Can we Rock, Paper, Scissors the classes?

[mashlagoo1982]

I recently had the interesting idea below and was wondering how feasible it could be.

Going to forward this with saying I have not really put much thought into it, so I’m sure there are plenty of flaws. I’m not pushing it as a good idea, but it seemed entertaining enough to share and spark discussion.

Generally, it seems that the PC classes can be divided into three large categories: non-casters, divine casters, and arcane casters. Non-casters often get the short end of the power stick because magic rules.

My idea to help rebalance things (maybe only slightly) would be to turn that power imbalance into more of a rock, paper, scissors struggle. This maybe accomplished by altering a few rules.

Implement a rule where all arcana spells have NO impact on non-casters unless the non-caster wants the effect of the spell. There are obviously huge areas that would need reviewing to fully enact this rule, but it seems like an interesting thought experiment.
To further help encourage the theme and allow non-casters to become more effective against arcane casters, all non-casters would have UMD as a Class Skill. There UMD skill level would be at least .5 their class level if they invest no additional skill points. I already see this would create a wealth tax against non-casters, so further considerations would need to be observed.

While this nerfs arcane casters, we also need to nerf divine casters. So, we would make divine spells have NO impact on arcane casters unless the arcane caster wants the effect of the spell. No additional UMD class features for any caster class.

In theory, a game with the rules above would have non-casters that gain an edge against arcane casters, arcane casters that gain an edge against divine casters, and divine casters that maintain their edge against non-casters.

How good/bad idea is this?

I’m personally thinking the rules of the game are overly detailed to implement something like this in a simple method.
There are probably too many outliers for this idea to be feasible.

Edit:
I just remembered the real problem and realized these rules don't really address the imbalance of power in the game. It isn't that casters can easily take out non-casters. It's that the power casters have makes non-casters less useful. So, while still a fun thought experiment... it won't really help to rebalance gameplay.

[ciopo]

I don't see how this could be implemented within the framework of 3.5 / d20, mostly on what framework you put the "noncasters are immune to arcane spells" in hard, curnchy numbers?

Do you give them an arbitrary spell resistance that works only for arcane spells? but what do you tie this to? what about multiclass?.

it kindaish feel like gestalting forsaker as a category, but I don't see why the three categories have to be along these lines, since it's a complete reworking of the base system anyway

[mashlagoo1982]

I don't see how this could be implemented within the framework of 3.5 / d20, mostly on what framework you put the "noncasters are immune to arcane spells" in hard, curnchy numbers?

Do you give them an arbitrary spell resistance that works only for arcane spells? but what do you tie this to? what about multiclass?.

it kindaish feel like gestalting forsaker as a category, but I don't see why the three categories have to be along these lines, since it's a complete reworking of the base system anyway

I admit I was thinking about Megaman and Eternal Darkness when applying this idea.

There was no hard number crunch going on.
It amused me in a kinda stupid way.

[gijoemike]

Umm, this plain will not work. Wizards would just magic the cave to collapse. Or destroy the bridge the non casters need to cross. A Wizard could even create an arrow or orb of acid or open a portal to a lava flow. Acid and lava still burn. It doesn't matter if how they got here was magical. Oh look the wizard summoned a fiendish X from the pits of hell. It kills the fighter.

You system nerfs evocation into pointlessness, save or dies are effectively gone, and it also removes the concept of a curse from anyone non magical. But it doesn't address the actual issues.

Clerics still rule. Wizards can disable the cleric and then create a giant pit under the mundanes. Bards wouldn't be able to use magic to do affect most social circles, which would destroy their niche.

[RandomPeasant]

The classes aren't imbalanced because Wizards can beat up Fighters. The game is not a series of cage matches between equal-leveled members of PC classes, it's a series of combat (and noncombat, but that's a whole other can of worms) encounters. And while "a Wizard" or "a Fighter" is a possible combat encounter, it's only one possible combat encounter out of the hundreds in even the MMI, and whether or not a particular character beats it is of only extremely marginal relevance to that character's power level. What matters is how characters do against the overall range of expected opposition, and that's where the non-casters fall behind relative to the casters.

Though, as people have noted, there are also significant implementation questions about the issue. While many spells are direct magical attacks, many are not. How does the Fighter's immunity to arcane magic interact with wall of stone? What happens if a Beguiler has charmed or dominated a bunch of monsters and orders them to beat up the Fighter? Does a Fighter automatically make his save against silent image? There is room for a character whose shtick involves having very good defenses in exchange for lower offensive firepower, but blanket immunity to magic isn't really workable, especially in the system as it exists.

[Psyren]

The other big problem here is that gishes and many monsters can do more than one of these. Even if you did find the perfect wording to make it so that martial>arcane>divine>martial, a druid or eldritch knight could use half its kit to handle one and the other half to handle the other. So could a dragon or fiend or hag or beholder etc. Your change would actually hose martial classes even more than they already are, because while the casters (and monsters) have ways to access martial abilities in addition to their own, martials have no such recourse.

More fundamentally, RPS design is for PvP games, which D&D is not. D&D is a way to bring archetypical fantasy monsters (dragons especially, they're right in the name) to life so that we can pretend to stick pointy things and spells in them. And many of those monsters fall into multiple categories as a result.

[mashlagoo1982]

The classes aren't imbalanced because Wizards can beat up Fighters. The game is not a series of cage matches between equal-leveled members of PC classes, it's a series of combat (and noncombat, but that's a whole other can of worms) encounters. And while "a Wizard" or "a Fighter" is a possible combat encounter, it's only one possible combat encounter out of the hundreds in even the MMI, and whether or not a particular character beats it is of only extremely marginal relevance to that character's power level. What matters is how characters do against the overall range of expected opposition, and that's where the non-casters fall behind relative to the casters.

I realized this moments after the original post and made the edit.

https://images.app.goo.gl/VxySU1dsABZCxoaj7

[Harrow]

There's already a rock-paper-scissors element to D&D, it's just poorly implemented. The classes divide into casters, front liners, and (for lack of a better term) experts. Casters have 1-9 spell progression, front liners have good hit points and BAB, experts have skills, mobility, and usually some special resistance to magic.

The general idea is that casters, like wizards and clerics, have higher damage per round than front liners and from further away (plus the casters are less likely to be slowed down by armor), and so casters tend to do well in that match-up. This is just the gist of a design intention that I've picked up from playing D&D, smarter and more experienced people than I generally feel that blasting wizards don't deal that much damage and a good charging build deals plenty (though, I feel that at least part of this has to do with the fact that wizards have better things they could be doing than direct damage as opposed to them being particularly ineffective at it, while fighters generally only have the damage thing going on).

Front liners have (or are supposed to have) good AC, lots of hit points, and hit anything within charging range like a truck. These are your fighters and barbarians. Casters are supposed to be able to easily hit them with Fireballs and Flamestrikes and Hold Persons. And they can. But experts, on the other hand, generally have lower accuracy and armor than front liners, so in a slap-for-slap fight between these two, front liners are supposed to come out on top.

Finally, you've got the experts. Rogues and monks. They get things like evasion and tumble. They tend to have a natural inclination toward multiple, lower accuracy attacks (two-weapon fighting, rapid shot, flurry of blows). These are supposed to miss against the front liners, but hit the casters. The idea is that they slip past the front liners using their higher mobility and hit the enemy casters in the back row. The experts also can sneak around to scout, so they can hit casters before they even know what's going on.

So, casters are supposed to have an advantage against front liners, who are supposed to have an advantage against experts, who wrap back around to having an advantage against casters. Sounds nice on paper, but you've got 2 big problems in practice.

Problem number 1 is that it doesn't really work out that way. A monk has every possible core defense against a wizard. All good saves, evasion, spell resistance, bonuses to touch AC. But, even in core, wizards can still summon, mind control, or Animate Dead some front liner minions that by-pass all those defenses. Or Polymorph themselves. Or just Teleport away, Scry until successful, and Teleport back in to kill the monk in its sleep. Outside of core, the wizard has even more options. And that's not even getting into the druid, which has a front liner as a class feature, can wild shape into a front liner, and then cast spells to make more front liners if necessary, all on top of full casting.

The second problem is the Monster Manual. Almost all of the monsters that aren't "caster plus front liner plus a little bit of expert" tend to just be front liners. The only monster I can think of that really fits the caster role exclusively (d8 HP per HD or lower, spells per day) is the nymph. Yeah, monks are great against nymphs, but tend to have bad match-ups with the rest of the MM.

So there you have it. There already is a rock-paper-scissors thing going on, it just doesn't work because rock is surprisingly good against paper and the only time the DM isn't throwing "scissors" is when he's putting out "bomb" instead.

[Ramza00]

Ideas like this want to jettison the d20 system without jettisoning the d20 system and the end result is being unhappy from several angles at once.

Of course we can make a game system with wizards and fighters but also clerics plus rogues where the fighters are good at killing wizards, wizards defeat clerics and so on. But to do so and be fun you need to rework the mechanics from the ground up. It is not about the d20 but instead hidden math where classes advance abilities at a 10+1/2 HD+ Ability modifier rate, and saves advance at 2+1/2 HD rate and your bad saves at a 1/3 HD rate. Likewise the same for the bab, skills, and so on. All based around the d20.

Instead you need to create similar things like there can be saves but maybe not fort, ref, will, and so on.

[icefractal]

Flavor-wise, it feels a bit odd. I'd personally go with:

1) Arcane magic doesn't work on divine casters.
Because their divine connection overrides the weave around their person.

2) Divine magic doesn't work on non-casters unless they choose to accept it.
Because most people fall under the domain of multiple gods, hostile use of divine power is a minefield for deific diplomacy, and thus forbidden. Since arcane casters challenge the domain of the gods, use of divine magic against them is universally allowed.

So Arcane > Non-Caster > Divine > Arcane
Which fits better with existing stuff like "The evil sorcerer was menacing the town until a holy knight came to stop him", "The suspicious wizard hires you to steal an ancient tome from the temple of Pelor, which he dares not enter himself", and "The tyranny of Asmodeus's laws was ended when the populace rose up and overthrew the theocracy". The other way around would be more like "The evil sorcerer was terrorizing the temple until they hired mercenaries to take him down" - which is possible too, but less iconic.

[Maat Mons]

While, mechanically, Arcane and Divine are the two categories of spellcasting ability, I feel that the game often tries to treat Nature casting as thematically separate from other types of Divine Casting. At least some of the designers seem to what an Arcane / Holy / Nature trifecta of magical power sources. Wizard, Cleric, and Druid. Sorcerer, Favored Soul, and Spirit Shaman. Hexblade, Paladin, and Ranger. Maybe you could try creating a rock-paper-scissors dynamic with three different flavors of spellcasting.

It would also be possible to do a three-way split for mundanes. There's the classic Offense / Utility / Defense. Though it's always hard to make Defense interesting, and D&D's lack of an agro mechanic makes the situation even worse. If you did pull it off, you could easily establish parity between the roles and the physical ability scores. Offense = Strength, Utility = Dexterity, and Defense = Constitution. It would go great with my long-standing desire to associate each mental ability score with a magical power source. Arcane = Intelligence, Nature = Wisdom, and Holy = Charisma.

If you really like threes, you could add a third category beside Magical and Mundane. It doesn't fit D&D very well, but for a more generalized system, I'd go with Technological. The closest equivalent to technology in D&D is magic items. So the closest you could come to making a Technological D&D character is to make one that is wholly reliant on magic items to function. Which is to say, a Mundane. But I was hoping to make Technological another category on top of Mundane, not a synonym for it. In a system where Mundanes are allowed to do cool things without relying on magic or technology, I'd rename the category from Mundane to Innate. That actually sounds like the top-level breakdown of a superhero RPG, Magical / Technological / Innate. Doctor Strange / Iron Man / Captain Marvel. I'm not sure what three subdivisions of Technological their would be to keep the three thing going.

[Crake]

Umm, this plain will not work. Wizards would just magic the cave to collapse. Or destroy the bridge the non casters need to cross. A Wizard could even create an arrow or orb of acid or open a portal to a lava flow. Acid and lava still burn. It doesn't matter if how they got here was magical. Oh look the wizard summoned a fiendish X from the pits of hell. It kills the fighter.

You system nerfs evocation into pointlessness, save or dies are effectively gone, and it also removes the concept of a curse from anyone non magical. But it doesn't address the actual issues.

Clerics still rule. Wizards can disable the cleric and then create a giant pit under the mundanes. Bards wouldn't be able to use magic to do affect most social circles, which would destroy their niche.

If you make it "immunity to the effects of arcane spells" rather than "SR: NI vs arcane spells" then the effects change pretty significantly. You would become immune to even conjoured effects, or non-SR effects like a wall of force, presumably you could just walk right through it, a summoned monster would be incapable of hurting them. Sure you could still destroy the bridge, or cave in the ceiling, but those aren't always options, and falling rocks aren't actually too difficult to avoid, and don't do particularly much damage against a high HP martial anyway. As long as you're making it outright immunity to the effects of spells, rather than just NI SR, because if it's just NI SR then as others have said, it's not really going to affect the field that much.

I dunno if a Martial -> Arcane -> Divine -> rock paper scissors circle is necessarily the way to go though. Especially since Arcane/Divine theurges exist, and where does psionics fit into the mix? And how many levels of martial do you need to get the arcane immunity? I dunno, seems like not a particularly great idea ngl.

[RandomPeasant]

You would become immune to even conjoured effects, or non-SR effects like a wall of force, presumably you could just walk right through it, a summoned monster would be incapable of hurting them.

But what about charm monster? Are you immune to a charmed Ogre? What about another Fighter that's accepted a bull's strength? Can you "immune" the effect of dimension door and attack someone as if they were still in the square they occupied before casting it? Are you immune to swords that were created by fabricate? If you want to give someone good defenses, give them the defenses that exist. Saves, Spell Resistance, Evasion, Meddle, that sort of thing. Don't try to invent a new defense that the game wasn't written to expect or interact with.

[Psyren]

You would become immune to even conjoured effects, or non-SR effects like a wall of force, presumably you could just walk right through it, a summoned monster would be incapable of hurting them.

What happens if you telekinesis/unshrink some boulders over their head and drop them? Or open a portal inside a volcano? Or collapse a mountain over the two of you and teleport away? Or possess/dominate a monster and fight them with that? Or impersonate a king and send his armies? Or take the macguffin and go hide out on the Negative Energy Plane?

There's all kinds of ways to fight with magic that don't rely on the effects themselves being magical. Combating all of those will either require so much legalese that you spend more time wordsmithing than playing the game, or chopping out/banning so many spells that the game itself would be left an unrecognizable shell.

[icefractal]

Why would it be necessary (or even desirable) to block indirect effects of magic from working? I was visualizing this more like Pokemon than actual Rock/Paper/Scissors, where one side has a major edge, but it's not like they're so impervious they could take a nap on the battlefield.

The issue with setting it up as caster/caster/non-caster, though, is that in most campaigns a significant majority of foes the party faces are non-casters - because casters are rare in the world, because it's easier mechanically, or both. If SLAs count as casting that makes arcane more common, but it's rare for SLAs to be divine.

That means that with the original setup, if the RPS factor was strong:
Arcane Caster - very niche, only good for the rare times you fight cultists/priests.
Non-Caster - also niche, good for when you fight mages or heavy SLA-users.
Divine Caster - good against everything except arcane casters.
So the party probably looks like three divine casters and a single non-caster.

[Doctor Despair]

I mean, if we're just trying to make mundanes stronger against casters, give all characters the effects of Vecna-blooded, have their actions be protected from divination as if by the Xorvintaal game, and have their actions specifically not activate contingent magic. Then, have them lose those qualities when they become able to cast X level spells. Maybe 5th, to let rangers and paladins keep it? Fluff it as casters opening themselves up to the universe in order to more directly impose their will on it.

That alone makes it a lot harder for casters to deal with mundanes, as they'll never know what to prepare. Of course, that doesn't mean a caster can't kill a mundane -- nor should it. Mundanes having advantage in fighting casters doesn't mean it should be assured. We could tilt things more in the mundane's favor by adding SR to that boost, Mettle, Evasion, save boosts... But at the end of the day, a caster with persisted delay death atral projecting from their demiplane won't care much how tanky the mundane is. A caster who doesn't want to die has a lot of tools to ensure they never do. However, an ill-prepared caster actually has to roll initiative against a party to win the encounter, and the mundanes carrying the macguffin can actually get the jump on a distracted caster given a clever enough plan.

With that said, casters would still have a vastly greater way to address plot problems and encounters. The rock-paper-scissors here would end up more like mundanes beat casters, casters beat plot, plot beats mundanes...

Edit: Maybe we give the anti-divination and anti-contingency abilities to rogue/experts? That way they can more effectively flank/assassinate the backline casters.

Then, give fighter/barbarian types fortification and HP, and maybe some sort of extrasensory detection modes,, so they can detect and tank those same rogue-types.

Let the casters orb of X or dominate the fighters, the fighters smash the rogues, and the rogues assassinate the casters. This, of course, doesn't account for the fact that casters can just send simalacrums or ice assassins or astral projections to the field in their stead, or contingent true resurrection, or... any number of things. However, that encounter would be ended for them, at least, and the scry-and-die retribution against that rogue would be a lot harder with them being immune to the "scry" part

[Jay R]

Don't kid yourself. You are not proposing a slightly different version of d20. You are proposing a totally different game based on totally different principles.

Yes, you can certainly create a new game on completely new principles. Without a lot more information about the details of the game, I have no idea how well it would work.

[RandomPeasant]

Why would it be necessary (or even desirable) to block indirect effects of magic from working? I was visualizing this more like Pokemon than actual Rock/Paper/Scissors, where one side has a major edge, but it's not like they're so impervious they could take a nap on the battlefield.

From the perspective of the OP, the issue is that if you only make martials immune to some of the spells that casters use to win combats, casters will simply prepare the other spells that make them win combats. It's like trying to nerf the Wizard by hitting a specific list of spells. It doesn't work, because casters can just choose spells you didn't nerf.


The issue with setting it up as caster/caster/non-caster, though, is that in most campaigns a significant majority of foes the party faces are non-casters - because casters are rare in the world, because it's easier mechanically, or both. If SLAs count as casting that makes arcane more common, but it's rare for SLAs to be divine.

That's certainly the biggest problem with it, but it's not the only one. For example, while beating up on Wizards because you're immune to their puny spells is fitting for a Barbarian or a Paladin, it doesn't make a lot of sense as a Rogue shtick. If a Rogue beats a Wizard, it's by getting a drop on him and knifing him between the shoulder blades before he can do anything, not by wading through a barrage of spellfire to batter him down in a protracted melee. There is a kernel of a good idea here ("you could make martials viable by making them defensive specialists"), but the idea of sticking all classes into a rock-paper-scissors dynamic just doesn't seem useful or necessary in a game like D&D. You have hundreds of monsters, and those are the actual challenges. Why would you even want to fit everything into a three-point system?


I mean, if we're just trying to make mundanes stronger against casters, give all characters the effects of Vecna-blooded, have their actions be protected from divination as if by the Xorvintaal game, and have their actions specifically not activate contingent magic.

I am deeply confused by a mindset that sees that as the primary issue facing non-casters. A high-level Wizard doesn't need to prepare a specialized set of spells to beat up on a Fighter, he just needs to prepare any of the dozen-plus spells at each level that make him win fights. The Fighter doesn't need an answer to weird TO chess-matches based on nested contingences, he needs an answer for "there's a Horned Devil in the next room, what do we do" that is as simple and effective as what the Wizard does in that situation.