Words have power: Bards and Truenamers

[Deepbluediver]

Has anyone ever noticed that Bards and Truenamers are kinda....similar?

I'm sure the first reaction is to say "no" because on the surface they seem quite different. The Bard is a fully functional (if a bit wacky) class enjoyed by many, while the Truenamer is the textbook example of how not to build a unique magic system. And thematically Bards are often trickers, jesters, or at least outlandish and daring, while Truenamers are bookish nerds.
But in the end, but both fight enemies by talking at them.


Personally I'm not sure the classic vacian casting system is the best way to represent a Bard's abilities in-game, it was just the only thing available when 3.5 was released. I also know that skill-based magic system got a bad rap in 3.5, but I feel like they could work with a better design- maybe if you made the Bard more like a Truenamer by basing checks off of the perform skills. Or maybe both classes could be better represented by using a system more like the Warlock's invocations. I'm just turning thoughts over in my head and seeing what jumps out at me.

Has anyone else ever had thoughts like this? Have you ever played with a group that drew the parallels between these two somewhat oddball classes? Have any of you ever tried to rebuild them?


Edit: In LotT, the basis for so much of D&D and classic fantasy, Manwë sang the world into existence after all. I'd almost be tempted to try and COMBINE the two classes, if not for the aforementioned difference in feel and playstyle.

[Andor13]

Yes and no? It's true that both use words to invoke their magic, but then, so does every spell cast with a verbal component.

I think a deeper themantic link comes from how both tie into the Fey, where bard are often associated with the fey (as the both come from the same myths) and True names are a traditional means of getting power over the Fey (and other supernatural entities.) But the implementation of truenamers is just so bad there is pretty much nothing to draw on there.

If you want to run with your idea of combining them, I think the thing to do would be to dump the Truenamer class entirely, except the idea of true names granting power, and then incorporating that either into the bard as a base, making an archetype for it, or maybe a feat chain. You might have a look at Arcana Unearthed. IIRC it made true names a major part of the system and knowing someone's true name made your spells more effective on them, both for good and ill.

[Falontani]

There was a system that I saw in a comic, was explained in a bit of detail for it's fluff. I tried to write up a mock up for 5th edition. I'm definitely not the best homebrewer but if anyone would like to see it I'd be okay with posting it in a spoiler.

Basically the premise was you could say a word of power, and depending on some variables is how you could control it to do what you wanted. An example was say you said the word that meant Heat. You could take heat from nearby sources to apply it elsewhere temporarily. Then the heat would return to where it was supposed to come from. The further away your source or the more of the source you needed made it more difficult to accomplish what you wanted to. Later you could string several words together to change the effects.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I did a Warlock-Bard (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?392463-The-Bard-v2-%28Spell-less-and-Fixed-List-Caster-Project-Versions%29) a few years back. Sort of, anyway. You burn Bardic Music uses to do your magic songs, and make Perform checks to determine how effective they are.

I could see a Truenamer variant that used Perform instead of Truespeak. A lot of the powers seem reasonably on-point, and you'd have more and better options for boosting your skill check...

[Deepbluediver]

Yes and no? It's true that both use words to invoke their magic, but then, so does every spell cast with a verbal component.
I realize I'm nitpicking here, but I feel like both the Bard and the Truenamer put much more emphasis on the words themselves than other classes do.


I think a deeper themantic link comes from how both tie into the Fey, where bard are often associated with the fey (as the both come from the same myths) and True names are a traditional means of getting power over the Fey (and other supernatural entities.) But the implementation of truenamers is just so bad there is pretty much nothing to draw on there.
I'm pretty sure the idea of the divining something's name and gaining power over it goes back even farther than Tolkein, and a number of different historical mysticisms had some conceit like that. Which is fine when applied to D&D if you limit it to demons* and fey and maybe magical beasts, but if slipping a few bucks to the local under-paid and over-worked bureaucrat gives you access to the social-security records and someone's Truename, I feel like it would make interactions with humanoids problematic.

This is probably one of those things that would need to be baked into the setting from the ground up and accounted for, or you'd need to sit down and work through how it might feasibly interact mechanically with D&D.
Just as an off-the-cuff example, none of the Truenamer's spells utterances have save-DCs to resist them, but it's hard to tell if that was intentional or simply yet another oversight of the class. Either way, if you fixed the Truenamer's balance issues, maybe you could put that back in some how- such as knowing someone's Truename could dis-allow them chances to resist your spells. It's kind of a niche effect, but it's the quirky sort of thing I could see working on a non-core class or subsystem, assuming the cost is reasonable.

There's a really great series that has this as it's main form of magic and explores some of the trouble you can get into when you don't discard your name fast enough- the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud. It mixes humor and seriousness in good measure, doesn't drag on to long like some series, and is overall just really great YA fantasy.

If you want to run with your idea of combining them, I think the thing to do would be to dump the Truenamer class entirely, except the idea of true names granting power, and then incorporating that either into the bard as a base, making an archetype for it, or maybe a feat chain. You might have a look at Arcana Unearthed. IIRC it made true names a major part of the system and knowing someone's true name made your spells more effective on them, both for good and ill.
Or maybe a PRC? For Bards that want a little less Rogue and a little more Wizard.



There was a system that I saw in a comic, was explained in a bit of detail for it's fluff. I tried to write up a mock up for 5th edition. I'm definitely not the best homebrewer but if anyone would like to see it I'd be okay with posting it in a spoiler.

Basically the premise was you could say a word of power, and depending on some variables is how you could control it to do what you wanted. An example was say you said the word that meant Heat. You could take heat from nearby sources to apply it elsewhere temporarily. Then the heat would return to where it was supposed to come from. The further away your source or the more of the source you needed made it more difficult to accomplish what you wanted to. Later you could string several words together to change the effects.
I think there was some fluff on how the Power Word: X spells were supposed to be this, except that aside from the name, they don't really share anything in common or have anything to set them apart from other spells. Possibly though this could be a decent idea as it's own sort of subsystem- by expending feats or skills points or just gold and time, ANYONE can learn "words of power", and Truenamers just get more of them for free as a class feature.
The issue there is that I worry they'd have the same problem as the standard Fighter, where they don't really have anything special to call their own.


I did a Warlock-Bard (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?392463-The-Bard-v2-%28Spell-less-and-Fixed-List-Caster-Project-Versions%29) a few years back. Sort of, anyway. You burn Bardic Music uses to do your magic songs, and make Perform checks to determine how effective they are.

I could see a Truenamer variant that used Perform instead of Truespeak. A lot of the powers seem reasonably on-point, and you'd have more and better options for boosting your skill check...
I think I've seen that fix before, but I'll take another look at it; one can never have to many good ideas to throw into the mix.

Maybe we could divide them by having the Bard focus more on ongoing-effects, while the Truenamer's stuff is more one-and-done/fire-and-forget? Really though I think it would be fun to emphasize the Bard's non-spellcasting features more to separate them from other Vancian casters. Either way I feel like we should only have 1 resource to track per class. Either Bards get spell slots and unlimited music, or they have uses-per-day of the special music and something like invocations as a backup.

[johnbragg]

I think that Bards are best expressed as slow, inexorable but very powerful magic. Basically, once a Bard song starts up, you probably have 30 seconds before it takes full effect, give or take a few saving throws, but when it takes full effect the battle is probably decided.

The most fleshed out example I have is Song of Fear. All hostile targets within earshot must make a will save each round, or apply a new condition.
1. Bane (-1 to saves, or counters bless)
2. Bane again (does not stack, but -1 to saves if first casting countered bless)
3. Shaken
4. Frightened
5. Panicked
6. Cowering

Other obvious candidates are Song of Sleep, Song of Healing, Song of Following, Song of Love, Song of Rage.

I don't know how levels would work. I don't think this makes a good PC class. I do know that the addition of this Bard would turn a fight with a dozen mooks from ordinary to a terrifying ordeal.

[Telonius]

Edit: In LotT, the basis for so much of D&D and classic fantasy, Manwë sang the world into existence after all. I'd almost be tempted to try and COMBINE the two classes, if not for the aforementioned difference in feel and playstyle.

Words of Creation (from Book of Exalted Deeds) tried to do something kind of similar-ish, though it was written before Truenamers were a thing.

[Feantar]

I think one could argue that truenamers and bards do the same thing but approach it very differently. A relevant example would be from the Elder Scrolls universe: Tones and words have eldritch power. One can learn to control it using the Thu'um (voice magic) which is based on a magic language but contains a lot of emotion (how to say something, not so much what to say) or Tonal Architecture, which is essentially fluid dynamics applied to the arcane power of sound. So, the truenamer would recognise what the bard does, but the bard probably won't - as the truenamer goes into a much more reductionist frame. That being said, the various bard songs are essentially what you're asking; you could expand from there.

PS: I know this is pedantic, but saying that Manwë sang the world into existence, is really misleading. He was part of a chorus of many, and not even the first among them (That was Melkor, pre fall).

[Alent]

I built a homebrew PF Bard that used Songs reengineered to use Truenamer gameplay mechanics via perform checks a long time ago. It was fun, I didn't finish converting the spell and songs list beyond what we used in the campaign, and I decided it was the one true way to bard. I personally think that it worked out so well that I decided to make that the foundation of my Bard and Battledancer equivalents in my perpetually unfinished D20 rewrite.

Making a truespeak style Bard work required rewriting all the songs in 3.0 and 3.5 to adapt their mechanics to your truenamer fix of choice. I used one of the truenamer fixes from here as a starting point (the name that pops to mind is Kyuudo?) and basically created and ran my songs/spells past my DM on a song by song basis. Some were easier than others- the Seeker of the Song performances already have truenamer style reversal effects baked in. I made those 2nd level Songs (Bard 5) and altered them a little such that they acted like Dragonfire Inspiration, providing an Elemental damage party buff and reversed to give Ghetto warlock blasts. We never developed a huge exhaustive list of songs because we just didn't play often enough to do so.

Some practical issues we ran into were that the perform checks were changed to be solely based on my own HD and the level of the song for the sake of speed and to conceal the ECL of creatures in the encounters. With the Perform Check item support available in merged 3.5/PF play, we also had to increase the law of sequence penalties to keep me from having effectively unlimited songs. Ideally you'd flatten those skill ranks and bonuses at a system level, but there's probably some practical way to do that within the class itself instead of altering the entire game's skill system.

[Zaq]

There's some overlap (if nothing else, the shared access to knowledge is kind of interesting), but I don't think I'd go as far as you do. (And as some nitpicks, Bards can use wordless music for many of their effects, and while most of the "good" utterances don't have saves to resist, plenty still do.)

It's possible to think of the two classes as drawing from similar power sources in-universe if that's fun for you and your group, of course. 4e's Runepriest is allegedly divine rather than arcane or anything else, but it's basically the Truenamer as well.

As far as skill-based casting goes, the more time I've spent thinking about it, the more convinced I am that it's a terrible idea in anything resembling the 3.5 paradigm.

If you make it a simple binary of success/failure the way the RAW Truenamer does it, then you're basically going to end up with folks spending however much of their build resource pool on getting a sufficiently high bonus to never fail, and you've basically just turned the ability into "at-will, but with weird and nonintuitive costs," which strikes me as not being fully intended or honest. (I mean, there might theoretically be people who don't invest in their class's primary tactic, but you can't design a system around the idiots who choose not to engage with it—you don't necessarily want to assume that every possible PC is built by a tactical genius with terrifyingly high system mastery, but if we assume basic competence and we assume that people are going to use the resources in their power to make it so they succeed more than they fail, this is probably what's going to turn up.)
If you restrict how much people can boost their checks in the relevant skill to the point where they can't autosucceed, then it's not really skill-based casting anymore so much as just RNG-based casting, since part of what makes skills interesting in 3.5 is that you can choose to invest in them and get good at them. If you (hypothetical you) don't want nickel-and-dime bonuses adding up to a whole that's worthy of the investment that one put in, go play 5e or something. I guess that it's possible to explore that particular subset of design space and see if RNG-based casting can be fun, but I personally don't like having more rolls that necessary standing between my turn mattering and my turn not mattering. (We've already got saving throws and stuff, y'know?) As a subordinate idea to these two bullet points, if the magic can't be relied on to succeed, the payoff when it does succeed had better be pretty amazing to make the risk/reward ratio sufficiently appealing to bother with—but if you go too far down that road, you end up in save-or-die territory where the caster's turn comes down to a binary "either you accomplished nothing with your action or you completely removed one or more elements of the encounter in one go," which not everyone finds to be good game design. (I particularly don't like save-or-dies.)
If you turn the skill check into an opposed roll, that roll had better be opposed by another skill check (as opposed to a saving throw or a similar roll that isn't a skill check), or else the skill check is going to stomp the non-skill-check almost every time. The Bardic Music effects that have save DCs based off of Perform results are basically treated as autosuccesses against anything level-appropriate for pretty much this exact reason, and it's debatable whether they're balanced at all. That said, if you're making a magic skill check against another skill check, then what makes this feel like casting rather than simply, you know, rolling skills?
If your skill-based casting system assumes that the caster will succeed (so there's no inherent chance of the action straight up fizzling) and then has the skill check determine effects like range, duration, and so on, that's a little better, but the net effect is still going to basically depend on what kind of cookies you hand out for getting a high roll on the relevant check. Like I said in the first two bullet points, folks are just going to invest resources to reliably hit the DCs they care about (whether that's the maximum called for or simply a desired middle effect), or they'll be prevented from investing the resources and will kind of just end up with RNG-based casting again. The other wrinkle is that if rolling high on the check doesn't really make the effect significantly more interesting, then you're adding additional rolls (likely rolls against a table or against a formula, which would be arguably even worse as far as time goes) to the game and slowing down the caster's turn for something that isn't going to be a big deal. Some folks are more okay with that than others, but it's not necessarily great game design when turns already take as long as they do in 3.5. (At best, this is likely to look a lot like Knowledge Devotion, but with one check per action rather than one check per monster. Knowledge Devotion is a fine feat, but there's a reason it's also not a mandatory feat.)

I'm not saying that it's impossible to mix skill checks in with creating magical effects. The concept is compelling for a reason, and there's a reason why so many people have attempted it. I don't think they were all misguided or necessarily all off on a fool's errand or anything like that. But I think that if we're starting with the game that actually exists rather than making a brand new system (with very different assumptions) from scratch, dropping a skill-based casting system in the middle is almost certain to bump into some weird interactions and is likely to end up going in a different direction than intended.

I think I ended up answering a different question from the one you asked, but I don't feel like deleting this whole thing, so perhaps I should leave it off there. Fluff is what you make of it, skill-based casting is troubling in the extant 3.5 paradigm, and while it doesn't particularly bother me to think of Bards and Truenamers as being different faces of the same die, I also don't think that's the only way to approach them.

[Cosi]

Both Music Magic (Lord of the Rings, The Second Apocalypse) and Word Magic (Wizard of Earthsea) have rich traditions in fantasy, and are ripe for inclusion in the game. Neither the Bard nor the Truenamer really delivers on that though. Making skill checks doesn't really feel conceptually "word magic"-ish, and nothing the Bard does feels terribly musical from a mechanical perspective. Personally, I would probably make the Bard the representative of Word Magic and pitch it as the divine music of creation. Word Magic has a much better definition in terms of effects than Music Magic does, but Music Magic is a little easier to figure out mechanically.


Personally I'm not sure the classic vacian casting system is the best way to represent a Bard's abilities in-game, it was just the only thing available when 3.5 was released.

I agree that there are probably better magic systems for "music magic".

You could do something like having abilities power up as you used them. So you start out with crappy little abilities, and those build up until you can throw around extra-strong power chords.

Or you could give abilities tags, and then have each ability give you a one round buff to abilities with a certain tag. You sing the song of unmaking which gives all of your [Dissonant] tagged abilities extra damage next round or something.

Every class should have something like that.


I also know that skill-based magic system got a bad rap in 3.5, but I feel like they could work with a better design

No. Skill-based magic in a level-based system is a non-starter regardless of what the actual mechanics are. If skills scale linearly with level, it's pointless window-dressing on a level check. If skills don't scale linearly with level, it's broken in some direction at some level. Since it's bad if A and bad if not-A, it is bad in every possible case. We can therefore shut the book on skill-based magic and move on to some other system that is at least theoretically not-broken in some cases.


I think that Bards are best expressed as slow, inexorable but very powerful magic. Basically, once a Bard song starts up, you probably have 30 seconds before it takes full effect, give or take a few saving throws, but when it takes full effect the battle is probably decided.

Most fights don't last 5 rounds. If the plan is that a Bard has abilities that win a fight 30 seconds from now, you need to eliminate the Wizard's ability to end fights 6 seconds from now.

[Jormengand]

Most fights don't last 5 rounds. If the plan is that a Bard has abilities that win a fight 30 seconds from now, you need to eliminate the Wizard's ability to end fights 6 seconds from now.

:vaarsuvius: And that would be wrong.

[Cosi]

:vaarsuvius: And that would be wrong.

That would be outside the scope of the discussion. If your plan is to make a character do something that sucks in the game as it exists, you need to also propose changes that make doing that thing not suck. Otherwise it sucks, and what was the point of what you did?

[Deepbluediver]

Wow, lots of good feedback. Here's the first half of my reply, I'll try to get to the rest tonight, but I might have to break to work on dinner for a bit.



Words of Creation (from Book of Exalted Deeds) tried to do something kind of similar-ish, though it was written before Truenamers were a thing.
I will have to look the up, then. I feel like the Truenamer had lots of existing resources to draw on, or at least things that it could have interacted with, and yet instead of sitting down and figuring out how these many disparate pieces might fit together, WotC decided to just make something new. And horribly, horribly broken.



So, the truenamer would recognise what the bard does, but the bard probably won't - as the truenamer goes into a much more reductionist frame. That being said, the various bard songs are essentially what you're asking; you could expand from there.
Maybe the relationship between the Bard and Truenamer is kind of like that between Sorcerers and Wizards. The later takes the studious route, working to understand the basics of the source of their power and building it up step by step, while the former is a kind of savant who never really had to practice, they just kind of have a knack for certain aspects of the power.


PS: I know this is pedantic, but saying that Manwë sang the world into existence, is really misleading. He was part of a chorus of many, and not even the first among them.
I'm not a LotR expert- I only know what I glean from the wiki-pages. WHO sang isn't really as relevant in this case as WHAT they were doing, I think. I just used it to indicate a sort of precedent for where I was going with all this.



I built a homebrew PF Bard that used Songs reengineered to use Truenamer gameplay mechanics via perform checks a long time ago. It was fun, I didn't finish converting the spell and songs list beyond what we used in the campaign, and I decided it was the one true way to bard.
I'd love to hear more details on how you balanced it, what sort of role it had in the party, and how other classes and NPCs interacted with it.


I decided to make that the foundation of my Bard and Battledancer equivalents in my perpetually unfinished D20 rewrite.
I feel you there :)


Making a truespeak style Bard work required rewriting all the songs in 3.0 and 3.5 to adapt their mechanics to your truenamer fix of choice.
That's kind of an ongoing problem- it's not necessarily a class that is unbalanced or hard to fix, but the abilities that they get to choose from, whether it's spells, soulmelds, manuevers, mysteries, binds, etc. And stuff goes both ways- sometimes it's OP, sometimes it's trash.
There's about 100 pages of spells in the PHB alone, and fixing magic would require re-writing, maybe not all, but a significant chunk of them. Tackling that project is what eventually killed my old magic fix.


Some practical issues we ran into were that the perform checks were changed to be solely based on my own HD and the level of the song for the sake of speed and to conceal the ECL of creatures in the encounters. With the Perform Check item support available in merged 3.5/PF play, we also had to increase the law of sequence penalties to keep me from having effectively unlimited songs. Ideally you'd flatten those skill ranks and bonuses at a system level, but there's probably some practical way to do that within the class itself instead of altering the entire game's skill system.
Hmm, seems like that might be a vote for scrapping the Truenamer mechanics and running the Bard off of invocations.
I think I'm going to talk more about this later, but I feel like part of the fix for a skill-based casting class would be to NOT have everything run off of a single skill, which tends to lead to hyper-specialization and a really finicky balance point.

[Deepbluediver]

Ok, definitely gonna have to split this up into three chunks, and go work on dinner for a while.



I think that Bards are best expressed as slow, inexorable but very powerful magic. Basically, once a Bard song starts up, you probably have 30 seconds before it takes full effect, give or take a few saving throws, but when it takes full effect the battle is probably decided.

The most fleshed out example I have is Song of Fear. All hostile targets within earshot must make a will save each round, or apply a new condition.
1. Bane (-1 to saves, or counters bless)
2. Bane again (does not stack, but -1 to saves if first casting countered bless)
3. Shaken
4. Frightened
5. Panicked
6. Cowering

Other obvious candidates are Song of Sleep, Song of Healing, Song of Following, Song of Love, Song of Rage.

I don't know how levels would work. I don't think this makes a good PC class. I do know that the addition of this Bard would turn a fight with a dozen mooks from ordinary to a terrifying ordeal.
I like the idea, certainly, I'm just worried that we'll end up with something that's mechanically very powerful but really boring to actually play. I'ts like a CC-based Wizard; no one will ever make the save to throw off their spells, and the rest of your party will EVENTUALLY whittle the target's health down, so every fight is a long, drawn-out, foregone conclusion.
Even making attack rolls every round and dealing damage feels more exciting to me than something like "I continue to make my perform check".

The idea of effects that build up or combo, though, is one I believe could definitely be incorporated somehow, especially with higher-level play. Maybe as part of something else- like you could call them background melodies and let the player bootstrap them onto other more one-and-done sorts of things.



And as some nitpicks, Bards can use wordless music for many of their effects, and while most of the "good" utterances don't have saves to resist, plenty still do.
Not sure I like the idea of a silent Bard- it feels counter-intuitive.
My mistake about the Truenamer, though; I've never tried to play one so I mostly go by what I read.


It's possible to think of the two classes as drawing from similar power sources in-universe if that's fun for you and your group, of course.
That's basically the kind of thought that kicked off this thread.


4e's Runepriest is allegedly divine rather than arcane or anything else, but it's basically the Truenamer as well.
I never got into 4e, and I'm worried I might not understand enough of the mechanics to make it worth my time trying to read through, but maybe doing magic through writing, too, is an avenue worth exploring.


As far as skill-based casting goes, the more time I've spent thinking about it, the more convinced I am that it's a terrible idea in anything resembling the 3.5 paradigm.
It would be difficult, that's for certain, in no small part because skill-based competency is terribly balanced. It's not uncommon to reach a point where between two separate people in the same party, one of them can't make the check to save their life (often literally) while the other can succeed on a roll of -10.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I think part of the answer would be to increase the number of required skills so that it's less beneficial to dump all your resources into a single skill check. Another part of it might be to lower the initial DC while increasing the rate the DC gets tougher by. This way a non-hyper-optimized player still gets at least a few uses per day, while anyone trying to min-max runs into the soft cap faster.

And on top of all that, you'd probably STILL need to be careful about how many different ways a player can use to boost a single skill check you allow to exist in your world. Maybe we need to make skill-bonuses have types like other bonuses, and you can't stack multiple bonuses of the same type.


If you make it a simple binary of success/failure the way the RAW Truenamer does it, then you're basically going to end up with folks spending however much of their build resource pool on getting a sufficiently high bonus to never fail, and you've basically just turned the ability into "at-will, but with weird and nonintuitive costs," which strikes me as not being fully intended or honest. (I mean, there might theoretically be people who don't invest in their class's primary tactic, but you can't design a system around the idiots who choose not to engage with it—you don't necessarily want to assume that every possible PC is built by a tactical genius with terrifyingly high system mastery, but if we assume basic competence and we assume that people are going to use the resources in their power to make it so they succeed more than they fail, this is probably what's going to turn up.)
If you restrict how much people can boost their checks in the relevant skill to the point where they can't autosucceed, then it's not really skill-based casting anymore so much as just RNG-based casting, since part of what makes skills interesting in 3.5 is that you can choose to invest in them and get good at them. If you (hypothetical you) don't want nickel-and-dime bonuses adding up to a whole that's worthy of the investment that one put in, go play 5e or something. I guess that it's possible to explore that particular subset of design space and see if RNG-based casting can be fun, but I personally don't like having more rolls that necessary standing between my turn mattering and my turn not mattering. (We've already got saving throws and stuff, y'know?) As a subordinate idea to these two bullet points, if the magic can't be relied on to succeed, the payoff when it does succeed had better be pretty amazing to make the risk/reward ratio sufficiently appealing to bother with—but if you go too far down that road, you end up in save-or-die territory where the caster's turn comes down to a binary "either you accomplished nothing with your action or you completely removed one or more elements of the encounter in one go," which not everyone finds to be good game design. (I particularly don't like save-or-dies.)
If you turn the skill check into an opposed roll, that roll had better be opposed by another skill check (as opposed to a saving throw or a similar roll that isn't a skill check), or else the skill check is going to stomp the non-skill-check almost every time. The Bardic Music effects that have save DCs based off of Perform results are basically treated as autosuccesses against anything level-appropriate for pretty much this exact reason, and it's debatable whether they're balanced at all. That said, if you're making a magic skill check against another skill check, then what makes this feel like casting rather than simply, you know, rolling skills?
If your skill-based casting system assumes that the caster will succeed (so there's no inherent chance of the action straight up fizzling) and then has the skill check determine effects like range, duration, and so on, that's a little better, but the net effect is still going to basically depend on what kind of cookies you hand out for getting a high roll on the relevant check. Like I said in the first two bullet points, folks are just going to invest resources to reliably hit the DCs they care about (whether that's the maximum called for or simply a desired middle effect), or they'll be prevented from investing the resources and will kind of just end up with RNG-based casting again. The other wrinkle is that if rolling high on the check doesn't really make the effect significantly more interesting, then you're adding additional rolls (likely rolls against a table or against a formula, which would be arguably even worse as far as time goes) to the game and slowing down the caster's turn for something that isn't going to be a big deal. Some folks are more okay with that than others, but it's not necessarily great game design when turns already take as long as they do in 3.5. (At best, this is likely to look a lot like Knowledge Devotion, but with one check per action rather than one check per monster. Knowledge Devotion is a fine feat, but there's a reason it's also not a mandatory feat.)
All valid points, I think, and things that would need to be taken into account when fleshing out a potential class. The "auto-success" problem comes up a lot with traditional spellcasters, being both single-stat and not needing to use many of their resources to be good at casting spells.

A key part of my old magic fix was to require a roll every time someone wanted to cast a spell, not just if their target had spell-resistance, and yes the balancing can be quite tricky.



I'm not saying that it's impossible to mix skill checks in with creating magical effects. The concept is compelling for a reason, and there's a reason why so many people have attempted it. I don't think they were all misguided or necessarily all off on a fool's errand or anything like that. But I think that if we're starting with the game that actually exists rather than making a brand new system (with very different assumptions) from scratch, dropping a skill-based casting system in the middle is almost certain to bump into some weird interactions and is likely to end up going in a different direction than intended.
I certainly think you'd have to sit down and examine the core assumptions of your setting for inserting new subsystems that lean hard on existing core components, especially ones that have a lot of support. Most of the non-core splatbooks seems to ignore virtually all other non-core material, which I get because you want your new material to be accessible to people who haven't already spent thousands of dollars on your hobby, but it leads to weird interactions when people DO bring everything under the sun into play.

The Truenamer seemed to acknowledge that boosting skill-checks to absurd levels was a thing, while still ignoring every other possible resources they could have drawn from or built on. On the scale of optimization needed to play a Truenamer, the d20 is basically a joke.
Maybe they should have just started the DC to use utterances at 50, have the law of sequence increase it by 10 each time, and let the Truenamer roll a d100 instead. :smallbiggrin:


I think I ended up answering a different question from the one you asked, but I don't feel like deleting this whole thing, so perhaps I should leave it off there.
I don't mind- I made a very open-ended topic mainly to see what sort of responses I'd get. Part of me was worried I'd see a lot of posts like "how dare you compare our beloved Bard to the filth that is the Truenamer!" so really, I figure things are going pretty well here. :smallcool:

[johnbragg]

Most fights don't last 5 rounds. If the plan is that a Bard has abilities that win a fight 30 seconds from now, you need to eliminate the Wizard's ability to end fights 6 seconds from now.

That's part of the reason that it's not a good PC class. Much like the Expert, it's a feature of the campaign world, but not something you'd build a PC with. (Quite like the Marshal, and in the same niche--not a good fit for most adventuring parties, but a force multiplier for a horde of mooks.)



I like the idea, certainly, I'm just worried that we'll end up with something that's mechanically very powerful but really boring to actually play. I'ts like a CC-based Wizard; no one will ever make the save to throw off their spells, and the rest of your party will EVENTUALLY whittle the targets health down, so every fight a long, drawn-out foregone conclusion.
Even making attack rolls every round and dealing damage feels more exciting to me than something like "I continue to make my perform check".

The idea of effects that build up or combo, though, is one I believe could definitely be incorporated somehow, especially with higher-level play. Maybe as part of something else- like you could call them background melodies and let the player bootstrap them onto other more one-and-done sorts of things.

I have it mostly as an NPC class--the PCs have to win the fight *quickly*, or they're not winning the fight. Whether it's elves and fey chasing them through the woods while the Fey-Bard sings "Come Away With Me", or deep in the cultists' dungeon where the Demon-Bard sings "For Whom The Bell Tolls", or the city crowd whipped into a frenzy (mob template) by a Song of Rage from the BBEG's underling bard who teleports away, the Bard is almost always going to be bad news for the party. The Bard of Healing isn't so bad, but healing isn't that hard to come by.

If each level gives you one Song of Power, you might dip a level or two of the NPC Bard class.

[Deepbluediver]

Both Music Magic (Lord of the Rings, The Second Apocalypse) and Word Magic (Wizard of Earthsea) have rich traditions in fantasy, and are ripe for inclusion in the game. Neither the Bard nor the Truenamer really delivers on that though. Making skill checks doesn't really feel conceptually "word magic"-ish, and nothing the Bard does feels terribly musical from a mechanical perspective. Personally, I would probably make the Bard the representative of Word Magic and pitch it as the divine music of creation. Word Magic has a much better definition in terms of effects than Music Magic does, but Music Magic is a little easier to figure out mechanically.
I'm curious how you might make these mechanical systems feel like what they represent- in the original game you basically just stated what actions your character was taking and then rolled dice, for everything, afterall. Where do we draw the line between Tabletop-gaming and LARPing?


You could do something like having abilities power up as you used them. So you start out with crappy little abilities, and those build up until you can throw around extra-strong power chords.
You mean like building up a combo-chain over the course of a fight? The idea is interesting, certainly, I'm just not sure yet how we might make it work in the slower, more turn-based kind of battles D&D has.


No. Skill-based magic in a level-based system is a non-starter regardless of what the actual mechanics are. If skills scale linearly with level, it's pointless window-dressing on a level check. If skills don't scale linearly with level, it's broken in some direction at some level. Since it's bad if A and bad if not-A, it is bad in every possible case. We can therefore shut the book on skill-based magic and move on to some other system that is at least theoretically not-broken in some cases.
With all 3.5 had to offer, you think there's no way we could make a skill-based magic system work? I don't believe it.
Mainly I disagree with the second assumption you make- there are LOTS of imbalanced things in 3.5, but the game as a whole is still workable and fun in most ways, and anything based on that doesn't necessarily need to be broken. I feel like the Truenamer turned a lot of people off skill-based casting systems, but that's mostly due to how badly it was implemented; I don't think it says anything about the core concept itself.


Most fights don't last 5 rounds. If the plan is that a Bard has abilities that win a fight 30 seconds from now, you need to eliminate the Wizard's ability to end fights 6 seconds from now.
Yeah, I'm not really sure I like the idea of letting PCs put a clock on fights, and turn things into a sort of "hold out for 6 rounds and then you win". It's the kind of tactic I could see employed occasionally, but not for every encounter.



That would be outside the scope of the discussion. If your plan is to make a character do something that sucks in the game as it exists, you need to also propose changes that make doing that thing not suck. Otherwise it sucks, and what was the point of what you did?
It's hard to homebrew in a vacuum- there's just SO MUCH of 3.5 that's both imbalanced and connected to other things that it's nearly impossible to make any significant changes without having a cascading effect. The best I think you can do is say what your goal is, and tell anyone reviewing your stuff to just assume that everything else is balanced at that point, and then see if you fix meshes with that theoretical point. You should only have to describe what else you would change and how you would change it if it's integral to what you're doing at this moment.

[Cosi]

That's part of the reason that it's not a good PC class. Much like the Expert, it's a feature of the campaign world, but not something you'd build a PC with. (Quite like the Marshal, and in the same niche--not a good fit for most adventuring parties, but a force multiplier for a horde of mooks.)

Disagree about the Marshall -- buffing your allies seems like a totally legitimate niche (at least in theory), and you could totally get a couple of mooks.


I have it mostly as an NPC class--the PCs have to win the fight *quickly*, or they're not winning the fight. Whether it's elves and fey chasing them through the woods while the Fey-Bard sings "Come Away With Me", or deep in the cultists' dungeon where the Demon-Bard sings "For Whom The Bell Tolls", or the city crowd whipped into a frenzy (mob template) by a Song of Rage from the BBEG's underling bard who teleports away, the Bard is almost always going to be bad news for the party. The Bard of Healing isn't so bad, but healing isn't that hard to come by.

I just don't see why that needs to be a class at all. It seems more like an environmental hazard like "the demon gate is powering up" or "the room is flooding" or "it is raining fire". It's not like (in 99% of cases) it's actually going to matter that there's a character attached, let alone one of a specific class.


I'm curious how you might make these mechanical systems feel like what they represent- in the original game you basically just stated what actions your character was taking and then rolled dice, for everything, afterall. Where do we draw the line between Tabletop-gaming and LARPing?

Ideally, the kinds of actions you take would be evocative of the particular type of character you were playing. So if you were playing a Wizard, your actions would "feel like" your character was a sage who meticulously prepared for everything in a way that they would not if you were instead a Barbarian or a Shadowcaster. And Vancian Magic works kind of okay for that. Picking all your spells at the beginning of the day requires you to think about what enemies you might encounter, and rewards you for gathering intel. It's not perfect, and there are certainly character concepts for which Spell Preparation type mechanics might be a better fit (for example, Gadgeters or Truenamers), but it's IMO a much better fit than, say, the Warlock.

You could imagine doing other things for other classes. If your Warlock invocations were really big blasts that left you drained after using them, that would invoke a feeling of channeling powers beyond mortal man. If your Barbarian powers got more powerful as you dealt and took damage, that would feel like you were getting angrier and angrier as you fought. Stuff like that should be the default, because it simultaneously makes characters more interesting and more evocative.


With all 3.5 had to offer, you think there's no way we could make a skill-based magic system work? I don't believe it.

I think there is no way you could make skill-based magic work in a level based system (in the sense of "being a good idea"), regardless of whether that system is 3e, Mutants and Masterminds, 4e, or something else. Because the system is dumb regardless of how your skill system works, which means it is always dumb.


Mainly I disagree with the second assumption you make- there are LOTS of imbalanced things in 3.5, but the game as a whole is still workable and fun in most ways, and anything based on that doesn't necessarily need to be broken. I feel like the Truenamer turned a lot of people off skill-based casting systems, but that's mostly due to how badly it was implemented; I don't think it says anything about the core concept itself.

Skill checks can diverge by 30 points in the mid levels. The entire RNG is only 20 points long. How are you going to make a system that takes a skill check as input and produces level appropriate output without it either being broken in the hands of someone with system mastery or worthless in the hands of someone without it?

And I reject that "the game had broken things and it was okay" is a reason to intentionally design things that are broken.

[johnbragg]

Disagree about the Marshall -- buffing your allies seems like a totally legitimate niche (at least in theory), and you could totally get a couple of mooks.

In theory, yes. In practice, the Marshall is gimped by the fact that it was designed in part for miniatures play, so it's abilities are highly useful in mass combat scenarios, but underwhelming in small-unit commando raids that are the bread-and-butter of D&D.


I just don't see why that needs to be a class at all. It seems more like an environmental hazard like "the demon gate is powering up" or "the room is flooding" or "it is raining fire". It's not like (in 99% of cases) it's actually going to matter that there's a character attached, let alone one of a specific class.

Um, it matters because you solve the effect by killing the dude making the crazy music.

It's also a class because I believe in PC-NPC transparency. Yes, player, at the cost of a one-level dip, you too could spend an entire combat performing a Song of Power as a full-round action, which would mean the players win the combat as long as you survive and keep on Song of Powering until the enemies fail 4-6 will saves. (And as long as the enemies do not silence you, or are not immune to mind-effecting, or have high SR, or use dispel magic to reset the effects to zero, or....)

As you say, however, it's not a very good life choice for an adventurer.

[Andor13]

You mean like building up a combo-chain over the course of a fight? The idea is interesting, certainly, I'm just not sure yet how we might make it work in the slower, more turn-based kind of battles D&D has.

The LotRO games minstrel class works like this IIRC. Some of their abilities build off of the ones that came before, so if you start with a damaging song, you can build on it to deal more damage, or inflict debuffs, and build on that as the music builds. But if you want to switch to healing the you have to start over at the beginning of that melody, and build on the healing music/magic.

So you can build multipart action chains based on musical segments (Intro, stanza, crescendo, etc) with each chain representing a different song. And if you have multiple movements, then each round the Bard has choices to make which one they play, in response to what is happening.

You still have the problem of "Nice song, but the Wizard ended the fight 2 rounds ago" but ultimately that's a table problem to be solved by the GM and player together.

[Cosi]

In theory, yes. In practice, the Marshall is gimped by the fact that it was designed in part for miniatures play, so it's abilities are highly useful in mass combat scenarios, but underwhelming in small-unit commando raids that are the bread-and-butter of D&D.

I think "this particular class blows" is a bad argument for it not being reasonable to have that concept as a PC class. I agree, the Marshall blows. But so does the Fighter, the Monk, the Truenamer, and (to varying degrees) and number of other classes. But the idea that those classes sucking as-written implies that they don't work as PC classes strikes me as assuming too much. "Mystic Kung Fu" seems like a completely reasonable power set for a character, as does "Word Magic".


Um, it matters because you solve the effect by killing the dude making the crazy music.

Sure. But that doesn't necessitate that the dude be of a particular class. If the dude playing the crazy music can't take other actions, he's not terribly different from a ritual focus (well, maybe he can move). I don't think "kill the Bard" versus "smash the demon skull" is enough to hang a class on.


It's also a class because I believe in PC-NPC transparency.

Sure, that implies PCs should have access to Bardic rituals. But they're rituals. Couldn't everyone just have access to them? They're kind of a crap deal in combat, and they're probably more interesting overall if they guy doing the ritual might actually be a Necromancer or a Warlock himself.


You still have the problem of "Nice song, but the Wizard ended the fight 2 rounds ago" but ultimately that's a table problem to be solved by the GM and player together.

No, that's a problem the system should solve so that fights go enough rounds that the Bard's song matters, but not so many rounds that the Wizard's spells don't.

[Alent]

I'd love to hear more details on how you balanced it, what sort of role it had in the party, and how other classes and NPCs interacted with it.

I balanced it around the idea of being a buff supporter/skill monkey/secondary healer. I had hooks for a melee focused support/melee variant, but I never used it because we had plenty of that at the table, and needed a Healbot/buffbot. I more or less kept spell and song scaling as is- direct and small area attacks set at 1d6 per 2 caster levels, larger area effects on a slower cycle. I did define it as an arcane casting class, so that it could benefit from +arcane caster PrCs.

There were no real special interactions to note on the PC side. NPCs liked it because PF bard with stacked perform is a diplomancer, no matter how you slice it. I don't advocate keeping the Jack of All Trades feature if you use the PF bard as a chassis.


I feel you there :)

Yeah. Some recent events are gasoline in the tank, and I'm making progress, but it's an uphill climb.


That's kind of an ongoing problem- it's not necessarily a class that is unbalanced or hard to fix, but the abilities that they get to choose from, whether it's spells, soulmelds, manuevers, mysteries, binds, etc. And stuff goes both ways- sometimes it's OP, sometimes it's trash.
There's about 100 pages of spells in the PHB alone, and fixing magic would require re-writing, maybe not all, but a significant chunk of them. Tackling that project is what eventually killed my old magic fix.

Yes. A related problem I had was that I didn't really have a good feel for how the bardic spell list worked. 3.x bard is a really eccentric mishmash of random spells that don't fit into any real thematic consistency. I felt better about that once I realized the spell list was basically a giant mishmash of leftovers, but there's not much else that can be addressed other than to just full stop rewrite all of them.


Hmm, seems like that might be a vote for scrapping the Truenamer mechanics and running the Bard off of invocations.
I think I'm going to talk more about this later, but I feel like part of the fix for a skill-based casting class would be to NOT have everything run off of a single skill, which tends to lead to hyper-specialization and a really finicky balance point.

It depends on how closely you're trying to tune things. I found that combat didn't last long enough for functionally infinite casting to matter, and endurance testing wasn't possible due to our adventuring workday. Action Economy limited me from ever exceeding what I would do as a core bard, but I really enjoyed the constant feeling of perform checking. I'm sure there's something in there that will work without rewriting skills.


In theory, yes. In practice, the Marshall is gimped by the fact that it was designed in part for miniatures play, so it's abilities are highly useful in mass combat scenarios, but underwhelming in small-unit commando raids that are the bread-and-butter of D&D.

Motivate Charisma isn't that good of a class if single classed, but as a dip for a cha based skill monkey like Bard, it's hard to beat Motivate Charisma as a class.

... What do you mean the class isn't named "Motivate Charisma"? :smallconfused:

[Deepbluediver]

That's part of the reason that it's not a good PC class. Much like the Expert, it's a feature of the campaign world, but not something you'd build a PC with. (Quite like the Marshal, and in the same niche--not a good fit for most adventuring parties, but a force multiplier for a horde of mooks.)
....
I have it mostly as an NPC class--the PCs have to win the fight *quickly*, or they're not winning the fight.
....
If each level gives you one Song of Power, you might dip a level or two of the NPC Bard class.
I feel like anything that's a class should be open to all, but there are certainly different ways to you can represent that. Part of what you're describing sounds kind of like a PRC- one that's only 5 or even 3 levels though, which would save you from having to balance around a whole 20 levels.

Alternatively, maybe these rhythmic rituals ARE just something that anyone can perform. But the fact that they exist doesn't mean the have to be common or easy for the PCs to get their hands on- tracking down the sheet-music scroll could be an entire arc unto itself.



Disagree about the Marshall -- buffing your allies seems like a totally legitimate niche (at least in theory), and you could totally get a couple of mooks.
Sounds like it might be an interesting way to play a minion-mancer who's not a caster.


Ideally, the kinds of actions you take would be evocative of the particular type of character you were playing. So if you were playing a Wizard, your actions would "feel like" your character was a sage who meticulously prepared for everything in a way that they would not if you were instead a Barbarian or a Shadowcaster. And Vancian Magic works kind of okay for that. Picking all your spells at the beginning of the day requires you to think about what enemies you might encounter, and rewards you for gathering intel. It's not perfect, and there are certainly character concepts for which Spell Preparation type mechanics might be a better fit (for example, Gadgeters or Truenamers), but it's IMO a much better fit than, say, the Warlock.

You could imagine doing other things for other classes. If your Warlock invocations were really big blasts that left you drained after using them, that would invoke a feeling of channeling powers beyond mortal man. If your Barbarian powers got more powerful as you dealt and took damage, that would feel like you were getting angrier and angrier as you fought. Stuff like that should be the default, because it simultaneously makes characters more interesting and more evocative.

Ok, I think I get what you're saying now- I've thought about ways to do that with the standard magic system(s), such as having Arcane, Divine, and Wild (for the Druids) magics all have slightly different mechanics.

But there are a LOT of base-classes, so while it's cools if you can come up with a neat little trade-off like that, I don't think you should be prevented from designing a class mechanically if you can't.


I think there is no way you could make skill-based magic work in a level based system (in the sense of "being a good idea"), regardless of whether that system is 3e, Mutants and Masterminds, 4e, or something else. Because the system is dumb regardless of how your skill system works, which means it is always dumb.
Ok, WHY do you think it's "dumb" or why do you think it can't work? If it's simply because the skill-system is unbalanced, then why do we even have a skill-system to base it off of in the first place?


Skill checks can diverge by 30 points in the mid levels. The entire RNG is only 20 points long. How are you going to make a system that takes a skill check as input and produces level appropriate output without it either being broken in the hands of someone with system mastery or worthless in the hands of someone without it?
That's merely an issue with balancing the skill-system itself; it's not an inherent flaw. If you had a skill-system with fewer ways to provide bonuses, checks might only diverge by 10 points. Even without that though, I don't see it as an unsolvable problem. Maybe the first few attempts are easy for ANYONE to make- you might not even have to roll. Then for the next few you have to roll decently, and if you want to use whatever it is MORE than that, you have to be rolling really well and/or have a really high bonus.

Also, if you have the magic part of your class require DIFFERENT skills, you can have different magic-users specializing in different things. You can even have highly focused specialists and more broadly-focused generalists. One of the main issues I think with the Truenamer was that it invented a totally new skill that applied to nothing else other than this one class, instead of basing itself on existing material.

Why not have the utterances from Lexicon of the Crafted Tool run off of Crafting checks instead? Why not base the Lexicon of the Whatever Map (I can't be bothered to look this up right now) based on Knowledge (geography) or Survival instead? Why not make any of the creature-targeting utterances based off of the Knowledge (planes/nature/religions/dungeoneering) skill? Why not base the healing utterance off of the Healing skill? WHY NOT ALL OF THAT so that different Truenamers can choose what kind of role they want to fill?


And I reject that "the game had broken things and it was okay" is a reason to intentionally design things that are broken.
I would never intentionally design something broken, but neither should imperfection stop you from trying something new.



In theory, yes. In practice, the Marshall is gimped by the fact that it was designed in part for miniatures play, so it's abilities are highly useful in mass combat scenarios, but underwhelming in small-unit commando raids that are the bread-and-butter of D&D.
Clearly there is only 1 solution here- MORE HOMEBREW!
Seriously though, even if it's mechanically powerful, I'm not sure a class that gets by only by buffing it's allies is interesting enough to make someone want to play it. That said, the Healer is also a class I kind of like, so maybe it's just my person preference.



The LotRO games minstrel class works like this IIRC. Some of their abilities build off of the ones that came before, so if you start with a damaging song, you can build on it to deal more damage, or inflict debuffs, and build on that as the music builds. But if you want to switch to healing the you have to start over at the beginning of that melody, and build on the healing music/magic.
Sounds interesting, but complicated. And I know nothing about the LotR games- how does it fair when compared to other classes in that setting?



I think "this particular class blows" is a bad argument for it not being reasonable to have that concept as a PC class. I agree, the Marshall blows. But so does the Fighter, the Monk, the Truenamer, and (to varying degrees) and number of other classes. But the idea that those classes sucking as-written implies that they don't work as PC classes strikes me as assuming too much. "Mystic Kung Fu" seems like a completely reasonable power set for a character, as does "Word Magic".
Part of it might be the setting- for example, I've never played Exhalted but it sounds like my kind of game. But it's definitely got more of an anime/wuxia feel than classic Tolkienish high-fantasy. One of the things I really like about 3.5 is that it's got just SO MUCH STUFF you have rules for nearly anything you want. The downside, of course, is that coming from so many different designers with so many different philosophies over such an extended period, it doesn't all play nicely together.


Sure, that implies PCs should have access to Bardic rituals. But they're rituals. Couldn't everyone just have access to them? They're kind of a crap deal in combat, and they're probably more interesting overall if they guy doing the ritual might actually be a Necromancer or a Warlock himself.
CAN have access? Yes. But DO they have access? Maybe, maybe not.
Just because something is printed in a rulebook somewhere doesn't mean you have to let your players have it, or have it easily. Not everyone does the magic-mart style of worldbuilding. Like I said before, if the players see a really awesome item/enemy-class/magic-spell/animal-companion/whatever, then tracking down one of those whatevers for their own could become the focus of it's very own subplot.



I don't advocate keeping the Jack of All Trades feature if you use the PF bard as a chassis.
I feel like there's a fair number of classes that where trying to offer that kind of trade-off: power in a narrow area vs. versatility over a broad swath. But because 3.5 tends to reward specialization and punish the jack-of-all-trades types, no one ever really picked the latter option.


Yes. A related problem I had was that I didn't really have a good feel for how the bardic spell list worked. 3.x bard is a really eccentric mishmash of random spells thhat don't fit into any real thematic consistency. I felt better about that once I realized the spell list was basically a giant mishmash of leftovers, but there's not much else that can be addressed other than to just full stop rewrite all of them.
Yeah, I feel like it was supposed to be something of a trickster/swashbuckler type, heavy on the enchantment, but the Beguiler did that same schtick better from the casting perspective. Maybe it was just that early in 3.5's development cycle, WotC didn't really know where to go with the Bard. Was the Bard a 3.0 or earlier edition class that they tried to port?

Maybe it should be an important lesson that when making a new setting/system/edition you start with the basics: melee, caster, holy, wild, & skill-monkey, and save the more complex stuff for once you see how people handle your rules.


It depends on how closely you're trying to tune things. I found that combat didn't last long enough for functionally infinite casting to matter, and endurance testing wasn't possible due to our adventuring workday. Action Economy limited me from ever exceeding what I would do as a core bard, but I really enjoyed the constant feeling of perform checking. I'm sure there's something in there that will work without rewriting skills.
I feel like part of the scope of having a "variety of encounters" is changing up when and how they occur. Just because the party has called it quits for the day because the Cleric is out of spells doesn't mean nothing will stumble across them. Maybe if the Wizard is reduced to plinking away with a crossbow, it gives other people the chance to strut their stuff.

Really though I think the better point is that functionally-infinite casting is a different playstyle- one where, if in a particular encounter the best option is to just spam the same thing over and over and over again, you can do so without worrying to much about it impacting the NEXT encounter. That's appealing to a lot of people.


... What do you mean the class isn't named "Motivate Charisma"? :smallconfused:
Heh :smallamused:
Boosting stats is always mechanically good, but thematically boring IMO. At most, it should be part of something else.

[Alent]

I feel like there's a fair number of classes that where trying to offer that kind of trade-off: power in a narrow area vs. versatility over a broad swath. But because 3.5 tends to reward specialization and punish the jack-of-all-trades types, no one ever really picked the latter option.

Er... *looks* Ah. Derp. That statement didn't come across right because remembered a class feature's name incorrectly during my late nightearly morning post construction. That statement will probably make more sense when you see what I thought I was referencing:


Versatile Performance (Ex)
At 2nd level, a bard can choose one type of Perform skill. He can use his bonus in that skill in place of his bonus in associated skills. When substituting in this way, the bard uses his total Perform skill bonus, including class skill bonus, in place of its associated skill’s bonus, whether or not he has ranks in that skill or if it is a class skill. At 6th level, and every 4 levels thereafter, the bard can select an additional type of Perform to substitute.

The types of Perform and their associated skills are: Act (Bluff, Disguise), Comedy (Bluff, Intimidate), Dance (Acrobatics, Fly), Keyboard Instruments (Diplomacy, Intimidate), Oratory (Diplomacy, Sense Motive), Percussion (Handle Animal, Intimidate), Sing (Bluff, Sense Motive), String (Bluff, Diplomacy), and Wind (Diplomacy, Handle Animal).

This feature does not result in a particularly healthy party dynamic when you're excessively stacking bonuses on perform, which is what I was trying to say, rather than criticizing the Jack of all Trades trope. (It gets worse when someone else wants to be the party face)


Yeah, I feel like it was supposed to be something of a trickster/swashbuckler type, heavy on the enchantment, but the Beguiler did that same schtick better from the casting perspective. Maybe it was just that early in 3.5's development cycle, WotC didn't really know where to go with the Bard. Was the Bard a 3.0 or earlier edition class that they tried to port?

Maybe it should be an important lesson that when making a new setting/system/edition you start with the basics: melee, caster, holy, wild, & skill-monkey, and save the more complex stuff for once you see how people handle your rules.

I agree on the trickster/swashbuckler type, but the support design almost seems to discourage melee. I find it a really hard class to get a good read on since the fluff doesn't do a very good job of describing what it does outside of music and storytelling. The fluff for Battledancer is an homage to the Okinawan myth of Karate, which ended up giving me a reasonable amount of design for how/why Bards might favor unarmed combat and music, and I riffed with it from there.

On the older class port question, if I understand correctly, it was the OD&D(?) equivalent of a PrC, it became a base class at some point in AD&D, then became what we know in 3.0. Then somewhere in 3.5, they implemented the Fochlucan Lyrist PrC, which was based on the original Bard.

I mostly agree with making sure that the primary archetypes work out, but I really think Skill monkey should not be it's own archetype. Skills define non-combat roles, everyone should be interacting with skills or the system is effectively wasted.


I feel like part of the scope of having a "variety of encounters" is changing up when and how they occur. Just because the party has called it quits for the day because the Cleric is out of spells doesn't mean nothing will stumble across them. Maybe if the Wizard is reduced to plinking away with a crossbow, it gives other people the chance to strut their stuff.

Really though I think the better point is that functionally-infinite casting is a different playstyle- one where, if in a particular encounter the best option is to just spam the same thing over and over and over again, you can do so without worrying to much about it impacting the NEXT encounter. That's appealing to a lot of people.

I wish there was a good way to scope this other than trial and error. There's too much variance between groups and playstyles.

Warlock is one of my favorite classes, tho', so I think it should be pretty obvious I like at will, action economy limits over Arbitrary per diems.

[Eldariel]

Music magic actually goes as far back as mythologies. E.g. the world of LotR draws quite heavily on Finnish mythology (the easiest modern source for it being Lönnrot's concoction "Kalevala", based on Karelian verbal heritage), where "song" and "magic" are practically synonymous. That's far from the only mythos where music is associated with magic of course. It's almost a panhuman phenomenon.

Of course, the nature of folklore magic (particularly in animistic folklore) and D&D magic is rather different, and those differences are quite hard to reconcile. The idea of "spells" as such and indeed, trading effects as opposed to the clashing "magical might", is quite the departure from the subtler and more holistic magic that occurs in folklore. The latter rhymes much better with musical magic than the former leading to musical magic feel a bit out of place in D&D outside of simple fascination, inspiration and fear (which is more or less what Bard songs do).

Truenames work more naturally as discrete effects and indeed, sit in as a part of D&D style magic naturally in binding fiends, controlling fey, etc.

[Cosi]

But there are a LOT of base-classes, so while it's cools if you can come up with a neat little trade-off like that, I don't think you should be prevented from designing a class mechanically if you can't.

I dunno, by the end of 3e, every class was getting its own set of totally arbitrary unique mechanics. Binders, Warblades, and Incarnates all have different mechanics from each other (and with the exception of the Incarnate and the Soulborn) the other classes in their books. I don't think it's that harsh of a restriction, and I think the fact that you can't write a class without it's own suite of powers makes it less likely that you'll end up with classes like the Fighter that don't get high level abilities. Also, you can reuse things and it's fairly easy to justify whatever mechanic you happen to like for a caster. Here's a list of mechanics I've seen or thought of that you could hang a class on:

1. Drain (your spells are bigger than normal, but inflict status conditions on you) -- appropriate for a Warlock or Binder, could be worked for a Barbarian type.
2. Spheres (you learn a suite of related abilities) -- appropriate for whatever caster you happen to run with.
3. Stances (you get a bunch of stances, which come with linked maneuvers that can be expended and are refreshed you change stance) -- appropriate for a skirmisher type like a Scout or Ninja.
4. Winds of Fate -- Table (you have a six-row table to which you assign columns of abilities, roll a die to see which row you can use) -- appropriate for a Binder, or perhaps some kind of Shaman type.
5. Winds of Fate -- Deck (you have a bunch of abilities, you draw a random subset every so often) -- used on the Crusader, could work for something like a Marshall.
6. Power Points (you have a bunch of abilities that have different costs from the same pool) -- used for Psionics.
7. Vancian (you prepare from a large set of abilities into a smaller set of slots) -- obviously works for Wizards, but as mentioned a Gadgeteer type could work here.
8. At-Will (you have abilities you can use as often as you want) -- works for pretty much whoever.
9. Aspects (you have a couple of ability suites that give passive powerups, you can set one active for better abilities) -- works for a Binder or a Beastmaster.
10. Recharge (your abilities refresh after some number of rounds) -- arbitrary magic.
11. Conditions (your abilities have triggers that allow you to activate them) -- classic Rogue setup (e.g. to turn on Sneak Attack you have to be Flanking), works passably for a tactician.
12. Sequencing (your abilities have tags and buff abilities with different tags) -- suggested for the Bard, could work for an Elementalist type.
13. Warblade (you spend a round not using your abilities to get them back) -- obviously, this is how the Warblade works.
14. Preparation (you spend actions charging up your abilities) -- I first saw this suggested for an Assassin, but it works for some kind of channeler.
15. Rage Meter (as you deal or take damage, you unlock better abilities) -- this screams Barbarian to me.
16. Charging (your abilities make later abilities better) -- suggested for the Bard, works for casters (in [I]Traveler's Gate this is how the Lightning Mages work).
17. Augments (you have basic abilities that you can make better with various upgrades) -- psionics and SoP both do this.
18. Backlash (you can upgrade your abilities at the cost of damage to yourself) -- pretty similar to Drain, but damage rather than debuffs.
19. Energy (you have a pool of points, you assign them to different abilities to upgrade them) -- this is Incarnum, but it would also work for a Gadgeteer type.
20. Slots (you have a couple of slots to which totally arbitrary kinds of buffs are assigned) -- this is the other half of Incarnum.
21. Paired (each ability has another ability paired with it, use one to recharge the other) -- I guess this works for the Truenamer on the basis of that whole reversed utterance thing they do.
22. Encounter (you get a bunch of big nukes that you can set off once each) -- it's like a Wizard or Sorcerer, but for a paradigm where everyone is expected to refresh before each encounter.
23. ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL (you have a bunch of weak minions and also some powers you can activate to buff them up) -- could work for a WoW-style Warlock, or really any summoner.
24. Auras (you have some auras that give AoE buffs) -- Marshalls and Dragon Shamans do this, as do Bards to a degree. I'm not sure this is an entire character, but hey.

That's enough to write more than twenty classes with no repeats, and there's plenty of room to tweak things like how fast recharging works. Also, you can definitely reuse the same broad mechanic in different ways. For example, you could have a Beastmaster whose animal Aspect determined which companion follows her around and also a Binder whose vestige Aspect determines whether get gets a flame nova or a singularity blast.


Ok, WHY do you think it's "dumb" or why do you think it can't work? If it's simply because the skill-system is unbalanced, then why do we even have a skill-system to base it off of in the first place?

I thought I outlined that in the initial post. In a level based system, your skills can either be some consistent function of level, or they can not be some consistent function of level. In the first case, all your "skill based magic" does is make a level check more complicated. That's not problematic from a power perspective, but I think it's basically a waste of time. In the second case, you're inputing something that has very little to do with level into a function that needs to provided level-consistent results, which can't work well.

And honestly, this isn't even really a "the skill system is broken" problem. I think it is totally okay if some skills don't scale directly with level. Ancient sages should be able to know mystic secrets the party needs without also needing to be substantially more bad-ass than the party (or having to be 20th level Experts). But that means that there can't be a way to turn your knowledge of the dining customs of the ancient empires of the Minotaurs into blasting magic.

[Tvtyrant]

I think Truenamer is a lot like Words of Power from Pathfinder: You are essentially a hacker entering code into the world. It may be magical but it is hardly mystical, while Bards feel more like your performance inspires the world to change. A Bardic spell could involve dancing, drums, singing, or flute playing depending on the performer. It isn't what you do but the talent and will of the performer that matters, closer I think to a Psion.

[Deepbluediver]

This feature does not result in a particularly healthy party dynamic when you're excessively stacking bonuses on perform, which is what I was trying to say, rather than criticizing the Jack of all Trades trope. (It gets worse when someone else wants to be the party face)
Lately I've started being of the opinion that everyone who is present should have some contribution to skill-checks, rather than just the person with the highest bonus. Especially for social encounters.
For example, the Sorcerer is halfway through enthralling the king the party is visiting with a combination of flattery, exaggeration, and deference when the Fighter and the Ranger loudly start comparing the attributes (https://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Length_031eeb_63493.jpg) of their respective weapons in the background. Of the Barbarian cuts loose with a gigantic fart (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPY6Nk4VUv8). Then the Sorcerer sends everyone else outside, and he's just getting back into the rythym of things when a huge cacophony interrupts. Apparently someone made some harsh insinuations (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAy4zULKFDU) about the Monk's parentage, and he decided to settle things with a punch-up.
Or for something entirely different, maybe right in the middle of a dungeon the Cleric decides that he's an expert (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) in picking locks, and tries to offer the Rogue advice.

Stuff like this might encourage the party to distribute their skill points a bit more evenly to ensure that everyone is minimally competent to the point where they won't inflict penalties on other party members. Or it becomes a way to control someone who's min-maxing a particular skill.


I agree on the trickster/swashbuckler type, but the support design almost seems to discourage melee.
Do you think that was intentional, unintentional, or just a result of magic being so much better than melee in 3.5?


...a reasonable amount of design for how/why Bards might favor unarmed combat and music, and I riffed with it from there.
You know, I always pictured Bards as fencers or maybe dual-wielding Rogue types, but I never considered that they might choose to fight unarmed. That's a very interesting possibility I might have to pursue further.


On the older class port question, if I understand correctly, it was the OD&D(?) equivalent of a PrC, it became a base class at some point in AD&D, then became what we know in 3.0. Then somewhere in 3.5, they implemented the Fochlucan Lyrist PrC, which was based on the original Bard.
I'd heard of the Lyrist before, but I never went and looked it up until just now. The combination of Bard and Druid seems very strange. Not in a bad way, just unexpected. Kind of like a Mystic Theurge for less common combos, and I can't imagine anyone getting into that PrC naturally. It really feels like the kind of thing you'd have to intend to do from level 1.


I mostly agree with making sure that the primary archetypes work out, but I really think Skill monkey should not be it's own archetype. Skills define non-combat roles, everyone should be interacting with skills or the system is effectively wasted.
I think it's tough for that to be ALL class does, depending on the system of course, but if you design a skill system well enough than even a skill monkey shouldn't be able to master everything. They might have more moments to show off their expertise of skills, whereas a Fighter has more moments to demonstrate his combat prowess, but ideally there would be occasional encounters where they trade roles.


I wish there was a good way to scope this other than trial and error. There's too much variance between groups and playstyles.
Yeah, I think I said this recently in another thread, but 3.5's ability to do almost anything is both a strength and a flaw.


Warlock is one of my favorite classes, tho', so I think it should be pretty obvious I like at will, action economy limits over Arbitrary per diems.
In a perfectly-designed system, there would be room for players of all types and it would be easy for a GM to give them all plenty of action and moments in the spotlight. Also while I'm wishing, lets end poverty, violence, and discrimination, and have all our politicians suddenly become a cross between Mother Teresa, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, & Teddy Roosevelt. :smallwink:



Of course, the nature of folklore magic (particularly in animistic folklore) and D&D magic is rather different, and those differences are quite hard to reconcile. The idea of "spells" as such and indeed, trading effects as opposed to the clashing "magical might", is quite the departure from the subtler and more holistic magic that occurs in folklore. The latter rhymes much better with musical magic than the former leading to musical magic feel a bit out of place in D&D outside of simple fascination, inspiration and fear (which is more or less what Bard songs do).
You're not wrong, but as I've said before, some stuff makes for a good story and some stuff makes for a good game, and they don't always overlap. I'd love to take all the existing lore into account, but we need to be able to borrow from it when it's useful and discard what isn't.


Truenames work more naturally as discrete effects and indeed, sit in as a part of D&D style magic naturally in binding fiends, controlling fey, etc.
Some classes have abilities that specifically interact with certain creature-types; I wonder if we couldn't do something like that with the Truenamer and Fey and/or Outsiders.



I dunno, by the end of 3e, every class was getting its own set of totally arbitrary unique mechanics. Binders, Warblades, and Incarnates all have different mechanics from each other (and with the exception of the Incarnate and the Soulborn) the other classes in their books. I don't think it's that harsh of a restriction, and I think the fact that you can't write a class without it's own suite of powers makes it less likely that you'll end up with classes like the Fighter that don't get high level abilities. Also, you can reuse things and it's fairly easy to justify whatever mechanic you happen to like for a caster. Here's a list of mechanics I've seen or thought of that you could hang a class on:

1. Drain (your spells are bigger than normal, but inflict status conditions on you) -- appropriate for a Warlock or Binder, could be worked for a Barbarian type.
2. Spheres (you learn a suite of related abilities) -- appropriate for whatever caster you happen to run with.
3. Stances (you get a bunch of stances, which come with linked maneuvers that can be expended and are refreshed you change stance) -- appropriate for a skirmisher type like a Scout or Ninja.
4. Winds of Fate -- Table (you have a six-row table to which you assign columns of abilities, roll a die to see which row you can use) -- appropriate for a Binder, or perhaps some kind of Shaman type.
5. Winds of Fate -- Deck (you have a bunch of abilities, you draw a random subset every so often) -- used on the Crusader, could work for something like a Marshall.
6. Power Points (you have a bunch of abilities that have different costs from the same pool) -- used for Psionics.
7. Vancian (you prepare from a large set of abilities into a smaller set of slots) -- obviously works for Wizards, but as mentioned a Gadgeteer type could work here.
8. At-Will (you have abilities you can use as often as you want) -- works for pretty much whoever.
9. Aspects (you have a couple of ability suites that give passive powerups, you can set one active for better abilities) -- works for a Binder or a Beastmaster.
10. Recharge (your abilities refresh after some number of rounds) -- arbitrary magic.
11. Conditions (your abilities have triggers that allow you to activate them) -- classic Rogue setup (e.g. to turn on Sneak Attack you have to be Flanking), works passably for a tactician.
12. Sequencing (your abilities have tags and buff abilities with different tags) -- suggested for the Bard, could work for an Elementalist type.
13. Warblade (you spend a round not using your abilities to get them back) -- obviously, this is how the Warblade works.
14. Preparation (you spend actions charging up your abilities) -- I first saw this suggested for an Assassin, but it works for some kind of channeler.
15. Rage Meter (as you deal or take damage, you unlock better abilities) -- this screams Barbarian to me.
16. Charging (your abilities make later abilities better) -- suggested for the Bard, works for casters (in [I]Traveler's Gate this is how the Lightning Mages work).
17. Augments (you have basic abilities that you can make better with various upgrades) -- psionics and SoP both do this.
18. Backlash (you can upgrade your abilities at the cost of damage to yourself) -- pretty similar to Drain, but damage rather than debuffs.
19. Energy (you have a pool of points, you assign them to different abilities to upgrade them) -- this is Incarnum, but it would also work for a Gadgeteer type.
20. Slots (you have a couple of slots to which totally arbitrary kinds of buffs are assigned) -- this is the other half of Incarnum.
21. Paired (each ability has another ability paired with it, use one to recharge the other) -- I guess this works for the Truenamer on the basis of that whole reversed utterance thing they do.
22. Encounter (you get a bunch of big nukes that you can set off once each) -- it's like a Wizard or Sorcerer, but for a paradigm where everyone is expected to refresh before each encounter.
23. ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL (you have a bunch of weak minions and also some powers you can activate to buff them up) -- could work for a WoW-style Warlock, or really any summoner.
24. Auras (you have some auras that give AoE buffs) -- Marshalls and Dragon Shamans do this, as do Bards to a degree. I'm not sure this is an entire character, but hey.

That's enough to write more than twenty classes with no repeats, and there's plenty of room to tweak things like how fast recharging works. Also, you can definitely reuse the same broad mechanic in different ways. For example, you could have a Beastmaster whose animal Aspect determined which companion follows her around and also a Binder whose vestige Aspect determines whether get gets a flame nova or a singularity blast.
There are certainly some very neat ideas in there that I might borrow from in the future- which one do you think fits best with the Truenamer and/or Bard?

Also though, there's 50+ base classes in 3.5, so if you're goal is to come up with a unique system for all of them, we're not quite halfway there yet. If instead you allow for a specific mechanic for every subsystem, with 2-4 classes each, I think it becomes a lot more manageable.


I thought I outlined that in the initial post. In a level based system, your skills can either be some consistent function of level, or they can not be some consistent function of level. In the first case, all your "skill based magic" does is make a level check more complicated. That's not problematic from a power perspective, but I think it's basically a waste of time. In the second case, you're inputing something that has very little to do with level into a function that needs to provided level-consistent results, which can't work well.
I didn't want to make assumptions.
Here's the thing though, there is not just one skill in our skill-system, and I think I've made clear that I believe it was a mistake to hang everything on a single, brand-new skill. There are several possible metrics you could have skills relate to, and I think a good way to run our intended system would be to fix power to level, and let versatility vary by skill-choice.

If you spread out the skills that a skill-based caster needed, you could have a system where everyone can use every ability once per day, and the players have to choose whether they want to use every ability twice per day, a handful of abilities 4 times per day, or a single ability 8 times per day. And obviously with either of the latter two options, which ability(s) you pick can vary by build.
It's harder to balance, I think, if you fix versatility and let power vary because you're likely to end up with a character who is either game-breaking or useless depending on the situation, but it might be a variant you open up to high-optimization groups or GMs who are good at improvising and adapting on the fly.


And honestly, this isn't even really a "the skill system is broken" problem. I think it is totally okay if some skills don't scale directly with level. Ancient sages should be able to know mystic secrets the party needs without also needing to be substantially more bad-ass than the party (or having to be 20th level Experts). But that means that there can't be a way to turn your knowledge of the dining customs of the ancient empires of the Minotaurs into blasting magic.
Ok I'll bite- why not? Knowledge is power, as they say, and I think its very easy to draw a correlation between ancient knowledge and real-world influence. The balancing issue, I think, comes from non-knowledge skills, but if we assume most groups will optimize for skill checks anyway, than particular encounter that their skill-monkey can't beat or is unavailable for becomes an opportunity for the party to think outside the box.

Also, just because you can't beat Skill Check X with opposed Skill X doesn't mean the situation is unwinnable. Maybe if you can't pick that lock a Search check finds you the key. Don't know a particular piece of knowledge? Stage a raid on the forbidden library to look it up. Can't jump across that chasm? Knowledge (engineering) tells you how to rig a rope-bridge.

None of this necessarily means that I think skills have to be linked to level- I'm just pointing out alternative ways to approach the balance issue.
Can't make that Balance check? Chop down a tree, haul it over, and build yourself a ramp!


I think Truenamer is a lot like Words of Power from Pathfinder: You are essentially a hacker entering code into the world. It may be magical but it is hardly mystical, while Bards feel more like your performance inspires the world to change. A Bardic spell could involve dancing, drums, singing, or flute playing depending on the performer. It isn't what you do but the talent and will of the performer that matters, closer I think to a Psion.
My personal headfluff-cannon is that "magic" is the language with which the gods built the universe, and it literally cannot be wrong. So if you lie (for example, "your head is on fire!") then reality shifts to match your words, more or less.

This certainly isn't a unique perspective- I can think of at least one example off the top of my head: the Young Wizards books by Diane Duane. Every wizard is a Truenamer, and the Law of Resistance is in full effect (but not the the Law of Sequence because that **** is bollocks on a duck).
But that's in part the difference between writing a story and designing a gameworld.

[Cosi]

Lately I've started being of the opinion that everyone who is present should have some contribution to skill-checks, rather than just the person with the highest bonus. Especially for social encounters.

Absolutely. What you need is something like Skill Challenges, but not terrible. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to fix Skill Challenges. Instead of having people roll until X failures (which encourages only the best PC participating), have people roll one check a round for X rounds.


There are certainly some very neat ideas in there that I might borrow from in the future- which one do you think fits best with the Truenamer and/or Bard?

I think there are a lot of things there that could reasonably work, depending on what you choose to play up. You could do a thing where Truenamers build sentences out of individual words, which would look something like Augmenting. As mentioned, you could do something with Sequencing for Bards to make them feel more like they were playing music. I'm not particularly partial to any of them, but part of that is because I'm not terribly partial to either Bards or Truenamers on a conceptual level.


Also though, there's 50+ base classes in 3.5, so if you're goal is to come up with a unique system for all of them, we're not quite halfway there yet. If instead you allow for a specific mechanic for every subsystem, with 2-4 classes each, I think it becomes a lot more manageable.

I don't think you need an entirely unique resource management system for every class, but I don't think that means you need to reuse them in some systematic way either. The thing that decides what resource management a class gets should mostly be determined by that class, not by it's power source or whether that resource management is totally unique. It is, in my view, completely acceptable for both the Warlock and the Berserker to work off of Drain. Or for the Warlock to work off of Drain and the Berserker to work off of a Rage Meter. Or whatever. The point should be to pick a resource management mechanic that feels appropriate for the class, not to feel forced to invent something new (though generally you'll probably want to make some tweaks, which will result in new-feeling classes even when underlying mechanics are similar) or be locked into using Drain because this is an Eldritch Power Source class.


If you spread out the skills that a skill-based caster needed, you could have a system where everyone can use every ability once per day, and the players have to choose whether they want to use every ability twice per day, a handful of abilities 4 times per day, or a single ability 8 times per day. And obviously with either of the latter two options, which ability(s) you pick can vary by build.

I still don't understand how this doesn't make the guy who knows about guidance of the avatar and custom items of arbitrary bonus types way better than the guy who doesn't. It's not quite so bad as the work where your abilities get more powerful, but if abilities are supposed to have daily limits presumably increasing those is at least some degree of overpowered.

Also, I worry that this ends up either forcing Truenamers into a particular subset of skills, or requiring a truly immense blowup in the number of abilities you write.


Ok I'll bite- why not? Knowledge is power, as they say, and I think its very easy to draw a correlation between ancient knowledge and real-world influence.

Working backwards from genre emulation. "We seek out a sage who knows what the runes mean" is a totally appropriate thing for characters in a fantasy story to do, so the game ought to be able to generate stories where the PCs do that. That means that there have to be sages who have knowledge the party doesn't, which is modeled by having a bigger number on some Knowledge check. If those numbers are a tight function of level, that means the sage in question is higher level than the PCs, which means you have to figure out why he isn't solving the problem.

[Alent]

Lately I've started being of the opinion that everyone who is present should have some contribution to skill-checks, rather than just the person with the highest bonus. Especially for social encounters.
For example, the Sorcerer is halfway through enthralling the king the party is visiting with a combination of flattery, exaggeration, and deference when the Fighter and the Ranger loudly start comparing the attributes (https://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Length_031eeb_63493.jpg) of their respective weapons in the background. Of the Barbarian cuts loose with a gigantic fart (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPY6Nk4VUv8). Then the Sorcerer sends everyone else outside, and he's just getting back into the rythym of things when a huge cacophony interrupts. Apparently someone made some harsh insinuations (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAy4zULKFDU) about the Monk's parentage, and he decided to settle things with a punch-up.
Or for something entirely different, maybe right in the middle of a dungeon the Cleric decides that he's an expert (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) in picking locks, and tries to offer the Rogue advice.

Stuff like this might encourage the party to distribute their skill points a bit more evenly to ensure that everyone is minimally competent to the point where they won't inflict penalties on other party members. Or it becomes a way to control someone who's min-maxing a particular skill.

That example is solidly on the wrong side of Grod's Law. I strongly suggest you don't do that. :smalleek:

Your best bet for encouraging the party to distribute their skill points is to not use 3.5 skills, or find some alternative means such as party averages. Consider: "The party's average diplomacy is a +6, despite the Sorcerer having a +19. If the party's being debriefed, the Sorcerer is helping to smooth things out, but everyone's using their own words, so you all make D20+6's and adapting some "Degrees of success" logic from another game system, determining the favorability of outcome on how many successes they rolled.

This is not what I would ever do at the table, because I prefer to see encounters like that freeformed because this story needs a plot and the players' actions are it... but a communal degrees of success system feels less... offensive... than a DM telling the Barbarian he rolled a natural 20 vs the cheese just because he rolled bad on a diplomacy check.


Do you think that was intentional, unintentional, or just a result of magic being so much better than melee in 3.5?

I believe it's unintentional. 3.x is just a weird enough ruleset where the DM and players can fail their will saves vs preconceived notions and play an entirely different game than the one written in the books. There's ample evidence to suggest that this happened with WotC's actual development team, but your guess is as good as mine on that.


I think it's tough for that to be ALL class does, depending on the system of course, but if you design a skill system well enough than even a skill monkey shouldn't be able to master everything. They might have more moments to show off their expertise of skills, whereas a Fighter has more moments to demonstrate his combat prowess, but ideally there would be occasional encounters where they trade roles.

I just think they should get different skills. There's enough "physical" skills that an 8+int skill point per level Fighter could spend all those and not encroach on the Rogue. My skill rewrite massively drops the number of skills and possible skill point expenditures, and 8+int fighter and rogue both still don't have that much in the way of skill or role overlaps.

[Deepbluediver]

Absolutely. What you need is something like Skill Challenges, but not terrible. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to fix Skill Challenges. Instead of having people roll until X failures (which encourages only the best PC participating), have people roll one check a round for X rounds.
I never played 4th edition but Skill Challenges have always sounded appealing to me. I'll try to look up some rules, but are there any pitfalls I should be aware of that aren't obvious right off the bat? What I'm asking is, is it the kind of thing like we saw a lot in 3rd/3.5 edition where something LOOKS neat at first, but then you start to examine it closer and it turns out to be just a veneer of paint and paper-mâché over mounds of suck?


I think there are a lot of things there that could reasonably work, depending on what you choose to play up. You could do a thing where Truenamers build sentences out of individual words, which would look something like Augmenting. As mentioned, you could do something with Sequencing for Bards to make them feel more like they were playing music.
I've seen lots and lots and LOTS of suggestions for "build your own magic" systems, but virtually all of them seem to be more complicated and more restrictive than the designers intend. Part of the problem seems to be that the number of combinations increases exponentially (5x5=25, 5x5x5=125, 5x5x5x5=625, etc) and you need to define how ALL of that is going to work. In the end, many distinct magical effects just seem better as specific spells, giving the creator less work and more control over what players can do.
Based on my experiences, I really think it's one of those things that just works out better for a story than for a game.

Also, ongoing effects in D&D are tricky to get to feel right because the system tends to expand combat and compress everything else. What I mean is, an all-day shopping trip through the city might be 5 minutes of real-world time, except for that moment when someone tries to pickpocket you and 30 seconds of combat occupies 2 real-world hours. It's easy for there to be 5-10 minutes between a player's turns, making it hard to keep that rhythm feeling going.
I've got something on the back burner for ToB to try and encourage comboing*, so maybe I'll see if I can't re-purpose it here, too, but ongoing effects are also inherently complicated for another reason: other things can happen during them. Look at combat menuvers like Trip, Disarm, Sunder, etc- they are a distinct effect that happen or don't happen and then the attempt is over. But a Grapple can go from round to round, necessitating the writing of guidelines for everything else that might happen while the grapple is occurring.

Not to get off topic, but here's what I'm thinking:

One of the major issues with ToB is that the maneuvers don't scale. We fix that by having them relate to level, but the better thing is to instead let their power relate to EFFECTIVE Initiator Level, and then make lots of things that can boost it. Without getting to much into the weeds, one major source of bonuses is doing a sequence of maneuvers all from the same School Discipline, with each one adding to the bonus for the next. For example, doing 4 Desert Wind maneuvers in a row means the first is done at +0, the second at +1, the third at +2, and the fourth at +3. Breaking the Combo (stopping to do a White Raven maneuver after the second Desert Wind maneuver) resets the bonus back to +0.

It's an idea I feel might work better for the Bard than the Truenamer, with the added complication that the Bard's spells or invocations or whatever are not already neatly broken down into Schools Disciplines Genres, so we'd have to figure out how to make that work.


I'm not particularly partial to any of them, but part of that is because I'm not terribly partial to either Bards or Truenamers on a conceptual level.
Fair enough, there are some people who don't like the magic-swordsmen/wuxia/anime feel of certain classes (most notably ToB) getting mixed up in their high-fantasy. I still appreciate your feedback though- it's very useful.


I don't think you need an entirely unique resource management system for every class, but I don't think that means you need to reuse them in some systematic way either. The thing that decides what resource management a class gets should mostly be determined by that class, not by it's power source or whether that resource management is totally unique. It is, in my view, completely acceptable for both the Warlock and the Berserker to work off of Drain. Or for the Warlock to work off of Drain and the Berserker to work off of a Rage Meter. Or whatever. The point should be to pick a resource management mechanic that feels appropriate for the class, not to feel forced to invent something new (though generally you'll probably want to make some tweaks, which will result in new-feeling classes even when underlying mechanics are similar) or be locked into using Drain because this is an Eldritch Power Source class.
One of my favorite alternate game systems is one written by Tailsteak, a gamer and webcomic artist, who had his characters discuss game-design in-story, and then he wrote it up and posted it: http://www.leftoversoup.com/AndTheBeatGoesOn.pdf

It's very rules-light, only about 10 pages all told, but the whole world runs on a kind of universal rhythm; maybe I'll try to see if I can't incorporate some element of that into Bard-combat as well.


I still don't understand how this doesn't make the guy who knows about guidance of the avatar and custom items of arbitrary bonus types way better than the guy who doesn't. It's not quite so bad as the work where your abilities get more powerful, but if abilities are supposed to have daily limits presumably increasing those is at least some degree of overpowered.
Custom items or arbitrary bonuses are a problem and the GM needs to address it, but things also depend on the variance between optimization levels. If the difference between optimized and optimized is 1 and 5, that's an issue. If the difference, however, is 10 and 15, that's less of a problem. In absolute terms the optimizer gains the same amount, but RELATIVELY speaking they gain a 50% boost in power instead of a 500% boost in power.
Like I said before, changing the DCs so that you can use all of your abilities at least a few times but that it's harder to use them an effectively unlimited amount (the DC scales up quicker) lowers the gap between optimization levels (I think; we'd obviously require a lot of playtesting to get it right).

I really believe that the Truenamer was such a mess because it was poorly designed and inadequately playtested, not because the underlying system is unworkable. Anyone who tells you differently isn't being creative enough with the way we use skills, or how much they change about the subsystem.
As presented, yes, there's no simple fix, you have to rebuild it from the ground up. But that's merely a question of effort, IMO, not an impossible no-win scenario.


Also, I worry that this ends up either forcing Truenamers into a particular subset of skills, or requiring a truly immense blowup in the number of abilities you write.
Why? I mean, most classes already have skills they focus on, but frankly the Truenamer could use some more variety in his Utterances anyway. Maybe that should be a challenge we set for ourselves- write an Utterance that can logically flow from every skill, and only then start doubling up.

Just going on what's already been written...

Word of Nurturing- Heal
Archer's Eye- Spot
Perceive the Unseen- Listen
Energy Negation- Knowledge (Planes)
Incarnation of Angels- Knowledge (Religion)
Morale Boost- Intimidate
Spell Deflection- Knowledge (Arcana)
Ward of Peace- Diplomacy
Mystic Rampart- Knowledge (Architecture & Engineering)
anything from Crafted Tool- Craft or Appraise
anything from Perfected Map- Knowledge (nature), Knowledge (geography), or Survival



Working backwards from genre emulation. "We seek out a sage who knows what the runes mean" is a totally appropriate thing for characters in a fantasy story to do, so the game ought to be able to generate stories where the PCs do that. That means that there have to be sages who have knowledge the party doesn't, which is modeled by having a bigger number on some Knowledge check. If those numbers are a tight function of level, that means the sage in question is higher level than the PCs, which means you have to figure out why he isn't solving the problem.
Ah, OK, lets see what we can do with this.
The rules are to some degree an abstraction, and I don't think they need to be the absolute final word in all situations. You're right that for most classes Level is an equivalent metric for combat-prowess, but I don't think it needs to be, not do I see much of a problem with giving someone a few levels of Expert if they are supposed to be really good at something. However often is that party deferring to other people anyway?

Going a little more outside the bounds of the RAW, feel free to provide various bonuses as appropriate- even if someone is only level 1, if they spent their entire life studying something, feel free to give them a +5 circumstance bonus (or whatever) on appropriate knowledge checks*. Or if there is somewhere the players can go to research the answer, then the check is really more of a test of how quickly they find it or how many resources they have to expend.
If there is something the characters can't do directly, let them use the other skills they DO have to work around the problem. Maybe exchange a few odd jobs for a local merchant for access to rare and exotic tomes he's collected in his travels. Or just break into his house at night and steal the damn thing. :smalltongue:

*as an aside, I'd love to find some way to decouple the crafting system from combat-ability as well.



That example is solidly on the wrong side of Grod's Law. I strongly suggest you don't do that. :smalleek:
I had never heard of Grod's law (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=17613518&postcount=102) specifically, though I certainly agree with it. The corollary can be that giving an overpowered ability a long cooldown doesn't balance it either.

That wasn't my intent here though- of all the imbalanced aspects of 3.5, I think the Skill system is arguably one of the least problematic. Aside from maybe Diplomacy and maybe Bluff (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0768.html), I think there are very few things that are truly gamebreaking. Really though the point was just to say that skill-checks should be involved, kind like I was talking about with Cosi. 30 seconds of combat involves the entire party and dozens of dice, but 3 hours of negotiation has just one person making 1 roll and that's supposed to be OK? Not in my book.


Your best bet for encouraging the party to distribute their skill points is to not use 3.5 skills, or find some alternative means such as party averages. Consider: "The party's average diplomacy is a +6, despite the Sorcerer having a +19. If the party's being debriefed, the Sorcerer is helping to smooth things out, but everyone's using their own words, so you all make D20+6's and adapting some "Degrees of success" logic from another game system, determining the favorability of outcome on how many successes they rolled.
I didn't explore mechanics but ultimately what I was picturing would have a similar end result- maybe every encounter has some sort of minimum-competence check, and anyone who fails that imparts a penalty on the person with the highest bonus.
And if the players want to roleplay around it, let them. For example, before going to see the king the Bard takes half a day and gives the whole group etiquette lessons, which grant a +2 circumstance bonus on the check but fade after an hour as your party of murderhobos forgets the rules or gets bored or simply runs out of patience.


This is not what I would ever do at the table, because I prefer to see encounters like that freeformed because this story needs a plot and the players' actions are it... but a communal degrees of success system feels less... offensive... than a DM telling the Barbarian he rolled a natural 20 vs the cheese just because he rolled bad on a diplomacy check.
It doesn't have be denigrating for the character, either; fluff is mutable afterall. Maybe you play it out as the Barbarian just being so intimidating or the Wizard so hauntingly beautiful that the target you want to Diplomance spends more time staring at them than listening to the party-face.

Either way, I kind of want the whole party to have more input into skill-checks, somehow.
....And while this is really interesting, I think we've gotten a little off topic. *peers backwards at the horizon*


I believe it's unintentional. 3.x is just a weird enough ruleset where the DM and players can fail their will saves vs preconceived notions and play an entirely different game than the one written in the books. There's ample evidence to suggest that this happened with WotC's actual development team, but your guess is as good as mine on that.
Maybe if we boost the Bard's melee-abilities somehow, we can set up a dynamic where the relationship between Bards and Truenamers is more like that between Warblades and Wizards (or just Warmages). I.e. one is the full-on "magic" user, while the other is the "sword/music-magic" gish, but they both kinda have the same roots.


I just think they should get different skills. There's enough "physical" skills that an 8+int skill point per level Fighter could spend all those and not encroach on the Rogue. My skill rewrite massively drops the number of skills and possible skill point expenditures, and 8+int fighter and rogue both still don't have that much in the way of skill or role overlaps.
I'm not entirely sold on the skills-as-a-function-of-class, though. I thought one of the benefits of the system was that anyone could (in theory) level up any skill, whether it was to fill in a gap in the party's toolkit, or to qualify for some kind of non-standard build, or just to add a mechanical facet to some sort of roleplay.
If you're just going to give every class a fixed set of skills, then you don't really need ranks at all. Skill checks are just d20+stat, and you get a bonus on everything named in your "class skills" section. I don't think that's the direction we really want to go in either, and I'm OK with different builds for the same class choosing to focus on different subsets of skills.

[Cosi]

I never played 4th edition but Skill Challenges have always sounded appealing to me. I'll try to look up some rules, but are there any pitfalls I should be aware of that aren't obvious right off the bat?

There's a better summary here (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49652) than I can probably come up with. The TL;DR is that RAW Skill Challenges have the opposite incentives of what you want. Because you lose when you have enough failures, the optimal strategy is to only have the guy with the best chance of success go. That's problematic, because it means most people won't participate.


I've seen lots and lots and LOTS of suggestions for "build your own magic" systems, but virtually all of them seem to be more complicated and more restrictive than the designers intend.

Build your own magic systems do often fall into that trap. For such a thing to work, it would have to be more like metamagic, where you have spells that are useful already, and apply one-to-three minor modifications. Or like Psionic blasting effects, where you pick which of four minor buffs to add to your spell. But yes, it has to be much less fiddly than it could in a book or a movie.


Well, custom items or arbitrary bonus is a problem itself, IMO, and the GM needs to adders it, but things also depend on the variance between optimization levels. If the difference between optimized and optimized is 1 and 5, that's an issue. If the difference, however, is 10 and 15, that's less of a problem. In absolute terms the optimizer gains the same amount, but RELATIVELY speaking they gain a 50% boost in power instead of a 500% boost in power.

I'm not convinced (at least, not a priori) that this is an advantage. I think, for example, that going from 7th to 9th level spells is as much of a relative advantage as going from 1st to 3rd level spells (or more), even though both of those are linear 2-point differences.


Why? I mean, most classes already have skills they focus on, but frankly the Truenamer could use some more variety in his Utterances anyway. Maybe that should be a challenge we set for ourselves- write an Utterance that can logically flow from every skill, and only then start doubling up.

That seems bad though. We want people to have choices. It should be possible to build multiple loremaster-type Truenamers who feel distinct, and that's hard to do if Knowledge only gets one utterance. Also, we probably want Truenamers to (generally) concentrate on some particular set of skills, and that's unlikely to happen if there are utterances for every skill.


The rules are to some degree an abstraction, and I don't think they need to be the absolute final word in all situations. You're right that for most classes Level is an equivalent metric for combat-prowess, but I don't think it needs to be, not do I see much of a problem with giving someone a few levels of Expert if they are supposed to be really good at something. However often is that party deferring to other people anyway?

I think level needs to be consistent in meaning. Particularly because if it's not, I don't understand how that's substantively different from just a world with non-level advancement, except that it is more confusing. If "level" means fighting prowess for a Wizard, but skill prowess for an Expert, you still functionally have a system where your level can be divorced from your skills (in that you can be really good a Crafting or Knowledge without being good at stabbing people in the face), but there's confusing terminology layered on top of that.

[Deepbluediver]

There's a better summary here (http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=49652) than I can probably come up with. The TL;DR is that RAW Skill Challenges have the opposite incentives of what you want. Because you lose when you have enough failures, the optimal strategy is to only have the guy with the best chance of success go. That's problematic, because it means most people won't participate.
Thanks for the link- I think I get the issue now. That link has another link with some charts I don't fully understand, but everything else they wrote out makes sense. It seems as if WotC's aversion to playtesting extended into the 4th edition as well. Which from some of the reviews I've read, was because they were using the ToM as a paid beta-test to get people on board with the changes they were making and new systems they wanted to try.

Overall though, they really do sound like the sort of thing I'd love to implement if you can do it well.
Mainly it seems like there needs to be more variety. Maybe you have a fixed time limit (or number of rounds) and success is determined by how many times you beat the DC and/or how long it takes you to beat it a specific number of times. Or everyone is required is participate and the degree of your success is determined by some sort of success/failure ratio. Or the challenge requires teamwork with 2+ people both contributing to a single roll. Or all of the above.

And obviously it would be nice if the outcomes where less binary, but that's an issue with designing a specific scenario.

After that, I think there need to be more in-game mechanics based around skills challenges, including core class features. Class-based skill bonuses are nice, but they are kinda passive and boring IMO. I'd love to see more options for skill challenges the same way we have for combat. Once per day decrease the number of successes you need to beat the challenge by 1, or give free Aid-Another to party members, stuff like that. And then "skillmonkey" takes on a deeper meaning than just "has lots of skill points".

I don't think skill-challenges need to feel exactly like combat, in fact it's probably a good idea of they don't, but more nuance and player-involvement can only be a good thing in my book.


I'm not convinced (at least, not a priori) that this is an advantage. I think, for example, that going from 7th to 9th level spells is as much of a relative advantage as going from 1st to 3rd level spells (or more), even though both of those are linear 2-point differences.
Obviously it all boils down to how you design the system. I once read somewhere that in 3.5, characters where roughly supposed to double in power every other level. Obviously some classes hit that mark better than others.

Power and versatility aren't completely inseparable and if you let one vary then yes, it does have some effect on the other, but neither do I think we should design with the goal of trying to completely kill off optimization altogether. I'm really just trying to narrow the variance in optimization so that people can pick up the class without achieving complete system mastery first.
If the newbie can play and have fun while the veteran isn't game breaking, that's good enough for me. Anything more than that should be dealt with at the group level and on a case-by-case basis.


That seems bad though. We want people to have choices. It should be possible to build multiple loremaster-type Truenamers who feel distinct, and that's hard to do if Knowledge only gets one utterance.
I never said they should only get one utterance each, that was just a place to start.


Also, we probably want Truenamers to (generally) concentrate on some particular set of skills, and that's unlikely to happen if there are utterances for every skill.
They still can, if class skills give a bonus to certain skillchecks and some skills have more utterance options than others. I don't think it would be hard to make the Truenamer focus more on the Knowledge skills, which most classic skillmonkeys ignore.

As an aside, most casters in 3.5 got the minimum amount of skillpoints. My version of the Truenamer would likely get the maximum (8 or 10 or whatever depending on the system) because I like to fill in unexplored niches, and I don't see any problem with having a bookish skillmonkey rather than a flamboyant one if no player in your party wants to roll a Rogue this time around.


I think level needs to be consistent in meaning. Particularly because if it's not, I don't understand how that's substantively different from just a world with non-level advancement, except that it is more confusing. If "level" means fighting prowess for a Wizard, but skill prowess for an Expert, you still functionally have a system where your level can be divorced from your skills (in that you can be really good a Crafting or Knowledge without being good at stabbing people in the face), but there's confusing terminology layered on top of that.
I'm not entirely sure I get what you're saying here.

There can be different ways to design skill-systems, but de-linking it from level entirely would make the whole minmaxing thing worse, I think, since levels put a kind of soft-cap on it. In fact maybe we should make that a more hard-and-fast rule. For example, I believe 4e added 1/2 your level to all skill checks, making a kind of minimum incompetence floor. Suppose you also said that the bonus from all sources combined to any particular skill-check couldn't be more than twice your level- that would narrow the range you have to work with considerably.

At low levels it would encourage people to spread out their skills points (or other skill-increasing resources) since concentrating them would be a waste. And this might be a good thing since you need several people to contribute to a skill-check to get at least one success because everyone's bonus is lower. And then as people level up they start to focus more and more on specific things, moving from the jack-of-all-trades to the master of a few. That's not the only design philosophy you can have, of course, but it's one worth considering I think.


...I might have to start a separate thread just for the skill-system discussion stuff. :smallsigh: