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  1. - Top - End - #1
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    Default were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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

    Quote Originally Posted by rel View Post
    Some of the later 3.5 casters (the favoured soul comes to mind immediately) were designed to need two different mental stats.

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

    Since then the dual attribute caster idea hasn't seen much use and I think this is a shame because, implemented with some thought, it could help address the traditionally unbalanced nature of magic while keeping the 3.5 feel.
    It doesn't. It makes casters harder to play in a balanced way without effecting the upper levels of power at all, which is the opposite of good game design. A Charisma/Intelligence wizard is still going to be able to bind, teleport, and break reality apart. She just won't have enough constitution to survive in combat throwing fireballs and using leather armor.
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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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

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

    Magic is mostly for casters, but not totally useless for a non-caster, since it makes magic items like a Ring of Telekinesis work better.
    Last edited by icefractal; 2020-11-23 at 06:09 PM.

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

    Quote Originally Posted by rel View Post
    Some of the later 3.5 casters (the favoured soul comes to mind immediately) were designed to need two different mental stats.

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

    Since then the dual attribute caster idea hasn't seen much use and I think this is a shame because, implemented with some thought, it could help address the traditionally unbalanced nature of magic while keeping the 3.5 feel.
    Personally, I think that… "6 stat characters" put me more into the min-maxing, wargaming, "care about the stats" mode then the role-playing mode that I want to be in while playing an RPG.

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Tvtyrant View Post
    It doesn't. It makes casters harder to play in a balanced way without effecting the upper levels of power at all, which is the opposite of good game design. A Charisma/Intelligence wizard is still going to be able to bind, teleport, and break reality apart. She just won't have enough constitution to survive in combat throwing fireballs and using leather armor.
    And, following that logic, we can see that zero-casting-stat casters would be even more easily balanced. (Color blue to taste).

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

    There are three things that a caster's ability scores are used for: the 10+spell level hard requirement, save DCs, and bonus spells:
    • Favored soul, for example, has hard req + bonus spells on Cha, but DCs on Wis.
    • Spirit shamans have the same split, but the other way around: hard req and bonus spell on Wis, but DCs on Cha.
    • Archivists have a different split: hard req and DCs on Int, but bonus spells on Wis.
    • The Arcane Disciple feat (and Anyspell, technically, although there it's much less likely to matter) is similar: hard req and DCs on Wis, which are probably not your casting stats as an arcane caster.
    • The Justice of Weald and Woe (CoR 48) has the really exotic mechanic where they don't have a minimum ability score to cast spells, DCs and bonus spells are both off Wis, but their spell known is keyed off Int for the levels where they need bonus spells to have slots—which, okay, both of those are probably editing errors, but still.
    • There's this one Dragonlance book (Holy Orders of the Stars) that loves to use the split where the hard req is on Wis, but both DCs and bonus spells are on Cha.


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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

    Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post

    And, following that logic, we can see that zero-casting-stat casters would be even more easily balanced. (Color blue to taste).
    Yeah, attacking things in ways unrelated to what makes them powerful is a definite path to success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I like the idea of changing the stats up with the introduction of a dedicated magic stat but that is probably beyond the scope of this discussion.
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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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

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

    Magic is mostly for casters, but not totally useless for a non-caster, since it makes magic items like a Ring of Telekinesis work better.
    Mechanically, this reminds me of the old shadowrun chargen. Where you rank attributes, skills, money at chargen, but there is a place to rank magic which is either 0 for non mages or maxed for mages.

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

    Quote Originally Posted by Gnaeus View Post
    Mechanically, this reminds me of the old shadowrun chargen. Where you rank attributes, skills, money at chargen, but there is a place to rank magic which is either 0 for non mages or maxed for mages.
    Even in the newer Shadowrun editions, magic initiation kind of works like this, where mages and adepts max their Magic attribute at chargen and focus on their initiation after that almost to the exclusion of everything else. Because if there's one number that governs the potency of all the things you care about, well, you want that number to be as high as possible.

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

    Quote Originally Posted by sreservoir
    There are three things that a caster's ability scores are used for: the 10+spell level hard requirement, save DCs, and bonus spells:
    *snip examples*
    That said, I'm in the "it accomplishes nothing" camp, in that practically speaking it just means that the caster has to sacrifice either bonus spells or save DCs, and while that makes them marginally weaker when played the way the writers seem to have imagined, it does nothing to curb the things that actually need curbing.
    Well, it doesn't accomplish nothing; SADness is definitely noticeably better in play than MADness to the point that roguish types routinely go out of their way to be Dex-SAD, paladins routinely go out of their way to be Wis-SAD, eldritch blast-focused warlocks will go Dex-SAD and not take any invocations requiring saves at all, and so forth.

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

    ---

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

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

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

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

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

    EDIT: It just hit me that you might've meant the personality of a build rather than the personality of a character. Either way, I don't really see it.
    Last edited by Batcathat; 2020-11-24 at 05:22 PM.

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

    EDIT: It just hit me that you might've meant the personality of a build rather than the personality of a character. Either way, I don't really see it.
    They're talking about all casting being based on a hypothetical 7th stat called Magic. Then suddenly not only do wizards and sorcerers not have to be smart/charismatic, it's actively advantageous for them to sacrifice that in favor of pumping Magic.

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

    Quote Originally Posted by PoeticallyPsyco View Post
    They're talking about all casting being based on a hypothetical 7th stat called Magic. Then suddenly not only do wizards and sorcerers not have to be smart/charismatic, it's actively advantageous for them to sacrifice that in favor of pumping Magic.
    I get that. My point is that a wizard who doesn't have to be intelligent or a sorceror who doesn't have to be charismatic have more personality choices. Intelligence, wisdom and charisma all affect a character's personality (or should, anyway. I'm sure there are people who play a 3 INT and an 18 INT character the same way) and if magic power is independent of those, there's more freedom to pick your character's personality. And yes, obviously minmaxers would boost magic as much as they could but how is that different from them boosting some other casting stat?
    Last edited by Batcathat; 2020-11-24 at 06:10 PM.

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

    Imagine if for example stats gave no static passive bonuses to numbers, but you stat modifier corresponded to an X/day or X/encounter super ability like 'triple damage dealt', 'automatically pass a save', 'automatically dodge a single target attack', 'force anyone to reroll a die', 'add 30ft enemy or ally only AoE to an action', etc.
    Last edited by NichG; 2020-11-24 at 07:08 PM.

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

    Quote Originally Posted by Batcathat View Post
    I get that. My point is that a wizard who doesn't have to be intelligent or a sorceror who doesn't have to be charismatic have more personality choices. Intelligence, wisdom and charisma all affect a character's personality (or should, anyway. I'm sure there are people who play a 3 INT and an 18 INT character the same way) and if magic power is independent of those, there's more freedom to pick your character's personality. And yes, obviously minmaxers would boost magic as much as they could but how is that different from them boosting some other casting stat?
    The issue is that if Magic is an attribute then it's competing for stat points with the existing mental stats. When SAD casters max out their casting stat with a 18/14/12/10/10/10 stat line, they at least fall into the personality buckets of nerdy wizards, insightful clerics, dramatic bards, and so on, but if you add a Magic stat then that 18 goes into there (which doesn't provide any personality or roleplaying prompts) and the rest of their stat line is a very bland and un-prompt-ful 12/12/10/10/10/10 or whatever, regardless of casting class.

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

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

    At that point I'd think casters would have similar mental stats to non-casters: decent, but no usually maxed out. Although if this is 3.x, mental stats, Charisma in particular, are still the best at being added to lots of things.
    Honestly, just giving high point-buy totals does a lot to address the SAD/MAD disparity without changing the stats at all. If your party goes from 28 PB to something normally considered ridiculously high like 40 PB, the wizard doesn't care all that much that he went from 10/10/12/18/10/10 to 10/14/16/18/12/10, but the monk really appreciates that he went from 14/14/14/10/14/10 to 15/14/14/10/18/10. It's nowhere near parity, obviously, but it's definitely noticeable.

    Quote Originally Posted by NichG
    It gets away from D&D, but I like the idea of all classes being simultaneously MAD and SAD by having stats where picking one and going all in results in a viable - but different - build regardless of your class.
    It's not actually that far away from D&D--remember 3.0 psionics, where every discipline corresponded to a different key ability score and you had to track max powers known and power DCs separately for each one?

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

    Even sticking within the D&D framework and not changing how stats work, it would be interesting to see what classes that used a similar mechanic but avoided all the other...idiosyncrasies of 3.0 psionics might look like. Any classes based on spells or maneuvers could be modified for that easily by categorizing their stuff appropriately--I could definitely see a "wizard" class where focusing on Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, and Cha respectively gave you perks relating to Evocation, Illusion, Necromancy, Divination, Abjuration, and Enchantment, like throwing all the fixed-list casters in a blender and letting someone build their own, and the same for a "cleric" leaning Druid or Healer or Paladin, a "martial adept" leaning Crusader or Swordsage or Warblade, and so on--and forcing the blander martial classes to support six different styles would go a long way toward fixing the "barbarians and fighters are stupid grunts because sneaky skills are for rogues and wilderness skills are for rangers and..." thing that always plagues class rewrites.
    Last edited by PairO'Dice Lost; 2020-11-24 at 08:01 PM.
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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    Honestly, just giving high point-buy totals does a lot to address the SAD/MAD disparity without changing the stats at all. If your party goes from 28 PB to something normally considered ridiculously high like 40 PB, the wizard doesn't care all that much that he went from 10/10/12/18/10/10 to 10/14/16/18/12/10, but the monk really appreciates that he went from 14/14/14/10/14/10 to 15/14/14/10/18/10. It's nowhere near parity, obviously, but it's definitely noticeable.
    I like to do dice rolls. Roll 5 and use best 3. You roll 18 strength and 13 int for your wizard? No swapping. Just live with it and design your character around it.
    Last edited by Darg; 2020-11-24 at 08:11 PM.

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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

    That said the problem with these two previous lines is it can be overwhelming to the reader and new players. Thus you need to signal to the user these are secondary and tertiary abilities.
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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

    Quote Originally Posted by Darg View Post
    I like to do dice rolls. Roll 5 and use best 3. You roll 18 strength and 13 int for your wizard? No swapping. Just live with it and design your character around it.
    That assumes, of course, that in the general case (i.e. when a DM isn't forcing you to do otherwise) in a scenario where you're forced to roll your stats in order you'd pick your class first and then live with whatever stats you get, as opposed to rolling your stats first and going with a class that fits those. Every D&D edition has worked the latter way for a reason.

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

    Quote Originally Posted by rel View Post
    Interesting, thanks for sharing that.
    I think that rule could benefit from an additional rule to buff up the non-casters granting them extra skill points or something similar.
    There were other experimental houserules in that game as well, just none that involved shuffling around martial classes' stat dependence so they weren't really relevant here. As with anything involving class balance, a single change to one class or one type of class won't fix things in a vacuum.

    As ever with such rule changes, the problem of what to do with the gishes and other half casters is a tricky one...
    The trickiness depends on your preferred power levels, what the party is playing, and suchlike. For a few gish-focused PbPs I've run around here, I've just straight up said "Everyone gets one 18 in a physical stat, one 18 in a mental stat, and X point buy for the rest of the stats" and it's worked out pretty well...but of course that doesn't work if a DM thinks that 28 PB is the only acceptable point buy value or half the party wants to play monks and paladins or whatever.
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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    The issue is that if Magic is an attribute then it's competing for stat points with the existing mental stats. When SAD casters max out their casting stat with a 18/14/12/10/10/10 stat line, they at least fall into the personality buckets of nerdy wizards, insightful clerics, dramatic bards, and so on, but if you add a Magic stat then that 18 goes into there (which doesn't provide any personality or roleplaying prompts) and the rest of their stat line is a very bland and un-prompt-ful 12/12/10/10/10/10 or whatever, regardless of casting class.
    Sure, but a character with INT 18 doesn't have more personality or a more interesting personality than a character with 10 or 5 and if all wizard "have" to have high intelligence that seems like it limits their potential personalities more than if they could have any intelligence and still be wizards.

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

    1. SR6E can catch fire and die horribly
    Thank you

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

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

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

    Obviously, this is only a small part of how a character is portrayed. A good role player could probably play a character with high intelligence in a dozen different ways and a bad role player might play their character the same regardless of stats. But while having a separate magic stat would probably cause a lot of other issues, I do think it could help in this regard.
    For good and experienced roleplayers it doesn't matter much, certainly. For those who use "Well, my character has, like, 12 Wis, so she'd probably..." as a roleplaying prompt, though, it's a choice between three general stereotypes if using mental stats for casting stats or one general stereotype if using a magic stat.

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

    Quote Originally Posted by Xervous View Post
    1. SR6E can catch fire and die horribly
    Thank you
    Here, toss me your 6e books, I'll throw them on the bonfire I made out of my 5e books.

    Swing back to D&D. You start out with presumably point buy, but then all progression is unweighted flat +N. Of course you’re going to want to focus on as few as possible. The incentives that existed at character creation for diversifying stats just aren’t present during progression.
    Yeah, D&D is very lucky that that kind of supralinear-vs.-linear-build-currencies issue is limited to ability score generation and not, like, half of a character. And it's not just Shadowrun that suffers from that problem, obviously, other game systems like World of Darkness or In Nomine or World of Darkness or GURPS or World of Darkness have it pretty bad too.

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

    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    For good and experienced roleplayers it doesn't matter much, certainly. For those who use "Well, my character has, like, 12 Wis, so she'd probably..." as a roleplaying prompt, though, it's a choice between three general stereotypes if using mental stats for casting stats or one general stereotype if using a magic stat.
    This is only true if only the highest stat is the only possible role playing prompt. Yes, high intelligence has some stereotypes to chose from as inspiration but not only does is that still a possibility with a magic stat — even aside from role-playing reasons high intelligence, wisdom or charisma would presumably still have a use in this hypothetical magic stat system — there are also the stereotypes associated with low or average intelligence (okay, probably not many stereotypes associated with average intelligence but still). Thus, the player have a wider variety of role-playing prompts rather than just those of high INT (or whatever their "normal" casting stat is).

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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    Default Re: were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

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

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

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

    *As opposed to reading char-op guides online. For example, if your players are getting their wizard running advice from Complete Mage, it's ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If they get wizard running advice from the batman wizard guide it's 😮, but still basically fine. If they get wizard running advice from Tippy, I can't help you, no one can.
    Last edited by blackwindbears; 2020-11-26 at 12:05 PM.

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