Psionics and you [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Gnorman

2012-12-25, 04:37 AM

My guess would be that he's looking to understand how psions fit into the world, which is an issue every post-core class has. The fluff and crunch alike are written across-the-board on the assumption that the world is full of fighters and monks and clerics and druids and wizards and sorcerers and rogues and barbarians, with the occasional paladin and ranger and bard, and of course NPCs with their sucky classes. None of the books assume the existence of swashbucklers, warlocks, incarnates, binders, swordsages, or psychic warriors, so the moment you want any of them to be represented in your campaign world, published material becomes useless to you and you have to figure out the demographics and social dynamics yourself from square 1.

Campaign worlds and setting material don't really depend on the meta aspects - to your average "sucky class," it doesn't matter whether or not the funny-dressed guy wiggling his fingers and mumbling menacingly is a "wizard" or a "warlock" or a "binder." Most of the new classes are just as easily integrated, and many works assume the existence of alternative classes (for example, Sarlona in Eberron). The published material isn't useless at all - most of it is still relevant, but may require a bit of adaptation.

Also, monks never fit in anywhere.

The essential question you have to ask yourself is: what makes psionics different from magic?

What can magic do that psionics cannot? What can psionics do that magic cannot?

willpell

2012-12-25, 07:20 AM

Also, monks never fit in anywhere.

Ah, see, that's exactly what I mean - Monks do fit in everywhere, no matter how much you optimizers might claim they shouldn't. They're mentioned in just every book, and always in a context which suggests that they're taken seriously. All of the class's uselessness exists only in the letter of the rules; the fluff always talks about monks as if they were special and awesome, and paladins as if they were incredibly special and super-awesome, so any rules text which indicates otherwise is contradicting the setting. Thus, if you want to play something Tippyverse-ish which takes the rules literally, you have to adapt the setting to account for the discrepancies. And the same is true of psionics; they're not mentioned anywhere, and they're too different from wizards and monks and whatnot to be incredibly easy to replace. You *do* have to adapt things, and that's not an effortless task.

Arcanist

2012-12-25, 07:40 AM

the same is true of psionics; they're not mentioned anywhere

Eberron. The Kalashtar are Psionicist and perform Monkly training to maintain sanity.

Gnorman

2012-12-25, 07:49 AM

*cough* also Dark Sun *cough*

Also: my response had nothing to do with Tippyverse or optimization (no need to jump to conclusions there nor use that term as a pejorative) or rules text contradicting the setting (???) or anything other than the fact that "kung fu mystic" doesn't mesh well with "medieval fantasy." Not all campaign material assume the existence of monks (the class, not the concept), which serves as a point showing that you are wrong about the campaign world (I assume we're talking Greyhawk here, as you have not specified otherwise?) being irrevocably intertwined with their existence. It's usually a specialized region (always some Asian expy, like "Kara-Tur") or other limitation, because it's not really a common trope in D&D style fantasy (it sure can be, but it's not really the foundation of the system). "Swashbuckler" is so much easier to integrate into a pre-existing world and requires almost no adaptation whatsoever. Any reference to a fighter or rogue could be swapped out with a minimum of work. Heck, a "monk" could be a fighter/rogue multiclass with the right feats. "Monk" is a class. "Unarmed pseudo-mystic acrobat fighter" is a concept, and a rare one in your typical D&D setting. However, a heavily-psionic setting might be just the right place to make a monk work.

My main point is this: Nothing is effortless, but the existence of psionics doesn't require you to throw out the entire setting and start from scratch just because nobody specifically mentioned them. The basic building blocks are there and they're much broader than "barbarian" or "sorcerer." Heck, you can boil everything down to "Guy who is magic" and "Guy who is not magic" and still cover pretty much everything in D&D. Maybe add "Guy who is sort of magic."

OP: psionics usually does subtle magic better, what with being able to suppress manifestation signs, lots of telepathy powers, etc. Flashier powers exist, but I'd expect a world built on a psionic back to be a bit more mystical and secretive, despite the lack of bat poop. Replace wizard colleges with psion academies. Like magic, psionics is a poorly understood science, but it is still approached with academic rigor. Not many opportunities for messing with the Outer planes, so a psionic world is infested less with your standard planar-bindable demons and more your cosmic-horror beyond-the-veil aberrations.

willpell

2012-12-25, 11:39 AM

"Anywhere" meaning in core books. Yes psionics feature prominently in several campaign settings, but that's not the point. The point is that if you're building your own campaign setting, your starting point is "generic Grayhawk" as described in the 3E corebooks, where they give percentages of the population for the corebook classes, mention the corebook deities everywhere, and include not one word about any subsystem not contained in the same book, apart from a handful of exceptions. The vast majority of the game is structured to assume the absence of anything but the core, because they didn't publish new cores as the game expanded (even when they published books named PHB2 and DMG2, those weren't actually replacements for their predecessors; really PHB2 could just as easily have been named "Complete Adventurer 2" or "Tome of Dragons" or "Heroes of Swordplay", for all that it had in common with the original PHB). All the demographic info, all the sample NPCs, everything just about...core classes only.

And I would disagree that the monk's Asian influence makes him feel out of place; I figure that the class could be flavored as a Gregorian crusader-templar order, or a quasi-druidic spiritualist tradition, or an extraplanar task force from Mechanus sent to demonstrate the effortless efficiency of mindless mechanical thought, just as easily with the same mechanics. IIRC, the only part of the Monk class which is actually based on anything Asian are the special monk weapons, and those don't really make much sense anyway - how is a kama different from a sickle? - so it won't break anything if you substitute other weapons that feel less out of place and are comparable in effectiveness (d6 damage, light, dirt cheap, most with special abilities). Plus there's always your basic quarterstaff.

(But I do second your last paragraph there as good advice for the OP. Concentrating on aberrations rather than outsiders is a splendid idea.)

Dusk Eclipse

2012-12-25, 12:00 PM

Secrets of Sarlona is probabmy one of the best books for this kind of thing, it details an entire continent whih is Psionic based. Even if you are starting from scratch it might give you some pointers and ideas on how to start.

Psyren

2012-12-25, 01:13 PM

Arcanist

2012-12-25, 01:20 PM

Of course psionics are prevalent in the core setting - thanks to Mind Flayers, which are a very established faction within Greyhawk (and Faerun, slightly less so in Eberron.)

My personal favorite explanation for psionic classes appearing comes from the 4e fluff - that Illithids and other far-flung (i.e. Far Realm) interlopers have provoked a rise in psionic ability among the mortal races, akin to an immune response. We start to see psions etc. because they are needed to combat what our reality perceives as an infection.

Doesn't this conflict with previously established lore that the Illithid's ruled the multiverse at the end of time and time travelled back to try and resume their rule? Honestly the 4e fluff is pretty cool and in theory could fit in as in the Multi verse is trying to say "No" to time travel and that whenever you time travel you are effectively creating a backlash throughout time that triggers the birth of Psionics in the Multiverse... Cool :smallamused:

Psyren

2012-12-25, 01:36 PM

Doesn't this conflict with previously established lore that the Illithid's ruled the multiverse at the end of time and time travelled back to try and resume their rule? Honestly the 4e fluff is pretty cool and in theory could fit in as in the Multi verse is trying to say "No" to time travel and that whenever you time travel you are effectively creating a backlash throughout time that triggers the birth of Psionics in the Multiverse... Cool :smallamused:

I don't think it conflicts at all. Even assuming the Illithids were the only aberrations responsible for the immune response (they weren't), one could easily posit that the reason for their dominance of the Prime was that no other race had the psionics to stop them, at least in that timeline. Whatever disaster they fled from by jumping through time put them somewhere they weren't supposed to be yet, which in turn could have stimulated psionics among the other races.

Naturally, this explanation creates a paradox, but the Illithid lore did that anyway.

Arcanist

2012-12-25, 01:50 PM

I don't think it conflicts at all. Even assuming the Illithids were the only aberrations responsible for the immune response (they weren't), one could easily posit that the reason for their dominance of the Prime was that no other race had the psionics to stop them, at least in that timeline. Whatever disaster they fled from by jumping through time put them somewhere they weren't supposed to be yet, which in turn could have stimulated psionics among the other races.

I see... now this begs the question of what other Abberations could possible have the power (or had) to cause the multiverse to NEED to fight back against these threats...

Naturally, this explanation creates a paradox, but the Illithid lore did that anyway.

*gasp* The Illithids stole TARDIS and created a Paradox Machine! :smalltongue:

Dusk Eclipse

2012-12-25, 01:53 PM

I see... now this begs the question of what other Abberations could possible have the power (or had) to cause the multiverse to NEED to fight back against these threats...

Beholders? Tsochari? All the big ones from Lord of Madness?

Psyren

2012-12-25, 02:19 PM

The Far Realm is powerful enough to scare the gods. Even if the lesser aberrations are not necessarily from there, they are still more than likely products of its influence.

willpell

2012-12-26, 01:09 AM

Of course psionics are prevalent in the core setting - thanks to Mind Flayers, which are a very established faction within Greyhawk (and Faerun, slightly less so in Eberron.)

Mind Flayers were built as wizards under the core rules. As far as I can tell, their psionic status was originally nothing more than a kludge to explain why they don't autolose to a Silence field. Everything else probably came later, as more and more people with a sci-fi background came into TSR or freelanced for it, and wrote less fantastic influences into it for a variety of reasons.

I strongly suspect that it was a LONG time before the first tattooed mystic with a talking crystal for a best friend walked through the doors of Castle Greyhawk, and that Gary originally wrote his worldbuilding with NO IDEA such a thing would ever have a place within it. Which is cool, ideas evolve and all. But the default paradigm of D&D worlds is "medieval", and psionics are distinctly different in "feel" and require some work to account for. Subbing them for wizards and monks is not a bad quick-fix, but not a perfect one either.

Flickerdart

2012-12-26, 03:16 AM

Mind Flayers were built as wizards under the core rules.
Monster special abilities have been defined as "psionics" since the heyday of the game, predating wizard-spellcasting Illithids by decades.

Gnorman

2012-12-26, 03:18 AM

The "feel", as you describe it, is exactly what it most easily changed. Though there are a few things wizards can do that psions cannot, and vice-versa, they are both "guys who makes magic by study and being super smart." You could switch out the wizards with psions and most people wouldn't even notice. All that dreck about crystals and ectoplasm is easily discarded.

Astral Construct summons and shapes raw Abyssal chaos into a glistening, oily black demon to serve your purposes. Crystal shard, meet magic missile. Telepathy and enchantment get together for a drink, realize they have just about everything in common. The One Ring doesn't make you invisible, it just provides a perception filter that achieves the exact same result

I also should add that illithids and psionics were both designed by Gygax and introduced around the same time (Eldritch Wizardry included both in 1976). Your "strong suspicions" and the accompanying speculations are demonstrably off-base. Psionics are as old as the druid or Demogorgon.

If you are stating that in core 3.5, illithids were mechanically designed as wizard-like (due to the lack of psionics rules at the time), then you might be more correct. But they were originally introduced as psionics-users, and the fluff-based depiction thereof has been quite consistent.

EDIT: a direct quote from the 3.5 Monster Manual: "Mind flayers like to fight from a distance, using their psionic abilities, particularly Mind Blast." Their spell-like abilities are specifically labeled "Psionics."

JoshuaZ

2012-12-26, 09:11 AM

Mind Flayers were built as wizards under the core rules. As far as I can tell, their psionic status was originally nothing more than a kludge to explain why they don't autolose to a Silence field. Everything else probably came later, as more and more people with a sci-fi background came into TSR or freelanced for it, and wrote less fantastic influences into it for a variety of reasons.

I strongly suspect that it was a LONG time before the first tattooed mystic with a talking crystal for a best friend walked through the doors of Castle Greyhawk, and that Gary originally wrote his worldbuilding with NO IDEA such a thing would ever have a place within it. Which is cool, ideas evolve and all. But the default paradigm of D&D worlds is "medieval", and psionics are distinctly different in "feel" and require some work to account for. Subbing them for wizards and monks is not a bad quick-fix, but not a perfect one either.

The basic factual problems with this have already been explained pretty well by Gnorman. But there are other issues with it that are worth discussing. First, a lot of the psionic abilities do end up sounding very close to medieval notions of magic, but from areas in the East. That's why for example psionics uses dorjes. Second, to some extent D&D has always been very kitchen sinkish. One early adventure had stats for laser guns and involved a crashed spaceship from another civilization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_to_the_Barrier_Peaks). If anything. D&D has become more focused over time, with a more coherent fluff set. You can argue that psionics fits less well in that fluff set (some version of medieval Europe) or can state that as a personal preference issue one doesn't like the fluff. But any claims that it wasn't there, or that psionics are overly modern just doesn't fit the facts.

willpell

2012-12-26, 09:46 AM

All that dreck about crystals and ectoplasm is easily discarded.

I *did* discard the crystals stuff, and it *wasn't* easy. References to crystal are non-stop, and require a LOT of effort to expurgate (this also renders several EPH monsters unusable, though that's a fairly small loss). Powers conjure crystals, powers turn people to crystal, psicrystals are Constructs and not easily refluffed as anything else, psionic items are often studded with crystal and frequently made out of it (and not much distinguishes them from magic items otherwise)...it's friggin' everywhere. Ectoplasm is even more pervasive, appearing in the text of multiple powers and with several powers that entirely revolve around it - you can make an Astral Construct out of Ectoplasm, cast Ecto Protection on it, throw Entangling Ectoplasm at it, turn to Ectoplasmic Form, and then die when someone casts Dismiss Ectoplasm on you. Refluffing all that takes a lot of effort and produces numerous glitches.

I also should add that illithids and psionics were both designed by Gygax and introduced around the same time (Eldritch Wizardry included both in 1976). Your "strong suspicions" and the accompanying speculations are demonstrably off-base. Psionics are as old as the druid or Demogorgon.

Okay, I stand corrected on that part, it not being based on any firsthand knowledge.

That's why for example psionics uses dorjes.

?...please elaborate? (Not doubting you, just curious what you're getting at.)

Second, to some extent D&D has always been very kitchen sinkish. One early adventure had stats for laser guns and involved a crashed spaceship from another civilization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_to_the_Barrier_Peaks).

Eh, that was Dave Arneson's bag, and he was just one GM, albeit the first one. The same is technically true of Gygax, but he made a much deeper thumbprint on the game's formative years, which Wizards exascerbated by using Greyhawk as the default setting for 3E (an understandable call since it has one of the better mixes of "generic" and "detailed", but this did mean blink dogs and displacer beasts in the MM, so not a perfect choice).

If anything. D&D has become more focused over time, with a more coherent fluff set.

Agreed there, it's rather thoroughly got its own milieu - which mostly does not revolve around psionics (at least not as something humanoids have). It can be done, and has been in a few places, but I still stand by my original point, which is that including psionics means having to modify a lot of the info in the DMG and other books to account for the fact that you've diverged from the core assumption of exactly 11 classes. If you exactly replace all wizards with psions, all sorcerers with wilders and all monks with psychic warriors (replacing fighters with soulknives would be far too cruel), you could make it work, though the wilder is a good bit different from the sorc, and not all psywars pass for monks outside dim lighting, plus they're probably more common. But if you have both alongside one another, the population numbers will be off, and a lot of references will be either incomplete or redundant, and you'll have some extra work to do correcting for it, which gets harder the fewer discrepancies you're willing to tolerate. This is all I'm saying.

Augmental

2012-12-26, 01:17 PM

Powers conjure crystals,

Or blades of force.

powers turn people to crystal,

Or stone.

psicrystals are Constructs and not easily refluffed as anything else,

Why not pacifist golems?

psionic items are often studded with crystal and frequently made out of it (and not much distinguishes them from magic items otherwise)...

If there isn't much distinguishing them from other magic items, that's good - it makes them easier to refluff.

you can make an Astral Construct out of Ectoplasm,

Or another material from some other plane. Maybe from Mechanus?

cast Ecto Protection on it,

Or you could cast Reinforce Astral Construct

you throw Entangling Ectoplasm at it,

Or it could be any other sticky goo.

turn to Ectoplasmic Form,

Gel Form.

and then die when someone casts Dismiss Ectoplasm on you.

This is the only power I can't think of an easy refluff for.

Arcanist

2012-12-26, 01:24 PM

I *did* discard the crystals stuff, and it *wasn't* easy. References to crystal are non-stop, and require a LOT of effort to expurgate (this also renders several EPH monsters unusable, though that's a fairly small loss). Powers conjure crystals, powers turn people to crystal, psicrystals are Constructs and not easily refluffed as anything else, psionic items are often studded with crystal and frequently made out of it (and not much distinguishes them from magic items otherwise)...it's friggin' everywhere. Ectoplasm is even more pervasive, appearing in the text of multiple powers and with several powers that entirely revolve around it - you can make an Astral Construct out of Ectoplasm, cast Ecto Protection on it, throw Entangling Ectoplasm at it, turn to Ectoplasmic Form, and then die when someone casts Dismiss Ectoplasm on you. Refluffing all that takes a lot of effort and produces numerous glitches.

The funny thing about Crystals in D&D is that they can be used to power both Psionics (XPH) and Magic (MoF). Crystals have been used for centuries in multiple Cultures as spiritual focuses, tools for divination, meditation, etc.

A Construct made out of Crystal isn't much of a stretch, Turning a creature into a Crystal isn't a stretch for either magic or psionics and in most primitive cultures if you presented a mystical artifact that didn't have any Crystals or Gold or beautiful designs, most people would have just walked away and called your crazy. As for Ectoplasm? Well I find, just calling it something else works just as well and merging Dispel Psionics and Dismiss Ectoplasm makes sense and changing Ectoplasmic Form to Astral Form isn't much of a stretch either, in fact, most of the Ectoplasmic spells can just be altered into Astral Spells :smallsmile: It doesn't take much time really (just changing names).

?...please elaborate? (Not doubting you, just curious what you're getting at.)

Vajra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajra) is also another name for a Dorje. :smallsmile:

I like Psionics in my campaigns, they add the whole "New age" feel to it all that is fairly hard to add using Magic. :smallsmile: ... It also allows me to attack my party with a band of Psionic hippies! :smallbiggrin:

Andreaz

2012-12-26, 01:27 PM

You could always refluff with Coffee instead. Ectoplasm becomes coffee, psicrystals become sapient expresso machines, cognizance stones become caffeine shots.

Ravens_cry

2012-12-26, 01:36 PM

A refluff I like is focusing on, what I feel, is the primal quality of psionics. Rather than the elaborate rituals of divine magic, or the musty formulae and lore of arcane, it's merely thought to deed in a single step. You want it, and it is done; no need for all that fussy stuff of the 'civilized' peoples.

JoshuaZ

2012-12-26, 03:20 PM

Agreed there, it's rather thoroughly got its own milieu - which mostly does not revolve around psionics (at least not as something humanoids have). It can be done, and has been in a few places, but I still stand by my original point, which is that including psionics means having to modify a lot of the info in the DMG and other books to account for the fact that you've diverged from the core assumption of exactly 11 classes. If you exactly replace all wizards with psions, all sorcerers with wilders and all monks with psychic warriors (replacing fighters with soulknives would be far too cruel), you could make it work, though the wilder is a good bit different from the sorc, and not all psywars pass for monks outside dim lighting, plus they're probably more common. But if you have both alongside one another, the population numbers will be off, and a lot of references will be either incomplete or redundant, and you'll have some extra work to do correcting for it, which gets harder the fewer discrepancies you're willing to tolerate. This is all I'm saying.

There's really no assumption that there are are exactly 11 classes, and in so far that's an assumption that's a problem with any magical extension, not just psionics. There's no reason you can't have some strange or new form of magic or previously poorly understood system. If anything, having multiple magic systems helps makes things feel more mysterious and interesting. But they don't need to be common. And in many settings all forms of magic are so uncommon that the vast majority of people won't know the difference between a sorcerer, a wizard, a psion, a binder or any other thing they'd label a mage.

Gnorman

2012-12-26, 04:41 PM

Urpriest

2012-12-26, 10:31 PM

Where, exactly, are these population numbers and references that will be thrown completely off? At what point is 11 held up as some magic number? For that matter, why should you hold anything in the DMG as sacred and immutable? I certainly don't see why demographic data should be worried about so keenly - someone pulled it whole cloth out of thin air at some point, why worry about changing it around? So city X has 30 more monks, so what? So one finger-wiggling nerd calls it Fireball, the other calls it Energy Burst, what reference is made obsolete by doing so?

I just don't understand what discrepancies you are so worried about.

You need to come up with whole new demographic tables, and since it's unclear what the founding logic of the original ones is, it's unclear what the new logic should be. I was rather disappointed that when Eberron modified the tables they didn't fix them to be extendable.

willpell

2012-12-26, 11:35 PM

Vajra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajra) is also another name for a Dorje. :smallsmile:

Ooh! Neat find; Psionics fits nicely with Hindu/Buddhist/etc. fluff. I'll be looking into that at greater length.

Gnorman, I'll procure an answer for you when I get back to my books.

Larkas

2012-12-27, 09:05 AM

Ooh! Neat find; Psionics fits nicely with Hindu/Buddhist/etc. fluff. I'll be looking into that at greater length.

Huh. I hadn't noticed that either. Fits very well!

willpell

2012-12-27, 10:17 AM

I just don't understand what discrepancies you are so worried about.

Okay, here are some examples (Ur-Priest's entire post also applies but I'll try to get more specific.

* DMG treasure tables contain a comprehensive list of typical wands and scrolls and staves based on wizard, cleric, and druid spells, with randomization tables that give specific frequencies of appearance to indicate that some spells are less frequently made into items than others; no such information is available for non-core spellcasters, save perhaps in books such as Oriental Adventures, and even then it would be separate from the DMG tables.

* DMG chapter 4 gives you lists of quick NPCs you can use to come up with baseline stats for a member of any given class, with adjustments for races, but in both cases this information is core-only. If you want an Illumian Factotum in your game, you have to make him from scratch as if he was a PC; no shortcuts are provided.

* The World-Building section of chapter 5 has a way of rolling up the populations of towns, but again assumes only the core 11 classes. Likewise, the Class Roles in Society section provides information about how the various classes fit into the world, but such suggestions are harder to come by for later published classes/races/etc., and nowhere is ALL of the information from ALL of the books compiled into a comprehensive set of worldbuilding defaults.

* Unearthed Arcana offers neat variations on the classes, including the often-invoked Feat Rogue and the Cloistered Cleric, but there's no equivalent to this for the rest of the game other than whatever homebrew you can come up with (either personally or secondhand). UA might be little more than a bunch of houserules from the WOTCO staff's campaigns, but at least this means a modicum of effort has gone into keeping them balanced, consistent, and decently well-edited.

* Likewise, books such as Complete Mage and Dungeonscape are littered with ACFs to make the original classes more widely applicable. You can make your Ranger able to hunt "arcanists" rather than a creature type, or give your Paladin a "divine spirit" instead of a mount that can't follow him into the dungeon. But such adaptations aren't presented for psionic, incarnum-using, blade magic, Oriental, or other supplement classes. Thusly, the core classes have something like triple the build options available.

* And then there are prestige classes, which nearly always account only for the possibilities of building around core classes or classes found in the same book. From a game balance point of view, the Factotum class alone makes a mockery out of difficult PRC entry requirements which were intended to give that PRC cache and make it "safe" to dial up the power level, at least in theory. Find me a single Dragon Shaman-based PRC anywhere! I doubt one exists, because there were no PRCs in PBH2, and AFAIK the only other book to assume PHB2's existence is the Monster Manual 5, which posits a Hobgoblin Duskblade, and if there's another reference even in that book I missed it.

* Speaking of monsters, there's also the fact that these are usually only ever designed to have core classes or emulate the features thereof - the only monsters which have powers based on Binder vestiges are found in Tome of Battle, and the contents of various Monster Manuals weren't revised to replace Fighters with Warblades where appopriate.

Bottom line, there's zero integration across the board for nearly all supplemental material....Psionics is actually ahead of the curve, playing a major role in several books, but still not fully incorporated into every book. Whereas, for example, the Monk always is referenced wherever there's the slightest excuse, despite the optimization community's wholesale refusal to play single-class Monks. (And multiclassing is referenced infrequently at best in published materials.)

Draz74

2012-12-27, 01:17 PM

An entire column of online articles (The Mind's Eye) giving extra options for psionics, including some rather excellent ACFs and variants, helps to narrow the gap a little bit.

Psyren

2012-12-27, 05:37 PM

@ loot tables: MiC has updated ones that incorporate loot for a variety of new systems, including psionics, invoking and incarnum. (This might be a good time to remind you that MiC explicitly supersedes the DMG where magic items are concerned.)

@ UA: The non-core classes have plenty of adaptations and "class acts" segments in Dragon. It's not perfect, but it's still readily available for the community to critique and hammer something out. Sure it's homebrew, but it's not like WotC has had a perfect strike rate themselves even when they fleshed things out for us.

@ World-building and NPCs: Just about every new class includes a blurb saying which core class it is similar to in niche/feel. The purpose of this is for you to know which classes to tweak, making room for the new arrivals. For instance, Totemists are described as being similar to both druids and barbarians - you can therefore reduce the numbers of one or both classes to fit in a couple of their incarnum cousins. Similarly, psions/erudites could easily replace some wizards in the echelons of a city's mageocratic power.

Urpriest

2012-12-27, 05:51 PM

@ World-building and NPCs: Just about every new class includes a blurb saying which core class it is similar to in niche/feel. The purpose of this is for you to know which classes to tweak, making room for the new arrivals. For instance, Totemists are described as being similar to both druids and barbarians - you can therefore reduce the numbers of one or both classes to fit in a couple of their incarnum cousins. Similarly, psions/erudites could easily replace some wizards in the echelons of a city's mageocratic power.

But that's not how it works in practice. Remember, each class makes its own tree of lower-level characters, and there is always (for a large enough town) one and precisely one highest-level member of each class. It may still seem reasonable to simply substitute in similar classes, but read on:

Look at Eberron's "updated" tables, and you'll find they work precisely the same way, with Artificers (and Magewrights) added as entirely new trees, rather than as potential substitutions to existing trees. This is apparently how WotC wants us to do things, despite the fact that we cannot do things this way for every class lest the demographics become truly Faerunian in their ridiculousness. So without nontrivial homebrew to fit new systems and classes into the setting, one is rather at an impasse.

Psyren

2012-12-27, 09:28 PM

But that's not how it works in practice. Remember, each class makes its own tree of lower-level characters, and there is always (for a large enough town) one and precisely one highest-level member of each class. It may still seem reasonable to simply substitute in similar classes, but read on:

Look at Eberron's "updated" tables, and you'll find they work precisely the same way, with Artificers (and Magewrights) added as entirely new trees, rather than as potential substitutions to existing trees. This is apparently how WotC wants us to do things, despite the fact that we cannot do things this way for every class lest the demographics become truly Faerunian in their ridiculousness. So without nontrivial homebrew to fit new systems and classes into the setting, one is rather at an impasse.

I still think the "problem" is being overblown. Do you really need one of every single non-core class to be represented in every town? How many classes suggest the "you are a unique and mystic foreigner with strange powers from a faraway land" fluff as explanation for why the PC would be the only one in the region - or even world - with their powers? At a glance, I see the Sha'ir, Shugenja, Wu Jen, all the Incarnum and psionic classes, ToB etc. going this route. Basically, if you want the exotic NPC that badly then stat him up, and if you don't, just say there aren't any others and the PC is unique.

I'm just not seeing the problem. Unless you have a compulsive need to have the game world reflect every combination or expression possible in 3.5, you should only have to come up with something on your own a handful of times if that. If that's too much work, well, don't do it.

Novawurmson

2012-12-27, 11:14 PM

A few ideas on how to integrate any new subsystem into your current game (mostly stolen from the Draconomicon, I believe):

1. They've always been there. That guy you saw slinging fire around? He was a psion, not a sorcerer. That guy who did magic and swords? He was a psychic warrior, not an eldritch knight. For the average Hroth'gar, the difference is so minimal as to not be apparent. One guy has a magic sword he took from a dragon's sword, another guy has a magic sword he makes with his mind: Either way, you stab him if he's pointing his sword at you and help him if he's pointing it at an enemy.

2. They've always been somewhere. Psionics is new to most of the people in the setting...but there has always been a continent/country/cult/plane/school/university/cooking club that used psionics; they're just rare or a far enough distance away that most people haven't heard of them. Maybe they're secretive. Maybe they murder anyone who reveals their existence. Maybe there's just not very many of them. Either way, they're just not well known where the characters have been so far.

3. They're new. An ancient artifact is uncovered or a bizarre planar event happens or a god of the mind intervenes or a meddlesome wizard hatches a poorly thought-out experiment and BAM! Psionics.

willpell

2012-12-27, 11:29 PM

I still think the "problem" is being overblown. Do you really need one of every single non-core class to be represented in every town?

No, but *most* should be represented in *most* towns. If there's such a thing as a Swashbuckler or a Spirit Shaman or a Soulknife possible in the universe, what reason could there be for such things to not be as common as druids and monks and paladins and even rogues? The forces that create them (whether "the spirits" or "psionic energy" or just "clever finesse fighting and a sparkling wit") are usually not going to be cloistered off in some isolated location, and even if they are, they should spread as people interact with the unusual person and want to learn how he does that trick, then when they do they teach it to others in turn, and this repeats over centuries. Besides which, being cool and unusual and special works a lot better if there aren't five thousand other also cool and also unusual and also special (but in different ways) people bobbling around within a six-county area. If you really want your Special Snowflake to stand out, make him actually be the only one around; in a blizzard he'll just be one more "unique just like everybody else" line-item.

How many classes suggest the "you are a unique and mystic foreigner with strange powers from a faraway land" fluff as explanation for why the PC would be the only one in the region - or even world - with their powers? At a glance, I see the Sha'ir, Shugenja, Wu Jen, all the Incarnum and psionic classes, ToB etc. going this route.

Incarnum shouldn't be even close to this; if Good Itself periodically grants people the power to make a warhammer out of their soul and sprout a pair of angel wings (that don't actually fly, but can deflect blows or something), and Chaos gives people battleaxes and makes them look like giant blue frogs that run real fast and are somehow really good with a bow, then that sort of thing should be happening worldwide, just as is true of clerics (without even the regionalizing influence of particular churches; in essence an incarnate is a "cleric of a cause", so if such things can happen, they should, and one would assume they have at least some competitive advantages compared to theoclerics, though the latter may also have some).

Shugenja/WuJen and Shi'ar, they're only flavored that way because the setting defaults to Europe-based, but Kara-Tur and whatever the Arab-based one are actual countries with their own equally thriving populations, so the classes aren't rare there. And if there's more than the tiniest trickle of commerce, eventually the wizards and the wu jen are going to start arm-wrestling each other to figure out whose mojo is better, and it probably won't be long until the handful of wu jen spells are transcribed into wizard scrolls and the wu jen ceases to exist (unless the DM loves wu jen and nerfs the wizard into oblivion, IWC the opposite).

Tome of Battle is a weird one; the as-written fluff suggests it should be rare and spooky, but the community often regards the Warblade as nothing more than Fighter 2.0 and completely mundane in nature, so if you go with that interpretation it's definitely not that unusual. But it might not completely replace the fighter either, if only because fighter makes a better NPC class. So you might have to divide the fighter demographic a bit. Same for Crusaders and Paladins to some extent, and Swordsages and Monks to a lesser one (the default Swordsage, on account of having a sword, is not precisely a Monk, but the unarmed variant is pretty close).

I'm just not seeing the problem. Unless you have a compulsive need to have the game world reflect every combination or expression possible in 3.5

That's pretty much it. I want my gameworld to be holistic, natural, and thriving; I don't want it to seem like I just slapped it together for the sake of it revolving around the PCs. I like having multiple plots operating in the background which the players can choose whether or not to get involved in, and that means the closer I can get to writing an entire phone book for the city and a geopolitical map of "involveds" from surrounding kingdoms, the happier I'll be. So I'd like it if there were better tools to assist me in this degree of worldbuilding...that there *aren't*, IMO, is why few people other than me have thought to wish for such a thing.

Augmental

2012-12-27, 11:49 PM

Draz74

2012-12-28, 04:09 AM

I want my gameworld to be holistic, natural, and thriving; I don't want it to seem like I just slapped it together for the sake of it revolving around the PCs. I like having multiple plots operating in the background which the players can choose whether or not to get involved in, and that means the closer I can get to writing an entire phone book for the city and a geopolitical map of "involveds" from surrounding kingdoms, the happier I'll be. So I'd like it if there were better tools to assist me in this degree of worldbuilding...that there *aren't*, IMO, is why few people other than me have thought to wish for such a thing.

I sympathize with this desire ... but IMO, 3.5e is so far away from it that demographics of non-Core classes aren't even on the Top 10 List of issues, so they're not worth bothering with. :smallbiggrin: (The economy, especially with infinite-money loops involved, would probably be the first problem you'd have to face in order for the setting and mechanics to blend so believably.)

Arcanist

2012-12-28, 04:18 AM

That's pretty much it. I want my gameworld to be holistic, natural, and thriving; I don't want it to seem like I just slapped it together for the sake of it revolving around the PCs. I like having multiple plots operating in the background which the players can choose whether or not to get involved in, and that means the closer I can get to writing an entire phone book for the city and a geopolitical map of "involveds" from surrounding kingdoms, the happier I'll be. So I'd like it if there were better tools to assist me in this degree of worldbuilding...that there *aren't*, IMO, is why few people other than me have thought to wish for such a thing.

I know this feeling all too well... I try to make my campaigns as vast and as diverse as possible allowing for absolutely every possibility imaginable, but it's beyond my power to accurately perform this and be satisfied with the results... I just feel that I can never apply to much life to a world so that I can sit back and think "It was good" :smallsmile:

I'm going to try to do that with a PbP with an entirely homebrewed campaign setting using a homebrewed system (Gramarie) in a 3.5 setting. :smallsmile:

willpell

2012-12-28, 04:41 AM

Because people tend to stick with what they know in real life, and the same should hold true in D&D.

So why wouldn't the career path of EG the Swashbuckler be among those always known, everywhere? It isn't even nautical in theme, it's just a lightly armored agile fighter with more skills than a Fighter and more HP than a Rogue. There is zero reason why it shouldn't be in Core, and zero reason why it shouldn't be treated as interchangeable with the core classes. Factotum is another class that doesn't lend itself to being ghettoed away in a small local area either; they shouldn't be numerous, but they should be smoothly integrated throughout society. Marshal, Knight, and probably Beguiler are all pretty basic and there's no reason to treat them as rare and unusual just because they weren't in core. The variant paladins of Unearthed Arcana, if they exist at all, should be as common as the actual Paladin (though less commonly PC-appropriate since two of them are Evil). Archivists and Favored Souls shouldn't be much rarer than Clerics, warlocks ought to be found wherever wizards are, certainly Dragonfire Adepts should exist where there are dragons...the list goes on and on.

There's a fair amount of spells which the Wu Jen, but not Wizard, have on their spell list. Giant Size, for example.

I'm guessing it's still tiny compared to the number of wizard spells that exist across all books (even if you exclude setting-specific and third party works - there's another thing about the non-core classes, they were much less likely to get attention under the OGL, and in many cases they legally couldn't, even if they were a perfect fit for some other setting).

But how much of your work is going to go unused because the players didn't interact with it? There's a reason The Law Of Conservation Of Detail has a TV Tropes page. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheLawOfConservationOfDetail)

I despise that trope and avert it as hard as humanly possible. Ideally, what doesn't get used in this campaign will in a future one, as I continue to build on my work ad infinitum. Past efforts in this direction haven't gone well, but that was largely due to organizational failures on my part which I'm making a serious effort to learn from.

(The economy, especially with infinite-money loops involved, would probably be the first problem you'd have to face in order for the setting and mechanics to blend so believably.)

I would just ban any infinite-money loop since they virtually always involve shenanigans that any sensible DM would say no to. But I don't think a D&D world has to possess anything resembling an economy as we know it; the laws of physics (such as "matter and energy can't be created or destroyed", or the 2nd law of thermodynamics) are explicitly not present in D&D world, and the influence of gods and outer planes can change functionally anything, so while the D&D world should have internally consistent workings, they needn't resemble our stupid universe (which IMO is clearly not well-suited to sustaining life, and I'd abandon it in a second if I knew how - sadly there's only one documented method, and a deplorable paucity of data concerning its results).

JoshuaZ

2012-12-28, 08:45 AM

I would just ban any infinite-money loop since they virtually always involve shenanigans that any sensible DM would say no to. But I don't think a D&D world has to possess anything resembling an economy as we know it; the laws of physics (such as "matter and energy can't be created or destroyed", or the 2nd law of thermodynamics) are explicitly not present in D&D world, and the influence of gods and outer planes can change functionally anything, so while the D&D world should have internally consistent workings, they needn't resemble our stupid universe (which IMO is clearly not well-suited to sustaining life, and I'd abandon it in a second if I knew how - sadly there's only one documented method, and a deplorable paucity of data concerning its results).

Basic economics, e.g. supply and demand, Gresham's law, externalities, etc. are physics independent. They'd apply for example in a purely Newtonian universe or a D&D universe. Economics is essentially what happens when one has scarcity, and that clearly exists in the D&D verse for many different things (although what is scarce may be different from what is scarce in are world).

willpell

2012-12-28, 10:15 AM

The gods would seem to have specifically engineered the D&D world to counteract the concept of economics. Perhaps money itself is magically empowered to price-fix across the entire cosmos, so that anyone who makes an Appraise roll accurately measures exactly what a saleable good is worth, and that figure is the same anywhere on the planet. No matter how much or how little of something you have, you know there's more somewhere and someone somewhere who wants it, so there's no opportunity to gouge anyone.

In my campaign world I make this explicit.

Psyren

2012-12-28, 11:21 AM

No, but *most* should be represented in *most* towns. If there's such a thing as a Swashbuckler or a Spirit Shaman or a Soulknife possible in the universe, what reason could there be for such things to not be as common as druids and monks and paladins and even rogues?

"Swashbuckler" is just another flavor of "Fighter" so that's an easy one to add. But the other two are sufficiently unique/outlandish that you can easily justify there simply not being any in most places.

And you're still assuming that enough "centuries" have passed between the introduction of such a power source or technique to allow for its spread. Even for firmly established settings like Greyhawj and Faerun, new things can still be created or discovered.

Incarnum shouldn't be even close to this; if Good Itself periodically grants people the power to make a warhammer out of their soul and sprout a pair of angel wings (that don't actually fly, but can deflect blows or something), and Chaos gives people battleaxes and makes them look like giant blue frogs that run real fast and are somehow really good with a bow, then that sort of thing should be happening worldwide, just as is true of clerics (without even the regionalizing influence of particular churches; in essence an incarnate is a "cleric of a cause", so if such things can happen, they should, and one would assume they have at least some competitive advantages compared to theoclerics, though the latter may also have some).

MoI itself gives you plenty of reasons why Incarnum may not have been around before. For example, check the "Opening the Wellspring" campaign arc in MoI 200, where the PCs (unwittingly) unleash the power of Incarnum on an unsuspecting world.

Shugenja/WuJen and Shi'ar, they're only flavored that way because the setting defaults to Europe-based, but Kara-Tur and whatever the Arab-based one are actual countries with their own equally thriving populations, so the classes aren't rare there.

So? If your story has never actually gone to those places, what's the difference? The techniques are still strange and new here.

Tome of Battle is a weird one; the as-written fluff suggests it should be rare and spooky, but the community often regards the Warblade as nothing more than Fighter 2.0 and completely mundane in nature, so if you go with that interpretation it's definitely not that unusual. But it might not completely replace the fighter either, if only because fighter makes a better NPC class. So you might have to divide the fighter demographic a bit. Same for Crusaders and Paladins to some extent, and Swordsages and Monks to a lesser one (the default Swordsage, on account of having a sword, is not precisely a Monk, but the unarmed variant is pretty close).

Again, so what? Your approach here seems fine, so what's the problem?

That's pretty much it. I want my gameworld to be holistic, natural, and thriving; I don't want it to seem like I just slapped it together for the sake of it revolving around the PCs. I like having multiple plots operating in the background which the players can choose whether or not to get involved in, and that means the closer I can get to writing an entire phone book for the city and a geopolitical map of "involveds" from surrounding kingdoms, the happier I'll be. So I'd like it if there were better tools to assist me in this degree of worldbuilding...that there *aren't*, IMO, is why few people other than me have thought to wish for such a thing.

If wishes were horses, etc.
It sounds like you want an incredibly detailed world, but are balking at the amount of work required to make such a thing a reality. But there is a solution - you have a great community of D&D nerds right here willing to help with that. Make threads asking "hey, I have DMG table X, but want to insert classes X, Y and Z - can anyone help me stat these up?" Then take the responses you get, tweak them, and bam.

TL;DR: Crowdsource it, "problem" solved.

willpell

2012-12-28, 11:29 AM

It sounds like you want an incredibly detailed world, but are balking at the amount of work required to make such a thing a reality.

Exactly. The tools provided for worldbuilding by Wotco are inadequate to the point of mild insult, and so I criticize them, and stridently proclaim that better should have been done...actually doing it myself, while something I would gladly do if I could, is beyond my abilities when I'm not being paid for it and do have other tasks. (The Wotco editors were paid for it as their chief task, and so I feel perfectly justified in railing against their ability to live up to my standards.)

But there is a solution - you have a great community of D&D nerds right here willing to help with that. Make threads asking "hey, I have DMG table X, but want to insert classes X, Y and Z - can anyone help me stat these up?" Then take the responses you get, tweak them, and bam.

The results I have observed in this community are...variable, at best. I have only barely begun to identify a handful of posters who produce relaibly decent-quality work, and even they seldom completely satisfy me. As for the "tweak" part, well, that's exactly where I am. Getting more data prior to doing it all myself just means that the work of sifting that data replaces the work of compensating for its absence; it is at best a partial improvement, and possibly worse. As with many things in my life, I am left with the impression that there is no good solution.

Psyren

2012-12-28, 11:33 AM

No one's saying you can't rail against them - by all means, do so. But writing a perfectly scathing putdown and hitting submit isn't exactly going to solve your problem, since they've moved on from 3.5.

willpell

2012-12-28, 11:40 AM

Hence my solution is to appoint myself a one-man committee for creating a replacement which preserves the best aspects of 3.5 while correcting everything that I deem to have been a mistake thereof. That this is a long-term project is obvious, but I have yet to find another person I trust enough to share the responsibility with, even if they were willing to shoulder it.

Urpriest

2012-12-28, 01:27 PM

I still think the "problem" is being overblown. Do you really need one of every single non-core class to be represented in every town?

Why not? That's how it works with the core classes. Until we know why the core classes work that way, we can't know whether or not non-core classes need to work that way. The reasoning behind the demographic system is really really opaque, and the fact that it was updated with no significant changes (to that aspect anyway) to Eberron, a setting that felt free to update pretty much everything else to more rational systems, indicates that WotC really thought this was an appropriate way to do things. The question is why, and until we know (and we'll never know) we don't how which way to incorporate non-core classes into that system is appropriate.

Psyren

2012-12-28, 01:39 PM

Why not?

Because (a) it's needlessly complicated, (b) ignores the suggested fluff of many classes that they are unique to a given region (or even brand new to the world as a whole), and (c) implies that non-core classes should be just as common as core ones just because they are similar. A Spirit Shaman plays a lot like a Druid, but that doesn't mean one should be as easy to find, or that their form of magic has been around as long.

As for why they did Eberron the way they did - Eberron was designed to work both with every single 3.5 splat created before it, but it was also designed to work for those groups that only had the three core books + ECS. They even sequestered the lion's share of the setting's psionics in an insular land that DMs would have every reason to ignore, just to cater to the groups that didn't like psionics. It was a delicate balancing act, and I for one feel that they did the best they could.

Urpriest

2012-12-28, 02:14 PM

Because (a) it's needlessly complicated, (b) ignores the suggested fluff of many classes that they are unique to a given region (or even brand new to the world as a whole), and (c) implies that non-core classes should be just as common as core ones just because they are similar. A Spirit Shaman plays a lot like a Druid, but that doesn't mean one should be as easy to find, or that their form of magic has been around as long.

(a) As was the original system, evidently that's not a reason against it.
(b) Monks are in core, Barbarians are arguably unique to barbaric regions. And Druids are insanely culturally specific.
(c) Vice versa might also be true. And just because a Paladin plays similar to a Fighter doesn't mean that every town should have one.

As for why they did Eberron the way they did - Eberron was designed to work both with every single 3.5 splat created before it, but it was also designed to work for those groups that only had the three core books + ECS. They even sequestered the lion's share of the setting's psionics in an insular land that DMs would have every reason to ignore, just to cater to the groups that didn't like psionics. It was a delicate balancing act, and I for one feel that they did the best they could.

See, it would have been trivial to change the system to be one based on categories rather than classes, and it wouldn't have offended anyone. There was zero obvious reason for every town to have both a Sorceror and a Wizard, and Eberron had the chance to institute the obvious commonsense reform of having each town instead have an "arcanist", which could be a Wizard, Sorceror, Artificer, or, optionally, a non-core class. They didn't institute that, despite using various other obvious reforms (some even in the demographics engine!) which indicates that there is something important about this otherwise completely stupid system that they wanted to keep. And until we know what that is, we can't be sure that we're not harming some critical feature of the system when we try to homebrew around it.

Psyren

2012-12-28, 02:47 PM

(a) As was the original system, evidently that's not a reason against it.
(b) Monks are in core, Barbarians are arguably unique to barbaric regions. And Druids are insanely culturally specific.
(c) Vice versa might also be true. And just because a Paladin plays similar to a Fighter doesn't mean that every town should have one.

(a) But they have a guaranteed return on their time investment, since they know every group will have the core books. The same just isn't true of Complete X or Tome of Y.
(b) But none of those are considered to be "new" to a given setting the way, say, Incarnates before the Wellspring might be, or psionicists before the Crystal Moon showed up. Far-flung/isolated perhaps, but still at least present.
(c) Again, they have more reason for the assumption that the core 11 are more common, because they know everyone will have access to them.

See, it would have been trivial to change the system to be one based on categories rather than classes, and it wouldn't have offended anyone. There was zero obvious reason for every town to have both a Sorceror and a Wizard, and Eberron had the chance to institute the obvious commonsense reform of having each town instead have an "arcanist", which could be a Wizard, Sorceror, Artificer, or, optionally, a non-core class. They didn't institute that, despite using various other obvious reforms (some even in the demographics engine!) which indicates that there is something important about this otherwise completely stupid system that they wanted to keep. And until we know what that is, we can't be sure that we're not harming some critical feature of the system when we try to homebrew around it.

Oh come on, give me a break. You know we understand the balance of their game better than they do. What "critical feature" are you worried about harming? If you don't want to expend the effort to do it, that's fine, but implying that the folks responsible for the CR system had some lofty and inscrutable yet perfectly-designed reason for constructing the demographics the way they did, something so far beyond reproach that we risk collapsing the entire house of cards by making adjustments, is laughably absurd.

In short, we fix their crap all the time. They took the easy way out, and we have every right to be upset about it, but saying we can't do anything about it ourselves undermines the essence of what D&D is all about - as Rules Compendium describes it, "the Living Game."

willpell

2012-12-29, 04:39 AM

And Druids are insanely culturally specific.

Huh? Druids are empowered by nature, and nature is everywhere and has nothing to do with culture. I don't really get where you're coming from on this.

See, it would have been trivial to change the system to be one based on categories rather than classes, and it wouldn't have offended anyone. There was zero obvious reason for every town to have both a Sorceror and a Wizard, and Eberron had the chance to institute the obvious commonsense reform of having each town instead have an "arcanist", which could be a Wizard, Sorceror, Artificer, or, optionally, a non-core class. They didn't institute that, despite using various other obvious reforms (some even in the demographics engine!) which indicates that there is something important about this otherwise completely stupid system that they wanted to keep. And until we know what that is, we can't be sure that we're not harming some critical feature of the system when we try to homebrew around it.

Even I suspect that you're reaching here, but I'm glad to see you arguing this point even though I don't agree with it. :smallsmile:

or psionicists before the Crystal Moon showed up.

I thought the Crystal Moon was just an example of a campaign development, rather than something that was actually assumed to have happened in the default setting.

Oh come on, give me a break. You know we understand the balance of their game better than they do. What "critical feature" are you worried about harming?

I sort of agree with both Ur-Priest and Psyren here. It seems unlikely that it actually matters, but I do wonder whether there's something I've missed. It'd be a shame to fix 3E's problems only to create the same number of new ones, so I do feel we should tread carefully.

If you don't want to expend the effort to do it, that's fine, but implying that the folks responsible for the CR system had some lofty and inscrutable yet perfectly-designed reason for constructing the demographics the way they did, something so far beyond reproach that we risk collapsing the entire house of cards by making adjustments, is laughably absurd.

I think he has a point, actually...while we know that there are things about the CR system that are screwy, we can't be sure how many of them are actually Wizards having built the system on bad assumptions, versus having built the system on good assumptions which they didn't properly communicate, versus having built a good system which the community doesn't actually play as intended for various reasons (for instance many groups waive weight limits as too fiddly to be worth bothering with, even though theoretically they have the potential of making Fighters more useful and limiting the advantages of Small size and so forth; the writers may have intended for a magic item's weight to be a balancing factor compared to its gold cost, and it ended up overpowered as a result, though this example is admittedly a stretch). I read an article a while ago where one of the original designers talked about the logic behind skill checks and DCs, where they based the original Jump rules (in 3.0) on real-world athletes, so that a Jump check from a maxed-out level 6 character would be comparable to the world record distance. Obviously they were not successful in making the entire system this well-oiled a machine, but I don't think they should be faulted for having tried, and I don't think we should dismiss their efforts until we understand exactly what they did and why (I don't agree with UrPriest that this is impossible, though certainly it's absurdly difficult; we could theoretically track the authors down and harass them with emails or send them a petition or something, not that we should, and if nothing else if we had billions of dollars we could just buy out Wotco and dig around in their file cabinets until we found the original design documents, which hopefully would explain the long-since-misplaced logic behind certain aspects of the system).

In short, we fix their crap all the time. They took the easy way out, and we have every right to be upset about it, but saying we can't do anything about it ourselves undermines the essence of what D&D is all about - as Rules Compendium describes it, "the Living Game."

Heh. Being bound by the terms of the OGL makes the game a lot less "living" than it could be. It's hard to evolve the system when you're contractually prohibited from refining certain aspects of it...not being in business, we can of course get away with ignoring that in practice, but it still limits what could ever be done in print form. I just find it rather ironic that they would market themselves in such a way and then have lawyers zealously protecting their IP.

Arcanist

2012-12-29, 05:24 AM

If wishes were horses, etc.
It sounds like you want an incredibly detailed world, but are balking at the amount of work required to make such a thing a reality. But there is a solution - you have a great community of D&D nerds right here willing to help with that. Make threads asking "hey, I have DMG table X, but want to insert classes X, Y and Z - can anyone help me stat these up?" Then take the responses you get, tweak them, and bam.

You know what? I'm going to actually do this and see what happens :smallsmile:

... What page is that on again? :smallredface:

JoshuaZ

2012-12-29, 08:29 AM

Huh? Druids are empowered by nature, and nature is everywhere and has nothing to do with culture. I don't really get where you're coming from on this.

Druids are specifically a variation on certain Celtic themes during the iron age. The D&D druid is based off of this in some part although it also connects with late portrayals of druids like that in The Tain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A1in_B%C3%B3_C%C3%BAailnge), and later works where the term is essentially synonymous with sorcerer or wizard, along with the late romantic emphasis on Celtic aspects that occurred in the late 1700s and the 1800s (essentially people in Britain and France talked a lot about turning to Celtic roots, at least for literary inspiration, but their ideas of what that entailed had little connection to historical fact). How much this matters depends on setting. But one can easily have druids as a nature thing or can have them connected to specific locations. The whole thing is frightfully complicated, but the Wikipedia article is worth reading (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druid).

Moving back to the demographic issue: modifying the demographic numbers is easy, and the idea of moving to emphasizing number of magic users per a city rather than number of people of each type is certainly one solution. The standard demographics don't even make much sense once one starts thinking about how people would interact. The standard pseudo-medieval setting just shouldn't be marginally stable. So yeah, modifying the demographics should be fine. Moreover, for the non-arcanists, the difference between say a rogue or a swashbuckler is so small that it shouldn't matter at all.

Tentakel

2012-12-30, 10:35 AM

Okay, here are some examples (Ur-Priest's entire post also applies but I'll try to get more specific.

* DMG treasure tables contain a comprehensive list of typical wands and scrolls and staves based on wizard, cleric, and druid spells, with randomization tables that give specific frequencies of appearance to indicate that some spells are less frequently made into items than others; no such information is available for non-core spellcasters, save perhaps in books such as Oriental Adventures, and even then it would be separate from the DMG tables.

* DMG chapter 4 gives you lists of quick NPCs you can use to come up with baseline stats for a member of any given class, with adjustments for races, but in both cases this information is core-only. If you want an Illumian Factotum in your game, you have to make him from scratch as if he was a PC; no shortcuts are provided.

* The World-Building section of chapter 5 has a way of rolling up the populations of towns, but again assumes only the core 11 classes. Likewise, the Class Roles in Society section provides information about how the various classes fit into the world, but such suggestions are harder to come by for later published classes/races/etc., and nowhere is ALL of the information from ALL of the books compiled into a comprehensive set of worldbuilding defaults.

* Unearthed Arcana offers neat variations on the classes, including the often-invoked Feat Rogue and the Cloistered Cleric, but there's no equivalent to this for the rest of the game other than whatever homebrew you can come up with (either personally or secondhand). UA might be little more than a bunch of houserules from the WOTCO staff's campaigns, but at least this means a modicum of effort has gone into keeping them balanced, consistent, and decently well-edited.

* Likewise, books such as Complete Mage and Dungeonscape are littered with ACFs to make the original classes more widely applicable. You can make your Ranger able to hunt "arcanists" rather than a creature type, or give your Paladin a "divine spirit" instead of a mount that can't follow him into the dungeon. But such adaptations aren't presented for psionic, incarnum-using, blade magic, Oriental, or other supplement classes. Thusly, the core classes have something like triple the build options available.

* And then there are prestige classes, which nearly always account only for the possibilities of building around core classes or classes found in the same book. From a game balance point of view, the Factotum class alone makes a mockery out of difficult PRC entry requirements which were intended to give that PRC cache and make it "safe" to dial up the power level, at least in theory. Find me a single Dragon Shaman-based PRC anywhere! I doubt one exists, because there were no PRCs in PBH2, and AFAIK the only other book to assume PHB2's existence is the Monster Manual 5, which posits a Hobgoblin Duskblade, and if there's another reference even in that book I missed it.

* Speaking of monsters, there's also the fact that these are usually only ever designed to have core classes or emulate the features thereof - the only monsters which have powers based on Binder vestiges are found in Tome of Battle, and the contents of various Monster Manuals weren't revised to replace Fighters with Warblades where appopriate.

Bottom line, there's zero integration across the board for nearly all supplemental material....Psionics is actually ahead of the curve, playing a major role in several books, but still not fully incorporated into every book. Whereas, for example, the Monk always is referenced wherever there's the slightest excuse, despite the optimization community's wholesale refusal to play single-class Monks. (And multiclassing is referenced infrequently at best in published materials.)

I agree. I'd love to see more interaction.

The problem is that while I'm a completist and try to own every book (I just enjoy having and reading them even not playing), there's a few players in most gaming groups that try to get away not owning anything, or even just the core groups. So if WotC makes a (hypothetical) Monster Manual 6 and it contains something like, "the book gnome's favored class is the archivist, which you can find in Heroes of Horror, and to read any further and it making sense you need to own this book", they will cry bloody murder ("those evil Wizards need more money so they make me buy more books"). So they try to make every book useable (and thus purchaseable) even by those who only own core books.

I am an extensive comic book collector and I see this all the time. I believe that if something happens to the comic book world in issue X, then issue Y should reflect this happening, even if the writers are different. But the creators want it all to be more accessible to the occasional reader (and thus sell more books), and if issue Y doesn't make sense without issue X, then a lot of potential readers would rather pass on both than buy both. So in issue Y we pretend issue X didn't exist so everyone can go and buy and enjoy issue Y. Same concept. I hate it, I like continuous story lines and not "reset buttons to make it easier for new readers". I think I should get rewarded for having purchased all the books up to issue Y and get a good connected storyline, yet they cater to the potential new reader instead - they already have my money.

Towards the end of 3.5 they actually got better at that... I remember Exemplars of Evil had a Cancer Mage and other stuff, and the Fiendish Codexes referred to the Book of Vile Darkness numerous times.

willpell

2013-01-03, 04:53 AM

It's true that too much interconnectivity makes it look like a cash grab (and increasingly resembles the bloated continuities of Marvel and Detective Comics comics), but too little is just as bad.

As it stands, without HUGE amounts of homebrew, martial adepts are this teeny-tiny corner of the world, and incarnum is this other teeny-tiny corner, and psionics is this slightly larger corner. We have Races of Stone and Races of the Wild and Races of the Dragon, but no Races of the Brain or Races of Motion Blur or Races of Stuff Made Out of Your Soul. There are no substitution levels for a Rilkan Crusader or a Thri-Kreen Totemist; there are no theurge classes which advance your Binder level and your Swordsage maneuvers, nor prestige classes specific to Killoren which give a quasi-druid spell list which includes spells from the Player's Guide to Faerun, even if there's no reason those spells couldn't have been published in Core, simply because they weren't. We have Complete Arcane and Complete Divine, but they say nothing about beguilers or archivists. We have the Affiliation system in PHB 2, but about 1% of the number of affiliations you'd need to fill out even Greyhawk exactly as it's described in the corebook, let alone any other system - we have the Sun Fane of Pelor and the Chalice of Heironeious, but there isn't an Affiliation devoted to Fharlangn which guarantees the safety of travelers, nor one for Trithereon which encourages virtue through individual liberty rather than centralized authority. We've got Devotion feats in one book and Reserve feats in another, but neither offer any benefit to an Exalted cleric with the Pleasure domain from Book of Exalted Deeds, or to someone casting Wu Jen spells that don't coincide with any of the Reserve Feat categories (I haven't studied the Wu Jen much, but at a guess I'd speculate that their Wood-element spells don't work very well with Reserve Feats designed either for wizards or for druids, since they're not druids and most wizards don't have many plant-related spells).

The way they just dabble in stuff here and there without following through makes the setting seem to have been artificially partitioned off. What they should do instead is provide modularity...a variety of favored class choices depending on what books are in the campaign, or two-sentence descriptions of a wide variety of NPCs of various optional races which you can take or leave as preferred, rather than a single fully-statted out character who is Yet Another Dwarf Paladin But With This Latest Awesome Thing Instead Of The Previous One. They shouldn't make it mandatory to buy all the books - but as it stands, you have very little incentive to do it even if you can, because they're all pieces of separate puzzles that don't assemble into much of anything.

Starbuck_II

2013-01-03, 09:17 AM

We've got Devotion feats in one book and Reserve feats in another, but neither offer any benefit to an Exalted cleric with the Pleasure domain from Book of Exalted Deeds, or to someone casting Wu Jen spells that don't coincide with any of the Reserve Feat categories (I haven't studied the Wu Jen much, but at a guess I'd speculate that their Wood-element spells don't work very well with Reserve Feats designed either for wizards or for druids, since they're not druids and most wizards don't have many plant-related spells).

Objection! You got that Wrong!
All domains are accounted for, even future unwritten ones, in the Devotion category in Complete Champion. They mention if you don't know which fits your diety, take one that is closest.

For Pleasure?
I'd guess Animal Domain to quote a song, "You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals, so lets do it like they do on the Discovery Channel".

Maybe healing Devotion? Quote another song "Sexual healing is good for me"

willpell

2013-01-03, 09:23 AM

Objection! You got that Wrong!
All domains are accounted for, even future unwritten ones, in the Devotion category in Complete Champion.

Oh that so utterly doesn't count.

For Pleasure?
I'd guess Animal Domain

Animal domain lets you sprout poisonous fangs. It's not even "pick an animal" with the option to restrict the choices - you take the Devotion and you get all four of the animals that go with it, of which maybe two are vaguely sexual in subtext, and certainly not Exalted.

Maybe healing Devotion? Quote another song "Sexual healing is good for me"

That one almost works, but you still miss the point. If Death and Destruction get their own special devotions that do completely different things, then why shouldn't Pain have one equally unique, despite being in the Book of Vile Darkness. No, just because they "patched" the book with an offhanded mention that there were other domains out there does not mean the problem I've noted doesn't exist.

Gnorman

2013-01-03, 12:44 PM

So brew up new Devotion feats.

willpell

2013-01-04, 03:25 AM

So brew up new Devotion feats.

I may have to, but the point is that I *shouldn't* have to. Anyone can homebrew anything, but then what's the point of buying books? The official source for the real rules of the game ought to have made sure that they were sufficiently complete. I'm not interested in any homebrew that doesn't measure up to the quality of official material (at least; even that is often insufficient), which sets a high bar for my own efforts and sharply limits my ability to rely on the work of others.

Gnorman

2013-01-04, 01:24 PM

The point is to fill the gaps in the pre-existing system. The designers of 3.5 sure weren't perfect (honestly, the bar for "as good as official material" is pretty low), and I don't think you're going to get anywhere holding them accountable for the work they didn't do. The only option for getting what you want is homebrew at this point (Pathfinder, by the way, is "homebrew"), so you have two choices: embrace homebrew, or embrace the deficiencies in your system. I'd favor the former - there is plenty of work out there that is just as good, if not better, than WotC's work, and you're sharply limiting your possibilities if you refuse to consider it.

So, to reiterate:

1. Use WotC's printed material for what you can.
2. Use pre-existing homebrew to fill in the gaps.
3. If unhappy with 2, ask the active and welcoming homebrew community to help you whip up a few things.
4. If unhappy with 3, do it yourself.

And about the bar being so high for your own efforts? Everybody starts somewhere. Very few of them start at "good enough." If you want to get better at homebrewing, then brew.

EDIT: Here's a bunch of devotion feats to use as a springboard (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=196229).

willpell

2013-01-04, 01:32 PM

They also aren't working on 3.5 anymore

Technically not quite true - they are publishing errataed collector editions of some of the 3.5 line, and if those prove to be strong sellers, it's conceivable we might actually see new material in the future. So it's more like they're not working on 3.5 at the moment, and perhaps for the forseeable future, but 'anymore" may be too strong a word.

And about the bar being so high for your own efforts? Everybody starts somewhere. Very few of them start at "good enough." If you want to get better at homebrewing, then brew.

Unfortunately the inhibitor here is the same thing that keeps me from accomplishing a lot of other things...an unwillingness to suck for a long time in the hopes of gradually improving. I'm a pessimist and a perfectionist; early and deeply flawed works have a tendency to haunt me.

Psyren

2013-01-04, 04:16 PM

I thought the Crystal Moon was just an example of a campaign development, rather than something that was actually assumed to have happened in the default setting.

The way XPH words it indicates that it happened, at least in Greyhawk. And Zuoken/Ilsensine are definitely Greyhawk deities whether or not they are featured in all campaigns. (Ilsensine has been part of the game since long before 3.5.)

I think he has a point, actually...while we know that there are things about the CR system that are screwy, we can't be sure how many of them are actually Wizards having built the system on bad assumptions, versus having built the system on good assumptions which they didn't properly communicate, versus having built a good system which the community doesn't actually play as intended for various reasons.

But we don't need to know all of that. All we have to know is the stated purpose of the CR system, which is mainly to say "An appropriately mixed party of X adventurers at level Y should be able to handle Z challenge, where Z is the CR number."

WotC did their main job by coming up with this formula. From there, the game itself gives us the values for the variables - we know how powerful certain attributes are and therefore have an idea of where the CR should be. Ask anybody on these boards and they'll tell you that shadows, or That Damn Crab, have lower CR than they should. We know this by looking at their stats and comparing them to the capabilities of a party at that level. The CR system gives us a starting point but nobody should be following it slavishly.

Obviously they were not successful in making the entire system this well-oiled a machine, but I don't think they should be faulted for having tried, and I don't think we should dismiss their efforts until we understand exactly what they did and why.

I'm not faulting them at all, I'm just saying that stopping where they left off and throwing up our hands is wasteful. Ur-Priest should know this better than anyone given his knowledge of the monsters they've created over the years, and we can apply that same methodology to the demographics system.

Heh. Being bound by the terms of the OGL makes the game a lot less "living" than it could be. It's hard to evolve the system when you're contractually prohibited from refining certain aspects of it...not being in business, we can of course get away with ignoring that in practice, but it still limits what could ever be done in print form. I just find it rather ironic that they would market themselves in such a way and then have lawyers zealously protecting their IP.

Oh believe me, I agree (and this is one reason I'll never switch from PF unless 5e is fully open as well.) But we're not publishing anything here - there are tons of ways around this restriction, just look at community projects like the BG ToB errata. It may not be official, but it's widely known, easy to understand and perfectly legal.

And besides, it's 2013, print is overrated.

So, to reiterate:

1. Use WotC's printed material for what you can.
2. Use pre-existing homebrew to fill in the gaps.
3. If unhappy with 2, ask the active and welcoming homebrew community to help you whip up a few things.
4. If unhappy with 3, do it yourself.

Indeed, I see no problem with any of this.

willpell

2013-01-05, 01:02 AM

(Ilsensine has been part of the game since long before 3.5.)

Why someone thought Mind Flayers would want anything to do with godhood or god-worship I'll never know. It strikes me as overwhelmingly off-theme.

Ask anybody on these boards and they'll tell you that shadows, or That Damn Crab, have lower CR than they should.

I've also heard it said that Mind Flayers are under-CR'ed. Is there a more comprehensive index of "fixed" CRs somewhere?

Oh believe me, I agree (and this is one reason I'll never switch from PF unless 5e is fully open as well.)

Which it won't be, because Wotco is trying to make a buck and they got burned pretty bad by 3E in a strictly financial sense, having essentially manufactured a competitor in PF. They won't ever do that again unless someone comes up with a nigh-miraculous way to guarantee them absurd buckets of money from it.

But we're not publishing anything here - there are tons of ways around this restriction

Doesn't every webpage on the Internet count as a publication?

just look at community projects like the BG ToB errata.

BG?

And besides, it's 2013, print is overrated.

Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I think there's just something about the physical weight of a book, and the guarantee it won't vanish during a power outage, that no electronic product can ever hope to compete with. I love the Internet, but it strikes me as ephemeral, like skywriting...you can take a "photograph" by saving the webpage, but even then there's a certain fragility to such records, while books are built to last.

Though that's sorta moot to what I was saying, as the point of me wanting official works is not so much that they're physical, as that they've been peer-reviewed by the definitional system masters (at least in theory). Monte Cook and Skip Williams and so forth almost certainly know things about their own rules (or at least did a few years ago, they may have forgotten by now) which they forgot to ever write down, so I'll always feel as though anything The Team didn't write themselves is missing a few puzzle-pieces which would make all the difference in the world.

Arcanist

2013-01-05, 01:08 AM

And besides, it's 2013, print is overrated.

I highly disagree with this. The feeling of a book in your hand just feels so calming to me... I also enjoy reading by candle light if I have the option to do so (which explains why I require glasses).

Regardless, the classics will always remain timeless and if one day, someone walks up to me and tells me that "Bowties are not cool" so be it. I will continue to wear my Bowtie, because Bowties are cool.

Psyren

2013-01-05, 12:41 PM

Doesn't every webpage on the Internet count as a publication?

Not in the "we'll sue" sense, which is really all that matters in this context.

It's not really the medium that matters here - it's the presentation. If I quote the exact text of a bunch of feats while pointing out what's wrong with them I'm obviously treading in dangerous territory. But if I tell you "You know feat X on page Y of book Z? Replace the third sentence with {correction} and add {clarification} to the end of it" then I've done nothing wrong.

BG?

Brilliantgameologists (but don't go there just yet, I think it's down.)

Though that's sorta moot to what I was saying, as the point of me wanting official works is not so much that they're physical, as that they've been peer-reviewed by the definitional system masters (at least in theory). Monte Cook and Skip Williams and so forth almost certainly know things about their own rules (or at least did a few years ago, they may have forgotten by now) which they forgot to ever write down, so I'll always feel as though anything The Team didn't write themselves is missing a few puzzle-pieces which would make all the difference in the world.

Can't you just... you know... evaluate it yourself?

Gnorman's steps work great here. And sure, you might make a mistake along the way. So did "The Team." But they got right back up on the horse and kept going. Ari Marmell is a brilliant designer, but he admitted flubbing the Shadowcaster - yet figured out how to fix it. Mearls flubbed the Hexblade, acknowledged it, and did better.

I highly disagree with this. The feeling of a book in your hand just feels so calming to me... I also enjoy reading by candle light if I have the option to do so (which explains why I require glasses).

I was specifically referring to errata/homebrew/community fixes. The big disadvantage to print in this case is that it's static - so if you release one round of fixes and playtesting uncovers further issues, you end up with two versions of your errata, or more.

Print is heavily disadvantaged in this arena because it's much more likely to lead to confusion. If your fix is electronic, you can keep tweaking and updating it until it's as near perfect as you need it to be, and everyone who's interested will have one-stop-shopping to obtain it.

willpell

2013-01-06, 03:48 AM

Can't you just... you know... evaluate it yourself?

That's what I'm doing, but I'm not very good at it, and it's an insanely slow process. I haven't mastered the trick of glancing at a monster's statblock and instantly knowing how dangerous it is, or knowing exactly what all the most important Wizard 4th-level spells so that I can tell what a 7th-level wizard ought to be capable of. I have to laboriously go through the entire process step-by-step, comparing one spell to one monster special ability, and often run a sample combat which takes like 4 hours just to figure out whether one spell seems overpowered by my standards.

Add in the fact that I don't trust probability, and that I can only benefit so much from asking the community given that they are generally much more tolerant of high optimization than I am, and the whole thing is just a pretty severe bind. I would really rather if I were able to just rely on the books, though obviously that's not quite possible either...still, the books seem to be written closer to my preferred level of (un)optimization, given that they tend to assume wizards are blasters and clerics are healbots, and write rules to be very restrictive and cut off as many of the nastier exploits as the writers could think of (though unfortunately also quashing a lot of creative ideas that weren't broken, and still leaving many loopholes.

In my wildest dreams there would be a highly adjustable and editable online D&D thing which would generate maps, track initiative order and status conditions, move figures around, show spell ranges and terrain effects, etc. etc. etc. I would happily pay for it, even if it were fairly primitive. So far the closest thing I've found is Tortoise's EZPBP, but it's far from living up to its name...decent in theory, and I can't complain since it's free, but far from my ideal solution.

I was specifically referring to errata/homebrew/community fixes. The big disadvantage to print in this case is that it's static - so if you release one round of fixes and playtesting uncovers further issues, you end up with two versions of your errata, or more.

Indeed. This is why I am increasingly in love with wikis. But I share Arcanist's attitude on books...I'm still hoping that someday we'll have something similar to a Star Trek PADD (or to a Kindle/Nook/Ipad, except minus the insanely huge pricetag), where you have a physical book which sits on a shelf but it's wirelessly networked to the writer's home computer and he can update it, and potentially you can use it to send him suggestions or veto his updates if you preferred the original version...sort of like a narrowly topical Wikipedia in a box.

Print is heavily disadvantaged in this arena because it's much more likely to lead to confusion. If your fix is electronic, you can keep tweaking and updating it until it's as near perfect as you need it to be, and everyone who's interested will have one-stop-shopping to obtain it.

The problem there is that there can be stealth-updates which are difficult to keep track of unless the program is hardcoded to record older versions and update timestamps and so forth. With books, you can look at the publication date and know whether it's obsoleted by a newer source. But on the web, the date itself can be edited to produce deceptive results, assuming the data doesn't just disappear altogether.