SEVEN (colors, not sins)

[DrPraetor]

So, a brief note on how I anticipate this will work, and why this is a motivating system specifically for an RPG.

Inevitably, different murderhobos will want to go on different quests, and there will be some tension. I'm using the color wheel to systemize this, so there are Cyan missions (which Cyan characters will want to do) and Green missions and so on, any of which can be morally good or evil depending. Violet quests which aren't evil involve rescuing undead from Cyan or Yellow oppressors, basically.

A Cyan quest has finite rewards which go to Cyan characters but which Cyan characters can't share. So if you have two Cyan characters, you'll presumably do twice as many Cyan quests total but the total haul is roughly the same.

Thus, it does matter to some extent which mix of power sources you have in the party but you can just show up with whomever. A Violet channeler doesn't suffer some kind of penalty for going up against Violet opposition with his buddy who channels Yellow. Maybe there are situations in which the Violet guy is a social liability, but I'm resistant to that because it means there are social adventure segments in which the Violet guy might just stay home? So I'm disinclined to have even high-level spirits react to opposite-colored channelers with increased hostility.

There is an assumption that the player characters are "good guys", which I'm legislating involves favoring the cosmic balance. You could also play the game as explicit partisans for some color or colors (for example, Yellow) but the explicit position staked out here, at least for fantasy land, is that anyone who wants to do this is a bad guy. This partially involves unique features of fantasy land - the forests have faeries and talking animals in them, so clear-cutting for agricultural land has an additional moral dimension, even if you're not a fan of Paul MacCready:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_maccread ... anguage=en

That said, the overall conflict is not Cyan vs. Red even if you do a bunch of Cyan quests; but, in response to the question from much earlier, it does matter what Cyan wants because then you know what a Cyan quest looks like. Violet is the toughest of these, I think.

[Username17]

Practically, there are several reasons to divide up magic and creatures into arbitrary groups, and those reasons rarely include "sides for characters to take." Sides want the characters to be on them, which in turn means that you're going to want them to have different magic because of role protection, which means teams always and forever want to have a cross cutting of different magics available.

• Role Protection. Stories with ensemble protagonists need characters to contribute things that other characters cannot contribute. Otherwise you ask "Why is this guy even here?" In an RPG, you never want to ask that question about the player characters. If abilities are divided arbitrarily between different key words and characters have limited numbers of key words, you have easily achievable role protection.
• Game balance. In an RPG (or any game) it's easy to have abilities that are very powerful when mixed. With arbitrary keyword restrictions, you can split those abilities up so that they either aren't mixed or at least require multiple players working together to achieve the combo so that no one player seems like they are running away with the game.
• Themed Opposition. In a D&D-esque game, it is desirable to have mixed groups of monsters. That's why even in 1977, the Monster Manual was talking about Stone Giants and Cave Bears together and shit. But standing in the way of that is the fact that you want some sort of reason to encounter groups of mixed enemies. The 4th edition Monster Manual really struggled with that, with most of their sample encounters eliciting a "WTF?" response from players. If you have arbitrary magic categories, you can easily bypass that. No one asks why you have bears and giant worms guarding Nature Nodes in Master of Magic, nor why you have Chaos Beasts and Hell Hounds guarding a Chaos Node. Those are mana nodes that make that color of mana, and those are monsters that can be summoned with that flavor of mana end of discussion.
• Willing Suspension of Disbelief for New Enemies. When you write an NPC or design a new monster or whatever the fuck, you (and by "you" I mean the author or MC) have unlimited power to make it do or be able to do whatever you want. If there are themed power sets in the setting, these new characters and monsters and shit can be incorporated into the already existing framework. "It's a Yellow Monster, it has Yellow Powers" is a statement that feels more organically true to the setting, which in turn feels like the author is not using their unlimited dictatorial powers in an unfair way, in a way that the statement "This new monster I made is resistant to your best attacks" does not.

So there's certainly advantages to having Red Characters, Red Monsters, and Red Adventure Locations. But there's no particular advantage for there to be Red teams.

When a card game makes a card Lion Clan or Boros as a faction this can create dynamic restrictions in what cards can be put into individual decks. And that serves the purpose of role protection because people play decks that use multiple characters. But in a roleplaying game, the party is the group of characters and they are supposed to have different skill sets and different personal tactics and shit.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

One alternative to having strict black/white "colours"; is that they're not "strict".

Rather, they are recognized for what they are: extremes of their actual value (value, not colour) of grey.

Likewise, brown is a yellow-mixed violet.

However, I think that the original ideas for the M:tG colours (Purity, Thought, Death, Chaos, Life) are still viable as factional concepts.

Some of them are ideologically opposed; others have more troubled relationships.

Additionally, I don't think that spells should primarily be mono-coloured; and that most colours should splash an other colour/concept in order to get abilities outside of its conceptual space (e.g. Black creatures use Green power to regenerate; likewise White ressurection powers; While Green splashes Black to add Poison/Infect/Deathtouch to its creatures repetoire).

Even magic doesn't always obey a hard and fast rule as to colours of creatures/spells & the colours used to cast them. Before Eldrazi introduced "Devoid", there was a colourless spell that required Red mana to cast.

Which also sort of reminds me Frank's previous work on a Next Edition, using some aspects of M:tG colour wheels to determine a character classes powerset; A Druid had to have GG, but a Ranger might have RG, or BG. Similarly, while Dominions did have spells/rituals that required as many as 5-6+ ranks in a flavour of magic, there were also spells with seemingly "opposite" flavours of magic which stood out as being slightly more powerful due to the opposed flavours synergizing.

[DrPraetor]

JE, I'm having a little trouble parsing your feedback, but here are some notes.

Abilities can have a color even if they aren't supernatural.

So Rage is an exceptional ability, but it is still Red, and that matters for various other effects (including red spells.)

So for example there is a Fire Sword, which bursts into flame when you use a red ability on yourself, which would include of course Rage.

The sword is then both a Sword (Brown, Exceptional) and On Fire (Red, Supernatural) so it is inflicting both Red and Brown damage for anything that cares.

Whether a Gorgon (Green) with Haste cast on it (Cyan) would be two colors, I'm on the fence; but, yes, there are going to be Death Gorgons that are both Green and Violet.

Most things, however, are going to start mono-colored and then you can stack them. There is a balance to be struck between inclusiveness and exclusiveness, but of course it's going to be very subjective.

In general, I would err on the side of making things the fewest possible colors.

[DrPraetor]

I'm pausing this while I try a difficult draft of the subsystems which are the real barrier to making a good heartbreaker (Stealth, Perception {the first two interact}, Logistics, Surveying, Diplomacy, Lore, Mechanics?). But, a few more thoughts.

On reflection, I want to go more MtG than Dominions for things being multi-colored.

Partially, this is a reaction to Ars Magica, in which everything and its little brother has a pre-requisite, and the consistency is poor.

So if something is multi-colored, it's a special bonus achievement and probably a synergy move between channelers or characters.

For example, Tempering the Will is an Artificer (Brown) spell, which counters the next mind-effecting spell that hits each member of the party. Very nice to have. It has a rider, so if you use a mind-effecting, self-targeting Red ability while Tempering the Will is up, you use it at +2 levels. The obvious synergy is with the Rage ability that Barbarians get.

Things like Sulfur Clouds are not going to be Red/Cyan and boiling water jets are not going to be Green/Red - this works well with the Dominions formulation but in dominions being Water 3/Fire 1 is at least nominally equivalent to being Water 4 and that's just not how things work in a D&D clone.

In the adventuring tier, I'm targeting 21 classes - that's one mundane, one hybrid and one caster for each color.

In the heroic tier, I'm targeting 21 classes again: 7 dichromatic full-casters (adjacent colors), 7 dichromatic mundane characters (indifferent colors), and 7 dichromatic hybrids (opposite colors.)

When going from the adventuring tier to the heroic tier, you can palette swap however you want, and the goal is for any choice to be viable. So a Mage(yellow adv caster) / Thaumaturge (yellow+cyan hero caster) might be somewhat better than an Assassin (violet adv mundane) / Reaver (green+red hero hybrid) but not so much that the Assassin / Reaver feels a full level lower in competence. It's actually not that high a bar but the design challenge is very real; and, you have to be honest about what sucks.

[Username17]

Before you can ask yourself how many colors you want, you need to ask yourself how you intend to use them. I mean yes, it's possible to decide on a color scheme for entirely esthetic reasons and then hunt for post hoc justifications for that, but that's obviously not a recommendable design strategy from a mechanics standpoint. The big question of colors, or "power sources" to use the 4e D&D terminology are the following:

• Does the party expect at least one player to be each color?
• Does the party expect no more than one player to be each color?
• Does a character being a particular color tell you what they can't do?
• Does a character being a particular color tell you what they can do?

Now the 4e answer to all of those questions was "No." Which in turn made us ask the fifth question "Why the fuck are we bothering with this shit?"

Now in a strategy game like Age of Wonders or Heroes of Might and Magic, a new faction increases replayability and the strategic depth of large maps, so a new faction is justified just so long as it provides a unique play experience and isn't so broken that it ruins the game. But even in that context the play experience doesn't have to be extremely unique - the Goblins and Halflings in Age of Wonders are almost identical and differ primarily in their base alliance profile. But that's still sufficient. The bar simply isn't very high, and honestly if someone brings out a new Heroes of Might and Magic or Age of Wonders title and it has less than 8 playable factions on release, I find that insulting.

But in an RPG you are asking those four questions. The first is whether you "Need" a Yellow character in the same way that a Shadowrun team "Needs" a Decker or a D&D party "Needs" a Cleric. The second is whether it's a reasonable demand that another player not play a Green character because you are "already" playing a Green character. These two questions are structural and aspirational. Obviously you don't actually need a Cleric in any edition of D&D, but the game is certainly much harder to play if you don't have one in most editions.

So going back to 4th edition, the "Power Source" was a thematic skin that was distinct from the "Role" that was the part of your character that was remotely protectable or requestable as a means of problem solving. You were supposed to say "We need a Striker" or "I'm already playing a Controller, you should play something else" but you weren't supposed to make those kinds of statement with regards to "Primal" or "Psionic" or whatever.

Now that's a valid life choice, to be honest. You could have Arcane Warriors and Arcane Wizards and Arcane Rogues and have all of them have the nebulous "Arcane" tag and have all of those characters or none of them in the party and have that be fine. You have to ask yourself what fucking difference it makes for those characters to "be Arcane" and other characters to not be, but it's doable.

On the flip side, you could have the colors mean more. You could have them mean much more. You could have it such that all the Yellow characters do Healing and none of the other characters do. So every party would request that they have between 1 and 2 Yellow characters. You'd have to explain why we'd rather call such characters "Yellow" than "Paladin" or something, but again it is doable.

The issue is that I'm not sure how you get to a desired 7 colors. If you need every team to have a Red character, then you have to have less colors than there might plausibly be players. If you need every player to play a different color, then you need more colors than you might plausibly have players. Or to put it another way: no one is going to be able to play a game that has seven archetypes that are individually as mandatory as "Mage" or "Decker" in Shadowrun - and no one wanted to play 4th edition D&D when it tried to launch itself with only eight classes, let alone seven. Most color formulations end up with you wanting to limit it to 3 or expand it to 12.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I'm more interested in the stealth and diplomacy minigames as being the big design challenge for making a heartbreaker that is actually better than D&D 3rd; one aspect of that, reflected into the class chart which I intend to temporarily close this thread, is you should have flunkies. Stealth, Mechanics and Logistics (which includes survival) are high-priority skills, while Diplomacy, Lore, and Perception are lower priority (also paradoxically it's better if the PCs have them anyway.) By, "priority" I mean, that Stealth and Mechanics and to a lesser extent Logistics can lead to the

problem fairly easily. Sneaking into the evil castle or surviving a trek across the desert may not be optional if you want to advance the plot.

Flunkies show up as monsters ( adding a link to this thread so I can find it later: https://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=57012 ) - and any monster can be a pet for the PCs under the right circumstances - but flunkies are intended as henchpeople that the DM trots out when the party is missing some non-combat specialty needed for the adventure, but who are significantly inferior to the PCs so they don't steal the limelight too much. You'd always rather have an assassin who can sneak the party into the castle than have this role taken over by some disposable red shirt, but you want the plot to move along. The rule is, when Timmy the Expert is inevitably killed by one of the traps he's trying to disarm, you have to promise to be very sad about the loot you probably didn't get because your party doesn't include a Rogue, Bard, Magician, Smith, Alchemist, Wanderer or Enchanter.

Color	Mundane	Hybrid	Magic	Flunky/Class (skills)
Red	Berserker	Duskblade?	Wizard	Thug/Ravager(Stealth)
Brown	Fighter	Smith	Alchemist	Expert/Lurker (Mechanics, Logistics)
Yellow	Soldier	Paladin	Mage	Steward/Controller (Logistics, Diplomacy)
Cyan	Wanderer	Monk	Enchanter	Scholar/Controller (Lore, Diplomacy)
Green	Ranger	Warg?	Druid	Scout/Harrier (Stealth, Perception, Logistics)
Indigo	Rogue	Bard	Magician	Peddler/Lurker (Perception, Diplomacy)
Violet	Assassin	Hexblade?	Warlock	Hermit/Harrier (Lore, Perception)

The flunkies are (slightly modified) monster classes, naturally enough. Every color also gets humanoid brutes; the thug is meant to be an advantage for red in spite of having only one skill, because they have a combat-oriented flunky who is easy to sneak into places.

Note that these are (again except the flunkies) adventuring tier classes, so I'm saving a lot of class names for the heroic tier, including anything ending in -mancer, as well as adepts, ninjas and swordsages and shit.

So, in answer to Frank's question from last week:
[*] You want at least one from each column (except Flunky).
[*] You don't want more than one from each cell, that will be redundant.
[*] You get a synergy bonus - but it is moderate - for having adjacent (including diagonal) types in the same party. So Barbarians have synergy bonuses to exploit with Assassins, Fighters, Smiths, Swashbucklers, Hexblades, Wizards, Alchemists and Warlocks (!).

The Berserker is basically a 3E barbarian. They have a big charge radius which helps to engage enemies.
The Fighter is a master of weaponry; if you want to have a sword, an axe and a spear, and to alternate these weapons by circumstances and have it matter, play a fighter.
The Soldier is a master of ZOC, which helps to engage enemies.
The Wanderer boosts mobility for the rest of the party (which helps control who engages who).
The Ranger can force people to engage at range, but is also a bruiser himself, so enemies have to charge the Ranger before the cloth wearers but they're not happy about it.
The Rogue does cruel brutal damage if you try to engage anyone *else*.
The Assassin has reaction powers that brutally murder enemies who try to *disengage*.

The Duskblade delivers magical energy damage and stabs people at the same time. The name kinda sucks but that is the core functionality in common with the D&D 3rd expansion class.
The Smith is big and strong and makes his own minor-magic gear.
The Paladin has a protection zone for everyone else.
The Monk has glowing blue fists that and magical stances and shit like the Tome monk.
The Warg is a combat-oriented shape changer. I'm not happy with the name.
The Bard has a light weapon and uses magic and poetics (which may or may not be magic) to provide boosts during combat.
The Hexblade stabs people and debuffs them at the same time. As with the duskblade, I don't like the name but the functionality of the 3rd edition expansion class is on the mark.

The Wizard gets Red magic, which includes fire damage, smoke and blindness, and anger bonuses,
The Alchemist gets Brown magic, which includes buffs that are equipment-oriented, with potions and gasses as well,
The Mage gets Yellow magic, which is long on protection, healing, sleeping and stunning,
The Enchanter gets Cyan magic, which includes haste and speed type buffs, position control / hindrance, as well as air, cold and lightning,
The Druid gets Green magic, which strongly features nature-themed battlefield debuffs like entangle and web, and can also turn into or summon animals,
The Magician gets illusions, short-distance teleports, charm and colored lights type effects,
The Warlock is a baby necromancer, so gets an undead flunky or three, as well as fear, confusion and disease themed save or die effects.

Before developing these in any greater detail, you need to solve the minigame problem, which you need to write a monster manual that can then support specification of these classes in more detail.

[Username17]

The issue we have here is that the Smith and the Alchemist aren't meaningfully "the same" in any important axis. And the Bard and the Magician even less so. You've got the Bard as some kind of buffing guy and the Magician being some kind of debuffing guy, and the fact that they are "the same color" means pretty much fuckall in terms of role protection.

At the point where you have 21 character classes and the categories don't act as meaningful predictors as to what characters can do or how they do it, you might as well not have categories at all. Or if you do have categories, you might as well have an open ended number of categories. Like if that chart was simply extended with Orange Psions and Gray Shadowcasters and Pink Necromancers that would be totally unsurprising. With six secondary skills (Diplomacy, Logistics, Lore, Mechanics, Perception, and Stealth) there are twenty different three-skill combinations you could have. So you could have Diplomacy, Mechanics, and Perception with the Oracle, whose color is Cornflower and you could have Lore, Stealth, and Logistics with the Geomancer, whose color is Burnt Sienna.

Basically you have to answer what the colors mean and do, which you haven't. Why have seven colors? Why not more? Or less? You won't have characters from all seven colors in your party, what fucking difference does that make?

There is a real issue that it is possible to draw circles with any number of colored circles around the edge for any number up to nine and also twelve, but not really ten, eleven, or thirteen because that's too busy and doesn't look like a clock. So you can defend 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 12 from a graphical design standpoint. But you're talking about 21 character classes, so I think that ship has probably sailed. 21 is already so many classes that you could run three campaigns and never have players play the same character classes within or between games.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

First off, your premise is wrong. The seven spoke color wheel exists to have synergistic pairings of colors, neutral pairings of colors, and antagonistic pairings of colors. That's why it has seven spokes, nothing whatever to do with role protection (which is in the columns in a you-want-at-least-1 sense, and in the individual cells in the you-don't-want-multiples sense).

So you wouldn't add Burnt Sienna because you didn't have friendly colors to put it next to, for synergy bonuses.

Second, your role protection / birthday math is off. With 21 choices, assuming equal popularity among classes (which there would not be), you'd have a:
20/21 of 2 people having different classes.
20/21 * 19/21 of 3 people having all different classes
20/21 * 19/21 * 18/21 of 4 people all having different classes
20/21 * 19/21 * 18/21 * 17/21 ≈ 60% of 5 people all having different classes!
So if you don't want repeats at the table, 21 is about the minimum!

But, since the title of the thread is SEVEN - if I decided I needed more classes, I would go 7 * 4 = 28 not 9 * 3 = 27.

The Smith and the Alchemist have synergistic magic effects that target items. Everyone in Brown is focused on their inventory, that's what makes them Brown. The theme is "inanimate".

The Soldier, Paladin and Mage are all defensive: their defensive bonuses are meant to synergize. Defensive magic/skills is what makes you Yellow. The theme is "community", since farming power isn't something you care about.

The Wanderer, Monk and Enchanter all get mobility skills/spells. A focus on mobility is what makes you Cyan. The theme is "distance", what with being under the sky and all.

The Ranger, Beastmaster (?) and Druid get nature powers. These do slightly different things but I don't think anyone has trouble recognizing: the theme is "nature".

The Rogue, Bard and Magician all get expression and trickery. Do you really find it odd to put the Bard and the Illusionist in the same category, even if the Bard is using his communication-based spells to buff people instead of to mislead them? The Rogue, Bard and Magician are all doing fun stuff after sunset - the theme is "evening", which I admit is odd, but I think perfectly recognizable.

The Assassin, Psyker (?) and Warlock all get death powers. If the Assassin gets offensive death powers and the Psyker gets debuff powers they're still fitting to a theme. The theme was originally meant to be "pestilence" but it ended up as "cursed" instead, pretty clearly.

The Berserker, SOULKNIFE and Wizard all get some combination of fire and anger. Again, Fire Magic and Hulk Strength are not the same thing, but I don't think anyone will have trouble recognizing there a common theme: literal and metaphorical "fire".

[Username17]

The seven spoke color wheel exists to have synergistic pairings of colors, neutral pairings of colors, and antagonistic pairings of colors.

But that has no value for descriptors that player characters in a roleplaying game could have. Like, if thee were political parties in Not-Sigil and taking missions for one faction would piss off two others but make two different ones slightly more inclined to hire you that could be a thing. Or if you were making a card game and your base faction determined which cards you could put in your deck and which cards cost extra to play or something, that could be a thing. But the player characters are all allies in an RPG. There's no game if they aren't allies. It doesn't mean anything for Necromancers and Druids to be neutral or opposed to each other in general, because the party has one of each and they fucking work together because that is the fucking entirety of the game.

The nominal level of love or ire in any particular color pair is completely irrelevant to intraparty dynamics. Within a party, everyone works together to the best of their abilities and risks life and limb to aid each other in whatever circumstances they happen to find themselves in at all times. Because it's a role playing game, and otherwise the game grinds to a halt and doesn't go anywhere.

These do slightly different things but I don't think anyone has trouble recognizing: the theme is "nature".

No. That's 4th edition thinking. The fact that the Barbarian and the Druid are "nature themed" isn't actually enough to make them meaningfully "the same" in any game mechanical fashion in a role playing game. Power sources only mean something if you make them mean something.

In a role playing game, a character is a sample size of one. Any facet of a character only means anything if it allows other people at the table to make positive predictions about other things about the character. So in the statement "I am playing an Orc Assassin" that allows players to conjure a mental picture and to assume that they have Orc abilities and Assassin abilities. The statement "I am playing an Orc Assassin who likes cranberries." contains an italicized non sequitur, because whether or not the character likes cranberries has no predictive value about what they can do in any situation or even what other food they like or do not like.

If your power sources do "different stuff for different characters" then they are a stone cold waste of time. Explaining that someone is Green or Violet is precisely as interesting or helpful as explaining the character's opinions on cranberries or cottage fried potatoes.

You cold possibly have this set to magic damage resistances, but there's no particular need for it being one or another. Seven is a fine number of elemental resistances for a game to have, but it's hard for me to wrap my mind around wanting characters to have exactly one element that they use in all cases. Obviously there are people who want to play Fire Mages, which is why I made the Fire Mage class for 3e D&D - but I think it's instructive that the default Wizard in D&D gets Lightning Bolt, Fireball, and Cone of Cold.

Do you really find it odd to put the Bard and the Illusionist in the same category, even if the Bard is using his communication-based spells to buff people instead of to mislead them?

If the category doesn't say or do anything, it's not worth anything. Obsessively dividing characters into arbitrary slots doesn't help anything. You could put a buffer and a debuffer into the same category with any kind of sorting mechanism you wanted - you could sort these characters by eye color or height. Or whether they like fucking cranberries or not. But if that categorization doesn't help define what the character is capable of, it's not a helpful categorization whether you're able to explain it to people or not.

Consider again 4th edition. You can explain how the Artificer and the Warlock are both Arcane Heroes, and you can explain how the Warden and the Druid are both Primal Heroes. But so fucking what? Those characters being nominally in the same category doesn't actually give them any overlapping functionality. All it does is tell you what book to look up expansion powers for them in. But those powers are still on different lists in the relevant books.

Psyker (?)

This right here is your core problem. You make a class because you have a concept that you think needs a class. Not because you have an empty slot on some row or column.

There's the occasional issue with character concepts that are resonant and desirable but do not have a public domain name. Like, obviously you want players to be able to play Jedi, but Jedi is a registered trademark of the Disney Corporation. So yes, it's possible to have characters where you have a big question mark on the class name. But that's not the sense I am getting from here. It seems more like you're trying to fit an arbitrary framework onto your design and you're finding that framework to be straining.

The entire "Might and Magic" framework where you have a Might class, a Magic class, and a hybrid class for each type of magic is something you can do but which you should not do. While you obviously can make a hybrid class for any kind of magic and have Necromancer -> Death Knight and Calculator -> Math Knight and Fire Mage -> Fire Warrior and so on and so forth for however many magic types you happen to have, why are you doing this? There's a virtually bottomless demand for new flavors of wizard (and good strong game balance reasons why you'd want to slice up wizarding as fine as you can), but "magic warrior" is a concept that is covered with just a few flavors. Or to put it another way, think about Heroes of Might and Magic 4, and how there was a hero for each kind of magic and then a single "Might" hero. That was actually fine because having a non-magic hero for each kind of magic is inherently contradictory and pointless.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I'm more interested in the other thread at the moment, so I will say briefly: bollocks.

It matters if there is a war (or history of war) between Orcs and Elves going on in the background, even if the party is going to include both Orcs and Elves and is not aligned with either group of partisans in the conflict. In fact, it provides plenty of opportunity for tension, stories, and other things you want in an RPG.

D&D 4th is awful and lame in every aspect of the implementation - including the power sources. It's true that there is no objective reason why bolt of cold is arcane or nature; and there's no objective reason for it to be green or cyan in this setup. Nonetheless, you are going to split the effects into different spell lists for the many types of mages you endorse having, at which point you've split the magic pie up into power sources whether you want to admit it or not. Once you've assigned things to piles, the theme emerges from the mashup - so if I lazily heap a bunch of "Babylonian" stuff in Cyan they'll summon Anzu, even if the other chimera type monsters are in another color.

Now, having done that, I propose to split up the mundane skillset pie as well, and along parallel lines, and declare that it matters. So if Tactics is Cyan while War Cry is Red, color-dependent abilities will trigger on these mundane effects as well.

I think the benefits of that decision, in terms of keeping mundane characters relevant and able to interact with the setting, are pretty clear.

Finally, I don't think you read what I wrote above - I had no trouble coming up with 21 classes. Then, I assigned them to color/role combinations - and with a little jiggering, a solid theme emerges for each color. If I had 28 classes, I might have to scrape the bottom of the barrel a bit more, but even then the problem would be coming up with 7 more classes, not with assigning the new 7 to colors.

The only issue is what to name the:
[*] Guy who turns into a wolf and fights.
[*] Guy who has a sword that shoots fire.
[*] Guy who has a sword and violet-themed debuffs people.

[tussock]

You do have way too many mundane splits and could easily have more magic splits.

The Berserker is basically a 3E barbarian. They have a big charge radius which helps to engage enemies.
The Fighter is a master of weaponry; if you want to have a sword, an axe and a spear, and to alternate these weapons by circumstances and have it matter, play a fighter.
The Soldier is a master of ZOC, which helps to engage enemies.
The Wanderer boosts mobility for the rest of the party (which helps control who engages who).
The Ranger can force people to engage at range, but is also a bruiser himself, so enemies have to charge the Ranger before the cloth wearers but they're not happy about it.
The Rogue does cruel brutal damage if you try to engage anyone *else*.
The Assassin has reaction powers that brutally murder enemies who try to *disengage*.

Here you are describing feats. Good feats, but feats. And even good feats obviously suck compared to a fraction of what a Druid can do. Even at quite low level concepts, let alone being a bear surrounded with giant bears in a storm where it's raining electric bears while your foes are drowning in living mud.

Compare

The Druid gets Green magic, which strongly features nature-themed battlefield debuffs like entangle and web, and can also turn into or summon animals,

Where I might write: The Figtanman gets Fight magic, which features taunts into ZoC, long charges, weapon differentiation, and cruel damage if foes refuse combat.

Those are still not that similar degrees of game space. I'd still back the Druid to get accidental powers that leave the Fightanman with no reply. Fold your Fighters and Half-Fighters into seven classes and split the Wizards into 7 Clerics/Theurges and 7 Mages, at least. There's already 7 deep schools of magic to draw from in D&D, and huge numbers of Clerical concepts that are under-used.

Or just give your grunts a proper magic source and upgrade the half-grunts if you like the concepts. Slainé could pull warpfire from the earth and beam it out his sword while also being hot enough to boil water and tough enough to blunt steel and warped enough to swing a tree as a club and mad enough to slay 200 men and not think it enough, but he's just a Barbarian with a touch of the earth goddess and a few levels.

---

I don't like Soldier at all though, everyone needs ZoC, and also Charges, and also punishing attacks, just if you want melee to be a thing outside low levels. Humans are conceptually very slow compared to almost all monster concepts and that means you're not in melee by default.

[Username17]

Now, having done that, I propose to split up the mundane skillset pie as well, and along parallel lines, and declare that it matters.

I'm going to take a bit of time to talk about 3rd edition Shadowrun. In an effort to make Street Samurai different or feel like they had relevant things on their character sheets, 3rd edition decided to divide "Firearms" into Pistols, Rifles, and so on and so forth. It mattered, and there were different things you could choose to get access to and the different bits all cost skill points. This was terrible and it made Street Samurai substantially weaker.

Dungeons & Dragons and its successor titles suffer tremendously from a Linear Wariors // Quadratic Wizards situation. The ability to "do magic" has a much bigger narrative impact than having Thief Skills or Ranger lore could ever hope to be. When you split up skill sets you limit the narrative impact of the characters who have access to parts of the skill set that is being split up. If you split up "magic" into multiple skillsets, you are weakening all the magicians by making them choose to be on one side or the other of an arbitrary line. If you split up "exploration" or "swording" into multiple skill sets, you're weakening all the mundane characters in the same way and for the same reason.

Declaring that you're going to have an equal number of pie slices worth of Might and Magic characters is equivalent to making the claim that the Fighter and the Wizard need equal amounts of narrative restrictions to keep from running away with the game. And that is quite simply completely absurd. It's completely obvious that in a game with magic and non-magic characters that the magic needs to be hacked up more than the non-magic does. The set of the unreal is always going to be bigger than the set of the real. And Wizards also have hands and can sneak and talk and use their thumbs to manipulate objects and use tools.

This isn't new ground. This isn't an active debate. This is just settled fact. The need to divide magical effects into non-overlapping magisteria to keep Wizards from singing the "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better" song is very real. The need to similarly divide up sword maneuvers is simply not.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I say to thee a second time: bollocks.

Excluding competencies from fighting men types to create protected roles for other fighting men is, indeed, a bad idea. But, that is neither the premise nor the goal here. You can have Fighters and Assassins without forbidding one or the other the use of swords. You can divide the pie up in a non-overlapping way for the spells and in an overlapping-way for the fighting skills. Also, yes, there is some "chassis penalty" priced into the cloth wearers, so their spells are somewhat better than individual kung fu whirlwinds, in exchange for which the fighter gets to be tougher and know how to plan an ambush and so forth.

It isn't trivial to come up with 7 lists, each of 3 circles of fighting techniques, containing abilities which are level-appropriate.

It helps a lot that I only have 6 levels / 3 circles to fill - so something that previous editions would push into 14th level capstone territory can be handed out at 6th level.

Now, again, the other thread is more interesting, but consider Web and Covering Fire. Both are second circle green techniques, so they both use the same resource management scheme (lifecost, they do you damage when you use them.) Web is supposed to be better than Multi-Pin, because it shows up on the Green Spell List instead of the Green Fighter Ability List.

Web, Green Spell (Lifecost DR: 13), 2nd Circle
Range: Medium; indirect
Target: 10m radius spread, vs. Evasion
The target area is filled with Webs (see hazards). Individual targets hit by the spell are entangled by the webs, other targets will have to move through the hazardous area as normal.

Covering Fire, Green Ability (Lifecost DR: 12), 2nd Circle
Range: by weapon; direct
Target: up-to-level individual targets, vs. Ranged
Requires the use of a bow. Passive techniques applicable to bow attacks apply to all attacks from this technique.
Make a ranged attack against each target, and engage them. If a target is hit, in addition to normal damage, roll to confirm the hit; on a confirmed hit, the target is also pinned.

Now Fighters can get Bow abilities that do different things than pin and engage targets, so it's not that the other fighting men can't use bows or even that they don't get their own menu of bow powers. Likewise, other fighting men get ZOC, but Yellow gets various bonuses with it.

It's going to take a fair bit of work to:
[*] finalize the resource schemes for each color (red = rage bar; orange = logistics/supply, otherwise at-will; yellow = threat ratings?; cyan = vancian; green = life cost; indigo = luck/mana points; violet = extended actions and delays. I'm not quite happy with that.)
[*] come up with 14 spelltechnique lists, for circles 0 through 3.

But your general principles and highly abstractified naysaying are not really relevant. You don't like divvying things up into seven colors and you especially don't like procedural generation of anything - so it's really the foundations of the entire exercise and not the specifics with which you disagree.

[Username17]

You can have Fighters and Assassins without forbidding one or the other the use of swords. You can divide the pie up in a non-overlapping way for the spells and in an overlapping-way for the fighting skills.

Yes. You can do that. Doing that weakens fighting men. Every part of the game that might be in your character's wheelhouse but is not for whatever reason weakens your character. That's just what it does. Again: that is not up for debate. It's tautological.

If Assassins and Knights have things that are protected for themselves that are not accessible by Knights and Assassins, that makes both Assassins and Knights weaker. If Sun Mages and Druids have things that are protected for themselves that are not accessible by Druids and Sun Mages, that makes both Sun Mages and Druids weaker. Because this is obviously and tautologically the case.

Now historically Sun Mages and Druids have been "unbalanced" in D&D successor titles precisely because they have too much that they have access to. The things spells can do is much larger than the things you can do with your hands because you have special expertise abilities that you couldn't do with your hands just as a random dude - both in terms of the power (the effect on the game environment when used) and utility (the number of effects that they could potentially be used for. So telling Sun Mages to piss off and give up some pie slices to Druids and Illusionists and shit is fine by me.

But a similar argument cannot be made in good faith for Scouts and Assassins. Indeed, K made a credible argument that basically everything the Scout is supposed to be good at is simply something that every adventurer should be able to do. Sneaking, fighting, talking, exploring and interacting with the environment are simply things that adventurers need to be able to do in order for the story to advance at all, whether they are "Pirates" or "Samurai."

You don't like divvying things up into seven colors

No. I like dividing things into seven colors just fine. I did a fair amount of writing on a world that has seven elements and many cultures. But this thing you're doing with seven elements? It's not good. You're trying to make colors do something that they aren't good at and then using procedural generation to run yourself off a fucking cliff.

I have no problem with you deciding that for whatever reason you want seven flavors of magic. But it's glaringly obvious that if you want players to play mundane swordsmen alongside those seven flavors of magic you are going to need a lot less than seven flavors of mundane competency.

-Username17

[jt]

You can have Fighters and Assassins without forbidding one or the other the use of swords. You can divide the pie up in a non-overlapping way for the spells and in an overlapping-way for the fighting skills.

Yes. You can do that. Doing that weakens fighting men. Every part of the game that might be in your character's wheelhouse but is not for whatever reason weakens your character. That's just what it does. Again: that is not up for debate. It's tautological.

What you're saying is true but doesn't actually rebut DrPraetor's suggestion. If there's 35 units worth of conceptually interesting things a wizard can do, you can give 5 to each of seven branches of wizards and make them totally unique. If there's only 10 units worth of conceptually interesting things for martials to do, and you still need to give each of seven classes 5 units worth of stuff to keep up with wizards, you can do this by coming up with seven different subsets (of 252 to choose from). This gives every class a similar amount of conceptual pie, by making martial classes more similar to each other and wizards more different from each other.

It also makes multiple martial characters more redundant than multiple wizard characters, which is true no matter what unless you dig up more conceptually interesting things for them to do.

---

I'm still at a loss for why we'd want to divide everything up into seven colors though. If the entire point of this is "arbitrary restrictions give more texture" (which, sure) then I don't see why a 3 x 7 matrix is a particularly useful kind of arbitrary. Xing Yi Quan is one of the three Wudangquan styles of martial arts and divides its teachings along five elements and twelve animals. That's a 3 - 5 - 12 split and I haven't even had to make something up yet. If you want to build an arbitrary graph of relationships that more conveniently fits the material you're trying to use, you can just do that.

[Username17]

There are things that arbitrary element lists are good at in an RPG context:

• Epic Destinies. Many character classes, especially mundane character classes, do not have an obvious means of progressing past certain power levels. But if a character also has an element, their "high level" powers can come from the element rather than their class. The obvious example is Magic: the Gathering. Nissa is a Scout who becomes a powerful Green Planeswalker, and Gideon is a Soldier who becomes a powerful White Planeswalker. Being a "Human Soldier" or an "Elf Scout" doesn't really lend itself to high level play, but being a world waking animist or a sun cleansing angel lord does.
• Vulnerabilities and Resistances. Without looking it up, how do you kill a Demodand? In an RPG it is often important to predict what weapons and magics you should use to fight different monsters. And Dungeons & Dragons is a complete fucking mess about this. The Tendriculus is a plant monster with special resistance to axes and fire. With a fixed elemental paradigm you could make rational expectations about how to fight a Rot Beast without reading its stat line.

If you're using elements for those things, go ahead. But insisting that you need an equal number of class divisions of Fighter and Wizard is just obviously losing the plot.

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

jt: I imagine the issue is that some, if not all of the 10 units of useful mundane things you give to martials are things every humanoid adventurer can do. So if you divvy up the mundane units among the martials, and any of the 35 units given to casters can enhance or replace the mundane units, you run into the linear warriors/quadratic wizards problem.

Now I would suggest making your Might types gishes if keeping the color wheel = power source thing is important to DrP, and turning it into a resistance chart like Frank suggests (and did for SAME) if it isn't.

[jt]

jt: I imagine the issue is that some, if not all of the 10 units of useful mundane things you give to martials are things every humanoid adventurer can do.

Yeah, you have to limit those concept units to things that not just anyone can do.

And if, having removed those, you find out there's only 6 left, then that's not enough to make 7 unique fighters (hell, if you have 7, your fighters are each 86% the same and only differentiated by the one thing they can't do). If there's only 4, you can't even make one fighter class that's as good as the wizards without starting to remove things wizards can conceptually do.

Taking the arbitrary units out, the question becomes "if I divide everything that magicians can do by 7, is that still more than the number of unique things trained warriors can do?" And if it's not, you have to either eliminate kinds of magic or divide magic by an even bigger number.

[DrPraetor]

I was going to go on a rant about Street Samurais and Mercenaries and Earth Elementalists and Fire Elementalists in Shadowrun - but Frank and jt kinda short-circuited it.

One important part of that rant was - even if the existence of Mercenaries (or even Mercenary-specific gear the Street Sam isn't allowed to have) is jiggered so as not to weaken the Street Samurai as a role, when someone sits down at the table and does the same stuff as you, abstract arguments about conceptual pie slices fall away, because there are now two shooting-people-in-the-face experts in the party. So this is "concern C".

For that matter, Riggers don't weaken Street Samurai by taking over the conceptual space of driving vehicles around and having pet robots, they weaken Street Samurai by saturating the entire neighborhood with ordinance while the other runners cower beneath the rubble.

Anyway - I propose:
[*] Gideon wants to be Yellow at first level. Even if he later turns into an eyeball-licking bondage vampire (Violet).
[*] A Yellow-fighter and a Red-fighter are going to be more mutually similar than a Yellow-mage and a Red-mage, but this can be adjusted for in a number of ways. D&D 3rd doesn't adjust for this problem but it barely tries; the abilities that medium-level fighters get in D&D 3.5 are weak tea completely independently of how much of the playspace they have to cede to the Ranger, Scout, Rogue, Assassin, Barbarian, Swashbuckler, Ninja, Samurai, Knight, Marshall, Crusader and Warblade. EDIT: AND Swordsage.

Now, that adjustment-in-a-number-of-ways does require some effort, because at root, I am promising that neither of these two parties:
[*] Berserker, Smith, Mage, Wanderer, Ranger
[*] Wizard, Alchemist, Soldier, Monk, Druid

is going to look at the other party and say, "Jeez, we really screwed up." This is, of course, the same "concern C" I was worried about above.

But, if you are willing to give 5th level fighters combat abilities that are comparable to 3rd circle spells I am pretty confident this can be achieved.. Mainly, because, this is a tactical combat game, so someone who specializes in running around with a weapon dispatching people can be given an interesting role as long as the tactical minigame has rules for positioning, deflecting, interrupting, and etc. sufficient to keep the fighter interested; and, as long as you aren't terrified of 5th level fighters getting anything good because this might disrupt some good outcome you erroneously feel you achieved in previous editions.

This is "concern C" because it's my third most severe concern about party design in my hypothetical heartbreaker, with more pressing concerns being:
[*] What if everyone in the party wants to have the same strategy? That is, it's easy to come up with an engine where the entire party wants to kite and anyone who can't is dead weight; or, the entire party wants to contribute part of the overlapping Paladin Forcefield and anyone who can't is just dead weight, and so on.

[*] I'm worried about accidentally-introducing overpowered synergies between classes, likely from angles that I completely fail to expect. Like Yellow Mages stun monsters including inanimates, and then the offensive bonuses against helpless targets that Violet is supposed to use to team up with Indigo become dominant.

Do the extra face-stabbers feel like dead weight if multiple people show up with one? I think I can design around that, and even make them play pretty differently.

[DrPraetor]

Anyway, I want to go back to the non-combat challenges thread (still thinking about jt's notes on the stealth minigame), but I think the first two tiers would look something like:

Adventuring Tier

Color	Mundane	Hybrid	Magic
Red	Berserker	Reaver	Sorcerer
Brown	Fighter	Smith	Alchemist
Yellow	Soldier	Paladin	Mage
Cyan	Wanderer	Monk	Enchanter
Green	Ranger	Seeker	Druid
Indigo	Rogue	Bard	Magician
Violet	Assassin	Accursed	Warlock

Heroic Tier

In the Heroic Tier there are only three mundane classes, because at this point most people are going to be hybrids.
Marshall (Yellow/Brown) - has a bunch of dudes with outstanding equipment and training.
Destroyer (Red/Violet) - is a continuation of berserker and assassin both; has no magic but turns the "kill people" dial to max.
Gryphon Knight (Cyan/Green) - all in on mounted combat, including an exotic mount.
When the mages start getting Teleport and shit, I basically agree with Frank's previous point - I no longer think it's practical to slice the mundane pie up finer than that. All of these character types get what would be considered D&D 3rd edition mid-level rogue competencies as well.

We have a total of 21 pairings to hand out, and that's 3. I think the hybrids will actually see the most use at this tier, so I'll make 11:7 and see how that goes.

So... hybrids

Color1	Color2	Name
Red	Brown	Runemaster
Red	Yellow	Warrior Mage
Brown	Cyan	Iron Fist
Yellow	Cyan	Adept
Yellow	Green	Warden
Cyan	Indigo	Skylark
Green	Indigo	Avenger
Green	Violet	Fallen
Indigo	Violet	Ninja
Indigo	Red	Skald
Violet	Brown	Ninja

Violet/Cyan is Necromancer
Cyan/Red is Wizard (notice above I made the red-adventurer "Sorcerer" instead)
Red/Green is Elementalist
Green/Brown is Geomancer
Brown/Indigo is Transmuter
Indigo/Yellow is Thaumaturge
Yellow/Violet is Summoner

[Orca]

So someone who has a noble warrior with holy magic in adventuring tier, a Paladin advances to the next tier and has the options of becoming a Warrior Mage, an Adept (whatever that is) or a Warden. Is that how this works?

[jt]

1) What if everyone in the party wants to have the same strategy? That is, it's easy to come up with an engine where the entire party wants to kite and anyone who can't is dead weight; or, the entire party wants to contribute part of the overlapping Paladin Forcefield and anyone who can't is just dead weight, and so on.

2) I'm worried about accidentally-introducing overpowered synergies between classes, likely from angles that I completely fail to expect. Like Yellow Mages stun monsters including inanimates, and then the offensive bonuses against helpless targets that Violet is supposed to use to team up with Indigo become dominant.

Unless your system is incredibly boring, your outline is already too complex to avoid these things. Embrace it and put proper safety valves in play. Check this ancient Sirlin article on how Guilty Gear gets away with being so over the top.

1: An all-kiting party trivializes a big chunk of your monster manual. Ideally your system has some balancing factor so that the kiters instead trivialize a handful of monsters and get an advantage against that big chunk. Can you piggy back a solution for dead weight characters on the solution for that?

1 again: You can solve this by pokemoning your colors. If an all-green party has an awesome synergy but no resistance to red tactics, you have to weigh whether it's worth having no blue around.

1 yet again: This problem requires most of the party to cooperate on something that's not fun for another member, or one member to refuse to go along with something the rest of the party wants to do. This group is not going to have fun regardless of your system.

2: Introduce checks at the seams between classes. Things that might have really powerful synergies should have use limits, counters, or drawbacks. If all yellow stuns are paired with a longer buff (e.g. -2 to hit because the target is still glowing) then this might not matter too much normally but can become a problem if you start passing them out like candy.

[DrPraetor]

So someone who has a noble warrior with holy magic in adventuring tier, a Paladin advances to the next tier and has the options of becoming a Warrior Mage, an Adept (whatever that is) or a Warden. Is that how this works?

Those are the options if you want to play-to-type. Adepts get to cast spells on themselves or their allies while taking unarmed combat actions at the same time, essentially.

You have open swapping between tiers, so if you want to be a Paladin in the adventuring tier and then get bored with that and decide to be a Necromancer in the heroic tier, that's fine.

The only restriction is that people can't have more than three colors total.

This is going to be unbalanced. As long as the balance differences aren't so extreme that some combinations are either pathetically-disappointing traps or overwhelmingly advantageous, I'm happy.

[DrPraetor]

Color	Mundane	Hybrid	Magic	Scheme
Red	Berserker	Reaver	Sorcerer	Rage Bar
Brown	Fighter	Smith	Alchemist	Logistics
Yellow	Soldier	Paladin	Mage	Magic Points
Cyan	Wanderer	Monk	Enchanter	Vancian
Green	Ranger	Seeker	Druid	Lifecost
Indigo	Rogue	Bard	Magician	Deck of Cards
Violet	Assassin	Accursed	Warlock	Double Actions

The reasoning runs thusly:
[*] Red gets a rage bar because it's fire barbarians.
[*] Brown is all equipment-oriented powers, so the boosts apply when you get equipment using your logistics skill(s).
[*] Yellow has magic points for game balance reasons - yellow is healing/defensive, and we want fights to have a clock, so yellow has to count down rather than up.
[*] Cyan has Vancian magic (that's spell preparation D&D 3e style) because Cyan has kiting which we also want to count down.
[*] Green has lifecost because you're channeling nature, not for any real mechanical reason.
[*] Indigo has "opportunist" powers which are best represented using winds of fate, deck of cards style resolution (although I may actually have people fill in a table and roll dice.)
[*] Frank made a strong argument of why lose-an-action is the correct mechanic for assassins, and I think it's fair to give that to necromancers and hexblades at the same time.

But we're doing the monster manual first!

Elite monsters work just like PCs, and have a full resource management portfolio to keep track of.

[*] Red scrubs either have a rage token or they don't.
[*] Brown scrubs just have static bonuses - often they "are" equipment so golems and shit are just bigger numbers with no resource scheme.
[*] Yellow scrubs have enough magic points to use their defensive power once (presumably at the start of combat) and their healing power once (presumably later).
[*] Cyan scrubs show up with two powers prepared, which they will presumably use on the first rounds of combat, so Cyan monsters are an early threat. Sometimes these are kiting powers and they'll do hit and run or something to soften you up? (seriously, should we have that or is it just annoying?)
[*] Green scrubs typically have a lifecost power that they'll want to spam, so they have a shorter clock than other mobs.
[*] Indigo scrubs have a very short deck (3 or 6 cards, so you can roll a die instead, if you wish) from which they draw exactly 1 card per turn.
[*] Violet scrubs will alternate between their delay and big strike action most rounds, so are simple to run.

Now I want to fill out the color by monster table. We want three monsters of each color at least at each level, but we don't need to fill out the entire color x class table this time and further we can have multiple monsters of the same color x class combination at the same level, even if it makes those fights a bit redundant.