC should prepare short lists of abilities for the players to select from during play. Do you fucking remember that? Because I do.

WoF is different from spell preparation in exactly the way you said a system should be. I can only conclude that you continue to denounce WoF because you are butt hurt for not having thought of it first. Remember the thing you said you wanted?

Phone Lobster, on replacing downtime spell selection with the MC handing out a shortened fixed list each time it comes up wrote:A moment extra which WILL BE SHORTER THAN DOWN TIME and will also REMOVE DOWN TIME costs from the game.

Sounds like replacing Spell Prep with WoF matrices to me!

PL wrote:And in a more abstract respect. Assuming you sat down and made an awesome action resource management system that met the very important game play goals you had identified and worked towards. You are now going to sit down and write how many more and still expect to meet those goals with each and every one? Without undermining the other systems attempts to meet those goals? Really?

Who said that each resource management system had the same goals? Seriously, who the fuck said that? Because they obviously don't. You have multiple resource management systems because they appeal to different people or appeal to the same people in different ways.

You have power point pools or Strength-based WoF rolls or Drain because you want to ration a character's access to higher powered actions by forcing them to balance it out with lower powered actions over the course of multiple rounds in encounters. You have Cool Down Timers or Encounter Charges or strength-agnostic WoF setups because you simply want to break up ability spam. You have reconfigurable ability lists because you want the characters to be doing different things from battle to battle and feel like their planning matters. And so on.

Different systems are not only there to do different things, they are intended to appeal to people on different levels. There are a lot of people who like psionic power points. I don't particularly, but moving those little points around clearly scratches an itch for some people.

Josh wrote:Pretending it actually matters, my opinion is that any TTRPG written for the sort of people who aren't likely to argue about it for 5 pages on the Den shouldn't have more than Two or Three distinct resource management systems. One of those should be At Will, another of which needs to be your Health and the third of which should be whatever funky thing you think you've invented.

I assume we're talking about "per character", in which case I agree. I don't think that Wizards should have secondary power point pools to augment their spells or that Psions should have secondary charges per day on tertiary abilities or anything like that. There's your skills and shit that you can do whenever they come up, there's your health bar, and then there's your class ability framework. That really seems to be enough for a character.

Of course, I conclude that in a D&D-like game, the class ability framework can be and should be different for different classes.

-Username17

Frank, if you're going to argue with someone, at least read some of what they write. Yes, if you have diverse character classes with an entire spectrum of mutually non-transparent resource management systems, the game can't work, and making multi-classing work is very hard (if not impossible.) You need to apportion the GTFO abilities in the fashion that I describe, and then, as a relatively minor but still needed issue, you need to make the resource management match up in some relatively transparent way.

Regarding your table of classes: I propose don't do that. Make every class have maneuvers which come in 9 levels or whatever, and everyone gets 3rd-level maneuvers which are meant to be roughly comparable. Multi-class characters get fewer of these, especially of the highly desirable sort which you aren't allowed to have freely.

Class	WOF Character	MP Character	Rage Meter Character
Warlock	Puts "Warlock" powers in a WOF deck	Gets (the same) Warlock powers which cost MP	Cost rage bar, gets Warlock rules for ragebar filling
Warblade	" "Warblade" powers	" "Warblade" powers	" "Warblade" powers, Warblade rules
Warmage	Warmage yada	Warmage yada	Warmage yada
War Wizard	War Wizard hey	War Wizard hey	War Wizard hey

This is going to give you classes which are somewhat flat, they're not going to "feel" as unique as if you give Warmages a destruction meter which enables them to deliver MASSIVE DAMAGE after doing the same elemental damage type n rounds in a row, or whatever the hell stuff you come up with.

On the other hand, multi-classing will work and the classes may actually be balanced. Which yours, in spite of umpteen thousand hours of work, generally are not.

If you want to make a Monk and a Wizard balanced, you have to give the 5th level Monk kung fu moves which are at least on the same plane of utility as 3rd level spells; so you might as well just make them 3rd level Kung Fu moves and move from there.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Class	Limited Access to Known Powers	Limited Access to Uses per Day
Warlock	No	No
Warblade	Yes	No
Warmage	No	Yes
War Wizard	Yes	Yes

But hey, let's see if we can make multi-classing work for these classes using the principle I described, starting from pathfailure.

Warlock:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-par ... nt/warlock
This is actually easy to fix. For each "School Ability" you take, you get to choose a school ability up to (character level) instead of up to (warlock level). In exchange, the rate of gain of "School Ability" needs to get more rapid as you rise in level, instead of (sigh...) slowing down. So the Warlock/Warblade at 6th level still gets level-appropriate abilities, but the Warlock 6 will get many more of them and will get the damage reduction and whatnot.

http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/3rd-par ... ---warlord
The warlord is a fighter clone so he doesn't get level appropriate abilities in the first place. The closest he comes is his "Inspiration" ability, which I suppose would be keyed to (character level) or (warlord level * 2), whichever is less.

And you could do this for example with your 17 classes. So a Necromancer / Barbarian gets a smaller Necrontis pool but can still spend t on level-appropriate undead; and so forth.

That would sorta work - but it would be a tremendous mess, which is why I propose that if you want to have multi-classing which is the point of the thread, you should have "mutually transparent" resource management schemes and force every class to use them.

Some people think you should have those anyway, I tend to agree, but in the case of multi-classing it's a no-brainer.

DrPraetor wrote:Frank, if you're going to argue with someone, at least read some of what they write.

That is hilarious coming from the guy who bolded the part of his last post where he talked about the uses per day of Bone Spear, the thing which can literally be used every single round for all time.

More fundamentally, Praetor, you are advocating for 4e classes instead of 3e classes, and the entire point here is that this would be stupid, because a) people like different things, b) The thing were all powers have to be balanced on multiple resource systems makes all the powers fucking bland as shit.

Kaelik wrote: That is hilarious coming from the guy who bolded the part of his last post where he talked about the uses per day of Bone Spear, the thing which can literally be used every single round for all time.

Kaelik, what the fuck are you on? I just searched the entire thread for the word "Bone", and (except for quotes of me), no-one else uses the word bone!

If you're referring to Diablo II - Bone Spear costs Mana, you do run out of those eventually.
http://www.diablowiki.com/Bone_Spear_(Diablo_II)

More fundamentally, Praetor, you are advocating for 4e classes instead of 3e classes, and the entire point here is that this would be stupid, because a) people like different things, b) The thing were all powers have to be balanced on multiple resource systems makes all the powers fucking bland as shit.

Prior to the end of the run, when other resource schedules were added, 3E had:
- at will.
- a few X/day schedules for misc. stuff - turning attempts, rage, bardic music. {set 1}
- trigger conditions, but not very many.
- three different, but mutually transparent, resource management systems for spells (Wizard, Sorcerer and Psion.) {set 2}
- costs money/XP.

and that is about it. So my proposal is to collapse set 1 into set 2, and you think that turns the game into 4E, if turning attempts and bardic music use up spell slots?

So I don't know what you're smoking, but 3E did *not* have -
* Multiple round combat maneuvers, even spells. In theory all sorts of spells could have a casting time of 2 rounds, but none did.

* It did not have Rage Bars.

* It did not have Winds of Fate for a long time.

* I don't think it had mutually-exclusive stances likewise.

* Incarna pools came in very late.

* It did not have Drain.

So how exactly is Frank's proposal more like 3E? It is true that I'm proposing that everyone get spell slots (or some mechanic which is transparent with spell slots), which is different from 3E. In 3E, some people get spell slots, and some people suck.

Frank proposes that some people should get... Incarna Pools, superior held-action power, more triggered actions, rage meters and that these other resource mechanics would then be leveraged to an equal footing with Spell Slots, a proposal of which I remain highly skeptical because he hasn't done it so far. They certainly help, no question there.

But the point of the thread is how to deal with resource management and multi-classing; and I think his proposal kills multi-classing dead. Frank doesn't seem to disagree with that, even.

I think that my proposal allows multi-classing to stay alive (and is an order of magnitude easier to balance), with which people seem to disagree. Or they think it makes the game more boring - but it certainly doesn't make the game like 4E.

No, my point is that if you are dealing with the sort of casual gamer who the hobby desperately needs to attract to stay alive and/or the sort of gamer who's playing Angry Birds on his phone whenever it's not his turn you need to keep the basics not merely simple enough that even Eric can understand how his character works, but simple enough that Bunny and Finger can also understand how Eric's character works and explain it to him when Eric spaces out.

One distinct resource management system per each of the dozenplus classes in D&D-clones is far more complexity than that. So unless you have used software to fully automate your Super Meter, Rage Gage, combo pushback, infinite detection and accumulated hitstun towards dizzy the way that a Final Guilty Mortal Skull X-Alpha Blaze Strike fighting game does, then implementing multiple meters in the ruleset cuts Finger, Bunny and Eric out of your potential player pool. At the very least it makes Tabletop Gaming a confusing and frustrating experience for them and pushes them back to playing Bayonetta and Dark Souls.

So my contention is that for the sort of people who are not arguing here, games are best if they are limited to

• Health
• At-Will Abilities
• One Additional Scheme

Now, obviously that is highly limited and that may feel restrictive to people heavily involved in the hobby of arguing about RPG design on the internet -- but those people can and will write their own games, so I don't see a need to cater to them.

One issue that I haven't seen discussed is that of ability lists. 3e got a lot of use out of its ability lists because multiple classes used each one. Everyone got Feats, Paladins used Cleric spells, Rangers used Druid spells etc. This meant that the ability lists themselves could be fairly long, which allowed for plenty of customisation between characters. If you have 8-11 classes each requiring their own lists of abilities that don't have any crossover, aren't you by neccessity limiting the length of those lists to the level where characters risk becoming cookie cutter? Also, doesn't writing expansion material become a bitch when you can't just write some Feats and some Arcane spells and cater to half the existing classes?

It seems like you're setting yourself up a whole load of extra work if your Paladin, Berserker and Hero all use different types of powers to basically kill a fool.

You're assuming those people are idiots, Josh. People can remember more than three things at a time and have the ability to tell the other players at the table what they can or can't do at any given time. As long as you keep things to one system (with maybe another simple system, like at-will) at a time, people will get it. The players have down time and pre-game to figure the system mechanics for the whole game out. If you provide simple pregens, it'll make acclimating to the systems easier.

It's not like there will be one player for every system sitting at the same table at the same time.

Rob: you'd be writing new ability lists regardless. Only being fucked to provide ticky-tack customizations for some classes and straight up vertical power for others will sink your game's balance. The resource allocation system would prevent characters from feeling cookie cutter, and there's nothing stopping you from chunking classes into separate ability trees to make them distinct.

DrPraetor wrote:Kaelik, what the fuck are you on? I just searched the entire thread for the word "Bone", and (except for quotes of me), no-one else uses the word bone!

Okay, apparently I am going to have to reexplain this for the four thousandth time to you, because you are literally the dumbest person in the world.

What you said was this:

DrPraetor wrote:Going back to Frank's favorite necromancer - "having a ghast following you around" is a GTFO/major ability and you take it instead of adding a really desirable spell like gaseous form to your list. That's how you balance the resource management for Necros - who are never going to trade having more better undead for being able to throw a stupid bone spear, that bone spear had better shed a stinking cloud when it hits, and then the uses per day of that bone spear is less important than having more undead.

Now, in the context of this thread, what would Frank's favorite Necromancer be referring to? Oh right, the specific class he is making that he has been using as an example:

The Necromancer wrote:Essence
A Necromancer powers their magic and imbues their minions with their own life essence. Any minion or magical power has a minimum amount of essence to function at all. If insufficient essence is placed into a power it cannot be activated and its ongoing effects are nullified until sufficient essence is placed into it again. If a necromantic minion has insufficient essence to power it, it cannot act until it gets enough essence again and is helpless in the meantime. Essence beyond the minimum can be assigned to powers and minions up to a maximum total increase in any one equal to the Necromancer's level. The Necromancer's pool can be redistributed once per round as a minor action. As a Necromancer rises in level, they have a larger pool of essence to distribute. When the Necromancer is wounded (half hit points), they lose a quarter of their essence, which if they have already allocated their essence is lost from the Necromancer's powers and minions. Lost essence returns (unallocated) if they are no longer wounded. If a Necromancer is incapacitated (zero hit points) or killed, they lose another quarter of their essence. Any minions still active after a Necromancer is slain go on an uncontrolled rampage.

Now, obviously literally every ability that such a Necromancer has is going to based off of Essentia, which means literally every single ability has an infinite number of uses per day. But just in case you were too stupid to realize that, both Frank and I explained that to you several times before you decided to use Frank's infinite uses per day Necromancer as an example of how many uses per day it has.

Frank wrote:You've already failed. The Necromancer life essence doesn't ration daily abilities at all. It rations how powerful individual parts of the Necromancer's army are from moment to moment. It's like Focus in War Machine, so if you try to make it ration how many times per day you turn into a bear, you've already pissed in the Cheerios. Seriously, you just talked how many times per day you can transform into a bear this round. How did you not see how little sense that made?

See. So when you propose Bone Spear as a Necromancer ability used by Frank's favorite Necromancer, which you very specifically did, then I can already tell you how many uses per day the Necromancer has of Bone Spear. It is infinity. Because Necromancers do not have uses per day limitations.

More fundamentally, Praetor, you are advocating for 4e classes instead of 3e classes, and the entire point here is that this would be stupid, because a) people like different things, b) The thing were all powers have to be balanced on multiple resource systems makes all the powers fucking bland as shit.

Prior to the end of the run, when other resource schedules were added, 3E had:

Indeed, Prior to the second half of 3.5, and the ten years since that people have enjoyed playing 3e D&D, the resource managment systems existed in only 4 kinds.

Of course, you know, if you include the second half of 3.5 material that came out during 3.5 and has been used for much longer than 3.5 even existed as a thing that was updated, then you are full of shit.

Also, it had mutually exclusive stances/auras back in 3.0, so suck a barrel of cocks and learn to read.

Anyway, I regard the objections of DrPraetor and PhoneLobster to the idea of having multiple resource systems to be answered. The first answer is that multiple non-transparent resource systems has already been done and been done in every single game that has ever graced the number 1 slot or even come particularly close to doing so. The second answer is that the alternative is either "Let's force everyone on the same exact resource system" (Phone Lobster) or "Let's neuter all the powers so that none of them are different enough to not work when shoehorned into mutually transparent resource systems or swapped from list to list" (DrP). And both of those statements are literally core "breakthroughs" of the 4e design team - who I shouldn't have to remind you took those breakthroughs and ended up making a game so bad it almost killed the entire hobby.

So yes: multiple resource systems. Multiple resource systems that are not transparent enough that you can blithely transport one power from one class to another with any confidence that such a thing will be even vaguely acceptable.

---

But to get back to the matter at hand. Let's say we have our multiple resource systems and we want multiclassing. To a certain extent, if we go with the subclassing idea, we can just let that happen. You'll always be bringing the top level stuff from your "main" class, so ideally everyone should be able to compete regardless of whether their subclass combination is "good" or "bad". Indeed, even if the subclass combinations are so disparate in value that (like in FFXI) the player base ultimately decides that only an eighth of the theoretically possible combinations are actually worth pursuing, that's still twice as many characters as you could have made if you didn't have subclassing.

To a first approximation, you could just accept that Berserkers are always going to sub Cleric or Illusionist because that way they have some cool burst effects to do at the beginning of the battle before their Fury ramps up (with the cost being that those abilities will be refractory when their Fury has already ramped up and they don't care because they'll be using enhanced Berserker abilities anyway). That's still two flavors of Berserker you can play when the subclassing kicks in as opposed to the one flavor you'd be able to play if there wasn't any subclassing. And hey, if it turns out that there are three - or eight different viable Berserker builds, that's even better.

The big problem comes down to actually broken builds. And I mean that both in the CharOp sense of "this build is considerably more powerful than other options" and the regular natural English sense of "this build does not work". The first comes in when you have minions and buffs in your sub-class that consume the sub-class' resources without actually costing actions. The Necromancer is a great candidate for being OP as a sub-class, because dumping all your Essence into a backup band of minions while you rely on your actual main class for combat actions seems like a really good deal. You can't possibly test all 272 combinations, but some of the more obvious ones can be hit with the nerf stick before they go to print. The second comes in when someone takes a combo that sounds cool but actually is nearly worthless. Like maybe Druidism and Elementalism, because it turns out that you're only spending a single minor action each turn on getting powers available, so the sub-class powers pretty much never get used. This is a problem in that characters might get stuck holding the bag for a "trap option". I think that this is best dealt with by allowing people to retrain their sub-classes if they don't like them.

But now we're in to the other issue: complexity. While I think that Josh's suggestion that having spell points and uses/day in the same game is too much is itself deeply and laughably absurd, he is right that there is an upward maximum of complexity the game can handle. And it's lower than you'd think. To that extent I think that subclasses should be considerably simpler in their in-game effects than the full versions. Maybe the Druid subclass only has one totem, so when you call on it, you always get the same powers. That kind of thing. And probably the Necromancer sub doesn't get minions at all (or at least, not until pretty high level, at which point shit has already "gone crazy").

-Username17

Josh_Kablack wrote:No, my point is that if you are dealing with the sort of casual gamer who the hobby desperately needs to attract to stay alive and/or the sort of gamer who's playing Angry Birds on his phone whenever it's not his turn you need to keep the basics not merely simple enough that even Eric can understand how his character works, but simple enough that Bunny and Finger can also understand how Eric's character works and explain it to him when Eric spaces out.

Dubious how much the guy in bold even adds to a game; also, he's going to be confused even with no resource system, because stuff happened while he wasn't paying attention. Also, if your players are new and not interested in the mechanics, why are you playing a game like D&D anyway? There's a hell of a lot of simpler games out there.

@Frank, with the major/minor system you could just write two versions of troublesome power, the major and minor version. This would be the pre-nerf to OP combos (ie, minor classes which grant passives), and you could write cool synergies for traps (ie, calling 'the spirits' and 'the elements' may be done as a single minor action)

And you can't print the Players Handbook with 17 classes, that's absurd. You print it with 6-8, because 30-56 is possible to playtest. Then, when you print Power Of Nature you only need to playtest 16 more combinations, same as printing Power Of Faith/Kungfu/Mind.

BearsAreBrown wrote:@Frank, with the major/minor system you could just write two versions of troublesome power, the major and minor version. This would be the pre-nerf to OP combos (ie, minor classes which grant passives), and you could write cool synergies for traps (ie, calling 'the spirits' and 'the elements' may be done as a single minor action)

And you can't print the Players Handbook with 17 classes, that's absurd. You print it with 6-8, because 30-56 is possible to playtest. Then, when you print Power Of Nature you only need to playtest 16 more combinations, same as printing Power Of Faith/Kungfu/Mind.

So is 289. It's a stretch, but as long as you stay in the low triple digits and have a decent installed playerbase, you could get that shit knocked out easily. Now, for a few-man team like us, we'd need to go lower, but 6-8 is too low. Remember 4e only shipped with 8 classes and people got pissy. Even single man projects like the Apocalypse World based systems rolled out with 10-12 classes and immediate expansion material.

But 8 is really 64 with Major/Minors and if you frame the class section well that should come across. Even then, bump it up to 10/11 classes and ship like 3.0 did because 90-110 is still miles easier to playtest. And you really don't need that much in a core book.

I agree with Praetor. If you want to have a good rubric for a multiclassing system, the power system needs to be the same regardless of what that power system happens to be.

^ But Praetor didn't say that. Frank and I said that. We spent the better part of 5 pages bashing that idea into DrP's fucking skull. And he still doesn't get it.

BearsAreBrown wrote:But 8 is really 64 with Major/Minors and if you frame the class section well that should come across. Even then, bump it up to 10/11 classes and ship like 3.0 did because 90-110 is still miles easier to playtest. And you really don't need that much in a core book.

Yeah, that's reasonable. Although if we're going under the assumption that a class can subclass itself, it'd probably make sense to put the minor classes on a shared resource allocation system instead of on the same system as the base class, but worse.

BearsAreBrown wrote:@Frank, with the major/minor system you could just write two versions of troublesome power, the major and minor version. This would be the pre-nerf to OP combos (ie, minor classes which grant passives), and you could write cool synergies for traps (ie, calling 'the spirits' and 'the elements' may be done as a single minor action)

Well, you're going to have to make some sort of variant tweaked version of classes to do subclassing that makes any sense. If you just give out a restricted number of selections from the normal classes at the regular levels you're going to end up with a cherry picking nightmare. If you just give out the classes at a lower level you're going to end up with a lot of classes being fully useless while others rock out with their cock out - getting a lower level attack action is worth possibly less than nothing, while every +1 on a d20 is worth just as much when you're 20th level as it was at 2nd.

So the "sub-Druid" class is actually a different class than the Actual Druid class, and the point is to make it feel like you have some Druiding going on.

And you can't print the Players Handbook with 17 classes, that's absurd. You print it with 6-8, because 30-56 is possible to playtest. Then, when you print Power Of Nature you only need to playtest 16 more combinations, same as printing Power Of Faith/Kungfu/Mind.

You totally can print the Player's Handbook with 17 classes. All you have to do is be economical with your high level content and wordcount within abilities. For fuck's sake, 4e went to print with 8 classes and they went to 30th level. If you cut the starting book off at something more manageable like 10th level, you could have over 20 classes without straining things.

Red Rob wrote:One issue that I haven't seen discussed is that of ability lists. 3e got a lot of use out of its ability lists because multiple classes used each one. Everyone got Feats, Paladins used Cleric spells, Rangers used Druid spells etc. This meant that the ability lists themselves could be fairly long, which allowed for plenty of customisation between characters. If you have 8-11 classes each requiring their own lists of abilities that don't have any crossover, aren't you by neccessity limiting the length of those lists to the level where characters risk becoming cookie cutter? Also, doesn't writing expansion material become a bitch when you can't just write some Feats and some Arcane spells and cater to half the existing classes?

D&D ability lists are way too damn long. And they are way too long because their text blocks are not economical. Consider Shadowrun spells. They aren't exactly spare, but they are fairly direct and to the point about what the fuck they do. And the Illusion spells (which are the wordiest) nevertheless are 70 words per spell. Combat spells are the most economical and are 40 words a spell. That's achievable. 4e powers are over 75 words each even for the "short" powers. A 3e spell like wall of stone is over three hundred and thirty words by itself.

Abilities don't have to give up theme or tactical notation to fit fifteen to a page. They just have to be written like a Shadowrun power and not written like a 4e power and certainly not written like an AD&D essay. At a more sensible 50 or 60 words per ability, a class with reasonably full content (say, 8 abilities per level) would be taking up less than five thousand words with its ability list. And since that is less than half the wordcount of a 4e class, I hold that it is eminently achievable.

As for expansion content, I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Let's say you felt you wanted to write up another 2 abilities for each of 10 levels for all of seventeen classes. At 60 words an ability, you're only 20 thousand words into the book. Your minimalist "White Wolf Shovelware" book is 80-100k, meaning that you aren't even a quarter done with your powercreep book writing up a couple powers for every level of every class. You'll have to put in some essays about tactical roles or Halfling/Berserker synergy or something to pad word count. Or hell, let's say you're making the PHB 2 and it's going to contain levels 11-20 for thirty four prestige classes and lay down an average of 8 powers per level for every single one of them. Now we're talking. We're talking a hundred and sixty thousand words... that's almost a full sized modern supplemental core book (around 200k unless you're White Wolf). Or you could scale back a bit on the 34 PrCs and fill up another eighty thousand words with discussions of high level campaigns or something.

Classes and expansion powers just don't take up all that much space. That's why books these days are so full of "fluff". They need something to eat up the wordcount that "a slightly differently shaped blast of fire" just doesn't.

-Username17