New Edition: Setting

[CatharzGodfoot]

1198322612[/unixtime]]

So I noticed that you need to use all of the attribute combos to get 15 separate options (which fits exactly the 5 colors & 3 classes per color). Which will it be? We could do something contrived like having every color get 1 phys/phys, 1 mental/mental, and 1 physical/mental.

Pretty much. I was thinking of expanding it to 15 sample characters of 3 per color and giving each color a Might, a Magic, and a Mixed (note that without even writing new abilities or rearranging abilities within a school you could release a new set of 15 sample classes 15 times).

Yeah, the triviality of creating new classes is pretty nice, and the mechanical aesthetics make me happy.

You said that classes are preselected ability sets. Is there anything stopping a person from bypassing MAD by focusing on Health and Sacrifice or Decay and Truth? Is 'multicoloring' the new multiclass?

I'm also having a bit of trouble seeing the difference between 'sword' classes and 'spell' classes. By nature all schools have a 'magic schtick' and also make talented warriors. What makes the 'White Mage' more of a Magic Hero than the 'Black Knight'?

And one pragmatic concern: 30 ability sets is a lot of work. I'm a bit worried that if you stick with one school for every attribute this will never get finished. My (probably dumb) recommendation is that you combine some of the schools together, possibly even reducing them down to three physical and mental attribute pairs for each color.
The effect is pretty much the same as having 6 schools, but you can pretend that they're finished after half the work.
Then each class might be a pairing (If you have Death, Decay, and Deception then you could have Death/Deception [assassin], Decay/Death [necromancer], and Deception/Decay [blackguard]). You could, alternatively, have each class be a school (assassin school, warlock school, blackguard school). That would kill the versatility and probably be too limited...

I'm sure you understand the amount of work involved better than I, but trying to start out with 5 colors with 6 schools each and (say) 10 levels of abilities for each (300 abilities!) seems like a lot. Even if you assume that a character gets one ability per level and so do 5 per school, that's 150. It's not like you can use the 3e solution and dump all the spells unchanged from the previous edition.

1198322612[/unixtime]]

I think the next biggest question is what White does, simply because it's so limited.

Let's do White.

Awesome. That makes perfect sense. Runic magic seems to have come out of left field, but it's cool and fits.

1198322612[/unixtime]]

I guess that's the problem with attribute-based systems. My bias is that I have trouble seeing physical attributes governing slavery magic.

That is among the reasons that we are going More Hindu. You get magical powers by sudying and prayer, but you also gain magical powers by standing on one foot for a long time (Dex), picking up heavy rocks (Str), and stabbing yourself with fish hooks (Con).

-Username17

I was serious that, in particular, I have trouble seeing undead animation and command or demon summoning and command keying off of physical attributes. I have no problem seeing fire blasts being based on Strength or teleportation on Dexterity. I can just barely see divination being based on Constitution (fasting and taking drugs until you start seeing things). Any sacrifice-based magic could make sense with Constitution too (even undead or demon conjuring).

I'll admit that it's almost certainly an irrational bias, but wrapping my head around why being really strong (or really agile) would make you good at calling up the undead is hard. Maybe I'm just not understanding what the changes in how attributes work and what they represent really mean.

[Username17]

You said that classes are preselected ability sets. Is there anything stopping a person from bypassing MAD by focusing on Health and Sacrifice or Decay and Truth? Is 'multicoloring' the new multiclass?

Initially I was thinking that each character would get to multicolor at level 11 and triple color at level 21. But it's not super important since ideally you could just take all your abilities from Health and never take an ability from any other school ever if you really wanted. Each ability is itself supposed to be double-attribute dependent, so the fact that all of your abilities use a single stat doesn't necessarily reduce your MAD any (likely increases it vs. branching into other schools and taking things which MAD back towards your original school). At the limit of infinite ability writeups, a single character could indeed focus everything on just two stats. But I doubt that will happen and I'm unconvinced it would really be that bad of a thing if it did.

I'm also having a bit of trouble seeing the difference between 'sword' classes and 'spell' classes. By nature all schools have a 'magic schtick' and also make talented warriors. What makes the 'White Mage' more of a Magic Hero than the 'Black Knight'?

In the abstract, the answer is "nothing." Sword classes use bows and swords rather than orbs and wands, but that is entirely a flavor concern. The actual writeup of abilities is essentially irrespective of whether things are "magic" or not. A "Crippling Shot" out of the school of The Hunt is very much like a "Dark Grasp" spell. The difference is primarily one of flavor text. Although there should probably be some designators on there which make the abilities work better or worse in certain situations on the grounds that they are or are not a "spell".

And one pragmatic concern: 30 ability sets is a lot of work. I'm a bit worried that if you stick with one school for every attribute this will never get finished.

The first thing which I think should happen is the completion of one color to level 10. Once a solid rubric is in place, "infilling" takes a lot less time and can be largely handled by multiple people independently.

I'll admit that it's almost certainly an irrational bias, but wrapping my head around why being really strong (or really agile) would make you good at calling up the undead is hard.

OK. My assignment of undead animation to strength was mostly one of "who reanimates the dead?" And the answer, it seems to me, is necromancers brimming with dark power, vampires with the strength of 20 men, and so on and so forth. And while literarily "necromancy makes you strong" and not vice versa, game mechanically you choose your attributes and then your abilities. So the training which lets you animate the dead makes you strong, so the strength attribute on your character sheet essentially represents how much of that you've been doing during your life.

Attributes want to correspond to appropriate character types. Powerful Necromancers should be hard to push over or grab things from. That's a Tenacity Defense, and that means that they have a high Strength. And since attribute boosting magic is right out, that means that Necromancers have to have Strength Dependent abilities for that to happen.

-Username17

[CatharzGodfoot]

Alright, I'm sold on the attribute thing.

[Username17]

I have often felt that the distinction between Red and Blue is arbitrary and incomprehensible. Especially as regards "the sea" being associated with the rational faction instead of the emotional faction. That's just lame. So in that spirit, the "Red" faction should get the sea, while as iron mines should go to the "Blue" faction. For that matter, by the time this is over, I fully expect the wheel to have renamed points on its pentagram.

So anyway, the emotionalists still get Dragons, but now those dragons look like this:

And they don't look like this:


Dragons grow from fish, and presumably they created the merfolk in order to have emmisaries on land.

This also means that the "Blue" faction contends with creatures from deep under ground as its dragon/sphinx/demon equivalents.

-Username17

[Bigode]

BTW, what about the fact that there's just a fire school, and all other elements (from any system I remember) aren't explicitly allocated?

[Username17]

1198522365[/unixtime]]BTW, what about the fact that there's just a fire school, and all other elements (from any system I remember) aren't explicitly allocated?

Honestly, I'm sick of the elements. Just because someone can cast Fire Magic doesn't mean that someone else needs to be able to cast Earth Magic, that's just dumb.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

1198523460[/unixtime]]

1198522365[/unixtime]]BTW, what about the fact that there's just a fire school, and all other elements (from any system I remember) aren't explicitly allocated?

Honestly, I'm sick of the elements. Just because someone can cast Fire Magic doesn't mean that someone else needs to be able to cast Earth Magic, that's just dumb.

-Username17

Psshh that's a bit selfish. Not everyone is a Fire fan (though, I am). Just leave the other elemental magics up to other people if you don't want to touch it.

[Username17]

1198525070[/unixtime]]
Psshh that's a bit selfish. Not everyone is a Fire fan (though, I am). Just leave the other elemental magics up to other people if you don't want to touch it.

No, that's exactly what not to do. I don't want to have "Pastamancy" in the game, so I don't put it in. It isn't "selfish" to not put it in, it's the setting. And the setting doesn't have pastamancy.

If the universe isn't divided up into four elements, or five elements, or seven elements. Or any number of "elements." That's just not how things are divied up. If you write things up to do a Taosist Five Element wheel, you aren't being selfish by not putting in "Air Elementals" and you sure as fuck aren't going to "leave it to other people to write" because damnit, the elements are Water, Fire, Earth, Metal, Wood, and there's no fucking air elementals!

Well in this setup, there are five spokes, but the Spentas use fire, the Rakshasa use fire, the Dragons use fire, and the Fey use fire. Fire is the magical source of righteousness and damnation and there isn't any fucking earth elementals. Or metal elementals. Or void elementals.

-Username17

[Bigode]

Heh, I have no problem whatsoever with not having an elemental system; in that case, I just wonder why to have fire as its own school (Especially because I presume various schools are gonna have "water"/"ice", so why not "fire"/"metal"/"your ass" too?).

[JonSetanta]

Ah well, that's a weird decision for setting... no Water/Ice Mage, no Lightning Mage, etc.
By selfish I meant that since you, Frank, only wanted Fire Mages, it first seemed that every other type would get the shaft. If there was at least a niche for other types for fans of other elemental-specialists, well, it at least wouldn't seem Frankocentric.

[Username17]

1198539347[/unixtime]]Ah well, that's a weird decision for setting... no Water/Ice Mage, no Lightning Mage, etc.
By selfish I meant that since you, Frank, only wanted Fire Mages, it first seemed that every other type would get the shaft. If there was at least a niche for other types for fans of other elemental-specialists, well, it at least wouldn't seem Frankocentric.

And that is exactly the kind of attitude that makes things suck. If you put everything into your setting, heck if you put in everything that someone else might want, your "setting" is nothing.

In order to really have anything in your setting, you have to agree to not have everything else. And I see no reason or place for elemental damage wheels in such a setup. Sonic and electric effects probably exist, but Electricity burns things. It's just a kind of fire, it's not something else entirely.

If you want to have a set of elementals, elementalists, you have to write them in at the beginning or it's retarded.

-Username17

[NoDot]

So... no Titanium Elementals?

</ half serious>

[Cielingcat]

The way I think Magic has done elementals was that an elemental was a spirit possessing an inanimate object. So an earth elemental is a spirit assembling a body out of earth, a fire elemental one who did the same out of burning things, and a thorn elemental is just a spirit who's possessing a briar patch.

[JonSetanta]

OK so now I'm gone from slightly confused to confused-enough-to-give-up, so that's what I'll do.
Damn. It just seems like we're misinterpreting each other or something. I'll stop bugging about elements then and go back to bloodline feats or do that devil-fey race I've been pondering...

[Bigode]

Yeah, the idea I've for elementals is the same as Cielingcat's - so there's potentially elementals of absolutely everything despite there not being an elemental system. But anyway, I'm thinking that "Red" should get both fire and water ...

[Captain_Bleach]

1198540536[/unixtime]]

In order to really have anything in your setting, you have to agree to not have everything else.

-Username17

Too bad Eberron doesn't get this.

[Bigode]

I may as well take the chance to ask what's so bad with Eberron (aside from the monster excess, which's pratically a D&D trademark), since, despite some other minor flaws, I find it a fairly interesting setting (haven't read much on it, though).

[Captain_Bleach]

"If it's got a place in D&D, it's got a place in Eberron."
People tried to use this to introduce Drow that are slutty BDSM queens into Eberron, which caused many a heated debate on the Wizards boards.

[Bigode]

On the manure boards, I suppose. But it's an example regardless, thanks.

[Crissa]

Electricity may 'burn' things, but it does so by passing a stream of energy through the material - so it can burn metals, water - whereas fire does so by raising the vibration level of the material.

Personally, I think it's a mistake to limit elementals to one type or another. And I don't mind them being of non-equal strengths. If we build it into the system that they are not all equal in all ways.

-Crissa

[Username17]

Old school D&D had "balls of fire" and "bolts of lightening[sic]". That was the dichotomy, and if you play the game Dungeon! it still works that way. In Greyhawk they threw in Cold as well so you could have Lightning, Cold, or Fire. And in AD&D they let people use Acid as well. And they were all pretty much indistinguishable save that some were used as puzzles where you had to use the right arbitrary damage type on various creatures. Different colors of ooze responded differently to different elements. The originals were Green Slimes (Lightning to kill) and Black Puddings (Fire to kill). But with more damage types they introduced Ochre and Gray oozes and I can't even pretend to care which one required what kind of magic to harm.

But AD&D was pretty much designed from the ground up with Lghtning, Cold, Fire, and Acid. And it was sort of consistent. And you'll note that in 3rd edition when they brought in Sonic to the holy pantheon of damage types it never really fit. There weren't any iconic ways to do Sonic and noone cared. The Yrthrak is stupid and noone fights it. You've probably never fought a Destrachan either, and you probably won't because those monsters have no "traction."

And yeah, if you want to hit someone with a bunch of ice, that should be a physical attack. Flash Freezing Magic is a very big impact on the setting and there's no reason for its inclusion.

---

The big problem that Eberron has is that there is no discipline to including things in the setting. No thought put into setting stability. The presented setting is destroyed almost immediately because all the crazy crap that's in there overthrows the ancient orders just by thinking about it.

It's like if they tried to write a campaign about Czarist Courts and then wrote in a historically accurate Red Army to the setting. Basically all that crap they just wrote about lasts for a few days while the Bolsheviks storm the palace and then the Czar gets shot in the head.

No, you fucking can't have Incarnum if Spellfire is supposed to be unique and special and new.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1198629293[/unixtime]]
No, you fucking can't have Incarnum if Spellfire is supposed to be unique and special and new.

I really don't think you have to be that exclusive in world design.

You can't have a crazy nation of powerful Incarnum users running around, that's true, but a few spread out cult of incarnum guys isn't going to hurt anything really. It's not like incarnum has some special abilities that let it conquer the world or something. If the new abilities aren't any more powerful than the old ones, then they can just be rare. And if there's only like 15 dread necromancers or totemists in your entire world, then that'd explain why you haven't heard of them.

[JonSetanta]

1198629293[/unixtime]] You've probably never fought a Destrachan either, and you probably won't because those monsters have no "traction."

My experiences differ.
A Monk humanoid-shaped destrachan equipped with level-appropriate stuffs is quite an interesting foe.

It was probably just executed poorly as the monster exists by default, being a sloppy adaptation of a vague idea put to random monster stats and abilities, much like most iconic D&D monsters. It came from no-where, and it went no-where. I would not be surprized if it dies out before 4e since the entire sum of destrachan abilities could possibly be duplicated with a single spell.
It would make a cool base race, with tweaking/nerfing...

[Koumei]

Let's not forget the fact that in Eberron, everything either builds itself (I hate putting robots in my fantasy. If I use golems, and I rarely do, then they look less like robots and more like elementals or enchanted suits of armour), or is "Humans had sex with X. IT BREEDS TRUE!"

Combined with their "Let's use everything!" approach, this means that one day the Giff will find their way in. And then they will write "Humans fucked some hippos. IT BREEDS TRUE!"

While playing Pokemon, I actually had this great idea about damage types: They could all, as the "other effect" for their attacks (the one that you get slapped with on a successful hit, or the one that affects you even if you miss, depending on whether you want damage to be automatic or on-hit), have some kind of keyed effect. So Fire always burns (dealing Con damage, or a speed penalty and a few rounds of extra HP damage), Lightning always stuns, cold always slows, bashing always dazes or knocks you prone, slashing always makes you bleed etc.

And psychic attacks can always hit you with confusion.

Course, then I read your idea on "Fire only", and while this doesn't exactly make me sad, it does kick that idea out the door, mostly. You could still have flash-freeze stuff though: you're not creating cold, you're draining heat. Heck, you could even have effects which actually do move heat from A to B, dealing fire damage to one, and cold damage to another.

And while I'm vaguely on the topic: Goddamn fucking Abra and Sableye.

That is all.

[Cielingcat]

I think there only needs to be 6 damage types: Black, Blue, Green, Red, White, and Colorless.