Everyone CAN use a sword - it’s just they can’t use them well (take a -4 non-proficiency penalty) without the proficiency, and under 3.0, Druids would lose their class abilities for a day if they used any sword other than a Scimitar.
Actually, that’s not correct. A Wizard can use a sword (and kinda effectively as well if he puts some work into it) just not very well… They get a substantial penalty.
My biggest gripe with DnD is that there are no interesting ability. As a matter of fact characters have three abilities:
Attack: Roll high, deal damage
Skill: Roll high, do something
Feat: you know this one
Magic: Roll hgh, kill stuff instantly (let’s face it, that’s what nearly everyone uses it for)
Not many people actually put anything interesting into their characters, no unusual abilities or nothing, since the system encourages people to reduce their characters to a few +'s. feats, thus far, are the best way of making PC’s unique, though WotC and most d20 producers are very, very unimaginitive in using them. Sadly, people also mostly play in fashions that require nearly all of their skill points in certain areas (after paying for all the essentials, nobody has any left without very high Int)…
This leaves attack and magic. Attackiung is attacking. And the way d20 does it is not the most imaginitive method (though it could be)… Hence, you;ve got magic. And if you look, most of the best PrC’s in terms of being interesting add various magical capabilites to characters. Most of these actually suck (I’m a fighter except I give up 3 feats to cast one spell a day… WHOOOOOOO!!!111)… not very interesting…
And yes, I do think I can do better, and yes, I am in the process of publishing a couiple of things to correct this. The first open up many more multiclassing options for people so its not quite as arche-type restrictive… The second is a more comprehensive system: think Champions in d20…
Buy my stuff! 
D’oh! Of course you two are correct.
Yeah, it’s called Mutants and Masterminds, apparently.
I picked up Mutants and Masterminds : Crooks and the Annual yesterday - thanks, E-Sabbath.
You’re going to have an awfully hard time breaking out of that mold, if you consider “roll high, do something” to be only one restricted ability. And killing things instantly is far from the only purpose for magic: Most spells don’t do any damage at all. Ever hear of an illusionist, say?
Not sure what you’re talking about, here. First, that would be four “abilities,” not three, although I’m not sure how you’re defining the term.
Specifically, how else do you think combat should be resolved? Every other turn, you have to roll low to hit someone? Or is it that there aren’t any combat options other than “hit someone with a sword?” I’d argue that’s pretty much untrue: I haven’t yet been in a combat situation in 3.5 where I wanted to do something the rules didn’t cover, including things like stuffing a struggling halfling into a bag of holding, or using a spiked chain to trip a charging warhorse (Bad idea, BTW. Don’t try that one at home)
Same with skills. There’s a huge variety of skills, especially when you start looking at the modern d20 settings, and there’s very little overlap between them. They all function off the same mechanic (which is a good thing) but they allow for a fantastic amount of flexibility in both combat and role-playing situations.
Feats, I don’t know what you’re talking about at all. Virtually none of the feats require any sort of die roll to use, although a lot of them influence die rolls you’d be able to make even if you didn’t have the feat.
As for magic, there’re generally only a small handfull of damaging spells per level in the game, even less if you’re playing a druid or cleric. Yeah, if I’m playing a wizard, I load up on the maximized fireballs, because that’s a big part of their function in the game, but they’ve got a lot of other functionality, and clerics are (finally) every bit as useful as magic support, as opposed to magic artillery.
I think that says more about your gaming group than the game. Suffice to say it in no way reflects my gaming experience with the d20 system.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here at all. Especially the bit about giving up feats to cast spells. Huh?
You think multiclassing in 3.5 is too restrictive? Wow. What makes you feel that, exactly?
Good luck with your books.
Yet surprisingly dangerous…
Nah. Its along the same lines, but its not explicitly of one genre (though definitely leaning toward fantasy)… We intend to release a pan-dimensional sci-fi edition later.
No, sorry, that wasn’t what I meant. I was hammering out words and I wasn’t clear. Its not the mechanic that bothers me. I was irritated that the rules don’t encourage people to do more elaborate stuff. I keep seeing groups running around who do nothing but hit stuff. They don’t try anything interesting (except for the loonies in the party, who delight in insanity). And the rules don’t really encourage them to. So a truly brilliant pal o mine is
Yup. But I didn’t explain myself very well.
I agree with the basic rules. I don’t like the way WotC and most 3rd party companies are developing the system into campaign-specific material.
If you look at most of the combat-oriented PrC’s out there, they mostly have this: minor bonus to X in situation Z, and cast Y spell like ability 1/day. In exchange, they give up some fighter progression or whatnot. Deeply unimaginitive, IMHO. I mean, the only real difference in these PrC’s is which specific bonus you get. Why do I need 60 PrC’s which really have very little actual difference. Hence the point of point-buy systems.
If you are just playing with the basic material its not bad. But the multiclassing rules make little to no sense in a world with 7,000 PrC’s. FR alone has at least a hundred official ones.
It could happen in 2E, too: your fighter just had to dual-class, and prestochangeo, he knew magic! He just couldn’t use his sword any more, or he’d never advance in magic-use.
3E gives that rule even more prominence, surprisingly: it’s called Rule Zero. The nice thing about rule 0 is that it’s not nearly as necessary: there’s not all kinds of ridiculous crap that you have to houserule away.
Some people started doing that in the beginning, seeing what the limits of the class and template adding were, but folks got tired of it, and now most folks stick to the reasonable stuff. A fiendish half-fire-elemental dire ape is pretty damn fun to fight, and pretty damn scary; a treant with levels of druid makes for a memorable ally; an ogre mage wizard leading a troupe of ogre barbarians into battle won’t soon be forgotten.
One of the best effects of this is that PCs can never take monsters for granted: if those kobolds you’re getting ready to plow through are an elite band of kobold rogues and sorcerers, you may be in for a nasty surprise.
Daniel
That’s 100% a problem with the players, and not at all with the rules. If a party just wants to go around hitting stuff, that’s what they’ll do. Any ruleset at all is going to have to allow that, and no matter what other options you allow, a hack-and-slasher is going to hack and slash. But I’ve played D&D with groups that have had only a single combat in the course of a multi-session adventure. Spells were still cast, class abilities were still used. We used our options, in ways other than just killing everything. And we didn’t need the rules to tell us to play that way, either: We did it because we consider it fun to play that way.
Like RIFTs. Or TORG. But seriously, Mutants and Masterminds can be used to build Fantasy-style characters. The superhero genre is easily adapted to almost any other genre - because there are fantasy-style superheroes, and there are scici-style superheroes, so any decent superhero RPG has to handle both.
Ummm. Huh. So you object the idea of releasing specific campaign material for a generic RPG system? That’s… wow. Well, I guess you’ll have a problem with… every RPG ever. I mean, even GURPS does campaign books.
Also - specific setting RPGs seem to do better in the market. Big sellers over the past ten years? D&D, World of Darkness, and (somehow) RIFTs. GURPS and HERO don’t do the kind of business that specific systems do.
Gross oversimplification. On the other hand, you’re looking at Combat-Oriented PrCs - most of their abilities are, surprise!, concerned with combat. Special maneuvers, combat related bonuses, etc.
Honestly, I can say the same thing about point-based systems… like attack powers. “If you look at most of the attack powers out there…” I could argue that one 60 point energy blast isn’t any different than any other 60 point energy blast, but that’d be silly too. As for the PrC’s not having much to distinguish them, I suggest you look at the Dwarven Defender vs. the Duelist. They model two entirely different fighting styles - and yeah, if you zoom out far enough, they could in theory look alike - but you’re zooming out way too far.
Both sorts of systems are a toolkit - and just because you feel that the class-level toolkit is unimaginative doesn’t make it so.
The multiclassing rules make no sense because there are lots of PrC’s? Explain.
And if you don’t think it’s possible, the DM can rule 0 it. But what about this:
Bob the fighter (Ftr1) is from the land of the swordkings, where every child trains with a blade from the day he can hold a wooden one. He leave his homeland, and joins up with an adventuring party including Tim the Enchanter. At first he trusts only his blade, but after a few months of adventuring he has come to respect and admire Tim’s abilities. (Ftr2) This magic business can do things a sword never could… “Tim,” says Bob, “Will you teach me your ways?” And so at night around the campfire, Tim shows Bob the ways of the magi, and before long, Bob can cast some small spells of his own. (Ftr2/Wiz1) He still relies on his sword, but supplements it with magic. And many years later, Bob is known as Bob the Runesmith, famous for the fine enchanted weapons he crafts. (Ftr10/Wiz10)
Or…
Grug the Half-orc Fighter (Ftr4) has known nothing but violence, growing up on the streets of CrumblingCity after being orphaned. One day he is fighting the Blackguard that killed his parents on a high parapet, revenge finally in his grasp, and the blackguard bull rushes him off the edge. As he falls to the certain doom that is 10d6 of falling damage, his rage of vengeance denied unlocks something deep in his soul, a fragment of untapped power from a long-forgotten dragon or demon ancestor. His scream and determination not to hit the ground takes shape into a feather fall spell, releasing the magic he never knew flowed in his veins. (Ftr4/Sor1)
A system that can handle those situations does unfortunately allow silly stuff like “I think I’ll become a druid, despite having never heard of one.” But the DM is supposed to weed that stuff out.
Again, the flexibilty does allow for absurdity (and some folks like absurdity). But it also allows for realistic combinations that just couldn’t be modelled easily or well before. Goblin Shamans, Vampire Necromancers, The Ghost of a Werebear Ranger, The legendary 10’ high mother of all Wolves, Doppleganger assassins…
I never thought about it back in the 2e days, but saying that every goblin is the same as every other goblin is just as silly as Basic D&D saying that Elf was a class, and every elf is a sorta-wizard/sorta-archer. If you can accept Elven Clerics and Elven Fighters, why can’t orcs or minotaurs or centaurs have classes too?
Its not that they go combatcombatcombat that bothers me. Its that DnD is not very interesting combat by default. It doesn’t encourage people to do cool stuff.
Hardly. I dislike the level of skill with which most people make campaign specific material, not that people sell it.
I’m doing a bit of both, actually.
Some of special manuvers I like (Expertise, for example, really encourages people to think before and during combat). But far too many of them are so generic that they add nothing. It would be better just to let people build their characters with a wider variety of toolsets and leave PrC’s behind altogether, or leave them for specialty slasses that have a specific place in the game.
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Ah, but the one should have been something you could build without a PrC (duelist). The other is nothng more than a variant lawful barbarian. Its the style that makes the class interesting, and you can easily have the style with a point buy.
Of course you are correct. But Champions, for instance, really encourages people to buy many different kinds of cool stuff on their Energy blast. Style is good and style is free, but its endlessly interesting to be able to put advantage and disadvantages on specific powers. In short, I not only want to appeal to players who love styles (deep roleplayers like me can live with any system) but also people who like to tinker and play around with the mathematics of it.
And for all those people who sort of half-heartedly play the game but do’t really get into it I have a lot of hooks to improve the roleplaying aspects. Mathematical hooks, characters hooks (contacts are actually a required part of the character a la Shadowrun) and plot hook (goals and such). Simple expedients of formalizing things like this into the character creation process really helps. I’ve seen these kinds of things help draw players out of ruts and shells into the game.
I specifically hate the way they put up barriers between magic and non-magic classes. In my new world (which sort of bridges the gap between DnD3 and our future release of point by Champions-like material. There are class archtypes, but people are encouraged to take levels in magic or nonmagic classes. They don’t give up much to do so, and its perfectly normal for advanced fighters or rogues to study a but of magic: the way things are set up they can easily pick up a dash of magic and its not only more useful but more flexible. All character are encouraged to play up their charcters and develop them in new ways as the game progresses, since you don’t lose much by not building the mega-character long befoer the game begin.
It helps that the magic system I’ve got is a lot more variable.
Hm. That’s a bit arrogant-sounding.
The Dwarven Defender is not a variant Lawful Barbarian. They get a somewhat Rage-like ability - temporary bonuses to stats - but the Unyielding Stance restricts movement - Rage restricts ‘calculated’ actions. Quite distinct. And you’re totally discounting the Barbarian’s enhanced movement, or tendency to favor light armor, whereas a DD is going to favor heavy armor.
Okay, #1 - this has nothing to do with the plethora of Prestige Classes. #2 - the barriers between Magic and Non-Magic classes aren’t as bad as you make them out to be. It’s perfectly normal and useful for a non-magic character to dip into a level or two of a magical class in 3rd edition. It can be very useful for a wizard (or moreso for a cleric or druid) to take a few levels of Fighter or Rogue as well, if it fits the character concept. A human 17th-level wizard / 3rd level Fighter is a perfectly valid and reasonable character concept.
starving, can I ask what company you’re with?
One thing our group does, is we ignore flavor-text a lot of the time in favor of our own. For my next character, I wanted a creepy little girl with a bad past who moves around all sneaky-like and debilitates people with deadly caressing touches. By all rights I probably should’ve used the rules for young characters, but since part of her schtick is that she got mentally trapped in a hell dimension for a couple decades while her body just aged for a year, that didn’t quite work.
So instead, I’m creating her using the rules for a halfling, giving her a mix of rogue levels and necromancer wizard levels. Eventually she’ll be in the arcane trickster class, but instead of being the lighthearted practical-joke-playing cretin described by that class’s flavor text, she’ll be, well, a creepy little girl who goes around sneak-attacking people with chill touch, vampiric touch, and the like, brushing her hand against cheeks and making her victims fall over dead.
The system isn’t as flexible as it could be, but there’s plenty of room for tweaking things, in my experience.
Daniel
Yes. Your point? I am entitled to opinion, however low, about other people. And no, I don’t think many of the d20 producers are very good. Should I lie about it?
But the primary ability which both classes are built around is essentially the same: Get the same bonus, give up a certain combat-related ability. While the specifics are different, in the end you could just as easily make ti a separate ability - or feat - and let people buy it as they will with whatever fair penalty the GM lets them. The ability itself is the same, its only different based around how people use it.
I’m sorry, once again I’m not clear. There are hundreds of PrC’s out there which mix martial and combat abilities. Why bother with that when you can simply make them easier to multiclass in the first place? I took about 1/2 a page in my book to do the work of fifty-100 pages of other people’s work. WHich one would you rather play with - the rules than let you do it quickly and easily or the ones that require 10 supplements.
Additionally, mathematically mixing classes in d20 usually results in a slightly more veratile but noticably less powerful character. Breaking archetype shouldn’t be that negative. Almost all solid multiclass charcaters (prC’s aside) mix martial abilites. Some spellcasters can get a little bit out of it, but generally only by screwing their primary abilities: 3 levels of Fighter really aren’t very good to a high level mage and vice versa unles there’s considerable cheese involved (fondly recalls his own Paladin 2/Templar 1/Wizard 17 with his Holy Avenger). But charcater’s shouldn’t have to be cheezy to do it.
Like push people off of bridges? Try and tie up a dragon with a rope? Conjure up a wall of fire with a wall of stone right behind it? Dimension door with the Paladin so he can whack the bad guy from behind? Run down the side of the wall with boots of spider climbing just so he could make a running jump? Jump over a pass with characters trapped in it, screaming at an opponent to freeze him with fear (intimidating rage)while jumping at another with a great axe, ignoring his set spear just to turn the tide of battle?
I’ve seen some fun stuff in the last year or so with my gaming group. I really like using miniatures to do all sorts of fun stuff.
Well that’s rather vague and rude. I like to think I do a good job.
Eh? I disagree totally. You’re oversimplifing to a great degree.
That’s a false dichotomy. First off, I don’t need 10 supplements to build different types of PCs; I can do it all on my lonesome.
That said, I can simplify the rules further, giving you an entire gaming system in a single sentence:
Everything else is just gravy. The question isn’t how much gravy you got; the question is how good the gravy is. If your 1/2 page system is more fun than the 3E system, then super duper; you’re gonna get rich.
Thing is, I’m skeptical: I’ve read lots and lots of different games, from the ridiculously complex to the ridiculously simple, and 3E does most things better than other systems IMO. Sure, Feng Shui makes combat a helluva lot more fun (at the expense of throwing balance out the window), and Baron Munchausen has a far better system for handling performance checks, but overall 3E is the solidest system I’ve seen.
I’m interested in knowing which company you work for, so I can see whether I’ve liked other results that company has done. The fact that you’re so down on most D20 publishers, however, makes me nervous: if you have such antipathy toward the things that I think work well, there’s a good chance that what you think works well isn’t going to be my cup of tea at all.
Daniel
For me, the game system exists for two reasons:
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To give me a framework of rules for things I don’t know how to do, like magic, lockpicking, and repair a Winnebago.
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To keep me consistent from one game to the next, so if somebody repairs the Winnebago this week, he should be able to do it next week; if he can’t do it today, and has to take it to a 6th level Winnebago repairman, when he makes 6th level, he should be able to repair a Winnebago.
As LHoD said, everything else is gravy. And sometimes you dump out the gravy if you have too much.
Of course you’re entitled to an opinion. There are just more diplomatic ways to express it sometimes. And while you don’t think many of the d20 producers out there are good, their commercial success seems to indicate a large portion of the gaming community disagrees. Personally, WotC did some very good stuff, but has fallen by the wayside for me. AEG and Green Ronin and Sword and Sorcery? Great stuff. Mongoose is pretty good - and those companies are the big ones.
That’s like complaining that two melee weapons are identical because they both have the same ability - they do damage.
The point of a Prestige Class is not to provide opportunities to mix magical and martial abilities. Some of them happen to, but you seem to miss the point of a PrC. (as some publishers do). A Prestige Class represents an organization or fighting style or special transcendant path or other group. It’s not just a collection of stats and bonuses. Some people use them that way, but that isn’t the point. If you are an Assassin, that means you belong to the Assassin’s guild and have undergone their special training. It doesn’t mean you’re a sneaky type who decided he’d like to have a few levels of wizard spells.
I’m currently playing an Elven Ranger with the Foe Hunter PrC from Masters of the Wild. His Chosen Enemy are Humans, because of political situations in the campaign that I won’t go into at the moment. I chose that PrC because my character concept was that of an Elven Rebel standing up to what he perceived as tyranny of the humans. Not because it has nifty abilities. As a matter of fact, the GM was uncomfortable with the level of Hate Enemy Damage Reduction that the class granted, so we talked together and substituted other things to tone back the power a bit.
My point was that the 3 levels of fighter don’t really hurt the Wizard, and if they’re appropriate to his concept, can be of great benefit.