TeeEl
2008-08-15, 03:41 AM
Sleep-deprived rambling brainstorm time. Warning: long and probably pointless.
So as a hobby I have been working on my own overhaul of 3.5e (plug (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86469)). Naturally one of the issues I will have to tackle if I want to make a robust fix for 3.5e is fixing the caster vs. non-caster disparity.
The stock answer for this issue in late 3.5e is Tome of Battle. It's not a comprehensive fix, of course, but it has a lot of fun stuff and helps patch things up a bit. But... I'm kind of lukewarm on the mechanics, actually. I appreciate that it fixes the problem of one-trick fighter builds that end up doing the same thing over and over again, but the maneuver/recharge mechanics just feel arbitrary. I have some other quibbles as well (I'm not really sold on the way maneuver levels are handled, for example, since it ends up with an awful lot of powers that read "Powerful Dragon Strike: Just like Slightly Less Powerful Dragon Strike, but with +2d6 damage"; I'd rather just see powers that scale), but the recharge is the main one for me.
4e takes this system further with the encounter power paradigm, which doesn't seem like a step forward to me. The binary simplicity of it streamlines bookkeeping, but that seems to be its sole virtue; it has no long term resource management aspect and its short term resource management seems to lend itself towards no-brainers. I suppose in its defense I may as well point out that it does do a good job of meshing with daily powers, so it is not entirely unsuited for its purpose. Still, unlike doorbells and sleigh bells these are not among my favorite things.
I'm going to have to do something here if I want to get around the fighter issue, though. Since the project at hand remodels the game to be very feat-centric, my instinct is to take a feat-centric route. Among the core feats there are a handful of proto-maneuvers: feats that in effect define their own alternate modes of attack. Things like Spring Attack, Manyshot, and Whirlwind Attack. As written these feats are very inaccessible and give very mediocre results outside of a few builds centered around them, and there's also a very limited selection of feats in this category, but all these things are fixable.
All this leads me, somewhat belatedly, to the point of this post. I'm all for letting fighter types pull off wicked badass stunts; I'm pretty sure those 8+ hit full attacks are probably stretching the laws of physics already (and you can get at least that many without needing magic, even in core), so we may as well let give them some more diverse and interesting ways to defy reality. But it would probably be a good idea to put in some form of limiting mechanic on these, both to help keep power levels in check (although not being a full caster already goes a long ways towards keeping power levels in check) and to keep combat from devolving back into spamming the same move over and over again. I had toyed with self-imposed status conditions as a limiting factor, but shooting yourself in the foot to use your cool trick can get old really quickly.
From there, I started thinking along the lines of a separate "condition", the sole purpose of which would be to make you wait a turn or so before you activate your big cool trick again. You have a state, let's call it "focus". When you have focus you can activate certain big cool tricks, spending your focus. If you go an entire turn without focus, you get your focus back. In essence you can only do one big cool trick every two turns, although there would probably be some exceptions. There would likely be some forms of limited recharge available, generally centered around certain triggers that you can't necessarily do at will (getting knocked down to low HP, dropping an enemy, etc.) and probably with some sort of "no repeats" rule (so you could theoretically string together two different big cool tricks in a row under certain circumstances, but not the same one twice). At higher levels maybe you could get to use the weakest big cool tricks at will, I don't know.
Anyhow, this train of thought led me to a really cool idea. I think it's a decent place to start with for a recharge mechanic on martial stunts... but then I got to thinking, what if the same was applied to spells, leaving you capped at one spell every two rounds? I think this has a lot of potential as a very simple, very straightforward limiting factor on spellcasters. It has a couple of nice benefits, but the biggest one is that it makes it harder for spellcasters to effectively break the action economy; even at high levels, they're generally going to be capped at 1 spell every two rounds even with quickened/swift casting spells (if there are any recharge abilities available, they're going to be much more available for non-magical feats than for spells). That right there nips a lot of abuse in the bud. Congratulations, you just dimension doored out of the dragon's grapple, now you can safely... shoot it with a crossbow? Hell, for that matter, that practically solved celerity without having to touch the spell itself. How cool is that?
Moreover, it makes it considerably harder to render the ability to whack things with swords obsolete, since even a full caster is going to be stuck at the whacking-things-with-swords level at least half the time. Granted there are still going to be issues with casters being able to buff themselves into melee machines too easily, although at least they can't cast three buffs and let loose a full attack by the second round of combat. It also avoids a common pitfall of many caster fixes, in that it restrains high level casters while leaving casters at the squishy levels largely unaffected (when you only have a few spells per day you probably won't necessarily want to blow them all one right after another).
So any thoughts? I think I've stumbled onto what could be a very simple, elegant and solid cornerstone for a ground-up revamp of 3.5e. By itself it's not a perfect solution, but... oh, who am I kidding. It is perfect and I am awesome. Thus concludes tonight's insomnia-fueled design rant.
So as a hobby I have been working on my own overhaul of 3.5e (plug (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=86469)). Naturally one of the issues I will have to tackle if I want to make a robust fix for 3.5e is fixing the caster vs. non-caster disparity.
The stock answer for this issue in late 3.5e is Tome of Battle. It's not a comprehensive fix, of course, but it has a lot of fun stuff and helps patch things up a bit. But... I'm kind of lukewarm on the mechanics, actually. I appreciate that it fixes the problem of one-trick fighter builds that end up doing the same thing over and over again, but the maneuver/recharge mechanics just feel arbitrary. I have some other quibbles as well (I'm not really sold on the way maneuver levels are handled, for example, since it ends up with an awful lot of powers that read "Powerful Dragon Strike: Just like Slightly Less Powerful Dragon Strike, but with +2d6 damage"; I'd rather just see powers that scale), but the recharge is the main one for me.
4e takes this system further with the encounter power paradigm, which doesn't seem like a step forward to me. The binary simplicity of it streamlines bookkeeping, but that seems to be its sole virtue; it has no long term resource management aspect and its short term resource management seems to lend itself towards no-brainers. I suppose in its defense I may as well point out that it does do a good job of meshing with daily powers, so it is not entirely unsuited for its purpose. Still, unlike doorbells and sleigh bells these are not among my favorite things.
I'm going to have to do something here if I want to get around the fighter issue, though. Since the project at hand remodels the game to be very feat-centric, my instinct is to take a feat-centric route. Among the core feats there are a handful of proto-maneuvers: feats that in effect define their own alternate modes of attack. Things like Spring Attack, Manyshot, and Whirlwind Attack. As written these feats are very inaccessible and give very mediocre results outside of a few builds centered around them, and there's also a very limited selection of feats in this category, but all these things are fixable.
All this leads me, somewhat belatedly, to the point of this post. I'm all for letting fighter types pull off wicked badass stunts; I'm pretty sure those 8+ hit full attacks are probably stretching the laws of physics already (and you can get at least that many without needing magic, even in core), so we may as well let give them some more diverse and interesting ways to defy reality. But it would probably be a good idea to put in some form of limiting mechanic on these, both to help keep power levels in check (although not being a full caster already goes a long ways towards keeping power levels in check) and to keep combat from devolving back into spamming the same move over and over again. I had toyed with self-imposed status conditions as a limiting factor, but shooting yourself in the foot to use your cool trick can get old really quickly.
From there, I started thinking along the lines of a separate "condition", the sole purpose of which would be to make you wait a turn or so before you activate your big cool trick again. You have a state, let's call it "focus". When you have focus you can activate certain big cool tricks, spending your focus. If you go an entire turn without focus, you get your focus back. In essence you can only do one big cool trick every two turns, although there would probably be some exceptions. There would likely be some forms of limited recharge available, generally centered around certain triggers that you can't necessarily do at will (getting knocked down to low HP, dropping an enemy, etc.) and probably with some sort of "no repeats" rule (so you could theoretically string together two different big cool tricks in a row under certain circumstances, but not the same one twice). At higher levels maybe you could get to use the weakest big cool tricks at will, I don't know.
Anyhow, this train of thought led me to a really cool idea. I think it's a decent place to start with for a recharge mechanic on martial stunts... but then I got to thinking, what if the same was applied to spells, leaving you capped at one spell every two rounds? I think this has a lot of potential as a very simple, very straightforward limiting factor on spellcasters. It has a couple of nice benefits, but the biggest one is that it makes it harder for spellcasters to effectively break the action economy; even at high levels, they're generally going to be capped at 1 spell every two rounds even with quickened/swift casting spells (if there are any recharge abilities available, they're going to be much more available for non-magical feats than for spells). That right there nips a lot of abuse in the bud. Congratulations, you just dimension doored out of the dragon's grapple, now you can safely... shoot it with a crossbow? Hell, for that matter, that practically solved celerity without having to touch the spell itself. How cool is that?
Moreover, it makes it considerably harder to render the ability to whack things with swords obsolete, since even a full caster is going to be stuck at the whacking-things-with-swords level at least half the time. Granted there are still going to be issues with casters being able to buff themselves into melee machines too easily, although at least they can't cast three buffs and let loose a full attack by the second round of combat. It also avoids a common pitfall of many caster fixes, in that it restrains high level casters while leaving casters at the squishy levels largely unaffected (when you only have a few spells per day you probably won't necessarily want to blow them all one right after another).
So any thoughts? I think I've stumbled onto what could be a very simple, elegant and solid cornerstone for a ground-up revamp of 3.5e. By itself it's not a perfect solution, but... oh, who am I kidding. It is perfect and I am awesome. Thus concludes tonight's insomnia-fueled design rant.