were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

[rel]

Some of the later 3.5 casters (the favoured soul comes to mind immediately) were designed to need two different mental stats.

Some of these classes were poorly designed, there was probably some player complaining, but mostly, the PHB offered classes that did the same thing but better and was almost always allowed. So they never saw much play.

Since then the dual attribute caster idea hasn't seen much use and I think this is a shame because, implemented with some thought, it could help address the traditionally unbalanced nature of magic while keeping the 3.5 feel.

[Tvtyrant]

Some of the later 3.5 casters (the favoured soul comes to mind immediately) were designed to need two different mental stats.

Some of these classes were poorly designed, there was probably some player complaining, but mostly, the PHB offered classes that did the same thing but better and was almost always allowed. So they never saw much play.

Since then the dual attribute caster idea hasn't seen much use and I think this is a shame because, implemented with some thought, it could help address the traditionally unbalanced nature of magic while keeping the 3.5 feel.

It doesn't. It makes casters harder to play in a balanced way without effecting the upper levels of power at all, which is the opposite of good game design. A Charisma/Intelligence wizard is still going to be able to bind, teleport, and break reality apart. She just won't have enough constitution to survive in combat throwing fireballs and using leather armor.

[icefractal]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of MAD for any class - by making more attributes required for specific purposes, it reduces flexibility and forces PCs more into a set array.

What would reduce caster power a bit is to make Magic it's own stat. Magic does these things:
* Powers casting (spells/day, DCs, max level castable)
* Powers some other supernatural abilities (TBD which ones)
* Determines magic item DCs (fixing the problem that offensive magic items are garbage)
* Is the stat for Use Magic Device

That's it. No other skills, no other rolls.
This means that casters are only inherently good at casting spells. Wizards don't have tons of skills, Sorcerers aren't the face, Clerics/Druids aren't masters of perception and willpower. They can still be good at those other things, but it's a secondary competency you have to invest in like it is for non-casters.

If doing so, and you want Wizards to retain their "scholar / sage" flavor, you'd want to bump their skill points and/or give them a bonus to Knowledge skills.

Magic is mostly for casters, but not totally useless for a non-caster, since it makes magic items like a Ring of Telekinesis work better.

[Quertus]

Some of the later 3.5 casters (the favoured soul comes to mind immediately) were designed to need two different mental stats.

Some of these classes were poorly designed, there was probably some player complaining, but mostly, the PHB offered classes that did the same thing but better and was almost always allowed. So they never saw much play.

Since then the dual attribute caster idea hasn't seen much use and I think this is a shame because, implemented with some thought, it could help address the traditionally unbalanced nature of magic while keeping the 3.5 feel.

Personally, I think that… "6 stat characters" put me more into the min-maxing, wargaming, "care about the stats" mode then the role-playing mode that I want to be in while playing an RPG.

If I have to care about and fiddle with Power, and Toughness, and Evasion abilities, and casting cost, and rarity (thank you pauper mode), and uniqueness (thank you Highlander), and financial cost (thank you reality), I'm playing a very different minigame building an MtG deck than I want to be playing in an RPG.


It doesn't. It makes casters harder to play in a balanced way without effecting the upper levels of power at all, which is the opposite of good game design. A Charisma/Intelligence wizard is still going to be able to bind, teleport, and break reality apart. She just won't have enough constitution to survive in combat throwing fireballs and using leather armor.

And, following that logic, we can see that zero-casting-stat casters would be even more easily balanced. (Color blue to taste).

[sreservoir]

There are three things that a caster's ability scores are used for: the 10+spell level hard requirement, save DCs, and bonus spells:

Favored soul, for example, has hard req + bonus spells on Cha, but DCs on Wis.
Spirit shamans have the same split, but the other way around: hard req and bonus spell on Wis, but DCs on Cha.
Archivists have a different split: hard req and DCs on Int, but bonus spells on Wis.
The Arcane Disciple feat (and Anyspell, technically, although there it's much less likely to matter) is similar: hard req and DCs on Wis, which are probably not your casting stats as an arcane caster.
The Justice of Weald and Woe (CoR 48) has the really exotic mechanic where they don't have a minimum ability score to cast spells, DCs and bonus spells are both off Wis, but their spell known is keyed off Int for the levels where they need bonus spells to have slots—which, okay, both of those are probably editing errors, but still.
There's this one Dragonlance book (Holy Orders of the Stars) that loves to use the split where the hard req is on Wis, but both DCs and bonus spells are on Cha.


That said, I'm in the "it accomplishes nothing" camp, in that practically speaking it just means that the caster has to sacrifice either bonus spells or save DCs, and while that makes them marginally weaker when played the way the writers seem to have imagined, it does nothing to curb the things that actually need curbing.

[Tvtyrant]

And, following that logic, we can see that zero-casting-stat casters would be even more easily balanced. (Color blue to taste).

Yeah, attacking things in ways unrelated to what makes them powerful is a definite path to success.

5E has endgame casters stronger than the other classes after reducing all of their high level spells in power and giving them only a single spell slot per spell level. Nothing will balance high level spells except removing them from the game, this doesn't even effect them. All it does it makes playing a bad caster less effective.

[rel]

So to expand a little, when I look at the various classes I see the following broad groups

full mundane
these use str or dex to deal damage, con to survive and int (through skills) for utility. 3 important stats

part casters
these use str or dex to deal damage, con to survive and a mental stat (through spells) for utility. 3 important stats

full casters
these use a mental stat to (through spells) to deal damage, con to survive and the same mental stat (through spells) for utility. 2 important stats.

Now obviously, under the current system they aren't balanced, but if you are trying to write a new D&D system. Or even just a whole new set of classes and you've decided to keep the existing stats then this is something to address.

Because even if we assume that you can balance the various class features such that level 20 shoots spells good is equivalent in power to level 20 swings swords good you still have this fundamental disconnect of attribute dependency between the archetypes all other things assumed to be equal.

I like the idea of changing the stats up with the introduction of a dedicated magic stat but that is probably beyond the scope of this discussion.

[Gnaeus]

Yeah, I'm not a fan of MAD for any class - by making more attributes required for specific purposes, it reduces flexibility and forces PCs more into a set array.

What would reduce caster power a bit is to make Magic it's own stat. Magic does these things:
* Powers casting (spells/day, DCs, max level castable)
* Powers some other supernatural abilities (TBD which ones)
* Determines magic item DCs (fixing the problem that offensive magic items are garbage)
* Is the stat for Use Magic Device

That's it. No other skills, no other rolls.
This means that casters are only inherently good at casting spells. Wizards don't have tons of skills, Sorcerers aren't the face, Clerics/Druids aren't masters of perception and willpower. They can still be good at those other things, but it's a secondary competency you have to invest in like it is for non-casters.

If doing so, and you want Wizards to retain their "scholar / sage" flavor, you'd want to bump their skill points and/or give them a bonus to Knowledge skills.

Magic is mostly for casters, but not totally useless for a non-caster, since it makes magic items like a Ring of Telekinesis work better.

Mechanically, this reminds me of the old shadowrun chargen. Where you rank attributes, skills, money at chargen, but there is a place to rank magic which is either 0 for non mages or maxed for mages.

Thematically, it makes me think of Diskworld, and its Unseen University full of wizards with really bad mental stats.

[Darg]

A stat of 10 would be the stat of average. Having 12 in a stat means you are above average. The fact that most casters in the system wouldn't actually ever be able to cast 9th level spells is not abnormal. The difference is that the player character is not an average specimen and is actually exceptional. In other words, abnormal.

The problem is that the system isn't designed for non casting classes to express exceptional talent in meaningful ways. Sure, you can always ubercharge, but there really isn't much else. You get your abilities through feats and class features. The problem is that most of your abilities don't ever surpass third level spells and feats generally have pointless prerequisites.

Spellcasting feats are extremely potent too. Imagine applying metamagic to maneuvers. It drastically improves potential.

While stats can help balance out combat options, it really doesn't change the true unbalancing nature of utility, buff, or area control spells.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Mechanically, this reminds me of the old shadowrun chargen. Where you rank attributes, skills, money at chargen, but there is a place to rank magic which is either 0 for non mages or maxed for mages.

Even in the newer Shadowrun editions, magic initiation kind of works like this, where mages and adepts max their Magic attribute at chargen and focus on their initiation after that almost to the exclusion of everything else. Because if there's one number that governs the potency of all the things you care about, well, you want that number to be as high as possible.

Basically, making magic a separate stat doesn't balance anything, it just makes characters more one-dimensional both in terms of personality and in terms of build.


There are three things that a caster's ability scores are used for: the 10+spell level hard requirement, save DCs, and bonus spells:
*snip examples*
That said, I'm in the "it accomplishes nothing" camp, in that practically speaking it just means that the caster has to sacrifice either bonus spells or save DCs, and while that makes them marginally weaker when played the way the writers seem to have imagined, it does nothing to curb the things that actually need curbing.

Well, it doesn't accomplish nothing; SADness is definitely noticeably better in play than MADness to the point that roguish types routinely go out of their way to be Dex-SAD, paladins routinely go out of their way to be Wis-SAD, eldritch blast-focused warlocks will go Dex-SAD and not take any invocations requiring saves at all, and so forth.

The issue, though, is that the practical effect of having some SAD casters and some MAD casters is not that people play the MAD casters and end up more balance, it's that people entirely avoid the MAD casters or find ways around the MADness (e.g. Academic Priest), so designing casters to be MAD would only really affect balance if all casters were MAD.

---

I've actually experimented with the make-all-casters-MAD thing in a previous campaign to see how that would change things. I houseruled that max spell level was dependent on Int (because you needed to be smarter to grok the magical theory behind higher levels of spells), bonus spells were dependent on Wis (because you could fit more spells in your mind at once if you could intuit shortcuts in the spell formulas and such), and save DCs were dependent on Cha (because you could put more metaphysical oomph into your spells that way), regardless of the type of magic a character used.

The results? Well, at high levels casters were noticeably weaker mechanically, since they couldn't just dump everything into a 30 to 34 casting stat and had to spread their stat boosts around...but it made things more painful at the low levels (1-4ish) where casters are the least fun to play because losing out on that extra 1st-level spell or giving one of your handful of daily spells are lower success chance isn't great. It also led to a bit of a loss of class identity at all levels, where wizards could no longer afford to buy as many Knowledge ranks and sorcerers weren't natural party faces and suchlike--which might seem like a good thing, as the party casters no longer got to cover secondary schticks "for free," but it wasn't like the party noncasters could suddenly spare the Int or Cha to pick up the slack so it just made the party less knowledgeable and sociable on the whole.

Now, one could compensate for these issues (raising low-level daily spell allotments, making skills more accessible, creating stat-boosting items that affect multiple stats, etc.), but (A) those are the kinds of changes one might want to make to D&D or a D&D-alike game regardless and (B) at that point most of the benefits of enforced MAD go away and you're just left with more homogeneity among caster classes. Everyone being a dual-caster instead of a triple-caster would ameliorate that somewhat, but there's still enough overlap (wizard with cleric if the wizard is Int/Wis, wizard with sorcerer if the wizard is Int/Cha, and so on) for that to be an issue.

In short, I don't think casters that are dependent on multiple stats are a good design idea. Casters that can benefit from multiple stats, however--the way that the Warmage, Crusader, Swordsage, and Warblade benefit from a high Int, Cha, Wis, and Int respectively but can completely dump their secondary stat and still get along just fine, and the way the Archivist would work if you houseruled it to be Wis-SAD but all of its class features still relied on Int--would be an interesting avenue to explore.

[Batcathat]

Basically, making magic a separate stat doesn't balance anything, it just makes characters more one-dimensional both in terms of personality and in terms of build.

While you're probably right about the build part, I don't see why a separate magic stat would make their personalities more one-dimensional. In D&D a wizard is always going to be intelligent and a sorcerer is always going to be charismatic and while there are different ways to portray those characteristics you can't really make a dumb wizard or uncharismatic sorcerer without seriously crippling your character (yes, I'm sure there are various specific tricks to do it, I mean for the average player). If magic was a separate stat, it seems to me like you could have more varieties of personality while still being good at magic.

EDIT: It just hit me that you might've meant the personality of a build rather than the personality of a character. Either way, I don't really see it.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

While you're probably right about the build part, I don't see why a separate magic stat would make their personalities more one-dimensional. In D&D a wizard is always going to be intelligent and a sorcerer is always going to be charismatic and while there are different ways to portray those characteristics you can't really make a dumb wizard or uncharismatic sorcerer without seriously crippling your character (yes, I'm sure there are various specific tricks to do it, I mean for the average player). If magic was a separate stat, it seems to me like you could have more varieties of personality while still being good at magic.

EDIT: It just hit me that you might've meant the personality of a build rather than the personality of a character. Either way, I don't really see it.

They're talking about all casting being based on a hypothetical 7th stat called Magic. Then suddenly not only do wizards and sorcerers not have to be smart/charismatic, it's actively advantageous for them to sacrifice that in favor of pumping Magic.

Bit of a tangent, but actually, I rather liked Shadowrun 6E's solution to that: there are now two stats you can pump with the points you've spent on your "Special" attribute; one of them is Magic and one of them is the universally helpful Edge (luck). So now dumping that isn't the automatic decision for non-casters. Casters are still forced to pump it, but have to start the game with a weak stat in Edge as a trade-off for being able to manipulate the laws of reality more directly.

[Batcathat]

They're talking about all casting being based on a hypothetical 7th stat called Magic. Then suddenly not only do wizards and sorcerers not have to be smart/charismatic, it's actively advantageous for them to sacrifice that in favor of pumping Magic.

I get that. My point is that a wizard who doesn't have to be intelligent or a sorceror who doesn't have to be charismatic have more personality choices. Intelligence, wisdom and charisma all affect a character's personality (or should, anyway. I'm sure there are people who play a 3 INT and an 18 INT character the same way) and if magic power is independent of those, there's more freedom to pick your character's personality. And yes, obviously minmaxers would boost magic as much as they could but how is that different from them boosting some other casting stat?

[icefractal]

If I was doing (a 7th stat), I'd combine it with a high point-buy total, so that getting decent stats of tertiary importance was viable. And probably bump any 2+Int classes up to 4+Int.

At that point I'd think casters would have similar mental stats to non-casters: decent, but no usually maxed out. Although if this is 3.x, mental stats, Charisma in particular, are still the best at being added to lots of things.

[NichG]

It gets away from D&D, but I like the idea of all classes being simultaneously MAD and SAD by having stats where picking one and going all in results in a viable - but different - build regardless of your class.

Imagine if for example stats gave no static passive bonuses to numbers, but you stat modifier corresponded to an X/day or X/encounter super ability like 'triple damage dealt', 'automatically pass a save', 'automatically dodge a single target attack', 'force anyone to reroll a die', 'add 30ft enemy or ally only AoE to an action', etc.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I get that. My point is that a wizard who doesn't have to be intelligent or a sorceror who doesn't have to be charismatic have more personality choices. Intelligence, wisdom and charisma all affect a character's personality (or should, anyway. I'm sure there are people who play a 3 INT and an 18 INT character the same way) and if magic power is independent of those, there's more freedom to pick your character's personality. And yes, obviously minmaxers would boost magic as much as they could but how is that different from them boosting some other casting stat?

The issue is that if Magic is an attribute then it's competing for stat points with the existing mental stats. When SAD casters max out their casting stat with a 18/14/12/10/10/10 stat line, they at least fall into the personality buckets of nerdy wizards, insightful clerics, dramatic bards, and so on, but if you add a Magic stat then that 18 goes into there (which doesn't provide any personality or roleplaying prompts) and the rest of their stat line is a very bland and un-prompt-ful 12/12/10/10/10/10 or whatever, regardless of casting class.

If Magic were some sort of derived stat, like the average of a character's top two ability scores or a stat-independent "base magic bonus"-type number or similar, then that would certainly broaden rather than narrow caster personality options like you describe, but that's a very different scenario than the Shadowrun setup Gnaeus brought up.


If I was doing (a 7th stat), I'd combine it with a high point-buy total, so that getting decent stats of tertiary importance was viable. And probably bump any 2+Int classes up to 4+Int.

At that point I'd think casters would have similar mental stats to non-casters: decent, but no usually maxed out. Although if this is 3.x, mental stats, Charisma in particular, are still the best at being added to lots of things.

Honestly, just giving high point-buy totals does a lot to address the SAD/MAD disparity without changing the stats at all. If your party goes from 28 PB to something normally considered ridiculously high like 40 PB, the wizard doesn't care all that much that he went from 10/10/12/18/10/10 to 10/14/16/18/12/10, but the monk really appreciates that he went from 14/14/14/10/14/10 to 15/14/14/10/18/10. It's nowhere near parity, obviously, but it's definitely noticeable.


It gets away from D&D, but I like the idea of all classes being simultaneously MAD and SAD by having stats where picking one and going all in results in a viable - but different - build regardless of your class.

It's not actually that far away from D&D--remember 3.0 psionics, where every discipline corresponded to a different key ability score and you had to track max powers known and power DCs separately for each one? :smallamused:

For all that people (justifiably) give 3.0 psionics grief for that, it did lead to very distinct psion characters. A pure egoist with 18/10/12/10/10/10, a pure seer with 10/10/10/12/18/10, and a generalist psion with 10/14/14/14/10/14 definitely played very differently from one another while all being equally viable and their mechanics and personality reinforcing one another quite nicely.

Even sticking within the D&D framework and not changing how stats work, it would be interesting to see what classes that used a similar mechanic but avoided all the other...idiosyncrasies of 3.0 psionics might look like. Any classes based on spells or maneuvers could be modified for that easily by categorizing their stuff appropriately--I could definitely see a "wizard" class where focusing on Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, and Cha respectively gave you perks relating to Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, Divination, Abjuration, and Enchantment, like throwing all the fixed-list casters in a blender and letting someone build their own, and the same for a "cleric" leaning Druid or Healer or Paladin, a "martial adept" leaning Crusader or Swordsage or Warblade, and so on--and forcing the blander martial classes to support six different styles would go a long way toward fixing the "barbarians and fighters are stupid grunts because sneaky skills are for rogues and wilderness skills are for rangers and..." thing that always plagues class rewrites.

[Darg]

You can totally have an unintelligent wizard or uncharismatic sorcerer. Abilities are, even though loosely, still tied into how capable your character is. Just because one chooses to optimize their stat spread just to be the best they could be at a class doesn't mean one is forced to if they would prefer to roleplay instead. Using items and levels can get you 19 in any stat from 10.

If you don't have enough ability score to cast higher level spells, multiclass or prestige until you do.


Honestly, just giving high point-buy totals does a lot to address the SAD/MAD disparity without changing the stats at all. If your party goes from 28 PB to something normally considered ridiculously high like 40 PB, the wizard doesn't care all that much that he went from 10/10/12/18/10/10 to 10/14/16/18/12/10, but the monk really appreciates that he went from 14/14/14/10/14/10 to 15/14/14/10/18/10. It's nowhere near parity, obviously, but it's definitely noticeable.

I like to do dice rolls. Roll 5 and use best 3. You roll 18 strength and 13 int for your wizard? No swapping. Just live with it and design your character around it.

[Ramza00]

It is bad class design to make your main ability with its save dcs, number of spell slots, etc be dual attribute.

That said it is good class design making "dead level" class abilities that use a 2nd or 3rd attribute and forcing the character to choose.

For example a Wizard is Int based, but give a secondary class abilities that are wis based, or a different set of class abilities that is cha based.

That said the problem with these two previous lines is it can be overwhelming to the reader and new players. Thus you need to signal to the user these are secondary and tertiary abilities.

[Darg]

Spells are already overwhelmingly strong. I don't think requiring them to need multiple abilities is bad design. The bad design is that D&D is built around SAD spellcasting. If your SAD casters were MAD it wouldn't really change much but it forces you to make decisions on how you pick and prepare your spells.

[Thunder999]

You don't play a wizard if you roll 18 strength and 13 int, either you play a different class or your d4 HD wizard ventures into melee with his quarterstaff and then dies, better luck next time.
Normally I'm more attached to characters, but this happens pre game, so just shelve any nice backstory and make him forgettable.

[Darg]

You could always gish with those stats. Which is the point. You might not want to play straight wizard, but having spells is still better than no spells.

[rel]

I've actually experimented with the make-all-casters-MAD thing in a previous campaign to see how that would change things. I houseruled that max spell level was dependent on Int (because you needed to be smarter to grok the magical theory behind higher levels of spells), bonus spells were dependent on Wis (because you could fit more spells in your mind at once if you could intuit shortcuts in the spell formulas and such), and save DCs were dependent on Cha (because you could put more metaphysical oomph into your spells that way), regardless of the type of magic a character used.

The results? Well, at high levels casters were noticeably weaker mechanically, since they couldn't just dump everything into a 30 to 34 casting stat and had to spread their stat boosts around...but it made things more painful at the low levels (1-4ish) where casters are the least fun to play because losing out on that extra 1st-level spell or giving one of your handful of daily spells are lower success chance isn't great. It also led to a bit of a loss of class identity at all levels, where wizards could no longer afford to buy as many Knowledge ranks and sorcerers weren't natural party faces and suchlike--which might seem like a good thing, as the party casters no longer got to cover secondary schticks "for free," but it wasn't like the party noncasters could suddenly spare the Int or Cha to pick up the slack so it just made the party less knowledgeable and sociable on the whole.


Interesting, thanks for sharing that.
I think that rule could benefit from an additional rule to buff up the non-casters granting them extra skill points or something similar.
(Add your physical stats to your mental stats for the purposes of saves and skills maybe? I dunno, something.)

That way you can really play up the difference between the magicals and the muggles; the muggles have mundane skills, better saves and so forth. The magicals don't get any of that natively but they can emulate those abilites and more through their spells.

As ever with such rule changes, the problem of what to do with the gishes and other half casters is a tricky one...

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I like to do dice rolls. Roll 5 and use best 3. You roll 18 strength and 13 int for your wizard? No swapping. Just live with it and design your character around it.

That assumes, of course, that in the general case (i.e. when a DM isn't forcing you to do otherwise) in a scenario where you're forced to roll your stats in order you'd pick your class first and then live with whatever stats you get, as opposed to rolling your stats first and going with a class that fits those. Every D&D edition has worked the latter way for a reason.

Which is not to say that you can't make a high Str/low Int arcane gish, or a low Str+Dex/high Int+Cha skillmonkey ranger, or the like, just that whether it's physically possible to build a character of X type using Y stat line has no bearing on whether that character will be useful to the party and/or the kind of character you actually want to play.


Interesting, thanks for sharing that.
I think that rule could benefit from an additional rule to buff up the non-casters granting them extra skill points or something similar.

There were other experimental houserules in that game as well, just none that involved shuffling around martial classes' stat dependence so they weren't really relevant here. As with anything involving class balance, a single change to one class or one type of class won't fix things in a vacuum.


As ever with such rule changes, the problem of what to do with the gishes and other half casters is a tricky one...

The trickiness depends on your preferred power levels, what the party is playing, and suchlike. For a few gish-focused PbPs I've run around here, I've just straight up said "Everyone gets one 18 in a physical stat, one 18 in a mental stat, and X point buy for the rest of the stats" and it's worked out pretty well...but of course that doesn't work if a DM thinks that 28 PB is the only acceptable point buy value or half the party wants to play monks and paladins or whatever.

[Batcathat]

The issue is that if Magic is an attribute then it's competing for stat points with the existing mental stats. When SAD casters max out their casting stat with a 18/14/12/10/10/10 stat line, they at least fall into the personality buckets of nerdy wizards, insightful clerics, dramatic bards, and so on, but if you add a Magic stat then that 18 goes into there (which doesn't provide any personality or roleplaying prompts) and the rest of their stat line is a very bland and un-prompt-ful 12/12/10/10/10/10 or whatever, regardless of casting class.

Sure, but a character with INT 18 doesn't have more personality or a more interesting personality than a character with 10 or 5 and if all wizard "have" to have high intelligence that seems like it limits their potential personalities more than if they could have any intelligence and still be wizards.

Obviously, this is only a small part of how a character is portrayed. A good role player could probably play a character with high intelligence in a dozen different ways and a bad role player might play their character the same regardless of stats. But while having a separate magic stat would probably cause a lot of other issues, I do think it could help in this regard.

[Silly Name]

While a potentially interesting design space, I have to agree with everyone else that it actually didn't really do a lot to "balance" casting, and only ended up being a more fiddly, annoying system that took more time to learn ("wait, are my DCs based on Charisma or Wisdom? Let me check again what determines my bonus spells...").

Also, I don't think it really made those classes MAD. MAD-er than a Cleric or Wizard, sure, but having to keep two stats decently high isn't that hard to do. Look at the poster children for MAD: Paladin and Monk. They depend on four/five stats, which is way too much and ends up spreading your scores thin. Two scores (plus Con)? Hardly that bad.

Single-stat casting is way more intuitive, and I'm always in favor of consolidating stat-dependance (for example, in my games Paladin can decide whether their class features key off Wisdom or Charisma, and the same goes for their spells, no extra costs, no feats required).

[Xervous]

1. SR6E can catch fire and die horribly
Thank you

2. Bringing up Shadowrun (generally) leads us to a system that can actually accommodate MAD characters.

Purchasing higher skill ranks or attributes costs increasing amounts of karma. Priority build (assign packets of resources to various categories and build those parts in a way that does not reflect how a character progresses off karma) and build point (more granular but still does not track with karma) typically encourage players to minmax their stats because those systems literally allow you to milk extra karma by defying the usual escalating costs . The equivalent in D&D would be assigning ability scores with the only limit being that they all sum to 70.

Swing back to D&D. You start out with presumably point buy, but then all progression is unweighted flat +N. Of course you’re going to want to focus on as few as possible. The incentives that existed at character creation for diversifying stats just aren’t present during progression.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Sure, but a character with INT 18 doesn't have more personality or a more interesting personality than a character with 10 or 5 and if all wizard "have" to have high intelligence that seems like it limits their potential personalities more than if they could have any intelligence and still be wizards.

Obviously, this is only a small part of how a character is portrayed. A good role player could probably play a character with high intelligence in a dozen different ways and a bad role player might play their character the same regardless of stats. But while having a separate magic stat would probably cause a lot of other issues, I do think it could help in this regard.

For good and experienced roleplayers it doesn't matter much, certainly. For those who use "Well, my character has, like, 12 Wis, so she'd probably..." as a roleplaying prompt, though, it's a choice between three general stereotypes if using mental stats for casting stats or one general stereotype if using a magic stat.

This obviously doesn't matter if you have really high point buy so you can easily boost tertiary stats, or really low point buy so every caster sucks, or the group rolls stats so you can just happen to roll three 17s as a caster and put one in Magic and two in mental stats, or the party wizard is new and puts his 12 in Int and 18 in Cha, or whatever, but in that case the SAD vs. MAD issue doesn't come up at all.


1. SR6E can catch fire and die horribly
Thank you

Here, toss me your 6e books, I'll throw them on the bonfire I made out of my 5e books. :smallcool:


Swing back to D&D. You start out with presumably point buy, but then all progression is unweighted flat +N. Of course you’re going to want to focus on as few as possible. The incentives that existed at character creation for diversifying stats just aren’t present during progression.

Yeah, D&D is very lucky that that kind of supralinear-vs.-linear-build-currencies issue is limited to ability score generation and not, like, half of a character. And it's not just Shadowrun that suffers from that problem, obviously, other game systems like World of Darkness or In Nomine or World of Darkness or GURPS or World of Darkness have it pretty bad too.

I've seen a few houserule attempts to hand out point buy points instead of stat boosts in 3e, so that instead of +1 to a single ability score every 4th level you get N points to increase your stats as per point buy, instead of a racial +2 to [stat] you get +N point buy points applied to [stat], and so forth. A few have managed to thread the needle and lead to nicely-diverse-but-still-competent characters, but setting generically accurate values is difficult and it's definitely a lot more fiddly. One could possibly make something like that work if a simpler base point buy setup were used, but I've never seen that tried.

[Batcathat]

For good and experienced roleplayers it doesn't matter much, certainly. For those who use "Well, my character has, like, 12 Wis, so she'd probably..." as a roleplaying prompt, though, it's a choice between three general stereotypes if using mental stats for casting stats or one general stereotype if using a magic stat.

This is only true if only the highest stat is the only possible role playing prompt. Yes, high intelligence has some stereotypes to chose from as inspiration but not only does is that still a possibility with a magic stat — even aside from role-playing reasons high intelligence, wisdom or charisma would presumably still have a use in this hypothetical magic stat system — there are also the stereotypes associated with low or average intelligence (okay, probably not many stereotypes associated with average intelligence but still). Thus, the player have a wider variety of role-playing prompts rather than just those of high INT (or whatever their "normal" casting stat is).

[Darg]

The problem with being a wizard able to cast 9ths who is an idiot is that the roleplay is paradoxical. Your ability to cast spells require an above average intelligence to learn. You could be absent minded with low wisdom, but not not an intellectual. Charisma being a caster stat is just part of being a catch all.

From a roleplay perspective, I like the idea of making all casters dual attribute dependent for their spellcasting. The worst all it does is reduce your spells per day and makes gishing slightly weaker. The only issue is that casting is so superior that there isn't any practical reason to not be a caster. Bringing the non-casting side of the spectrum up is just as important to reduce the desire to focus on a sole casting stat.

[blackwindbears]

I've tested this. It works fine. Other posters are right that it doesn't effect TO builds very much. But if you're hitting 4 encounters per day the lack of bonus spells *does* matter when you choose to optimize DC's instead.

The thing is though, 3.5, contrary to popular opinion, when you're playing with folks that just read the books and build characters, is balanced just fine*.

If you do this it's not going to substantially harm your game, and if your main problem is the party wizard is casting too many high level spells in a day, then it might help. But also recall D&D is an attrition game. If you aren't getting the daily recommended dose of encounters, balance is also going to suffer

*As opposed to reading char-op guides online. For example, if your players are getting their wizard running advice from Complete Mage, it's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If they get wizard running advice from the batman wizard guide it's 😮, but still basically fine. If they get wizard running advice from Tippy, I can't help you, no one can.

[Darg]

If you do this it's not going to substantially harm your game, and if your main problem is the party wizard is casting too many high level spells in a day, then it might help. But also recall D&D is an attrition game. If you aren't getting the daily recommended dose of encounters, balance is also going to suffer

The problem is that the game is "balanced" around 4 encounters per day. This causes disparity at higher levels where the capabilities of your mundanes don't increase much against equal combat strength enemies, while your caster get better and better options to use against those equal combat strength enemies. That is unless your DM is capable of playing on a tightrope and discovering and calculating complex mathematical formulae that lead to fundamental understanding of the universe.

My preference is to increase the number of encounters per day at varying strength levels. This has the preferred effect of putting more emphasis on party support over one and done spells.

[Quertus]

You don't play a wizard if you roll 18 strength and 13 int,

Well, maybe you don't :smalltongue:

Imagine the looks in the goblins' faces when they realize that the Wizard they have surrounded has taken Great Cleave!

[blackwindbears]

The problem is that the game is "balanced" around 4 encounters per day. This causes disparity at higher levels where the capabilities of your mundanes don't increase much against equal combat strength enemies, while your caster get better and better options to use against those equal combat strength enemies. That is unless your DM is capable of playing on a tightrope and discovering and calculating complex mathematical formulae that lead to fundamental understanding of the universe.

My preference is to increase the number of encounters per day at varying strength levels. This has the preferred effect of putting more emphasis on party support over one and done spells.

That is exactly the right approach!

I think it's similar to the one outlined in the DMG. (I think they further suggest that 5% of your encounters should be overwhelming. I've followed the distribution reasonably closely for the last 15 years and the balance issues, even at high levels, haven't shown up yet. Maybe one day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Gnaeus]

I've tested this. It works fine. Other posters are right that it doesn't effect TO builds very much. But if you're hitting 4 encounters per day the lack of bonus spells *does* matter when you choose to optimize DC's instead.

The thing is though, 3.5, contrary to popular opinion, when you're playing with folks that just read the books and build characters, is balanced just fine*.

If you do this it's not going to substantially harm your game, and if your main problem is the party wizard is casting too many high level spells in a day, then it might help. But also recall D&D is an attrition game. If you aren't getting the daily recommended dose of encounters, balance is also going to suffer

*As opposed to reading char-op guides online. For example, if your players are getting their wizard running advice from Complete Mage, it's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If they get wizard running advice from the batman wizard guide it's 😮, but still basically fine. If they get wizard running advice from Tippy, I can't help you, no one can.

You know where those guides came from? People who had seen issues in play. I was in a party where the DM would just double the monsters for his fight. My Druid would solo one with his pet. The other 3 PCs would fight the clone and generally I would help them finish theirs. Throwing in an occasional overwhelming encounter only meant that the swashbuckler died. That was before most of those guides were written and certainly before I had seen any. Nothing weird or theoretical, not even stuff like venomfire fleshrakers. Just a Druid capable of picking the good spells out of spell compendium and a swashbuckler, samurai and rogue. At one point the samurai decided TWF was too good and rerolled a monk. The fact that you haven’t seen them, and I believe you, just indicates that your group somehow balances naturally. I have guesses as to why that may be. I’ve played with T4 sorcerers who only took core spells from one school. But it’s really easy to accidentally overbalance 3.5/PF without any guides

[blackwindbears]

You know where those guides came from? People who had seen issues in play. I was in a party where the DM would just double the monsters for his fight. My Druid would solo one with his pet. The other 3 PCs would fight the clone and generally I would help them finish theirs. Throwing in an occasional overwhelming encounter only meant that the swashbuckler died. That was before most of those guides were written and certainly before I had seen any. Nothing weird or theoretical, not even stuff like venomfire fleshrakers. Just a Druid capable of picking the good spells out of spell compendium and a swashbuckler, samurai and rogue. At one point the samurai decided TWF was too good and rerolled a monk. The fact that you haven’t seen them, and I believe you, just indicates that your group somehow balances naturally. I have guesses as to why that may be. I’ve played with T4 sorcerers who only took core spells from one school. But it’s really easy to accidentally overbalance 3.5/PF without any guides

That's funny, the animal companions in my games died so frequently it became a running joke in a few campaigns. I don't mean to suggest there have been no balance issues, they just don't happen to line up with what problems this board believes I should be having. The biggest balance issues I've had over 15 years and 20-odd players have been:

- Cleric always needs some build assistance
- Ranger focused on ranged combat + belt of battle was a substantial problem
- Complete psionics sold XPH errata as a new supplement (and I'm still salty about it)

It never would have occured to any of my players to for example, stack nightsticks to abuse divine metamagic because they didn't even particularly find DMM to be all that interesting in the first place. I think my experience matches the 3.0 and 3.5 playtesters pretty well. The important thing to remember is that everyone on this forum is probably in the top 10% of 3.5 character optimization. It's just not reflective of the typical table made up of folk who aren't Very Online.


Edit: One of the issues I have noticed with 3.5 is that it's really easy to get the rules wrong. This board contains some of the *most* rules knowledgeable folks in the world in 3.5, and you still see frequent errors and omissions. One of the things that has been the biggest lifesaver in the balance of my games is knowing the core rules and system expectations backwards and forwards.

Two more balance issues come to mind:
1) Every monk has always been very, very bad.
2) The mystic theurge really never comes into it's own

[Gnaeus]

It never would have occured to any of my players to for example, stack nightsticks to abuse divine metamagic because they didn't even particularly find DMM to be all that interesting in the first place. I think my experience matches the 3.0 and 3.5 playtesters pretty well. The important thing to remember is that everyone on this forum is probably in the top 10% of 3.5 character optimization. It's just not reflective of the typical table made up of folk who aren't Very Online.

Wouldn’t have occurred to us either. It’s never a thing I saw in a game. I realized very early pre guide that craft wondrous items added 75% to my WBL and it was 75% that I picked while my colleagues were getting vendor trash. I wrote my own chart compiling every magic item, cost and prerequisites and with that tool alone, + using the best spells as written, I consistently overbalanced tables.

The forums didn’t teach me to break the game. The forums taught me that when I broke the game I wasn’t just “playing smarter” or “being good at gaming” or “building good characters”, I was exploiting weaknesses on an uneven playing field.

And some of it involves the group dynamic. My gaming friends in my early 3.5 days were vampire LARPers. In game politics and character goals over party goals came to those groups naturally. Maybe in some groups who has some party tools doesn’t matter, as long as someone does. For that group, though, being the person with the teleport or the item crafting meant that your character controlled where the party went and if you suspected that the rogue was stealing from you he just didn’t get magic items.... or heals.

As far as the other, that may once have been true (although there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of imbalance occurring a lot). Today though? Doubt it. This is a game that has been out of print and replaced for years by easier, more streamlined versions. I suspect that it’s closer to the opposite % now. That the vast majority of groups that still play 3.pf play it because of the massive options available in play. 5e has parts I like and dislike but it’s way better as far as that playtester game. I doubt there are many groups that play 3.pf today in which none of the members have read guides or figured out tiers or some rough approximation.

[blackwindbears]

As far as the other, that may once have been true (although there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of imbalance occurring a lot). Today though? Doubt it. This is a game that has been out of print and replaced for years by easier, more streamlined versions. I suspect that it’s closer to the opposite % now. That the vast majority of groups that still play 3.pf play it because of the massive options available in play. 5e has parts I like and dislike but it’s way better as far as that playtester game. I doubt there are many groups that play 3.pf today in which none of the members have read guides or figured out tiers or some rough approximation.

I mean, maybe, it's a hard group to survey, and by definition an impossible one to survey online. So all I've got to go off of is everyone I've ever met in person. It's not something I worry overmuch about, but I always think it's necessary to mention, because it's extremely easy for online fora to become echo-chambers, especially as the 3.5 communities start to disappear and this is really the last big one that I'm aware of.

The thing is that groups, for the most part, play whatever the DM is running. I tried running 5th for a couple years, but I wasn't having fun. So I onboard people with 3.5, and then they onboard people with 3.5. That's how most people were brought into the hobby pre-critical role. I don't know how it is now.

I can guarantee you there are at least three groups of players floating around that build characters by reading the books, and take the advice they get in them. The wizards blast, the clerics heal, the martials kill stuff, and the rogues die.

So maybe you're right about the proportions, I've got no idea. Given the amount of odd things that new accounts think are unbalanced, I really suspect that there's a big pool of not very online players and DMs. It's hard to explain otherwise. Similarly I have yet to hear anyone have a problem with rangers outshining most of the party, but the last campaign I ran (Shackled City Hardcover), it gave me a bunch of problems after about level 11. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Darg]

Similarly I have yet to hear anyone have a problem with rangers outshining most of the party, but the last campaign I ran (Shackled City Hardcover), it gave me a bunch of problems after about level 11. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Some times I want to put all rolls into a spread sheet and compare the average versus the actual. Some times people get amazingly lucky on average and that simply unbalances the game itself; as does the opposite.

[rel]

I've been thinking some more about how you might build classes based on a two attribute dependency model.

If you leave out con as a passive stat that everyone needs, you have 5 stats with 10 possible pairings:

Further the pairings can be roughly broken up into 3 purely mental combos (IW, IC, WC), 3 dex plus mental (DI, DW, DC), 3 strength + mental and a final pure physical combo of str + dex.

So 10 possible classes or underpinning themes around which classes or PRC's can be built.

[blackwindbears]

Some times I want to put all rolls into a spread sheet and compare the average versus the actual. Some times people get amazingly lucky on average and that simply unbalances the game itself; as does the opposite.

I mean, it was enough of a problem for me during the last year of the campaign that I ran every encounter through a monte carlo of the ranger specifically.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The thing is though, 3.5, contrary to popular opinion, when you're playing with folks that just read the books and build characters, is balanced just fine*.
[...]
*As opposed to reading char-op guides online. For example, if your players are getting their wizard running advice from Complete Mage, it's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If they get wizard running advice from the batman wizard guide it's 😮, but still basically fine. If they get wizard running advice from Tippy, I can't help you, no one can.

3.5 can be balanced just fine when people know the game backwards and forwards and consult online guides when building every PC, too, because when a group is that knowledgeable about the game they can aim for whatever power level they want and keep things within certain bounds; in fact, when players put in the time to research the game and learn more about balance and power levels, that in and of itself is probably going to help avoid balance problems in a campaign.

My current group consists entirely of knowledgeable optimizers and we've run fun campaigns at a variety of power levels, since just because one can build a wizard capable of flooding the world with self-replicating swarms of Solar-summoning ice assassins doesn't mean one always must do that. :smallamused:

Things generally get imbalanced, in my experience, when there's a difference in group knowledge (e.g. one person reads a bunch of guides, builds a God Wizard, and stomps all over the game while the rest of the party has no idea what they're doing) or expectations (e.g. the group agrees to aim for a certain power level but some PCs don't abide by that range). If everyone's on the same page then it doesn't matter what experience level or power level that page happens to be.


The problem is that the game is "balanced" around 4 encounters per day.
[...]
My preference is to increase the number of encounters per day at varying strength levels. This has the preferred effect of putting more emphasis on party support over one and done spells.


That is exactly the right approach!

I think it's similar to the one outlined in the DMG. (I think they further suggest that 5% of your encounters should be overwhelming. I've followed the distribution reasonably closely for the last 15 years and the balance issues, even at high levels, haven't shown up yet. Maybe one day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Pardon the digression, this is a pet peeve of mine:

"3e is balanced around 4 encounters per day" is one of those forum memes that was originally just used as shorthand and then started to be repeated as criticism of the DMG encounter-building guidelines by people who obviously haven't actually read said guidelines. :smallannoyed: What it actually has to say on the matter is thus:


A well-constructed adventure has a variety of encounters at several different levels of difficulty. Table 3–2: Encounter Difficulty shows (in percentage terms) how many encounters of a certain difficulty an adventure should have.

Table 3–2: Encounter Difficulty
% of TotalEncounterDescription
10%EasyEL lower than party level
20%Easy if handled properlySpecial (see below)
50%ChallengingEL equals that of party
15%Very difficultEL 1–4 higher than party level
5%OverpoweringEL 5+ higher than party level

[...]

Challenging: Most encounters seriously threaten at least one member of the group in some way. These are challenging encounters, about equal in Encounter Level to the party level. The average adventuring group should be able to handle four challenging encounters before they run low on spells, hit points, and other resources. If an encounter doesn’t cost the PCs some significant portion of their resources, it’s not challenging.

So, what counts as a “challenge”? Since a game session probably includes many encounters, you don’t want to make every encounter one that taxes the PCs to their limits. They would have to stop the adventure and rest for an extensive period after every fight, and that slows down the game.

An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PCs’ level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources—hit points, spells, magic item uses, and so on. This means, on average, that after about four encounters of the party’s level the PCs need to rest, heal, and regain spells. A fifth encounter would probably wipe them out.

The party should be able to take on many more encounters lower than their level but fewer encounters with ELs higher than their level. As a general rule, if the EL is two lower than the party’s level, the PCs should be able to take on twice as many encounters before having to stop and rest. Two levels lower than that, and the number of encounters they can cope with doubles again, and so on. By contrast, an encounter of even one or two levels higher than the party level might tax the PCs to their limit, although with luck they might be able to take on two such encounters before needing to recover. Remember that when the EL is higher than the party level, the chance for PC fatality rises dramatically.
Emphasis mine. Those two sentences are the ones people remember and quote, completely ignoring the surrounding context about varying ELs, varying numbers of encounters, the fact that "trick" encounters and varying circumstances can adjust difficulty without changing the monster CR at all, etc. So stuff like "increase the number of encounters per day at varying strength levels," far from being a "fix" to 3e's encounter balance, is literally and exactly the DMG advice on how to build encounters and should not be a revelation to any DM who's ever read the Pelor-darned book!

</pet peeve>


Some times I want to put all rolls into a spread sheet and compare the average versus the actual. Some times people get amazingly lucky on average and that simply unbalances the game itself; as does the opposite.

It's true. One of my players is infamous in our group for rolling incredibly poorly, to the point that him rolling 8ish or higher multiple times per session is noteworthy, and the quirk has somewhat persisted even after switching from physical dice to Roll20's dice roller (going from 8sh to 14ish). He's basically accepted it and starting building characters who make as few rolls as possible and/or pick up a bunch of reroll abilities, but if he weren't such a good sport about it and found a way to compensate, that could be a real issue for his enjoyment of the game and his PC's balance with the rest of the party.


I've been thinking some more about how you might build classes based on a two attribute dependency model.

If you leave out con as a passive stat that everyone needs, you have 5 stats with 10 possible pairings:

Further the pairings can be roughly broken up into 3 purely mental combos (IW, IC, WC), 3 dex plus mental (DI, DW, DC), 3 strength + mental and a final pure physical combo of str + dex.

So 10 possible classes or underpinning themes around which classes or PRC's can be built.

I've experimented before with a modular 10-base-class setup, where you have 4 "pure" classes for the classic archetypes (Warrior for martial, Wizard for arcane, Rogue for skills, and Priest for divine) and 6 "hybrid" classes for the possible combinations (Gish for arcane/martial, Champion for divine/martial, Trickster for arcane/skills, Mystic for divine/skills, Adept for martial/skills, and Theurge for arcane/divine), with all existing classes being builds/subclasses/ACFs/etc. of those 10 (monk as an unarmed and unarmored Mystic, paladin as a LG-themed Champion, warlock as a Trickster with good ranged firepower, and so on).

That maps surprisingly well to the pairings you laid out:
Warrior = Str+Dex, as befits the purely physical class
Wizard = Int+Cha, for a bit of a sorcerer + wizard mix
Rogue = Dex+Int, as per the existing rogue
Priest = Wis+Cha, as per the existing cleric
Gish = Str+Cha, like a melee bard or battle sorcerer
Champion = Str+Wis, like a Serenity paladin
Trickster = Dex+Cha, like the bard or beguiler
Mystic = Dex+Wis, like a cloistered cleric or more cleric-y monk
Adept = Str+Int, for a warblade-esque "tactical combatant" type
Theurge = Int+Wis, like a classic wizard/cleric
If you're going to try to build a set of DAD (dual attribute dependent) classes from scratch, that seems like a pretty solid set to start with.

[Darg]

Pardon the digression, this is a pet peeve of mine:

"3e is balanced around 4 encounters per day" is one of those forum memes that was originally just used as shorthand and then started to be repeated as criticism of the DMG encounter-building guidelines by people who obviously haven't actually read said guidelines. :smallannoyed: What it actually has to say on the matter is thus:

Emphasis mine. Those two sentences are the ones people remember and quote, completely ignoring the surrounding context about varying ELs, varying numbers of encounters, the fact that "trick" encounters and varying circumstances can adjust difficulty without changing the monster CR at all, etc. So stuff like "increase the number of encounters per day at varying strength levels," far from being a "fix" to 3e's encounter balance, is literally and exactly the DMG advice on how to build encounters and should not be a revelation to any DM who's ever read the Pelor-darned book!

</pet peeve>

As far as I can tell, it's part of how tiers are placed. If you run 10 encounters and the wizard tries to use their spells to solo the encounters, they would simply run out of any ammunition before halfway through. That's where having the non-spellcasters shine because they're like the Duracell bunny. As long as they have the hp they just keep on keepin' on. Attrition is also where feats start to really show their worth (other than ubercharging), especially spring attack. Not to mention classes that are not made to enhance full attacks such as the order of the bow initiate. The funny thing is this also increases the utility of an evocationist and cleave.

[blackwindbears]

Pardon the digression, this is a pet peeve of mine:

"3e is balanced around 4 encounters per day" is one of those forum memes that was originally just used as shorthand and then started to be repeated as criticism of the DMG encounter-building guidelines by people who obviously haven't actually read said guidelines. :smallannoyed: What it actually has to say on the matter is thus:

<snip DMG>

Emphasis mine. Those two sentences are the ones people remember and quote, completely ignoring the surrounding context about varying ELs, varying numbers of encounters, the fact that "trick" encounters and varying circumstances can adjust difficulty without changing the monster CR at all, etc. So stuff like "increase the number of encounters per day at varying strength levels," far from being a "fix" to 3e's encounter balance, is literally and exactly the DMG advice on how to build encounters and should not be a revelation to any DM who's ever read the Pelor-darned book!

</pet peeve>

Three cheers for reading the Pelor-darned book, and completely agreed! Hopefully it's clear that that's what I meant by:

That is exactly the right approach!

I think it's similar to the one outlined in the DMG.

[Gnaeus]

As far as I can tell, it's part of how tiers are placed. If you run 10 encounters and the wizard tries to use their spells to solo the encounters, they would simply run out of any ammunition before halfway through. That's where having the non-spellcasters shine because they're like the Duracell bunny. As long as they have the hp they just keep on keepin' on. Attrition is also where feats start to really show their worth (other than ubercharging), especially spring attack. Not to mention classes that are not made to enhance full attacks such as the order of the bow initiate. The funny thing is this also increases the utility of an evocationist and cleave.

1. It’s pretty easy for some tier 1s to move into martial mode and handle any length day as long as hp healing is a thing. In the aforementioned Druid + pet outcompeting monk, swashbuckler and rogue, I was casting a bunch of long duration buffs, then usually one spell/combat (typicality bite of the wereX on round 1.) Pet charge/pounce/grapples an enemy within 30 then I chargepounce the same thing on rounds 2+. Clerics are pretty darn good at that also. Especially if you add in 2xCL HD of undead and maybe a planar ally. Planar binding becomes better. Dominate/charm become better. Golems become better.

2. There are a ton of easy ways for any caster to extend his adventuring day. Reserve feats. Wands. A pile of scrolls. Pearls of power. Etc.

3. If I’m a caster and I’m worried about running out of spells, the actions I will take to compensate actively makes the game harder for low tiers. This essentially involves buffing/summoning followed by blitz tactics. If I’m scared of running low on spells, once that polymorph/haste/greater invisibility/summons combo is up, I’m going to want to fight until all my round/level, maybe all my min/level spells drop. We have cleared 3/4 of the monsters in a room? I order my summons to open the door and engage the next room like a swat team. The easiest way a wizard steamrolls a 12 encounter day is to make it into a 4 encounter day by chaining 3 encounters into each fight. My summons sorcerer would put 4, 5 angels on the map and the fighting wouldn’t stop until they started going home and the haste dropped. Sure, the rogue can’t do his job and the martials may enter combat at 3/4 health, but all the buffs are already up. I don’t mind using a wand of magic missiles on my turn if I’m already taking half a dozen turns for minions. Remember that some of those low difficulty encounters are expected to be things like traps. If an angel runs ahead into a hall, opens a door and eats a lightning bolt to the face from a trap, whether he survives or not he completed an encounter.

[Darg]

1) That's the point. Your druid goes martial leaving room for the other martials to perform. Not to mention it also spreads the need for healing while simultaneously fueling the need for more healing. A good Cleric can't animate dead and even then if there are animated dead under the priest's control it only helps everyone to perform better. Planar Ally and Planar Binding are always DM fodder as you have to present a reasonable reward for service.

2) Exactly. The point is when the party isn't inundated with money, all those options become that much more precious and valuable tactically and costly.

3) It's up to the DM to encourage or discourage this behavior and the party doesn't have to condone it either. I prefer it when I and other players eat the consequences of our actions instead of the DM playing to the recklessness of a behavior. If the campaign ends so be it. In reality though, it's really easy to simply extend the duration of encounters.

[Maat Mons]

Arguably, a class-based system doesn't need ability scores at all. The function of a class is, broadly speaking, to determine what you're good at. The function of ability scores is, broadly speaking, to determine what you're good at. A system doesn't really need two different ways of accomplishing the same thing. You could just design classes so that they give you the numbers you should have for attack, damage, spell DC, and uses per day. And then eliminate all this fiddling around with ability score generation and ability-boosting magic items.

[Gnaeus]

1) That's the point. Your druid goes martial leaving room for the other martials to perform. Not to mention it also spreads the need for healing while simultaneously fueling the need for more healing. A good Cleric can't animate dead and even then if there are animated dead under the priest's control it only helps everyone to perform better. Planar Ally and Planar Binding are always DM fodder as you have to present a reasonable reward for service

If that’s the point imbalance is proven. There is no number of encounters/day that a Druid or combat cleric won’t outperform a similarly optimized monk or swashbuckler or samurai or melee ranger. One or 50.



2) Exactly. The point is when the party isn't inundated with money, all those options become that much more precious and valuable tactically and costl

Cool. You are aware that the less money the party gets the more the T1 will outperform the T5, right? Both because they have tricks that break RAW when used as written and because the martials need money to solve common problems that high tiers can just handwave. Oh, I don’t have enough money to cast in all the fights? I guess the fighter is providing his own sources for flight, see invisibility, ghost touch, etc....



3) It's up to the DM to encourage or discourage this behavior and the party doesn't have to condone it either. I prefer it when I and other players eat the consequences of our actions instead of the DM playing to the recklessness of a behavior. If the campaign ends so be it. In reality though, it's really easy to simply extend the duration of encounters.

If the DM has to step in to prevent a class played tactically from overwhelming other classes, that’s a pretty clear indication those classes aren’t balanced. That’s pretty close to Oberoni fallacy.

[blackwindbears]

If that’s the point imbalance is proven. There is no number of encounters/day that a Druid or combat cleric won’t outperform a similarly optimized monk or swashbuckler or samurai or melee ranger. One or 50.

Gah, this is the point of the discussion I always get lost at. The argument becomes so subjective you can "prove" anything once you hit the words "similarly optimized". I say, in my games the druid had more trouble than the monk, and you say well that just means the druid was less optimized than the monk. A neat little trap!

At, say, level 2 monk has two feats, flurry of blows, and better saves over the druid. The druid has a couple spell slots and an animal companion over the monk. After 10 encounters spaced about an hour apart the druid has either burned their spell slots or not used them. The spell slots are worth something. So it stands to reason that the monk is at least relatively better off with 10 encounters per day rather than 1 encounter per day.

Then we can sit around and argue about what builds count equally optimized, but I've found that to be a pretty unconvincing waste of time, and not particularly useful to anybody. Therefore, I don't accept that this has been "proven".

[Gnaeus]

Gah, this is the point of the discussion I always get lost at. The argument becomes so subjective you can "prove" anything once you hit the words "similarly optimized". I say, in my games the druid had more trouble than the monk, and you say well that just means the druid was less optimized than the monk. A neat little trap!

At, say, level 2 monk has two feats, flurry of blows, and better saves over the druid. The druid has a couple spell slots and an animal companion over the monk. After 10 encounters spaced about an hour apart the druid has either burned their spell slots or not used them. The spell slots are worth something. So it stands to reason that the monk is at least relatively better off with 10 encounters per day rather than 1 encounter per day.

Then we can sit around and argue about what builds count equally optimized, but I've found that to be a pretty unconvincing waste of time, and not particularly useful to anybody. Therefore, I don't accept that this has been "proven".

Yeah, but at level 2 the riding dog is equivalent to the monk. Same BAB, HP. Monk can flurry but dog gets a free trip on every attack and better AC. They are roughly equal and anything the druid does with a sling or spells is just bonus. At level 2 the Druid could be holding a wand of CLW and be the party healer and the monk at the same time.

But the issue isn’t at 2. Monks are ok at 2. It’s at about 5 -7+At that point the monk is worse than the buffed bear or tiger, which has a spare buffed spellcasting bear or tiger.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Three cheers for reading the Pelor-darned book, and completely agreed! Hopefully it's clear that that's what I meant by:

Yep, I was quoting your post for the "I've followed the distribution reasonably closely for the last 15 years and the balance issues, even at high levels, haven't shown up yet" part, since it shows that when people actually go by the DMG's guidelines then most of the encounter-/workday-related balance issues people complain about on the forums are mitigated or don't arise at all.


Arguably, a class-based system doesn't need ability scores at all. The function of a class is, broadly speaking, to determine what you're good at. The function of ability scores is, broadly speaking, to determine what you're good at. A system doesn't really need two different ways of accomplishing the same thing. You could just design classes so that they give you the numbers you should have for attack, damage, spell DC, and uses per day. And then eliminate all this fiddling around with ability score generation and ability-boosting magic items.

You could do that, yes, but building absolutely everything into classes falls apart immediately as soon as a player runs into things that class features don't cover or a designer/DM wants something to be available to characters of any class. That means you need a skill system or equivalent, and unless you have only very few skills, using ability scores as a basis for said skill system works very well (hence why the earliest D&D skill system was just ability checks).

You could totally separate skill stuff from class stuff such that your swording and your swimming are completely unrelated, but "This warrior is an all-around athlete with unrefined sword skills and that other warrior is an accomplished tactician and back-line commander but they both have exactly equal combat capabilities" can be a big hit to verisimilitude. Heck, 4e did that for its monsters, not even the PCs, and a lot of players quickly noticed and disliked the fact that the beefy bruisers and the tricky skirmishers had basically the same combat numbers plus or minus a few points despite being flavored very differently; doing that on the PC side would just make the effect worse and much more obvious.

And you could make those numbers something other than base physical and mental capabilities, the way 1e D&D used pre-adventuring professions, Fate Accelerated uses approaches, and so forth...but those nearly always turn out to be either unhelpfully handwavy like the former ("I was a mason. How good does that make me at lifting heavy things?" "Er...no idea, really.") or essentially ability scores by another name like the latter ("Okay, to lift the cart, roll Strength." "You mean 'Forceful'?" "Same difference.").

Basically, every attempt I've seen to do something other than ability scores (both in published games and in homebrew) either adds pointless epicycles to the whole process or just causes more problems. Probably the best one can do is stick with ability scores but keep a firm hand on the math and available character options so that characters can't spread themselves too thin or make themselves too much of a one-trick pony and accept the resulting variance.

[CharonsHelper]

The thing is though, 3.5, contrary to popular opinion, when you're playing with folks that just read the books and build characters, is balanced just fine*.

...

*As opposed to reading char-op guides online. For example, if your players are getting their wizard running advice from Complete Mage, it's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If they get wizard running advice from the batman wizard guide it's 😮, but still basically fine. If they get wizard running advice from Tippy, I can't help you, no one can.

Oh - definitely. Especially the first 8-10 levels. I'd say that Pathfinder is even a bit better, as it brings the martials mostly in-line with each-other. (Giving fighter, [unchained] monk, and [unchained] rogue more toys etc.)

It's the whole ceiling/floor thing. If everyone is playing at or near the floor, the balance is fine. It's when everyone starts shooting up near the ceiling that full casters start to dominate, especially once they start getting 5th level spells and higher.

But yeah OP - this would work okay, but it doesn't do much to balance the martial/caster disparity which you might see at your table. There's no easy fix to that, as the balance issues are mostly in the spells themselves rather than in the classes as their chassis being OP. Theoretically the wizard & cleric classes could be 100% balanced as they sit - but there would need to be a culling of the top quarter or so of all spell levels, with that probably going up to half starting at spell levels 4/5ish.

Frankly - a lot of the most OP spells are OP for one of two reasons.

1. They were originally designed as more of an BBEG scary spell and/or a plot plug. One reason that higher level spells got SO crazy powerful is that in really early editions of D&D, it basically expected you to retire your character before you hit double digits - maybe shifting into some sort of kingdom management.

2. Some spells weren't actually that OP in the edition for which they were invented, but modifying them to the mechanics of later editions made them so. The big ones here are the save or death spells. By the time that mages could cast Finger of Death 1/day in 2e, the saving throw of an equivalent EXP fighter would shrug it off far more often than not. But once you got to 3.0+, spell DCs rose as a caster leveled and with their primary attribute. On the other hand, for most characters, their saving throws have difficulty keeping up with spell DCs, especially for any secondary saving throws.

Note: #2 is also why most damage spells are sub-par in 3.x. Characters & monsters both have a ton more HP, especially at high levels. So between the two - 3.x has a major shift away from damage spells and towards save or suck/death spells.

[Crake]

If you ask me, the best way to do it is to have the schools of magic be skills rather than class features, and set the casting stat based on the school of magic, determine caster level of a school based on ranks, and use a spell point system rather than spell slots, again, determined by ranks.

Make the caster's class features a bunch of bonus skill points to spend on magic skills, make wizard casting the default casting mechanism (study from a book to prepare spells for the day, no free spells known, that's a class feature), but allow different casting mechanisms to be taken either through class levels or feats.

[Darg]

If that’s the point imbalance is proven. There is no number of encounters/day that a Druid or combat cleric won’t outperform a similarly optimized monk or swashbuckler or samurai or melee ranger. One or 50.



Cool. You are aware that the less money the party gets the more the T1 will outperform the T5, right? Both because they have tricks that break RAW when used as written and because the martials need money to solve common problems that high tiers can just handwave. Oh, I don’t have enough money to cast in all the fights? I guess the fighter is providing his own sources for flight, see invisibility, ghost touch, etc....



If the DM has to step in to prevent a class played tactically from overwhelming other classes, that’s a pretty clear indication those classes aren’t balanced. That’s pretty close to Oberoni fallacy.

If your characters are being stingy just because they can't cast all day long, it shouldn't take very long for the party to break up. I never said that underperforming classes don't get outperformed. I said they get the chance to perform. Blitzkrieg is effective, if you can pull it off quick enough. It's fine to be effective some of the time, but to use it for every situation simply means that your DM doesn't know how to actually challenge the party.

[SirNibbles]

A minor note: dual stat casting can actually be better for someone who doesn't need high DC because they aren't casting spells to force saves from the enemy. In that case, getting more bonus spells from a more useful stat than your DC/prereq stat can make life easier.

Consider, for example, if a Paladin were to get bonus spells from Charisma instead of Wisdom- you would only need a tiny bit of Wisdom to qualify for your spells and then be able to benefit from having more Charisma for Smite Evil and Divine Grace.

I've previously suggested that Fighters should have the same CL/Spell progression as Paladins (maxing out at 4ths), casting Arcane spells with Int to Max level/DC and Con to Bonus spells. Of course it'd be nice to just have straight Con to Max level/DC but you have to have some realism.

[Gnaeus]

If your characters are being stingy just because they can't cast all day long, it shouldn't take very long for the party to break up. I never said that underperforming classes don't get outperformed. I said they get the chance to perform. Blitzkrieg is effective, if you can pull it off quick enough. It's fine to be effective some of the time, but to use it for every situation simply means that your DM doesn't know how to actually challenge the party.

If they get outperformed, isn’t that by definition unbalanced?

The imbalance is so baked in that you think it is “stingy” for the caster to not buff. Think about that. You intrinsically expect the caster to do his job while also covering the weaknesses of the low tiers. And when you set the adventuring day to where the caster is stretched, he is being stingy if he doesn’t carry candy that lets the fighter/monk do their basic jobs. If it were balanced the T5 would be supporting the T1 as much as the opposite occurs. If being selfish with your class abilities caused parties to break up, no one is more stingy than the tier 5, who picked classes that will forever suck up resources from more capable characters. Making the swashbuckler work isn’t the wizard’s job.

“The dm doesn’t know how to challenge the party”. Translated: that means that the high tiers must be intentionally countered by the DM through clever adventure design to negate their intrinsic advantages. Realistically, you will have a lot of days with one or 2 encounters. Those will play well to casters who can nova. You will have some interactive days where you are exploring an ancient ruin or such, where the caster can set the day to his advantage because there isn’t a driving need to fight that golem or trigger that trap before resting another day. That obviously favors the caster. And then you get big enemy lairs and castles, which, having lots of cooperating bad guys close together, are subject to being blitzed. That DMs can challenge casters, even that they should, I don’t dispute. But they challenge swashbucklers and soulknives just by including at CR monsters. These things aren’t like each other.

And bear in mind that I don’t even really oppose class imbalance. I think there are good sides to having soulknives and druids in the same world. And if someone likes swashbucklers and doesn’t mind the imbalance, or cranks up the opti-fu to 11 to make it work, or finds a wizard who doesn’t mind enabling their malfunction, or the group decides to have a swashbuckler ninja truenamer adept party that’s cool as long as all are having fun. But I never pretend that T1s and 5s are on a level playing field. Not every party is prepared to give a participation trophy to the monk for showing up to play.

[Darg]

A minor note: dual stat casting can actually be better for someone who doesn't need high DC because they aren't casting spells to force saves from the enemy. In that case, getting more bonus spells from a more useful stat than your DC/prereq stat can make life easier.

Consider, for example, if a Paladin were to get bonus spells from Charisma instead of Wisdom- you would only need a tiny bit of Wisdom to qualify for your spells and then be able to benefit from having more Charisma for Smite Evil and Divine Grace.

I've previously suggested that Fighters should have the same CL/Spell progression as Paladins (maxing out at 4ths), casting Arcane spells with Int to Max level/DC and Con to Bonus spells. Of course it'd be nice to just have straight Con to Max level/DC but you have to have some realism.

It takes 20 wisdom to even get a second 1st level bonus slot. It's just not worth it for the paladin to have more than 12 wisdom by level 4. If you use point buy, I would suggest simply leaving it at 10 and use a magic item to simply increase your wisdom.

As far as fighters getting spells, there are better PrCs to take instead of giving them paladin spell progression such as the Suel Arcanamach.


If they get outperformed, isn’t that by definition unbalanced?

The imbalance is so baked in that you think it is “stingy” for the caster to not buff. Think about that. You intrinsically expect the caster to do his job while also covering the weaknesses of the low tiers. And when you set the adventuring day to where the caster is stretched, he is being stingy if he doesn’t carry candy that lets the fighter/monk do their basic jobs. If it were balanced the T5 would be supporting the T1 as much as the opposite occurs. If being selfish with your class abilities caused parties to break up, no one is more stingy than the tier 5, who picked classes that will forever suck up resources from more capable characters. Making the swashbuckler work isn’t the wizard’s job.

“The dm doesn’t know how to challenge the party”. Translated: that means that the high tiers must be intentionally countered by the DM through clever adventure design to negate their intrinsic advantages. Realistically, you will have a lot of days with one or 2 encounters. Those will play well to casters who can nova. You will have some interactive days where you are exploring an ancient ruin or such, where the caster can set the day to his advantage because there isn’t a driving need to fight that golem or trigger that trap before resting another day. That obviously favors the caster. And then you get big enemy lairs and castles, which, having lots of cooperating bad guys close together, are subject to being blitzed. That DMs can challenge casters, even that they should, I don’t dispute. But they challenge swashbucklers and soulknives just by including at CR monsters. These things aren’t like each other.

And bear in mind that I don’t even really oppose class imbalance. I think there are good sides to having soulknives and druids in the same world. And if someone likes swashbucklers and doesn’t mind the imbalance, or cranks up the opti-fu to 11 to make it work, or finds a wizard who doesn’t mind enabling their malfunction, or the group decides to have a swashbuckler ninja truenamer adept party that’s cool as long as all are having fun. But I never pretend that T1s and 5s are on a level playing field. Not every party is prepared to give a participation trophy to the monk for showing up to play.

I wasn't talking about imbalance as that is simply inherent. I was talking about allowing other classes to perform their assigned roles.

Fly is a touch spell that doesn't specify a number. This means you can hold the charge and touch up to 6 willing targets as a full-round action. The other spells you mentioned were personal or is specifically 1 weapon. Getting a ghost touch weapon is easy enough with a +1 enhancement.

Summons have innately short durations. You aren't summoning an army at low levels to plow through 10+ encounters regularly especially when they are full-round cast times. Not to mention abusing planar ally and binding is a good way to get extra enemies that the character wouldn't be able to handle.

[blackwindbears]

The imbalance is so baked in that you think it is “stingy” for the caster to not buff. Think about that. You intrinsically expect the caster to do his job while also covering the weaknesses of the low tiers. And when you set the adventuring day to where the caster is stretched, he is being stingy if he doesn’t carry candy that lets the fighter/monk do their basic jobs. If it were balanced the T5 would be supporting the T1 as much as the opposite occurs. If being selfish with your class abilities caused parties to break up, no one is more stingy than the tier 5, who picked classes that will forever suck up resources from more capable characters. Making the swashbuckler work isn’t the wizard’s job.

I guess I don't quite agree. If there's an invisible enemy, the primary casters job, in my view, is to make it so the party can see them. "I might need to buff my summoned pets" is a good way to get booted out of the party and replaced with an NPC that works with the party. Similarly, if the rogue spends also his resources to be able to sneak past all the encounters and none helping the party, he's gonna find himself replaced.

Similarly the point of adventure design is to ensure that all the players are contributing to the success of the party. If one of the players is actively trying to not do that, they're A) less effective than a party working together and B) making the game more difficult for everyone. Of course I've not had a problem with a fighter contributing. And they can pull their weight against typical CR encounters whether there are 2 or 10 of them in a day. It has not in general been the view of my players that the fighter is being selfish. I guess other tables must be different, but again this doesn't describe any table I've actually seen in real life.

[NigelWalmsley]

I don't really see the benefit to having split stat casters. I guess it technically makes them less powerful, but not to any terribly noticeable degree. In practice it mostly means that your highest and second highest stat are spoken for (instead of just your highest) which means that you have less flexibility in how characters are built. This is another case where I think the casters are just better designed and the game would be improved by moving other classes towards them rather than the reverse.


Arguably, a class-based system doesn't need ability scores at all. The function of a class is, broadly speaking, to determine what you're good at. The function of ability scores is, broadly speaking, to determine what you're good at. A system doesn't really need two different ways of accomplishing the same thing. You could just design classes so that they give you the numbers you should have for attack, damage, spell DC, and uses per day. And then eliminate all this fiddling around with ability score generation and ability-boosting magic items.

D&D, for all that people complain about the rigidity of classes, is not a purely classed system. You have things like Feats and Skills and Items that exist outside the scope of the class that you are. By having things key off attributes and classes care about particular ones, you can create associations where particular classes are better or worse at specific things. If the Paladin wants Strength and Charisma because of their class features, you can expect them to be good at talking to NPCs or doing physical things. That's a useful assumption to be able to make, and it's good to not need to explicitly note what "definitely not ability score" things each class has.


I guess I don't quite agree. If there's an invisible enemy, the primary casters job, in my view, is to make it so the party can see them.

What if the caster is a Dread Necromancer or a Warmage, and doesn't get any spells that let the rest of the party see invisibility? What if they already cast See Invisibility last encounter and only have Web now? Should I expect that as a Wizard all my spell slots are going to be dedicated to solving the Fighter's problems?

The job of characters is to win encounters. If you choose to do that by casting buff spells on your allies or debuffs on your enemies, great. If you choose to do that by having a bunch of minions and making them fight the enemies, great. If you choose to do that by charging enemies and turning them into chunky salsa, great. As long as whatever you are doing contributes to the party's victory to a level appropriate degree, good for you. But if you need someone else to spend their resources before you get to do anything useful, you're the problem. Not them.

[Gnaeus]

I wasn't talking about imbalance as that is simply inherent. I was talking about allowing other classes to perform their assigned roles

Oh there are plenty of ways that the muggles get to swing at something. I think it’s quite a bit less humiliating for the Cleric/Druid/Wizard to have spells to cast to buff or crowd control or even SoD while the muggles tank or kill disabled enemies than it is to be slashing a badguy next to a Tier 1 who is outperforming your A game while he uses his C game.


Fly is a touch spell that doesn't specify a number. This means you can hold the charge and touch up to 6 willing targets as a full-round action. The other spells you mentioned were personal or is specifically 1 weapon. Getting a ghost touch weapon is easy enough with a +1 enhancement.

Even if I agreed with your definition of how fly works (I don’t) there isn’t necessarily a reason for the wizard to prep it daily. There are probably 2 dozen level 3 contenders from good to great in that slot. He might. It’s a decent tool. A sorcerer might not take it at all, he could limp by with other flight methods until he has polymorph or overland flight.

How is the fighter making that ghost touch weapon? Oh he can’t. So if the group is at WBL, and if the fighter decides he needs to spend that 6kgp+ adding ghost touch to a weapon (more if a monk wants it on strikes), and if the game has magic mart in a place the muggle can access, he can do that, assuming that he doesn’t need AC/Saves/Damage more. Unless he’s a soulknife. Or maybe the cleric/wizard can make it for him and put the difference between craft cost and market cost in his pocket.



Summons have innately short durations. You aren't summoning an army at low levels to plow through 10+ encounters regularly especially when they are full-round cast times. Not to mention abusing planar ally and binding is a good way to get extra enemies that the character wouldn't be able to handle.

And the unbalance doesn’t usually occur at low levels. By mid levels they can. 10 rounds probably covers 3 encounters, especially since the 10 encounter day presupposes many are below CR.

Planar ally never generates extra enemies. You are calling minions of your own god. Planar binding can also often be used safely.


The job of characters is to win encounters. If you choose to do that by casting buff spells on your allies or debuffs on your enemies, great. If you choose to do that by having a bunch of minions and making them fight the enemies, great. If you choose to do that by charging enemies and turning them into chunky salsa, great. As long as whatever you are doing contributes to the party's victory to a level appropriate degree, good for you. But if you need someone else to spend their resources before you get to do anything useful, you're the problem. Not them.
Nigel is spot on. If the Druid wants to fight invisible things with his personal blindsight he has no obligation to the fighter.

Also, we now know why Blackwindbears thinks classes are balanced. It’s because he is used to casters fastening on the rangers bib before combat, making airplane noises while they move the plastic mush filled spoon to the muggle’s face, and patting them on the back after combat to make sure they don’t spit up.

[blackwindbears]

What if the caster is a Dread Necromancer or a Warmage, and doesn't get any spells that let the rest of the party see invisibility? What if they already cast See Invisibility last encounter and only have Web now? Should I expect that as a Wizard all my spell slots are going to be dedicated to solving the Fighter's problems?

The job of characters is to win encounters. If you choose to do that by casting buff spells on your allies or debuffs on your enemies, great. If you choose to do that by having a bunch of minions and making them fight the enemies, great. If you choose to do that by charging enemies and turning them into chunky salsa, great. As long as whatever you are doing contributes to the party's victory to a level appropriate degree, good for you. But if you need someone else to spend their resources before you get to do anything useful, you're the problem. Not them.

Ah, I may have misunderstood. No, my expectation is that the characters each fulfill their roles reasonably well, and I do view the wizards role as dispelling stuff from time to time. Outside of monks, martials have always contributed in my games to encounters of their level.

I do think that martials in general seem to be treated as a straw man, but I don't know anything about how your games are run.


I think that Oberoni's fallacy has done a lot of harm to folks trying to work on house rules in their game. It gets thrown around outside of the context it was originally used for, in the extreme treating D&D as though there is no GM making rulings, or constructing encounters or adventures. You might call this extreme version of the fallacy, Oberoni's Tyranny. Which, in this case, means taking Oberoni out of its original context of discussing the design of the game and thrusting it into the playing of the game.

No D&D game is played in a vacuum, with some advanced computer spitting out perfect RAW rulings. Therefore to actually help OP, the most important question, which none of us asked, is: What is your metagame? Which is to say: what other house rules are in effect? What optional rules are in effect? What do your players usually do? Are the casters causing significant problems? What way are they causing problems?

Hell, one of the most fundamentally important questions is probably, "How do you assign ability scores?". This house rule probably has a pretty different impact using the elite array compared to point buy!

Last, as far as I can tell I'm the only one that actually played with a similar rule, and I didn't even explain very clearly how it went!


So here you go OP, your rule in the wild:
I played with a similar rule for a game that lasted about a year, going from level 5 to 15.

1) I roll ability scores, meaning players are most likely to end up with the elite array.
2) My casters use mostly core spells and don't abuse planar binding, polymorph, or alter self
3) The party had four to five people and at various times had a Sorcerer, Druid, Barbarian, Warlock, Monk, Warlock, Rogue, and Bard
4) The primary casters weren't happy about it. This is unsurprising, nobody ever likes a nerf. The question should never, ever be would my players rather have less power?
5) The players enjoyed most sessions, nobody quit, and anonymously rated the game slightly higher than the average of the other games I've run, and much higher than games they've played with other DMs (I don't know how reliable the second is, it involves a lot of differences)
6) Casters ran out of gas and were occasionally caught without their best spells. Boss battles seemed to last somewhat longer (about a half round, not significant). This was in part because the attrition was more significant in the lead up as the party had slightly fewer daily resources
7) One of the casters did invest in more wands. Consequently was usually a few thousand gold behind when I would audit PC wealth. This was not a huge problem
8) A handful of times I think it resulted in a more interesting retreat choice. Probably 3 or 4 times spread over the whole campaign
9) It was a lot of extra work. I couldn't reuse stat-blocks or modules very directly so I had to rework every caster statblock.

I no longer use it as a house-rule. I thought that it was fun and it made that campaign world feel a little different, but it wasn't worth the time. If I wanted to accomplish the same thing balance wise I'd just shift the bonus spell slot table up by one (effectively treating their modifier as one less for the purpose of bonus spells). That would make it a lot easier to prep for using existing materials, but it just doesn't make a huge difference.

I can't say for certain what would happen if I used point buy instead, but my suspicion is the results would have been a little different.

[Psyren]

I'd be fine with DAD casters if you could economically pump two attributes from leveling instead of one. But being forced to choose between, say, bonus spells and save DCs just isn't fun - it forces you into much more narrow spell choices to have an effective character. You end up with either a small amount of spells per day that allow saving throws, or a wider array that bypass the mechanic entirely like buffs and summons, instead of a healthy mix of both.

[blackwindbears]

I'd be fine with DAD casters if you could economically pump two attributes from leveling instead of one. But being forced to choose between, say, bonus spells and save DCs just isn't fun - it forces you into much more narrow spell choices to have an effective character. You end up with either a small amount of spells per day that allow saving throws, or a wider array that bypass the mechanic entirely like buffs and summons, instead of a healthy mix of both.

I found my players would be down one or two bonus spell slots. They all focused on DCs. Of course if I had used point buy it might have worked out differently.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I'd be fine with DAD casters if you could economically pump two attributes from leveling instead of one. But being forced to choose between, say, bonus spells and save DCs just isn't fun - it forces you into much more narrow spell choices to have an effective character. You end up with either a small amount of spells per day that allow saving throws, or a wider array that bypass the mechanic entirely like buffs and summons, instead of a healthy mix of both.

I don't think the effect is quite as pronounced as you're putting it here, since in my experience casters already tend to focus pretty strongly on buffs or summons or control and so on as a playstyle issue, regardless of casting stat. Heck, even necromancers, who have both "animate skeletons" and "shoot death rays" firmly within their comparatively broad theme, tend to choose between throwing save-or-lose spells or creating a massive undead army or animating a small number of more powerful undead minions even when they're a Dread Necromancer who gets all three kinds of spells for free.

Sure, casters almost always dabble in secondary and tertiary foci, but I think those foci tend not to correlate with whether the spells allow saves or not. For instance, in one campaign I had a mostly buffing-focused Bard/Heartfire Fanner in the same party as a more blasty/BFC wizard, and when the wizard retired because his player had to leave the group the bard decided to detour into Sublime Chord to pick up a bunch of blasty/BFC spells to cover the resulting capability gap. The bard certainly appreciated the fact that his offensive spells had good save DCs because he was Cha-SAD, but he was most likely going to pick up those offensive save-requiring spells even if he'd had to base them on Int or Wis because it was about picking up the spells the party needed and not squeezing every last point of save DC out of his spells.

For another instance, every single player who takes the theurge route with Wizard/Druid/Arcane Hierophant, Psion/Cleric/Psychic Theurge, or any other DAD combo is making a choice that not only loses out on SADness but drops multiple spellcasting levels as well because they value breadth of spell selection over the efficacy of a single class's spells, and so is leaning even harder into the extra-spells-vs.-high-DCs dichotomy.


Now, having said all that, you're definitely right that increasing attribute dependency for any set of classes, whether just certain casters or across the board, works out better when it's easier to boost multiple stats. Multiclassed and dual-classed PCs were noticeably sub-par in AD&D when raising stats at all was rare and difficult, then multiclassed MAD characters were a lot better off in 3e when you could spread level-based stat boosts around and actually did quite well when you could buy multiple stat-boosting items at higher levels, then multiclassed characters got really screwed in 4e when you want to hyper-focus on one or two stats and multiclassing outside of those stats knocked you off the bonus treadmill, then multiclassed characters got better again in 5e where things weren't so restrictive anymore but weren't as well off as things had been in 3e.

In general, I'd say a situation where casters are DAD but characters can easily boost 2 or 3 stats (so the martials who want high Str+Con or Dex+Con plus possibly a mental stat are also doing better) would probably end up being as good or better than the current situation where casters are largely SAD and characters can easily boost 1 stat, but that would of course depend on the specific implementation and ability score ranges and so forth.

[Lucas Yew]

Multi stat casting is one thing, but I do think it's even better if you just chop down the high level multi-purpose spells into smaller functioning spells (like how PF2 thoroughly dissected Summon Monster X down into Summon [Creature Type] spells).


You could totally separate skill stuff from class stuff such that your swording and your swimming are completely unrelated, but "This warrior is an all-around athlete with unrefined sword skills and that other warrior is an accomplished tactician and back-line commander but they both have exactly equal combat capabilities" can be a big hit to verisimilitude. Heck, 4e did that for its monsters, not even the PCs, and a lot of players quickly noticed and disliked the fact that the beefy bruisers and the tricky skirmishers had basically the same combat numbers plus or minus a few points despite being flavored very differently; doing that on the PC side would just make the effect worse and much more obvious.

The moment I realized this was when I became a staunch "Simulationist", sometime about 10 years ago when I was not even a year experienced in roleplaying games...

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Multi stat casting is one thing, but I do think it's even better if you just chop down the high level multi-purpose spells into smaller functioning spells (like how PF2 thoroughly dissected Summon Monster X down into Summon [Creature Type] spells).

The problem with that, of course, is that the more finely you slice up the more versatile spells, the more that spontaneous casters with limited spells known are screwed over--and the more you're likely to end up with niche spells that never get learned or cast, like how the 3.0 version of Otiluke's freezing sphere included a fire seed-like time delay option (so you could stockpile a few and pass them off to a fighter buddy to throw) as well as what is now polar ray, to make it a nicely versatile blasting-plus-buffing-plus-utility spell, but in 3.5 you almost never see casters use either freezing sphere or polar ray because neither is at all worth it on its own.

The only way I could see splitting up spells work out well is if you leave in class features or spells that let you access multiple of those spells without using up lots of spells known, kind of like undermaster does for earth spells. If you made separate summon animal, summon outsider, summon elemental, summon undead, etc. lines and stuck those on the druid, cleric, wizard, and cleric+dread necromancer+wizard lists respectively but retained a summon monster line for sorcerers and conjurer wizards that was basically "When you cast this spell, you get the effects of any summon X spell up to 1 level lower than this spell," that would give most casters the more thematically-focused spells you're looking for without making it a huge pain to build a devoted summoner type.

[NigelWalmsley]

Multi stat casting is one thing, but I do think it's even better if you just chop down the high level multi-purpose spells into smaller functioning spells (like how PF2 thoroughly dissected Summon Monster X down into Summon [Creature Type] spells).

That's not really a necessary change. Summon Monster was never a particularly problematic spell. The change you really want to make there is to set things up so that instead of summoning a Vrock at 15th level (a monster with half a dozen active abilities and a laundry list of defenses, but whose numbers are insufficient to be meaningful at that level) you summoned a thing that was tactically simple and numerically level appropriate. More like what you get from Animate Dead, basically.


The problem with that, of course, is that the more finely you slice up the more versatile spells, the more that spontaneous casters with limited spells known are screwed over

In fairness, I'm not sure how much that's a niche people really want. What people want out of spontaneous casting seems to be closer to the Warmage-type casters (where you have a specific list of spells that is simply however long it needs to be to cover a concept), rather than the Sorcerer. In that context, it doesn't really matter how broad or narrow spells are. Though it does make splitting them rather pointless.


in 3.5 you almost never see casters use either freezing sphere or polar ray because neither is at all worth it on its own.

That's because Polar Ray is stupidly over-leveled. The Orbs and Scorching Ray deal roughly proportionate damage, and people cast those periodically. It's just that "d6 damage per level to single target" is under no circumstances worth an 8th level spell slot (even if it keeps scaling until you're a 25th level character). If Polar Ray had come out of the split-up as a 1st or 2nd level spell (as it probably should have), it would still be something people used on occasion.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

In fairness, I'm not sure how much that's a niche people really want. What people want out of spontaneous casting seems to be closer to the Warmage-type casters (where you have a specific list of spells that is simply however long it needs to be to cover a concept), rather than the Sorcerer. In that context, it doesn't really matter how broad or narrow spells are. Though it does make splitting them rather pointless.

Pretty much, yeah. One still can rewrite casters to be DAD without going the fixed-list caster route, though, so I was pointing out the pitfalls there.


That's because Polar Ray is stupidly over-leveled. The Orbs and Scorching Ray deal roughly proportionate damage, and people cast those periodically. It's just that "d6 damage per level to single target" is under no circumstances worth an 8th level spell slot (even if it keeps scaling until you're a 25th level character). If Polar Ray had come out of the split-up as a 1st or 2nd level spell (as it probably should have), it would still be something people used on occasion.

It's not just a matter of over-leveling (though that is the main issue on the polar ray side), it's that the three individual functions of 3.0 Otiluke's freezing sphere don't individually stack up to similar spells (the "cold ray" version is almost exactly lesser orb of cold plus a higher damage cap but minus the antimagic penetration, the "globe of cold" version is inferior to fire seeds when used as a grenadelike weapon, and the "frigid sphere" version is far too niche to ever be prepared unless you know for certain you'll use it). The fact that they're all packaged together means you have some flexibility with the two blasty uses of the spell and you get the utility usage "for free" on top of that, but when split up they're not really worth taking on their own over similar spells even if they're appropriately re-leveled.

Summon monster is much the same. The monsters you can summon with it can be used for direct combat (though only at lower levels, as you note, before the CR drops off too much), for trap-springing, for scouting, for their utility SLAs, and so on, so you can always get a bit of use out of it, but if they were split up into summon combat bruiser and summon tiny scout and summon useful outsider and so forth those narrower spells probably wouldn't be worth spending a known spell on even if the monsters were more CR-appropriate simply because at that point taking a more broadly-useful spells for buffing the party fighter, rogue, or wizard respectively is a better investment.

[Xervous]

If you have a system that assumes numbers need to go up to stay on par and has multiple important numbers you need a reasonable way to increase multiple numbers.

Casters aren’t explicitly a numbers issue. Pulling back on spell slots doesn’t change the disparity of power between different spells. Fly is still going to make GMs throw a hissy fit when it bypasses an encounter that was relevant 5 levels ago. If the MAD change doesn’t make the MAD monk relevant without boosting other things into the sky it probably isn’t much more than a contrived bandaid to some narrow case that could be better implemented with some attention to detail.

Find a way to make ability score progression extend logically from the point buy valuations and you’ve got a solid foundation. It’s not going to change problem spells, but it will give you a more consistent baseline to weigh SAD against MAD