Multiclassing and resource management systems.

[Username17]

One of the things a class based system lets you do is to have different classes have different resource management systems. This pretty much requires that the classes be segregated, because otherwise you end up like Iron Heroes where everyone has like 8 flavors of tokens and it's a giant pain in the ass. And it probably wouldn't be balanced anyway, like trying to multiclass 3e Psions and Wizards.

Different players are going to be attracted to resource management systems that are more or less complex. And that's OK. I've been thinking about how 4th edition was supposed to include a series of classes that all had different refresh mechanics and noone had spells per day and that sounds kind of awesome.

For example, you could have:

Assassin

Warm up is the name of the game here. You have various abilities, but they require time to activate. You can do your basic super crossbow shot by giving up movement for the turn, but if you want to do your death strike, you have to give up an entire turn.

Berserker

Someone gets to have a Rage Bar, and the Berserker is a good obvious fit for that. Power up your super moves by hitting people and taking damage. You could institute a limit on sacrificing chickens to the Berserker by having fatigue set in a certain amount of time after the ragebar starts up.

Druid

Druids have always been way overcrowded conceptually, being everything from spirit shamans to nature priests to lycanthropic fighting machines. Here, we're going for the more "deals with nature spirits" end of things and less with the "bear warrior". You have a number of spirits that can aid you and at any given moment one of them is available. This is like a Green Arrow WoF setup, where you randomly determine which spirit you get to use each round and that spirit comes with a fixed set of options. So if you get Thunder Spirit this round you can use any of the Thunder Spirit powers, and if you get the Oak Spirit or Wave Spirit instead, you get a different set of powers to choose from.

Hero

Someone is going to want a "simple" character where they can spam the same attacks over and over again if that is what they want to do. There does need to be an "everything at will" class, and I think the Hero is it.

Monk

Magical martial arts are based on the linking of stances and maneuvers. That is, you can spend an action to change to a new stance, which will give you a new list of maneuvers you can use. Kind of like a warblade, but the maneuvers you get each time you refresh are fixed to short lists, in order to make the mid-battle resculpts take less table-time.

Necromancer

Incarnum was terrible, but many of the underlying concepts were not bad. Necromancers get a certain amount of Life Essence that they can route to various things. Basically this means that the army you can have gets bigger (and if you go for a big Diablo 2 style golem instead, that can be bigger) as you go up in level, and also that as your army (or bodyguard) gets more powerful you drain off your own ability to shoot black beams that kill people. Most importantly of all, it gives a solid in-character reason why your personal attacks are less level appropriate than those of the other characters when you have a skeleton army going.

Paladin

The new improved Paladin is basically a Crusader with more healing and protection wards. So you get a small deck-based WoF. Divine inspiration gives you a couple of choices each turn and you do whatever seems most useful at the time.

Psion

I am not a fan of spell point systems, but many people are. The Psion would get power points and use them to power their abilities. In essence, everything is available all the time, but there's a pretty short battery per encounter. Power Points would come back quickly with meditation. To balance this with the Wizard (see below), you'd give them less powers known and also give them few enough power points (and a steep enough cost curve) that they want to use their smaller powers sometimes.

Rogue

The Rogue is also nominally an "everything at will" class, except that all their tricks have trigger conditions (like Sneak Attacks requiring enemies to be flanked or denied their dex bonus). This means that while all of your tricks are theoretically unlimited, the actual class is fairly complex to play because you have to set up special conditions to use your stuff.

Warlock

You have big powers and small powers. The big powers all have Drain of various kinds, which makes you want to use them as close to the end of battles as possible. But you still have your eldritch blasts.

Wizard

The idea here is to do spell preparation, but to do so in a way that is less annoying than 3e's "prepare 30 spells and tough it out all day" version. With this you get a small pile of spell slots to prepare into, but you can prepare new spells between encounters. So it's like 4e in that you have what are essentially encounter powers, but unlike 4e in that that is all you have and that you can trade those out in a few minutes. When you run out of prepared spells, you can fallback on your cantrips and reserve spells.

----

So off the top of my head, that's 11 resource systems and no one tells you that the adventure has to be over for the day because they've cast color spray twice. Note that such systems don't handle a lot of the "adventure mode" abilities that people want and need. You're going to need to wait longer than a round or two before you seduce the princess or make a suit of chain mail. So you're still going to need "rituals" or "skills" or some shit that takes significant time and possibly other resources to do various stuff.

But you're also going to have to profoundly limit the way these things interact. I really don't see anything more than "subclassing" or "split classing" to be even possible in such a scenario. Open multiclassing is right the fuck out.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Right. And therein lies the problem with mixing and matching. Just looking at Frank's list Rogue/Assassin is (generically) made of ass and Paladin/Warlock is made of win. You can of course tamp down on things so that Assassin/Barbarian doesn't necessarily trip over its own dick -- such as awarding 'bad' resource management combinations some extra swag) -- but that's way too complicated and doesn't expand well.

[DrPraetor]

Giving up free multiclassing is giving up too much, for too little gain.

If you're going to do a D20-like fantasy heartbreaker, you should
accept that the player characters mostly want to be star-elf
duskblades. Actually, they don't - they want to be star-elf Hero/Wizards, or star-elf Assassin/Psions. They'd rather have open multiclassing than have a choice of interesting resource tracks, if it's one or the other; but I think people will accept two resource tracks. An alternative would be that you choose a resource management track at chargen, and that resource management track applies to whatever class abilities you take.

For emphasis, you should refer to them as [EDITED] throughout the rules. The players, the alter-egos they adopt, and you, the reader, will be referred to interchangeably by the term [EDITED] (capitalized and italicized for emphasis.) [EDITED], prepare for a bewildering world of adventure!

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm personally not a fan of free multiclassing, at least how 3E D&D does it. It's way too much work to balance for too little benefit. I mean, from a storytelling standpoint what do you get from describing your character as a Rogue 7 / Wizard 3 as opposed to a Rogue 5 / Wizard 5? If you were doing a movie or book most people would barely even notice.

That said, I think that mix-and-match resource-management systems break down even with relatively simple multiclassing schemes like FFXI main/subclasses. Hence the point of this game.

[Username17]

Giving up free multiclassing is giving up too much, for too little gain.

Free Multiclassing gives us only heartbreak and sadness. It is a fire breathing moloch that consumes our children and in return promises only to spare the ones that remain.

More seriously, open multiclassing gets us:

• The promise that we can grow our characters organically. Unfortunately, we'd have to somehow get away from the Multicaster problem and the 20-level "build" in order to make that promise a reality. Since no one has managed to do either of those things, this promise is likely not realizable.
• The ability to have characters become more magical or special in a gradual or punctuated fashion - like a character in a doorstop sized fantasy novel. There are of course other ways to do this, such as Paragon Paths.
• The ability to make a character that is an incoherent pile of disparate abilities. There are much better ways to do this, most of which involve point systems.

Seriously, that's it. We're giving up being able to have multiple resource management systems for three promises that open multiclassing hasn't even been able to deliver on.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

This is going to be a deal-breaker for people. No-one wants to wait until level 7 to be a Wizard/Fighter - they might be willing to wait for 2nd or 3rd level but that's it. AD&D 1st edition could deliver this; the fact that AD&D 3rd basically failed doesn't mean you're going to get anywhere without delivering it.

Actually, I figured out how to solve the multi-caster problem some time ago, in the context of D&D 3rd. You never get spell slots above (your level / 2, RU) - 1.

Spells Per Day:

CLevel	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
1	+1	+0	+0	+0	+0
2	+2	+1	+0	+0	+0
3	+2	+2	+1	+0	+0
4	+3	+2	+2	+1	+0
5	+3	+3	+2	+2	+1

And so on. It works well for any Wizard A / Other B, as long as A >= (A+B)/2. A Wizard 5 gets 3/3/2 spells per day, while a Wizard 3/Fighter 2 gets 2/2/1 spells per day, which is more or less a fair trade. It doesn't work for "open" multiclassing, it's true - so for example yeah you don't care about a Wiz 5/Thief 3 vs. a Wiz 3/Thief 5 and you'd always see the former. But it works for Wiz/Ftr, Wiz/Thf and Wiz/Ftr/Thf in some range of level-ratios so I regard the problem as solved.

In terms of making a character with disparate abilities, this is simple as well. A Barbarian/Wizard has a WoF deck that has a level-proportionate mix of green (barbarian) and white (wizard) CARDS IN IT.

It will take a certain amount of work to fiddle it out either way, but I see no reason to give up on Elric or the Grey Mouser just because it will take a little work to balance out. [EDITED] for all! [EDITED] thou not? I'm hoping those will also turn into something funny.

Gotta go.

[Mistborn]

Well if you're mixing open multiclassing and diffrent resource systems you're going to end up with "wrong" choices. That's just how it is. Now you want to avoid what happend in 3e where multiclassing out of a casting class was like punching yourself in the face.

It's not too hard to come up with somthing better than 3e on this. For starters caster level should always be your total level end of story Fighter 8/ Wizard 1 should at the very least be casting magic missile at the the stregnt as Wiz 9.

You could do it more ToB style where your spelcasting/psionics/weeaboo fightan magic/whatever is partially advanced by having levels in other stuff so for example a Ftr 8/ Wiz 1 cast's like a wiz 5. (Of course you have to be not like the Tob when it come to what happen when he gains two more levels of fighter.)

[Lago PARANOIA]

For the system I have been (eternally) working on, here's how I have things set up.

Multiclassing is mandatory. You have a mandatory main class and sub class. Each of the twelve base classes corresponds to a main class and sub class. The ratio of character abilities for main class vs. sub class is about 65 to 35%. The abilities and features that a main class and a sub class grant are different and non-overlapping. For example, 'Weapon Specialization' is only granted by subclassing Warlord. So a Rogue / Engineer plays differently from Engineer / Rogue. If you want to play a 'single' class you pick your main and sub class to be the same thing. Such as Wizard/Wizard.

On top of your Main and Sub Class, you get a Kit, a Prestige Class, and Paragon Path (referred to as Extra classes) at certain game breakpoints. These give you additional features and powers. Your Main class determines what Extra Classes you can get.

So a typical character would be something like a L9 Engineer (Black Valkyria) / Monk | Artillery-Master. Or a L13 Warlord (Gladiator) / Psion | Maho Buijin \ Gold General.


The problem I ran into is with the resource management systems. Frankly, there are some combinations of systems that are potentially overpowered or ass for one reason or another. Warm-Up + Cool-Down pretty much guarantees scripting. Spell Charges + Rage Meter is overpowered. Drain + Wind of Fate is extremely swingy. So on.

[...You Lost Me]

Right. And therein lies the problem with mixing and matching. Just looking at Frank's list Rogue/Assassin is (generically) made of ass and Paladin/Warlock is made of win. You can of course tamp down on things so that Assassin/Barbarian doesn't necessarily trip over its own dick -- such as awarding 'bad' resource management combinations some extra swag) -- but that's way too complicated and doesn't expand well.

Thinking in terms of d&d here, I think those sorts of problems can be solved with a feat, along the lines of the rogue/swashbuckler Daring Outlaw feat. If a rogue/assassin makes it through the lower levels and keeps relatively on par with their tram, and then can take a feat that gives a real power-up to the rogue archetype: "Any assassin ability applies [fraction] of your sneak attack dice in addition to its normal effect" or "you may take a move action when you set up an assassin ability".

NEW THOUGHT:
A good way to prevent open multiclassing without making players throw a fit is to make prestige classes /paragon paths that look like the base classes. If you call the classes something mundane like "advanced classes", make entry requirements minimal, and then include a section of the book right before the advanced classes that outright states how much more awesome it is to have an advanced class, then you'd probably see a greater number of players go towards advanced classes. It might even work out so that you leave multiclassing open so in the occasional edge case where a player wants to go paladin/hero for a good reason, they're still allowed to do that.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Thinking in terms of d&d here, I think those sorts of problems can be solved with a feat,

No.

[Username17]

This is going to be a deal-breaker for people. No-one wants to wait until level 7 to be a Wizard/Fighter - they might be willing to wait for 2nd or 3rd level but that's it.

I agree. But Open Multiclassing will always force you to wait a long time to get whatever class combination you are wanting. Literally the only thing it does is to allow you to have a unique combination of seven class levels at level 7. And if that's what you want, you're going to have to accept not having that unique combination of class levels before level 7. And you're going to have to accept being forced to abandon that combination of class levels at level 8. Indeed, you won't have that particular ratio of class levels again until level 14.

I mean, people can sort of get behind being 3/5 Ranger at level five, but if that's the actual goal then open multiclassing is a fucking failure because you can't be 3/5 Ranger at level 4 or level 6.

If you think it's important to be able to be some sort of hybrid class at some particular level, you should introduce hybrid classing (or multiclassing, or subclassing, or whatever) at that level. You shouldn't just open the floodgates of Open Multiclassing, because Open Multiclassing does not deliver even on the things it is supposedly for.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

Thinking in terms of d&d here, I think those sorts of problems can be solved with a feat,

No.

Ouch. Why not?

[Red_Rob]

Here's a discussion on Feat Taxes and why they are bad. I'm guessing it has some bearing on the current discussion.

[John Magnum]

Here's a TGD discussion that's not 4e-specific. In some hypothetical complete overhaul where feats work totally different from the ground up, this wouldn't necessarily apply, but it's still unpleasant to use feats to patch away the deficiencies of the class system.

If nothing else, "Class (combination) X is underpowered at level Y. Let's give it feat Z to give it the powers we feel it needs!" doesn't actually fix anything, because if Class X is brought up to par with that feat, then every Class Not-X gets to take some other feat and be more powerful than they were before, so you haven't really reduced any power disparities.

[DrPraetor]

I'm going to move this into another thread in a moment, but:
No-one cares about being 60% Ranger/40% Wizard vs. being 40% Wizard / 60% Ranger.

People care about being Ranger 1st / Wizard 2nd / Thief 3rd; and if Wizard and Thief are equal counts at levels where it doesn't divide evenly, no-one cares.

Now, you don't really need open multiclassing for this. You could have a system where people can have "up to 3 classes", and then everyone would get their mix in by level 3 or 4. But you might as well let the system support Open Multiclassing, since it's not that much more of a challenge.

In any case, I think that the correct solution IS to force everyone to pick a single resource management scheme (which I am going to go ahead and call a "Power Schedule") which is going to use one of the following systems:

Points: Each adventure, you get some number of Points, which you can spend to activate your abilities, until you run out. You might rarely get some points back.

Meter: You don't start with any Points at all, and if you have unspent Points, you burn 1 at the start of each round. You very often get Points to spend.

Luck: You make a deck of cards, and write a special ability on each one. The total power cost of all the cards in your deck cannot exceed X, and your deck cannot contain fewer that Y cards. You draw a hand of Z cards each round and can choose one to do.

Drain: Every time you use an ability, you suffer some (possibly random) unpleasant side-effect.

So, for each Power Schedule x Class combination, you're going to need to mock up some rules, and those rules are going to have to work for any combination of Wizard A / Barbarian B; if that Wizard / Barbarian is on the "Meter" schedule, then when he's struck in battle or cleaves someone with his axe, he gets MP which he can spend either to do more cleaving or to hurl fire bolts - and he can do the same thing by passing divination checks when enemies cast spells or whatever Wizards do to charge their meter.

Tough, but doable - and, I think, clearly worth the effort if you're going to do a fantasy heartbreaker *at all*. I think it actually makes the different classes easier to balance - but mainly just by moving the workload of balancing things onto a different part of the decision tree.

It's an open question how you'd handle abilities which aren't used while the combat music is playing. Still thinking about that one.

[Mask_De_H]

Wait, DrP, what are you suggesting? Every character picking a source and then delineating separate classes from that? If so, you still run into the Multicaster problem (if class abilities per level are not equivalent to class abilities per level or tier) or the Multicaster and incoherent power blob problem (if they are and you choose powers from whatever list you have access to). Also, now, you have to figure out equivalencies for the same power used in different schedules. Then, you have to balance every power for each class against every other power under each schedule and each possible permutation of powers you could have under each schedule. Assuming a ten level system, that is a motherfucker of a combinatorial sequence to do for very little gain. You've actually removed resource management systems from Frank's off the cuff version for basically fuckall but more math to do.

Now a less insane idea would be some sort of subclass system which gave you at-will, power schedule agnostic abilities based on the subclass you chose.

[DrPraetor]

Multicaster and incoherent power blob problem (if they are and you choose powers from whatever list you have access to).
I choose that problem. The details remain to be worked out, but if you are a Wizard 9 / Barbarian 1, you have a (small number) of 10th-level appropriate Barbarian powers mixed into the bag. Frank's "Crusader" class is the model for this for everyone - as a 1st level Barbarian you have 2 barbarian powers to choose, but as a 10th level character you meet the 10th-level pre-req for 5th-level powers.

you have to figure out equivalencies for the same power used in different schedules.
Each power has a "level". If you have magic points or a rage meter, that's how many MP/rage it costs to use.
If you suffer drain, that determines how much drain-damage it causes you.
If you have a deck of cards, the total level of all the cards in your deck is capped.

As to the rest of it - the perfect is the enemy of the good. Not all combinations need to be balanced; but all combinations need to be balanced enough, where enough is considerably better than D&D 3rd edition such that people might choose to play this game instead.

[Mask_De_H]

Holy shit that sounds terrible.

What you're proposing is exponentially more difficult to even get 3e balance at than 3e is. And your method of balancing the abilities is bad since a) now you can't fully explore the design space of your schedules since each power has to fit all of them and b) certain powers are going to work better under certain schedules regardless, making an ungodly amount of trap options. Depending on how refreshes work, entire power schedules could end up shit in this system. All your character types are going to end up with the most cost effective powers of whatever level and whatever source by hopping around the class system, which is throwing more bullshit on what is ultimately a point buy system you can't be fucked to present as is?

Your ideas are nowhere near perfect or even good. If this is what you're going to do with it, keep your heartbreaker unfinished, for God's sake.

[OgreBattle]

I like that Hybrid Class has you make the decision at the beginning, then you just stick with it. That's all I wanted out of 3e multiclassing.


Hybrid|Hybrid + Theme
My favorite part of 4e was just putting those combinations together to make ninjas of all flavors.

So for me the multiclassing itch is scratched as something that is in CHARACTER CREATION. After that you stick with it (and possibly take up a 4e multiclass, if you want)


So in practice something like...

"Here is the Wizard class. You can be a full wizard class, but for advanced playerz you can be 1/3rd or 2/3rds wizard and use a segment of another class!"


So your spellsword who likes swinging swords made of fire is FighterI/WizardII
And your spellsword who likes shooting fire from a sword is WizardII/FighterI

And they begin at level 1 and progress as those segments.

[Username17]

When you put an ability into a power schedule, its utility changes dramatically. When our short deck WoF Paladin gets a new usable prayer below his level, he gets weaker because it dilutes his level appropriate power draws (this is why the Crusader gets the "readied maneuvers" filter to essentially allow them to declare any low level trash ability as "not usable" to keep it from diluting them). But when our Power Points Psion gets a new usable low level manifestation he gets more powerful, because he gets tangible rewards (in terms of having more power points left) for finding uses for low level abilities in place of his high level abilities.

In After Sundown, pretty much everyone gets a pretty tight list of powers. And I still think that I should do some overhauls where more things cost power points. But regardless, the differences in power schedules available are minor just as the differences in powers are fairly minor as well. In a D&D clone, you have a fucking minion-master necromancer and a DPS hog and they are really wildly different in their resource management concepts.

The proposed Life Essence essentia hack for Necromancers fits them fairly well, but it wouldn't fit anyone else. Think back to Champions style multipowers with just Force Field and Energy Blast in them. Yes, there are reasons to shift some points from one to the other, but there aren't very many. In most cases you just pick a ratio you're happy with and stick with it. If you don't have multiple "systems" like a starship or a a necromancer, the whole framework of deciding where to allocate power from the engines is a confusing waste of time. Just look at the way Magic of Incarnum worked out for people who weren't using Necrocarnum. Basically, people just took something that got awesome for having all the Essentia dumped into it and left everything else empty all the time. As opposed to the Warmachine model, where dumping focus onto one minion or another is an interesting tactical consideration because they are in different positions and benefit differently from you spending your points in one round or another.

-Username17

[Mistborn]

Since I just remembered about it what about the Legand multiclassing system where you have tracks A B and C from class 1 and you can swap out any of them for tracks A B and C for any other class.

[...You Lost Me]

It's an awesome way to put together classes with the same resource management scheme, but it's not solving the problem of conflicting resource management.

It also guarantees that a trap option will continue to screw you the whole advancement progression, but it's easy to fix that sort of thing.

[Username17]

Since I just remembered about it what about the Legand multiclassing system where you have tracks A B and C from class 1 and you can swap out any of them for tracks A B and C for any other class.

The actual Legend document can't even be fucked to give all the tracks a thing at every level or even to keep the empty levels at the same levels within each track type. So it's not even in the running as more than a "proof of concept" board post or something.

If you were to actually do that, you'd not only have to balance all the C tracks against each other, you'd also have to balance all the C tracks as they synergized with all the possible A and B tracks. Let's say you had 8 base classes and ten levels. You'd then be declaring that you had balanced 512 class track combinations at ten distinct power levels. There are ways to speed that up, but I'm not exactly holding my breath on it ever being accomplished. Adding base classes increases your work cubically and adding levels multiplies your work only once.

-Username17

[...You Lost Me]

Actually, the tracks have 7 parts, and you choose one to be "fast", one to be "medium", and the last to be "slow". 2 abilities go at first level, and then you get 1 every level after that up to 20th. Their playtesting is basically telling players to go at it, and then combing through reported problems. Players are better playtesters than the designers anyhow, and it gets some good results.

But speaking of balance tests....

Unrelated Rant

It's not stated anywhere in the book, of course, and you also can't do an SGT or anything because they don't have a good standard for challenge ratings. There's a level 2 grunt, a level 2 striker, a level 2 tank, a level 2 operative (one track, 2 feats), a level 2 myriad, a level 2 miniboss (three tracks, two feats), and while the disparity in their raw power is enormous they're also all rated as level 2 encounter monsters. The designers' response to queries is "figure it out", and even with their 1.0 release they're not really clarifying what an "encounter level" is.

/Unrelated Rant

[TarkisFlux]

That's not quite how it works Frank.

Each track consists of 7 distinct power. Each class is built out of 3 track "slots" or whatever (which we will call A, B, and C for ease), which grant the 7 powers of a track at different levels. The A slot gives you the track things at 1, 3, 6, 12, 15, and 18; the B slot gives you things at 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16, and 19; and the C slot gives you things at 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 20. And you "multiclass" by dropping one of the tracks that they give you and gain a different track to fill those seven missing powers. So you basically get something else's class power every 3 levels.

It's an interesting idea, but it's not particularly revolutionary or anything.

[Edit] Ninja'd