Sidestepping Multiclass Requests

[MGuy]

No. When first afflicted with vampirism you get all the weaknesses, none of the benefits. You get the daytime skin condition, the need to drink blood, and that shit. The only boon you'd get is being immortal because you're undead (and thus fall prey to any undead related shenanigans). The idea is (in my game) that being turned into a vampire or werewolf is, at least for those who don't learn how to embrace it, completely shitty. Regular people (common tier folk) are just completely screwed when they get turned unless they are cured (they get no feats). So instead of getting turned basically being a free pass to being completely fucking awesome, it actually fucking sucks for most people (which is a credible reason for people not wanting it to happen to them).

Those who CAN deal with it (IE people who actually get feats) can overcome the afflictions and go on to be awesome immortal vampire/lycan people.

[...You Lost Me]

Well that certainly is a power-now for power-later thing. It doesn't sound very viable.

[MGuy]

Well that certainly is a power-now for power-later thing. It doesn't sound very viable.

As I said, the idea is that getting bitten is NOT a good thing. Those are diseases. I want them to be bad instead of being instant long term power ups. I want people to not really wanna contract the disease (as it is supposed to be a bad thing). Players can cope with it pretty well as they can either get cured or embrace it and change their character to being a vamp or lycan lord/lady. Being a vampire/lycan comes with a host of abilities (and not bad ones either) so there's no real reason (to me) why a player shouldn't have to pay long term costs to earn them over time.

The only real problem I had with this set up is that it made little sense to make a player have to wait to gain the appropriate level in order to embrace the new condition. So instead they can just go back and retrain a feat they already have and embrace it by just spending some downtime and sacrificing another long term ability.

[Username17]

so there's no real reason (to me) why a player shouldn't have to pay long term costs to earn them over time.

Because power now for power later is jacked up? It was jacked up in AD&D, and it's jacked up now. Letting all the other players lord it over one player until they get to lord it over the other players is a recipe for resentment now and resentment later. And because it's an RPG with an unknown end date, there's no reason to believe you can ensure that the end date comes far enough in the future but not too far so that the low power and high power periods will in any way balance.

Plus, since it's a cooperative game, when one player is in their "suck phase", then everyone else has to cover for them. If one player burns in the sunlight, then the entire party can't travel or have major showdowns during the day. You aren't just punishing the player who is eventually going to get the power payoff, you're punishing everyone at the table so that one player can eventually get a power payoff.

This is Gygaxian Actuary Table Bullshit. And it was a bad idea in the 1970s. And it's still a bad idea today.

-Username17

[MGuy]

What 'suck' phase exactly are you coming down on? The part where when you first contract a disease you have to suffer for it? The dropping of a feat to acquire access to multiple abilities over time instead of getting an assload of special abilities that, altogether, are better than most singular magic items and that don't take away from any of your actual abilities from your classes and shit?

Exactly what have I said indicates that somehow you're going to bring the party down other then when your character is actually fucking suffering from the status condition they had forced upon them? Do you have a problem with people suffering from status conditions in general or something?

[Username17]

What 'suck' phase exactly are you coming down on? The part where when you first contract a disease you have to suffer for it? The dropping of a feat to acquire access to multiple abilities over time instead of getting an assload of special abilities that, altogether, are better than most singular magic items and that don't take away from any of your actual abilities from your classes and shit?

Exactly what have I said indicates that somehow you're going to bring the party down other then when your character is actually fucking suffering from the status condition they had forced upon them? Do you have a problem with people suffering from status conditions in general or something?

First of all, you're asking someone to suck for several adventures. Possibly several levels. That is all kinds of flavors of bullshit. You can fap fap fap about it's a disease and it's supposed to be bad all you fucking want, but you're still putting players into a position where they could just retire their character and play a different one (in the same or different game, which you have to remember is also an option) and not have to put up with being teabagged by the DM for several actual weeks and possibly the entire remaining length of the game.

Secondly, I don't know what "a feat" does in your homebrew game. Seriously, you're using it in the 3e/4e context of "some bullshit character advancement resource you get every couple of levels" as opposed to what the word actually means, which is "an awesome thing you did". But within the context you seem to be using it, it's a resource which is normally expected to provide benefits that are quite a bit less than "transforming into a clawed, regenerating warform" would be expected to be. So superficially you appear to be presenting "open up a super optiona few levels down the road in which you get substantially more for your level advancement resources than anyone else could plausibly hope for" to the people you are currently shitting on.

So it's the same stupid fucking "lose power now, gain power later" idea that Gygax floated in the Nixon administration. And it was a shitty idea then, and it's a shitty idea now.

-Username17

[MGuy]

Perhaps I am overestimating players then. I readily assume that players have access to abilities that get rid of something as common as a disease. I can, perhaps, see players who are completely unprepared and stuck out somewhere they can't escape from suffering from a disease over an adventure. I certainly can't imagine players suffering from a disease over even one whole level. I've never run or played in a game that a player suffered from a disease for the duration of an entire adventure. A level, and especially several, sounds completely ridiculous and I certainly wouldn't ask anyone to do that.

Your worry, however, seems forced. There are worse conditions players can contract, from being petrified to straight up dying. Hell, just being beat up or stolen from can be pretty damn crippling. Having to stay inside during the daytime and turning into a wolf infrequently just doesn't seem as bad and are more readily curbed with relatively simple precautions.

What I am offering is that you can take a disease (something that's supposed to specifically debilitate people) you contracted, do some retraining or use your next feat to turn it into power. That's pretty much it. I don't know where this "few levels down the road" thing you're presenting comes from. I straight up said: Take feat --> Gain Benefits over time. So when I ask you "What suck time are you talking about" I seriously mean where the fuck are these intermediary levels worth of wait and uncertainty coming from. Hell I even if you HAD thought that I was going to make somebody wait until their NEXT feat to benefit that would require you skipping over when I said:

The only real problem I had with this set up is that it made little sense to make a player have to wait to gain the appropriate level in order to embrace the new condition.

I go this far to acknowledge that waiting until the next level you get a feat from is a problem and so I my answer to that is "Well all the player has to do is take some downtime, drop a feat, and embrace it".

Perhaps the "over time" part is confusing so I'll clarify. What I mean by that is that you don't gain ALL the abilities at once. Think of this particular use of a feat as a scaling one (with level of course). As you go up in level you get better lycan/vampire abilities. I don't think that through the use of a feat you can earn all the vampire abilities right off the bat at any level. Some of the vampire's abilities (like seeing in the dark, not starving by going a few days without blood) I don't care about so you get that shit right off the bat. Mind control, gaseous/swarm forms, etc are a bit big so I'd prefer they be delayed a bit So you don't start off with all your bad ass vampire abilities but you take the feat once, unlock the shit over time. That seems like a good deal since you get that shit IN ADDITION to every other fucking thing you get as you level up.

[tussock]

Sorry to interrupt again, but I see I left a conversation behind here, regarding 3e design etc. Back on topic at the end.

So which is it Tussock? Are they good at game design or not? Because you keep switching in the same posts. Did they intentionally make the wizard overpowered, and did they fuck up when trying to make wizards crap at low levels?

Yes, they intended some classes to be better than others, that doesn't mean they intended literally every single thing that exists in the game to be exactly as powerful as it is.

So, that answered that. They meant a great deal of the PHB things to be better which are better, totally lied about that for marketing purposes for years, plus some random noise over the top of that because nobody is perfect.

So why do you keep calling them bad game designers making a bad game who are shit if they made the game enjoyable?

Did I? I said they made certain classes and feats and skills suck for various reasons, including to make people feel good about themselves for noticing. That was fine until the internet arrived in force and stopped it being hard work, or any work at all.

They also made the underlying mechanics work better for small skirmishes, which required the monsters be quite a lot more dangerous to account for the reduced numbers faced, which reduced the number of encounters you could run between rests, which exploded off other subtle rules tweaks to produce undesirable emergent tactics they certainly didn't see coming.

So, good game designers, making the most common fights more fun and challenging, and bad game designers, not testing to destruction the full suite of changes involved in that. They should really use an open playtest, and not the sham we're getting for 5e (and had for Pathfinder).


Another example. Good design: 3e character building is interesting and consequential, your choices matter, it's a fun mini-game for the first few dozen times.
And bad design: once they expanded the options a little beyond core 3.0 you end up locked into deeply nested development paths that suck out all the flexibility and interest. You don't pick 15 interesting options, you just pick 1 new high-level option from a splatbook and do a bunch of complex backtracking to make sure you get it on time, and then play for months through the prereqs to get to use the high-level option you picked at the start.

Good design: 3e monsters are built on the same rules as PCs (give or take) so everything interacts with them in very obvious ways. They're a fuck-ton easier to run than AD&D when people try something interesting, and similar for the simple stuff.
And bad design: holy crap, they told me I could modify them, but it takes forever, because they're as detailed and loaded with bonus stacks as a full PC, and turned out to be annoyingly fiddly to get what you want out of. Unless you ignore the entire way they build monsters, like the designers do in their home games.


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On Topic: I made werewolves by giving the infected reserve HD. Lose your regular HPs and the lycanthropy kicks in with the Evil NPC tag and being a 2HD wolf and shit. Full moon you're an NPC. Want shifting control, your own alignment, stat mods, DR, demi-shape? Buy the monster-class levels. Don't want that? Don't. Probably needs a lycanthrope-Sor/Wiz and lycanthrope-CoD PClass to be fully 3e compatible.

Werebear-Druid class too, as Druids clearly need more bear.

[echoVanguard]

The way I see it, you have a couple of failure points:

• When you start talking about spending 8 destiny points for something, I just get a flash of Feat Points. Balancing things to big slots is really hard, increasing the granularity of costs makes balancing things even harder. If you thought it was difficult to balance two different 4th level spells or two different feats or anything else that costs the same amount as the thing you're comparing it to, how much more difficult is it to balance something that costs 7/8ths as much as the thing it is being compared to? Especially when you consider that now you're relying on some third (or fourth, or fifth) selection to be taken or not in order to make the points come out evenly. At the very least, you're talking about comparing an 8 point selection plus a 2 point selection versus a 7 point selection plus a 3 point selection. You have in essence doubled and then squared your balance comparison space, for as far as I can tell very little gain.

It's not ideal, no - but it provides more choice for the player than "okay, you're level 8, so you can equip rings now", which tends to engender a lot of arguments at the table from armchair realism theorists. It might be simpler to have Destiny costs be less granular by having everything cost "one destiny" and only granting Destiny Points say, every four or five levels, but that makes them too close to feat-like character advancement options which are already in the system as Talents; the available solution space is shrinking as the game becomes more mature. That being said, if you have alternate ideas, I'd certainly be willing to bring them to the team for review.

• In your Vampire example, you have several buy-in possibilities, and some of those buy-ins are buying bonuses and some of those buy-ins are buying off penalties. That's extremely problematic, as you are in essence creating an optional disadvantage system in which people can take drawbacks in order to increase the number of points they have to spend on abilities. Most games that have instituted such programs have regretted it - check out the various trait bullshit from D&D's Unearthed Arcana. Indeed, most successful games that have disadvantage points give people a maximum number of disadvantage points and then assume everyone takes the maximum all the time (Shadowrun, Champions). But in your Vampire Mantle example, the choice to have more disadvantages and more power or less power and less disadvantages is dynamically given in the middle of play, meaning that players will have more or less power based on how powergamey they want to be in the middle of play. To use a D&D example, that would be like letting one player have the choice to buy feats with traits in the middle of play.

Unspent Destiny Points grant other bonuses, such as rerolls, that are intended to be slightly inferior to the benefits granted by Artefacts or Mantles (since those are more focused). And quite frankly, there's nothing wrong with having in-play character advancement tracks - every game has them, although they usually take the form of equipment or weird power-ups completely off the advancement schedule.

Also, I find it a little weird that your example compares equipping items and gaining templates in Nemesis Age to gaining UA traits/flaws in D&D instead of the intended equivalences, which are equipping items and gaining templates in D&D.

echo

[hogarth]

When you start talking about spending 8 destiny points for something, I just get a flash of Feat Points. Balancing things to big slots is really hard, increasing the granularity of costs makes balancing things even harder.

If I understand your suggestion, you were suggesting that having a vampire power would take up a character's neck magic item slot (or whatever). But certainly, if we're talking about 3E D&D, magic items that fit in the neck slot are wildly unbalanced as well.

[Username17]

Also, I find it a little weird that your example compares equipping items and gaining templates in Nemesis Age to gaining UA traits/flaws in D&D instead of the intended equivalences, which are equipping items and gaining templates in D&D.

Because your example was that people could get the Vampire Mantle for 8 Destiny Points with all the powers, but that for some lesser number of Destiny Points you still get the Vampire Mantle Powers but you get shafted with various disadvantages.

Which means that the actual price of the Vampire Mantle is still 8 points, but have the additional option to buy more Destiny Points by taking on various Vampiric Weaknesses. That is why I am comparing it to systems where you have optional disadvantages that give you fungible character advancement resources. Because that is exactly what you have described. Just in a bass ackwards way.

-Username17

[echoVanguard]

Because your example was that people could get the Vampire Mantle for 8 Destiny Points with all the powers, but that for some lesser number of Destiny Points you still get the Vampire Mantle Powers but you get shafted with various disadvantages.

Which means that the actual price of the Vampire Mantle is still 8 points, but have the additional option to buy more Destiny Points by taking on various Vampiric Weaknesses. That is why I am comparing it to systems where you have optional disadvantages that give you fungible character advancement resources. Because that is exactly what you have described. Just in a bass ackwards way.

It doesn't quite work that way. The cost of the Vampire Mantle, with all of its powers, strengths, and vulnerabilities, is 8 points, whether you have enough points to pay for it or not. If you don't, then until you do, you are also subject to the Drawback. For every Artefact or Mantle, the Drawback is always the same: a periodic loss of control of your character in certain specific situations unless you spend Luck Points to stave it off temporarily. For example, the Vampire Mantle's Drawback is that you vant to suck bluud, and you are forced to attack and feed off of innocents unless you spend a Luck Point to stave off the craving...for now. Similarly, the Lycanthrope Drawback is that you HUNGER FOR THE FLESH OF MEN, and you are forced to kill and eat bystanders at times when it might be terribly inconvenient. A crystal ball of remote viewing's Drawback would be Fascination, where you occasionally lose control of your character while staring into the Palantir crystal ball thingy and wind up with some unpleasant post-hypnotic suggestions kicking around in your psyche that crop up at most inopportune moments.

Since you gain Luck Points by performing altruistic actions, it mechanically models the trope of barely maintaining control of your monstrous nature or dangerous widget. This continues until you out-level the Artefact or Mantle (i.e. you can pay the Destiny cost) at which point such struggles are assumed to no longer be compelling.

Now, in theory, you could load yourself up with a bunch of Artefacts and Mantles and drive your Destiny balance deep into the negatives, but you'd very quickly reach a point where all the overlapping situations where you lose control of your character essentially amount to your character becoming an NPC. It's not a perfect system (after all, it's still very early in development), but it feels interesting and can probably be tweaked in various ways to improve it, such as by instituting hard caps on Destiny negatives or grouping various destiny-consuming options into categories. Maybe the Vampire Mantle and the Lich Crown both occupy your Head chakra, while Lycanthropy and the Crystal Amulet both occupy your Heart chakra. There are options.

echo

[lans]

A lot of the handwringing over trap options just GOES AWAY if you bake retraining into Players Handbook 1. So your Flaming Uppercut technique actually sucks...

Wouldn't a better place to start would be for your Flaming Uppercut to not suck, but maybe taking flaming/ice/thunder/quick uppercut isn't working out so well and you need something else.

In Magic terms- you build a deck that has Swords to plowshares, path to exile , o-ring etc. You used good cards in your deck, but its not a good deck.