Annoying Game Questions You Want Answered

[...You Lost Me]

I'll add 3 more notes on the topic of Wild Shape being a spell:

Wild Shape synergy: Wild shape is fairly unique in that it's a huge buff to your physical characteristics, it can last all day, and it can be used alongside druid spells with Natural Spell. I can see a Wild Shape spell being balanced if you cut down 2/3 of those. Otherwise, I think the power budget is too large for wild shape to be a spell.

Wild Shape as a signal: Emerald said something to this effect, but I want to echo it. The wild shape class feature communicates a particular playstyle and aesthetic. If wild shape is squirreled away on a spell list instead, it doesn't communicate its playstyle or aesthetic as strongly, which is probably going to reduce the number of druid-y characters at your game table. I'm not sure if that's good or bad to you, but instinctively I think it's bad. Druids are cool and thematic.

Existing Wild Shape spells: That's not to say this is out of the question. The Maginomicon has some fixes for polymorph self spells. I think you can just use the suggestion for lycanthropy. That puts a wild shape spell at 3rd level.

IMO: Just because you can fold cleric & druid together doesn't mean you should. The cleric/druid thematics are very distinct, and players enjoy playing both of the classes. If you do choose to have Druids & Clerics folded together, I think it would be better to create a selectable class feature (along the lines of the D&D 5e archetypes) that grants wild shape. I think that will send a stronger signal to players that druids are a playing character type in your system.

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On the topic of tiny wild shape, a lot of low-level challenges are built around players not having significant mobility, and easy access to flight will probably invalidate those challenges. I haven't run into problems with high stealth ruining any games (so a cat form is reasonable), but I think it's a bad idea to hand out personal flight at level 1, especially on something as flexible as wild shape.

[Emerald]

Clerics get Spells, two Domains, and Turn/Rebuke. So, their features are all established at level one.

Druids get Spells, Animal Companion, Wild Empathy and Wild Shape (plus some bullshit small abilities that hardly matter, like pass without trace, resist nature's lure and venom immunity).

So, just thinking about it in my head while driving, I was thinking that Druids get an Animal Companion where Clerics get Domains, Wild Shape can be a spell, and rather than interacting with diplomacy rules, Wild Empathy becomes Rebuke/Command Nature.

That's a fairly novel idea for Wild Empathy (most homebrew I've seen just turns it into "you can use normal social skills on plants and animals at no penalty"), and given that, it sounds like the unified secondary mechanic suggestion would be a good option.

What if the Acolyte got a single "Divine Channeling" resource and each subclass gave a Turn/Rebuke ability at 1st level and a self-transformation or aura ability at 5th level? For clerics, 1st is Turn/Rebuke Undead and 5th is some sort of active domain powers (like the [Devotion] or [Reserve] feats, but all centered around self-buffs). For druids, 1st is Rebuke Natural Being and 5th is Wild Shape.

You could even adapt other divine casters with the same pattern: Shugenjas get could get Turn/Rebuke Elemental of a type matching their school at 1st and maybe Elemental Form at 5th ('cause Sense Elements as their signature ability really doesn't cut it), Spirit Shamans could get Chastise Spirits at 1st and a scaled-back Spirit Form at 5th, and so on.

Then I have to figure out whether to even care about the bullshit small abilities.

Depends. If you're getting rid of the small flavor abilities for all classes, then they can safely be ditched. If not, turning them into spells would be good; Trackless Stride and Woodland Stride would make for nice cantrip options for an exploration-heavy wilderness campaign even if they're very niche outside of that, buffing Resist Nature's Lure into a "protection from evil, but against fey" spell would be handy, and so forth.

A third option is the old "give out more-flavorful-than-powerful feats as adventure rewards or the result of downtime training" thing that perennially pops up in threads here. Resist Nature's Lure and Venom Immunity aren't really worth a feat slot, but as a minor reward at the end of an adventure against a scheming dryad or a drow assassin they could be nice perks.

[Username17]

Counterpoint: Cleric is a garbage class and shouldn't exist. To the existent that characters are priests of various gods, there's no reason for them to be the same class. Nature gods can have priests who are druids, sun gods can have priests that are paladins, death gods can have priests that are necromancers and so on and so on.

-Username17

[Pedantic]

I rather like Fantasy Craft's implementation here. Divine power is just a list of 5 abilities organized into domain-like themes called Paths. Classes that let you do divine stuff (or, just want to use the power delivery system) let you take a domain abilities, in order.

Priests get more path steps instead of other abilities, and some general divination stuff. Other themed classes appropriate as divinely empowered get steps down a limited set of paths that are appropriate, and you can get at them via feats as well.

It also gets clerics out of the caster business, and essentially merges them with warlocks. Paths might offer spell-like abilities per encounter or day or whatever but not full customizable casting.

[Emerald]

Counterpoint: Cleric is a garbage class and shouldn't exist. To the existent that characters are priests of various gods, there's no reason for them to be the same class. Nature gods can have priests who are druids, sun gods can have priests that are paladins, death gods can have priests that are necromancers and so on and so on.

-Username17

Counter-counterpoint: The examples you gave are caster-y gods with easy cleric substitutes. The pattern doesn't hold when you're talking about the god of battle with priests who are fighters, the god of orcs with priests who are barbarians, and so on. When people want to play a "priest" they don't just want to fill the social role of a priest, they want to have magic themed after their god, and not every god theme maps one-to-one to a class theme in a satisfying way.

And passing out all the clerical stuff to other caster classes to address that is nontrivial. A sun god's "priest" being a paladin only fills that niche if it can create daylight, launch sunbeams at people, and such, when that would require the paladin to be more spell-heavy than paladins have traditionally been; a sea god's "priest" being a druid only fills the niche if it has enough water-themed spells to pull off the theme, when the 3e druid has a grand total of six water spells of 3rd level or lower. If you start shoving enough thematic spells into other classes for a paladin to be a priest of a sun god, a god of honor, a god of battle, etc. and a druid to be a priest of a moon god, a sea god, a desert god, etc., you start bloating those spell lists and diluting the other classes' themes. If you divvy up all those spells into thematic spell packages by god, well, you've just reinvented clerics with their domains.

I rather like Fantasy Craft's implementation here. Divine power is just a list of 5 abilities organized into domain-like themes called Paths. Classes that let you do divine stuff (or, just want to use the power delivery system) let you take a domain abilities, in order.

Not knowing anything about Fantasy Craft beyond the Den review of it, are those a divine-magic-only thing, or are Paths a generic thing that everyone can use for things beyond Cleric Lite stuff?

I think the latter option (whether it actually is that way in Fantasy Craft or not) would be a workable heartbreaker idea, and a workable way to get rid of the cleric like Frank wants. If a paladin can decide to pick up a Sun Priest package and do all the things you'd expect out of a Cleric of Pelor at a basic level alongside his normal paladin stuff, and a fighter or fire mage could pick it up as well to be more or less Templar-y than the paladin version, then that resolves most of the issues with removing the cleric. And if any of those characters could have instead picked up e.g. the Demon-Blooded package to play a fiend from 1st level, then divine casting isn't its own special snowflake subsystem and so is easier to balance and incorporate into the rest of the system.

[Thaluikhain]

When people want to play a "priest" they don't just want to fill the social role of a priest, they want to have magic themed after their god, and not every god theme maps one-to-one to a class theme in a satisfying way.

Dunno, GW keeps going back and forth between totally non-magic and magic priests.

Though, yeah, more god themes than class themes (until you get a zillion classes, I guess), but that still might seem better than a zillion god themes and one class to suit them all.

[tussock]

Given a heartbreaker close enough to 3e that "class feature vs. spell" is a meaningful distinction, the only real differences between a Turn Undead class feature powered by its own separate resource and a turn undead spell-that's-not-a-spell powered by its own separate resource is that the latter has spell components, can be counterspelled, can be put in a wand, and so on, which would all seem to be undesirable characteristics, either making it harder for the character to use a signature formerly-a-class-feature or making it easier for other people to access it.

A potion of Wild Shape sounds awesome, and it doesn't need to be a massive combat buff in the first place, as Druids are already very powerful spellcasters.

Plus, wands of divine spells are poison anyway, like do fix that in any heartbreaker. Hell, use AD&D Wands, always caster level 6, only spells off the Wizard list (hint, the Wizard list is basically "stuff you can do with wands in myths").

Plus, 4e showed that if you shove the noncombat spells off to their own section and added any impediments to using them over your normal set of spells, they're likely to be neglected by most players.

Yeah, those things weren't really used in 3e or AD&D much either. The extra costs on using them was weird, because of course they wanted a limit on spamming but didn't leave themselves design room to give Wizards two free ritual slots! 4e is just shit.

Give your five Wizard classes free ritual slots. Like, you give them spell slots every day, they cast spells, give them two ritual slots they can be working on in non-played downtime for free and boom, they'll use rituals and sometimes that won't be enough and they'll also plug through whatever cost you've got to stop them being spammed.

You could also just tag spells with "ritual" where casters can only prepare one at a time but they still work like normal spells, it's just there's an assumed downtime component that stops you using heaps of them. Like you can only have one "concentration" spell active at a time.

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@You Lost Me
Signal, yes. Like Domain slots make people actually read the domain spells, so does a special slot for it (a slot so you can as a designer put other things in it later) make people read the Wild Shape spell. People didn't miss animal companions in 3.0 just because it was a spell instead of a class feature, it was after all right there in the art.

[Prak]

I think if I were to do Rituals, the main extra resource over a normal spell would be a longer casting time, and maybe more material components. There'd be ritual class lists, but honestly, when I think of a ritual, I think of something that anyone with the knowledge of how to perform it (including in the form of a book), time, and the components can perform.

I could see the Druid's various minor bullshit abilities as the result of rituals. Trackless Step and Woodland Stride are, like, 15 minute ritual prayers you know just for being a druid, and they last for 24 hours. Venom immunity is an hour long ritual you know for being, like, a fifth level druid, and it lasts for 24 hours, or you can perform a three day ritual that's physically demanding to get permanent venom immunity. And maybe that three day ritual is, like, an adventure (delve into Deep Wood, which takes a full 24 hours of walking into the woods, once there seek a totem spirit of venom and defeat it, and then leave with another 24 hour walk out of the Deep Wood, or something).

[Username17]

Counter-counterpoint: The examples you gave are caster-y gods with easy cleric substitutes. The pattern doesn't hold when you're talking about the god of battle with priests who are fighters, the god of orcs with priests who are barbarians, and so on.

I think the argument is stronger when you get to gods whose shtick is farther from a Judaic sky god. It's weird to try to make a priest of the local Death god use the same spell list as Moses, but it's really weird to have the priests of the god of crossroads or something have the same spell list as Moses.

In fact, I would say that if you want a type of Priest that is a bad fit for any existing class you should make a new class. The Cleric class as concepted is basically just a Paladin with a coat of paint and is genuinely terrible at covering any priesthood that isn't just a bunch of Paladins.

If your Sea God is a bunch of cryptic pirate oracles and you can't find the right stack of divination magic, weather control, and swashbuckling in a floppy hat in any existing class, make a new class. Trying to do that off the back of the Cleric Class and some domains is stupid ad also doesn't work very well.

This was the basic conclusion of the Complete Book of Priests back in 1990. And that insight is just as true today as it was 30 years ago.

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

What's wrong with a Cleric where the only spells you get are domain spells?

[DenizenKane]

What's wrong with a Cleric where the only spells you get are domain spells?

Because at the point where you're writing a class the transforms into other classes, you might as well just write those classes, because they'll be more unique and easier for the player.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, the average cleric spell simply isn't very good and clerics make up for that through a combination of a decent chassis, riding the unusually good spells they do have into the ground and by paying no opportunity cost for knowing utility shit like Purify Food and Drink. Limiting them to a selection of domains will lead to hardcore cherry picking and even if you gave enough picks that the character broke out of fighter tier you'd still end up with something rather specific rather than something modular.

[deaddmwalking]

What's wrong with a Cleric where the only spells you get are domain spells?

Let's say that you're going to play a Cleric of knowledge.

Is a 3/4 BAB thematically appropriate? Most 'scholars' have a 1/2 BAB bonus. What's the point in having a skill list that includes all the knowledge skills if you have 2 skill points per level and Wisdom is your primary casting stat? Does heavy armor proficiency and a shield make sense?

If you think that the wizard is a better chassis for your class, what benefit is there of trying to put it on a cleric chassis?

[Foxwarrior]

That's easy, deaddmwalking. The domain power of the Knowledge domain is: "Play a wizard instead."

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Hmm... maybe I should've implied that the chassis and domains would need to be changed as well. Basically, just a magic priest class with different spell lists depending on the god. But DenizenKane made a fine point.

[Dean]

Are there any GURPS books that are known to be good? A good gurps book is useable for just about any system as inspiration so I thought I would look at whichever ones are supposed to be the best Gurps books.

[Emerald]

A potion of Wild Shape sounds awesome, and it doesn't need to be a massive combat buff in the first place, as Druids are already very powerful spellcasters.

You're right, it doesn't have to be a class-defining major combat buff, but the point is that it currently is and if Prak's trying to turn Druid into a subclass then there's not really any other signature thing to use that doesn't fit "cleric of a nature god" just as well. So if you're gonna spell-ify Wild Shape there's a tension between making it just another buff spell (which is fine power-wise but really dilutes the druid's theme) and making it a spell hefty enough to carry the druid through combat (which is good for the theme but would be too good if other classes can access it), hence why leaving it as a class feature may be the better and easier idea.

In fact, I would say that if you want a type of Priest that is a bad fit for any existing class you should make a new class. The Cleric class as concepted is basically just a Paladin with a coat of paint and is genuinely terrible at covering any priesthood that isn't just a bunch of Paladins.

If your Sea God is a bunch of cryptic pirate oracles and you can't find the right stack of divination magic, weather control, and swashbuckling in a floppy hat in any existing class, make a new class. Trying to do that off the back of the Cleric Class and some domains is stupid ad also doesn't work very well.

Because at the point where you're writing a class the transforms into other classes, you might as well just write those classes, because they'll be more unique and easier for the player.

The argument isn't that you need to keep the exact 3e cleric around in a heartbreaker in its self-buffing undead-turning plate-wearing mace-wielding form, it's that having some kind of generic Priest class with modular parts that you can snap together to make a priest of whatever god you want is easier to make then having to make separate classes for every god you want to use.

The Beguiler, Warmage, and Dread Necromancer are great classes conceptually, with tightly-themed spell lists and synergistic features, and it's pretty much always going to be easier, stronger, and more fun to play a Beguiler instead of a Sorcerer who just happens to pick a bunch of Enchantment and Illusion spells. But if a player wants to play a summoner, and then the PC dies and she wants to roll up an earth-themed BFC caster, and then someone else in the party wants to roll a flying blaster, it's a lot easier to point them at the Sorcerer and have them cobble their concepts together out of that than to write up full-on Diabolist, Geomancer, and Storm Mage classes when the player won't be able to see the class before the DM writes it up to judge if they like it, the DM doesn't know what level range the PC is going to play at (maybe they die their first session!), and so on.

And of course since Prak's initial idea was to merge similar classes, I imagine that e.g. a Necromancer is going to look a lot less like a Dread Necromancer with a fully-developed spell list and playstyle all its own and more like a prestige class or domain with a small set of distinctive but not amazing benefits so as not to overwhelm what it gets from its Arcanist/Wizard/whatever superclass, so the difference between "make a whole new Ship's Priest class for priests of Poseidon to take" and "make whole new Ocean and Storm domains for clerics of Poseidon to take" would be fairly small in practice anyway.

[OgreBattle]

The Beguiler, Warmage, and Dread Necromancer are great classes conceptually, with tightly-themed spell lists and synergistic features, and it's pretty much always going to be easier, stronger, and more fun to play a Beguiler instead of a Sorcerer who just happens to pick a bunch of Enchantment and Illusion spells. But if a player wants to play a summoner, and then the PC dies and she wants to roll up an earth-themed BFC caster, and then someone else in the party wants to roll a flying blaster, it's a lot easier to point them at the Sorcerer and have them cobble their concepts together out of that than to write up full-on Diabolist, Geomancer, and Storm Mage classes when the player won't be able to see the class before the DM writes it up to judge if they like it, the DM doesn't know what level range the PC is going to play at (maybe they die their first session!), and so on.

We're mostly talking about flavor. Having power schedule differences between the geomancer, diabolist, and storm mage is why you'd make 'em different classes.

Perhaps you have X amount of power schedules with some variants on flavor and powers

[DenizenKane]

I think there are far more class concepts than novel resource schedules. Some should share: for player familiarity, exploring the design space from a different angle, and the fact that good resource mechanics are difficult to design.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Let's say you lived in a world where the tides generally varied by 60 to 150 feet. Some really heinous shit. Logically, how do you set up your docks so that ships don't get swept out to sea or dashed against the rocks all the time? Does that make the coastline more rugged, or more smooth? I've done some research on this so far, but I know there are people here far more knowledgeable and pedantic than I.

I've kinda gone with "multi-story dockhouses", but I doubt that works like I think it does, ergo the question. I don't think I fully understood just how crazy 50 meter tidal variances are when I came up with the idea.
If you're wondering why it's like that in the first place: two moons.

[erik]

I’d imagine the docks themselves are essentially large rafts that boats dock onto. I’m presuming, possibly incorrectly, that the tidal shifts aren’t catastrophically fast.

If they do change very rapidly then you probably have multiple docks with some that get submerged at high tides. It would be neat to have a coastal stone cliff with tall poles you can latch onto and float up or down it. The cliff would be far enough out that it is always partly submerged and have a bridge to connect to land.

Another option could be a floating bubble dock city. Kinda like the series of connected rafts but more elegant. Maybe made from the hardened carcass of a jellyfish looking kaiju.

Or dock on a living creature like a kaiju turtle who mostly just hangs out near the coast.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

They're... probably catastrophically fast, since they work like in real life: once a day, there's a high tide, and once a day there's a low tide. With a maximum variance of 50 meters, that's roughly 4 meters per hour in either direction. Twice a day. Basically, if you leave your kid on the shore for 15 minutes they'll probably fucking disappear or something.

The coastal stone cliff thing is kind of how I've had it work so far, for places that need to be accessible most of the day. Smaller villagers have it a lot rougher. They'd either need to dig some ramps for their boats to be dragged up and down when the tide isn't at its highest, or have some kind of pulley system they could attach their boats to.

It's important to note that these are worldwide changes. All the tides, from the ocean to inland seas, are completely fucked. I'm cool with dock cities on the backs of monsters, but not everybody can do that.

[Grek]

Logically, how do you set up your docks so that ships don't get swept out to sea or dashed against the rocks all the time?

By not putting them in the ocean. You'd have to put them a good ways upstream, in a river or else you just couldn't dock.

Does that make the coastline more rugged, or more smooth? I've done some research on this so far, but I know there are people here far more knowledgeable and pedantic than I.

The big change would be that your intertidal zones would be much larger and much deeper, filled with what is basically quicksand studded with massive sprawling tidepools and giant sea worms.

They're... probably catastrophically fast, since they work like in real life: once a day, there's a high tide, and once a day there's a low tide. With a maximum variance of 50 meters, that's roughly 4 meters per hour in either direction. Twice a day.

Not quite. I mean, for one most areas have two high tides per day. But more importantly, one moon produces a (mostly) sinusoidal pattern in tidal height - each high tide is followed by low tide of roughly equal size, having two moons moving in and out of conjunction with one another would produce a much more funky tidal pattern:

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Aw, man, that's the good shit, Grek. That's exactly what I was asking for.
If it helps, the twin moons actually move at exactly the same rate, and are always equidistant from one another. It's some mystic shit, but I thought since it was so 'balanced', it would result in more severe tides instead of funkier tidal patterns.

[Grek]

If they're always on opposite sides of the planet from one another, then yes, the results will be similar to having one big moon instead.