Sidestepping Multiclass Requests

[ishy]

I don't know what to tell you either. When the DM says, I can move forward and die, or move back and die, or move left and die or move to the right and board a train; I'm not going to say that I had so many meaningful options in his campaign. In fact I'd say I had none.
Since you apparently disagree and I don't think we'd ever agree on this, let's agree to disagree?

[Ferret]

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...well, you survive the current combat and maybe you have to slob some DM nob for a <we train for x-timeframe> in a segue but it's fixable, even if you have to live with it for a short time.

I'm 100% okay with that. But if you put it in there, it needs to be in front of the players as a tool that they have access to from day one, book one, so there's no question about it being 'optional'. That means Players Handbook 1 specifically - not in the DM's guide, not in PHB2, it's gotta be right there in the original create-and-level-a-character chapter.

[Red_Rob]

The things like Toughness in 3e are there to make people feel smart for noticing how crap it is.

One of the things players responded to feeling super-good about in the late 2nd-edition surveys WotC did after taking over was "system mastery". That's code for the bit where time-rich players have read through an enormous bunch of fluffy crap and picked out the winning mechanics (aside: that's a pre-wiki concept, post-2005 the winners are well-documented public knowledge in a couple days).

Anyway, Monte and Skip and Jonathan put a lot of deliberately useless crap in 3e and associated splatbooks so you could find the gems amongst it, thereby feeling superior to the game designers. "Rewarding system mastery." Deliberate 3e design goal.


Don't mistake it for them wanting you to take Toughness. They don't want anyone to do that. They want to tell you to take Toughness on some corner-case character and let you figure out how stupid that is. Like everyone did. Like the monsters get a lot tougher if the DM actually uses the rules to give them custom feats and skills and the odd extra HD, same deal, make you feel comparatively smart.

Yeah, that's what I'd say if people started noticing a game I designed was full of bad options. "Oh sure we knew they were bad when we put them in there. Of course we did, it was just so you could feel smarter when you figured it out. That was it all along. Ahem."

Colour me unconvinced. As another example, look at the first set of MtG. Ridiculously broken power next to unplayable tat. Game designers rarely have a comprehensive understanding of the winning strategies in their games during design, even if they think they do. It took years for the concept of "the curve" to become a recognised thing in MtG, yet now its a basic foundation of the game and seems obvious in hindsight. I honestly don't believe a game as complicated as 3e was so well understood by its designers they could take the bold move of putting intentionally underpowered stuff in for the sole purpose of having players ignore it. It seems just as likely people would pick the trap options, fail and die and blame the game for being shitty.

[MGuy]

But my cleric has 8 Wisdom and can't cast any spells. OMG TRAP OPTION!!!

I disagree, I don't consider metamagic feats an option for someone who can't cast spells in the first place. Which is why I pointed out that bad options aren't options.

I don't know what to tell you. If you look at something and evaluate whether you want it or not, you're choosing between two options (take it/don't take it). You can't just declare in retrospect that one of them was never an option. Unless you're just using argumentum ad gibberish, in which case I have to say "well played, sir".

Well that's kind of stupid considering that he didn't know anything about the character. The revelation that the character taking the metamagic feat can't use spells is something you only revealed AFTER he said it was a good deal. If he were generating the character he would've known that he couldn't cast spells and thus would not have even considered taking a metamagic feat. The fact that he did it in retrospect this time is because you set up some kind of dumb argument where he's supposed to divine a good choice fora character he knows nothing about. Had he said it was a bad option you could've warped the character in question such that taking it was good. The reverse happened this time but either would've been equally pointless because when you're generating a character you know that type of info.

[Mistborn]

I don't think anyone is arguing for trap options. There is almost no scenario where taking Toughness will make youre character meaningfully better than taking almost any other feat in the same way there is almost no scenario in which adding Chimmney Imps to you magic deck will make it better. We dont want stuff like that in our games noone is advocating that.

On the other hand adding Delver of Secrets into your deck may or not be an improvement to your deck in fact unless you designed your deck specifically to work with Delver it's going to be subpar. Divine Metamagic is much the same way.

You really can't design a game where all you your feats/spells are alway good options for all people. Even if your feats list dosen't have any garbage options like Tougness some things are going to work better than other things.

[Omegonthesane]

But my cleric has 8 Wisdom and can't cast any spells. OMG TRAP OPTION!!!

I disagree, I don't consider metamagic feats an option for someone who can't cast spells in the first place. Which is why I pointed out that bad options aren't options.

I don't know what to tell you. If you look at something and evaluate whether you want it or not, you're choosing between two options (take it/don't take it). You can't just declare in retrospect that one of them was never an option. Unless you're just using argumentum ad gibberish, in which case I have to say "well played, sir".

In his defence, one can reasonably claim "X is not an option" if X is so obviously the wrong choice as to not merit further thought.

[Orion]

There absolutely is a context where Toughness is one of the best feats in the PHB -- a game that starts and ends at level 1. Those games probably got a lot of attention from the design team, since they were presumably involved in shit like planning boxed sets, running convention demos, and running through Keep on the Borderlands over and over. And honestly, I can see an argument for leaving it in the game. It works decently as a kludge to make everyone's life slightly less painful when you're giving some 10-year-olds pre-gen characters at a birthday party. Reducing the odds of an un-fun instakill while also avoiding giving them more abilities to worry about it a win for the MC.

Telling people to take it on their real characters was what was unconscionable.

[tussock]

The things like Toughness in 3e are there to make people feel smart for noticing how crap it is.

One of the things players responded to feeling super-good about in the late 2nd-edition surveys WotC did after taking over was "system mastery". That's code for the bit where time-rich players have read through an enormous bunch of fluffy crap and picked out the winning mechanics (aside: that's a pre-wiki concept, post-2005 the winners are well-documented public knowledge in a couple days).

Anyway, Monte and Skip and Jonathan put a lot of deliberately useless crap in 3e and associated splatbooks so you could find the gems amongst it, thereby feeling superior to the game designers. "Rewarding system mastery." Deliberate 3e design goal.

Don't mistake it for them wanting you to take Toughness. They don't want anyone to do that. They want to tell you to take Toughness on some corner-case character and let you figure out how stupid that is. Like everyone did. Like the monsters get a lot tougher if the DM actually uses the rules to give them custom feats and skills and the odd extra HD, same deal, make you feel comparatively smart.

Yeah, that's what I'd say if people started noticing a game I designed was full of bad options. "Oh sure we knew they were bad when we put them in there. Of course we did, it was just so you could feel smarter when you figured it out. That was it all along. Ahem."

This thing, you're doing it right there, where you think they're not very good at game design, and ever so many people who are not you are falling into those "traps", that's exactly what they wanted you to feel. Rewarding system mastery is something they talked about before the game hit the shelves.

Re: MTG 1st run vs 3e. Magic was a whole new type of game. Collectable cards that are also a game was a stroke of fucking genius, but figuring out what that meant is like what Gygax and Arneson were doing in the early '70's with Chainmail, not what Cook, Tweet, and Williams were doing in the late 90's with AD&D.

I honestly don't believe a game as complicated as 3e was so well understood by its designers they could take the bold move of putting intentionally underpowered stuff in for the sole purpose of having players ignore it. It seems just as likely people would pick the trap options, fail and die and blame the game for being shitty.

3e was not built from scratch. The numbers are a lightly inflated scale from late 2nd-edition-with-full-splats, but it's really just putting a consistent ruleset (d20, feats and skills, action economy) underneath the standard 1998-era AD&D game balance.

I mean, if there's a clear blind-spot in the rules design, it's that they balanced all the Wizard goodies against the Wizard, while balancing all the Fighter goodies against the Fighter, and just assumed the two would otherwise get along, somehow, like they always had.

There absolutely is a context where Toughness is one of the best feats in the PHB -- a game that starts and ends at level 1.

For your 6 Con Elf Wizard, in 3.0, without even a single splatbook, and even then it's very negative character design when you could take PBS or Combat Casting and try to achieve more in your short life. Or did you mean "one of the best" as in "one of the only ones you qualified to use at all before they printed the feats that gave you an extra 1st-level spell".

[tussock]

The things like Toughness in 3e are there to make people feel smart for noticing how crap it is.

One of the things players responded to feeling super-good about in the late 2nd-edition surveys WotC did after taking over was "system mastery". That's code for the bit where time-rich players have read through an enormous bunch of fluffy crap and picked out the winning mechanics (aside: that's a pre-wiki concept, post-2005 the winners are well-documented public knowledge in a couple days).

Anyway, Monte and Skip and Jonathan put a lot of deliberately useless crap in 3e and associated splatbooks so you could find the gems amongst it, thereby feeling superior to the game designers. "Rewarding system mastery." Deliberate 3e design goal.

Don't mistake it for them wanting you to take Toughness. They don't want anyone to do that. They want to tell you to take Toughness on some corner-case character and let you figure out how stupid that is. Like everyone did. Like the monsters get a lot tougher if the DM actually uses the rules to give them custom feats and skills and the odd extra HD, same deal, make you feel comparatively smart.

Yeah, that's what I'd say if people started noticing a game I designed was full of bad options. "Oh sure we knew they were bad when we put them in there. Of course we did, it was just so you could feel smarter when you figured it out. That was it all along. Ahem."

This thing, you're doing it right there, where you think they're not very good at game design, and ever so many people who are not you are falling into those "traps", that's exactly what they wanted you to feel. Rewarding system mastery is something they talked about before the game hit the shelves.

Re: MTG 1st run vs 3e. Magic was a whole new type of game. Collectable cards that are also a game was a stroke of fucking genius, but figuring out what that meant is like what Gygax and Arneson were doing in the early '70's with Chainmail, not what Cook, Tweet, and Williams were doing in the late 90's with AD&D.

I honestly don't believe a game as complicated as 3e was so well understood by its designers they could take the bold move of putting intentionally underpowered stuff in for the sole purpose of having players ignore it. It seems just as likely people would pick the trap options, fail and die and blame the game for being shitty.

3e was not built from scratch. The numbers are a lightly inflated scale from late 2nd-edition-with-full-splats, but it's really just putting a consistent ruleset (d20, feats and skills, action economy) underneath the standard 1998-era AD&D game balance.

I mean, if there's a clear blind-spot in the rules design, it's that they balanced all the Wizard goodies against the Wizard, while balancing all the Fighter goodies against the Fighter, and just assumed the two would otherwise get along, somehow, like they always had.

There absolutely is a context where Toughness is one of the best feats in the PHB -- a game that starts and ends at level 1.

For your 6 Con Elf Wizard, in 3.0, without even a single splatbook, and even then it's very negative character design when you could take PBS or Combat Casting and try to achieve more in your short life. Or did you mean "one of the best" as in "one of the only ones you qualified to use at all before they printed the feats that gave you an extra 1st-level spell".

[hogarth]

Well that's kind of stupid considering that he didn't know anything about the character. The revelation that the character taking the metamagic feat can't use spells is something you only revealed AFTER he said it was a good deal.

My whole point is that you can't say "designers shouldn't put in trap feats" because 80% of the time what a "trap feat" is depends on context.

Like Lord Mistborn said, no one is arguing in favour of unarguably bad feats (like Pathfinder's Prone Shooter that does literally nothing), but those are clearly a small minority.

[Aryxbez]

Yeah, that's what I'd say if people started noticing a game I designed was full of bad options. "Oh sure we knew they were bad when we put them in there. Of course we did, it was just so you could feel smarter when you figured it out. That was it all along. Ahem."

I wouldn't, I hope I would be honest about my product enough, that I wouldn't be in denial when there's a problem. Much like fans of what they like, will be in denial about a games flaws, or try to make up excuses, I'd prefer to not look through the game as if I had beer goggles.

I think it's been said a couple times before, that Monte Cook was probably just saying that to look better. Some people who gave him the benefit of the doubt, like to think that was his intention all along, despite it being unlikely. Tussock thinking they're secretly fooling us, with no evidence about it being spoken about before, I find rather silly of him, especially the connotation that he's in super special know-how, to sound unique among the posters.

Thing is, most Designers are bad at their job, the fact that relying on past/outdated products is the best RPGing is offering, is testament to that, and that's sad.

True enough in regards to how options over time others will become weaker or more obsolete by supplements and the like. However as been said, you do want to try and at least make sure they're playable, or at least will become more useful later on, even if a niche (like how skull servants in Yu-Gi-Oh, eventually got card support around them).

[Kaelik]

Tussock's point about them tricking us into feeling like we are good at system mastery by having good options and bad options is stupid.

First, the part where he thinks they actually know which things are really good, and which aren't, is already obviously false.

But more importantly, even if it wasn't, so what? Blizzard isn't "tricking" us into enjoying their game by researching the optimal rate of positive reinforcement to keep us enjoying the game. They are making the game enjoyable.

Likewise, in making the game have bad options so we enjoy playing the game more by choosing good options... we fucking enjoy the game. They aren't tricking us, they are making the game enjoyable.

[tussock]

Wait, what? That's what I said. Except the bit where you still think you're smarter than the guys who wrote 3e.

For 3rd Edition D&D, we decided that ‘system mastery’ would be a built-in reward. This is the idea that people who play the game longer figure out better choices than a brand new player, and so the old veteran around the table feels rewarded.

Yes, it's not a "trick" as such, just psychology, but they really did deliberately put clearly better and worse options in the game and then publicly claimed that they thought every option valid. Over and over again. Totally on record as saying Toughness is a valid choice, while every single player out there sees through that and thinks themselves clever for doing so.

Even the Fighter vs Wizard thing they were well aware of. There's a quote out there somewhere about Skip and Monte arguing during the design about how much better Wizards should become at high level, and how much they should suck at low level. Because Fighters are simple to play, you see, while playing a Wizard is a lot of work, so they deliberately rewarded that and argued about how much of a test you needed to pass to earn that reward. Just like Gary had from day 1.

3e Clerics are OTT awesome because most people don't really like playing Clerics, but someone always needs to. Making Cleric a super-rewarding class to play was deliberate, it says thank you for playing the Cleric.

Now, they deny these things publicly, yes. Point at your SGT and call it names. But seriously, it's deliberate. Monte Cook fucking hates player empowerment, but he wrote a game full of it because that was the design spec, to kick sand in the face of 2nd edition's "the DM is a punitive god" ethos. Have you read AU and AE? The guy nerfed the fuck out of his Wizards and had players of Wizards loving it because he gave them extra shit to fiddle with. He's really good at game design.

I mean, that thing where 1st edition, 2nd edition, 3rd edition, 3.5, and Pathfinder Monks are all really crap? They all worked hard to include rules specifically to screw over Monks. All of them. For over thirty years. It's not an accident. They make Fighters and Rogues look good by comparison. You noticed this and felt smart. I noticed this and felt smart. We look at people playing Monks and feel smart. People playing Monks eventually notice and stop playing Monks, and feel smarter.

Publicly, they claim Monks are fine, and then they go find new ways to nerf them. Which makes us all feel smart. Psychology. Haw haw, look at that Pathfinder guy, occidentally nerfing Monks again, how smart we all are to notice his continued mistakes!.

[Red_Rob]

So basically your position is that Monte is a master manipulator and played the entire RPG world without anyone suspecting a thing...

[ishy]

My whole point is that you can't say "designers shouldn't put in trap feats" because 80% of the time what a "trap feat" is depends on context.

Like Lord Mistborn said, no one is arguing in favour of unarguably bad feats (like Pathfinder's Prone Shooter that does literally nothing), but those are clearly a small minority.

Your example was that people who can't cast spells totally take meta-magic feats and consider taking a feat that makes metamagic (even though they can't use it)cheaper a meaningful choice. That is pure stupidity.

You could have had a point if your example was, say power attack. Since it might be bad if your attack bonus isn't high enough. In which case I probably would have replied that power attack shouldn't be a feat in the first place. And would not even be a trap option. Since it doesn't appear to be better than it actually is.

This thing, you're doing it right there, where you think they're not very good at game design, and ever so many people who are not you are falling into those "traps", that's exactly what they wanted you to feel.
[ . . . ]
I mean, if there's a clear blind-spot in the rules design, it's that they balanced all the Wizard goodies against the Wizard, while balancing all the Fighter goodies against the Fighter, and just assumed the two would otherwise get along, somehow, like they always had.
[. . . ]
Even the Fighter vs Wizard thing they were well aware of. There's a quote out there somewhere about Skip and Monte arguing during the design about how much better Wizards should become at high level, and how much they should suck at low level.

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?

[Kaelik]

Okay Tussock:

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

2) Yes, I am smarter than the designers. They did not intend for me to find the locate city bomb, because they didn't even know it existed. They did not intend for me to find and combine Body Outside Body with Incantatrix Persist to get like infinity uses? No, because they didn't know it exists as a combination.

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.

I wrote the Storm Lord class. I intended it to be at a specific power level, that doesn't mean I intended specfically the thing where you use nothing but Dust Storm to lock in anyone not capable of teleport/weather/whatever.

[codeGlaze]

The point is that the feats provided should be meaningful things. Meaning 'trap' options should specifically be kimkted ti system mastery ONLY in the sense that a 'Master' player would know his Knight would be more efficient with his 'Shield Powah!' ability, while a new player takes 'Amazing Cleave' beacuse it SOUNDS SO COOL. While both of them will BENEFIT from those choices, for this example 'Shield Powah!' synergizes better with the Knight and it's role.

Metamagic anything was NOT an option, because the class diesn't have magic.

TL;DR
*System mastery should be represented by a better understanding of which abilities best synergize. (bang for your buck)
*All feats should at least be meaningful
*Meaningful has context. Don't be a derp.

Where were we in context of the original thread discussion?

[Username17]

You might be able to handle some monsters by treating their monster powers as gear. Like, assuming that a Ring of Invisibility is a thing you can have, a Pixie is seriously just a halfling who comes with an unremovable Ring of Invis. Have the monster powers take up item slots, and don't let PCs play one unless the human characters have comparable wealth. Maybe a blastery demon is just a Sorcerer who comes with a Ring of Fire Resistance, Magic Platemail, Amulet of Regeneration, and Wings of Flying, all of which happen to be made out of his skin. The nice thing is, this gives you a way to let the MC use the PCs toys (stuff in the magic items chapter) without dropping stupid numbers of items.

This plan is looking better and better to me. And the reason is Lycanthropy. Sooner or later, someone is going to get bitten by a werewolf and they are going to want to keep playing that character. Open Multiclassing tried to give us a way to handle that by forcing the player to multiclass into levels of Werewolf until their powers were bought off. But that was horse shit, even before we got into the Level Allowance crap where it all cost way too much XP to be worth it. Because it had to give you all the good transforming into a wolf bits up front, and you were paying it off later down the road. But with sacrificing Item Slots for monster powers, you actually have something you can pay for the wolf transformation goodness right away. Heck, if you already have stuff filling your item slots, the lycanthropic curse can just pry some off of you to pay for itself.

This also gives clear and unambiguous level minimums for some of the more powerful races and templates. All you have to do is have the item slots increase as characters rise in level. If being a Succubus costs 6 slots, then obviously you can't fucking be one until you are high enough level to have 6 slots.

So yeah, I'm totally sold on trying to figure out how to pay for monster abilities out of sacrificing item slots to power them. That seems like something that could totally work.

-Username17

[Avoraciopoctules]

If you go with something like this, then pretty much all monster powers are going to be something you could get an item for. And that seems pretty nice to me. Ghostly burial-shrouds that let you phase through stuff and medusa-gaze eye lenses tend be pretty cool as far as magical artifacts in fantasy games go.

[Username17]

If you go with something like this, then pretty much all monster powers are going to be something you could get an item for. And that seems pretty nice to me. Ghostly burial-shrouds that let you phase through stuff and medusa-gaze eye lenses tend be pretty cool as far as magical artifacts in fantasy games go.

Not necessarily. While every playable monster would be composed out of magic item legos, non-playable monsters still exist and labor under no such restriction. The players can't play a swarm of bees, so their rules don't have to fit neatly into having winged sandals, a cloak of beeing a swarm somehow, and gloves of poison somehow Voltroned together.

-Username17

[echoVanguard]

So yeah, I'm totally sold on trying to figure out how to pay for monster abilities out of sacrificing item slots to power them. That seems like something that could totally work.

-Username17

The most recent iteration of Nemesis Age uses this mechanic. Characters have a "Destiny Rating" equal to their level; Artefacts (magic items) and Mantles (templates) have a "Destiny Cost" based on the general power rating of the Artefact or Mantle. Acquiring or equipping a higher cost than you can pay results in losing control of your character in a limited fashion until you can either pay the cost or give up the Artefact or Mantle.

Example:
A character bitten by a Vampire gains the Vampire Mantle, at a cost of 8 Destiny. If the character has enough available Destiny, they gain all of the Vampire Mantle's powers and benefits. However, if they have insufficient Destiny, the Vampire Mantle's Drawback (Unquenchable Bloodthirst) takes over, and they must give in to the compulsion to consume the blood of innocents on a regular basis. A character can resist the compulsion for a while by spending a Luck Point, giving characters a (costly) way to control the outcome even if they've picked up a Mantle or Artefact above their level - but even if the character chooses not to, or runs out of Luck Points, they can still continue to play their character with the Drawback (instead of having the character die or become an NPC in the manner equivalent to acquiring too much Taint or too many DSPs).

echo

[MGuy]

I worked in contracting lycanthropy and vampirism a different way. While I could see it working in item slots could definitely work I treat both as actual afflictions unless the character give up feats in order to pay for the abilities of lycanthropy and vampirism. Basically until the character embraces either their lycan/vampiric affliction the character suffers all the penalties ad none of the boons.

For example, a character who contracts lycanthropy has a chance, every night, to transform into a wolf and go wild (controlled by the GM). There's a related will save but the TN changes depending on the moon's cycle. That character can either treat lycanthropy as the affliction it is, taking steps to keep others out of harm's way (classic werewolf stuff), or embrace their new found affliction and take steps to learn how to control and utilize it though they have to sacrifice something else in order to do so. Currently they only give up feats though in the first iteration it was class abilities (that turned out to be a complete fucking disaster) but I changed it and it works out ok.

[Username17]

I worked in contracting lycanthropy and vampirism a different way. While I could see it working in item slots could definitely work I treat both as actual afflictions unless the character give up feats in order to pay for the abilities of lycanthropy and vampirism. Basically until the character embraces either their lycan/vampiric affliction the character suffers all the penalties ad none of the boons.

This is just "pay now, benefit later". That has never worked. Seriously, I can't see how anything but bad could come of this sort of thing.

A character bitten by a Vampire gains the Vampire Mantle, at a cost of 8 Destiny. If the character has enough available Destiny, they gain all of the Vampire Mantle's powers and benefits. However, if they have insufficient Destiny, the Vampire Mantle's Drawback (Unquenchable Bloodthirst) takes over, and they must give in to the compulsion to consume the blood of innocents on a regular basis.

This also seems like a bad idea, though less of one. 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.
• 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.

-Username17

[MGuy]

I worked in contracting lycanthropy and vampirism a different way. While I could see it working in item slots could definitely work I treat both as actual afflictions unless the character give up feats in order to pay for the abilities of lycanthropy and vampirism. Basically until the character embraces either their lycan/vampiric affliction the character suffers all the penalties ad none of the boons.

This is just "pay now, benefit later". That has never worked. Seriously, I can't see how anything but bad could come of this sort of thing.

Well both are supposed to be afflictions. I'd expect there to be a rough patch when you first come down with either one. Thus far the only really big issue is the waiting period for getting a feat. The fact that players have to wait in order to make the decision to embrace the bites at all was a really hard kick in the pants for those who want to go ahead and turn over. Theoretically the retraining rules I implemented should smooth it over though I haven't had need to go back and reassess it recently.

[...You Lost Me]

So you would be a vampire with con drain, DR, summon swarm, etc. but you would burn in light, take double holy damage, not cross running water, etc.?

And then at the next level you'd take a feat and be able to cross running water, take standard holy damage, and just sparkle in light?