FrankTrollman wrote:People want abilities that can be defined narratively that they can use in different situations. The old AD&D spells that were defined incredibly vaguely were actually much closer to what people want than the 4e ones. That is: it is better to be told that their fire power "makes fire" and have no rules at all than it is to be told an exact amount of fire damage that they can do to enemies in five contiguous squares but not be able to burn inanimate objects at all.
Honestly, if you're going to go Vancian, people probably want magic to come out like Spheres. Getting (or preparing) Fire Magic at your level lets you shoot little bullshit fire bolts all day and call down a giant explosion once a day and make walls of persistent fire twice a day. That sort of thing.
The actual Metamagic was a failure primarily because the things it tinkered with were in almost all cases shit people did not care about. About the only one that is really thematic is the one that lets you shoot a touch spell as a ray. And that one actually sucks, even though it's the sort of thing people actually want to do.
-Username17
Yeh, the only metamagic I'd be sad to see go would be the one from Libris Mortis that makes zombies when you kill fools.
Lord of the Uttercold would also be missed because it's just so weird when you use the way it was not intended, but that's not really metamagic.
Last edited by K on Sat Nov 12, 2011 7:28 am, edited 2 times in total.
I always thought Explosive Spell and Born of Three Thunders were cool; the former was overpriced and the latter was too harsh with the self stun, but I still think they were cool.
"Besides, my strong, cult like faith in the colon of the cards allows me to pull whatever I need out of my posterior!"
-Kid Radd
shadzar wrote:those training harder get more, and training less, don't get the more.
Lokathor wrote:Anything worth sniffing can't be sniffed
If feats are to be pointless flavour bullshit that does nothing useful and can be ignored without really hurting your character (which Mike Mearls once noted was kind of the idea in 3.0, like with 2-feat TWFing and old Power Attack), then metamagic makes sense.
Because it does that. Nothing useful while being slightly flavourful. Without eating precious spell slots like in 2nd edition. Trevor the Evoker can say: "My Fireballs are HUGE", and it's true, but doesn't matter. If Trevor picks Toughness by accident, no one cares, because there are no good feats.
Only some of the other feats are actually quite good, and stack with more feats that are also quite good, and then everyone complains how crap their flavour feats like metamagic and toughness are, so we get free metamagic for Clerics and 3e falls over and dies. /history.
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:
But all of this is just pushing around numbers. The question I have for the boards is: Why? Why have a game effect that does what metamagic is supposed to do? Why not just have different powers altogether such that you can free yourselves from the shackles of metamagic.
Energy Substitution is bad for the game if you're not trying to cut down on space. For example, with Fireball there's no need to make Acidball or Iceball or Lightningball or whatever. But the flipside of that is that if those were discrete powers you could have jazzed them up by making Acidball sticky or Iceball slow people or Forceball push them or whatever. Energy Substitution just makes all of the other energy balls have the same base effects as fireball.
In an ideal world Acid Ball is sticky and Ice Ball slows, but writers have limited time and space and writing hundreds of slightly different nukes isn't a priority. In PHB1 your slow-rider Ice Ball just doesn't exist and if you want to play an "ice mage" you're SOL until a couple years worth of splats. Energy Substitution is a stopgap. It should be obsolete by the end of the edition but at the beginning it's better than nothing.
Diablo 2 had every special damage type have its own inherent effects, so dealing cold damage automatically slowed the target. A section on the "special effects" of damage would allow fireball to be different to acidball without writing reams of description every time.
D&D spells should be more like Champions powers, with a few parameters you can choose when you learn them. So the third level spell would be "Elemental blast", and would do D6 damage per level of an energy type of your choosing, with an area chosen from single target, line, burst or cone.
Invisible Spell is actually cool (if vague to the point of broken), but since it's +0, you don't even need to invoke the metamagic system.
All the "Fell" feats were cool, if dubiously balanced.
Ocular Spell, for all that it mainly served as vehicle for certain cheesy tricks, is kind of a neat concept.
Chain Spell, likewise.
I'm in favor of the "energy types inherently do things", although I would actually make it a tag on the spell. So if you cast a [Fire] spell, it will set things on fire and melt stuff. A [Thunder] spell will knock people down and temporarily deafen them. You can still have something like "Burn from Within" that does fire damage but creates no actual flames, just don't give it the [Fire] tag.
MtA Spheres in D&D? Well I'd play it, but I think it would create even more of a "caster edition". When you have magic that powerful and open-ended, it tend to make the game about the magic. Spells (all abilities, actually) could definitely stand to go more in that direction though - the 4E-style "your power does this and only this" is just not inspiring.
Last edited by Ice9 on Sun Nov 13, 2011 8:55 pm, edited 7 times in total.
The problem with energy types inflict status ailments is that you're exasperating an already significant problem in 4E. Namely, there's a stupid amount of timers already in play for your powers, your buffs, your ailments, etc etc. Giving energy types status ailments kind of sucks because it means more shit to keep track of in an already cluttered game.
In Diablo 2 the computer is keeping track of all that shit for you, so you can do stuff like that.
My other problem is that it gives casters yet *another* buff. Which is in my opinion not necessary.
Well ideally, all the status conditions would last either momentarily, the whole combat, or until you did something about them. So no timers to keep track of:
* On fire - Put it out
* Knocked down - Stand up
* Deafened - 5 minutes, it lasts the whole combat
Also, there should not be any tiny bullshit penalties like "Dazzled, -1 to attack rolls". Any penalty should be something you care about enough not to mind keeping track of.
As for powering up casters, if we were rewriting the magic system this much, I'd imagine some rebalancing would be part of it.
Last edited by Ice9 on Sun Nov 13, 2011 9:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Ice9 wrote: Any penalty should be something you care about enough not to mind keeping track of.
I imagined this scenario.
DM: "All right, the monster hits you for the last of your health. You are at -15 HP and dead.'
Player: "I don't care about being dead."
DM: "OK, go ahead and take your next turn then."
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.
Red_Rob wrote:Diablo 2 had every special damage type have its own inherent effects, so dealing cold damage automatically slowed the target. A section on the "special effects" of damage would allow fireball to be different to acidball without writing reams of description every time.
D&D spells should be more like Champions powers, with a few parameters you can choose when you learn them. So the third level spell would be "Elemental blast", and would do D6 damage per level of an energy type of your choosing, with an area chosen from single target, line, burst or cone.
Psionics does that. It's pretty cool.
Problem is, psionics can only get away with that because there are no psionics grognards. Nobody objects when a new edition screws around with all the psionic powers, but at least a few people would be put off if they read the wizard spell list and saw Energy Ball and Cone of Energy instead of Fireball and Cone of Cold.
I really liked a lot of the splatbook metamagic better. I'm not sure whether spell reserve feats were technically metamagic, but they did much better at "be a magic dude" than cantrips do.
Besides that, offhand there were the corpsecrater feats and the feats which buffed your DCs for being thematic.
