Oh No, I'm Nerfing Casters!

[Fouredged Sword]

The problem with skill checks is that you run into the Truenamer problem.

Skill checks are one of three things - Impossible, variably successful, or trivial. The problem is that the range that the skill check isn't ether impossible or trivial is 20 wide. That's the problem you are going to be grappling with. It is generally easy to have a larger than 20 point swing between optimized and unoptimized skill checks. Any DC high enough to still be variably successful for players who don't optimize that skill check is going to be trivial for players who do.

So I expect this sort of DC check on spells to be completely pointless to players who it most needs to restrain and completely frustrating for the players it doesn't.

If you make the check absolutely static with no ways for players to work around it or reduce in any way you are going to be denying a lot of player agency and this makes for an unfun game.

Honestly, I am going to recommend you implement one of the more tried and true solutions to caster supremacy. Play E6. Reduce spells of higher than 3rd level to rituals that require significant expense and time.

[Gnaeus]

Every creature and EVERY spell. I guess it isn't as obvious if you don't read through the whole thread.

So, if I'm casting Planar Binding, 3 days prior to the adventure (or teleport, or Animate Dead), I don't care about most of those results. Cleric heals the damage within 24 hours. I only care about the result where you can't cast again for days, and the paralysis result if we rolled a 1 and don't have another caster with the cure. And thats only for the nat 1 fumbles. A simple failure is "I take a cure light wounds charge or two or damage and recast next round". It only affects blasting and control because those are spells that are cast IN COMBAT. And most of the chart effects we don't care about if we aren't in combat. Buff builds don't care much, and minionmancy doesn't care at all.

There are also some chart results that are really bad only for fixed list casters. Especially the "you can't use this spell again for duration" results. If you are a T1, you just vary your attack spells. As in "No Fireball? Lightning Bolt! No Black Tentacles? Solid Fog!" For a sorcerer you could easily be barred from casting your best spells for days.

It also hits the basic fumble table problem. Which is that it disproportionately screws PCs over NPCs and leads to potential disasters. Because the NPC casters are mostly fights that they are narratively intended to lose. If they lose a bit faster, maybe it deprives the group of a good fight, but no real loss. Unless it is the BBEG for a big section of the campaign arc (which is also bad... Strahd casts a spell at you on round 1 and is now immobile for 24 hours. Hope that dispatching his still body is exciting) fumbles by enemy casters won't change fight outcomes at all. A PC is going to be rolling for failed casts multiple times per day, and a bad roll in a close fight could easily lead to TPK or at least player death. Now, I'm odd, and actually enjoy player death (because I can make a new PC). But I at least want my deaths to be a result of a player error or a tense fight, rather than a fumble table. A typical sorcerer 10 will be fumbling once on average every other day, and only in fights where he feels a need to use powerful spells, meaning any combat fumble is potentially disastrous (unless, again, he respeccs to avoid ever casting high level spells in combat, only outside combat, a generally more optimized approach).

Do spell completion items trigger checks? If yes, the ones who are really hurt are UMD types like rogues, because wands are typically minimal caster level, so will always be more expensive or risk issues. If no, you have Harry Potterized your combats, because the easy way around it is to craft a wand or staff for your combat spells. Which again, mostly just hurts blasters, the least optimized casters, because the haste from a stick is about as good as a cast haste, but the fireball is not.

[The_Snark]

Thought #1: The true power of a wizard is his versatility.

Suggestion: Limit his versatility.

I think this is one of the most promising avenues of restricting casters, although it's also one of the most difficult. I'm not sure I like the skill idea - as someone above me just mentioned, the Truenamer illustrates some of the issues with that. You could maybe write a good skill-based magic system, but I think you'd have to do it from the ground up, with the power of spells scaling based on your result rather than being a binary "if you hit the DC you cast the spell, if you don't nothing happens" check.

My preferred solution is slightly simpler: ban wizards. And sorcerers, and any full caster whose spell list is too broad and vaguely defined. The Generic Magic-User who can do just about anything is the enemy, here: it gives full casters immense power and far more flexibility than non-casters. My model classes here are the beguiler and the dread necromancer - specialist classes, powerful within their niche, but with a much more limited toolset than the traditional wizard.

The obvious problem here is that we don't have nearly enough classes like that to cover all the magical archetypes a player might want. Just looking at the schools of magic, the beguiler handles enchantment and illusion, the dread necromancer is necromancy (obviously), and the warmage kind of covers evocation (although not very well); that leaves abjuration, conjuration, divination, and transmutation all lacking in access. (I don't think classes should necessarily correspond one-to-one with a school of magic, but it's a starting point.) Either you* have to write several classes of your own to cover the remaining territory, or you hack something together where you let people play wizards and sorcerers but they only get to pick 2-3 schools of magic. While the latter is much easier, it's also less satisfying on the player end: "you can play an illusionist wizard, but you have to ban 5 schools of magic" feels punishing, whereas "here's the beguiler class, its spell list is way more limited than a wizard but you get interesting perks and powers to compensate" is more of a give-and-take. And then you need to figure out what to do with the divine casters; the cleric probably needs to be chopped up into 2-3 different classes as well, but the archetypes that compose itare much less intuitive to me than they are for arcane magic, and the druid is borderline (it has a tighter theme than clerics and wizards, but "nature" is still awfully broad and there are so many spells printed)...

*Or you use someone else's work. I think I've seen at least one project like this undertaken on these forums, but I can't recall details.

Anyway. I don't know that this translates to anything easily usable; the above is me musing about how an ideal rework would look rather than offering anything actionable. But I think restricting spell access is worth thinking about. D&D's Generic Wizard, whose powers could theoretically include almost anything, is a really hard concept to balance.

[Gnaeus]

I think this is one of the most promising avenues of restricting casters, although it's also one of the most difficult. I'm not sure I like the skill idea - as someone above me just mentioned, the Truenamer illustrates some of the issues with that. You could maybe write a good skill-based magic system, but I think you'd have to do it from the ground up, with the power of spells scaling based on your result rather than being a binary "if you hit the DC you cast the spell, if you don't nothing happens" check.

My preferred solution is slightly simpler: ban wizards. And sorcerers, and any full caster whose spell list is too broad and vaguely defined. The Generic Magic-User who can do just about anything is the enemy, here: it gives full casters immense power and far more flexibility than non-casters. My model classes here are the beguiler and the dread necromancer - specialist classes, powerful within their niche, but with a much more limited toolset than the traditional wizard.

The obvious problem here is that we don't have nearly enough classes like that to cover all the magical archetypes a player might want. Just looking at the schools of magic, the beguiler handles enchantment and illusion, the dread necromancer is necromancy (obviously), and the warmage kind of covers evocation (although not very well); that leaves abjuration, conjuration, divination, and transmutation all lacking in access. (I don't think classes should necessarily correspond one-to-one with a school of magic, but it's a starting point.) Either you* have to write several classes of your own to cover the remaining territory, or you hack something together where you let people play wizards and sorcerers but they only get to pick 2-3 schools of magic. While the latter is much easier, it's also less satisfying on the player end: "you can play an illusionist wizard, but you have to ban 5 schools of magic" feels punishing, whereas "here's the beguiler class, its spell list is way more limited than a wizard but you get interesting perks and powers to compensate" is more of a give-and-take. And then you need to figure out what to do with the divine casters; the cleric probably needs to be chopped up into 2-3 different classes as well, but the archetypes that compose itare much less intuitive to me than they are for arcane magic, and the druid is borderline (it has a tighter theme than clerics and wizards, but "nature" is still awfully broad and there are so many spells printed)...

*Or you use someone else's work. I think I've seen at least one project like this undertaken on these forums, but I can't recall details.

Anyway. I don't know that this translates to anything easily usable; the above is me musing about how an ideal rework would look rather than offering anything actionable. But I think restricting spell access is worth thinking about. D&D's Generic Wizard, whose powers could theoretically include almost anything, is a really hard concept to balance.

Probably easier is to make spells have prerequisites. Mostly other spells, but also potentially feats, attributes, etc. You want Overland Flight? Take Fly, Levitate, Gust of Wind and Feather Fall. Then just limit Cleric/wizard spells known from All to Some appropriate number. The more OP the spell for its level, the more prereqs it needs. The theming will follow from the prereqs.

[RandomPeasant]

It only affects blasting and control because those are spells that are cast IN COMBAT. And most of the chart effects we don't care about if we aren't in combat. Buff builds don't care much, and minionmancy doesn't care at all.

Basically, when you're proposing a caster nerf, you should ask yourself "does this make the Warmage worse". If it does, your nerf is probably a bad idea, because the Warmage is at a power level that's fine.

There are also some chart results that are really bad only for fixed list casters. Especially the "you can't use this spell again for duration" results. If you are a T1, you just vary your attack spells. As in "No Fireball? Lightning Bolt! No Black Tentacles? Solid Fog!" For a sorcerer you could easily be barred from casting your best spells for days.

It's not even really fixed-list casters, it's specifically Sorcerers. A Warmage has ten different 4th level spells they could reasonably use in combat. That's really quite a lot, their issue is just that more than half of them are Orb spells and almost all of them are damage spells, so they don't have that much versatility in practice. But if you randomly lock them out of orb of fire, they can just use orb of sound or orb of cold and be basically as effective. But half the time a Sorcerer has literally one top-level spell, so rolling the wrong mishap is going to make them dramatically less useful.

A typical sorcerer 10 will be fumbling once on average every other day, and only in fights where he feels a need to use powerful spells, meaning any combat fumble is potentially disastrous (unless, again, he respeccs to avoid ever casting high level spells in combat, only outside combat, a generally more optimized approach).

There's also the related issue that fumbles will happen more often to people you would expect to be experts, because they cast spells more often. An apprentice Wizard who casts one or two spells per day fumbles much more rarely than an archmage who's been casting spells for decades, but casts dozens of spells each day.

You could maybe write a good skill-based magic system, but I think you'd have to do it from the ground up, with the power of spells scaling based on your result rather than being a binary "if you hit the DC you cast the spell, if you don't nothing happens" check.

I'm quite skeptical that you can write a good skill-based magic system. The basic problem is this: either your skill check has a predictable correlation with your level (in which case your "skill-based" magic is a level check with extra steps and no different from any other form of magic) or your skill check does not have a predictable correlation with your level (in which case your skill-based magic is broken in some direction or other). Skill-based magic systems are tempting, but in a level-based system they're just not a good idea.

My preferred solution is slightly simpler: ban wizards. And sorcerers, and any full caster whose spell list is too broad and vaguely defined. The Generic Magic-User who can do just about anything is the enemy, here: it gives full casters immense power and far more flexibility than non-casters. My model classes here are the beguiler and the dread necromancer - specialist classes, powerful within their niche, but with a much more limited toolset than the traditional wizard.

I would not ban the Sorcerer. It is true that you can build Sorcerers to do a wide variety of things, but any given Sorcerer does a very narrow set of things, which are known in advance of any particular encounter or adventure you might have to create for them. And the Sorcerer fills an important niche in the world of fixed-list casters, allowing you to build a character that fits into whatever arbitrary niche you haven't provided a fixed-list caster for. If someone wants some of the Dread Necromancer's SoDs that target Fort saves and also some of the Beguiler's SoDs that target Will saves (but not the Dread Necromancer's spells that create undead minions or the Beguiler's illusions, and so on), that's really fine. But you can't create a class for that and also for every other idiosyncratic combination of abilities people want. At a certain point you need a catch-all, and the Sorcerer does that well.

the warmage kind of covers evocation (although not very well)

The Warmage covers evocation about as well as the school can be covered. Evocation does direct damage, and the Warmage does direct damage. It doesn't get contingency, but honestly if you're trying to limit casters, reducing access to contingency is a fine thing to incidentally do (in the same way that for this purpose taking away the minionmancy aspects of the Beguiler and Dread Necromancer would be fine).

While the latter is much easier, it's also less satisfying on the player end: "you can play an illusionist wizard, but you have to ban 5 schools of magic" feels punishing,

I would argue that the issue is that it doesn't really feel punishing. Or at least not nearly as punishing as someone like OP probably wants. A Wizard with Illusion, Conjuration, and Transmutation (or even Illusion, Necromancy, and Abjuration) is not as powerful as one who has only banned Evocation and Enchantment, or one who has opted to be a generalist, but they're still quite powerful. The issue that you have to get at when doing something like this is that there are some schools (Conjuration, Transmutation, Necromancy) that can easily support an entire character or more (e.g. Transmutation plausibly gives you an Elementalist, some sort of buff-bot, and a shapechanger), while others (looking at you, Divination) don't have enough to carry a character without giving them some sort of secondary schtick. You need to do the work of designing (or finding someone else who designed) fixed-list casters, because the schools themselves aren't balanced in the first place. There's a reason a lot more people specialize in Transmutation or Conjuration than Evocation or Abjuration.

the cleric probably needs to be chopped up into 2-3 different classes as well, but the archetypes that compose itare much less intuitive to me than they are for arcane magic

The easy way to do the Cleric is to give them the core Cleric utility (healing, maybe some sort of smiting), and then have them pick up more Domains, but no regular spells. That does sort of leave the Healer holding the bag, but I rather suspect most people don't remember the Healer exists.

the druid is borderline (it has a tighter theme than clerics and wizards, but "nature" is still awfully broad and there are so many spells printed)

The Druid absolutely needs to be split up if your desire is to have narrow and thematic classes. Guy who commands beasts, guy who commands the elements, guy who controls plants, and guy who turns into animals are all plausibly different classes.

D&D's Generic Wizard, whose powers could theoretically include almost anything, is a really hard concept to balance.

If we're talking about game design in general, rather than OP's specific desire to make casters worse, I don't think that's really true. People can have whatever grab-bag of powers they want, the issue is that people want to have thematic classes, and that's easier to do if you're not dealing with "class that does whatever" as a core concept.

[Rynjin]

Probably easier is to make spells have prerequisites. Mostly other spells, but also potentially feats, attributes, etc. You want Overland Flight? Take Fly, Levitate, Gust of Wind and Feather Fall. Then just limit Cleric/wizard spells known from All to Some appropriate number. The more OP the spell for its level, the more prereqs it needs. The theming will follow from the prereqs.

This, to me, is another case of "balance by annoyance". You'd honestly be better off at that point bringing back Opposition Schools being banned Schools, because it has the same effect of limiting spell selection without introducing the "feelsbad" mechanic of needing to take garbage spells just to get access to the good ones.

This is how martials are "balanced" too, and it suuuuuucks. Why replicate a design flaw?

[RandomPeasant]

It also does not remotely sound easier to me. Do you know how many damn spells there are? You want to go through all of those and give them prerequisites? There are also issues where high level spells don't really have plausible low-level prerequisites (what's the 1st level spell that grows up to be time stop), or low levels spells don't really have plausible high-level versions (what 9th level spell am I setting myself up for with comprehend languages). I think it is much easier to churn out a couple of Warmage-alikes for the schools that didn't get one if you want to encourage people to play specialized casters. That model works, and it scales reasonably well.

[pabelfly]

The Bard has a good skill-based casting system in that its special abilities solely based on skill ranks, and they are really tightly-controlled. If we're talking about skill-based casting systems, I'd be using Bard as a starting point.

[King of Nowhere]

every one of us has a different idea of how to balance casters, and every one of us uses some form of it at their tables.
but if every one of us tell the OP to do something different, it's no good. just because it works for our table, it would not work for others. caster balance is extremely specific, because the problem is different at different tables.

regarding the OP idea, yes, it does run the risk of running into grod's law. rolling fumbles once is fun, rolling fumbles all the time is annoying.
that said, that solution can work very well if one goes for the feeling of "magic is dangerous". because yes, it does justify how the wizard blows up his tower every once in a while, and how the people may distrust magic as a result. so I'd say yes, for the purpose of worldbuilding it works wonderfully.
for the purpose of limiting casters, it probably works much more poorly. failures are rare, true fumbles are even rarer, and there's almost no downside to using magic in downtime to advance the plot.
if you and your players want to adventure in such a world.

in any case, rpg is too complicated to predict in advance. i say that the only way to test and refine an idea is to play it. so by all means, go ahead and playtest. and be ready to make adjustments on the fly. this is how I always achieved balance... damn, I said stop trying to force our own solutions on the OP, and I've done it myself!

[RandomPeasant]

The Bard has a good skill-based casting system in that its special abilities solely based on skill ranks, and they are really tightly-controlled. If we're talking about skill-based casting systems, I'd be using Bard as a starting point.

What the Bard is doing is exactly "the skill is just a layer of obfuscation in front of a level-based system". Your level caps the maximum number of skill ranks you can have in Perform, and no Bard is going to take less than that, so functionally what you have is the same as Bards getting Perform for free, less skill points, and music at different levels. Encouraging Bards to have a specific skill is compelling flavor, and if you wanted to do things like "Evokers are good at Intimidate, Diviners are good at Gather Information" that would be fine, but it's not "skill-based" in any real sense.

that said, that solution can work very well if one goes for the feeling of "magic is dangerous". because yes, it does justify how the wizard blows up his tower every once in a while, and how the people may distrust magic as a result. so I'd say yes, for the purpose of worldbuilding it works wonderfully.

If you want magic to feel dangerous, I think you want something more like Shadowrun's Drain mechanics. Randomly getting hosed by iterative probability does not produce a satisfying feeling of "danger". But if there is a predictable level of injury you take from using powerful magic, I think that works well.

I also disagree that you need "magic sometimes blows up on you" to explain Wizarding research accidents. It's not surprising that a demon-based research project blows up, it's surprising when it doesn't.

[pabelfly]

What the Bard is doing is exactly "the skill is just a layer of obfuscation in front of a level-based system". Your level caps the maximum number of skill ranks you can have in Perform, and no Bard is going to take less than that, so functionally what you have is the same as Bards getting Perform for free, less skill points, and music at different levels. Encouraging Bards to have a specific skill is compelling flavor, and if you wanted to do things like "Evokers are good at Intimidate, Diviners are good at Gather Information" that would be fine, but it's not "skill-based" in any real sense.

Sure, but the alternative with a skill check system like Truenamer's is that it's completely dependent on allowed sources, allowed resources, and player optimization ability, which makes it impossible to get the skill check DCs right.

[Gnaeus]

Sure, but the alternative with a skill check system like Truenamer's is that it's completely dependent on allowed sources, allowed resources, and player optimization ability, which makes it impossible to get the skill check DCs right.

Thats a good point. I'm reasonably certain I can make a Truenamer that hits the DCs to use his abilities. But if I want to discuss Quicken on a Truenamer (a +20 check DC), I can't reliably show that in a campaign neutral way without having discussions about custom skill items and item familiars and organizations and what is the relative optimization level of each of those things. I think that in most games, or at least most games that are inhabited by people who read things on forums, it's still pretty doable. But the route to get there would vary by what individual DMs thought was cheesy.

[pabelfly]

Thats a good point. I'm reasonably certain I can make a Truenamer that hits the DCs to use his abilities. But if I want to discuss Quicken on a Truenamer (a +20 check DC), I can't reliably show that in a campaign neutral way without having discussions about custom skill items and item familiars and organizations and what is the relative optimization level of each of those things. I think that in most games, or at least most games that are inhabited by people who read things on forums, it's still pretty doable. But the route to get there would vary by what individual DMs thought was cheesy.

Actually meeting the checks is worse than you think. Let's assume you start with an 18 from rolls/point buy, get regular wealth by level, and get access to Amulet of Truespeak and Headband of Intelligence, which is the level of optimization expected of Truenamer without going outside of core and Tome of Magic.

Spoiler: Truepeak Check Maths

Show

Level 1
Ranks – 4
Skill Focus (Truespeak) – 3
Intelligence – 5 (assumes 18 from stats with a +2 INT race)

Total – 12 (DC is 17 for a level 1 opponent)

Level 5
Ranks – 8
Skill Focus (Truespeak) – 3
Lesser Amulet of Truespeak – 5
Intelligence – 5

Total – 21 (DC is 25 for a level 5 opponent)

Level 10
Ranks – 13
Skill Focus (Truespeak) – 3
Amulet of Truespeak – 10
Intelligence – 8 (+2 from levels, +4 from an Intelligence item)

Total – 32 (DC is 35 for a level 10 opponent)

Level 15
Ranks – 18
Skill Focus (Truespeak) – 3
Amulet of Truespeak – 10
Intelligence – 8 (+3 from levels, +6 from an Intelligence item)

Total – 39 (DC is 45 for a level 15 opponent)

Level 20
Ranks – 23
Skill Focus (Truespeak) – 3
Amulet of Truespeak – 10
Intelligence – 10 (+4 from levels, +6 from an Intelligence item)

Total – 46 (DC is 55 for a level 20 opponent)

The DCs are obviously worse against higher-level opponents, which is ironic since you'll want to use your utterances against harder enemies the most.

The obvious response to this is to adjust the DC of the skill check, but given that the difference between the expected DC and the achievable skill check can vary quite a bit by level, it's hard to come up with a reasonable formula to counter this. Unless you want a class whose difficulty in casting varies quite a bit throughout his lifespan.

Bard does it better - ranks is a much better system and it's much easier to work with one expected skill check number at each level that is extremely difficult to change.

[RandomPeasant]

Sure, but the alternative with a skill check system like Truenamer's is that it's completely dependent on allowed sources, allowed resources, and player optimization ability, which makes it impossible to get the skill check DCs right.

But that's exactly my point. There are two failure modes. One is that the "skill-based" part of your system is just a formality. That's what happens with the Bard. It's true that the Bard "needs" skill ranks to unlock his abilities, but that's not functionally any different from just getting the abilities on level-up, because "do I want to have all the abilities I am supposed to have at this level" is not a real choice. The other is that (because skill checks in D&D can vary so widely with optimization) you end up with a class that varies unrecognizably in performance between tables. That's what happens with the Truenamer. If your 20th level Truenamer makes the bare minimum investment in Truespeak, the can find themselves virtually (or actually, depending on just how bare your minimum is) unable to effect a CR 20 monster. Conversely, if you pull out all the stops, you can have a character that can Quicken a given Utterance a double-digit number of times each day. There's no way to get to game balance when that's the kind of variation you're looking at before even asking what abilities actually do. Which is why I think it is structurally impossible to have skill based magic where A) the skill is a meaningful part of how the character works and B) the magic is remotely balanced in a level-based system.

[Quertus]

Which is why I think it is structurally impossible to have skill based magic where A) the skill is a meaningful part of how the character works and B) the magic is remotely balanced in a level-based system.

How about if you’re playing 2e D&D, where it’s a level-based game, but your skills don’t improve as you level?

[Darg]

A skill based casting system could work if it were tied directly to the skill instead of a class. The class could instead be based around improving/mitigating/benefiting from the skill.

[pabelfly]

A skill based casting system could work if it were tied directly to the skill instead of a class. The class could instead be based around improving/mitigating/benefiting from the skill.

But Truenaming is already fairly dysfunctional as a skill-based casting system, we've seen the multiple ways in which it's flawed as a concept. Moving it away from a class wouldn't change the inherent problems it has.

[King of Nowhere]

If you want magic to feel dangerous, I think you want something more like Shadowrun's Drain mechanics. Randomly getting hosed by iterative probability does not produce a satisfying feeling of "danger". But if there is a predictable level of injury you take from using powerful magic, I think that works well.

actually, it's the reverse. if the level of injury is predictable, then magic is not dangerous. it is simply something that you have to account for. predictability kills danger. mixing liquid oxygen and hydrogen and throwing sparks in the mix is terribly dangerous, and yet because it is also predictable we use the reaction to propel rockets into space. especially if you get damage that can magically healed, adventurers become desensitized to that (both the player and the character).

that said, such unpredictability may not be desirable for a game. also, i have no idea what shadowrun is, so I may be getting some wrong vibe. but if you want your players to feel danger, you have to throw in some unpredictability. otherwise they'll just find some way to overcome the danger.

I also disagree that you need "magic sometimes blows up on you" to explain Wizarding research accidents. It's not surprising that a demon-based research project blows up, it's surprising when it doesn't.

that may work for the world at large. however, if the magic is reliable, then the players will know all about optimizing stuff so that their own demon-based research project works smoothly. so when you narrate that the wizard blew himself up or got his soul eaten, they will not think "magic is dangerous and unreliable". no, they will think "this guy was a total noob. he should have done x y and z and he'd be fine"

all those are perfectly fine options, but they are not quite the same thing as establishing "magic is dangerous for you too". it all comes down to the tone you want to have.

[RandomPeasant]

How about if you’re playing 2e D&D, where it’s a level-based game, but your skills don’t improve as you level?

Well then your skill bonus would not be correlated with your level, and you would be left with a reality where there was some level at which the mechanical effect the skill produced was not appropriate in one direction or another.

A skill based casting system could work if it were tied directly to the skill instead of a class. The class could instead be based around improving/mitigating/benefiting from the skill.

I don't understand how you think changing where abilities come from changes whether the resultant total combination of abilities is balanced or not. We don't have to get into all this complicated "what if we did it this way" stuff, the basic question is this: can you design a system where you can have either a +15 bonus or a +50 bonus where having either of those bonuses is balanced? Because it seems to me that the only real way to do that is something like "you are rolling against DC 10", which is right back to "skill-based" not mattering as a descriptor.

actually, it's the reverse. if the level of injury is predictable, then magic is not dangerous.

I suppose it depends what you mean by "dangerous", but "this physically harms you when you use it" does a very good job of indicating that something is dangerous to use. It may be possible to travel safely in the Elemental Plane of Fire by taking appropriate precautions, but I don't think anyone would claim that the fire world where everything is on fire all the time is not dangerous.

that may work for the world at large. however, if the magic is reliable, then the players will know all about optimizing stuff so that their own demon-based research project works smoothly.

Adding a random component doesn't mean you can't optimize things to a point of safety, it just means you have to optimize more to reach a point of safety. If magic circle + dimensional anchor will let you safely bind any demon, you just do that and are safe. But if those spells will sometimes fail and require you to have security on-site, it doesn't mean you can't do research safely. It just means you have to have security on site.

[enderlord99]

Nerfing casters is fine, as long as you make it clear ahead of time exactly how you're doing so. Knowing the rules (including your houserules) is not cheating, and you need to keep that in mind.

[Quertus]

a) Well then your skill bonus would not be correlated with your level, b) and you would be left with a reality where there was some level at which c) the mechanical effect the skill produced was not appropriate in one direction or another.

A) with you so far

C) ah, what if the list of effects you were allowed to attempt in the first place was bound to level?

B) at that point, why would there be levels where the effects the skill produced were inappropriate?

Now, I can maybe answer “B”, especially in the context of this thread: b1) a chance to fail at casting Magic Missile *may* be possible to balance at 1st level, but will that still be balanced at 20th level; b2) it just “feels wrong” for the 20th level Wizard to not be better at Magic Missile than the 1st level character.

But here’s the thing: it’s not like vanilla Magic Missile is exactly a “balanced” contribution from a 20th level Wizard already - at least, not at any table I’ve played at.

Also, 20th level Wizards *aren’t* better than 1st level casters at most spells in most editions of D&D already. The level of the guy casting Sleep doesn’t change how potent the spell is - it doesn’t suddenly start affecting whole armies, or dragons, or undead.

So, if there’s already so many vectors in which the Wizard just isn’t getting better with their spells, why, when a new vector is introduced, does it feel necessary for the Wizard to improve in that vector as they level?

And why would “apprentice spells” need to feel balanced from an Archmage?

[Ryuken]

I never used it, but the vitalizing spell variant from UA always seemed to be a nice mechanical way to replicate a lot of what's written in fiction. Uses spell points and fatigue to put a damper on casting many/high level spells in a short period of time. Maybe some of that can be adapted for your table. May not hold back the full casters as much as you want, but makes the player really consider casting that second cone of cold or spamming magic missile if keeling over from exhaustion changes the encounter dynamic.

[paladinn]

The best way to "nerf" casters: use the 5e casting system. Spell effects are limited by the level of the spell slot used; no more 15d6 effects. At the same time, casters have more flexibility as all casters are "spontaneous."

IMO it's a win-win

[Darg]

But Truenaming is already fairly dysfunctional as a skill-based casting system, we've seen the multiple ways in which it's flawed as a concept. Moving it away from a class wouldn't change the inherent problems it has.

Skills inherently can fail based on conditions and chance. That is how skills work in 3.5. Failing a spot/listen check can be just as or even more devastating than failing a truespeak check. That's just how it goes. The reason I mention making the skill its own thing is to simply keep that interaction while one can have the class remove the fumble where pertinent and improve the capability of the skill. The point that I was making is that it's completely possible to have a skill based casting system with a class built around it. As written, truenamer is the car with truespeak being the key that allows it to go anywhere. My thought is that the skill should be the car + key while the truenamer overhauls it to symbolize specialization and expertise around the skill based system. Basically it's ok for the skill to fumble, but it's crap for the class itself to have built in extra fumble.

I don't understand how you think changing where abilities come from changes whether the resultant total combination of abilities is balanced or not. We don't have to get into all this complicated "what if we did it this way" stuff, the basic question is this: can you design a system where you can have either a +15 bonus or a +50 bonus where having either of those bonuses is balanced? Because it seems to me that the only real way to do that is something like "you are rolling against DC 10", which is right back to "skill-based" not mattering as a descriptor.

It's not about where they come from. It's about maintaining the mechanical theme of what a skill is as portrayed in 3.5 while providing a class built to exploit that skill. Skills are designed to be able to fail, whether by chance or by lack of investment it doesn't matter. However, in large part an additional point of failure for the bread and butter of a class just stinks. As has been said it ranges from pointless to unnecessary. At present I do think it's possible to design a system where a wide range in optimization can be balanced on both ends of a wide spectrum and maintain the mechanical reliance established in ToM. It would require a total revamp of the entire truenaming system to implement. Then again, I'm not really motivated to build an entire system I'll likely never see the use of or profit from. My thought is that the class(es) would provide fumble protection at rate of skill rank progression and give extra benefits to expand the usage of the skill. The skill would have a fleshed out augment system reminiscent of how bull rushing works (replaces higher level versions of utterances and with testing a form of diminishing returns could allow optimizers to benefit, but not totally outstrip less optimized players) and increased variety and functionality of utterances.

[pabelfly]

Skills inherently can fail based on conditions and chance. That is how skills work in 3.5. Failing a spot/listen check can be just as or even more devastating than failing a truespeak check. That's just how it goes. The reason I mention making the skill its own thing is to simply keep that interaction while one can have the class remove the fumble where pertinent and improve the capability of the skill. The point that I was making is that it's completely possible to have a skill based casting system with a class built around it. As written, truenamer is the car with truespeak being the key that allows it to go anywhere. My thought is that the skill should be the car + key while the truenamer overhauls it to symbolize specialization and expertise around the skill based system. Basically it's ok for the skill to fumble, but it's crap for the class itself to have built in extra fumble.

The problems with a skill-based casting system is that the performance of the spells is dependent on system mastery in a way that other casting systems aren't.

A Wizard casts a third-level spell, regardless of the ability of the person playing the Wizard.

Meanwhile, if we start doing skill checks on casting, whether you can cast or not depends on the player ability, allowed resources, and how much they are allowed to optimize. With Truenaming for example, from one extreme you have people that might not even get their spell off, to the opposite end where people just spam their spells all day without worrying about the Law of Sequence.

This doesn't seem like good game design to me.

[Quertus]

A Wizard casts a third-level spell, regardless of the ability of the person playing the Wizard.

3e Int 12 Wizard bags differ. AFB, but I suspect 2e Int 9 Wizard does, too.

And, even if they *can* cast 3rd level spells, an Int 13 Wizard throwing a DC 14 Fireball isn’t the same as a Tainted Sorcerer throwing a DC 50 Fireball - especially when they’re using Reserves of Strength and caster level boosters to be throwing 20d6 or 30d6 DC 50 Fireballs. Let alone the Wizard who has picked a better spell than Fireball.

So, no, even just “can cast 3rd level spells”, not all Wizards are created equal. Player > Build > Class.

[Gnaeus]

Actually meeting the checks is worse than you think. Let's assume you start with an 18 from rolls/point buy, get regular wealth by level, and get access to Amulet of Truespeak and Headband of Intelligence, which is the level of optimization expected of Truenamer without going outside of core and Tome of Magic.

Good to know thats the standard, and Barbarians don't get pounce, because it isn't in core + book they are in. Also, you missed 2 points, I have a masterwork item of truespeach. Also, you aren't using any kind of spells or items that can boost skill checks, despite many of them being core. Also, your high level truenamer will use wishes or tomes to boost stat like everyone else.

And if you raise that to a mid op, I get +10 for a custom skill item, +10 for paragnostic assembly. Maybe a bunch more from item familiar if I'm a risk taker or in a game where the culture thinks stealing the wizard spellbook is uncool. Autohitting the DCs isn't hard at mid op. The quicken DCs are more questionable, although obviously the devs thought they were doable, if they thought about truenamer at all.

[Darg]

The problems with a skill-based casting system is that the performance of the spells is dependent on system mastery in a way that other casting systems aren't.

A Wizard casts a third-level spell, regardless of the ability of the person playing the Wizard.

Meanwhile, if we start doing skill checks on casting, whether you can cast or not depends on the player ability, allowed resources, and how much they are allowed to optimize. With Truenaming for example, from one extreme you have people that might not even get their spell off, to the opposite end where people just spam their spells all day without worrying about the Law of Sequence.

This doesn't seem like good game design to me.

Counterpoint: warlocks, dragonfire adepts, and martial adepts exist so what is the issue in being able to cast all day or at the very least a long time?

A wizard relies heavily on system mastery too, it's just more intuitive. A wizard starting with 10 int isn't going to be able to do much for a while and less effective with saving throw spells compared to a wizard with 14+ int.

It's possible to not have skill failure or make it so you only have a chance to fail after so many uses per day. You're arguing about how it is as if it were the only way to design the system.

[pabelfly]

Good to know thats the standard, and Barbarians don't get pounce, because it isn't in core + book they are in. Also, you missed 2 points, I have a masterwork item of truespeach. Also, you aren't using any kind of spells or items that can boost skill checks, despite many of them being core. Also, your high level truenamer will use wishes or tomes to boost stat like everyone else.

And if you raise that to a mid op, I get +10 for a custom skill item, +10 for paragnostic assembly. Maybe a bunch more from item familiar if I'm a risk taker or in a game where the culture thinks stealing the wizard spellbook is uncool. Autohitting the DCs isn't hard at mid op. The quicken DCs are more questionable, although obviously the devs thought they were doable, if they thought about truenamer at all.

Have a look at the example Truename builds in Tome of Magic. When the people developing Tome of Magic said, "this is what we're going to publish," this is what they thought their Truenamers would have equipped when making their skill checks. Their exemplar Truenamer has a Truespeak check of 24 at level 9 (and is a... half-elf), so the combat starts with the DM using the default character only has about a 40% chance to hit an opponent at the same level.

Now, there are a bunch of ways to optimize so that the skill checks automatically succeed. You cite the Paragnostic Assembly, but remember that Complete Champion came out in May 2007 and Tome of Magic came out in March 2006. I'll go out on a limb here and say that maybe the original designers of Tome of Magic weren't thinking about the Paragnostic Assembly when working out the class. And you point out that custom competence items can be made, which is true, but it's not a ringing endorsement of the maths of skill checks when you need to custom-create an item to get the maths to work, or the quality of writing of the Tome of Magic section when they could have just included, I don't know, a few Rings of Truespeak and that +2 masterwork item you'd like to have next to the Amulet of Silver Tongue.

So, tl;dr: Truenamer wasn't properly playtested, the original calcs for Truespeak made no sense, and the idea of doing a skill-based casting system is still inherently flawed. Still, if you optimize the **** out of Truespeak, it can be a fun class.

Counterpoint: warlocks, dragonfire adepts, and martial adepts exist so what is the issue in being able to cast all day or at the very least a long time?

When you treat the Truenamer class like this (and I always do), you can have a lot of fun with the class. It's not designed that way, though, until you come up with a huge load of extra skill point bonuses to tack onto the class to trivialize the skill check.

[Gnaeus]

Have a look at the example Truename builds in Tome of Magic. When the people developing Tome of Magic said, "this is what we're going to publish," this is what they thought their Truenamers would have equipped when making their skill checks. Their exemplar Truenamer has a Truespeak check of 24 at level 9 (and is a... half-elf), so the combat starts with the DM using the default character only has about a 40% chance to hit an opponent at the same level.

Now, there are a bunch of ways to optimize so that the skill checks automatically succeed. You cite the Paragnostic Assembly, but remember that Complete Champion came out in May 2007 and Tome of Magic came out in March 2006. I'll go out on a limb here and say that maybe the original designers of Tome of Magic weren't thinking about the Paragnostic Assembly when working out the class. And you point out that custom competence items can be made, which is true, but it's not a ringing endorsement of the maths of skill checks when you need to custom-create an item to get the maths to work, or the quality of writing of the Tome of Magic section when they could have just included, I don't know, a few Rings of Truespeak and that +2 masterwork item you'd like to have next to the Amulet of Silver Tongue.

So, tl;dr: Truenamer wasn't properly playtested, the original calcs for Truespeak made no sense, and the idea of doing a skill-based casting system is still inherently flawed. Still, if you optimize the **** out of Truespeak, it can be a fun class..

So, 1. If we are going to base anticipated optimization on the example character stat blocks, there are many, many incompetent (or just illegal) classes. I would put quite a bit less weight on that than the fact that they obviously intended pcs to hit DC+20 checks. (Or just had no idea at all, and just made up numbers at random, which is also unfortunately plausible.)

2. I never said it was a well written class. I never said it didn't belong in T5. It is probably the second worst written class I have seen, only exceeded by a Kineticist. Clearly poorly playtested if at all, with way too many abilities that duplicate things a caster would have had many levels prior, often in a worse way.

3. Complete champion came out 4 years after core. So we on the forums therefore assume Spirit Lion totem doesn't exist?

4. I agreed with you that the math for skill based casting is wonky. That was, in fact, my point, was agreeing with you. The only thing I dispute is your math sheet suggesting that a truenamer optimized by a reasonably proficient player can't hit their basic DCs. Honestly, even at the OP levels you suggest, I think they are competitive with other similarly unoptimized low tier PCs. A badly built fighter can't solo most CR=APL encounters either. And your math is basically like a fighter that took Power attack and a level appropriate weapon and did nothing else in the next 19 levels.