Monte's WOD magic in 3.5

[coffeedragon]

I've DM'd it, I've played it, I've hated it and right now I'm enjoying it.
For better or for worse, D&D 3.5/Pathfinder has become my system of choice, because I know it and because the people I play with know it.

However, there are a few aspects of the game that I would be happy to see changed, namely combat and the magic system.

I have played around with creating my own system based on elements of other games, but after years of work on said systems on and off, they each become more of a mangled mass of confusion than anything playable.

So I have 2 suggestions: the first is to use the Monte Cook World of Darkness magic system instead of the 'regular' spell and magic system.
How would this impact the game as a whole, other than making mages far more flexible and powerful?
Could some sort of mechanic be put in place to handicap that power boost?

The second is something along the lines of Torn Asunder critical hits to make combat deadlier and hopefully QUICKER. My biggest gripe with D&D combat is that a single battle takes forever to finish and there is no consequence to being wounded.
I propose that hitpoints be viewed as luck and stamina that get used up, reflecting how tired you get in a fight. When your Hp are up, you are too exhausted to dodge or block blows anymore and real wounds are inflicted. Real wounds cause real damage to limbs or body parts. I'm thinking of a wound location table and corresponding penalties to actions related to the aflicetd part.

Any comments, thoughts or suggestions?

[lightningcat]

I've played in games with similar hit location systems, and while a fight may take fewer rounds, the RL time is unchanged, or even made longer. It one of the truths of RPGs, the more realistic the combat, the longer it takes to resolve.
I'm not saying it will not work for you, in fact it might reduce the number of combats. But it is unlikely to make those fights any shorter.

[Zeta Kai]

As someone who is not entirely familiar with Monte Cook's WoD, could you please explain some the basics, so that we could all judge whether or not this proposal is a good idea?

[coffeedragon]

As someone who is not entirely familiar with Monte Cook's WoD, could you please explain some the basics, so that we could all judge whether or not this proposal is a good idea?

My most humble apologies for assuming the good folk here would all know the D20WOD magic system
The short version: it's the will and the way. If you think it, you can do it... provided you can make the magic skill check.
The longer version: basically it allows the mage to construct spells on the fly as it were. Each component of a spell has a point cost (range, duration, damage dealt, etc) and these add to the DC of the skill check. If you make the skill check, you cast the spell.
each spell has an exhaustion rating which acts as a negative modifier to further spells cast that day. so the more spells you cast, the harder it gets to do magic. if you cast spells easily within your ability (low DC) the exhaustion rating is low or even non-existant, but if you're pushing yourself hard and casting at the edges of your ability (high DC's) then you will very quickly tire to the point where it is impossible to do any further magic until you have rested.

Hope that helps shed some light

[Milskidasith]

Ah, so it's epic spells, but for everything.

Epic spellcasting is considered a broken system for a reason, and making all spells rely on such a thing makes balancing impossible. Not merely hard, but literally impossible.

Not only that, but with an increase in DC when you cast, it gets into truenamer levels of unworkability, though at least it *probably* doesn't also have something silly where the DC to cast all spells goes up two points every level.

[lesser_minion]

Ah, so it's epic spells, but for everything.

Epic spellcasting is considered a broken system for a reason, and making all spells rely on such a thing makes balancing impossible. Not merely hard, but literally impossible.

I'm not familiar with MCWoD, but I doubt that's a fair assessment. Epic Spellcasting is broken. It doesn't follow that every system where you can write your own spells and use a check to cast them is broken.

Not only that, but with an increase in DC when you cast, it gets into truenamer levels of unworkability, though at least it *probably* doesn't also have something silly where the DC to cast all spells goes up two points every level.

Again, I think you're still rejecting it out of hand based on experiences with an incompetently-designed system.

I doubt this could be pulled off with a character who isn't at least semi-competent without access to this kind of magic. But that doesn't make it impossible to pull off successfully. Even D&D can support characters with more than one set of options.

[erikun]

Epic spellcasting is considered a broken system for a reason, and making all spells rely on such a thing makes balancing impossible. Not merely hard, but literally impossible.

This, unfortunately.

The problem is not that such a system cannot work, it's that such a system cannot work in 3.5e D&D. Skills are much too easy to modify and influence, as you could easily have a +10 or possibly even a +15 on a skill check at level 1. Skill Focus, Magical Aptitude, masterwork and magical item bonuses, and other tricks can make the check absurdly high (or not).

Which is the big problem. What stardards are you setting for casting 9th level spells? If you are assuming full skill ranks, 18 Int + level increases + Helm of Intellect, Skill Focus, Magical Aptitude, +10 magical item, and synergy bonuses, then a DC 45 would be average for a 15th level spellcaster. If you remove the magical item and feats, then DC 30 becomes more reasonable. Take a look at the Truenamer for a (failed) attempt at a skill-based caster.

Also, Monte Cook's World of Darkness tends not to be very popular... anywhere. There are a few people who enjoy it, I'm sure, but most D&D players don't seem as interested in the WoD mechanics and most WoD players aren't interested in the d20 system.

[coffeedragon]

Also, Monte Cook's World of Darkness tends not to be very popular... anywhere. There are a few people who enjoy it, I'm sure, but most D&D players don't seem as interested in the WoD mechanics and most WoD players aren't interested in the d20 system.

OK, lots of input, some of it relevent, some I think not so much... Monte Cook's World Of Darkness IS d20 It is based on the White Wolf stuff, but mechanically it's a d20 game. I don't really see the relevance of how popular the game as a whole is? Or am I just missing something?

Personally I have no desire to play Monte's WOD as a stand alone campaign. However, the magic system just oozes potential to me.

Erikun, thanks for the explanation as to why the idea is flawed for a 3.5 setting. Even without the all the skill bonuses, it still makes mages very powerful, as in MCWOD they have to be able to go toe to toe with vampires, werewolves and demons.
I suppose I'm wanting a simplified version of 3.5... Pathfinder is heading in the right direction, but it looks like I may need to remove even more feats and things to get my desired mix just right.

The thing with a magic system like this is that the core mechanic is so versatile that you can afford to remove a lot of the feats and things that would normally be used to influence magic.

Milskidasith, I find your post harsh... but fair in light of the fact that i did state my intention to try this in a 3.5 setting . Having never played to epic levels I was unaware of the nature of epic spells. Thanks for the heads-up.

Lightningcat, I am dismayed to hear that combat will likely take just as long, but then if i can at least have fewer combats, maybe that's a good start - guess I'll have to try it out on some unsuspecting players and see

OK, so 3.5 is definately a no-go, what about other similar systems? Castles and Crusades? I've heard it's compatible, but haven't had a chance to peruse yet. Any other comments or suggestions?

[Set]

ENWorld Publishing (IIRC) had a product called Elements of Magic that had a similar modular magic system, where you started with a 'fire' effect, and then started adding modifiers to it like; range (close), extra burning, area effect (10 ft. burst), etc.

It was definitely more complex than the old Ars Magica system, which felt vaguely like that as well, but was designed to work pretty well within the d20 system (unlike Ars Magica).

Some mentions of the product;
At RPG.net
At DriveThru

[Altair_the_Vexed]

MCWoD's magic system is seriously exploitable - in a d20 modern game where we used it, the mage character utterly dominated the action. I did my best to stop him, with enforced time limits to the action so he couldn't rest up and reset his spell points too often, but even then, the mage could do crazy things like one-shot a yeti, raise the dead, or as an immediate action interrupt another PC being killed (to -20 or so) to heal them fully.
All this at about level 3.

Thing is, you can burn nearly all your spell points on huge spells and then recover spell points by casting spells to replenish your points.
It's also too easy to make spells outright killers. Increasing damage costs only 1 point per die - so a 20d6 attack is only +19 to the DC of a 1d6 attack.
You can deal that damage to a target you're familiar with anywhere on Earth with an increase to the DC, and you can buy off the DC with more spell points (which you can, of course, always replenish).

My (untried as yet) fixes for this areas follows:

• Limit spell costs to 0.5 times the daily allowance.
• Change the cost for increasing damage to increase by 1 per die, so that 1d6 costs 1, 2d6 costs 3, 3d6 costs 6, and so on.
• Don't allow the use of spells to replenish spell points, or seriously limit this use.

[For Valor]

A damage spell does 1d6 base damage (typed: Fire, Acid, Electric, Cold) with a DC 11. You can add +1d6 for +1 to the DC, to a maximum damage equal to your level. After that, it costs an extra +1 to the DC for each integer (# of dice - your level).

So at level 10, 10d6 fire damage is at a DC of 20, and 11d6 fire damage is at a DC of 22, while 12d6 is at a DC of 25.

It costs +3 DC to make the damage Sonic, Negative, or Positive (that's damaging positive, like the Ghaele's pew-pew lasers) energy damage, and +5 to make the damage untyped.

And you can't buy off the DC with spell points.

I've never played Monte Cook's aWoD (I've played Frank Trollman's version, which runs like SR), so I just pulled this out of my ass. How does it match up?

[coffeedragon]

My (untried as yet) fixes for this areas follows:

• Limit spell costs to 0.5 times the daily allowance.
• Change the cost for increasing damage to increase by 1 per die, so that 1d6 costs 1, 2d6 costs 3, 3d6 costs 6, and so on.
• Don't allow the use of spells to replenish spell points, or seriously limit this use.

Yeah, to my mind, using the magic to get more magic is like wishing for more wishes!
Certain things need to be beyond the ability of a human mage, including replenishing spell points via magic, creating life (only the gods and beings of similar power can pull that off) and of coursea nything else that comes up as broken
When you say "limit spell costs to 0.5 times the daily allowance" do you mean you reduce the components a mage gets per day to half the original amount?
I would also limit the dice factor of a single attack spell to no more than the mages level. E.g. a 5th level mage can't cast a dpell over 5d6 worth of damage.

To try and balance the mage with other d20 characters i would also ban any feats allowing reduced spell point cost as well as any feats or items that increase the mages Spellcraft check. Or allow them, but when used, they cause physical harm to the mage because his body and mind aren't ready for that kind of power yet.

It costs +3 DC to make the damage Sonic, Negative, or Positive (that's damaging positive, like the Ghaele's pew-pew lasers) energy damage, and +5 to make the damage untyped.

And you can't buy off the DC with spell points.

Not bad at all for something pulled out your ass

[CMG]

Hey Mr J... what are you up to with this WOD magic stuff... Whiterock was going to be an Old School dungeon crawl, with PFRPG... wasn't it...

Imagine the voice of the Windhoek Lager ads... "I'm watching you"...

And your avatar name is very distinctive...

[SgtDarkside]

*cough* *cough*

What's all this then ......

[Altair_the_Vexed]

...
When you say "limit spell costs to 0.5 times the daily allowance" do you mean you reduce the components a mage gets per day to half the original amount?
I would also limit the dice factor of a single attack spell to no more than the mages level. E.g. a 5th level mage can't cast a dpell over 5d6 worth of damage.

No - what I meant was that no single spell is allowed to cost more than half the base amount of spell points you get per day.
This limits casters to more level-appropriate spells - you can't burn off all your magic in one hit.

[jiriku]

This may seem an odd question, but why do your combats take so long? Against level-appropriate foes, both PCs and monsters generally drop after 1-3 full attacks in the games I see.

A critical hit table that involves additional dice rolls will certainly make your combats longer, not shorter. Accumulating penalties as you get wounded will also make combats longer, both because players must recalculate their bonuses and because characters hit less often and deal less damage, extending the fight. As the complexity of the system increases, combats will also get longer, because players will make mistakes, someone else will catch the mistake, and everything will stop for a moment while people figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

If you want combats to go by faster, they need to be more decisive. Generally that means that attacks need to deal more damage, monsters should have fewer hit points, and any special critical effects you create should heavily degrade the victim's defenses or just outright KO the poor guy. The Vitality Point system in Unearthed Arcana may be of some use to you -- I've found that it increases both player and monster fragility. Other options might include something like:

Crippling Injury: anyone who receives a critical hit has taken a crippling injury, and is considered flatfooted until the end of the encounter. The effect can be removed with a DC 15 Heal check as a full-round action, or with any form of magical healing of 2nd level or higher.
Massive Damage: instead of saving against death, anyone who sustains 50 or more hp of damage from a single attack is automatically stunned for one round with no save. If the attack also delivered a stunning effect (such as with the Stunning Fist feat), the durations stack.

However, I'd test changes like this carefully if I were you. If crits become too good, all of your players will switch to crit-monkey builds, which you may or may not find desirable.

(Note that these changes utilize existing game mechanics in new ways rather than creating new mechanics. This makes them easier to learn and use. Also note that they don't require additional rolls; Massive Damage actually eliminates a roll. This is key, because their purpose is to make fights shorter, so they must not add extra steps.)


As the DM, you can also control the pace of combat by avoiding the use of build elements and tactics that extend it, such as the Withdraw action, concealment, sniping, the Tumble skill, excessive optimization of enemy saves and AC, and spells like entangle, solid fog or evard's black tentacles that involve many rolls and reduce PC mobility or accuracy. Likewise, you can heavily optimize your monsters for accuracy and damage. Essentially, if everyone becomes a glass cannon, fights end more quickly.

[coffeedragon]

This may seem an odd question, but why do your combats take so long? Against level-appropriate foes, both PCs and monsters generally drop after 1-3 full attacks in the games I see.

To be honest, i'm not really sure why they take as long as they do. Maybe players are 'faffing around' taking too long to decide their action for the round, or maybe it's just that everyone has too many hitpoints and too high AC's - or some combo of the above...
In our current game, our DM has taken to pitting us against hordes of 'medium difficulty monsters' in favor of one or two heavy hitters because we're a 6-man (ok, 1 woman elf, 3 men, a gnome and a halfling) party of swashbucling death against single enemies
2 of our group are capable of taking down a level eqivalent foe in a round or two, but the rest of us aren't optimised for that.
Then add in battle extenders like healing, and you start to see how they can drag out...

A critical hit table that involves additional dice rolls will certainly make your combats longer, not shorter. Accumulating penalties as you get wounded will also make combats longer, both because players must recalculate their bonuses and because characters hit less often and deal less damage, extending the fight. As the complexity of the system increases, combats will also get longer, because players will make mistakes, someone else will catch the mistake, and everything will stop for a moment while people figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

I agree that additional rolls will extend combat length. I'm leaning more towards the 'glass cannon' approach with everyone having fewer Hp to speed combat up.
The crit effects are more of an atempt to make combat a bit more interesting than "I hit him, he hits me, i hit him, etc, etc until one of us dies from lack of Hp or from boredom"
I certainly don't want to rewrite any rules - any significant change impacts too many other factors in the game, but I'd love to see combat run faster, be more fun and have more consequences.

If you want combats to go by faster, they need to be more decisive. Generally that means that attacks need to deal more damage, monsters should have fewer hit points, and any special critical effects you create should heavily degrade the victim's defenses or just outright KO the poor guy. The Vitality Point system in Unearthed Arcana may be of some use to you -- I've found that it increases both player and monster fragility.

I quite like the Vtality system and I'm playing around with it to see how best to make it work

Other options might include something like:

Crippling Injury: anyone who receives a critical hit has taken a crippling injury, and is considered flatfooted until the end of the encounter. The effect can be removed with a DC 15 Heal check as a full-round action, or with any form of magical healing of 2nd level or higher.
Massive Damage: instead of saving against death, anyone who sustains 50 or more hp of damage from a single attack is automatically stunned for one round with no save. If the attack also delivered a stunning effect (such as with the Stunning Fist feat), the durations stack.

However, I'd test changes like this carefully if I were you. If crits become too good, all of your players will switch to crit-monkey builds, which you may or may not find desirable.

(Note that these changes utilize existing game mechanics in new ways rather than creating new mechanics. This makes them easier to learn and use. Also note that they don't require additional rolls; Massive Damage actually eliminates a roll. This is key, because their purpose is to make fights shorter, so they must not add extra steps.)


As the DM, you can also control the pace of combat by avoiding the use of build elements and tactics that extend it, such as the Withdraw action, concealment, sniping, the Tumble skill, excessive optimization of enemy saves and AC, and spells like entangle, solid fog or evard's black tentacles that involve many rolls and reduce PC mobility or accuracy. Likewise, you can heavily optimize your monsters for accuracy and damage. Essentially, if everyone becomes a glass cannon, fights end more quickly.

Thanks for all the input - it's much appreciated.

[coffeedragon]

Hey Mr J... what are you up to with this WOD magic stuff... Whiterock was going to be an Old School dungeon crawl, with PFRPG... wasn't it...

Imagine the voice of the Windhoek Lager ads... "I'm watching you"...

And your avatar name is very distinctive...

*cough* *cough*

What's all this then ......

Tsk tsk Mr C! AND SgtDarkie
They say assumption is the mother of all...<CENSORED>
Who said anything about MCWoD magic being used in Whiterock?! Besides, I very clearly stated in my Intro that the PLAYERS are limited to core PFRPG choices which by process of elimination means that I, THE DM am not limited in any way

Just trying to keep it interesting for you guys - fret not, it will be classic old school dungeon-crawling with stale beer (we'll raid Dean's fridge) and you can EVEN wear khaki shorts, a tie and a school blazer if it makes you feel better

ps, the avatar name is out of pure neccessity - if I try come up with something original, i'll forget it, my username and my password within a week and have to start all over again

[jiriku]

Something I use for briefer combat is to sort of blend the minion rules from D&D 4e with the NPC class design from Star Wars D20 (which is the original source for the Vitality Point system). In a nutshell:

Characters with NPC classes get no hit dice; they only have Wound Points = Con. I apply a similar rule as a template to monsters (which can get Conx2 or Conx4 for very large monsters). If I modify a creature this way, I generally reduce its CR by about 1/3. I also try to use this "minionizing template" on monsters that are simple to run and have basically only one combat tactic. The end result is that the monster is quite accurate and can hit hard for its CR, but falls down after one or two solid hits. You can really bulk up the size of your encounter groups this way, but the melee characters will chop through them like wheat, and the casters will burn them down easily with AoE spells. Fights that include large groups of minions are fierce and quick, because the minions can easily overwhelm the players if ignored, but drop quickly under even light attack.

[coffeedragon]

I also saw the wound point system in the Star Wars D20. I really liked a lot of systems from that game, including the skill checks on Force powers.
I'll definately give the 'Con only' for npc's a try.

[Aran Banks]

DC 12 for really minor effects (e.g. temp. Deafness):

DC 14 for lesser effects (temp. Blindness):

DC 16 for mediocre effects (perm. deafness):

etc, all the way up to SoD at DC 26 and "Just die" at DC 28-30.

[Baron Corm]

I think that Fax Celestis's sorceror would really interest you. It's almost exactly what you describe, except not skill-based. To be honest, I haven't read most of it, because it's kind of complicated, but the gist of it is that you build your own spells on the fly.