OgreBattle wrote:Were they consciously going for a lower power level than wizard/cleric/druid? Like they acknowledged "wow we really overpowered them in 3e, let's tone it down with the spellcasters", or were the incarnum classes just weaker by accident?
You can see the wheels of nerfage spinning in this book. What starts as a pretty sweet Gorgon Mask turns completely worthless as it gets no less than five restrictions added to it that turn it into basically a 1st level spell you get at character level 14. I don't think there was ever even a rough idea of what powers were level appropriate - just a paralytic fear of writing something overpowered.
You saw the same design strategy with Savage Species - the idea was that players would figure out how to break things so anything that you could figure out something even passably decent to do with during design needed to be nerfed. That might seem crazy to you, but Rich Redman confirmed that was literally exactly the design guidelines given down from above for Savage Species. And it doesn't help that when I talked to him in 2003, he was convinced that your benchmark for power had to be
magic missile because "it's the best 1st level spell and nothing should be better than it."
So basically, WotC corporate culture was convinced that it was 1994 and that wizards not only
could contribute meaningfully to encounters by casting
magic missile but that they would be advised to do so. In addition, they were basically afraid of min/maxxers and decided that the way to "play it safe" was to make things superficially weak in proportion to how
weird they were. This results in Incarnum and other "alternate" systems coming out the gate with heavy handed nerfs applied right and left.
In short: the design target was "garbage tier" under the understanding that it was new territory and they would probably miss the mark and hit higher than that.
Say if you had a campaign where the only magic allowed was incarnum based would they be able to overcome shadows, wyverns, beholders and so on?
If everyone was a Totemist,
maybe. Although it would be hard and all the characters would end up looking the same. Incarnates and Soulborn have no fucking chance. Soulborn don't even
have any soulmelds until 4th fucking level.
chakra and essentia would be easier to explain if they called it "mana", "tapping", and it came in more than 1 color (maybe 5 colors, and a colorless one)
Essentia and Chakras just needed to be way simpler than they were. I
think that what we're looking at is like four or more draft proposals being run in parallel with the attempt of somehow figuring out which one was best from forum feedback. There are ten body slots which each have three distinct levels of slotedness and there are two different other kinds of slots and a power point pool that you can use to buy things into two of the levels of those body slots, and one of the levels of body slots only comes online at higher levels and does so at a different rate for different characters. It's a hot mess.
First of all, the "body slot" thing just has to fucking go. It increases all of the complexities of everything by ten fucking times. Secondly, you need to fucking rank these things. Don't try to sneak in chakra types to level associations, because that doesn't make any fucking sense. That's what ends up with you giving out
true seeing as a 24th level ability (I wish that was a joke). Nut up and write "low," "medium," and "high" level shit. Fucking call it that so you know what you're writing and your reader can fucking find shit.
But of course, as long as Andy Collins was lead developer on the project, tracking body slots was always going to happen. It's stupid and unworkable, but Andy Collins wouldn't let that dog lie for seven actual years.
-Username17