Class specific non-combat powers for mundane characters [Archive]

View Full Version : Class specific non-combat powers for mundane characters

rel

2023-09-06, 12:30 PM

It's no secret that the various mundane classes don't get any unique class specific powers for dealing with non-combat challenges. Sure they get skills and feats, and they can use items and gear, but any character of any class can do all that. Unlike a spellcaster, or otherwise magical character, mundanes rarely bring any truly unique class derived powers to the table.

I think this lack of tools for participating in 2 of the 3 pillars of D&D gameplay is a problem, and over the years I've tried to remedy it with system overhauls and class reworks, but I never made anything I was really happy with.

I'm about ready to have another go at trying to homebrew a solution to this most intractable of issues, and I'm looking for inspiration.

Does anyone have any rules fixes or class reworks that specifically give unique non-combat powers to non-magical characters?

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-06, 03:40 PM

Imho it is fine as it is.

My point is, you can play 3.5 as you like.
Wanna play a mundane party with low to none magic? You can do that in 3.5

Sure most of the time people prefer a more magical setting. But you can do that too.

You can even go beyond (the power level) of anything presented in media (if you want).

Nobody forces you to play a Fighter or Barbarian if you wanna play a warrior type character. You can play a Bard of Duskbalde as a magical warrior too. Or go for a gish with 9th lvl spells. Anything is valid. Class != your ingame profession

It's all up to you and the optimization lvl of your table. Imho the greatest appeal of 3.5 that it is totally unbalanced and that your party/DM can decide how powerful your characters can be.

And there are a lot of prc without actual spellcasting but who come with some nice gimmicks (Tattooed Monk, Arcane Duelist, Shadow Sun Ninja and the like..).

Finally, why do all the hassle with updating/balancing classes if you could just use Gestalt characters with some rules on how you can pick your classes, like Mundane on one side and (?non-)Full-Caster on the second side.

Inevitability

2023-09-06, 05:32 PM

Imho it is fine as it is.

When reading a story about a 'warrior type character', often said characters have unique skills outside of killing things, skills that even their 'magical' teammates rely on them for. Roy possesses a degree of leadership and drive that Vaarsuvius and Durkon lack, Legolas can scout through a snowstorm while even gandalf is snowed in, Arthur has the divine right to the throne that Merlin lacks. 3.5 D&D, as it currently exists, fails at emulating this, which is bad, because as you yourself say the strength of D&D lies in the variety of stories that it can be used to tell.

And to an extent that's all about power: no barbarian will ever be as good at breaking down doors as a Disintegrate, or as good as a Greater Teleport at guiding the party through the wilderness, no matter how much he boosts strength and Survival. And you never will plausibly get that level of power on a martial, that's something to accept, but also, the out-of-combat effects that martials get are replicable by casters in a way that doesn't flow the other way. A high-level cleric can cast Find Traps and Divine Insight and barge into the rogue's niche: the rogue has no way to cast Break Enchantment or Plane Shift. A fighter with maxed-out Handle Animal isn't going to be useful outside combat if your party has a druid, and if that druid also picks up Track then the same goes for your ranger.

And just to emphasize: this isn't merely a function of power. A healer (tier 5) has out-of-combat relevance that a crusader (tier 3) lacks, just to compare one of the weakest casters to one of the strongest martials (about the same number of utility skills, but access to sanctified spells and various status healers on one side and Mountain Hammer on the other). The system really is just genuinely uninterested in finding interesting and unique things for martials to do after Sword Hitting Time is over!

And the sort of mechanical substitutions you suggest are only a partial solution. If someone wants to play Conan the Barbarian and you point them towards Ranger, they'll eventually catch on that all their cool out-of-combat moments aren't based in savage intuition or menacing demeanor: they're based in having a spell list with Might of Oaks and Commune with Nature. It's hard to suspend your disbelief and reflavor stuff when the enemy wizard just Dispelled your cleverly camouflaged snare!

Solving the irrelevance of martials is a hard problem, made harder by the system's willingness to let druids do anything if there's a plant involved and let wizards do anything period; a good first step would be to encourage lower-powered casters for people whose character concept could also be implemented as a Dread Necromancer or Warmage. But after doing that, you still need to accept that the current system, where a monk with maxed diplomacy will always be a worse and less flexible face than a beguiler with maxed diplomacy and also spells, is in need of an update. Non-magical classes need to have abilities that make the rest of the party turn to them in exploration and social situations, and they need to be actually unique.

Otherwise, why bother handicapping yourself by playing a class that's only good at combat, when you could be good at combat and other stuff?

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-06, 11:52 PM

When reading a story about a 'warrior type character', often said characters have unique skills outside of killing things, skills that even their 'magical' teammates rely on them for. Roy possesses a degree of leadership and drive that Vaarsuvius and Durkon lack, Legolas can scout through a snowstorm while even gandalf is snowed in, Arthur has the divine right to the throne that Merlin lacks. 3.5 D&D, as it currently exists, fails at emulating this, which is bad, because as you yourself say the strength of D&D lies in the variety of stories that it can be used to tell.

....

While I get what you mean, imho the problem is that you are comparing a Low Fantasy/Magic setting (LotR) to a High Fantasy/Magic setting (3.5).

In 3.5 in most cases magic just simply beats everything. And there is no other way around as to give mundanes magic like abilities if they should compete and at that point the question is, why bother with fixing classes when you can simply create a specific build (e.g. a gish) to get what you want.

But nobody forces you to play a highly magical game.
The E6 format for 3.5 exists for that reason. Because people want to limit the omnipotence of magic.
I have played plenty of low lvl campaigns (where some even had Epic scale plots) that ended around lvl 4~5.

It's up to you how you wanna play. You can play mundane low lvls in one campaign, and highl optimized high lvl casters in another campaign.
Imho that's the beauty of 3.5. You(r DM) can decide the powerlvl and balancing in your current campaign.

JNAProductions

2023-09-06, 11:55 PM

What non-combat powers does a 6th level Fighter have compared to a 6th level Druid?

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-07, 12:03 AM

What non-combat powers does a 6th level Fighter have compared to a 6th level Druid?

Intimidate xD

RandomPeasant

2023-09-07, 12:31 AM

When reading a story about a 'warrior type character', often said characters have unique skills outside of killing things, skills that even their 'magical' teammates rely on them for.

Also many "warrior type characters" just have magic. Kaladin starts out as a Fighter (arguably even a Warrior), but he eventually gains powers like "flight" and "having a spirit guide" and "sticking stuff to other stuff", which he uses to good effect when enemies like "giant rock monsters" or "dudes who can turn into lasers to chase him" show up.

One of the things that I find irritating about these discussions is that there's an equivocation between "magic" and "literally and exactly a Wizard". Yes, you need something more than "being a regular dude with useful skills" to compete with the various magic-users. But that doesn't mean you need to get spells. The Ranger can get some sort of planar travel ability that competes with plane shift without just saying "plane shift x/day" (though, honestly, that's probably also fine). But there's nothing inherently concept-invalidating about the martial characters getting magic eventually, because in the source material that happens all the time. The idea that there are "magical characters" and "mundane characters" is entirely an invention of D&D, which can and should be discarded because it makes the game worse.

Roy possesses a degree of leadership and drive that Vaarsuvius and Durkon lack, Legolas can scout through a snowstorm while even gandalf is snowed in, Arthur has the divine right to the throne that Merlin lacks.

This doesn't really work. Leadership is just a feat you can take, and there are plenty of examples of wizard-kings in fantasy. Legolas's scouting (or Aragorn's herbalism) is useful, and I think you can make a case that skills should be better than they are, but that doesn't really close the gap when scrying and raise dead are spells you can learn.

And you never will plausibly get that level of power on a martial, that's something to accept

Sure you can. When Thor calls the Bifrost, that is at least in the same ballpark as Doctor Strange's sling ring as a travel power. No one in the First Law books gets particularly powerful, but it seems pretty clear that Logen's elementalism has the potential to scale at least as far as Bayaz's magic or Ferro's demonic heritage.

a good first step would be to encourage lower-powered casters for people whose character concept could also be implemented as a Dread Necromancer or Warmage.

The idea that you can meaningfully balance the game by moving the target for casters from "Wizard" to "Dread Necromancer" is a fantasy. The Dread Necromancer may be less powerful than the Wizard, but with the exception of Healer, Warmage, and maybe Wilder at the low end (and Artificer at the high end) any two casters are at power levels where, if one is your power target, the other is within a reasonable deviation.

What you have to do -- and you do mention this, but it needs to be the first step -- is give the non-casters some abilities that do things outside combat (and, frankly, an in-combat tune up too). The Marshal, for instance, is nominally a leader of men, but they get no abilities that offer them any soldiers to command. And that's just the bare minimum you should get from the class that's supposed to make you a Leader of Men. Marshal is the perfect place to put some non-caster versions of the various status removal tools the Cleric gets, or some travel powers that have tradeoffs that are suited for moving large numbers of people (teleport is great for the party, but doesn't do a whole lot for an army).

why bother with fixing classes when you can simply create a specific build (e.g. a gish) to get what you want.

Some of the martial classes have mechanically unique niches (mostly the ToB ones, to be fair). The Crusader has a unique play pattern, with your available options being determined randomly, and it is perfectly imaginable that someone might find that compelling while also wanting to have non-combat abilities.

You can play mundane low lvls in one campaign, and highl optimized high lvl casters in another campaign.

An astute observer will note a variable other than "which classes get to play all the parts of the game" that separates these two scenarios.

Intimidate xD

The Druid can just go Druidic Avenger if they want, which adds Intimidate to their skill list.

rel

2023-09-07, 01:06 AM

I'll start things off with one of my old system changes:

The Price of Power
Stats are generated using point buy. A really low value like 15 is chosen, to make the full casters really feel the price of the power they wield.

At character creation a character can choose to distrust magic, this restricts the build to a maximum caster level (or equivalent) of 1/2 of their character level. In exchange they get double the normal point buy (30 instead of 15).
Alternatively the character can choose to reject magic, this restricts the build to a maximum caster level of 0. In exchange they get quadruple the normal point buy (60 instead of 15).

While it doesn't actually give the mundanes any new utility powers, this house rule seeks to evoke the corrupting power of magic from settings like Conan the Barbarian, causing wizards to be sickly and weak from the forces they play with, while fighters and barbarians are swole gigachads from their refusal to engage with the dark arts.

awa

2023-09-07, 07:37 AM

So the goal is primarily to increase the martial versatility without necessarily increasing their raw power. Making them wider without making them deeper so to speak. I dont have any specific reworks but here are some ideas on how one could do it.

So first easy enough we give them a bigger point buy and larger increases from level. Look at the warriors from fiction very few have the glaring dump stats of the D&d fighter, wizards are often smart and weak but Aragorn and Conan have no dump stats they are strong, and agile and wise and smart and tough etc all their stats are exceptional. Even roy in this very comic tell me which of his stats is a dump stat? So give them more stats and incentivize them to bring up dump stats.

Second skills, now knock might be better at opening a door than open locks but part of the reason that's the case is because open locks requires a greater investment in resources than knock. The more skill points a character has the smaller investment it represents. In fiction most warrior types are very broadly competent but a D&d fighter is lucky if he knows how to climb, jump, and swim. If the fighter had 8-12+ int skills and some free skill he would run into far fewer situations where he just has no mechanical ability to contribute.

Now their are a lot of noncombat feats like endurance that no one takes just look through those find a bunch that would benefit a character without increasing combat ability beyond the preferred level and give them for free.

One part of the caster/martial divide is that each level the martial gets one thing if hes lucky while the wizard gets both new spells and all his old spells get better. So lets take the monk it already has some noncombat abilities their just terrible part of why their terrible is how late they come on line, so we take these abilities spread over 20 levels and pack them down into the first 5 or what ever then he we poach monk prestige classes to fill back in the rest of the chart but keeping in mind the quadratic wizard we dont just give them one ability a level we give them more each level.

Personally if I were going to actually write out this system I would either end martial classes at say level 5 and then transition them into "prestige classes" or put them directly into subclasses that determine what class abilities they get. Because a viking warlord type barbarian should be getting different abilities than a Tarzan type barbarian.

A few preemptive counters to common gripes about this style of fix

(Wish and shape change is better a wizard will still walk all over these martial), maybe but they are better off than they were, which is better than doing nothing at all.

(some people like being useless outside combat) that's fine they can just not use these noncombat abilities.

(the only way to balance a martial is to give them spells) not everyone wants to cast spells

(magic users should be better than non magic users it breaks my immersion if someone can be both smart and strong) dont imagine a barbarian pc as a generic warrior imagine him as a legendary 1 in a million hero powerful enough to fight alongside a wizard. The dm can reinforce that by not using the improved Martial's for generic npcs.

AsuraKyoko

2023-09-07, 09:37 AM

They're not class-specific, but Spheres of Might & Spheres of Guile (http://spheresofpower.wikidot.com/) for Pathfinder both give a number of interesting in and out of combat for mundane characters. That would be one of my first places to go for inspiration in giving martial classes utility abilities.

Beni-Kujaku

2023-09-07, 09:56 AM

More to the point and without going too much into the martial caster divide, there are already a few things that are specific, or at least intended for martials only:

Tracking is supposedly the realm of ranger.
Being good at breaking things (Fighter dead levels)
Being better at skills (rogue), and more largely having different class skills.
Disarming traps (rogue)
Uncanny Dodge (in previous editions, never affected by surprise rounds. Technically combat, but helps against ambushes)
In general, Skill Tricks are more aimed towards characters with skill points to spare, such as rogues.
Many martial archetypes/subclasses/prestige classes/ACF give various bonuses to skills.

In previous editions:
Fighters became lords at higher levels and basically gained an army. Paladins and ranger also acquired followers.

Apart from those, you can have bonuses to carrying capacity, or being better at planning large-scale battles, automatically making survival checks to identify some kinds of creatures, being better at helping others because of your discipline training, gaining more uses for intimidate, throwing things really far, ...

Metastachydium

2023-09-07, 02:05 PM

Disarming traps (rogue)

Or Scout; or Savant; or Ninja; or Mountebank; or Factotum; or Ranger (with ACF); or Barbarian (with Trapkiller); or Beguiler an INT-based full caster with lots of skill points.

Gnaeus

2023-09-07, 02:19 PM

One of the things that I find irritating about these discussions is that there's an equivocation between "magic" and "literally and exactly a Wizard". Yes, you need something more than "being a regular dude with useful skills" to compete with the various magic-users. But that doesn't mean you need to get spells. The Ranger can get some sort of planar travel ability that competes with plane shift without just saying "plane shift x/day" (though, honestly, that's probably also fine). But there's nothing inherently concept-invalidating about the martial characters getting magic eventually, because in the source material that happens all the time. The idea that there are "magical characters" and "mundane characters" is entirely an invention of D&D, which can and should be discarded because it makes the game worse.

Sure you can. When Thor calls the Bifrost, that is at least in the same ballpark as Doctor Strange's sling ring as a travel power. No one in the First Law books gets particularly powerful, but it seems pretty clear that Logen's elementalism has the potential to scale at least as far as Bayaz's magic or Ferro's demonic heritage.

Agreed. To cite probably the most meta source (fiction based on RPGs being used to define what is possible in an RPG) LITRPGs are FULL of this kind of thing. Becoming so good at studying the concept of AXE that your mundane warrior tosses around 5 meter long axe blades of energy capable of decimating a squad at a time. Or so attuned to sharpness that you can cut planar rifts open. Or having purified your body so extensively that you are functionally immortal and can jump over walls and withstand elemental attacks. And these are all from sources that HAVE spellcasters and make it clear that the people who do those things are not spellcasters. Thats a 100% mundane, non magic 20 foot long energy blade shooting out of my axe.

And just to emphasize: this isn't merely a function of power. A healer (tier 5) has out-of-combat relevance that a crusader (tier 3) lacks, just to compare one of the weakest casters to one of the strongest martials (about the same number of utility skills, but access to sanctified spells and various status healers on one side and Mountain Hammer on the other). The system really is just genuinely uninterested in finding interesting and unique things for martials to do after Sword Hitting Time is over!

Retiering project puts healer at T3. The best T5 casters are Truenamer, Magewright, Hexblade.

Paragon

2023-09-07, 03:04 PM

Those kind of maneuvers are Su tbh, which is the best kind of magic

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-07, 11:33 PM

Also many "warrior type characters" just have magic. Kaladin starts out as a Fighter (arguably even a Warrior), but he eventually gains powers like "flight" and "having a spirit guide" and "sticking stuff to other stuff", which he uses to good effect when enemies like "giant rock monsters" or "dudes who can turn into lasers to chase him" show up.

One of the things that I find irritating about these discussions is that there's an equivocation between "magic" and "literally and exactly a Wizard". Yes, you need something more than "being a regular dude with useful skills" to compete with the various magic-users. But that doesn't mean you need to get spells. The Ranger can get some sort of planar travel ability that competes with plane shift without just saying "plane shift x/day" (though, honestly, that's probably also fine). But there's nothing inherently concept-invalidating about the martial characters getting magic eventually, because in the source material that happens all the time. The idea that there are "magical characters" and "mundane characters" is entirely an invention of D&D, which can and should be discarded because it makes the game worse.
Yeah, it doesn't need to be spellcasting. But it has to compete with spells (otherwise why even bother trying to balance classes). And mundanes already have ACF and PRC options to get stuff like a "Plane Shift" SLA. But somehow most people dislike those x/day SLA options most of the times.. and thus they get ignored by most part of the community (imho).

Some of the martial classes have mechanically unique niches (mostly the ToB ones, to be fair). The Crusader has a unique play pattern, with your available options being determined randomly, and it is perfectly imaginable that someone might find that compelling while also wanting to have non-combat abilities.

That's what I am saying. We already have those niche options scattered all over the place (mostly in ToB as you said). There are a few maneuvers that can be used outside of combat (e.g. there is a healing maneuver; anything save roll related;). Then you have classes like the Marshall who can buff with his aura while not using spells. Imho we have enough of those niche options if you look carefully enough. No need to reinvent the wheel here.

An astute observer will note a variable other than "which classes get to play all the parts of the game" that separates these two scenarios.
Nobody forces you to play a certain class, nor to stay single classed.

What the OP is trying here is to give all mundane classes some off-combat options to play with that don't get totally overshadowed by their spell counter parts. This means that they have to be of similar power at least, which is already an almost brokenly high level due to the power of spells..

Why does every class need that kind of stuff by default?
Also reminding you of ACF and Racial Substitution Lvls. There you get some of those niche options too.
What comes next? Any possible multiclassing option needs to get the same love!?

We have pure mundane options, full casters and almost anything in between in 3.5. Do you want all classes to feel the same generic way? 4E did this IIRC and I'm not a fan of it..

The Druid can just go Druidic Avenger if they want, which adds Intimidate to their skill list.
That was more meant as a joke. But I have done the hassle to look up the options you have as "fighter":

1) Corsair variant
Can get a Slow Fall ability and extended duration to hold his breath instead of a bonus feat. Niche, but maybe nice on a sailing campaign.

2) Golarion Fighter
Exchanges his 1st lvl feat for additional class skills: Diplomacy (Cha), Gather Information (Cha), Knowledge (architecture and engineering) (Int), Knowledge (geography) (Int), Knowledge (nobility and royalty) (Int), Sense Motive (Wis)

3) Janissary
gains Speak Language and two Knowledge skills (of his choice) as class skills, but Handle Animal, Intimidate, and Swim become cross-class skills for him

4) Thane
Can pick up Improved Aid Another as bonus feat.

5) Thug
- more class skills: Bluff, Gather Information, Knowledge (local), and Sleight of Hand
- skill points 4+INT
- can pick Urban Tracking as bonus feat

6) Warrior of Air
- gains electricity resistance
- gains an Feather Fall like SLA that also boosts his damage
- Freedom of Movement as SLA

6) Warrior of Earth
acid resistance
- Magic Stone SLA
- Stone Shape SLA

7) Warrior of Water
- cold resistance
- Obscuring Mist SLA that also boosts dmg.
Water Breathing SLA

8) Zhentarim Fighter
Gets Skill Focus Intimidate, extended duration and the option to do it as a swift action.

While these options are nowhere as strong as most of the spells, they are still there. Even the simpleton "fighter" has options if he wants to adds some flavor to the class. But the main purpose of fighter levels will always remain the same: more bonus feats. And imho that is good as it is. If I want something else, I just "pick another class that gives me what I want" and don't try to "fix the other classes".

rel

2023-09-08, 12:00 AM

Thanks for the suggestions so far.
And for those that think this is a bad idea or not for them, plenty of other threads you can participate in instead ;)

Some have suggested skills as a source of non-combat utility. I'm generally leery of going that approach because skills aren't class specific, and generally quite limited.

If the party come across the maimed Fisher King and his cursed kingdom, a spellcaster might suggest spells that could heal the king like heal or regeneration, spells to break the curse like break enchantment or remove curse, or maybe even spells to alleviate the effects of the curse like control weather. And a GM is likely to be pretty receptive to these sorts of approaches. The GM is probably less sanguine when the rogue asks to use heal to restore the Fisher King's missing phallus.

And even if a skill check is required, having the right skill and being good enough to make the roll is difficult. Often the best skill monkey is actually a spellcaster with something like wieldskill or guidance of the avatar prepared.

All that said, I did once start writing an alternate progression system based on skills that could be adapted. The only problem is it required writing unique powers for all the skills in 3.5, and I only got as far as balance.

I've included it below anyway. Anyone want to help write up powers for the missing skills?

Superlative Skills
When a character gains a superlative skill it immediately becomes a class skill for all classes and gains the maximum possible ranks.

If the skill was already a class skill the character selects a different skill as a permanent class skill.
Any points the character already had invested into the superlative skill are refunded and can be reassigned.

When calculating a superlative skills skill bonus, the character can never have a stat bonus of less than +5.
This doesn't affect anything other than the skill bonus calculation.

The character can always take 10 when using the skill even if threatened.

A character with any number of superlative skills gains a pool of superlative skill points SSP equal to HD / 4 + 1. Having multiple superlative skills doesn't grant additional SSP.
A character can assign a SSP to one of their superlative powers or reassign a SSP to a different superlative power with a few minutes effort.

A character with a superlative skill gains access to a number of superlative powers associated with the skill. These don't do anything until a SSP is assigned to them. Once an SSP is assigned the character gains the benefits of the superlative power as long as the SSP remains assigned.

Superlative powers
The character tracks the disturbances creatures make as they move through the world. The character gains blindsense out to a distance of HD X 10 feet

By simply looking at an item, mundane or magical, the character learns its full functions and how to use it. Attempts to obfuscate the items function through artifice or magic have no effect on this power

The character lays bare the flaws in creatures and objects. Their attacks ignore hardness and DR.

The character can find hidden flaws in the earth itself. They gain a burrow speed equal to (HD / 4 + 1) X 5 feet.
The character can walk without disturbing the world. They are immune to tremorsense and can walk normally and safely on dangerous and non-weight bearing surfaces such as water, lava, and areas under the influence of the spike growth spell.

The character has learned to stand on the sky. They can walk on the air itself, moving in any direction including straight up as though walking on normal ground. Their movement speed is halved while doing this, but they are not otherwise impeded and can, for example, take a 5-foot step.

The character can recover perfectly from a fall, they take no damage from falling and always land on their feet.

DrMartin

2023-09-08, 12:43 AM

There´s a brief add-on for OSR systems called Dragon Union which has a neat approach to group dynamics and classes, that I believe addresses this issue in some way.

Each class comes with a given role within the party and within the society.

a couple of examples:

The Fighter is the boss, destined to be king, and gets to order people around. He can buy a sheriff´s charter or a baron´s domain and attract followers just by virtue of being a tough boss. This applies to NPCs and PCs, but of course, PCs are PCs. He also gets to decide who gets which share of treasure (which in old school game tend to be gold = xp)

The Thief is among other things the party accountant. As such he gets to keep books for all the treasure, and he gets to keep stuff that he finds on his own. The thief also has has a background business which can deliver items, information, and "security"

Both the "you are a respected man in society and can get people to do what you want" and "you have a network of crooks that deliver services to you" are open ended, non combat Toolkits that these classes gets to use, which give them a breadth of agency on the setting and non combat stuff in general that is normally the purview of spells or massive investments in feats and gp, which in 3.5 come with hefty opportunity costs of impacting your combat performance.

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-08, 01:20 AM

Thanks for the suggestions so far.
And for those that think this is a bad idea or not for them, plenty of other threads you can participate in instead ;)

I sole wanted to know if you have considered all 3.5 options that might do what you intend to do. Because if there is already stuff that does that what you want, why waste time on reinventing the wheel? I don't want to stop you from anything here. Just pointing up the options you already have.. like...

1. ACF
(e.g. exchange Evasion for Invisible Fist to become invisible for 1 round with 3 rounds to refresh)

2. Variant Classes

3. Racial Substitution Levels

4. PRC

5. Templates
(here you can find plenty of interesting stuff)

6. dips into soulmeld/invocations/psionics (or just even feats that enable them)

7. Sculpt Self
(imho this is the best option to get basically anything you want if the DM approves it)

Imho there are enough options to build a mundane character with some (out of combat) extra cheese. Especially if you consider Sculpt Self with even suggests to make your own stuff (approved by the DM). Imho this is the simplest solution here. It's basically a ruleset for homebrewed (or magic item based) abilities. Why not simply use that?

awa

2023-09-08, 08:37 AM

And even if a skill check is required, having the right skill and being good enough to make the roll is difficult. Often the best skill monkey is actually a spellcaster with something like wieldskill or guidance of the avatar prepared.

see in the core game that is correct, but you can fix that by just giving them bigger numbers, the more skills each martial has the greater the chance they have the right skill the higher the bonuses they get from their class the better they are at hitting high dcs. Further skills are not the same as spells, a caster is great at getting past a single super tough lock and terrible at getting past 51 mediocre locks.

what if instead of bumping into the fisher king and just knowing the problem, the scrodingers skill monkey walks into the land and make a knowledge nature check to know things aren't right, a knowledge arcane check to see the land is cursed, a gather information +spell craft check to know what the curses details are, a half dozen diplomacy checks to get to the king and convince him to let your wizard/cleric friend cast a spell to heal him.

So the iron heroes book had additional uses for all skills, however many of those were combat uses not non-combat uses.

Now I would not recommend trying to achieve your goal with only skills (3.5 magic is very broken), it is just one of the building blocks to overcoming the caster advantage. But it is objectively true that a fighter that has ranks in diplomacy, intimidate, sense motive and gather information is better at the games social pillar than one who has no ranks in social skills.

Quertus

2023-09-08, 11:54 AM

Class specific? I’ve never tried that before. Hmmm….

Aristocrat Prince(ss)

When you take the 1st level of this class, choose “Quality” or “Quantity”. This choice affects what class skills and class features the Prince(ss) receives.

Name Face Recognition Software: at 1st level, the Princess is a recognized noble. She has access to the castle (anywhere her parents haven’t placed off limits, at least), can command guards to follow reasonable orders, and can expect others nobles to provide food and lodging for her and up to one Retainer per class level when she is in their domain. The Princess also gets a +2 bonus to any social rolls / Charisma-based checks made when dealing with other nobles.

Trusted Retainer [Quality]: at 2nd level, the Prince gains a trusted retainer. Treat this retainer as a Cohort from the Leadership great; calculates the Retainer level as though the Prince’s Character level was = their Prince class levels +5.

Royal Guards [Quantity]: at 2nd level, the Prince is constantly shadowed by a number of Royal Guards equal to their class level + ChrMod. If slain, these can be replaced at the castle, or temporarily replaced with normal guards in any allied town. This number doubles at level 5, and again every 5 levels thereafter.

The Princess and the Pea [Quality]: starting at 3rd level, the Princess can (and will!) tell you what’s wrong with anything. While this gives her a -2 penalty to any social roll with craftsmen… peasants in general… other nobles…. Ok, pretty much everyone. :P However, she instead gets a +2 bonus to such rolls when dealing with skilled craftsmen (10 or more ranks in the appropriate skill), as her insights are rare and valuable, granting them a +2 circumstance to all rolls involving a craft skills for 1 year after she has critiqued their work. This bonus increases by +2 for every 5 additional ranks the craftsman possesses. The Princess gets a +4 bonus to social rolls involving anyone who can cast epic spells (who get a bonus equal to her Princess levels to any Epic Spell they research / cast if they sell the Princess’s critique) or strategists (the Strategist class gets blah blah blah synergy).

Increased Productivity [Quantity]: starting at 3rd level, the Princess can inspire craftsmen to increased heights of productivity. Treat all craft costs as reduced by -10% for determining craft time for her chosen craftsman; this bonus increases by an additional -10% at level 4, and every even level thereafter to level 10. At that point, it’s effectively “x2 speed”, and that multiplier increased by an additional +1 at every even level thereafter (ie, x6 at level 20). At level 3, she can only inspire a single craftsman; see table blah blah blah whole kingdom at level 20. This is a Morale effect.

Prince Charming: starting at 4th level, anyone meeting the Prince for the first time who doesn’t have a preconceived notion of the Prince will start at “Friendly”. The Prince can also raise any NPC to a minimum of Friendly by invalidating their preconceived notions of the Prince’s character.

Let them eat cake: when the Princess is disconnected from reality, Reality believes that it’s its fault. 1/day/5 class levels, the Princess can declare something nonsensical, and Reality will attempt to compensate for the disconnect. Treat this as a Limited Wish for purposes of determining the maximum value of normal, mundane goods that can be created / affected by this ability. However, each time the Princess uses this ability, they get a cumulative -2 penalty to all social rolls involving peasants for 1 year. Note that this penalty can even negate the Prince Charming effect.

Royal Hunt: a Prince must hunt! Starting at level 6, whenever a month passes without the Prince organizing and participating in a royal hunt, a monster of CR equal to the Prince’s class level +-2 (or, eh, just roll on turn results table or something) will appear within 20 miles of the Prince, who will know its location, and be subjected to a Quest to slay it. Even should the Prince take the penalties and ignore the Quest, they will be subjected to a Suggestion 1/day to slay the monsters (as Reality contrives to make people say things that happen to suggest the Prince do so); there is no defense beyond the Will save to these Suggestions (they aren’t even magic).

Blah blah blah

Queen: because they are a PC, they are going to be crowned Queen and rule the nation one day. Even if they’re 27th in line of succession, even if they’re illegitimate, even if they’ve been banished from the kingdom, even if their nation has been a patriarchy that treats women as property, it will happen. Rocks from Space will fall and kill their parents and the 26 in line ahead of them, the god of misogyny will suffer a life-changing amputation - whatever it takes, Fate will ensure that the character is crowned Queen, regardless of what obstacles stand in their path, when they reach this capstone.

——-

So, does this class offer anything like what you had in mind?

NichG

2023-09-08, 12:59 PM

Every single one of these threads I've seen runs into the same problem, and that's pivoting around the word 'mundane'. You can suggest all sorts of ability sets, but people get put off by them being anime or supernatural or mythological or even just not fitting into a mental image constrained to the sorts of characters Bruce Willis plays.

So first off, drop the mundane vs magic divide. Instead, say that all characters are Mythic, and their mythic properties manifest in different formats.

- Ammo-like, fixed form, but highly diverse 'spells'
- Passive natures that have consequences like 'can never be truly slain' or 'when speaking the truth, it is impossible for anyone to believe it false' or even just 'immune to fire' with all the natural consequences of that.
- Positional attributes such as being 'the one true king who all recognize over the authority of their current lords' or 'one with authority over the coming and going of souls' or even 'president of a country who carries a cellphone and can order air strikes and army deployments and direct funds'.
- Feats of nonsense, like 'I can steal anything - a building, a memory, a soul, a reputation', 'I can lift anything - a boulder, a mountain, a river, a cloud', 'I can know anything if I think to ask', 'I can issue commands to people that even reality can't force them to disobey, like Win and Live'

But it's not going to look like Die Hard, and it won't always be about muscles. It certainly won't be Mundane.

awa

2023-09-08, 01:37 PM

NichG

2023-09-08, 02:05 PM

I think their is a wide design space in-between the current hyper inept overspecialized martial and the mr can steal memories.

Like basically every fantasy protagonist whose not a caster. Base D&d cant really replicate any protagonist from Conan to robin hood because it punishes anything except hyper specialization. I think most people who want to play a barbarian want to play Conan not a wizard who casts spells with an axe.

You can easily play Conan in D&D. The issue is that D&D Conan is only really relevant in Conan-like contexts, e.g. where the party's highest level of magical support is someone whose magical power doesn't get much past Mage Hand and minor divinations.

Or to put it another way, 'stealing someone's memories' is something a Lv20 D&D party can reasonably get up to. Maybe it takes Thought Bottle and Mindrape and Programmed Amnesia and so on and is a bit more complicated than a Sleight of Hand check, but its in scope. If your mental model of 'character I want to play' doesn't even allow for the possibility for them to interact with that kind of thing, it doesn't matter what you give them mechanically as part of the class - when you're in that game, at that level, and everyone else at the table wants to be doing conceptual hijinks, you aren't going to want to participate even if you're able to do so. And so any class you find you want to play is going to not mesh with that game.

You can give someone a system that lets any character be infinitely powerful at any level, and a given player won't actually use that potential if they don't see it as aligning with their character's fantasy.

So the first step, rather than messing with numbers and pretending it'll help, is to change the way you're looking at things and figure out what it is you really want. If what you want is 'other people not to be escalating the power level of the game', then something like E6 really is a better answer than, say, letting Fighters roll a d100 instead of a d20 on all rolls. Because the issue you're really having in that case is the scope creep induced by everyone else basically comfortably making the transition to the mythological genre rather than Swords and Sorcery. If you don't like the 'memorizing and using up my ammo bank of spells' aesthetic but you can accept mythological stuff then X/day SLAs isn't a good solution and things more like mythological innate properties such as 'can never have his true words gainsaid' or 'never met a beverage he couldn't drink' are more promising. But if you convince yourself that anything that doesn't exist in the real world is 'casting spells with an axe', then you've already lost the ability to dig yourself out of that hole.

Fundamentally, even by Lv12, there will be parties that can be constructed in 3.5e rules that make Conan as a character concept not be able to contribute anything unique, regardless of his mechanical implementation.

awa

2023-09-08, 02:56 PM

NichG

2023-09-08, 03:34 PM

problem is you can't play conan as a concept, oh you can play a nerfed incompetent conan knockoff that gets 4 skill pts a level, you can call that conan but conan is not just broadly competent he is universally exceptional, he is peak human in every stat, a master of a dozen fighting styles. Hes a king, a pirate, a barbarian, a thief, a ranger, a nomad and more. He has almost every skill many of them to an almost superhuman degree.

Conans an extreme example but you can't play robin hood, or aragorn either. No d&d martial has the point buy to match their fantasy counterparts. Tell me which stat did robin hood put an 8 in?

Your taking this weak watered down moron and saying well see look you can play any hero you want they all just happen to be terrible now why dont you play a wizard we can just say its a fighter.

Factotum/pounce barbarian cross class who takes Leadership, Item Familiar. All skills are class skills, you can be 50% better at a given skill than a comparable character of your level. You can do roguey stuff, command others into battle, etc. You can fit ubercharger and basically kill anything in one hit.

Even better, go into Warblade and build off of Int/Str stacking.

Quertus

2023-09-08, 03:51 PM

Tell me which stat did robin hood put an 8 in?

An 8? Geez, you're playing with the wrong setup. Go play at Ed's table - even his most pathetic of statted NPCs have things like 13s as their lowest stats, and the better NPCs look like they rolled d4+14 for their stats.

If that's your only problem, it's easy to fix. That said, that's... kinda... hmmm... well, it's certainly not wrong to picture (to put it in my terms) Captain America as your base character concept, but that's true even if you're going the Doctor Strange route. So it feels almost orthogonal to the issue of "how can we make muggle classes give characters class abilities that allow them to contribute meaningfully out of combat?"

Of course, to answer that, it would make sense to first answer, "what challenges / opportunities exist outside of combat?". The classic answer (for D&D, at least) is to look at 3 pillars: Combat, Social, and, uh, Logistics maybe? I'm missing a nice name for that one. But I can imagine a whole lot of other pillars, like Economic, Information Warfare, Cultural, Political, etc, before more personal ones like "war over someone's soul" or "authority to set the dress code at Hogwart's". (EDIT, right, it's usually called "Survival", and "Logistics" can be another potential pillar to add out of combat capabilities to.)

Which is part of why I gave my silly Prince(ss) example, to work as a starting point to ask the OP, "so, what kinds of abilities were you thinking", because there's a vast untapped bed of potential. One that Robin Hood and Conan will still find themselves useless when partying with the kinds of muggle power I could bring to the table if my homebrew skills felt like it.

awa

2023-09-08, 03:57 PM

Factotum/pounce barbarian cross class who takes Leadership, Item Familiar. All skills are class skills, you can be 50% better at a given skill than a comparable character of your level. You can do roguey stuff, command others into battle, etc. You can fit ubercharger and basically kill anything in one hit.

Even better, go into Warblade and build off of Int/Str stacking.

so you can jump through a bunch of hoops to be a mediocre conan who loses all his abilities if he drops an item and has a very limited ability to do any of his tricks. No horse archery, no stealth in heavy armor, no 18+ stats across the board.

I'm not convinced.

NichG

2023-09-08, 04:27 PM

so you can jump through a bunch of hoops to be a mediocre conan who loses all his abilities if he drops an item and has a very limited ability to do any of his tricks. No horse archery, no stealth in heavy armor, no 18+ stats across the board.

I'm not convinced.

Having a character with 40 in every stat won't let you do things even a 5th level caster can do.

awa

2023-09-08, 04:48 PM

so you agree you can't actually play conan in d&d or really any high competence fantasy protagonist .

I am annoyed that whenever someone proposes a way to increase versatility in combat or out someone always comes along to tell them that wanting a competent martial is wrong and they should play a wizard with a sword instead. This is a pet peeve of mine I find it insulting, dismissive and unhelpful. This is the second version of this post, a much shorter one and since I should not post while annoyed I will probably bow out of this discussion.

NichG

2023-09-08, 04:57 PM

so you agree you can't actually play conan in d&d or really any high competence fantasy protagonist .

No. You can do it, but big numbers and throwing away half what the system gives you aren't the answer.

I would play the Factorum/Warblade/Lion Totem Barbarian who takes advantage of WBL as Conan before I would play the 40 in all stats Barbarian 20 as Conan.

The factotum-Conan can absolutely do horse archery, stealth, etc. He just doesn't have a class feature saying 'this is the you are good at horse archery feature'. His stats may not be all 18s, but his modifiers will be higher than someone who does have those stats. He'll be able to do things like carve through a steel wall with his fists, defeat a magical trap, find tracks in the wilderness, etc.

But also, I would not play Conan the concept in a Lv12 campaign. It's conceptually a bad fit.

RandomPeasant

2023-09-08, 07:36 PM

The thing with Conan is that there are two problems with D&D martials. One is that it is genuinely too hard to play a character with the kind of broad competence mundane (or not-flashy-magic) characters have in non-D&D sources at the levels where those characters are appropriate. The other is that those characters, even if you could implement them perfectly at the levels where they are appropriate, do not scale to high level. You can and should fix both of those problems, but there's no particular reason to think the solutions to them will have much overlap.

Resolving the first is mostly a matter of giving martial classes more skills, plus maybe adding some skill bonuses or more things like the Ranger's Track. Resolving the latter is considerably more complicated.

Imho we have enough of those niche options if you look carefully enough. No need to reinvent the wheel here.

As a 10th level Wizard, I can know teleport and fabricate without touching any non-Core sources or learning any spells from scrolls. And I still have two 5th level spells to use for combat. What is a 10th level Fighter doing with all the ACFs in the world to match that?

Nobody forces you to play a certain class, nor to stay single classed.

Nobody forces you to, but shouldn't you be allowed to? I can play a single-classed Wizard or Beguiler or Spirit Shaman and have relevant things to do in every part of a game that goes from 1st to 20th level. What is the reason that I shouldn't be able to do the same as a Fighter or Crusader or Swashbuckler?

What the OP is trying here is to give all mundane classes some off-combat options to play with that don't get totally overshadowed by their spell counter parts. This means that they have to be of similar power at least, which is already an almost brokenly high level due to the power of spells..

I don't understand how you can call spells "broken" in this context. There is simply no alternative set of non-spell options for them to be "broken" in comparison to. raise dead isn't "broken" for restoring people to life, it is simply the only option that exists for restoring people to life. For it to be "broken" there would have to be some baseline level of life-restoration that it deviated from, and there isn't.

Why does every class need that kind of stuff by default?

Why shouldn't they? I understand how the game benefits from having classes that are more or less complex, or that service different character concepts. But I don't see how the game benefits from having classes that don't interact with some parts of the game.

We have pure mundane options, full casters and almost anything in between in 3.5. Do you want all classes to feel the same generic way? 4E did this IIRC and I'm not a fan of it..

This is maybe the worst argument of all time. 4e classes feel the same because they are mechanically the same. A Crusader would not magically feel the same as a Wizard if it got some non-combat options, because it would still have its unique random-access resource mechanic. The way to ensure that the Barbarian feels different from the Wizard is to give the Barbarian unique mechanics (perhaps some sort of Rage Meter for their powers), not declare there are certain parts of the game the are Wizard-only which the Barbarian shouldn't worry their little head about.

That was more meant as a joke. But I have done the hassle to look up the options you have as "fighter":

There is not a single one of these that would make even be worth listing for a 7th level caster.

Both the "you are a respected man in society and can get people to do what you want" and "you have a network of crooks that deliver services to you" are open ended, non combat Toolkits that these classes gets to use, which give them a breadth of agency on the setting and non combat stuff in general that is normally the purview of spells or massive investments in feats and gp, which in 3.5 come with hefty opportunity costs of impacting your combat performance.

The problem is that these are also both things that it doesn't make sense to role-protect. Some leaders are mages of various sorts. Some mages have a network of contacts they can call upon (notionally, this is part of what it means to be a Mage of the Arcane Order, though the Spellpool tends to dominate in practice).

Like basically every fantasy protagonist whose not a caster. Base D&d cant really replicate any protagonist from Conan to robin hood because it punishes anything except hyper specialization. I think most people who want to play a barbarian want to play Conan not a wizard who casts spells with an axe.

This is not really a coherent category, because the idea of a strong caster/non-caster distinction only exists in D&D. Conan may not have any magic, but Logen Ninefingers is pretty clearly a Conan expy, but in addition to all his various barbarian-ing, he has the ability to speak with spirits, which he uses to real-but-modest effect throughout the series. You might imagine a D&D Barbarian having this sort of ability and using it to replicate effects like speak with animals, stone tell, and speak with dead (or perhaps more active magic, like summoning elementals). Perhaps it looks something like this:

Spirit Talker
When you talk, nature sometimes answers.
Benefit: As you gain Barbarian levels, various parts of the natural world communicate with you. If applicable, your caster level equals your Barbarian level and everything is a SLA unless noted.
At 1st level, you gain Auran, Ignan, Aquan, and Terran as bonus languages, and you can speak with animals as the spell, though it is a permanent non-magical effect.
At 5th level, you can speak with dead, stone tell, and speak with plants at will, though you can only ask any particular corpse questions once per day.
At 9th level, you can command the spirits. You can use stone shape, create water, pyrotechnics, and whispering wind at will.
At 13th level, you can speak to the great spirits of the world. You can use hindsight and legend lore at will, though their casting times still apply.
At 17th level, you can call spirits into the world. Once per day you can use gate, though you must summon a creature with the Elemental type, a creature from one of the Elemental Planes, or a creature you can convince your DM is probably a spirit.

liquidformat

2023-09-08, 10:23 PM

So I think one of the important things to remember is given the idea of E6 even if we ignore magic any character at level 7+ should start to be able to perform inhuman feats and by the time you hit level 20 you should be reaching Hercules levels of power or at least Captain America and to be frank a level 20 fighter without equipment and who hasn't seriously abused feats doesn't feel much stronger than a level 6 wizard in most situations.

I do believe the skill system is part of the issue, you should start to be able to replicate some level 0 spells by the time you have 9 skill points invested into a skill and a character with 23 skill points in a skill should be able to replicate some powers of level 4 or 5 spells. Granted actually creating that is as rel pointed out a lot of effort.

A couple quick fixes that I use are as follows though most of them are more combat focused and do apply to everyone they still tend to help mundanes more than magical classes.

- Defense Bonus + Armor as DR: I also move all full casters to Defense class A and monks to class C

- Pathfinder skill reduction: just in general is nice

- Craft (alchemy) can be used by any character and moving potions under: divesting craft (alchemy) from being magical is a pretty easy fix and with the access everyone has to monster parts why wouldn't a fighter be able to create say a potion of cure light wounds from the blood of a troll and some herbs to clean up the blood's toxicities.

- Add the following logic to class skill point distribution:
Base 2+Int for being a d20 System creature.
Plus 2 for not having Int as a keystone of your class features.
Plus 2 for having no Spell Slot/Powers progression at all.
Plus 2 for being a skill focused class. (18+ without skill combining, 15+ with skill combining)

- Add the following progression to BAB:
At +8 and +15 - an additional attack during standard action.
+12 - 1 attack as swift action.
+19 - 1 attack as a free action.

Properties of this progression
1. For the price of a standard and a swift, at BAB+15 you do get 4 extra attacks, but not technically a full attack action, which some bits of the game specifically interact with(hence why it's okay to get these a BAB earlier than a regular 4-attack full attack).
2. You get a nice progression in the mid levels, where you keep getting interesting new options regularly.
3. A default use of your swift action, which for certain builds is a very good idea.
4. Swift actions count as free. So anytime you can act - including around AoOs, immediate actions, etc.
5. 1 attack as a free action is strong, but still pales in comparison to what casters do at these levels. Only counterpoint might be that it adds more of the same rather than interesting things to do. Quantitative rather than qualitative. Martials are significantly better served by the latter.

- Damage changes:
Ranged weapon (as per the weapon category type in the PHB not including thrown) attacks done to targets within or equal to ½ the range increment of the weapon gain an extra damage die for that weapon type added to the total damage. In addition, any feat that increases the lethality of ranged weapons (i.e. – point blank shot, weapon specialization) also adds an extra damage die to total damage instead of the usual amount of increased damage described in the feat; these all stack with the above stipulation of ½ range increment damage.
Justification: artillery and ranged weapons were historically made because they were able to kill more easily, quickly, and more effectively than hand held or thrown weapons.

For all melee and ranged attacks: if the number to hit a target’s AC is met or exceeded by a value of 5 or more this too is considered a threat for a critical hit. Allows for a follow up roll to confirm a critical hit as per rules for 3.5 D&D. Furthermore, if a follow up roll to confirm a critical hit exceeds the target’s AC by a value of 5 or more again, increase the number of critical hit damage dice by +1 (i.e. – a long bow would become a x4 from a normal x3).
Justification: good aim is rewarded also luck is a thing in combat.

I have also been working on reworking feats (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pFwSVo331SLpKZRV_1utDb_IBKt4lwNtXlPgEgpjX8w/edit?usp=sharing), boosting the power of a lot of feats, making some just basic mechanics that come online as you meet prerequisites and changing some feats into skill tricks.

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-09, 12:24 AM

As a 10th level Wizard, I can know teleport and fabricate without touching any non-Core sources or learning any spells from scrolls. And I still have two 5th level spells to use for combat. What is a 10th level Fighter doing with all the ACFs in the world to match that?
That is my point. What do you intent to give him where the Wizard doesn't overshadow him with spells? At lvl 10 a wizard already has access to 90%+ of his needed problem solving spells to win the game almost alone. T1 characters played to their strength are just of the charts compared to mundanes. And unless you wanna buff those into similar broken power lvls with the abilities you wanna give em, it won't change the problem that as soon as there is a T1 character that there is the chance of him becoming just a sidekick.

Nobody forces you to, but shouldn't you be allowed to? I can play a single-classed Wizard or Beguiler or Spirit Shaman and have relevant things to do in every part of a game that goes from 1st to 20th level. What is the reason that I shouldn't be able to do the same as a Fighter or Crusader or Swashbuckler?
Where do the rules (or me) deny you to play a straight mundane up to 20?
But don't complain if you forced yourself into a suboptimal build because of some nostalgia for the class name.

If you go to car race with a small "kart" while everybody else drives a "Formula1 car", that is your problem, not the problem of the "kart". No need to pimp karts until they can compete with F1 cars.
But that doesn't mean that nobody likes to play/drive karts. People like em for what they are ant not for what they can compete with.

Same with fighter and other mundane classes in 3.5.
Sometimes you might wanna play something simple. Sometimes you want something powerful. 3.5 has options for all possible power lvls and I like it that way.

I've played low magic campaigns with almost pure mundane character parties and they have been fun.
But unless I intend to play a sidekick of a T1 character, I wouldn't attempt the same if my teammates are all playing T1-2 builds in a normal/high magic campaign.

I don't understand how you can call spells "broken" in this context. There is simply no alternative set of non-spell options for them to be "broken" in comparison to. raise dead isn't "broken" for restoring people to life, it is simply the only option that exists for restoring people to life. For it to be "broken" there would have to be some baseline level of life-restoration that it deviated from, and there isn't.
What kind of recovery options do mundanes have compared to Raise Dead?
- Heal skill
- potions and other consumables
Both won't help your mundane character if a party member is "dead".
Compared to that "Raise Dead" is like cheating and thus at a broken power lvl (for the character lvl the caster gets raise dead).
The same goes for all kinds of problem solving spells.

That is what people mean that you need to give mundanes spell equivalent powers to compete. Otherwise you wasted time and effort just to realize that the initial problem still prevails.
And giving out abilities at spell power lvl ain't an easy task from a balance point of view. There is a high chance that it is either to weak or to strong.

Why shouldn't they? I understand how the game benefits from having classes that are more or less complex, or that service different character concepts. But I don't see how the game benefits from having classes that don't interact with some parts of the game.

The beauty of 3.5 is imho that it is not balanced at all. You can play a mundane simpleton or a highly complex caster with godlike powers. As said above, sometimes you(r DM/party) might want(s) to play some low to none magic campaign. Or you wanna introduce someone into 3.5 and give him a fighter for his first test play to not overburden him with options.

And as said, unless you want to for some specific reason, there is no need to stick to a single class over 20 lvls. If you do it, it's your decision. But if you stick to a class for some sentimental reason, the problem is that and not the class. Because imho every single class build represents a niche. It's just that the niche of the single class mundanes is very small compared to the T1 classes.

rel

2023-09-09, 02:00 AM

NichG

2023-09-09, 03:49 AM

As an example of the kind of mundane power level I'm usually going for, here's a mundane class I wrote so long ago that I think 3.5 was still getting official support.
It still isn't finished to my liking, and it doesn't offer much in the way non-combat utility, but it illustrates my normal approach and what I'm looking for.

The Adventurer (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bvCZH3azorD2NidSWV3jJ_7tSxPWhEi1nN6iIEj7iMg/edit?usp=sharing)

It's kind of the opposite of what you're looking for, no? Everyone can have feats, but the Adventurer is even better at having feats...

Honestly I think the best way to go is just genre shift, take archetypes from genres like sci-fi or superhero stuff or historical dramas or myths who aren't 'wizards' but definitely do big impressive world-shaking things. Then figure out what can be abstracted, and build a way for that to be important, not worrying at all about whether the abilities fit within guy at the gym.

For example, the Diplomat:

BAB: 1/2
Good saves: Will
Skills: 6+Int
Class Skills: Appraise, Decipher, Disguise, Forgery, Diplomacy, Bluff, Sense Motive, Knowledges, Listen, Spot, Hide, Move Silently, Speak Language*
*: Partially redundant with class features

Linguistic Expertise: At 1st level, speak all 'friendly' languages of your world. At 3rd, includes unfriendly ones. At 5th, all planar languages. At 7th, can communicate with all creatures of Int 2+ even if they lack language or means to speak. At 9th, 500ft radius telepathy. At 11th, can even telepathically communicate with the undead, spirits, items (as if psychometry but interactive). At 13th, can mentally reach any entity they can name to speak with them regardless of range - includes deities, souls who have become petitioners, whatever. At 15th, immunity to hostile truespeech, Power Words, or language-dependant hostile effects, Blasphemy/Holy Word/etc.

Diplomatic Immunity: At 2nd level, the character gains minor status in friendly civilizations - generally can not legally be summarily judged and punished by local law for crimes, and can delay any punishments for 1d4 days per level. At 4th level can extend this to allies. At 6th, hostile civilizations will treat the character as a messenger under truce by default, if the civilization recognizes the concept at all. At 8th, the character is by default welcome to visit even secretive, selective, or hostile places and organizations so long as they take no (noticed) hostile actions. At 10th, even individuals struggle to initiate hostility against this character or their allies - DC 16+Cha mod Will save needed, or they cannot initiate a hostile act against the character for a day. At 12th, the character outright ignores wards, forbiddance, etc effects intended to restrict who may enter an area. At 14th, the Diplomat has full privileges to travel even metaphysical and cosmological spaces without judgment or restriction, and can effectively Planeshift at will - even as a soul after death.

Binding Words: A 5th level Diplomat knows when an agreement they brokered has been violated, and by which side. At 10th level they know the circumstances of this event in detail - why, how it was planned, who was involved, etc. At 16th level, agreements brokered by a Diplomat cannot be knowingly violated by people who willingly signed them under no misapprehension as to what they are signing, if it is possible to not violate them (an impossible conflict though allows full freedom to choose). This effect is extraordinary, is not Mind Affecting, and does not permit a save - but is strictly voluntary for the parties involved to enter into.

Contacts: At 3rd level and every 3 levels after, the character may on the fly define an NPC contact they have in a given place or organization. The contact may be no higher level than the character's level minus two. Contacts who die or become alienated (or who the player chooses to release) free up the slot after one month.

Negotiation Assets: When negotiating with organizations or governments, the Diplomat can promise resources on behalf of another party up to their WBL, a maximum of Cha mod times per month. The Diplomat may only use this feature when negotiating on behalf of a larger organization that can in principle access such resources - the class feature represents trust in the Diplomat, not independent wealth.

Fast Talker: Lv3. During combat as a standard action the Diplomat may make a Diplomacy check against 15+HD to prevent a target they can speak with from taking overtly harmful actions against the party for one round. Lv9 - this may also be done with a Swift action.

Careful Words: At 5th level and every 5 levels after, the Diplomat can take back a sentence spoken by themselves or an ally once per conversation, knowing in-character what the response would have been. This can be used for example to get the answer to a question but remove knowledge that the question was asked.

Leverage: At 10th level, once a month the Diplomat may ask for a single piece of blackmail to fall into their hands for a target they can name who is no more than 4 levels higher than them. At 20th level, the level restriction is removed.

Protective Detail: The Diplomat can arrange for a pair of guards 3 levels below their Diplomat level to protect them and remove them from dangerous situations. The guards will not take aggressive actions or participate in schemes except as needed to guarantee the Diplomat's life and escape.

Edict: A Lv14 Diplomat can issue an Edict binding a given city-sized area. They must remain in the area to sustain the Edict, and it takes one week to take hold. The Diplomat becomes aware of any violations of their Edict. At Lv18, attempts to violate the edict must pass a DC 10+Cha mod Will save. At Lv20, the Edict may bind reality itself, applying effects of equivalent power of up to 3rd level spells once per violation to ensure the Edict holds. A Diplomat may only maintain one Edict at a time.

zlefin

2023-09-09, 07:40 AM

Pathfinder's skill tricks are another way, if you limit them so no teveryone can get them.

If you want really strong powers (though that tends to conflict with the notion of 'mundane'), you oculd look up what they did with the Legend system. I haven't looked at legend in a long while, so I'm not sure it will actually have anythin rlevant, but it did have high power stuff for everyone at later level.

Quertus

2023-09-09, 08:43 AM

Some of it seems a bit narrative and dependent on the existence of a friendly kingdom, but I like the ideas.

Hmmm... yes, that is a prerequisite of the class. One cannot be a Prince(ss) without being a Prince(ss) of somewhere. I hadn't really considered there being a kingdom to be a Prince(ss) of to be an obstacle (especially with the existence of tech like reskinning it to work with warring tribes as a "Tribal Prince(ss)" / Tribal Leader or whatever), but it certainly falls apart if, say, the PCs are the only non-monsters in the entire world. Also kinda hilarious if the BBEG is the current King/Queen, and they suddenly die to natural causes (like a lightning bolt destroying the cliff they're standing on) when the Prince(ss) hits the "Queen" capstone (although, in hindsight, I think I'd make that the level 10 power, so that levels 11-20+ involve explicitly nation-level powers).

And, as long as we're talking about prerequisites, do note that this class had the prerequisite "PC". NPCs cannot take this class, and arguably PCs that lose their PC status and become NPCs lose access to the features of this class.

Yeah, some of this is helpful. I like the free retainers and guards powers. and the reality revision business.

For clarity when I say class specific I mean powers that you generally can't access without the class. for example, the wizards ability to gain the services of a familiar, the druids ability to turn into various baddass woodland creatures, and obviously the spellcasting access of any magic using class.

... <reading the entrails between the lines>... OK, here's my guess(es), hopefully you'll get a good laugh:

You rejected all the social stuff (most of which was just fiddly numbers, although Prince Charming had more meat), so you just don't care about the social pilar.

You accepted the level 2 powers, so character-creation fiddly numbers are on the table.

You rejected all the economic stuff, all of which worked on other characters, so you either don't care about economics, or don't care about buffs.

You accepted "Let them eat cake", so silly and open-ended are on the table.

You commented on the "narrative" requirement of a kingdom, but only rejected most of the powers that explicitly required society to fully function; presumably, if you spent more time on it, you would reject the "replacing dead guards" feature, perhaps making it function more like Thrullherd, with a generic hand-wave "it just happens" rather than tie it into a campaign feature.

You mentioned wanting things that are class-specific. I see I got bored of the class too quickly. The "hunting" power was intended to be tied into a number of higher-level Quantity vs Quality pairs of powers, which would allow the Prince(ss) to do things with their "trophies": see through their eyes, speak with them, animate them, summon them, gain their attributes, transform into them, ward their kingdom against their kind, etc. Would that have been more in line with what you were thinking?

By contrast, mundanes usually gain powers that are accessible to every character by default; ability checks, skill checks, feats, equipment, etc. Their numbers might arguably be a bit better, but they aren't bringing anything unique to the table.

Yet, curiously, you rejected the more unique abilities of the Princess ("Prince Charming" and "Queen" ignore normal operations, and arguably even "Royal Hunt" bypasses normal encounter / population rules (as it guarantees a monster will appear, even in a locked demiplane, at least once a month)), so I'm not sure how to square this circle.

-----

I guess my next step would be to detail some of the Prince(ss)'s Hunting- / Trophy- based powers, to see what feedback they receive, in an attempt to further divine the specifics of the feel you're looking for.

RandomPeasant

2023-09-09, 09:52 AM

And unless you wanna buff those into similar broken power lvls with the abilities you wanna give em

Again, define "broken" in this context. You can argue (though mostly not nearly as convincingly as people think) that casters are overpowered compared to the combat benchmarks. But there are no non-combat benchmarks. There's just the casters (who have non-combat abilities) and the martials (who don't), so you can't really say the casters are "broken", particularly when the premise of the thread is "perhaps the Fighter should not be useless outside of combat.

Where do the rules (or me) deny you to play a straight mundane up to 20?

The rules allow you to play a Commoner. That is, of course, much worse than playing a Wizard or even a Fighter. But, unlike the Wizard and the Fighter, Commoner is not presented as the equal of the real classes. The question is why it is desirable to have some classes that are nominally playable up to 20, but practically useless in that context. Your position seems to be "you don't have to do it so it's fine", but some people do in fact want to play Crusaders or Barbarians and telling them they have to play something else to be level-appropriate when we could just make those classes good at high levels (much as they are currently good at low levels) seems both pointless and somewhat insulting.

Sometimes you might wanna play something simple. Sometimes you want something powerful. 3.5 has options for all possible power lvls and I like it that way.

Is "simple" the opposite of "powerful"?

The same goes for all kinds of problem solving spells.

This is just circular. The spells are broken because martials can't keep up with them, so martials don't need the ability to keep up with them because they're broken. How do we infer that "not having the spells" rather than "having the spells" is the correct power level? After all, casters can buy potions and take ranks in Heal, so it's not like we're dealing with two separate approaches.

And giving out abilities at spell power lvl ain't an easy task from a balance point of view. There is a high chance that it is either to weak or to strong.

Yes, you could write something that is either underpowered or overpowered. This is true of every single thing you could conceivably write in any context where balance is a meaningful notion. How is it worse in this specific one?

And as said, unless you want to for some specific reason, there is no need to stick to a single class over 20 lvls. If you do it, it's your decision. But if you stick to a class for some sentimental reason, the problem is that and not the class. Because imho every single class build represents a niche. It's just that the niche of the single class mundanes is very small compared to the T1 classes.

So why shouldn't that niche be larger? What do we lose if, in addition to playing a guy with randomly-generated available options in low-level or low-power campaigns, you can play that guy in high-level or high-power campaigns? Because the thing we gain is very obvious (a class that works in a new way that might be more compelling than Vancian spell slots to some players), so if you can't identify anything we lose, it seems to me that we should set things up to do it.

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-09, 04:10 PM

....

I try to keep it short since I don't wanna derail the thread anymore.

Imho the Fighter in 3.5 represents a specific stereotype of "Warriors" that can be found in many game (including video games). And that is to be simple to play (sole focus is combat) but hard to equip (and sometimes also hard to build). That is also true for the 3.5 Fighter. It's a very gear and build dependent class which focuses only combat. You can play a Fighter 20 if you want.
But if you want a more flexible approach to a "Warrior" with more out of combat abilities, 3.5 has enough other options to pick that don't follow that stereo type. And yeah this stereo type is very niche by design, since it is simply combat and (combat-)gear focused.

If you wanna lure your Diablo fanboy buddy into a 3.5 session, give him a Fighter and put him into a dungeon with enough monsters to bash and some nice loot. He will be happy, I guaranty for it^^

RandomPeasant

2023-09-09, 04:29 PM

And that is to be simple to play (sole focus is combat) but hard to equip (and sometimes also hard to build).

This is, like, by far the least popular quadrant of simple/complex to build/play. There's also no reason it needs to be every martial class and zero caster classes. It is totally true that people have different complexity preferences, but those preferences are orthogonal to concept preferences, and 3e absolutely does not treat them that way.

But if you want a more flexible approach to a "Warrior" with more out of combat abilities, 3.5 has enough other options to pick that don't follow that stereo type. And yeah this stereo type is very niche by design, since it is simply combat and (combat-)gear focused.

Name one. Name one single class you can play that is "martial" that has out-of-combat abilities that are on par with what casters get. Hell, name one class that isn't a caster that gets that. The problem isn't just the Fighter not having non-combat abilities. That is a problem, but if that were the whole problem, it'd be something you could work around. The issue is that every single martial class lacks those abilities. The Barbarian is like that. The Crusader is like that. The Samurai is like that. The Scout is like that. "I would like to play a guy who is recognizably martial and has non-combat abilities" is a completely reasonable thing to want, and the only thing D&D has for that is "a gish maybe?". That's bad. We should fix that. We should not pretend there is some vast constituency of Diablo players who would be just fine with complicated non-combat stuff happening if they're allowed to tune out for it, but will lose their minds if they have things to do in that part of the session.

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-09, 05:28 PM

Name one. Name one single class you can play that is "martial" that has out-of-combat abilities that are on par with what casters get. Hell, name one class that isn't a caster that gets that. The problem isn't just the Fighter not having non-combat abilities.

How about immediate action Invisibility? A monk can get it as ACF at lvl2. Sole for 1 round with a 3 round cool down attached to it, but it is at will. Invest some skill points into hide and move silently and you will be an exceptional sneaker. Great if you should fail your hide role and observers notice you. Get invisible and retry to hide without the need for HIPS.

Or how about a Swordsage? Can get a short range teleport which can be used with a 5min refresh time (outside of combat). And also can get a single round of greater invisibility with the right maneuver. At lvl 1 you can get scent if you want. The Dance of the Spider stance can give you spiderwalk all day long. Later you can even get Air Walk all day long.

Or what about Crusaders Aura of Perfect Order, taking 11 on any skill (trumping even the normal limitations for UMD! beside from warlocks the sole other class that can do that and thus use ongoing magic items via UMD without the chance to fail on a natural 1 and thus block access for 24h since we bypass the roll by taking 11.)

What about Marshall? You get auras to boost your allies.

Tattooed Monk can get Alter Self with a duration measured in hours. Or buff skills where he has no skillpoints and other interesting stuff.

I think the list goes even further, but I hope I could satisfy your request for martial classes with "out of combat" abilities here.

RandomPeasant

2023-09-09, 07:47 PM

How about immediate action Invisibility? A monk can get it as ACF at lvl2. Sole for 1 round with a 3 round cool down attached to it, but it is at will. Invest some skill points into hide and move silently and you will be an exceptional sneaker. Great if you should fail your hide role and observers notice you. Get invisible and retry to hide without the need for HIPS.

How about it? Being invisible for one round out of every three all day seems, at best, comparable to being invisible for several minutes at a stretch when you need it, and casters can get that at 3rd level. So I suppose for the rather steep price of "being a Monk" you can get a niche for one level, and something of marginal utility after that. But at a certain point Persistent greater invisibility is a thing casters can just have and it's not even that good a use of Persistent Spell.

Or how about a Swordsage? Can get a short range teleport which can be used with a 5min refresh time (outside of combat). And also can get a single round of greater invisibility with the right maneuver. At lvl 1 you can get scent if you want. The Dance of the Spider stance can give you spiderwalk all day long. Later you can even get Air Walk all day long.

The Swordsage comes closest. But it's still a long, long way off. shadow jaunt requires both line of sight and line of effect, which is crippling for utility. As noted, casters getting all-day greater invisibility doesn't break the bank. Scent comes free with the Druid's wolf. dance of the spider is fine, and probably the best relative to caster options. balance on the sky is deeply inadequate when you realize that overland flight is a 5th level spell with a native duration of hours/level.

Now, you could give the ToB classes some useful non-combat stuff. For instance, if you wanted some shadow powers that were worth talking about as a Swordsage, they might look like this:

Wandering Shadows
Your mastery of the Shadow Hand discipline has brought your own shadow to life. It now wanders about obeying your commands, with the following effects unlocking if you know a Shadow Hand maneuver of at least that level:
1st: Your shadow operates as an unseen servant, though it appears as a shadow rather than being invisible. If it ever dissipates (either by being destroyed or by moving too far from you), you may recreate it in any square adjacent to you as a standard action. Issuing new commands to it is a free action and can be done purely mentally.
3rd: Your shadow can travel a greater distance from you (up to Long range), though it cannot perform physical actions at greater than Close range. You are aware of anything you would be in you were in its space, and any creature observing it must make a Spot check (opposed by your Hide check) to determine that it is anything other than an ordinary shadow. While your shadow cannot pass through physical objects, it can squeeze through a space as small as 1 inch in diameter.
5th: You can fragment your shadow, creating a number of distinct ones equal to your initiator level which move independently. Alternatively, you may combine shadows to increase their effective Strength score (this increase is linear, so 4 for two shadows, 6 for three, and so on).
7th: Your shadows become more stable. They can move an unlimited distance from your location, and may perform physical actions at up to Long range. Additionally, they may make skill checks with your skill bonuses, though they cannot make attacks, use your other abilities, or activate magic items. Finally, their speed improves to match your own, and they gain any movement modes you have.
9th: Your shadows are treated as incorporeal for the purpose of passing through solid objects, and can no longer be destroyed by damaging them.

I'm not totally sold on that at high levels, but I think it does a better job of providing much-needed utility to the ToB classes than anything printed. And you can easily imagine a parallel track that gives various abilities that interact with the Plane of Shadow, or tracks for other disciplines (for instance, perhaps Diamond Mind gets anti-magic, Devoted Spirit gets healing, and Stone Dragon gets various earth manipulations).

Or what about Crusaders Aura of Perfect Order, taking 11 on any skill (trumping even the normal limitations for UMD! beside from warlocks the sole other class that can do that and thus use ongoing magic items via UMD without the chance to fail on a natural 1 and thus block access for 24h since we bypass the roll by taking 11.)

I think you've got a misunderstanding about UMD somewhere, because the natural 1 thing is that if you roll a natural 1 and fail to activate you can't use the item for the rest of the day. By the time aura of perfect order shows up, a dedicated UMD-er will be rolling high enough not to fail to activate even on a 1. And there's no auto-fail for skills, that's why the Diamond Mind save-replacers are so exciting. Also it's wrong to say only the Crusader and Warlock get this, the Artificer gets it too and is also, you know, an Artificer.

What about Marshall? You get auras to boost your allies.

What about the Marshal? Having some 1st level Marshal followers with juiced-up Charisma is better than having a 10th level Marshal, because at no point do you get a second minor aura active. Even outside this, it's not remotely comparable to utility spells.

Tattooed Monk can get Alter Self with a duration measured in hours. Or buff skills where he has no skillpoints and other interesting stuff.

alter self has a base duration of 10 mins/level, and that "measured in hours" is by PrC level. If a Tattooed Monk grabs it as his first tattoo, the duration is not any higher than a caster would get. Even as a 15th level character, when he gets a total duration of 10 hours, that's still only the equivalent of spending two 3rd level slots on Extended alter self as a 15th level caster (and that's assuming no CL boosts).

I think the list goes even further, but I hope I could satisfy your request for martial classes with "out of combat" abilities here.

Name one single class you can play that is "martial" that has out-of-combat abilities that are on par with what casters get.

To be honest, I don't even mean as much breadth as a Wizard or Cleric is capable of. But I would like something more than "as a 15th level character, you have a 2nd level spell with a modestly long duration". That's not "on par". Something equivalent to an 8th level spell is "on par".

Gnaeus

2023-09-10, 07:30 AM

Quertus

2023-09-10, 07:51 AM

To be honest, I don't even mean as much breadth as a Wizard or Cleric is capable of. But I would like something more than "as a 15th level character, you have a 2nd level spell with a modestly long duration". That's not "on par". Something equivalent to an 8th level spell is "on par".

Talk of balance is all well and good, but in a call for ideas, in a brainstorming session, it’s generally considered best to table such discussions for the next phase IME.

Because if we were bringing up things like Balance, I’d be talking about the HP and BAB disparity, or players who don’t want the responsibility of having to pay attention outside of combat (so, at most passive boosts the the party, rather than explicit buttons to press).

Actually, that parenthetical can be good to bring up in a brainstorming session, to ensure all flavors of ideas are considered. Much like simple vs complex, or how some people hate metagaming powers, or retcon powers, or rebranding spells, so only providing solutions in one of those branches is not a good answer.

RandomPeasant

2023-09-10, 09:45 AM

I'm not sure if it counts as a mundane, but mountebank is technically a non caster that gets most of those powers together. Alter Self at same level as sorcerer, Dimension Door. Teleport. Not, admittedly as many powers as a high level caster has. But I think the real problem is what is a mundane? A wild shape ranger arguably has out of combat utility similar to many T3 casters. But it isn't exactly Conan or Robin Hood.

Mountebank is also close, but there's some important restrictions that I think mean it doesn't get there. You get alter self on schedule, and that's very good. Your dimension door is not quite as bad as shadow jaunt, but it's clearly geared towards in-combat use, as it takes a move action and moves you a bit less than 10% of the distance of a caster using dimension door. And then you get teleport at 16th level and it can't take any allies, significantly reducing its utility. The class also seems just kinda bad in combat, with your offenses amounting to half-progression Sneak Attack that is harder to use.

Wild Shape Ranger is good. I'm not totally sure how it measures up to T3 casters though. I don't really know enough about psionics to speak to the Wilder, but the Healer's problem isn't that it lacks utility. It has all the healing effects you could want, and those are quite useful. Its problem (like the Mountebank, actually) is that it's just not much good at combat. The Warmage is also weird, having no non-combat utility, but having a number of easily-accessible non-class options to fix that in a way that the Wild Shape Ranger doesn't have much to extend their form-changing to anything else.

It's true that there are various non-casters (and certainly non-traditional casters like the Binder or Warlock) who have some amount of non-combat utility. But even the best of these are typically getting slower and worse versions of options casters get, and I don't think any of them are good enough to keep up even at the point where 5th level spells come online.

Talk of balance is all well and good, but in a call for ideas, in a brainstorming session, it’s generally considered best to table such discussions for the next phase IME.

Because if we were bringing up things like Balance, I’d be talking about the HP and BAB disparity, or players who don’t want the responsibility of having to pay attention outside of combat (so, at most passive boosts the the party, rather than explicit buttons to press).

I think that's fine. It makes sense to have your "simple" class have simple non-combat abilities too. Though that does run into a bit of a problem with the under-developed nature of non-combat mechanics in D&D as a whole. There's no unified "doing stuff" mechanics outside combat the way there is in it, so it's harder to write passive bonuses. You're not using speak with dead or fabricate in the context of any particular system, so you can't just write a "+10 to the speak with dead system" ability for Fighters to have.

Logalmier

2023-09-10, 12:47 PM

Every time you say "name one" in a 3.5 discussion a new edition of Dragon magazine retroactively pops into existence.

Quertus

2023-09-10, 03:56 PM

I think that's fine. It makes sense to have your "simple" class have simple non-combat abilities too. Though that does run into a bit of a problem with the under-developed nature of non-combat mechanics in D&D as a whole. There's no unified "doing stuff" mechanics outside combat the way there is in it, so it's harder to write passive bonuses. You're not using speak with dead or fabricate in the context of any particular system, so you can't just write a "+10 to the speak with dead system" ability for Fighters to have.

When traveling in the company of a Ranger, all Animals default to at worst Neutral reaction.

When traveling with a Nomad an Explorer, all environmental damage is reduced by 1, to a minimum of 0.

When traveling with a Barbarian, double the results of all Survival and Scrounge rolls, as they know Orky value to things.

When traveling with a Spirit Nexus, anyone can attempt 1 question Speak with Dead 1/day, with success as Augury, and the Nightmares flaw.

When in the company of a Samurai, all imperial taxes are reduced -30%; however, the cost of mundane goods and services will increase or decrease based on the Samurai's reputation (see table).

When traveling with a known Thief, the inspection times by guards are doubled.

When traveling with a Fighter... ?

There's lots of potential passives one could give; some make more sense than others.

rel

2023-09-11, 11:59 PM

It's kind of the opposite of what you're looking for, no? Everyone can have feats, but the Adventurer is even better at having feats...

Exactly, I've noticed my earlier efforts at mundane classes including Adventurer lack unique non-combat powers and I'm looking to address that.

Honestly I think the best way to go is just genre shift, take archetypes from genres like sci-fi or superhero stuff or historical dramas or myths who aren't 'wizards' but definitely do big impressive world-shaking things. Then figure out what can be abstracted, and build a way for that to be important, not worrying at all about whether the abilities fit within guy at the gym.

For example, the Diplomat:

BAB: 1/2
Good saves: Will
Skills: 6+Int
Class Skills: Appraise, Decipher, Disguise, Forgery, Diplomacy, Bluff, Sense Motive, Knowledges, Listen, Spot, Hide, Move Silently, Speak Language*
*: Partially redundant with class features

Linguistic Expertise: At 1st level, speak all 'friendly' languages of your world. At 3rd, includes unfriendly ones. At 5th, all planar languages. At 7th, can communicate with all creatures of Int 2+ even if they lack language or means to speak. At 9th, 500ft radius telepathy. At 11th, can even telepathically communicate with the undead, spirits, items (as if psychometry but interactive). At 13th, can mentally reach any entity they can name to speak with them regardless of range - includes deities, souls who have become petitioners, whatever. At 15th, immunity to hostile truespeech, Power Words, or language-dependant hostile effects, Blasphemy/Holy Word/etc.

Diplomatic Immunity: At 2nd level, the character gains minor status in friendly civilizations - generally can not legally be summarily judged and punished by local law for crimes, and can delay any punishments for 1d4 days per level. At 4th level can extend this to allies. At 6th, hostile civilizations will treat the character as a messenger under truce by default, if the civilization recognizes the concept at all. At 8th, the character is by default welcome to visit even secretive, selective, or hostile places and organizations so long as they take no (noticed) hostile actions. At 10th, even individuals struggle to initiate hostility against this character or their allies - DC 16+Cha mod Will save needed, or they cannot initiate a hostile act against the character for a day. At 12th, the character outright ignores wards, forbiddance, etc effects intended to restrict who may enter an area. At 14th, the Diplomat has full privileges to travel even metaphysical and cosmological spaces without judgment or restriction, and can effectively Planeshift at will - even as a soul after death.

Binding Words: A 5th level Diplomat knows when an agreement they brokered has been violated, and by which side. At 10th level they know the circumstances of this event in detail - why, how it was planned, who was involved, etc. At 16th level, agreements brokered by a Diplomat cannot be knowingly violated by people who willingly signed them under no misapprehension as to what they are signing, if it is possible to not violate them (an impossible conflict though allows full freedom to choose). This effect is extraordinary, is not Mind Affecting, and does not permit a save - but is strictly voluntary for the parties involved to enter into.

Contacts: At 3rd level and every 3 levels after, the character may on the fly define an NPC contact they have in a given place or organization. The contact may be no higher level than the character's level minus two. Contacts who die or become alienated (or who the player chooses to release) free up the slot after one month.

Negotiation Assets: When negotiating with organizations or governments, the Diplomat can promise resources on behalf of another party up to their WBL, a maximum of Cha mod times per month. The Diplomat may only use this feature when negotiating on behalf of a larger organization that can in principle access such resources - the class feature represents trust in the Diplomat, not independent wealth.

Fast Talker: Lv3. During combat as a standard action the Diplomat may make a Diplomacy check against 15+HD to prevent a target they can speak with from taking overtly harmful actions against the party for one round. Lv9 - this may also be done with a Swift action.

Careful Words: At 5th level and every 5 levels after, the Diplomat can take back a sentence spoken by themselves or an ally once per conversation, knowing in-character what the response would have been. This can be used for example to get the answer to a question but remove knowledge that the question was asked.

Leverage: At 10th level, once a month the Diplomat may ask for a single piece of blackmail to fall into their hands for a target they can name who is no more than 4 levels higher than them. At 20th level, the level restriction is removed.

Protective Detail: The Diplomat can arrange for a pair of guards 3 levels below their Diplomat level to protect them and remove them from dangerous situations. The guards will not take aggressive actions or participate in schemes except as needed to guarantee the Diplomat's life and escape.

Edict: A Lv14 Diplomat can issue an Edict binding a given city-sized area. They must remain in the area to sustain the Edict, and it takes one week to take hold. The Diplomat becomes aware of any violations of their Edict. At Lv18, attempts to violate the edict must pass a DC 10+Cha mod Will save. At Lv20, the Edict may bind reality itself, applying effects of equivalent power of up to 3rd level spells once per violation to ensure the Edict holds. A Diplomat may only maintain one Edict at a time.

Some interesting stuff there, thanks. Doesn't fit the normal mold of D&D powers, but there's no reason things have to stay in that space.
Some of the ideas like friendly would need better definitions, and some powers like negotiation assets would probably need to do more, but some solid ideas.

... <reading the entrails between the lines>... OK, here's my guess(es), hopefully you'll get a good laugh:

Here's some more detailed thoughts on the Princess class:

Face recognition is potentially powerful, and has lots of fun non-combat utility, but its very campaign and GM dependent; Use of a castle great if the castle is actually near the action and the GM is permissive about the allowed uses. Commanding guards is powerful as long as suitable guards show up as obstacles / resources on the regular. etc.
The power requires (presumably) friendly nobility to be nearby wherever you're adventuring.

Trusted retainer and royal guards are fine. extra bodies is always a good power. I'd probably add some more verbiage insulating the princess from the negative consequences of the help dying on campaign and explicitly allowing for utility uses.

The pea thing doesn't seem helpful unless the epic rules are in play. Without an epic spellcaster to buff, the only bonus seems to be improving mundane crafting. Which might be useful in some games, but seems niche. Also, it comes with a penalty, which while funny, isn't a design style I like.

increased productivity seems powerful if it works on the parties magic item crafter.

The auto friendly power runs into the usual problems with diplomacy in 3.5, but this isn't a thread where I complain about the loss of the reaction roll mechanics and the general issues with skill checks.
Suffice it to say it's a powerful ability and with a permissive reading turns the prince into an instant diplomancer.

I parsed let them eat cake as 'limited wish HD/5 times per day'. Very powerful, especially since it seems to come online at level 5, but also quite spellcastery.

The royal hunt power is one of the more interesting ones, As written, the usefulness is very GM dependent since the specific monster, not to mention any benefits the hunt actually provides are left up to the GM.
Mostly it seems like a burden. The PC's need to stop doing what they actually want to be doing and go off and kill some random monster.
However, if it was optional and / or the PC could choose the type of monster that shows up it becomes potentially very powerful.
I like this as a power for beast tamer type classes.

The automatically become the monarch power is more narrative than I like to see in 3.5 and again, quite GM dependent.

So yeah, some good ideas that I like, some a bit too narrative and GM dependent for my tastes.
Thanks again for contributing :)

NichG

2023-09-12, 12:07 AM

Some interesting stuff there, thanks. Doesn't fit the normal mold of D&D powers, but there's no reason things have to stay in that space.
Some of the ideas like friendly would need better definitions, and some powers like negotiation assets would probably need to do more, but some solid ideas.

Yeah it needs a second and probably third pass for various things (distribution of abilities over levels, compatibility with PrCs, ability to coexist with combat PCs, etc). But more as a demonstration of, step out of D&D mindset and then bring what you find back into D&D.

exelsisxax

2023-09-12, 03:03 PM

NichG

2023-09-12, 07:11 PM

This is a problem that can't be solved by locking abilities behind classes.

1. fullcasters can do everything, so it is not possible to give unique abilities to martials
2. martials suck because casters get all the locked abilities. Inventing more things that a given martial can't do isn't helping.

Fundamentally, no martial can be made competitive with spellcasters except by making them functionally spellcasters. loading them up with at-will Su/Ex not-spells like ToB. Princess et al. are exactly this. the 3.5 corpse is simply too old and bloated, these ideas would need to be applied to a more blank slate game that did not already overload casters with stupendous and nigh-unlimited versatility. In such an environment you can just give everyone interesting powers equitably rather than tortuously give combat classes a handful of spells that still leaves them entirely left behind by spellcaster progression.

Fullcasters span the set of concepts that people normally think of as fitting in what D&D play is about, but that's not quite the same as 'can do everything'. There are more powerful, versatile, etc types of characters in other media and other game systems. I do think you have to fundamentally not try to make something that looks like D&D-as-it-is though.

The average starting Nobilis character for example leaves D&D spellcasters in the dust. Superhero and mythic genres of fiction have characters who do things which are beyond the scope of D&D spellcasters-as-played. Several of the powers from Worm for example - bioengineer anything you can imagine (normally the closest you get to this in D&D requires epic spellcasting), always know the next action to accomplish your goals, lower deity-like domain awareness except you can set your search filter, etc. Exalted has martial characters with perfect attacks and perfect defenses - if you want to get even close to this as a D&D caster, you need to be able to Quicken Limited Wish and cast it once per attack. Xianxia and cultivator fiction have martial characters who, for example, get to define the rules of reality within a 10 meter sphere of themselves - not as a spell that they cast, but as an always-on thing that is just part of the equivalent of the leveling process in that genre.

If you go outside of genres of fiction that focus on personal combat, the way you'd mechanically abstract what generals and leaders of countries can make happen via their orders would get you into a space which isn't necessarily matched with D&D spellcasters in direct power, but which basically D&D mechanics are largely just totally silent about - you could, for example, have a military leader ability that lets someone grant a temporary feat of their choice to everyone under their command structure as an 'training regimen' kind of thing. You could have a 'leader of a country' ability to do things like 'mandate that every town build disaster shelters', or a spymaster type of ability such that 'whenever a blond male halfling in their 50s with a scar across their eye does anything, anywhere, you hear about it' or 'discover if you have any enemies you didn't know about, who are beginning to move'.

For a D&D spellcaster to do that, they have to basically go through the whole in-game sequence of seizing power, making those contacts, giving those orders, etc. They certainly have the power to do such things, but it costs a lot of spotlight time to do so, and practically speaking someone who can just 'know whenever we would have a new enemy at least 1 game in advance, as well as know their classes and levels' is going to be doing that where there won't be so much patience for the wizard's player taking a week every other week to play 20 questions with Contact Other Plane or Divination or whatnot. So just like a high Cha Lv20 Fighter with Leadership could arrange for castings of Gate or whatnot but we wouldn't count casting Gate as part of a Fighter's abilities, a character who can simply and abstractly 'know what's going on in the world' as just a thing, not a spell, not a per day power is going to make a different niche for themselves than the Wizard or Cleric or even the Bard.

The dual costs of this are that 1. Now you need to be resolving certain things which previously you would have just ruled about on the fly. You need to actually have 'I destabilized the economy of the neighboring country' be a thing that means specific things and results in specific things that players can predict. and 2. The scope of the game is going to shift when those are the sorts of atomic actions the characters can consider taking, rather than 'go here, kill this or that'. But if you're okay with those things I do think its possible.

Even without going that far, getting away from the 'I need to limit powerful things by per-day uses, so everything powerful should look like a spell' gets you a lot. Like, a character 'just having Blindsense' or 'just having Telepathy' or 'everything they're about to do, they automatically know Weal or Woe' (e.g. something like Continual Augury) opens up a lot of options that you wouldn't really have if you have to dedicate a slot, anticipate need, cast it, and deal with finite duration. Letting things be freeform is another kind of pseudo-niche that's easy to get to by going against the D&D grain: a character who can simply and locally shapeshift themselves at will, not identifying that with specific spells like Alter Self or Polymorph, but being able to improvise things like 'I shapeshift my arm longer to increase my reach' or 'I shapeshift myself into a biological bridge spanning this chasm, so others can walk across' doesn't necessarily out-power casters but it gives a style of play that you can't get from playing a caster.

RandomPeasant

2023-09-12, 09:40 PM

fullcasters can do everything, so it is not possible to give unique abilities to martials

This is just... not actually true. There are versions of it that are sort of close to true (Artificers are dumb, and Clerics and Druids auto-knowing their list is bad), and there are versions of it that are true but not really useful (as demonstrated by this thread, even among what non-combat powers noncasters have, a lot of them are just "like X spell"). But "fullcasters can do everything" is one of those things that evolves from a true claim ("there is no reasonable power-based justification to play anything but a full caster") to an absurd claim ("every caster can do literally everything at no cost").

martials suck because casters get all the locked abilities. Inventing more things that a given martial can't do isn't helping.

This is not true either. Martials suck because they don't get abilities. You can make them not suck by giving them abilities. It's certainly more work to give abilities to individual classes than just writing some sort of generic "martials can do this" thing, but it doesn't mean you can't do it. If you write some power for Barbarians to have that Wizards and Clerics do not have, that is helping the Barbarian in the same way that teleport helps the Wizard and raise dead helps the Cleric.

Fundamentally, no martial can be made competitive with spellcasters except by making them functionally spellcasters. loading them up with at-will Su/Ex not-spells like ToB.

I am so tired of this argument. Yes, if you give non-casters non-combat abilities that will make them more like casters. In the same way, if you take a car with no tires and attach tires to it, you make it more like a Ferrari. Which is to say: who cares if we make them more like casters if the attribute of casters they are increasing in is "being functional as a class".

Several of the powers from Worm for example - bioengineer anything you can imagine (normally the closest you get to this in D&D requires epic spellcasting), always know the next action to accomplish your goals, lower deity-like domain awareness except you can set your search filter, etc.

Honestly most of the Worm powers are pretty much just D&D powers. Sure the various bio-tinkers or Nilbog can theoretically make "anything they can imagine", but in practice what they make is basically animate objects + grafts + ignoring CL limits (or permanent Astral Constructs, or various other existing minionmancy powers). Contessa is weird in a way that doesn't translate well to multi-author fiction, but her power is pretty close to foresight with a DM who's really, really permissive about the "what action you might take to best protect yourself" clause. Most of the other Thinkers are just one Divination (or a small suite of them) at-will. A 20th level caster can beat pretty much any Worm cape, though they do get pretty owned by Endbringers, Titans, or Scion (at least, if you translate those guys into D&D rules in a way that doesn't leave them open to any of the weird tricks). But if you look at, like, Alexandria, she is explicitly vulnerable to just casting drown on her and then she loses.

For a D&D spellcaster to do that, they have to basically go through the whole in-game sequence of seizing power, making those contacts, giving those orders, etc.

Sure, but in the source material the characters who do those things do go through those steps, just generally off-screen. The problem with role-protecting "kingdom actions" for non-casters is that those things aren't role-protected in the rest of the genre. There are plenty of mage-kings or arcane spymasters or what have you. You can reasonably make it so that there is a Court Wizard power suite (which has actions like "Train the Mage-Corps" or "Develop Superior Alchemies" or "Organize Cabals of Ritualists) and a Spymaster power suite (which has actions like "Infiltrate the Enemy's Civil Service" and "Pay Off the Thieves Guild" and "Perform Targeted Assassinations"). But you can't reasonably stop the guy who is playing a Beguiler from deciding that they would really like to become a Spymaster rather than a Court Wizard. So you also need to solve the problem of what the non-caster are doing outside your kingdom management layer.

NichG

2023-09-12, 10:45 PM

Honestly most of the Worm powers are pretty much just D&D powers. Sure the various bio-tinkers or Nilbog can theoretically make "anything they can imagine", but in practice what they make is basically animate objects + grafts + ignoring CL limits (or permanent Astral Constructs, or various other existing minionmancy powers).

Ehh. Bonesaw for example made a variety of extinction event pathogens she carried around. Of course they didn't actually get used successfully because then, oops, story over. But there was stuff like that which did get used, like the 'everyone forgets who everyone else is' virus. Panacea's stuff was similarly largely constrained more based on what the character was willing to do than what the power was limited to doing. You can choose to abstract those things in a way that pulls them back to existing D&D powers, but then it kind of misses the point of the exercise, which is to notice those things which are conceptually interesting but which are blind spots in D&D's design (well I suppose outside of the Sarrukh, so...)

Contessa is weird in a way that doesn't translate well to multi-author fiction, but her power is pretty close to foresight with a DM who's really, really permissive about the "what action you might take to best protect yourself" clause.

Well again, you can choose to compress things down to the nearest D&D point (but discard a lot of shenanigans that occur in the fiction), but that's missing the point I think. That particular kind of permissive-ness is, in some sense, mapping out a different design space that you would almost certainly not have seen just from reading Foresight.

Most of the other Thinkers are just one Divination (or a small suite of them) at-will. A 20th level caster can beat pretty much any Worm cape, though they do get pretty owned by Endbringers, Titans, or Scion (at least, if you translate those guys into D&D rules in a way that doesn't leave them open to any of the weird tricks). But if you look at, like, Alexandria, she is explicitly vulnerable to just casting drown on her and then she loses.

There's a lot of mutually assured destruction and rocket tag matchups there, and honestly just a ton of dependence on 'how are you statting X in Y system'. Does Mind Blank protect against Contessa pathing? What exactly is in Eidolon's well when the Lv20 caster shows up, what stuff is available for Glaistig Uaine to summon? Do Worm powers allow saves? Etc. Not sure you can really learn anything from this direction other than 'how cool do people think X or Y character is supposed to be?'.

Anyhow, 'can X kill Y?' is not in general a good way of mapping out potentially diverse design spaces for non-combat powers. A Lv20 Wizard can certainly kill Goddess, but Goddess can spin up a multi-planar empire much more quickly than a Lv20 Wizard can. A Lv20 Wizard can kill Coil, but Coil played right is a better diviner than any diviner you can make in D&D and furthermore can basically let anyone else with information gathering per-day spells or spell slots cast those spells for free at will (not to mention, if there are special things immune to his prognostication, he can detect the actions and influence of those things - infinite range divine intervention/mindblanked wizard detector basically). Aisha's power of 'cannot be remembered' doesn't really have something quite like it in D&D, and (I've used it) as a very nice and unsettling gimmick for an antagonist to have if you run it right, e.g. 'by the way, you seem to have been stabbed and your hp is 20 points lower than you thought, but you're not when or how that happened'. The closest thing I can think of is Godblooded of Vecna which is just vs magic and doesn't have that retroactive deletion of memory stuff. Well in general D&D doesn't really have anything to properly do memetics/anti-memetics, so that's a big design space that can be expanded on.

Sure, but in the source material the characters who do those things do go through those steps, just generally off-screen. The problem with role-protecting "kingdom actions" for non-casters is that those things aren't role-protected in the rest of the genre. There are plenty of mage-kings or arcane spymasters or what have you. You can reasonably make it so that there is a Court Wizard power suite (which has actions like "Train the Mage-Corps" or "Develop Superior Alchemies" or "Organize Cabals of Ritualists) and a Spymaster power suite (which has actions like "Infiltrate the Enemy's Civil Service" and "Pay Off the Thieves Guild" and "Perform Targeted Assassinations"). But you can't reasonably stop the guy who is playing a Beguiler from deciding that they would really like to become a Spymaster rather than a Court Wizard. So you also need to solve the problem of what the non-caster are doing outside your kingdom management layer.

You can let the Beguiler guy take the job of being a spymaster, but that doesn't mean they should get the class abilities of a classed Spymaster which make it easy and simple. Just like you can have a fighter who can learn to pick locks and fill the role of a rogue, but that doesn't mean they also get to have sneak attack. Just like a wizard can't increase their BAB by doing a lot of sword drills and keep advancing in wizardry just as fast as everyone else, they have to dedicate enough effort and time that they trade off that advancement in wizardry for instead getting good at hitting things. So the Beguiler who seriously tries to learn how to be a good Spymaster (versus just having the job title) is going to stop advancing as Beguiler and start advancing as Spymaster, and they will only get those things at the rate that they're gaining levels. Which, because of how D&D is, means that if they were already a very good Beguiler it will be much harder for them to learn the Spymaster class abilities and they will never be as good at those things as the dedicated Spymaster would.

Otherwise, why not say that the Fighter can just take lessons from the party wizard and start casting spells? 'Casting spells' is something that people in the world are doing by studying and then taking actions, so anyone who goes and does it should be able to cast spells! But no, we decide that it's class-locked. So in the same way, we can decide that developing a network of 1000 contacts who automatically report on all movements with perfect loyalty, and being able to build it over the course of a month is something that is class locked and above and beyond just 'well I can do that too!'.

This is, incidentally, why I said 'don't fixate on things being mundane'. Anything 'mundane' is something you've already decided anyone normal could theoretically do, so its already not appropriate as something defining for a class. But you can definitely say 'its not spellcasting, but its still mythic'. The master of disguise who can appear anywhere and as anything, through totally non-magical means, but where if you asked someone at the table 'okay how are you actually going to do this, step by step' there isn't actually an answer that could be given that would work. And yet, the disguise master still does it.

rel

2023-09-12, 11:32 PM

Fundamentally, no martial can be made competitive with spellcasters except by making them functionally spellcasters. loading them up with at-will Su/Ex not-spells like ToB.

I don't think giving a mundane character class specific powers automatically turns them into a functional spellcaster. But then, I don't find the ToB classes to be all that similar to spellcasters.

Point is, there are plenty of ways to set up a powerset to make it feel very different to spellcasting. From really simple tricks like having the powers tier up on even levels instead of odd levels or having a different number of tiers of power, to messing with costs, refresh mechanics and limitations.

I think mundane characters feeling like spellcasters is mostly down to a lot of powers being worded as 'functions like spell Y'. or having very similar rules and aesthetics to existing spellcasting systems.

RandomPeasant

2023-09-13, 01:00 AM

Ehh. Bonesaw for example made a variety of extinction event pathogens she carried around. Of course they didn't actually get used successfully because then, oops, story over.

A Wizard popping a shadow out of summon undead V is an extinction event.

But there was stuff like that which did get used, like the 'everyone forgets who everyone else is' virus.

That's impressive in scale, but the actual effect less than what you'd get out of programmed amnesia or mindrape. Which is the thing with a lot of Worm powers. It's not really that the effects qualitatively different, but that there's a bunch of things where, if you translated them to D&D directly, you'd get numbers that are stupid-huge. Skitter has a power that is roughly on par with creeping doom, but she has it always-on and with an area of multiple city blocks.

That particular kind of permissive-ness is, in some sense, mapping out a different design space that you would almost certainly not have seen just from reading Foresight.

The issue is that it's mapping out a design space that just doesn't work when multiple people are allowed to make narrative decisions. You can do stuff that is more free-form or whatever, but "this character knows how things are going to go and does the best thing" only works if there is a "how things are going to go", and that's out the window once more than one person has agency over the narrative.

A Lv20 Wizard can certainly kill Goddess, but Goddess can spin up a multi-planar empire much more quickly than a Lv20 Wizard can.

Goddess's big trick appears to be that she is a Diplomancer who's DM has for some reason decided that Diplomacy can be allowed to exist in its RAW form. Which, sure, that's very good but A) Clerics and Beguilers get Diplomacy as a class skill and B) Diplomacy cannot be allowed to exist in its RAW form.

A Lv20 Wizard can kill Coil, but Coil played right is a better diviner than any diviner you can make in D&D

This is just not remotely true. Coil has a neat power, but D&D has divinations that just tell you arbitrary information. Coil + someone else is good, but again the power doesn't merge well into D&D because "you can savescum every adventure forever" is actually miserable to play.

Aisha's power of 'cannot be remembered' doesn't really have something quite like it in D&D, and (I've used it) as a very nice and unsettling gimmick for an antagonist to have if you run it right, e.g. 'by the way, you seem to have been stabbed and your hp is 20 points lower than you thought, but you're not when or how that happened'.

You can be permanently invisible and have all the spells you cast be invisible as like a 10th level character. The anti-memetic stuff is cool, but it is not really clear to me that there is a particularly strong mechanical niche there.

You can let the Beguiler guy take the job of being a spymaster, but that doesn't mean they should get the class abilities of a classed Spymaster which make it easy and simple.

"Spymaster" is abstracting a particular role. You can arbitrarily declare that casters can't do that role, but that declaration will always be arbitrary because in the fiction casters do do that role. It's like saying that "General" is a special protected role that casters can't have. It works well enough mechanically, but then you run smack into the problem of Sauron being both the commander of the forces of darkness and a powerful mage.

Just like you can have a fighter who can learn to pick locks and fill the role of a rogue, but that doesn't mean they also get to have sneak attack.

But it does mean they get to pick locks as well as the Rogue. So, yes, if the Beguiler becomes a Spymaster, they don't get any sneak attack. But they get to keep progressing their Beguiler spellcasting, because the Rogue is certainly going to keep progressing their sneak attack as a Spymaster. The fundamental issue is that you're trying to solve a problem where classes are imbalanced in one context by adding a new context. But that can't work because it's a new context, and the classes are as imbalanced as ever they were in the original context.

From really simple tricks like having the powers tier up on even levels instead of odd levels or having a different number of tiers of power, to messing with costs, refresh mechanics and limitations.

You really don't want to do the first couple of those. Spontaneous casters progressing on different levels than prepared ones is already bad, doing that more just makes it worse. And the game is much, much easier to talk about if "5th level power" means something consistent. The other stuff is good, but "classes are on a similar progression framework" is a desirable goal, and you can make people feel different without breaking it.

I think mundane characters feeling like spellcasters is mostly down to a lot of powers being worded as 'functions like spell Y'. or having very similar rules and aesthetics to existing spellcasting systems.

The complaints about stuff functioning like spells are overblown. Of course stuff functions like spells, spells are the pieces we have that define the various non-combat effects that exist in the game. If you want something that does teleportation, you're not going to define how teleportation works from the ground up, you're just going to say "it's like teleport" and then explain the things that are different. Even in a system you were designing from the ground up, you'd still have basic effects things resolved down to, because that's just good game design, though they would not all be spells.

NichG

2023-09-13, 03:05 AM

A Wizard popping a shadow out of summon undead V is an extinction event.

Not by a long-shot in a world where there are 9th level characters around who can cast such spells. That's only an extinction event in clean room theory-craft discussions where for some reason there's one wizard and everyone else in the world is a Commoner.

That's impressive in scale, but the actual effect less than what you'd get out of programmed amnesia or mindrape. Which is the thing with a lot of Worm powers. It's not really that the effects qualitatively different, but that there's a bunch of things where, if you translated them to D&D directly, you'd get numbers that are stupid-huge. Skitter has a power that is roughly on par with creeping doom, but she has it always-on and with an area of multiple city blocks.

Scale matters. A character who can push a 500lbs rock and a character who can push a 5 billion ton rock have fundamentally different agency with respect to altering the world. Mythic stuff like 'you can chop off the top of a mountain' leads to qualitative differences in consequence compared to 'you can break down a 5ft x 5ft x 1ft wall section'

One of the blindspots of a D&D centric viewpoint is the degree to which the numbers and everything really center around small squads of powerful beings fighting each-other. Intense stuff is available, but rarely do even powerful characters get truly strategic-scale things they can just do, with a handful of exceptions (which are often the more interesting bits, really...). But a fully 'mundane' real-world leader regularly can make individual-level decisions with strategic-scale consequences.

The issue is that it's mapping out a design space that just doesn't work when multiple people are allowed to make narrative decisions. You can do stuff that is more free-form or whatever, but "this character knows how things are going to go and does the best thing" only works if there is a "how things are going to go", and that's out the window once more than one person has agency over the narrative.

I mean, I've literally used this in play in a custom system, by breaking it down from 'you just win' into more of a move/countermove hierarchy of anticipation, contingent on asking the right questions or finding the right questions to ask before your adversary does. The 'Strategist' class (which basically can do these things at will) could, at Lv13, gain the ability to ask the question 'what would X person I know a certain minimum about do in this hypothetical scenario that I am proposing?'. The ability did not need line of effect, but it did allow a save (unknowing), and on a successful save sufficiently similar scenarios would be blocked out but you could still ask other questions. The ability could explicitly get you information you would have no way of knowing, but you did have to propose the scenario and if you were trying to match that to real events but got some details wrong, you could get a wrong prediction. I had a PC play a Strategist and get into a prognostication war with an NPC Strategist, with both of them trying to set up a naval ambush for the other. It was interesting, and not an experience I had ever seen in any other D&D campaign despite the forum zeitgeist about paranoid Divination wizards.

Epic level Strategists could basically get Contessa's power but again with a few caveats. You ask for something, you get a path, as long as you agree to follow the path exactly you're guaranteed either the desired outcome or to be told when something has disrupted the path (like another Strategist using that ability and a handful of other 'absolute' things). However, you have no control over anything but a short phrase you state as your goal - you can't write paragraphs of legalese to try to get multiple things with one path. If you say 'I want to save the world' you have no guarantee that the path won't include 'kill your lover' or 'sunder the souls of your party members' or whatever aside from that the path isn't going to go out of its way to include that stuff but will only take the most efficient, shortest route towards victory. I think it got used once in that campaign, and it wasn't particularly a problem for the multi-author-fiction-ness of a tabletop game. It wasn't perhaps that much different than a off-the-safe-chart Wish in that particular case, since it wasn't a back and forth prognostication war like with the naval ambush. But it was more interactive than a genied Wish since you could decide to leave the path whenever it asked you to do something whose cost was too high, and the things you had already done would still be done and whatever advantage they gave you you'd still have.

What happens if one PC had objected to another PC using that ability, and basically tried to manually thwart the path without having a power that would explicitly counter it? Well they'd be railroaded, because that's what the power does - the power lets a player say: 'the GM's job is to force this to work', and if the world has to start to warp for that to happen, the world will have always been warped in that way. So yeah it could get tense in a PvP scenario. But it was a no-PvP game, so it was and generally can be fine. There's always the magic of 'this power has been used, this is what is has to happen, everyone at the table lets now work together to figure out which things would lead there and still feel the most natural to everyone'. But again, we didn't even need to use that sort of meta method.

So yeah, it can work just fine. At worst you just need a different algorithm for resolving those segments than 'go around and everyone state their action'.

Strategists also had a bunch of stuff for e.g. getting there 'in the nick of time' whenever that might have been, retroactively (from the players' perspective) having taken actions or set traps or distractions or have sourced supplies or things like that, converting another character's ability to strategic-scale (basically multiply another character's AoE diameter by 10), add additional stakes to an encounter such as 'if we win a defensive fight against any force from this organization, everyone in the organization suffers a negative level for 24 hours', change what types of actions can be used such as denying Move actions to both allies and enemies on an entire field of battle, 'seal' a secret associated with them such that anyone who knows it world-wide has to make a save each day or forget it, an ability that lets them take over organizations by capturing and imprisoning their leaders even if thats not how power normally transfers in that organization, muck with the timeline within an encounter or scene or scenario versus outside of it (so for example, in a rounds-scale battle if reinforcements would normally be a minute away, they could get there next round instead - not because they traveled faster or because time was frozen, but because the actual timing of when the reinforcements left and the battle started and so on is a bit abstract and the strategist can choose that the abstraction resolves in their favor, in character via having planned for this in advance); modify the rules for visibility and weather in a scenario to make the more or less stringent (again for both sides); and so on.

Goddess's big trick appears to be that she is a Diplomancer who's DM has for some reason decided that Diplomacy can be allowed to exist in its RAW form. Which, sure, that's very good but A) Clerics and Beguilers get Diplomacy as a class skill and B) Diplomacy cannot be allowed to exist in its RAW form.

Memetic contagion even through electronic transmission is kind of the big idea you can draw from the example of Goddess, but I'm not sure this individual example is worth arguing too deeply about. Take, say, any of the memetic stuff in Ar'kendrithyst or Worth the Candle or the Laundry Files or a lot of the SCP Foundation stuff as other examples of how the existence of these sorts of powers tends to definitely shape the way the rest of the world has to approach potential holders of them. Which would be true for a RAW Diplomancer as well I suppose, but you can do lesser ones that still have the interesting kind of spycraft information compartmentalization consequences.

There are a few of these in D&D, but they're pretty rare. The one I know of is from a feat actually, not a spell - there's a feat that lets you send a backlash at anyone who tries to read your mind. I guess maybe Sepia Snake Sigil sort of counts too, at a stretch? But yeah, I'd say there's untapped space here, just perhaps not the best match for 'martials' per se.

This is just not remotely true. Coil has a neat power, but D&D has divinations that just tell you arbitrary information. Coil + someone else is good, but again the power doesn't merge well into D&D because "you can savescum every adventure forever" is actually miserable to play.

The leverage in Coil's power to be really obscene at divination is that any method by which you could gain information at some bad consequence or cost becomes effectively free to use. And it can be used in an un-resistable and undetectable way. So Coil is as good as the best diviner money can buy or he can capture/imprison/manipulate, plus the ability to be constantly running counterfactual experiments about the consequences of choices anywhere in the world. Which is better than the kinds of arbitrary information you can get from D&D divinations because its very rich and detailed information rather than just yes/no or short cryptic answers. To actually make a version usable in play, I'd just limit it to say your portion of a given scene. Basically, whatever 'chunk' of thing you're resolving, before you choose what to do you can ask about two things you could do, hear what would happen immediately in each case, and pick the one you like. But once the DM has turned to another player or starts to narrates the action of an NPC, the 'chunk' ends and the next chunk begins the next chance Coil's player has to choose an action to take. Its definitely much weaker if thats it, so if you wanted to keep the potential mind games and power I'd add in a bunch of retroactive planning mastermind stuff for specific uses like getting out of death/capture, or something akin to 5e's Advantage/Disadvantage on basically everything; but that's the not-interestingly-new bits of the power, so from a design discussion perspective its not worth going too deep into.

You can be permanently invisible and have all the spells you cast be invisible as like a 10th level character. The anti-memetic stuff is cool, but it is not really clear to me that there is a particularly strong mechanical niche there.

Absolutely not the same thing, but its one of those things where you have to run it right to really get the effect. It's an extremely long story to get to the relevant points, but Ar'kendrithyst does a very good job of presenting the perspective of characters both dealing with anti-memetic threats they aren't immune to, and characters being the only ones immune to an anti-memetic effect that systematically impacts everyone else. The simplest way I've found to dip into these waters in tabletop is to have one monster type in an encounter which, when it attacks and hits, you don't tell the player how much damage they took but you mark it down and track their HP as the DM and just say when they're unconscious or dead. It's a psychological thing, mechanically basically almost a non-ability, but its freaky to deal with when you're used to knowing how much more you can take in order to make decisions about when to fight or run.

When you're doing this from the other side, e.g. the players are wielding the anti-memetic stuff against NPCs, you have to play into it for it to really be worthwhile (or you let the player with the anti-memetic thing write down what they're doing but not tell you, and then they say 'open the paper and resolve those actions' several rounds/minutes/days/whatever later). It's a very different kind of thing than D&D culture tends to teach you is important, but it can have a really big effect. Just like an ability that would force a player (or DM) to make decisions for a character on a 15 second egg-timer or lose their round rather than taking however long they need is mechanically illegible - you can't white room theorycraft it at all - but in real play situations it would be extremely potent, probably OP. Whether you want the game to feel like that, well, thats up to you.

"Spymaster" is abstracting a particular role. You can arbitrarily declare that casters can't do that role, but that declaration will always be arbitrary because in the fiction casters do do that role. It's like saying that "General" is a special protected role that casters can't have. It works well enough mechanically, but then you run smack into the problem of Sauron being both the commander of the forces of darkness and a powerful mage.

Here Spymaster is a class, not just a role. Its taking things that particularly skilled people in that role might do, multiplying by 5, and then as payoff for taking the class gives you that thing with a button rather than having to figure it out yourself. You can do this with literally anything. When you make a game with classes, or skills, or really anything that puts a number to a cognitive competency you are already doing this. Like, a player could just personally know well how to survive in the woods and say 'my Lv1 Commoner does these things'. But as part of system design the designers instead said 'this is going to be a character skill called Survival, and if you don't invest in that skill, even if you say the right things you could end up executing it wrong and mess it up'.

Here we're crossing scales to create the niche. So the Beguiler can go and cast enchantments on people and get the consequences of that, whatever they are. If that's enough to do the job as the kingdom's spymaster then great, they have filled that role as a Beguiler. The person who instead studies spymastery doesn't do it with enchantments, but uses abstracted-away unspecified knowledge of how people, kingdoms, etc all work to do it instead. Because the scale of those things is beyond what a player can actually hope to do action-by-action, the ability to choose to act at that abstract level grants a mechanical advantage that the Beguiler does not get to have. It's an ability, like a rogue's Sneak Attack, that can't be duplicated just by the Fighter's player saying 'I try to stab them in a weak point when they're distracted by my friend fighting them from a flanking position'.

Just as Marshals (the class) gain auras that grant boons to their soldiers, even if you can have a Wizard be a Marshal (the military rank), that doesn't mean they get to have the class abilities of Marshal (the class). Just because there is a military rank with that name, and its duties could be executed by a wizard, doesn't mean that there's no space for a class which concentrates the competencies that a mythic military marshal might have been said to possess and grants them to a character who pursues that path to the exclusion of others.

But it does mean they get to pick locks as well as the Rogue. So, yes, if the Beguiler becomes a Spymaster, they don't get any sneak attack. But they get to keep progressing their Beguiler spellcasting, because the Rogue is certainly going to keep progressing their sneak attack as a Spymaster. The fundamental issue is that you're trying to solve a problem where classes are imbalanced in one context by adding a new context. But that can't work because it's a new context, and the classes are as imbalanced as ever they were in the original context.

I'm not trying to solve 'a problem where classes are imbalanced'. I'm trying to point out unused design space where D&D is silent about things which could be systematized in a way that could matter, so that those things can be systematized and interesting abilities can be written which engage with those directions of play. Once you open up those directions of play, then you have hooks in the form of things which now matter explicitly, which only mattered abstractly in the mind of the DM before. And that gives you the opportunity to author abilities which directly engage with those hooks.

You are not obligated to also give those direct abilities to existing casting classes, or even any existing classes, depending on what you want to achieve. You can also let other (or all) characters indirectly engage with those hooks, by virtue of approaching them from another scale. In which case the way in which a King makes a successful country will be different than the way that a Wizard king makes a successful country, because the Wizard has to try to drag their squad-scale spells up to impact the foundations which make up the strategic scale. So the Wizard might e.g. build a city one structure at a time with Polymorph Any Object and Wall of Stone and whatnot or just pay for construction crews and get it done at the rate and cost of Stronghold Builder Guide rules, whereas the King gets a Gathering of Masters class ability which lets them convert the prestige they gained in the last war into incentives for master architects and craftsmen to gather organically to support the city construction project, reducing costs by 75% and speeding the project up by 20x.

The Wizard king could still win a war and go and RP out the scene where they say 'look how impressive our country is, we're the winners, come support our cause' and maybe that gets them one or two NPCs who agree to help, and that might modify the construction costs and speed. But there's no obligation for it to even be possible for them to get as good of a result from that as someone who spent class levels on having an innate ability to 'just do it'. The same way that even if a player narrates a very well thought out and detailed sneak attack, if the character doesn't have the Sneak Attack class ability there's no obligation for the DM to let them pretend to be a Lv10 Rogue without having paid those levels.

'Paying the levels' of course means something very vague, and it doesn't help that often in campaigns the first level might represent 20-100 years of study during a character's backstory and the next 19 are like a 6 month adventure. But in principle, what linear advancement asks us to do is to imagine that there really is some kind of competency that you can't just have by saying one or two correct choices or imitating someone else with the competency, but which takes so much time to acquire and maintain via practice and perhaps even requires mutually exclusive decisions about things like one's bearing and habits and relationships with others and all sorts of things that get fuzzed out in the 'level' abstraction that, just because a Wizard claims a crown doesn't make them the as good as someone who studied and practiced and schmoozed with nobles and made pacts and arranged marriages and so on all in order to be King, for the same length of time and cost of opportunity the Wizard spent on their magic.

rel

2023-09-14, 11:40 PM

Gruftzwerg

2023-09-15, 01:24 AM

Alright, I think my first new class will be fighter inspired. Working name is Blademaster.

The class will have a resource called Focus, gained primarily through killing enemies and winning fights. Focus will be expended to cut various normally un-cutable things (e.g. falsehood, magic, distance) to achieve utility effects.

The class will also be able to make cuts that aren't normally possible, either with focus or some other resource making cuts and therefore applying effects over entire areas like lines or bursts.

Finally, the cuts will be modifiable, currently calling these modifiers flourishes to change what cutting an impossible thing actually acheives.

So a final effect will be determined by what is being cut, how, and with what flourishes. This will hopefully mean you can get a lot of interesting effects and interactions from even a small base pool of components.
And that's both a fun minigame at the table, and provides a lot of potential power and versatility without having to create thousands of specific effects to rival the 3.5 spell lists.

An example of how this might play out: The Blademaster chooses to cut earth, destroying inanimate matter to remove physical obstacles like doors or walls. More impressive cuts like lines and bursts would instead create voids or tunnels. And flourishes might modify this base effect, creating tunnels that collapse after some time or on command.

Sorry, but I have to ask... what does this accomplish?

If I got you right you intend to make a new martial class that is exceptionally good/special at Sundering stuff.

Is that the non-combat power that should help the mundane to stay relevant or useful when compared to a wizard?
Making all the noise (when cutting stuff) while the wizard could have just used Teleport to solve the problem, or to skip the entire subplot the DM intended..

Sorry, but from my point of view you didn't hold true to your own goal in the OP but just homebrewed another mundane that might be fun to play (not gonna argue about fun here), but still runs into the same problems all mundanes have compared to full casters.

edit: How about the suggested arcane Swordsage variant? It's sole mentioned in the book and ain't fleshed out, but imho this would be the way to go here. If you intend to homebrew, this is imho the best starting point. Because Maneuvers are the best suited resource for this. They ain't at will but also ain't so limited as spells are due to the several active and passive refresh mechanisms.

rel

2023-09-15, 02:43 AM

Sorry, but I have to ask... what does this accomplish?

If I got you right you intend to make a new martial class that is exceptionally good/special at Sundering stuff.

Is that the non-combat power that should help the mundane to stay relevant or useful when compared to a wizard?
Making all the noise (when cutting stuff) while the wizard could have just used Teleport to solve the problem, or to skip the entire subplot the DM intended..

Sorry, but from my point of view you didn't hold true to your own goal in the OP but just homebrewed another mundane that might be fun to play (not gonna argue about fun here), but still runs into the same problems all mundanes have compared to full casters.

edit: How about the suggested arcane Swordsage variant? It's sole mentioned in the book and ain't fleshed out, but imho this would be the way to go here. If you intend to homebrew, this is imho the best starting point. Because Maneuvers are the best suited resource for this. They ain't at will but also ain't so limited as spells are due to the several active and passive refresh mechanisms.

Perhaps you misunderstood the idea of cutting impossible things.

This class should have no trouble teleporting. Cutting away the distance between points for example, or perhaps carving through the barriers between the planes.

The idea is to have a wide design space of achievable effects by chaining together targets and flourishes.