User talk:MisterSinister/TOToM (3.5e Sourcebook)

Recent ChangesEdit

I changed all instances of {{TOTOM Spell to {{Norm. I left {{TOTOM Spell, but I don't think it is needed. As such, if you are okay with it, put a request for deletion on it.

Furthermore, I did a bit of template editing to get the other sections of the TOTOM Spell into the preload. Since I'm not sure what to do with augments, I left it at User:Havvy/TOTOM and am using User:Havvy/TOTOM/sandbox‎ as a testing apparatus. I'd love to get some help with the augments. --Havvy 07:31, 26 October 2010 (UTC)

Move section to own pageEdit

It might make sense to move the new magic rules to its own page. SPR1 is already 37kb, and if you do so, I can put Template:Righttoc on without scrunching up various tags onto two or three lines. --Havvy 07:14, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

I think he was planning on merging them with the chapter 4 stuff. And then maybe moving the spell lists onto individual sub-pages. - Tarkisflux 15:16, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, Tarkis has it right. It's a pretty big pile of edits and new pages, so it might be a while, but it's most definitely going to be massively reorganised in a way that doesn't look like the wikimarkup equivalent of shit. - MisterSinister 06:24, 2 November 2010 (UTC)

ASF: Do we need it?Edit

I'm actually uncertain of this question. What does it add to the game to have this being such a huge problem, and why should we cripple arcane casters more than divine and natural ones for wearing armour in any case? Is there a reason to keep this rather archaic mechanic around? - MisterSinister 02:13, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

IMO, ASF (arcane spell failure) is a messed up mechanic. I'll create a variant for fixing a few of the issues, but the core issue is that you are rolling to see if you can use your limited resource at all. I would change ASF to a binary "Spellcasting Allowed" option for armor. Then pick a few light armors that don't have it, and give an ability for light (+2 bonus) and medium (+4 bonus) armor to have the Spellcasting Allowed option be on. This allows better feat usage (Armored Mage: You may wear all light armors and still cast spells.) and simplifies away a die roll every time you cast a spell, speeding up gameplay. --Havvy 06:54, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Outside of low levels where armor spells could run out in a day and also decrease your offensive arsenal, it's never been much more than a speed bump. At higher levels you just run around in a force shield or whatever all day. It used to be a speed bump in that it wasn't always easy to get armor special qualities on an arcane caster, but since Races of the Wild printed that 0 ASF thistle shirt of whatever it's not even that anymore. So yeah, we could just drop it without much whining from me. I'd prefer to keep something like Havvy's suggestion though, since I would rather the arcane guys use force instead of steel to reach higher ACs, and a simple toggle does that. I'd also be perfectly happy to restrict the toggle to only spells with somatic components and expand it to all casters (with Armored Casting feats or class features to allow defaults), but that might be beyond the scope of what you're looking for here... - Tarkisflux 07:32, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

Hmm... Well, I think Havvy's take is actually quite a good one, but I also like your suggestions, Tark. So let's go this way: we'll make it a toggle, as Havvy suggests, specifically for spells with somatic components, and expand them to all classes, plus Armoured Casting and class features for mitigation. Will write that in. Thanks! - MisterSinister 08:51, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

The alternative to a toggle is to go the Races of War route and make it a 5% per armor check penalty point. The toggle is certainly simpler, and while I generally prefer complexity that allows options I think it's probably the way to go. An in-text variant option might be appropriate though.

On opening it up to other casters, I'd prefer to set clerics to medium (because if you want full plate and cleric spells you should play a pally), druids to standard natural, and wizards to light; the partial casters can have their standard stuff. And the ability should probably be restricted to their own spell type. As for the feat usage, if armor proficiency is still a feat (or a level of fighter), I'd prefer to have a single feat that just let you wear anything you were proficient with and cast without penalty. If proficiency is easier than that to attain, then a set of light, medium, heavy, or natural feats might make sense. - Tarkisflux 02:26, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

RitualsEdit

As I have mentioned to both of you guys, I wanted to drag out certain spells (such as alarm and animate dead, for example) and make them into 'rituals'. The basic difference is that they're acquired not by taking levels in a caster class, but instead with a skill rank prereq (the former would likely need ranks in Perception or Dungeoneering, while the latter in Thaumaturgy), and also an expenditure of skill points (I'm thinking 2 here). They could also be granted as class features when appropriate.

I believe this to be a good way of giving noncasters some fun abilities outside of combat or to do with utility, but I'm wondering what you all thought on the subject. - MisterSinister 23:41, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

I think I'd prefer to keep them as regular spells, and allow non-casters with some rank prereq to spend 2 skill points (or cash even, I'm unsure here actually because the skill points would otherwise stack into new abilities) to just learn how to do it (possibly in some modified way). I agree that opening a fair number of spells up to others would be fine, I just don't see a reason to remove them from the casters lists off hand. - Tarkisflux 02:18, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough on the skill points side of things. Leaving them on the caster lists also makes sense from what you said. Spending cash is something I would like to avoid - especially later-on, this makes ritual acquisition a little too easy. - MisterSinister 09:07, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, cash is bad, but setting appropriate and somewhat equivalent acquisition and access costs between the two camps is an issue. I'm honestly not sure on the skill points thing. There's a lot of things to consider here.

• If we charge 2 skill points, you're delaying advancement in 1 skill by 2 levels or 2 skills by 1 level every time you take a ritual. And while that's probably fine for a couple of rituals (or at high levels where there's a lack of new skill abilities at present) it leaves open the possibility that you could ritual yourself right out of level appropriate skill ability / bonus land, and I don't know if the rituals themselves would make up for it.
• You've mentioned that exotic spells (and by extension any spell if someone wanted to do it) could be given as a quest reward / loot. If rituals are still also spells, then they can be acquired by casters with only an equipment opportunity cost (if even that), which sets up a cost disparity that I'm not immediately comfortable with. Removing them from spell lists solves this, but not in a way I feel particularly helpful (especially since your example would relegate raise dead and general necromancer-ness to clerics, though I'm not opposed to a shift in creature assignments for the monster skills). It could also be solved via retraining, but that's the next point.
• I have fairly generous (IMO) skill retraining rules written into ToP, and I don't know how the points spent on rituals would need to interact with that system. If they can be shuffled like any other skill points, it takes you a week to go learn any available ritual and do it, which means basically any of them that you have access to if you have sufficient down time. That sets the opportunity cost of access significantly lower, possibly too low if a substantial number of them are complex spells that require casters to actually use character resources to acquire (barring loot acquisition, which isn't necessarily any less problematic).
• This isn't even getting into use restrictions for people who don't fill spell slots with them, which is further wrinkles on the cost / benefit balance equation.

So yeah, there's a lot here that needs to be ironed out. And while I think skill point investment + retraining is probably the most workable way to start, there's lots of other options on the table. - Tarkisflux 18:27, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, my thoughts about this were roughly as-follows.

Method 1: Skill Point Purchase

In this method, we do as I suggested, but some classes get 'hardcoded' rituals at appropriate levels (like a Necromancer class with animate dead, for instance). You can also get stone tablets with these rituals engraved on them, but they're major items, obviously. To use said rituals, you make a skill check against an appropriate skill and DC. In terms of daily use limits, I think some kind of character-level-dependent limitation for use of ALL rituals each day would be good.

This has all the problems that you listed.

Method 2: Ritualist Feat

In this method, we have a feat called 'Ritualist' or 'Ritual Caster' or whatever. This lets you learn some number of rituals (I'm leaning towards 3), which are limited by your character level (thus, you can't learn animate dead until you're character level 5, and so on), and have a total use limit based on your character level as well (meaning you can use ALL of your rituals altogether that many times). People can also find stone tablets of such rituals, but without the Ritualist feat, they can't actually make use of them. Some classes would receive this as a bonus feat with the attached rituals hardcoded.

This method is a partial solution to the problem, but it creates an almost compulsory feat tax, which I'm not very happy about. Additionally, it's going to be exceedingly hard for any feat which is not Leadership to compete with such a feat - even if the number of rituals given is only 1! Plus, this has problems with scaling - even under our systems, level 1 rituals aren't going to be all that hot later.

Method 3: Rituals as Class Abilities

In this method, EVERY class has hardcoded ritual acquisition, and there also exists a Ritualist PrC (probably early-access and 5 levels long), which lets you pick and choose rituals from a list, limited by character level as described by Method 2. The class framework itself sets the limits on use.

This method should be better than Methods 1 and 2, but in many cases, runs into a significant verisimilitude problem - there are MANY more rituals that a wizard potentially could know than, say, a fighter. While this is partly a problem of class construction, we do have to live with it, and that's an issue.

If you can think of any other approaches to this, it would be good. I'm all out of ideas for now. - MisterSinister 20:41, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Backing off of rituals for a second to ask about a possibly related subject. Are you attempting to put a hard(ish) cap on spells known with your "all simple + 2 complex / level spells" setup, or is that more of a minimum that people can exceed with loot acquisition (where higher level spells are probably post-wish econ loot acquisition stuff)? If the former, it makes sense to regulate rituals rather strongly whether they are also spells or not. If the latter, then we don't need to worry about ritual acquisition at all unless they are substantially stronger than spells because we're not strongly concerned about spell acquisition (for a given spell level) after some point. If you intend the spells thing to do something else, then these are moot of course.

Sub-questions for clarity - That formula appears to best fit the wizard and sorc models. How is spell acquisition for clerics dealt with aside from new spheres? What about druids?

The next question is "are rituals basically spells?" If they are spells, they can't be investment or slot spells because those who do them as non-casters lack those options. They'd also have to either be written in a way that they're self regulating (so casters don't get a substantial benefit from having more slots to do them with) or nothing that we care about casters using more often than non-casters. And if they're not spells, then it's yet another subsystem to work with that needs its own set of rules. I'd rather tackle them like spells and just write them to be self-regulating because I want them to be more common than I think the subsystem style would lead to, but arguments can be made either way.

We really need firm answers to these two questions before we can start sorting out how to deal with them effectively. My preference is for the spells to be a minimum (since I don't see late level toolbox casters to be a substantial concern) and for rituals to be basically spells (because it has slightly harder issues to solve but leads to a generally less complex game), and that has some definite implications for how they are acquired and work, but we'll deal with those after we reach a concensus on the direction to take them in.

Semi-related side note: Since I pointed out the thaumaturgy thing, I've realized that undead in there is probably a bad assignment and arcana would be a better one for thematic reasons (necromancer, deities actually wanting souls in their afterlives instead of reanimated corpses, etc.). I'd swap elementals into thaumaturgy instead. This means we can drop the whole "channeling positive/negative energy" nonsense from clerics, and just give them all "deal damage to undead with my deity's hatred" instead since they don't need to know about them or how they work or anything (and if any of the spheres deal with making / controlling undead, we can deal with that on a case by case). It also gives me a nice immortality progression where the arcane guys lich out, the divine guys pokevolve into outsiders or elementals (if they don't just get rezzed over and over), and the natural guys just reincarnate themselves for as long as they want to. Unless there's opposition to this because I'm missing something, I'm planning on doing it. - Tarkisflux 22:24, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

In response to the question of the cap: Frankly, yes, the cap is meant to be hard-ish. You can find spells on stone tablets (or for very high-level ones, possibly on manaliths), but these are by definition major items, which means no amount of cash will ever buy them, and the GM is under absolutely no obligation to make them available to you. I'm also contemplating a 'spell-sharing' option (in that casters of the same class can teach each other spells), but I worry that this encourages very binary caster parties (which is definitely not something I want to encourage), so thus, this is uncertain as-yet. This is precisely why methods of ritual acquisition concern me so much.

In response to the question of spell acquisition: Clerics normally only get their spheres' spells on their lists, which they gain automatically as they level, plus all the Simple spells they're entitled to. Druids I'm not too sure about - I want a different model of acquisition to the wizard and the sorcerer, but am uncertain as to how. Paladins and rangers will work a bit like the Dread Necromancer - they know all of their Simple spells, and get to nab a Complex or Exotic (with GM permission for the latter) every couple of levels, like the Dread Necro's Advanced Learning. In all of these cases, they can make use of stone tablets or manaliths to learn new spells, but obviously, that's down to GM fiat.

On the questions of rituals being basically spells: Your idea regarding self-regulating spells is exactly what I actually wanted to go for, so I'm glad we're in agreement on that point. I'd ideally prefer them to be caster-blind (in that, casters can't do more with them than noncasters) and also to be (reasonably) class-agnostic.

Hopefully that clarifies my position on this.

On undead and Thaumaturgy: I was actually thinking of decoupling turning/rebuking from the cleric class, and instead making it a sphere power applicable to certain spheres (such as Sun or Undeath). I also think how it works needs a second look as well. But as for the change you've decided on, I actually think that's very sensible. - MisterSinister 03:52, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Ok. I'm not quite clear on the spells thing, so gonna push a bit more there. Should animate dead be a spell that casters can just prep in a slot and cast if they want to, or should it be something they do in addition to whatever they have in their slots? - Tarkisflux 05:12, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

The latter, and this is something that they share methodologically with everyone else who has access to it. - MisterSinister 05:14, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Chat discussion dump:

Rituals in spell slots out. Skill point cost to learn out. Skill prereqs or caster type and level prereqs in. Characters just get a few of these as they level, and probably don't get to retrain them. Feats available to get more rituals maybe. Rituals written in a way that prevents spamming more than we care about, and any other hard cap on them is out. - Tarkisflux 06:57, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Standardising Havvy's [CL] notationEdit

Since I quite like it, we need some standards for it. Obviously, we already have [CL]d6 to mean 'roll 1d6 per character level', but what about 1d6 per two? Is that [CL/2]d6? 1/2[CL]d6? Some other thing? - MisterSinister 21:11, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm not a fan myself and think it has some holes that you're going to have to write out anyway. [CL/2]d6 is probably the way to go though. - Tarkisflux 22:41, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

Can you give an example of such a hole? Also, while I was originally going to go with 1/2[Cl]d6, I was shown the light by Ghostwheel. [nCL/n] is the better way to write the formula.

Anyways, part of my meditations on Integrated d20, I realized that if there is going to be an enhanced/diminished state, having a standard optional attribute known as Base Calculation would be useful. That way you can write something as follows (using a trivial example):

Effect: This spell does [Base] energy damage to its target.

Enhanced: Multiply [Base] damage by 2.

--Havvy 01:50, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

It's just going to get complicated when non-multiples or non-rounddowns are added. Like [3CL+5]d6 (5d6 + 3d6 per caster level) or [1+(CL-1)/2]d6 (1d6 at first level plus 1d6 for each 2 levels above first) or whatever. Which aren't really holes, but are places where I think straight text works better. This is only an issue if these remain in the game though. - Tarkisflux 02:33, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

If we assume that people playing really don't want to do complicated math, formula like "[1+(CL-1)/2]d6" should be represented neither by straight text nor by numeric representation. They are too complex to be a simple element. For things like [3CL+5]d6, it would be better (IMO) to write as "5d6 + [3CL]d6". 5d6 is a semi-constant, after all. [nVAR/n]dn is about as complicated as a term should get before separating them out with a plus. --Havvy 04:05, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Magic missile is a perfectly understandable spell that follows the odd level progression you seem to think too complicated for either text or numeric progression. So your point that it's too complex for text falls rather flat. We can just remove that progression because it doesn't reduce to notation in a pretty way, but that sets half advancement CL stuff at even levels because of the round down rule, which feels odd to me, but meh. It's probably only a low level concern anyway. - Tarkisflux 04:43, 15 November 2010 (UTC)

Schools of Magic: Do We Need Them?Edit

Having chatted to IGTN on Mibbit, and read his rant on the subject, I think that eliminating schools of magic, while creating a few extra tags to cover the few things where this would be necessary (such as divination) to be a good idea. What do you guys think? - MisterSinister 05:57, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

It murders the plan we had for the sorcerer and your "every wizard is a specialist" idea, but those could be worked around I guess by going for more thematic classes or list setups. I'd want to see a viable replacement for specialists before I was particularly behind that plan, or a more general willingness to abandon those concepts.

There's another solution on the table though, and that's to more narrowly define the schools and then be somewhat rigid about what spells go where (i.e. no more than two schools for anything, and only then in edge cases). That doesn't address the character traction issue, but proper assignment of spells could address the "PC Diviner / easy specialist" issue. It does still suffer the "spells placed through special effect justification" issue though, where you just change the fluff and the spell falls into a new school, and that alone makes me want to consider other solutions. So what do you have in mind for those extra tags? - Tarkisflux 07:05, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Chat dump: Schools in because we're going with broad classes; narrow classes don't need or benefit them (so they will probably not be referenced in them, and feats will need to be school OR tag based or something else). Traction issues partially related to broad class setup, partially related to the "special effect justification" of things crapping all over school differentiation. Current plan is to resolve to some degree by adjusting school definitions, limiting some tags to specific schools, allowing dual school spells (where access to both is required) to allow for bizarre tag combinations, and then being hard-assed about things past that to limit concept erosion. A side effect of this will be to make iconic spells for each school even if they are similar to iconic spells in a different school (fear effects in enchantment and necromancy for example), since it is otherwise possible for iconic effects to be lost by selection the wrong banned school.

Open to criticism of course, especially since Havvy hasn't weighed in on the issue yet. - Tarkisflux 22:09, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

IMO, the idea of banning a school means that you are losing some utility to become more specialized. If you make it so that you can get the same effects from other schools, you just make specialization a better option. Schools are good to keep, but can we get rid of abjuration per chance? Protection spells should not be singled out from the other types. It would help if we could get a definition on what a school is outside of 'this is how we divided spells'. Tags limited to certain schools seems a bit weird to me. What tags were you thinking and why should those only be of that school? --Havvy 06:34, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

You seem to be arguing both sides here, and I'm confused. Limiting tags to a couple of schools means you do lose versatility because you lose substantial (if not complete) access to the tag / effect if you drop the school. And tying that piece of versatility to the school helps make the school itself more conceptually solid because there is less overlap between them. It also helps blunt the "but <the special effects of the spell> make it X school" problem where people just re-fluff stuff to get it into a school that isn't banned for them.

While there are a lot of them that I think we can and should do (the subschool tags for a start, but the full suggested list is pending), let's start with [Fear] as an example. It should arguably be an enchantment effect, since it's either an emotion or an override of normal brain responses to stimuli (depending on how you want to interpret it), and that school has the rest of those effects already anyway. It's also classically a necromancy effect, and that's fine since magical death energy would probably terrify you above and beyond your normal adventurer response to deadly stuff. Those are the only places where the fear tag really fits conceptually. So if we go one step further and just say that any spell with an unnatural fear component (one of the fear conditions) that would get the [Fear] tag has to be in one of those schools, we get specialists who do lose versatility if they ban enchantment or necromancy, and we get schools that have more direct meaning. You know if you're going up against a necromancer that they'll probably have damage + fear spells on hand, and if you're going up against an enchanter they'll probably have thralls and fear on hand.

To retain extra spell flexibility, we'd also allow really weird spell edge cases where it's clearly a mashup of two different schools to just belong to both schools as a "dual-school spell". In those cases you would have to have access to both schools to use the spell. There is a possible exception for "opposed schools", if such a concept makes it into the magic physics, where some dual-school combinations just don't happen ever. Spells with more than two schools just don't exist. It is a slight reduction in the number of possible spells, but that doesn't actually seem like a bad thing to me. Quite the opposite actually, since allowing people to think up new boxes to get around balance concerns isn't beneficial.

Lastly, I'm opposed to dumping abjuration. I'm not sure what you mean by "protection spells", but there are lots of other defensive spells in other schools. If you're referring to anti-possession spells, warding spells, and general dispels all being tied up there, so what? Those are thematically similar, and form a complete (if somewhat underpowered in the SRD) shtick. I honestly don't see a way to distribute them to other schools without doing a complete rethink of how effects are divided up and rewriting or eliminating schools in the process. - Tarkisflux 17:53, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

As written, that looks good to me, except I still don't like abjuration. But if you think abjuration fits with the rest of them, go for keeping it. I was more saying that the iconic spells of a school should not be based on a tag, but I think my thoughts on that were silly. As such, no real qualms. Go for it. --Havvy 20:12, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Suggested tag limits over here. - Tarkisflux 23:08, 10 December 2010 (UTC)

Throwing in my two silver: take a look into Tunnels and Trolls as well as the Hero system. Tunnels and Trolls was infamous for it's ten spell magic system, with names like Back You Fiend (the damage spell) and Aw, Poor Baby (the healing spell). This system declared anything else a special effect that had no consequences on what the spell did other than looking cool. Similarly, the Fantasy Hero magic system had a total of 40 spells, and special effects were bought that either increased or decreased the cost of the spell.

In short, instead of themed schools, go for effect. It would keep Abjuration and Illusion as schools, but it would sort out the ridiculous spells that were clumped together, like the entire Transmutation school. --Change=Chaos. Period. SC 00:07, 11 December 2010 (UTC)

SLAs - Why Charisma?Edit

I get why charisma was used for SLAs early on, but I think it works poorly in the revised setup. Charisma is not the dump attribute that it used to be, carrying several fairly strong skill abilities, will saves (in an optional variant), and the entire divine spellcasting mechanic. Keeping SLAs Cha only just takes an entire ability set and drops it there, which doesn't look like a particularly good design decision here. Is there a reason why we can't just make SLAs dependent on any of the 3 mental stats?

Proposal:

• Assign a stat to each spheres that all of their abilities are keyed off of.

• If we wanted to be specificish, we could do elemental spheres as natural (Wis), exemplar (fiend/angel) spheres as divine (Cha), undead/something else as arcane (Int), and then fill in the rest as appropriate.

• For ungrouped SLAs, if it is just a reference to a specifically arcane/divine/natural spell it uses the related stat.
• In all other cases SLAs either get the most appropriate of the three attributes or allows the user to select one.

Thoughts? - Tarkisflux 18:38, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Seems I got to talk to everyone about this in chat already, and everyone involved with the project (and a couple more) are on board. Here's how it'll break down:

• [Fiend] and the forthcoming [Angel] spheres will be Cha based. [Elemental] and the forthcoming [Wild] spheres will be Wis based. The forthcoming [Astral] and [Ethereal] (those are placeholder names, especially ethereal) spheres will be Int based. We don't expect any new sphere types after that.
• Sphere acquisition through feat will give you access through the stat indicated by the type in the feat, even if it's a multi-type sphere. Ex: if you took a feat that gave you access to an [Elemental] sphere, then that sphere is Wis based even if the sphere itself is [Elemental, Fiend].
• Some sphere classes will get sphere type overrides. Ex: If a conduit of the lower planes gained access to an [Elemental] sphere as a class ability, that sphere would still be keyed off of Cha.
• Some sphere classes won't get type overrides, and will have a bit of MAD for a change.
• Individual SLAs will use either Int, Wis, or Cha depending on whether it is an Arcane, Natural, or Divine spell. Spells that fall on both lists will allow the SLA user to select an attribute to use. There may also be specific overrides for these as well, but doing a lot of that erodes magic type differentiation.
• Ex and Su abilities will be able to pull from any of the 6 attributes for their DCs and whatnot, depending largely on ability fluff. Yes, these probably get special effect justifications, but that's not a huge deal since PCs don't generally get to create abilities of these types and we just have to exercise developer control.

Yay plans. - Tarkisflux 17:57, 27 December 2010 (UTC)

I'll revisit a few things in the Book of Elements to put these changes in explicitly. The Feral Libram will be built with these changes assumed in it (e.g., I will keep spherecasting key abilities in mind when setting the ability mods for races meant to be spherecasters). --IGTN 20:31, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

Text to this effect added to the Spheres section. I thought I'd have to think about the Planar Oracle and decide whether it should make the Oracle sphere fiendish or get it as an Elemental, but nothing in that sphere has a save, which made this decision really easy: I can ignore it. --IGTN 20:42, 28 December 2010 (UTC)

IncompleteEdit

This is incomplete to the point of being unusable without a lot of work. I think we should sandbox this book. --Havvy 05:37, 10 May 2012 (UTC)