My subsystem ideas [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Morphic tide

2017-04-12, 01:15 PM

Subsystems. They work best when you have more than one class to play with them. They come in many degrees of complexity and strength. Sometimes, they run on existing rules being applied in different ways. Sometimes, they are entirely new. Sometimes, they are just a boring rehash of an existing setup.

I have some ideas for subsystems. I'll start with just Truespeech, because I think that 3.X skill tricks that cost skill points are a neat way to work skillcasting that anyone can grab, but Experts can become PC worthy off of.

Fully skill-based, partially fluff-wise grammar-based, Truesnaming(3.X/Pathfinder): The idea here is to render the entirety of Truenaming into a single skill, so any character can grab it by just dumping skill points into it. Having it as a class skill is needed to make it your character's "thing," what the character focuses on, but anyone can have basic stuff grabbed with a small investment of skill points.

IIRC, skill tricks in 3.X require you to spend 2 skill points to get them. Maybe that was Pathfinder, but the point is that you can use Skill Points to buy stuff you do with skillcasting. This is important because the idea is to turn everything into part of the skill, including your selection of things you can do in the first place. This makes it so that you dump immense amounts of skill points into getting far with it, but part of the point of the rendition is that you are building the effects with the Truespeech words, with the ability to get extremely precise by stacking targeting conditions at the cost of screwing the DC.

Edit(replaced large chunk of section on April 19th, 2017): Okay, after some discussion, the ideas have changed. Namely, rather than adding Words reducing the resulting DC, the check result is the number of "points" you get to power the stuff you are doing with that check. Additionally, there'd be a cap on how high a check can actually be at given levels.

The basic outline version of the check cap is something like HD*(2+2/3)+30. What this means is that your maximum check result is two and two-thirds your hit dice plus thirty. The reason for this is that the dice roll is 1-20, so you have a flat 20 cap from the roll. Then, you have Intelligence, which caps at a +4 modifier for standard level 1 characters. Then, you have skill ranks, which max out at HD+3 for a class skill, and Intelligence increases, which I ballparked as one extra point of modifier every three levels. Then I doubled everything except starting Intelligence Modifier and the dice itself. This resulted in the equation of (HD+3)*2+(HD/3)*2+4+20, which collapses down to the above equation that has HD as the sole variable. Which is important because HD is one of the hardest things to pump in the game.

Now, for the way it all works, let's use an ad-hoc Word pair: Ray and Fire. Let's say that Ray lets us make a ranged touch attack with a range increment of 5 feet for every two "points" we put into it, and Fire gives us 1d6 Fire damage for every four "points" we put into it, all at level 1. The maximum check result for one hit dice is 33 points. Well, actually the math says 32 and one third, but we round that up. At any rate, assuming we have a +13 modifier and rolled a nat 20, we can achieve a maximum damage of 8d6, but that leaves us with half a square for the range increment because the range is actually counted out as per-point because this is a thought experiment to ad-hoc balance. Which means that each square is a -2 to the accuracy. If we trade one damage die, we get 7d6 damage and a 12.5 ft range increment, getting a -2 penalty for every five squares away an enemy is.

This is a lot of damage for an at-will at level one, and is a respectable range. But you have to get a total check result of 33 to have it. You get a maximum of +4 for skill ranks and +4 for intelligence unless you have racial modifiers. Meaning you still need another +5 from somewhere. And that only gets you to the cap when you roll a nat 20. So the cap is doing it's job of being not-easy to reach and isn't scaling nearly well enough for the bare basics to keep up, as it only goes up by two and two-thirds each HD. Which isn't enough for a damage die per level on this example version of Fire. So your power has to come from the combinations that turn stuff crazy to rely on it.

But there's a barrier to that: There's limits to how many Words can be used in a particular action. One Word for Swift or Immediate Actions, Two Words for Move Actions and three Words for Standard Actions. Full-round gets six Words and two checks for how many points you get, letting you get twice the cap. Really ad-hoc, I need to do a lot of number checking to make sure it all works out. Half the reason for the numbers posted above was to check the cap's interactions with ad-hoc Words that I came up with for the sake of example, and I changed the numbers to make it less crazy. For the sake of further example, if you keep the 12.5 range increment, your average damage from the above word-pair, assuming 4 skill ranks and 18 Intelligence, will be a grand total of 11.375.

Another limiter is that I'll probably be including some of the limitations that the Truenamer got hit with to further restrain the power of the at-will nature of it. Like the one that increased the DC for Truenamer being turned into a check-lowering thing that encourages focusing on self-buffs and encounter enders, stuff that you ought to use fairly infrequently. This makes it so that the above average damage drops by 0.875 per use per point that the penalty gives. Which will probably be a -2 penalty per use because the number of effects using single points will likely be rather small.

Spirit Magic: This idea is complicated. It's sort of an overarching setup for the 4e Primal power source, but doesn't rely on the nature of 4e mechanics, or anything D&D related for that matter. There's four main parts of the idea. "Spirit lists" restricting them by class/character type might be in order, due to different classes needing different abilities and having different themes. Granted, one can always use the idea behind subdomains to have subset picks of Spirits, acting like archetypes/AFCs/variants for the Spirit in question that you can tie the lists to to keep the right type of abilities given to each class.

The most basic is the simple number changes and passive/at-will abilities, mostly focused on melee/gish fighting on the typical ones, with some being focused on more rare things like ranged combat or straight magic bonuses(largely because most systems don't feel like magic users need supportive options from lists normally reserved for gishes and melee characters). This is where your "always on" stuff and stuff for Totem Barbarian type classes/abilities ends up in, along with the staple abilities used by various characters.

Then you have the "casting" setup of it, which could potentially vary from Spirit to Spirit. Like, in 3.PF, there might be some Spirits granting outright Vancian casting with a specified slot and spell progression system, while others might be giving you stuff like Spheres of Magic or Tome of Battle. Some classes can hot swap Spirits, but have restrictions to keep them from "lol infinite spells." Basically, you have this part specifically for casters, and have it set up as such, including Gish-compatible variations fitting the theme of the Spirit.

The third thing is the actual, actively-there Spirit. It's basically a fixed-progression Cohort or always-relevant Animal Companion, getting abilities that tie into the themes of the Spirit. Like a Wolf Spirit that gives piles of team buffs or bonuses for basic tactics mechanics like Flanking. Or a Hawk that has bundles of scouting abilities. Or a Kitsune using lots of trickery-based abilities.

The fourth is a list of abilities that come about when dismissed in a certain way, as in keyworded dismissal, like how some spells have effects when Dispelled or Dismissed, but not any other way of them running out. Maybe you can have two or three types of it with one ability for each type of dismissal, but the point is that this is disabling your Spirit-granted abilities to do something rather big. Maybe the abilities available from doing this are set up as one being relevant for each type of character, maybe they are built to all go with one type of character. But they are specifically abilities balanced under the assumption that there's a period you are vulnerable during, either by being build to negate the vulnerability in some way or use it as a downside to pay off the restriction.

Now, the big thing that needs to be addressed is that all the abilities have a progression covering all the levels, but the classes/access methods have different scaling values for the things. Some are half-progression, some are delayed or offset, most don't have all the progressions, but in general the idea is that the abilities have a series of numbers describing how you are interacting with them. For the expending/dismissing abilities, you might have several different abilities to do it, each scaling differently based on how long you lack the Spirit for. A class/available build might have several ways to access the passive/at-will abilities based on the usability of them, like always-on classes getting slower progression than the ones who have limited use access.

Spirit stat blocks can end up massively confusing, depending on formatting and how condensed you make them. For instance, it can be as simple as four 1-20 tables for each Spirit describing each set of abilities, with text for the non-standardized abilities and fluff for the things. Or you can have them be page space devouring monsters with every single ability, no matter how generic, getting a name, fluff, exact rules information and so on, no abbreviations in sight.

Grod_The_Giant

2017-04-12, 02:39 PM

Morphic tide

2017-04-12, 06:34 PM

It's an interesting idea, but I don't think skill check based DCs are ever a good idea, regardless of whether or not you invested a lot to get at them. I'd rather see something more like "Make a DC X skill check to use this Utterance. The save DC is 8+1/2 ranks+Int mod, with a +1 bonus for every 5 points you beat the DC."

Well, the thing is that the idea is build-an-Utterance. Like, you are getting parts of utterances as Skill Tricks, then use those parts to actually do things. And the point of having the DC be determined by the skill check is to remove the problem if passing a skill check to do a thing in the first place. A bad roll will botch the save DC, but for save-for-partial effects or effects that dictate strength by the roll, this just gimps their power. They still happen.

Like, you have Skill Tricks giving you effects, ranges, durations, areas of effect and basically everything needed to make Utterances. You end up with exponential possibilities once you get started.

The fluff point is that it's freeform Truespeech. Your skill tricks are words that are used to make Utterances, and you get to use these words however you wish within the limits of the system. Words representing more dangerous abilities need a higher Truespeech skill to get, or are parts of chains.

Yes, having DCs and effects scale with your skill checks leads to issues. But those issues are easier to manage than making the skill check dictate if your ability did anything at all. One way to mitigate DC bloat is to have your overall Truespeech bonus capped by hit dice, creating an optimization cap that cannot be passed backed into the mechanics.

Now, I'll be typing up the outline of another subsystem idea in the OP.

nonsi

2017-04-12, 10:02 PM

Well, the thing is that the idea is build-an-Utterance. Like, you are getting parts of utterances as Skill Tricks, then use those parts to actually do things. And the point of having the DC be determined by the skill check is to remove the problem if passing a skill check to do a thing in the first place. A bad roll will botch the save DC, but for save-for-partial effects or effects that dictate strength by the roll, this just gimps their power. They still happen.

Sounds interesting. Would require a solid implementation.

Like, you have Skill Tricks giving you effects, ranges, durations, areas of effect and basically everything needed to make Utterances. You end up with exponential possibilities once you get started.

Kinda reminds me of Illumians. I'm definitely no expert on Illumians, but IIRC they never got them right. Do you have something concrete formulated already, even as a rough draft?

The fluff point is that it's freeform Truespeech. Your skill tricks are words that are used to make Utterances, and you get to use these words however you wish within the limits of the system. Words representing more dangerous abilities need a higher Truespeech skill to get, or are parts of chains.

Yes, having DCs and effects scale with your skill checks leads to issues. But those issues are easier to manage than making the skill check dictate if your ability did anything at all. One way to mitigate DC bloat is to have your overall Truespeech bonus capped by hit dice, creating an optimization cap that cannot be passed backed into the mechanics.

While this concept is a fascinating teaser, it's hard for me to imagine how this would not further perpetuate the symptom of "melees don't get nice things", because they'd most likely not have it as class skill and they never have enough skill points to put it into actual practical use w/o severely crippling the basic functionality they require out of their class skills.
How do you plan on overcoming this obstacle?

Morphic tide

2017-04-12, 11:23 PM

Kinda reminds me of Illumians. I'm definitely no expert on Illumians, but IIRC they never got them right. Do you have something concrete formulated already, even as a rough draft?

Not really, in terms of balance, but in terms of numbers involved I have the basic mechanics thought out and can whip up a draft fairly quickly. The basic idea for a balance point is to balance it around t4 for cross-class and t3-t2 for class skill, assuming fully maxed investment of skill points. Generally, it ends up being a slightly-delayed access to lots of stuff from the at-will-ish classes, like Warlock and DFA Invocations, ToB Maneuvers and some Incarnum stuff, then adding in badly-needed abilities when actually needed, like Flight at the levels Flying enemies have good excuse to show up. Level 7 or 9, basically. For the cross-class progression, it'd be getting things at half-pace, but the most needed things, like Flight, would be set to the levels you need them at for the cross-class ranks.

Essentially, it's an excuse to have every character be able to access utter necessities on-time, regardless of class, by paying skill points instead of feats or something more valuable. It leaves quite a lot of characters more skill starved, but better to be skill starved than to lack access to Flight and endless healing by level 10 when the DM is expecting you to have it. Also an excuse to make Truenamer good by having their nightmarish system be bolstered by interaction with a less-sucky version using the same skill ranks.

Actually, working out how to make it interact with Truenamer would be a pretty big thing to work out... Because the intent is to be a thing the Truespeech skill does, not replacing the Truenamer class entirely, so having these skill tricks interact with Truenamer Utterances would have some odd implications... I mean, just being able to override the targeting of an Utterance to be able to set it to an AoE is a big deal. As is being able to launch an Utterance for every action, based on that action. Walking? No thanks, I use Truespeech to just up and teleport 30 feet on my move action.

While this concept is a fascinating teaser, it's hard for me to imagine how this would not further perpetuate the symptom of "melees don't get nice things", because they'd most likely not have it as class skill and they never have enough skill points to put it into actual practical use w/o severely crippling the basic functionality they require out of their class skills.
How do you plan on overcoming this obstacle?

Well, a lot of stuff ends up more relevant to melees by default. Melees tend to have better use of simple buffs, like DR, Energy Resistance, Fast Healing and so on, and can get away with self buffing alone much better. Sure, casters can rely on their spells a lot more, and have their often-useless Move Action to blow on True Speech and can use it for free Swift Action things, but melees get all the same access with it as a cross-class skill.

Also, I'd probably make stuff specifically to assist melees by replacing some skill sinks, like Tumble, Swim and Jump checks. Maybe do something about Spot and Listen checks, although that's too liable to free up space for casters to dive into it. Basic ability score bonuses handle a little of it, although scaling there is a pile of weirdness. I expect to use a lot of -10s and bigger reductions in the draft, if I get around to making it, to wrangle the average check down to good math...

Everyone gets the same potential access. Rogues probably get the most out of it due to getting enough skill points to just kinda deal with it without obliterating their combat ability due to losing key skills, but all the melees can set aside 4-10 skill points to get some nice things that make them work out a lot better. Like 1d20+Int+Truespeech skill HP on a Swift Action or Move Action. Law of Sequence/Resistance would not be a bad thing to leave in, given that sort of result...

As for not having it as a class skill, only Truenamer and homebrew end up with it as a class skill printed as such, and as such the main casters turn away from the sink because they have spells to bust the game apart. Wizards are really the only ones who could ever afford to use it, out of the core full casters, and it largely ends up being something to do with actions they don't have spells for.

GnomeWorks

2017-04-13, 12:41 AM

nonsi

2017-04-13, 01:41 AM

For the cross-class progression, it'd be getting things at half-pace, but the most needed things, like Flight, would be set to the levels you need them at for the cross-class ranks.

I think it's perfectly ok if "mundanes" struggle for a while vs. hard-to-reach targets, otherwise what's the point of introducing hard-to-reach targets into the game to begin with?

Actually, working out how to make it interact with Truenamer would be a pretty big thing to work out... Because the intent is to be a thing the Truespeech skill does, not replacing the Truenamer class entirely, so having these skill tricks interact with Truenamer Utterances would have some odd implications...

This means that You'd have to:
1. reconcile them.
2. beef up the Truenamer with some more class features, to justify its existence beyond "Yay, I'm the only dude around with Truenaming as class skill"... because, for one reason, there's the Factotum to take into account (I'm sure that if I put my back to it, I can find some more justifications).

Well, a lot of stuff ends up more relevant to melees by default. Melees tend to have better use of simple buffs, like DR, Energy Resistance, Fast Healing and so on, and can get away with self buffing alone much better.

The problem I see here is the skill-tricks currency. Melees just don't have enough to spare, even if you give them 4 skill points per level. This leaves them one-dimenssional. Again.
OTOH, if the Truenamer gets them for free, then it's a solid step in justifying its existence.
As far as the Fighter goes, with this approach, 4 skill points per level seem too little while 6 seems too many... unless you categorise different Truenaming effects to different classes (melees, arcane, divine, psionic, incarnum... etc), with Truenamer having access to all of them (but then, what about multiclassing? Now your level in each class category also hase to be taken into account).
If you manage to reconcile all the above, then you might really have something here worth an effort at fleshing out.

P.s. there is a possibility that the "Lexicon of..." mechanic might get in your way. Don't hold it sacred if it stands in the way of finding an elegant solution, because in the end, it's just a different distribution to effects that are very similar (and sometimes identical) to spells.

nonsi

2017-04-13, 01:53 AM

OP, listen to Grod. Grod is smart: skill-based casting systems in a class-based system, like d20, don't work. An hour spent perusing various "fixes" for Truespeech should demonstrate this fact, given that they all go in different directions and none of them really solve the core problem(s) present in the original system.

Just... no. Any kind of "build-a-spell" system is either going to be woefully incomplete, terribly balanced, suffer from "mother-may-I" with the DM, and/or mechanically collapse under its own weight.

As trunaming mechanics are presented in ToM, you're probably right. The thing is that in the realm of homebrewing, nothing's really sacred.
Maybe MT can find a tweak to Truenaming that will work. I'm not saying it's trivial or easy. Hell, it might require a revolutionary approach, but in the name of preserving the theme it might be worth it to at least try.

Morphic tide

2017-04-13, 10:26 AM

As trunaming mechanics are presented in ToM, you're probably right. The thing is that in the realm of homebrewing, nothing's really sacred.
Maybe MT can find a tweak to Truenaming that will work. I'm not saying it's trivial or easy. Hell, it might require a revolutionary approach, but in the name of preserving the theme it might be worth it to at least try.

Well, the main idea I have for making the two setups merge is mostly to just allow for stacking of the two systems. Like, Truenamer's utterances can be altered by the build-an-Utterance setup, with the crunch being that these changes lower the check result rather than raise the DC. Mechanicaly identical, but not subject to the same potential mitigation. DC lowering effects are mechanically possible, after all.

As for the idea of class-locking things, I could have a setup for reducing some requirements if you meet other requirements, based on relative interest in the effect. Like, getting melee buffs requiring Strength and BAB to be past a certain level to get a reduced Truespeech rank requirement.

What do you people think of the Spirit Magic idea?

noob

2017-04-13, 11:12 AM

The spirit magic stuff looks mostly like using prestige to attract a spell caster or a marshal.
Unless I interpreted it wrong.

Morphic tide

2017-04-13, 11:36 AM

The spirit magic stuff looks mostly like using prestige to attract a spell caster or a marshal.
Unless I interpreted it wrong.

It can be. Or it can be a set of base classes of it's own. Or both. I'm more asking for comments on the mechanic ideas. And a big thing to note is that very few Spirits would work together with the actual primary casters due to their casting largely being a separate thing. Granted, the Spirits can grant casting as a character of X class of Y level as a thing under one of the ability entries, but most wouldn't be attractive to casters because of lack of stacking progression or restrictions.

Edit: For example, there might be a Spirit that grants casting as a Sorcerer of the level of the score used to describe the casting strength, but it'd have a fixed Spells Known that tie you to the theme of the Spirit and override Sorcerer levels, stacking actual Sorcerer levels onto the score instead of stacking the score onto the Sorcerer levels, thus locking down your Spells Known.

It's a subsystem. Very few of them inherently cooperate with other subsystems and often have classes to themselves. I can think of a rather large number of possible classes for it based on differences in focus, access, quirks of use, possibly using extra subsystems and more.

Like, I can actually think of half a dozen subsystems made by mixing other subsystems. I might type out some of them here.

noob

2017-04-13, 12:11 PM

You have not really given mechanics for spirit casting.
If you did give more than just a loose impression of what it could possibly be I would be able to understand more about it.

Morphic tide

2017-04-13, 01:06 PM

You have not really given mechanics for spirit casting.
If you did give more than just a loose impression of what it could possibly be I would be able to understand more about it.

The mechanics for the casting depend on the Spirit. The thing is to have the Spirits be a set of four 1-20 progressions, with those progressions being marked as the category of ability they are rather than any single setup the progressions must follow. The subsystem is the Spirits, what the Spirits do is ridiculously varied.

Like, a Spirit might well end up using four different subsystems all at once, if you are being entirely insane with it. Potentially even more. The subsystem of Spirits is, as I said, an overarching setup for stuff like 4e's Primal power source. They can be used to describe Binders, some types of Clerics and Druids, Totem Barbarians, basically any class that can be described as using power from a spirit of some kind can use these numbers and choose a Spirit in some way.

noob

2017-04-13, 01:26 PM

Here there is the mechanics of 0 spirits and if the mechanics of spirits depends on the instance this means that I have 0 information on the mechanics of spirits.
Also you never said how you could pick a spirit and the ways to get the spirits(like you could possibly get it as an acf or as a feat or yet though another way or just get one because you get one but you never specified any way to get one)
So it means that as long as you have not developed anything about that system I can not guess how it exactly works for all I know it is just fluff which have not yet been put in a system and which already existed.
(there is already spirit fluff based base classes like spirit shaman)
If you post a spirit I might like it.

Knaight

2017-04-13, 03:28 PM

OP, listen to Grod. Grod is smart: skill-based casting systems in a class-based system, like d20, don't work. An hour spent perusing various "fixes" for Truespeech should demonstrate this fact, given that they all go in different directions and none of them really solve the core problem(s) present in the original system.

I wouldn't go that far. It doesn't work in 3.x specifically for any number of reasons (most of which have to do with the ridiculous number of ways in the system to crank skills to stupid high levels and the yawning chasm between the optimization floor and ceiling), but it worked okay in SAGA and could easily work in other class based games.

Morphic tide

2017-04-13, 04:01 PM

I wouldn't go that far. It doesn't work in 3.x specifically for any number of reasons (most of which have to do with the ridiculous number of ways in the system to crank skills to stupid high levels and the yawning chasm between the optimization floor and ceiling), but it worked okay in SAGA and could easily work in other class based games.

My solution to that is to simply put a cap based on hit dice for what you can end up with on a check and limit the number of parts by your direct skill ranks and action taken. Yes, you can still get arbitrarily powerful effects, but you need to blow lots of time on them. I mean, this leads to the Metabreath silliness, as in the trick where you cover most of a planet in near-instant death, but it ends up scaling linearly with time rather than exponentially.

Like, skillcasting is easy to keep from being entirely, fundamentally broken. You just have to put a limit on how high the check can go in some way. Heck, I'm actually tempted to work out more than one skillcasting setup and actually type them out to make general skillcasting classes work out as something you want to use.

noob

2017-04-13, 04:16 PM

Morphic tide

2017-04-13, 05:18 PM

A cap would mean that an optimizing player would reach that cap quickly then go find other stuff to do.
Meanwhile a normal player would have an hard time reaching that cap or if it is easy then most of the builds that do not use systems strictly superior to truenaming(like someone wanting to do an atomic annihilation super-pounce barbarian) would then probably reach the max of truenaming with ease as a secondary thing for the extra utility.
If it is easy then the intent was to have everybody use truenaming as a source of bonus stuff to do then it is okay but it will mean that characters of tier lower than 3 using truenaming would basically be better than the ones who do not do that.
If it is not really easy(in the sense that by just maxing int and the skill is not enough) then it will make a system hard to use for beginners.
So I think that finding the fine line for the cap and the difficulty to reach that cap will not be easy.

The point of the cap is to stop you from going t1 off of just one form of skillcasting, not to stop you from having decent optimization. You'd be fairly strong with just +6 Int and maxed skill ranks for the class skill, while going cross-class mostly limits your options rather than your power due to optimizing. Halved skill ranks is not as big a deal as having a cap that leaves the optimization ceiling at about one and a half times the obvious build. "Obvious" being that of a skill-rank-doubling magic item, in the sense of having the standard +X competence bonus be equal to your skill ranks in Truespeach, and +4-7 from Intelligence. 18 Int plus 0-6 from Enhancement Bonus items. And then adding 20 for the dice. So at level one, the cap for this setup of limiting is 4+4+4+20, making your maximum check result 32. Yes, this penalizes deep optimization, but it keeps things grounded.

Actually, phrasing the cap as a limit based on fairly constant numbers plugged into an equation makes it work in Epic quite well, as it never stops scaling upwards.

noob

2017-04-13, 05:29 PM

Morphic tide

2017-04-13, 05:47 PM

So the cap is based on skill rank.
So that means that if I stack all the maximum rank increasing stuff I can have higher maximum truespeech checks.
It is nice: it gives a new kind of thing to optimize.
I guess I now have to find ways to increase max skill ranks.
For that there is somewhere a feat that can add 1 I believe.
Then there is the trick of training while continuously having bards singing that song which gave you temporary hd.
It is hard to get more than a few scraps.

No, skill cap is based on hit dice and calculated based on the typical maximum skill rank of a class skill. You have (HD+3)*2+X+20, with X being whatever is used to describe the accounting for Intelligence, probably 4 plus some fraction of HD, then a multiplier of some sort to make room for deeper optimization than just following the "obvious" curve.

Your hit dice boosting would actually work out, if the temp HD count for normal HD based effects, but it'd be the only way to increase the cap. You wouldn't have to train for the boost, either, you'd just get the cap boosted right there, opening room for above-cap optimization to work on. This means that Bards are among the better cross-class skill Truespeach users, because they can bump their cap. A Truespeach optimizing party would love their Bard's limit breaking.

nonsi

2017-04-13, 10:49 PM

A cap would mean that an optimizing player would reach that cap quickly then go find other stuff to do.
Meanwhile a normal player would have an hard time reaching that cap or if it is easy then most of the builds that do not use systems strictly superior to truenaming(like someone wanting to do an atomic annihilation super-pounce barbarian) would then probably reach the max of truenaming with ease as a secondary thing for the extra utility.
If it is easy then the intent was to have everybody use truenaming as a source of bonus stuff to do then it is okay but it will mean that characters of tier lower than 3 using truenaming would basically be better than the ones who do not do that.
If it is not really easy(in the sense that by just maxing int and the skill is not enough) then it will make a system hard to use for beginners.
So I think that finding the fine line for the cap and the difficulty to reach that cap will not be easy.

This further validates my suggestion from above.

categorize different Truenaming effects to different classes (melees, arcane, divine, psionic, incarnum... etc), with Truenamer having access to all of them (but then, what about multiclassing? Now your level in each class category also has to be taken into account).

If this experiment has a prayer of turning up successful, then the only way to go is to scale the cost (and reverse-scale the potency) according to tire - to the point where Truenaming would hardly benefit T1s and T2s better than using plain skills.

Don't ask me about implementation, I have no idea, but that has to be the agenda.

Morphic tide

2017-04-14, 12:12 AM

If this experiment has a prayer of turning up successful, then the only way to go is to scale the cost (and reverse-scale the potency) according to tire - to the point where Truenaming would hardly benefit T1s and T2s better than using plain skills.

Don't ask me about implementation, I have no idea, but that has to be the agenda.

I'd largely do it as requirement reduction. Like, if you meet certain requirements, you get other requirements reduced and maybe have the cost of use on the check go down. For instance, having the physical stat bonus things have a lower requirement if you already have stuff often used by that stat which melees tend to grab without thinking. Like having Strength 16 and Power Attack reducing the requirements and check change of the Strength boost option.

And a quick way to make the weapon classes considerably better at using it is to have one of the targeting modes be temporary enhancement, making your attacks with a weapon apply the effect for the duration. One skill trick, almost every use for melees covered in a way that lets them focus fire better than casters could manage with it. Heck, it could actually make ranged weapons worth using, if done right.

Like, you can bring up problems and I can make ideas to at least reduce them. Having every attack get 2d6 Force damage for three rounds is considerably better than a 10 ft area dealing 2d6 Force damage each round to those inside it for 3 rounds. For instance, the enemy has a harder time running away from a melee character than they have leaving a 10 ft area. The melee can Charge them for trying to run. The area... sits there. The area triggers once per round on each target. The melee gets it off as many times as they have attacks per round.

Applying the same situation to an Archer has the advantage of using the ranged weapon's range rather than lowering your check result for range. A Longbow loses 1 point of accuracy for every 100 ft. So one can easily have the range increment of the Truespeech be 50 ft per point and Longbows still win out massively. More realistically, you'd be getting 10-25 ft "range increments" on the Truespeech. And you also have iteratives on ranged weapons to boost damage per round.

Mobility options benefit everyone, but are most relevant for melees who need to be adjacent to enemies as much as possible. 20-30 ft teleport as a Reaction/Immediate Action at level 15 is a lot better for a melee than a caster, for example. If only because the caster has better mobility options...

GnomeWorks

2017-04-15, 10:00 AM

As trunaming mechanics are presented in ToM, you're probably right. The thing is that in the realm of homebrewing, nothing's really sacred.

...yes, if someone says they're going to try to fix Truenaming in d20, I generally assume it's going to be based off of what's in ToM, because otherwise why would you say that you're starting with Truenaming.

Maybe MT can find a tweak to Truenaming that will work. I'm not saying it's trivial or easy. Hell, it might require a revolutionary approach, but in the name of preserving the theme it might be worth it to at least try.

A mere "tweak" will not save it. The entire mechanical concept behind Truenaming has to be removed and replaced with something sensible, because the chassis it has right now - which has been "tweaked" by dozens, if not hundreds, of others - has demonstrated that it cannot function properly.

Morphic tide

2017-04-15, 12:34 PM

...yes, if someone says they're going to try to fix Truenaming in d20, I generally assume it's going to be based off of what's in ToM, because otherwise why would you say that you're starting with Truenaming.

A mere "tweak" will not save it. The entire mechanical concept behind Truenaming has to be removed and replaced with something sensible, because the chassis it has right now - which has been "tweaked" by dozens, if not hundreds, of others - has demonstrated that it cannot function properly.

Well, the real issue is that you can have the mechanics work, but when you screw up on a roll it feels utterly horrible because you just completely wasted your action. I started with the idea of Words having Power, the core idea of Truenaming, and kinda thought about other setups that could describe it. For the sake of being somewhat interesting, I decided to make it completely skill-based, with no need of class features to use it. I mean, look at Skyrim. Anyone can use Thu'um, but they have to put assloads of work into it. The Dragonborn are special with Thu'um because they can use it without dedicating a large chunk of their life to it, not because they have exclusive tricks with it.

And having it be "build-an-Utterance" also ties into it. Why can't a Truenamer use Truespeech to make Utterances from scratch? "Cold" and "Cone" can be a two-word Utterance to replicate Cone of Cold. Replacing "Cold" with "Force" lets you swap the energy type. Simply saying "Force" gets you a ball of Force that's too short-lived to toss, so it's a Touch Attack.

And because Truespeech is an undefined language, words in the language can corral effects to properly control what PCs can do. "Move" in Truespeech can be very specific in meaning, making it apply only to movement speed, with a separate word of "haul" for telekinesis effects can exist that only does telekinesis. Possibly including being able to move people around, at the cost of them getting a save to deny the Truespeech. Similarly, "teleport" can be a single word effect for teleportation, including all the variables you use like the all-important accuracy, with a "casting" time representing how you specify the location and the range-words adding to the range, rather than specifying it.

Some of the Laws of Truespeech are actually good limiters on endlessly spamming effects to stomp everything, and makes it so you still want to pump as high as you can go with the check to be able to spam as long as possible. Getting a -2 to the check each time you've used an effect-word in the last day/hour/minute makes it so that just spamming the stuff every action of every round won't get you far unless you are far above the check cap. Which supports weapon users of all kinds, who apply the effects to their weapons and then play normally as their type of weapon user.

Seerow

2017-04-15, 02:33 PM

Morphic tide

2017-04-15, 03:29 PM

Starting with Truenaming the Mechanic is a bad idea. But a skill based system focused on neat effects you can build on the fly isn't terrible.

I'm imagining something closer to psionics, where you have a base ability (say you grab one per skill rank invested). The base abilities always work, and a skill check that grants points enabling you to add augments you customize on the fly to this base ability. You might have some augments that are universal (similar to metamagics) while others are specific to the particular ability you are augmenting. You could even toss in some skill tricks so a character can opt to invest more skill points than normal into the sub system, these skill tricks could be the source of the 'universal' augments.
Ah, the idea is actually just about that. You have basic abilities that always work, but their magnitude is determined by how much you get on the check, with DCs being based on The Check as well. It's a skill. You make rolls with skills. You can take penalties to the check to add stuff like longer range, durations, AoE and so on.

You spend a skill trick on each part of an ability. One skill trick gives you a damage type. A second gives you a range effect. A third gives you a way to have damage over time. A fourth can be a second damage type to use with the existing range and DoT, another range function for the damage type and DoT, or a second type of DoT to apply to the range and damage.

Although I agree on automatic abilities. One per skill rank is too many, given the build-an-Utterance setup, but it makes it usable for low skill point classes. And makes the proper skillcasters able to come to the t2 party, if not the t1 party.

Of course, completely trash the whole concept of "using this ability more often makes it harder" and make it basically a flexible at-will magic system at its core. Possibly have something where you can spend some time doing research and make a hard DC skill check to learn the true name of a specific creature, you can then tie in some benefits for using a creature's true name (things like increase save DCs against them, or increase effectiveness of buffs, etc)

The reduction with uses is basically a matter of "Yes, it's at will, no, you can't use it every round for an hour and have it work just as well." It opens up room for effects a bit better than the existing at-will systems, especially because it's based on skill checks which introduce an element of randomness. And for deeper-optimization, it gives a reason to pump as high as possible. If you're 30 effective ranks above the cap, that's 5 or 10 uses before you start having the dice matter.

It's there to stop you from having effectively Fast Healing 30 because you are spending your otherwise-unusable Swift Action to heal every round. Because this is Truespeech. It's based on talking. More complicated things take longer to say, so they take bigger actions.

Like, you can do one or two Words on a Swift Action, two or three on a Move Action and three or four on a Standard Action, with Full Round being one more than the sum of the three actions and Rounds chanting giving one more than that per round. So two rounds of chanting gives you room for a dozen Words or so. To balance that, one can go with your idea of the check giving you points to distribute between the potentially-massive variety of abilities let loose, with it remaining usable by giving a check per round/action.

As for classes... Well, I don't like the idea of skillcasting having classes locked to one form of it. Leave the fixed skillcasting type to the AFCs, PRCs and replacement levels. My ideal Skillcaster classes are the Fighter-Mage-Thief triumvirate, with thematic basic skills and a varying number of chooseable class skills. The Fighter-type would be heavily based on PF's Magus, making skill checks as they are in melee, being useful without skillcasting because they can make Diplomacy, Intimidate, Tumble and Jump checks mid-attack to get lots of mileage out of their 4 or 6+Int skill ranks per level. The Mage-type would be one bracket lower in direct skill ranks, but get extra bonuses to skills that counteract the lesser skill rank number and also have more class skills to pick freely. The Thief-type would get the most chooseable class skills and be a hardened skill monkey, with 8+Int skill ranks and all the skillmonkey skills and needed class features as class skills.

Of course, when you have enough types of skillcasting Expert becomes the master of it, thanks to having 10 class skills they can choose. Unless you make a PC version that is an even greater skillmonkey.

nonsi

2017-04-16, 03:25 AM

.
@MT: What are you saying, that with or without Truenaming as skill, different effects will be attributed to different skills? Does this also mean that you've decided to remove the Truenamer as a class from the equation?

I'm not sure if the "everyone's a spellcaster" approach is good for the game. That's why I suggested Truenaming for anyone but the Truenamer being class-category associated - so that warriors would still feel like warriors and skillmonkeys would still feel like skillmonkeys, and so that casters would still remain confined in their theme w/o stepping on each others' toes.

Truenaming, as a concept/theme, should enrich characters and allow them to perform better withing their realm of expertise, not blur the lines between the classes to the point where some of them are hardly distinguishable from one another.
I don't want brawlers to be tossing around fireballs or burglars binding demons to do their bidding.

Morphic tide

2017-04-16, 04:16 AM

.
@MT: What are you saying, that with or without Truenaming as skill, different effects will be attributed to different skills? Does this also mean that you've decided to remove the Truenamer as a class from the equation?
No, the idea there is having semi-generic skillcaster classes to cover all skillcasting. Including Diplomancy, which might as well by (Ex) Enchantment given what it can do. Truenamer'd have it's own exceptions/special case to describe interaction with the new skillcasting setup.

I'm not sure if the "everyone's a spellcaster" approach is good for the game. That's why I suggested Truenaming for anyone but the Truenamer being class-category associated - so that warriors would still feel like warriors and skillmonkeys would still feel like skillmonkeys, and so that casters would still remain confined in their theme w/o stepping on each others' toes.
Well, doing stuff by category just isn't possible. At best, you can stack requirements to make certain things work better for some classes. Otherwise, you have to define every single class as part of one or more of the categories. That's why I prefer having the mechanics support retained themes. Fighters will largely end up feeling like Pathfinder Magus, because their swords are coated with whatever effect they need at the moment(likely as many save-or-sucks as they have), replicating much of the sword-delivered magic feel of the Pathfinder Magus.

But this ties into the point of Truespeech: Anyone can use it for anything they want. Some people are liable to have applicable skills in other things that make getting certain Words easier to learn, but anyone can use any Truespeech. Except Utterances from Truenamer, which get a bundle of buffs from being able to stack the skillcasting version on top of them. Truenamer is underwhelming as-is. But suddenly have them be able to make those Utterances hit everything in an AoE, with the effect attempting to re-apply itself each round within said AoE, and they get quite a bit better. Especially with more, better Metamagic equivalents that they can get just by being a decent Truenamer, keeping their skill ranks maxed out.

Truenaming, as a concept/theme, should enrich characters and allow them to perform better withing their realm of expertise, not blur the lines between the classes to the point where some of them are hardly distinguishable from one another.
I don't want brawlers to be tossing around fireballs or burglars binding demons to do their bidding.
I did mention lowering prerequisites by meeting other, thematically-related, prerequisites. Like, having the Healing effect get lowered needed skill ranks to attain it if you can cast 2nd level Divine spells and/or have enough ranks in the Heal skill. And no matter how much Truespeech is involved, a Fighter is still better at swording a guy than a Wizard. And the Wizard is likely going to mono-focus on the parts of Truespeech that fills in the gaps in their spells, like getting decent Blaster abilities with Evocation as a banned school, or getting good self healing. Meanwhile, the Fighter will probably be getting the Truespeech stuff that makes them better at all aspects of swording people, from reaching the people to sword them to making the swording hurt a lot to making it a lot harder to kill them before they can sword people. All aspects of swording can be enhanced by Truespeech.

Burglars binding demons to do their bidding is a default assumption of high Int, high Cha Rogues, by the way. Diplomancy is a safe assumption, for them. Lets them get away with looting absolutely everything easier. Talking demons to work with them is kinda a safe bet, in that situation. And Truespeech would definitively not include Demon Summoning outside Truenamer: Degenerate loops are far too easy to pull when you give an opening for any form of Outsider summoning that doesn't blanket ban all the actually good picks.

noob

2017-04-16, 04:28 AM

I hope you do great content.

Morphic tide

2017-04-16, 05:34 AM

I hope you do great content.

My main obstacle to actually working out the subsystems in full is that I've wound up wanting to balance my creations at least not entirely horribly. Like, I want to figure out how to arrange it in a way that doesn't make the game even more broken. Skillcasting can get away with quite a bit because it can be made to seriously compete with other actions, thereby locking down a character's choices for actually doing things, and everyone has a limited capacity to work with it.

Maybe I should actually get started on typing out the alternate Truespeech subsystem setup I have in mind... I mean, we've extended the outline to basic mechanics to work with and a design goal of "martials get their nice things a lot quicker/easier than casters." I'd need a good 30 Words for the thing to have any real choice at high levels, but I can probably work out a good number of near-identical effects based on just swapping a word or two in the effect. Like, you can have 6 save-or-suck effects to work with very easy, just by targeting the six Ability Scores, and a good pile more from damage types. Honestly, the biggest issue is likely going to be figuring out words for the Words. Because figuring out a word for each "basic" effect in most of D&D is going to be time consuming and take a lot of checking to make sure it's worked out correctly.

Of course, a deep-Epic Word will be Wish: Sure, you need 60 skill ranks to qualify for it, but it lets you Wish at will. With a pile of restrictions based on check result. But you can Wish at-will, several times per round! Unfortunately, you are probably at the point that the Wizard has been doing the same thing for a dozen levels already. Still, instant magic items! Yet the Artificer's probably gotten a city made entirely out of Artifacts at this point... Mostly Warforged production facilities, admittedly(the Pain Engines won't make XP alone!), but still a city made entirely out of Artifacts. And probably a Staff of Infinite Wishes or five. Because you are probably above level 55.

noob

2017-04-16, 06:26 AM

Because you are probably above level 55.

54+2(bard)+3(skill)+1(that feat who increase cap yes you will qualify and not be able to use it and it is silly)
Well you can qualify earlier but not use it earlier.(but you can just gain tons of hd through some tricks so in a level 15 team if awaken loop works you get wish at will some days later)

Morphic tide

2017-04-16, 06:38 AM

54+2(bard)+3(skill)+1(that feat who increase cap yes you will qualify and not be able to use it and it is silly)
Well you can qualify earlier but not use it earlier.(but you can just gain tons of hd through some tricks so in a level 15 team if awaken loop works you get wish at will some days later)

At which point you are going so far into TO that you might as well be omnipotent without infinite Wishes.

noob

2017-04-16, 07:35 AM

But before beast of xvim (http://www.realmshelps.net/monsters/templates/beastxvim.shtml)(as many hd as you can get by feeding template(you could eat a whole lot of horses poly-morphed to humans(or just regular commoners) for gaining a whole lot of hd)) was a solid T3 class now it becomes a T1 class.

Morphic tide

2017-04-16, 07:43 AM

But before beast of xwim(as many hd as you can get by feeding template(you could eat a whole lot of horses for gaining a whole lot of hd)) was a solid T3 class now it becomes a T1 class.

Through grotesque cheesemongering that likely makes for t1 setups without skillcasting.

And any skillcasting setup gets broken with infinite hit dice. Kinda hard to work around that.

Also, that's a template, not a class.

noob

2017-04-16, 07:52 AM

JBPuffin

2017-04-16, 07:59 PM

It is not cheese it is 100% clear with that template there is no hoops or loops it is just straight have that template then kill and eat all the inhabitants of a village and have tons of hd.
It is unbalanced and not cheesed.
Touch of Hate can allow someone to create one beast of xvim every 10 days so there might be a lot of them in faerun.

Right...killing and eating the inhabitants of a village without DM intervention in order to gain massive numbers of hit dice...to be fair, one should assume humans form large groups, but assuming you'll get that far is rather, well, presumptuous.

Skillcasting is tricky, no lie, but I feel like it's not impossible to implement...except I think that making it an actual free-to-everyone skill is a serious problem with the idea, for exactly the reasons provided about hit dice and such. Having classes which advance some sort of "Truespeech" check bonus makes a good deal of sense - a form of caster check, except that you roll them whenever you use a...Word, I guess, and attempt to beat some DC.

Morphic tide

2017-04-16, 08:57 PM

Having classes which advance some sort of "Truespeech" check bonus makes a good deal of sense - a form of caster check, except that you roll them whenever you use a...Word, I guess, and attempt to beat some DC.

That's a big problem. Because if you don't meet the DC, you waste an action. Imagine if every spell a Wizard cast had a 5% chance of automatic failure. That's one of the things that makes Truenamer horrible to play, because you can just randomly end up doing nothing.

Instead, make the effect strength rely on the roll. You know, like a good three paragraphs throughout the thread went over.

Seriously, what you suggested is exactly what the first party Truespeech does. And it's an utter pile of bull**** because it feels absolutely horrible to lose your turn's usefulness completely because of a skill check.

And I don't like having dedicated skillcasters. Why make it a skill anyone can grab if you make classes that do only that one thing? I mean, PRCs that merge it with something else are great, but why make multiple classes for each type of skillcaster when you can make one set and a few feats/AFCs for focusing?

As for Skillcasting being broken by hit dice stacking... Welcome to D&D 3.5, homebrew rarely concerns itself with being broken by degenerate bull****. Because the sheer quantity of degenerate bull**** makes it extremely hard to account for it all. People tend to kindly ignores stuff like Pun Pun when homebrewing.

If you are going to make a skill to describe a power set, then it ought to be made with the assumption that anyone can pick it up. If you want it to be locked down to a small set of classes, don't make it a skill, make it a subsystem like Incarnum.

Knaight

2017-04-16, 10:44 PM

That's a big problem. Because if you don't meet the DC, you waste an action. Imagine if every spell a Wizard cast had a 5% chance of automatic failure. That's one of the things that makes Truenamer horrible to play, because you can just randomly end up doing nothing.

Similarly, imagine if every time a martial character tried to attack something they had a 5% chance of missing, minimum.

nonsi

2017-04-17, 03:12 AM

Seriously, what you suggested is exactly what the first party Truespeech does. And it's an utter pile of bull**** because it feels absolutely horrible to lose your turn's usefulness completely because of a skill check.

Here's an idea:
- First attempt: Auto success.
- Second attempt: Normal skill check.
- Third attempt: Skill check at -5.
- Fourth attempt: Skill check at -10.
- Fifth attempt: Skill check at -20.
- Additional attempts: Auto-fail

Just a thought.

Morphic tide

2017-04-17, 07:31 AM

Similarly, imagine if every time a martial character tried to attack something they had a 5% chance of missing, minimum.

My issue with the melee AC system is that physical armor is not treated any differently from dodging. Like, armor is supposed to stop you from being harmed when you are hit. Why does it make it less likely for you to be hit, then do exactly nothing to the damage taken when you are hit? For high-Dex characters, there's literally no reason at all to wear armor that would reduce their Dexterity bonus. They are actively disincentivized from doing so, in fact, because of Touch AC.

As for critical fails, I think they need to have a much harder time happening. Like making it so that you automatically hit if your attack bonus is 10 higher than the target AC, which also helps with making the whole "massive army of mooks" situation go through. Granted, this isn't really the place to complain about basic mechanics of the d20 system.

Here's an idea:
- First attempt: Auto success.
- Second attempt: Normal skill check.
- Third attempt: Skill check at -5.
- Fourth attempt: Skill check at -10.
- Fifth attempt: Skill check at -20.
- Additional attempts: Auto-fail

Just a thought.

Alternatively, regular skill check for the first, with the check dictating the effect strength, and a stacking -1 or -2 for each use after the first, making each use slightly weaker than the last on average. Because, again, having your ability do a grand total of nothing for a turn because the dice said so is quite a horrible feeling. Having nearly-continuous mediocrity is a lot better for gameplay than unreliably, temporarily, being on-par with the game breakers as of several levels ago. So I'll have the continuous mediocrity over the unreliable, behind-the-party, power if I actually get around to typing out this version of Truespeech.

Cluedrew

2017-04-17, 12:14 PM

My issue with the melee AC system is that physical armor is not treated any differently from dodging. Like, armor is supposed to stop you from being harmed when you are hit. Why does it make it less likely for you to be hit, then do exactly nothing to the damage taken when you are hit?Oh, I know this one. It a simplification of the idea that you can use the armour to block the blow. So if you are attacked with a dagger and it hits the center of the steal chest plate, you aren't going to get hurt. However if the dagger strikes you uncovered head, than you take full damage.

There might also be a rule of averages there, its not perfect, but that is the explanation I have heard for the system on several different occasions.

Deepbluediver

2017-04-17, 01:35 PM

I've always wondered- why does Truenaming have to be a separate skill? I get that at the time they were trying something new, but why not make your truenaming checks based on existing skills instead? That way it both spreads out the optimization plus it doesn't require you to dump all your resources into one skill that is useful for literally nothing else.

For example, to affect an Outsider or Aberation, the check is based on Knowledge(the planes). To affect an Animal or Plant creature, it's based on Knowledge(nature). Utterances that affect items would be based on Appraise or Craft or Disable Device, make an Utterance that restores HP based on Heal. etc etc etc

My issue with the melee AC system is that physical armor is not treated any differently from dodging. Like, armor is supposed to stop you from being harmed when you are hit. Why does it make it less likely for you to be hit, then do exactly nothing to the damage taken when you are hit? For high-Dex characters, there's literally no reason at all to wear armor that would reduce their Dexterity bonus. They are actively disincentivized from doing so, in fact, because of Touch AC.
I think this is getting off-topic, but Unearthed Arcana had a variant where armor exchanged some of it's AC for in exchange for Damage Reduction. It's generally not used for both the reasons you pointed out and that the DR was to expensive in terms of AC lost, but a system that treated armor that way might be more "realistic" if that's what your going for. There's a link to just such a system in my extended signature if you want to check it out.

Morphic tide

2017-04-17, 04:32 PM

I've always wondered- why does Truenaming have to be a separate skill? I get that at the time they were trying something new, but why not make your truenaming checks based on existing skills instead? That way it both spreads out the optimization plus it doesn't require you to dump all your resources into one skill that is useful for literally nothing else.

For example, to affect an Outsider or Aberation, the check is based on Knowledge(the planes). To affect an Animal or Plant creature, it's based on Knowledge(nature). Utterances that affect items would be based on Appraise or Craft or Disable Device, make an Utterance that restores HP based on Heal. etc etc etc

That could be worked in as a sort of skill synergy setup(of which I'd throw in Linguistics as a synergistic skill of Truespeech because it's only a +2 bonus, requires 5 skill ranks in Linguistics and it's Truespeech) or, as I've mentioned before on this thread, as a form of prerequisite reduction.

It's a good idea for a hard skillcaster setup, but doesn't fully fit with Truespeech, as Knowledge checks tend to be more a thing for finding True Names than affecting a particular thing. Granted, for stuff like Healing or certain damage types, knowing the anatomy of the target can be a rather good reason for a bonus.

Like, the point of having Truespeech be its own thing here is to make it so that you have a thing to focus on. Having it spread all over the place leaves the classes that need the boosts planned for martials have a much harder time getting it. And finding a skill for every single effect sounds... silly. Like, do I use Knowledge(Arcana) or Spellcraft for counterspell effects? What skill relates to attaching Force energy to my sword?

nonsi

2017-04-17, 04:48 PM

Alternatively, regular skill check for the first, with the check dictating the effect strength, and a stacking -1 or -2 for each use after the first, making each use slightly weaker than the last on average.

This approach requires some degree of symmetry between the spell that, AFAIK, will forever remain beyond your reach.
- Some spells have DCs associated with them
- Some have SR
- Some have CL
- Some have attack rolles
- Some are all or nothing
- Some some have AoEs
- Some care nothing about any of the above.

To nail this one, you'd have to go over each and every spell - individually... and still there would be little symmetry between the spells where Truenaming is concerned.
Seems to me like attacking things from your suggested angle is an impossible task.

Morphic tide

2017-04-17, 05:12 PM

This approach requires some degree of symmetry between the spell that, AFAIK, will forever remain beyond your reach.
- Some spells have DCs associated with them
- Some have SR
- Some have CL
- Some have attack rolles
- Some are all or nothing
- Some some have AoEs
- Some care nothing about any of the above.

To nail this one, you'd have to go over each and every spell - individually... and still there would be little symmetry between the spells where Truenaming is concerned.
Seems to me like attacking things from your suggested angle is an impossible task.

Why would I want to copy every spell in existence when I have repeatedly focused on effects being put together for effects? Like, I have stated the intent of having it be build-an-Utterance several times. Attack rolls? Range-Word option of Ranged Touch Attack with range increment, and Maximum Range by extension of an upper limit of Range Increments, determined by "points" put into it. AoE? Range-Words that define an AoE. SR? Does SR apply to supernatural and extraordinary abilities? DCs and all or nothing? They usually overlap, but in both cases, you put points into it. The check defines how many points you have to pump into a thing.

I'd be taking it effect by effect, not spell by spell. Do I have to edit the first post to get all these things in it, or are you just going to ignore the idea I was starting from some more?

Deepbluediver

2017-04-17, 07:17 PM

That could be worked in as a sort of skill synergy setup(of which I'd throw in Linguistics as a synergistic skill of Truespeech because it's only a +2 bonus, requires 5 skill ranks in Linguistics and it's Truespeech) or, as I've mentioned before on this thread, as a form of prerequisite reduction.
Sorry if I missed something- I read the first handful of posts and then skimmed the rest.

Edit: Linking Linguistics to Truename is actually a really great idea; I'll have to keep that in mind in the future.

It's a good idea for a hard skillcaster setup, but doesn't fully fit with Truespeech, as Knowledge checks tend to be more a thing for finding True Names than affecting a particular thing. Granted, for stuff like Healing or certain damage types, knowing the anatomy of the target can be a rather good reason for a bonus.
It doesn't have to be a Knowledge check all the time, those were just some examples thrown out there. IMO the "Find Truename" ability should be something more like research anyway, where the main issue is time . And then have it enhance the effect if you know your target's truename or something like that. If you can spare the time to sit around for a few weeks and figure out all your allie's truenames, that's useful, but it shouldn't be crippling if you can't, and make it more difficult but not impossible to figure out the truename of an enemy, too.

Like, the point of having Truespeech be its own thing here is to make it so that you have a thing to focus on. Having it spread all over the place leaves the classes that need the boosts planned for martials have a much harder time getting it.
Ok, I don't understand this. No one, AFAIK, has EVER liked Truenaming as it was RAW. If you take the thematic idea and discard the rest, what are the best mechanical versions of that you can then come up with? That's sort of what I'm getting at- Truenaming as presented is a very interesting idea lorewise, and a steaming pile of horse-excrement mechanically. So jettison the latter and start from the ground up.
And I really don't get what you're saying about martial classes. Frankly I think an (effectively) casting class with max level skill points (8 or 10 per level or whatever) could be an interesting twist and full a niche that is currently pretty lonely.

And finding a skill for every single effect sounds... silly. Like, do I use Knowledge(Arcana) or Spellcraft for counterspell effects? What skill relates to attaching Force energy to my sword?
If you're just looking to tweak existing mechanics, then in all honestly most the "Lexicon of the Crafted Tool" and "Lexicon of the Perfected Map" could just be Crafting (skill) and Knowledge(Geography), respectively. The only one that requires any degree of effort is the "Lexicon of the Evolving Mind". And as we've already stated, the Truenaming RAW is a load of monkey-ballocks.

How about rather than trying to fit new mechanics to existing ones, we rebuilt Truenaming from the other direction. Assuming you are varying your skills, look at the skill-list and then come up with Utterances that fit each skill. That way the Truenamer has great versatility based on what their player wants to focus on. Off the top of my head I'd think you could easily make them a buffer/healer, rogue-like sneaky trap-finder, or party face. Are you telling me you don't see any potential there at all?

Morphic tide

2017-04-17, 08:45 PM

Ok, I don't understand this. No one, AFAIK, has EVER liked Truenaming as it was RAW. If you take the thematic idea and discard the rest, what are the best mechanical versions of that you can then come up with? That's sort of what I'm getting at- Truenaming as presented is a very interesting idea lorewise, and a steaming pile of horse-excrement mechanically. So jettison the latter and start from the ground up.
And I really don't get what you're saying about martial classes. Frankly I think an (effectively) casting class with max level skill points (8 or 10 per level or whatever) could be an interesting twist and full a niche that is currently pretty lonely.

I find the Laws to include some important limiters. It's timing and check DCs that screw it over. There's fixes for most of the problems without removing the Laws. Like having the DC penalty of repeated Truespeech use decay at a combat-relevant time scale. Removing one "stack" per round doesn't seem like there's much point to it, but if you are focusing on it, you are probably using it multiple times per round. Which leads to actually having a penalty. One that won't cripple you if you can bother holding back when it becomes problematic.

If you're just looking to tweak existing mechanics, then in all honestly most the "Lexicon of the Crafted Tool" and "Lexicon of the Perfected Map" could just be Crafting (skill) and Knowledge(Geography), respectively. The only one that requires any degree of effort is the "Lexicon of the Evolving Mind". And as we've already stated, the Truenaming RAW is a load of monkey-ballocks.

Less "tweek," more "replace." And again, "build-an-Utterance." The idea I have is to have it be a list of words you pick as you gain skill in Truenaming, then you use the words to make actual effects. Some words would be utterly useless without others, largely being the ones that define how you are using the usual words. Range defaults to Touch, with other ranges, including AoE, being Words you have to get.

How about rather than trying to fit new mechanics to existing ones, we rebuilt Truenaming from the other direction. Assuming you are varying your skills, look at the skill-list and then come up with Utterances that fit each skill. That way the Truenamer has great versatility based on what their player wants to focus on. Off the top of my head I'd think you could easily make them a buffer/healer, rogue-like sneaky trap-finder, or party face. Are you telling me you don't see any potential there at all?

The only existing mechanic I plan on using is the skill the Truenamer keys off of. No mechanics beyond the skill's name and the fact that it's an Intelligence-based skill. I do have interest in having it tie into Truenamer proper, and if I do I'll probably make some non-sucky Utterances and an AFC or three to fix some of the problems or at least make it have abilities worth using, but it won't be based on Truenamer beyond fluff.

Refluffing of Truenamer Utterances might be something about them being more about the deep, long-forgotten syntax and grammar rules of Truespeech, or made-up words that tap into the cause of the reality-warping effects of Truespeech. And then make Utterances that actually do something with this by copying effects that any single component of would be overwhelmingly broken as mere Words, or nigh-impossible to make function as Words. Like Undead creation. Because being able to make dozens of HD worth of corpses come up as Wights each round in hundreds of feet is something to be avoided.

At any rate, the idea of having some things scale off multiple skills is a neat one. Having investment in other skills be a requirement to access some abilities is not. A person shouldn't be prevented from figuring out the Truenaming word for Healing because they know nothing about healing mundanely. Bonuses for doing so, I'm fine with. Locking a Fighter out of healing themself because they don't have the skillpoints to spare on Heal isn't.

Deepbluediver

2017-04-17, 10:45 PM

I find the Laws to include some important limiters. It's timing and check DCs that screw it over. There's fixes for most of the problems without removing the Laws. Like having the DC penalty of repeated Truespeech use decay at a combat-relevant time scale. Removing one "stack" per round doesn't seem like there's much point to it, but if you are focusing on it, you are probably using it multiple times per round. Which leads to actually having a penalty. One that won't cripple you if you can bother holding back when it becomes problematic.
I don't dislike the laws in theory, either. The problem with them was, as I understand it, that you had to either optimize out the wazzoo or be useless. If you could fix the balancing issue, then everything should work out a lot better.

Regarding the scale, having the penalty for repetition stack up faster but also fall off based on a per round or per minute could get you what you're looking for. The main issue though, is that this basically gives the Truenamer access to virtually all of their abilities for every single fight. There's nothing inherently wrong with making them more like a warlock, but just keep it in mind as you design the class.

Less "tweek," more "replace." And again, "build-an-Utterance." The idea I have is to have it be a list of words you pick as you gain skill in Truenaming, then you use the words to make actual effects. Some words would be utterly useless without others, largely being the ones that define how you are using the usual words. Range defaults to Touch, with other ranges, including AoE, being Words you have to get.
If you actually manage that then I'll have to congratulate you, because you'll be the fist person I've ever seen actually succeed. That sort of system has been talked about a lot, but I've yet to see one that actually works decently IMO. I get the feeling that it's just not the right fit for D&D. Or vice versa.

At any rate, the idea of having some things scale off multiple skills is a neat one.
I'll be honest- I don't really see the point of that. If your entire class boils down to exactly one number, then everything anyone playing that class will do will be focused on boosting that number as high as they can. It's the same issue the SAD casting classes had in the first place. Yes you can pick different utterances I guess, but any Truenamer will be able to learn any new utterance at any point and be equally good with it as any other equally optimized Truenamer.
Mixing up the skills required to use certain utterances essentially increases customization by limiting what you can do with any one build. Now, you CAN make a class too limited, but with the right balance of skill points and selection of utterances, you shouldn't have that problem.

A person shouldn't be prevented from figuring out the Truenaming word for Healing because they know nothing about healing mundanely.
You can do whatever you want with your class, but honestly linking the two feels pretty natural to me.

Locking a Fighter out of healing themself because they don't have the skillpoints to spare on Heal isn't.
And I don't get what this has to do with Truenaming at all, unless you're talking about multiclass characters.

Morphic tide

2017-04-18, 07:05 AM

I'll be honest- I don't really see the point of that. If your entire class boils down to exactly one number, then everything anyone playing that class will do will be focused on boosting that number as high as they can. It's the same issue the SAD casting classes had in the first place. Yes you can pick different utterances I guess, but any Truenamer will be able to learn any new utterance at any point and be equally good with it as any other equally optimized Truenamer.

Truenamer Utterances? Yes, because those are left unchanged, maybe given some badly needed editing to make them less horridly sucky as a side thing. The build-an-Utterance setup? Either they dump a vast number of skill ranks into it through skill trick based getting of extra Words, or they won't have all available things.

As for the min-maxing, it'll be present. But it'll be capped in practical use because of giving a cap on checks based on HD. Which leaves Bards the best cross-class users of the skill due to being able to pump HD. And Monks'll probably by screwed.

Mixing up the skills required to use certain utterances essentially increases customization by limiting what you can do with any one build. Now, you CAN make a class too limited, but with the right balance of skill points and selection of utterances, you shouldn't have that problem.

It's the "required" part I have issues with. Because this isn't about fixing Truenamer, this is about having a thing for at-will abilities that anyone can get and be useful with.

You can do whatever you want with your class, but honestly linking the two feels pretty natural to me.

It does for me, too. But locking out rather important abilities when half the point of the setup is to give everyone such things is rather counterproductive. So mixed scaling is the way I'll be going. When I have the time to type it out...

And I don't get what this has to do with Truenaming at all, unless you're talking about multiclass characters.

...Did you fail to notice the part where anyone can grab the skill it runs on? Because that's one of the big points. Anyone can get it. Anyone can get cross-class ranks to use it. Hell, anyone with the spare resources can get maxed out rolls.

Deepbluediver

2017-04-18, 08:56 AM

It's the "required" part I have issues with. Because this isn't about fixing Truenamer, this is about having a thing for at-will abilities that anyone can get and be useful with.
...
...Did you fail to notice the part where anyone can grab the skill it runs on? Because that's one of the big points. Anyone can get it. Anyone can get cross-class ranks to use it. Hell, anyone with the spare resources can get maxed out rolls.
Yes I believe I did- I apologize for that. I think there are better way to handle this sort of thing, but that's just my opinion. If you think Truenaming can give melee classes the boost they need, then I'll be very interested to see what you eventually come up with.

Morphic tide

2017-04-19, 11:38 AM

Hey people, I edited the first post to have the ideas that the discussion brought up replacing a bunch of words, with an example to demonstrate the actual numbers. Do you guys find the example numbers to be a good balancing point?

A note to make is that the check cap at level 20 is 83. So I have to somehow have setups taking 83 points that are relevant against CR 20 enemies. Do mind that this is less than triple the cap of level 1. With the example Words, this gives 20d6 damage and a range increment of 7.5 feet. On a single target Touch attack. So the higher-end Words need to get crazy, or I need to change the cap equation. Changing the equation to HD*3+30 gets us 90 points at level 20, which isn't nearly enough for relevant damage against decently tough enemies for CR 20.

For example, Ancient Brass Dragons (listed as CR 20, but Dragons tend to be... badly CRed, from what I've heard) have an average HP of 387, while the average damage of 20d6 is only 70, taking 6 hits for a kill. And it gives abysmal accuracy against anything decently far away. Ignore the Fire immunity, we can swap to Cold for no penalty to the check because the basic Elemental-related damage types are utterly interchangeable in every way beyond being different Words and damage types. Which does mean that you can split between the damage types if wanted, but it's not raising the damage dealt in any way.

noob

2017-04-19, 12:05 PM

Morphic tide

2017-04-19, 01:19 PM

I think that at level 20 you should input 32d6 at short range without too much difficulty(chuck a polar ray and a quickened ardent ray) but you could have the quicken utterance metamagic just add 20 to the check(remove 5d6 so you can deal 35d6) and then you could deal that minimal short range damage.
If you want to do damage through a skill instead of using your regular class abilities I think it is normal for that to be not too easy.

Well, the intent is to need heavy combinations to get to higher end stuff. Like, a later-on Word might be "Many" or "Split," which lets you use Points to get multiples of the thing you are using for an exponential curve of effect for things that can be focused. The effect of the "Quicken" alike feat is more likely to be adding additional Words to an action for cramming in larger-scale things into smaller actions.

When it comes to curving up, you rely on the metamagic-alikes to replace point costs. Empower, Enlarge, Extend and Widen all are metamagic feats that, when translated, reduce how many points you need to spend for a given effect. At certain thresholds, they become point saving to use.

For instance, if Empower takes 8 points, then you lose 2 dice for 50% more, giving you 27d6 damage for the same points as the level 20 example. If Enlarge is at 4 points, then you reduce the range by 10 ft to double it for Ray. Keep in mind, they'd be working by reducing your check result before the cap comes into effect, meaning that if you bloat your check enough you keep all your points and now have the bonuses.

So if you have a +90 total bonus, you can take Empower and still be guaranteed to get full points. This is why you have a point to go deep optimization when you focus on it. If you can get a +100 bonus, you have 18 virtual points to blow on penalties before you even start to actually need to roll. Why 18 when the cap is 83? Because you can't roll a number lower than 1 on a d20, so you need a +82 bonus to remove the need to roll for no-penalty checks. Which is also why a +90 bonus lets you Empower without rolling.

Really, when you go stupidly deep optimization, the cost of the metamagic-equivalent stuff is the feat, not the check penalty. Because level 20 has reasonable expectations of hitting Epic check values.

Like, I can easily figure out how to reach +62, the last point where the full die has use. You have +4 from starting Intelligence, +24 skill ranks for a class skill, +30 from a basic RAW skill item, +3 from RAW-standard +6 Intelligence item, +2 or 3 from level up ability score increases, +3 from Skill Focus and right there, with my limited optimization knowledge, I have +62 or +63 with really damn basic things.

noob

2017-04-19, 01:27 PM

Morphic tide

2017-04-19, 02:49 PM

Well now for example I use a nanomachines set up(lot of tiny helpers) and I am a bard of enough high level for the bonus hit die then the main effort is getting as many metanames feats as possible(and skill points for unlocking as many tricks as possible for diversity)
Now getting a lot of feats is done either through the major cheese of dark chaos shuffle and locations or though magic items giving feats.
Getting a lot of items or using a lot of dark chaos shuffle have a huge trouble: it costs a lot of your money.
So I guess that if you need around 20 meta naming feats for being competitive then it might be a good challenge to build.(You would spend enough of your wbl for starting to be inferior to just someone using a lot of staffs and wands)

That's deep optimization/cheesemonkeying. Depends on the person/table/DM which it is, but having the room for it is a thing that Snowbluff and Tippy might approve of.

As for the number of feats needed to be competitive, you simply cannot outclass t1s. You can keep up, if you focus on the t1 tricks of save-or-suck and buff-bot, which you can arguably do better than most t1 classes off this skill thanks to nigh-infinite flexibility of effect parameters, but you likely won't get past them meaningfully and lack the same quantity of major game breakers at any point past level 5. But you can go all day, losing available force little by little for endless spamming of the powers, and being able to rest for mere minutes to recover from the penalties.

Also, AoE buffs to turn your nano-helper swarm into a swarm of DOOM-helpers are a thing you can do a lot easier this way. Ever wanted to have a Helper Swarm with a higher Diplomancy capacity than most Bard 20s who went full Diplomancy? Because if the DM is allowing the nano-helpers when pure skillcasting is present in the first place, then they deserve the pain of said helpers suddenly devouring a Great Wyrm Time Dragon with enough levels in Sorcerer to get to Sorcerer 30 casting.

Morphic tide

2017-11-27, 12:47 AM

...Been a lot less time in this thread than I thought it was. At any rate, I have some more ideas for stuff to do. For this post, I'll go over just an idea I've made a separate thread for already:

Mana Dice/Channeling(5e/PF)
First off, the reason I came up with the subsystem. 5th edition D&D is psychotically rigid with encounter rates, with classes frequently falling apart with just one or two level-appropriate encounters over the recommended amount. The point of this is, essentially, to fix that. The PF side is that PF doesn't have any first-party at-will magic use, as far as I know, and it has an archetype system that enables replacing large chunks of classes, saving me from needing to make PF style classes. DSP uses archetypes to replace subsystems pretty frequently, from what I've heard.

The actual mechanical meat of it is that you get dice each round to do stuff with, as well as a pool to store unused mana in. Yes, it's the primary vidya game mechanic of spellcasting, made more obtrusive by dice. Said stuff includes, but is not limited to, casting actual spells, with a cost based on the average damage of a single-target damage spell of that level. Easier to do the desired underestimating in 5e, as I was given a link to a handy thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?504641) with the averages per spell level pre-calculated for me, while Pathfinder can have me draw on various at-will casting types from 3.X for inspiration as to balance points. And balance points aren't that bad

In 5e, the balance point would be having about half to two-thirds the damage output of Rogue(mainly because of how clean Sneak Attack makes the calculation), with the difference being made up for by better versatility of use and better reliability of actually using that damage. With actually casting spells, I'd go for having two or three times as much average dice output for each spell. Which is strangely close to 30 points per spell level, if I triple the points over damage... A lower-bookkeeping method would be to have the unused dice grant a single point, rather than provide Healing would need to be limited pretty harshly, given how 5e's numbers work. One-turn temporary HP or damage prevention, like the Ancestral Guardian Barbarian, would kinda work as a solution to issues with 5e's numbers being broken by such rapid and unlimited healing.

In Pathfinder, balance numbers aren't as strict because it's in a fairly broken game, and precedence for perpetual output is significantly higher. Of course, perpetual magic use is a harsh problem in a system where the main thing holding spellcasters back is daily limits, but using list mechanics possibly derived from 3.5 Truenamer(yes, really, it's useful due to the varied progression rates) can largely deal with the problems inherent in endless use magic. The fluff to explain the list mechanics, still existing on the 5e side, is that it's all about drawing energy from other Planes, hence being Channeling. So each "list" would be about using power from one particular Plane, possibly having partial lists for mixing together different sources that require having both sources. Like mixing stuff from the Plane of Negative Energy with stuff from the Plane of Shadows for hypermurder Shadow Illusion stuff.

Additional things beyond just casting or replicating spells would involve more spells in 5e, primarily Evocation spells that do somewhat abnormal things, and in the form of having some abilities be rather open ended in a similar fashion to the idea I had for Truenaming. Only less complete in how much you do. Bit more like Metapsionics, really, where you spend points to increase effectiveness.

aimlessPolymath

2017-11-27, 01:17 PM

Morphic tide

2017-11-27, 05:25 PM

Interesting. I'm going to try to summarize the rules as I read them, please correct me if I've misunderstood:
Focusing on 5e:
-Gain a number of dice per round to spend on stuff. The total "value" of dice gained per round is around 1/2 to 2/3 the "value" of dice that a rogue of similar level gets. These dice can be saved up, up to some cap.
-These dice can be converted into damage or spells by some means. In terms of damage, they deal damage equal to their value by some conversion method- the equivalent of Eldritch Blast, perhaps.
-In order to cast a spell or spell-equivalent ability under this system, you need to spend approximately 30 "points" per spell level, if I understand correctly? I'm a little confused about how this would work, actually.
This is right, although the second point is a "not strictly damage" sort of thing and the first part is about the overall damage, so it'd start at 1d6 and go up by 1d6 every three or four levels, as an example for when the dice are being used directly for damage. There'd be at least one support class providing what are effectively Bardic Inspiration dice(restricted to one use per affected value, which can still be three of them for a single attack) alongside some form of damage mitigation, but not negation, like the Ancestral Guardian Barbarian. Of course, then the dice progression has to be structured around not overwhelming the damage enemies deal, which affects how spells can be cast, making me consider nova potential. Or a particularly small dice size to have points generate faster, in the event of having points be based on unused dice, but then you're rolling over a dozen d4s per round, possibly every round, at high levels.

...The importance of being able to use numerous small dice instead of large dice to shift the focus towards casting actual spells instead of relying on direct Dice use is a point in favor of having the points be one per unused die. As is the large reduction in dice rolling.

Things I like:
-A significant degree of ability to customize the "feel" of your magic by way of varying kinds of dice- 2d6 feels very different from 1d12.
-Spellcasting stamina is now much closer to "short rest"-levels of recharge, which (as you said) lets players continue adventuring for much longer. At the same time, the ability of players to "save up" their daily abilities to blow through single fights is much reduced. Simultaneous with this, hit points become the main marker of time for players.
Oh, the magic recharge is effectively per-encounter because you can keep the dice going between fights. It's why . It's per-round generation. Which is why I rather pointedly desire to make it take two or three times as much dice value as you actually get from a spell, on average, so that charging up more spells in combat is basically worthless unless it's shenanigans spells.

Although a funny thing about 5e's structure is that it falls apart if you have more than two fights per short rest and more than six or so per long rest. The point of the mana dice/channeling is to remove this problem for the support characters, because actually rather abnormally effective damage options don't suffer from rest issues. See Rogue and Fighter, who have basically nothing important for baseline function on rest recharge and have above-average damage output(admittedly conditional for Rogue).

Things I'm less sure of:
-It seems like noncombat spells become close to at-will. As a result, wide spell lists become much more powerful, since there's no daily limit keeping the mage from using the appropriate spell for every occasion. You brought up the specific case of this for healing magic, but I'm wondering about more generally.
-I'm not entirely sure how the dice mechanic works for actually casting spells. Suppose I wanted to cast a 50 point spell, and I have 20 d6 left in my pool for the day. Do I just start rolling until I pass the 50 mark? Do I choose how many dice to roll, then roll them? What if I run out of dice before I reach 50- can I cast another spell instead? This is an implementation issue, I admit, but it seems rather important.
-Following up to that last point, it seems like this could slow down play a lot in order to roll dice.

For the second and third points, I'm kinda thinking about having the conserved point pool be measured in unspent dice, rather than in pure points. So it'd be two or three points per spell level, in that case, and unused dice just automatically add an equal number of points. Actual amount of rolling of dice would probably hover around the amount of it that a Rogue does natively, particularly Arcane Tricksters, given the similar structure.

An interesting possible side effect of having dice number be the defining factor of point generation is that subclasses that "split" dice would have to have that feature be pretty high level, as it offers significantly better ratios between spells and dice. 1d12 becoming 3d4 causes a three-to-one ratio of dice to spell level to become one die per spell level. Also, unholy number of d4s to roll, which leads to many caltrop wounds for foolish players.

For the first point, 5e's kinda broken, for a D&D game, due to what players can't reliably do. It's a low-magic game in a very high-magic series. Faerun and Eberron can't function in 5e the first instant you begin to take mechanics as modelling how the world works. Another subsystem idea I have, which will probably see a post to itself after this conversation ends, solves the issue you mention by having the currency of use be casting time. Basically a full Ritual Magic subsystem, where every spell the casters use is cast as a Ritual, but with casting time going up by spell level. High level spells would all be the crazy utilities, to make that casting time actually worth it.

I have some thoughts on the Truenaming system, but I'm not sure if that discussion is still open, or if you want to focus on the new system instead.
...I kinda gave up on that over the issue of coming up with non-overlapping names for range/area markers and the various status effects. Also issues with figuring out a decent formatting...

Morphic tide

2018-03-04, 07:15 AM

In case anyone is still subscribed to this thread, I'll get started on the outline to the Ritual Magic thing I mentioned in the previous post:

General Point to (Expanded) Ritual Casting/Rune Casting
Much like my Mana Dice idea, the point here is to have spellcasting that'll last through a potentially indefinite adventuring day. Unlike the Mana Dice, it's got less backup potential, being more in line with proper per encounter effects and not having much support for long fights at higher levels. Because of the less problematic implications, particularly in regards to utility spam, it's more likely for me to actually finish (then again, I have a thread for mana dice). Class niche wise, it's about more varieties of setup for spells and having access to more unusual spell use options, like partially replicating how Death Knights in World of Warcraft work (would probably involve a 2e-Cleric-spheres-like spell organization scheme to directly model it, so as to properly constrain the spells appropriately)

How it Would Work
The gist of it is to have spells get casting times based on spell level, rather than any other specification. [Ritual] tagged spells would have much lowered, possibly codified on a different table, cast times to maintain their basically trivial endless use, but less so than a normal spellcaster. As a general range, rounds per spell for 1st to 3rd level, minutes per spell for 4th to 6th level and hours for 7th to 9th level, at a 1/4/8 infringement, for the initial draft.

Spell Level
Casting Time

1st
1 round

2nd
4 rounds

3rd
8 rounds

4th
1 minute/10 rounds

5th
4 minutes

6th
8 minutes

7th
1 hour

8th
4 hours

9th
8 hours

For upcasting, the mechanism is that each spell level added by upcasting increases the cast time by half a unit (rounds/minutes/hours). Naturally, this means two rounds for a 1st level spell upcast to 3rd level, which is time efficient enough to consider using in long combat sequences, in comparison to an actual 3rd level spell costing 8 rounds. More importantly, the per-encounter side of things kicks in with Runes, which allow you to actually store the spells after casting them.

aimlessPolymath

2018-03-04, 03:50 PM

Sorry, what is upcasting?

Morphic tide

2018-03-04, 05:39 PM

Sorry, what is upcasting?

It's that thing in 5th edition D&D where you can cast a spell at a higher level that it's default for increased effect.

Morphic tide

2018-03-24, 02:54 PM

Another idea, this time less a proper subsystem and more a shorthand for meta-classes with fiddly multi-competencies and ability stealing, as well as PRC progressions that have need of progressing a wide variety of classes.

Associations; What Are They, What They Are Meant To Be Used For, Why Have Them?:
As the name suggests for people with a long-ass memory of things on this forum, this is based on the Trissociate build-a-class setup from 2012. Unlike that, this has actual base classes and the subsystem being planned here is more about centralizing a major list causing function. The intended use is mainly for feature-swapping, but continuing progression of specific features throughout PRCs is another use case, killing off rules exploits from Legacy Champion and Uncanney Trickster style PRCs. It also works for when you have features that need all "classy" functions, but be below the power of actual classes players would use, like the Splitsoul.

The reason to have them is simple: Kill off repetitive lists. If your class has direct feature copying, an Association can be used to limit the features and adjust them to be mechanically acceptable. If the class swaps features that are nearly identical to existing classes, then it can instead use Associations to streamline any sliding scale involved.

Mechanics of the Subsystem:
First off, it's actually more in line with Splitsoul's mechanics than Trissociate's, with each Association being a partial class in its own right. Generally t4 or t5 if used alone due to tight focus, unless its a particular subset of caster or something that has innate tiering problems like Conjurers or, potentially, Crusaders, and that's more on the brokenness/inherent flexibility of the topic. In the cases where the topic of casting is fundamentally broken, like Conjuration, it gets reduced in progression or is solely the subset of casting with some token focusing on a subset within it. Or a restricted possible list to relevel and exclude problem spells.

Accessing association levels will come with two numbers: Total Association Level and Maximum Association Level. The former will frequently be larger than one's actual level, while the latter will always be lower. How much varies, but the gist of it is that level appropriate abilities come from overlapping Associations. Multiple spellcasting associations to get level-appropriate spellcasting with multiple, though narrow, "topics", multiple precision damage associations to get to the 1/2 level d6s, multiple Rage-carrying Associations to get level-appropriate usefulness and so on.

The "partial class" thing would be taken further than Trissociate's Associations, but not quite as far as Splitsoul. Not sure if the full chassis would be present, though Splitsoul style use would necessitate it, the point is to have a streamlining of all the ability carry over present in the ruleset without exhaustive per-class lists or piles of specification clauses. In general, the mechanical limits to it make it so it'd need to be run by ratios, with the soft upper limit on the Maximum Association Level being whatever amount is needed for the "strong" progressions to max out at the standard class's strong progressions. For example, if Associations cap out at 2/3 BAB, then the soft upper limit is one-and-a-half Association Levels per class level. Mathematically, the general ratio will probably be decided by receprical of what I want the Associations to cap out at. Then bonuses come to make up for some of the deficiency where needed, like an automatic Weapon Focus chain on the weapon-focused version of the Fighter-type Association. The same could be made to apply to subsystem progressions, as well, to utterly remove overspeed progression.