The Gaming Den

To my knowledge there isn't a good pp system out there for 3.x dnd.

Psi has too huge numbers at the upper end and doesn't address nova problems. To some extent nova is a logical relation to pp systems but I think it can be better managed.

Here's what I'm working on.
Pool=Level + charisma stat.
Spell cost = 1 for cantrips, +2 per additional higher level.
Control = cost of spell is reduced by con modifier
Pp regen at 1 + cha mod per round.


Don't get too hung up on the stats themselves, con and cha. I am planning on modding strength to include all former con modifiers (saves and HP, constitution checks), so con actually is the control stat. I figured modding monsters and NPCs to take the higher of con/str and just use that isn't a difficult adaptation. That's a different discussion but not one i feel I need help with. I won't be put out if it gets someone's knickers in a bunch but I also probably won't care.

Specialists have a control bonus to their discipline (can increase at higher levels) to defray costs. (+1 to +5)

They may still nova but that doesn't ruin the rest of the adventuring day. A variety of defense moves will discourage blowing your load out the gate as well.

Does this seem an improvement? Am I missing anything huge or small?

Max out Charisma and Constitution, cast some more forever?

Yes, casters will need two stats to max out instead of one. I am worried about them never needing to stop top level powers and will need to tweak it.

The casters themselves will have fairly limited lists. Closer to invocations I suppose. I'm seeing if I can make this a better mechanic than at will or dailies. There's no meta magic in this so that helps curb the over the top novas.

Being able to cast all day but being tapped out briefly in battles using weaker powers while waiting for biguns to regen.

Problems I foresee:
Fast low level regen. lower level regeneration is relatively faster than at high levels.
Solution: limit regen to no more than 1 per round +1 per 2 Levels (?)
Limit regen to per minute instead of round?

Stat boosting for the win. Boosting stats pays for itself.
Solution: limit boosting of stats. Do I really need a Control or charisma boosting method (?)

Control too strong? Powers at top tier don't drain pool fast enough. Shouldn't be able to easily do more than 3 top spells in a row.
Solution: nerf control too(?)

Note. I am using d20 system but this is not a direct port to dnd. I just want to be able to borrow hundreds of premade monsters and a sturdy rule set with minimal extra effort. NPC monsters mostly won't be using the power point system so cha is just charisma for them and they have no con stat.

erik wrote:To my knowledge there isn't a good pp system out there for 3.x dnd.

That is because 3rd edition D&D is fundamentally incompatible with power point systems. I could imagine power sets that work well with power point resource management systems. Hell, they exist and I've played games that had them. But 3rd edition D&D's Wizards do not haze such a power list, and never have had. And that is why power point systems for D&D have always been variously shit.

erik wrote:Does this seem an improvement? Am I missing anything huge or small?

No. That's shit. The only thing your system does is let people cash in their high level spells to get a bunch of extra castings of low level spells or cash in their low level spells to get a couple extra castings of high level spells. Both of those are potentially abusable in various situations, but more importantly both make characters be less interesting.

The 3rd edition D&D Wizard is very wonky but the only thing that's actually interesting about him is that he goes into battle with charm monster, stinking cloud, and web that can each only be used once. And that's bizarre as fuck, but it makes their actions interesting because they are each a special snow flake of weirdness that wins the game in a different way and even targets different savings throws. If you make all of these spells use up a different amount of mana, they aren't going to mix that shit up, they are going to divide the amount of mana they get by the number of times they need to win and then cast the spell whose cost is that number over and fucking over again.

Your specific numbers are a dumpster fire, but it doesn't even matter. Because the entire concept of trading 1st level spell slots for 4th level spell slots or vice versa at any exchange rate does nothing for D&D except make things worse. There's going to be a correct mana expenditure configuration, people are going to find it, and then the game will be measurably worse than if you had just left well enough alone.

Where spell points work is where you have fundamentally similar effects with a difference such that you can make a meaningful tradeoff between using the ability more times and using the ability less times with the enhancement. So like how in Final Fantasy you can use Fire or Firaga, and Firaga does more damage per turn and Fire does more damage per mana point and sometimes you care more about one and sometimes you care more about the other. Where they conspicuously don't work is where you have charm person upgrading to charm monster and the effect becomes better and lasts twenty fucking four times as long and is also harder to resist and you honestly would never wipe your ass with charm person again so long as charm monster was a thing you could cast at any conceivable exchange rate.

The only thing you could ever hope to do with spell points in the context of 3rd edition D&D is to go through the spell list and give discounts for underperforming spells at various levels. I mean sure, you'd never prepare rage or sleet storm in a 3rd level slot, but what if you could prepare both instead of a single stinking cloud? Still probably not, but something to think about! If you're just going to declare all spells of the same level cost the same amount, I don't even care what that amount is, because your system is a priori shit.

-Username17

Yeah, that's what I'm afraid of with power points. I was hoping that with tweaking the dumpster fire could be turned into an efficient furnace, but just don't know if power points can be made work at all.

My objective was to make a chakra system for a naruto-esque ninja system. Having a pool of power which can be used to fire off low effects chosen from limited lists (mostly evocation-style, but a few status effects). Characters would be able to fire off weaker attacks at will, and bigger attacks only so often before needing to recharge.

d20 model is to save time being able to keep a lot of monsters and base mechanics, but the spell list would have a complete overhaul and is by far the greatest amount of time that would be spent on this. I'd be dumping lots of combat winning spells overboard in an effort to stem the concern of having an array of one-a-day winners. So specific spell complaints aren't as vexatious.

And characters have a limited amount "no that wasn't me, was a log, LOL" uses to discourage people blowing their load at the onset.

I suppose I could work at it from the other way and have a rage meter where you build up to your major power, but that goes against the copious examples of characters worrying that they only have enough juice for one more of this or that, or tapping out because they ran out of chakra.

I saw a d20 naruto project someone else made, and it looked like it combined the worst of every possible d20 system. Psionic pp (but with moar points!), d20 modern as a base, skill use for combat. And over 1000 pages so that was just a cursory skim. Anywho, I figured I could do better, low bar that it is.

If a regenerating power point structure isn't viable, then what else? I don't think WoF fits the genre but am open to ideas.

FrankTrollman wrote:Where spell points work is where you have fundamentally similar effects with a difference such that you can make a meaningful tradeoff between using the ability more times and using the ability less times with the enhancement. So like how in Final Fantasy you can use Fire or Firaga, and Firaga does more damage per turn and Fire does more damage per mana point and sometimes you care more about one and sometimes you care more about the other.

From this, does it stand to reason then that you think that an available spell selection put together with this kind of reasoning in mind (Firaga does more damage, but Fire mores more damage per mana) would be able to function as a spell point system?

I'm curious because right now I'm working on my mage class, and I currently have it as a spell point system, but after reading one of your arguments against it (and for spell charges) I'd been reconsidering. But the approach you mention here is what I've been trying to go with, where higher-"level" spells might have bigger effects but are less efficient in terms of point expenditure, so I'm interested if you think that's a valid design choice (or, if not, why not).

I'm going to disagree with Frank. When your specific numbers are a dumpster fire, you could absolutely have interesting characters who do a variety of interesting things using spell points, even if 'better spells' are available.

For example and for the sake of convenience, let's say all spells cost their level in PP. Let's also assume that 0-level spells don't cost anything to cast as long as you have at least 1 PP available (with adjustments as necessary if you don't like unlimited castings of a particular spell). Right off the bat, we can tell that if you have lots of PP, you're going to spam your highest level spells. In order to encourage spells from a wide variety of levels you'll have to have a fairly low number of PP. For the sake of this post, let's say we select a number of PP equal to Caster Level + CHA. A 5th level caster with +5 CHA (10 total). Personally, I think highest level spell plus ability would be better (8 instead of 10) but it matters more at high levels. Our caster could potentially cast 3 third level spells (or 2 with the reduced PP reserve).

That's clearly fewer spells than a caster in 3.x RAW. To keep this from being too restrictive, they're going to need a way to get PP fairly quickly. If the refresh is 1/round the net cost of a 3rd level spell is 2 (-3 PP for casting the spell + 1 mana for the refresh works out to -2 PP for the round).

If the cost/regeneration is balanced, you will want to use less expensive spells while you 'charge back up' for the higher level spells.

There are some variations you could consider to reduce or increase the cost. For example, you could regenerate a PP only if you don't spend one in the same round (ie, if you cast a 1st level spell you do not regenerate any mana that round). This would prevent infinite 1st level spells, particularly at 1st level. You might also want to make spell DCs independent of spell level. A major reason high level casters prefer 9th level spells is that the DC to resist is 8 higher than a 1st level spell. If it were 10 + 1/2 caster level + mod for every spell it would often make sense to use a 'discounted version' of a spell - say charm person against a humanoid while saving charm monster for a non-humanoid.

Ultimately, this would result in a system where casters want to be judicious in the use of high level spells, use low level spells when they could be effective and still encourage using multiple spells.

It certainly wouldn't be like 3.x, but if it's in line with your goals, I think it would work.

Please note that there are spells that would never be used (but mostly they're not used today). Polar blast is unnecessary if damage scales by CL rather than spell level.

I'm not sure that granularity anywhere near what 3.x psionics used is necessary. Ultimately, most systems aren't consistent enough with the power-level of spells and how those spells scale to say that, for example, Polymorph is worth exactly 1.4 Fireballs.

I think you could do it with one small pool:
* Minor spells are free, the action cost is the cost.
* Major spells cost one point.
* Pool is pretty small, like 5 or less points (refills with short break). Recovery in battle is 1-2 points at most.

If you want to handle spells that can be repeated for credit out of combat, then you could add a second (larger) pool that refills per-day and have those spells cost a point from that.

Narutoverse only has 6 tiers of jutsu, so definitely there's not a need for 10 levels of "spells". I do think it needs a bit more than depth than just minor and major though.

I'm probably not as discouraged as I should be for my original notion of a regenerating power point system given how many times Frank called it shit in one post. I can brush off the critiques about not being able to use the same spell list, as I had already intended to avoid that. I can't fault Frank for not reading my mind as I only hinted at that by noting the spells would mostly be evocation-style effects.

Likewise the complaint about only casting high level spells, since the whole point of toying with it is to provide a mechanism where when you run out of your top pool you have a choice between casting lowest spells to regen faster for a big finish, or medium spells to try to end the fight now. I don't think that this goal is mathematically impossible.

I'm not super worried about long duration utility/domination spells since those barely exist in ninja world. It's almost always short duration combat effects. The few utility powers beyond disguises are usually pretty unique and specialized (summoning, ink constructs, scouting powers).

The genjutsu/status effect powers that can be battle winners will need a way to be countered, but that is a separate problem I think, than the issue of a regenerating power point pool.

I'm sure the exact balance of numbers for calculating costs and regen aren't solid yet, that's why I cited them as things I need to tweak. If I can get the number of major spells per battle to a desired point across all levels of play then it's pretty similar to sorcerer spellcasting, but without needing to rest a day for new slots.

I reckon I'm better off just using sorc casting and having slots regenerate after 5 minutes of rest. It's certainly far, far less complicated.

But regenerating sorc slots doesn't do a good job of emulating a caster with a low pool but almost perfect control (Sakura) that can use most powers without lowering chakra, vs. a caster with an enormous pool but horrible control (Naruto) who can make huge expenditures of chakra at once but often runs low. I was gonna have cursed marks and sealed demons that give bonus to Chakra pool and a penalty to Control - balancing that was gonna be another trick. Maybe Naruto and Sakura are both a bit too mary sue though to bother emulating. I probably should do the sorc regen method and skunk the whole control and chakra, but I really liked that I could continue to use character sheets with Con and Cha.


[edit: In the interest of mathing out appropriate Chakra pools and chakra costs that are not actual dumpster fires, here we go.

Intention: Cast up to 3 top tier spells in a given combat, plus lesser powers. A power from a tier 2 levels lower should be nearly free and allow some chakra to regen. A precocious ninja may blow their load on a power they know that is one higher than their actual rank.
[/td][td]Char Level[/td][td]Regeneration[/td][td]Control[/td][td]jutsu level[/td][td]Chakra Costs[/td][td]Chakra stat[/td][td]Chakra Pool [/td][/tr]

1	2	2	Genin	8	16	17
5	3	4	Chunin	14	17	22
9	4	8	Jonin	21	18	27
13	5	12	Kage	30	19	32
17	6	20	Legendary	40	20	37

Regen rate determined by tier rather than Chakra stat
Control, limited by level. Can get rather high at the deep end (control bonus + bonus to specialty +tier class bonuses)
Chakra Pool = (Level + Chakra stat)

For the curious, levels go:
1-4 Genin
5-8 Chunin
9-12 Jonin
13-16 Kage
17 Legendary

So, that table demonstrates that I can meet my expectations for number of top attacks in a battle, and provide a choice for middling or lesser attacks.

Are you actually trying to model Naruto with any level of coherency whatsoever? Because I grant my sympathies for your Sysiphean task. Naruto is an incredibly incoherent and utterly broken universe. Any attempt to make it function for coherent narrative storytelling, never mind for the much high burden level of functional gameplay, means breaking the universe in half six ways from Sunday (and if you don't believe me there's roughly half a million words on my FF.net page to that effect. I will now bow my head in shame).

Anyway, Naruto is a poor fit for d20 in general, both thematically and in terms of character abilities. System wise, it actually matches almost perfectly to Exalted - translate charms into jutsu and essence into chakra and you're entirely there (you even get the divide between standard techniques and fuuinjutsu by dividing charms and sorcery) - and if the Exalted system wasn't jaw-droppingly terribad I'd suggest you use that.

As it stands, it's probably better to model Naruto abilities using your preferred super-hero system, given that Naruto ninjas are basically superheroes. Most don't have a wide range of powers and are simply built around multiple iterations of the same general power - ex. Shikamaru's shadow binding.

I've actually heard that Naruto's author originally wanted to do a story about wizards, however ninjas were pretty popular at that time and so their editor told them to make a ninja story. Thus the author went "fuck that noise, I'll make a story about wizards disguised as ninjas".

This is, one of the most iconic Naruto jutsus if freaking fireball for Vecna's sake! And there's familiars and summons all over the place. And they kinda live in ye old fantasy world. There's even a wizard ninja school and public ranks and their main weapon of choice are daggers. Plus they even learn and cast from mystic scrolls. At one moment a character even goes "I scribbled some millions of explosive runes this morning".

The characters with "multiple iterations of the same general power" are simply wizards who specialized in a specific school. Aka shadow mage, sand mage, water mage, whatever, not every wizard is a generalist. But they are all able to cast the low level stuff like disguise self and spider climb.

Mechalich wrote:Are you actually trying to model Naruto with any level of coherency whatsoever? Because I grant my sympathies for your Sysiphean task. Naruto is an incredibly incoherent and utterly broken universe.

Yeah, I'm gonna hafta cherry pick which parts to care about and what to throw overboard. Otherwise everyone's gonna want to be the guy who can do all jutsus and also have a near-unlimited chakra source shoved up their ass for good measure.

This bug up my but all started a couple weeks ago when a friend proposed DMing a new desert-based 3e campaign and I considered being a wizard who threw daggers with explosive rune tags tied to them and whose primary mode of transportation was riding around on a floating disk converted into a kiddie pool with a parasol and glass of everfull margaritas... and it mutated from there.

It may be that I need talked down from an unworkable idea. I know most ninja have such limited power sets that they could be quite boring. But I figured if I chunk classes into tiers that each last 4 levels then I solve multiclassing by getting rid of it and providing a palatable alternative (4e tried this too, but 3 tiers of 10 levels is a bit shitty. 4e was full of good ideas and shitty execution). And I can just give enough useful powers with each class that while it may be more diverse than naruto usually offers, it is enough for a DnD type experience.

I think there are two big downsides of my power point table above. People have to track their pool while doing a bit of math. I certainly have some players in my group who cannot handle even the most simple math, and this system expects everyone to be doing it. And yes, I do need to have spell lists that work within a power point paradigm. I certainly don't have the time to do that currently, so it remains a pie in the sky plan.

If a regenerating power point structure isn't viable, then what else? I don't think WoF fits the genre but am open to ideas.

Drain. In Naruto it's the big jutsus that make characters tired, hurts them physically, makes their eye bleed, and so on. Also encourages teamwork so you have one guy blast away while the others watch his back, as well as holding back your big finishing moves. Naruto's fight with Gaara ended when both were super exhausted but Naruto had enough in him for one last headbutt.

You'll also need a mechanic for doing things retroactively, as many of Naruto and Shikamaru's fights are based around "But you didn't know that I had already set up this thing here!". Or that moment in the anime where Sasuke gets slugged in the face by disguised Orochimaru, but it turns out he actually planted a bomb on Orochimaru.

So how much action do you expect one player turn to cover?

I'm not familiar with Naruto, but your new system seems overly complicated.

It's possible to provide a discount on spells that are of lower-level, but doing so makes higher cost almost a necessity. If a 1st level spell would cost '1' in a particular system, there is nowhere to go but 'free'.

I'd recommend that you abandon PP discounts and instead offer action discounts. A spell of your highest level requires a full-action; a spell of your highest level -2 requires a standard action. A spell of your highest level -3 requires a move action; a spell of your highest level -4 can be cast as a swift action. By tying it to the action economy, you have eliminated a lot of extra math.

If you want some people to be able to cast a lot of spells, you could give them an increased refresh rate (perhaps via feat). If you want to give people the ability to 'blow their load' you could potentially let them take damage to spend PP they don't have. If I have reduced my pool to 1 PP and I want to cast a 5 PP spell, perhaps I could take 4d6 damage to pay for those other PP (possibly as a Feat). This would let some people bleed from their eyes to cast ONE MORE powerful spell.

I don't see any real evidence that characters in Naruto live in a spell point system. In fact, the different flavors of wizards ninjas don't seem to use the same resource management system at all.

-Username17

Also, absolutely nothing about Naruto needs a retroactive fucking resolution mechanic. Aside from that it would be pointless, stupid, and counter productive, because it would make every fucking fight about who can retroactively recreate the past the most times, since the last person to do so automatically fucking wins, the reason "big surprise" moments work is because they convince you that they were really planned out from the beginning. Aizen's reveal isn't cool because Big Surprises Are Cool. It is cool because "Just As Planned" means that they convince you he really did set all that shit up.

Likewise every reveal in Naruto that works, is based on the idea they planned it, and the series went away from the "Substitution Justsu" bullshit that was so annoying and pointless precisely because most of the time it looked like a retroactive fuck you to the other person in the fight. (Unlike Clones, where you had a plausible way to say, "look I totally did set this up beforehand.")

If you make all planning 100% meaningless because everyone can retroactively adjust the past to negate all your planning, and have everyone win fights by retroactively adjusting the past, then everyone will hate playing your game. That is literally the most disempowering thing I could possibly imagine.

I do recall when I first watched naruto wondering if it would be a nevere ending gotcha with log subs for fights. If newbies can do this shit then how do skilled ninjas ever get hurt?

I feel myself being talked down from this silly project and am happier for it. Just make them gestalt monk-sorcerers and be done with it.

Kaelik wrote:If you make all planning 100% meaningless because everyone can retroactively adjust the past to negate all your planning, and have everyone win fights by retroactively adjusting the past, then everyone will hate playing your game. That is literally the most disempowering thing I could possibly imagine.

Or, conversely, you could make fucking with the past your "real" combat mechanic, while the actual action in the fight is just the dominoes tipping. I could see something involving cards played facedown that might work for this. But maybe at that point we're playing Death Note rather than Naruto.

You can also keep it under wraps by making the log subs cost campaign resources rather than daily or encounter resources. If it eats an action point, players will save it for life-saving circumstances rather than shouting "you've activated my trap card" every time they blow a saving throw.

erik wrote: Here's what I'm working on.
Pool=Level + charismacasting stat modifier.
Spell cost = 1 for cantrips, +2 per additional higher level.
Control = cost of spell is reduced by con modifier
Pp regen at 1 + chacasting stat mod per round.

edits mine (obviously)

What that boils down to in a given encounter is:
a) at low levels, you can just spam max power spells (which really isn't a problem)
b) as you move to higher levels, you get 2 maxxed powers, and are at half-power for the rest of the encounter (eventually probably only 1 max power/encounter at the very top end, barring point-storing items) (again, not sure I have a problem with that)
** this goes off the rails if you have players munchkining their stat boosts and/or point-storing items, so that shit needs to stay reined in to a sane level.


What am I missing?

okay, I've let this percolate a bit; and I think I may have had a case of the dumb.
I agree on 2-stat-dependancy. (for some reason, CON seems right for regen)
as far as related gear: increasing regen is right out, and storage becomes more powerful (at least on a point-for-point basis if nothing else). so there's that.

but a per-round regen seems too "easy mode".
certainly the refresh frequency need to be hammered down first (since per-round usage is presumably already a known quantity), followed by rate, followed finally by size of pool.

FrankTrollman wrote:Where spell points work is where you have fundamentally similar effects with a difference such that you can make a meaningful tradeoff between using the ability more times and using the ability less times with the enhancement. So like how in Final Fantasy you can use Fire or Firaga, and Firaga does more damage per turn and Fire does more damage per mana point and sometimes you care more about one and sometimes you care more about the other.

I am having trouble thinking of any point in a Final Fantasy game where I felt things actually worked that way*. I can think of situations where I debated between casting Firaga or using a regular attack for insignificant damage; I cannot recall any situation where I could have cast Firaga but decided to cast Fire instead. In the rare situation where I ran out of MP and the boss wasn't dead, I cast Aspir or used an item (and Aspir + Firaga would do more damage than 2x Fire).

I think their system works more like:

1. Your MP increases as you level up, because all your numbers MUST go up; it's part of the ethos.

2. That would mean you had effectively unlimited use of your basic spells at high levels, so they have to raise the cost of your spells to keep MP relevant.

3. Raising the cost of the same spell you've been using since level 1 feels like you're getting worse. Introducing a new spell that does exactly-the-same-thing-but-bigger feels like you're getting better, so they do that instead. (But they adjust the math so that the new spell merely maintains your previous level of performance relative to other classes.)

4. You never cast the low-level version again, but it clogs your menu forever.

5. As you advance through the series in chronological order of publication, they slowly phase out the entire mechanic of MP, with MP limits becoming more and more generous until some of the recent games don't even use MP and your spells are unlimited-use just like your attacks (and in those games, your basic spells actually scale and you can just use them forever, so "Firaga" either doesn't exist or is distinguished in some other way, such as a bigger AOE).


*I have not played either of the MMOs.

Sometimes (often) you will cast Fire because it will cause enough damage to kill the monster, Firaga would be overkill and it saves MP for later fights. In fact, in FF 9, if I recall correctly, I would rarely use Firaga because it was so inefficient.

Manxome wrote:I am having trouble thinking of any point in a Final Fantasy game where I felt things actually worked that way*.

...

*I have not played either of the MMOs.

In FFXIV (one of the MMO ones), unless you're dealing with a bunch of mobs at once, any Black Mage that throws around Fire II is an idiot. It deals less damage to an individual mob and costs more than Fire; the only time it's useful is in a group situation, probably of at least 3 or more.

Manxome wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Where spell points work is where you have fundamentally similar effects with a difference such that you can make a meaningful tradeoff between using the ability more times and using the ability less times with the enhancement. So like how in Final Fantasy you can use Fire or Firaga, and Firaga does more damage per turn and Fire does more damage per mana point and sometimes you care more about one and sometimes you care more about the other.

I am having trouble thinking of any point in a Final Fantasy game where I felt things actually worked that way*.

When I played a bunch of Tactics Advance, that is how I remember it working for a lot of the endgame.