Building an RPG system
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
- Whether you personally like it or not, elemental resistances and weaknesses are a thing.
And whether you like it or not, they don't enhance gameplay all that much.
They add a tactical element, especially if your wizards are limited in which elements they can attack with.
Are they? In all FF games I've seen they aren't.
...as noted in the
abbrtext.- Longer spells have a longer casting time.
Ah, right. Forgot about that element. Yes, that is actually an amazingly good tool for spicing up gameplay. Unfortunately, it'd be a nightmare to keep track of in tabletop.
Another possibility is cooldowns, where spells are cast instantly but then can't be recast for a certain duration. Mathematically speaking, after the first casting this is almost exactly equivalent to a casting time cost, but psychologically it feels different.
Because instant spells can be used based on current situation only, while with delayed spells, you have to pray that they will still be the right choice 3 turns from now.
Good point.
...huh. TIL. I haven't played that, but... I'm a bit surprised that you seem to enjoy it, given its reputation for requiring soul-crushing levels of grinding to deal with its massively punishing difficulty!
Quite the opposite. Grinding is entirely optional and not that useful anyway. DS puts a lot of emphasis on player's own skills rather than the skills of the character he's playing as. Having tried a cheated level 700 character once (normally you spend most of the game under level 100), it only feels like 4x stronger than level 1 character (ie. you'll still die a lot, even near the beginning if you're not careful). The real game changer is learning to roll at the right time so the split-second invincibility activates right when you need it. Also, parrying, which is even more timing-sensitive.
Yeah, that's the sort of game I classify as "player-hostile," and I have actively discouraged people in the past from designing games that way.
Why the emotional language? It just makes you sound dishonest. Dark Souls is simply a different genre. They had different goals from FF, so they made different choices to deliver different experience than FF. That doesn't make them better or worse. It's simply different. You don't like it, fine. But there's nothing hostile about it. Nothing wrong. It's just meant for different target audience. One that likes their reflexes and quick thinking challenged.
A challenge is one thing. Putting it beyond the capabilities of paying customers who may well have been unaware of the issues when they bought the game (see @HardwareGeek's post, for example) is another matter entirely.
Because the only examples I'm familiar with of games that use spell slots are D&D and games either directly based on it or heavily inspired by it.
Why do you need examples? Can't you think abstractly?
Sure, and so can anyone else. People can come up with all sorts of abstract ideas that sound really cool, right up until they're put to the test and only then do you find out if they actually hold up or not. Just look at Chrono Cross. It was filled with interesting ideas, but the game sucked because they did a terrible job implementing almost all of them. (And because of the horrendous abuse it perpetrated against the legacy of a much better game, but that's beside the point.)
And where do you see spell slots in FF? You're free to repeat the same spell over and over again without limit as long as you have MP, and all spells drain from the same MP pool.
I said this was FF1 specifically, which (once again) was very heavily inspired by D&D. You see it in everything from the magic system to the choice of monsters (anyone wanna fight some mindflayers? How about a drow?) to the
clericWhite Mage being restricted to non-bladed weapons only.Idiots will be idiots. Ignore them. Multi-turn spells are interesting and introduce good, meaningful tactical choices. But they don't solve this particular problem. Quite the opposite - they arguably make it worse. The higher level is the party, the more capable they are of protecting the wizard. And that means casting powerful spells becomes easier and easier, so they can be used more and more - which magnifies the power gain from regular character progression, making the real progression curve much steeper than the numbers suggest, especially at higher levels.
This is what I mean: you're turning the wizard into the Pandemic player calling all the shots. Why?
Because RPG players are generally nerds, and nerds naturally gravitate toward optimal strategies. When multi-turn spells are worth it, they become the dominant strategy and every other playstyle gets neglected.
In gamer circles, that specific type of nerd is generally called a "munchkin" and shunned even by his fellow nerds.
If the wizard is squishy and the tank is low-DPS, that's a form of balance right there!
Sure. And if that's your goal with your game design - to have a strict set of required roles that need to cooperate - that's great too. The question is, is that your goal? Or would you rather let players be melee damage dealers too if they want to, and make them equally viable throughout the game?
Nah, required roles suck. Just pointing out that "balance" is a far more nuanced subject than just "equal DPS," which appears to be the main focus of your argument.
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First, could you and gaska please stop these sentence-by-sentence posts? They're really a good way of pissing off everyone else and obscuring the points you want to make.
@Mason_Wheeler said in Building an RPG system:
In gamer circles, that specific type of nerd is generally called a "munchkin" and shunned even by his fellow nerds.
Not necessarily. Forgoing broken abilities that the game is designed around you having is anti-optimization, playing intentionally (or not) on hard mode. And if the game isn't designed around those broken abilities, then using them shatters any attempt at balance to pieces. Either way, the game falls apart.
Good game-play is the only thing that really matters in this particular case. You can always change the thematics. But having to work around a broken system that makes bad assumptions about how it's going to be played (or is broken regardless of how you play) is like playing through a broken window full of shards of glass. Sure, you can do it if you're really really careful, but likely you're just going to cut yourself all up.
Multi-round spells in TTRPGs are obnoxious to use. Trying to use that as a balance mechanism fails hard--they're either useless or they're OP. You can't balance a broken ability by making it obnoxious to use. You balance a broken ability by not making it broken.
This is very different from a VRPG, where long cast times are normal because you're not waiting 10s of minutes for you to continue not doing anything for another 20 minutes. 40 minutes of sitting around doing absolutely nothing is bad game design. This is also why Save or Suck spells/abilities are bad design, and especially bad design when used against players. Getting told "ok, you don't get to play for another 40 minutes" is a great way to get players to tune out completely. When used against the NPCs, they're not quite as bad, but they're inherently broken in an un-fixable way. They push the game to being a solved problem. And that's no fun for anyone who doesn't want to play the uber-nerd mage type.
Balancing magic requires first deciding what you want magic to be able to do. And especially what you don't want magic to be able to do. Cut back (from D&D levels, at least) the number of spells and their breadth of application. Make them single-purpose. Make them expensive. Etc.
Basically, there's 3 criteria here:
- Versatility--how many different things can this one ability do and how many situations is it useful for?
- Power--how much direct influence does it have when used?
- Reliability--how easy is it to get off? How frequently can it be used?
Good abilities have one of the following options:
- mediocre scores in all 3
- OK scores in 2, while being crappy on the third
- Great scores in 1, while being crappy on the others.
Fighter-types tend to be good on reliability while being poor at the others. Skill monkeys have great versatility, but (in 3e) poor power on so-so reliability. Spells (in D&D anyway) tend to break things by being good at all 3. 5e D&D drops their versatility (No Hidden Rules), while also minorly dinging their reliability (lots fewer slots/lower mana). At the same time it increases the power and versatility of the other options. Is it perfect? No. But it makes it so that a stock game doesn't suffer from LFQW.
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Another note, more generally.
If any single ability (even used more than once) can solve an encounter/"scene" by itself, then one or more of a few things is true (none of them good).
The scene/encounter designer built a bad encounter or scene. If you know that level Q people have fireball, and you make an encounter with a bunch of low-health peons all clumped together, it's totally on you. If the only thing stopping the party is a single lock, with no wandering guards, etc, it's totally on you. This might be due to bad design on the game's part--if the materials encourage you to make bad encounters and make it harder to make good ones, you've got a bad design.
AND/OR
The ability is broken. This was the case with much of 3e D&D's spells--they were just flat out broken. Individually and collectively. Shapechange (and that whole line). Summon spells, especially the planar ones. Solid Fog. And the list goes on.
AND/OR
Someone's playing fast-and-loose with the rules (finding "loopholes" and corner cases and exploiting them).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
Shadowrun is always the go-to example of hard niche protection
It probably shows how much out of the loop I am with current Shadowrun, but that is not my experience at all. Of course, 15 years after fourth edition came out (and a year after sixth), my group still uses a bastardised set of second-/third-edition rules that don’t suffer from what you describe anywhere nearly as much. Even plain first through third editions don’t, IMHO. They do have the problem of deckers going off to do their thing and leaving the rest sitting around waiting, and in a more limited way astrally projecting magicians too, but I wouldn’t describe it as everyone taking turns getting their place in the spotlight and then waiting around until the others have finished theirs.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Building an RPG system:
...huh. TIL. I haven't played that, but... I'm a bit surprised that you seem to enjoy it, given its reputation for requiring soul-crushing levels of grinding to deal with its massively punishing difficulty!
Quite the opposite. Grinding is entirely optional and not that useful anyway. DS puts a lot of emphasis on player's own skills rather than the skills of the character he's playing as. Having tried a cheated level 700 character once (normally you spend most of the game under level 100), it only feels like 4x stronger than level 1 character (ie. you'll still die a lot, even near the beginning if you're not careful). The real game changer is learning to roll at the right time so the split-second invincibility activates right when you need it. Also, parrying, which is even more timing-sensitive.
Yeah, that's the sort of game I classify as "player-hostile," and I have actively discouraged people in the past from designing games that way.
Why the emotional language? It just makes you sound dishonest. Dark Souls is simply a different genre. They had different goals from FF, so they made different choices to deliver different experience than FF. That doesn't make them better or worse. It's simply different. You don't like it, fine. But there's nothing hostile about it. Nothing wrong. It's just meant for different target audience. One that likes their reflexes and quick thinking challenged.
A challenge is one thing. Putting it beyond the capabilities of paying customers who may well have been unaware of the issues when they bought the game (see @HardwareGeek's post, for example) is another matter entirely.
Don't get me wrong, I hate QTE too, and suddenly requiring reflexes in a game mostly about being careful is bullshit. But Dark Souls is not that. Dark Souls is an entire game built around timing your attacks, blocks and dodges, and killing you in seconds if you fail.
The first and third game in the series both start with a tutorial area where 5 minutes in, you face a mandatory boss that will absolutely obliterate you if you're not already good at fighting. If that doesn't give you a clue about what kind of game it is, you have only yourself to blame (and if you bought it on Steam, you still have plenty of time remaining to get a refund. Yes, I do realize the game wasn't originally released on Steam and getting a refund for physical copy is much harder - but let's be thankful we don't live in those times anymore.)
Because the only examples I'm familiar with of games that use spell slots are D&D and games either directly based on it or heavily inspired by it.
Why do you need examples? Can't you think abstractly?
Sure, and so can anyone else. People can come up with all sorts of abstract ideas that sound really cool, right up until they're put to the test and only then do you find out if they actually hold up or not. Just look at Chrono Cross. It was filled with interesting ideas, but the game sucked because they did a terrible job implementing almost all of them.
So let's not criticize the implementation while we're still at the idea stage and there's no implementation yet, okay?
And where do you see spell slots in FF? You're free to repeat the same spell over and over again without limit as long as you have MP, and all spells drain from the same MP pool.
I said this was FF1 specifically, which (once again) was very heavily inspired by D&D. You see it in everything from the magic system to the choice of monsters (anyone wanna fight some mindflayers? How about a drow?) to the
clericWhite Mage being restricted to non-bladed weapons only.If it has no spell slots, it's irrelevant to what I'm talking about. Because I'm talking about spell slots, not D&D in general. Right now I actually wish D&D never existed at all, if only because it gave so much bad rep to spell slot system.
If the wizard is squishy and the tank is low-DPS, that's a form of balance right there!
Sure. And if that's your goal with your game design - to have a strict set of required roles that need to cooperate - that's great too. The question is, is that your goal? Or would you rather let players be melee damage dealers too if they want to, and make them equally viable throughout the game?
Nah, required roles suck. Just pointing out that "balance" is a far more nuanced subject than just "equal DPS," which appears to be the main focus of your argument.
So maybe stop pointing out obvious obviousnesses and let's finally talk about why you think spell slots make it harder to equalize DPS of a warrior and a mage than a simple MP system. Because saying that quadratic mage problem is worse with spell slots is literally the same as saying that equalizing DPS of a warrior and a mage is harder, because quadratic mage literally means DPS is out of control.
( @Benjamin-Hall that's the last one from me, I promise. I just wanted to wrap up the loose ends, and I hope we can have a single-threaded discussion now. If it doesn't work, I'll stop doing quote-talk anyway.)
(Fucking NodeBB can't handle (@ properly.)
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
Why do you need examples? Can't you think abstractly?
Sure, and so can anyone else. People can come up with all sorts of abstract ideas that sound really cool, right up until they're put to the test and only then do you find out if they actually hold up or not. Just look at Chrono Cross. It was filled with interesting ideas, but the game sucked because they did a terrible job implementing almost all of them.
So let's not criticize the implementation while we're still at the idea stage and there's no implementation yet, okay?
You literally took what I said and turned it inside out.And where do you see spell slots in FF? You're free to repeat the same spell over and over again without limit as long as you have MP, and all spells drain from the same MP pool.
I said this was FF1 specifically, which (once again) was very heavily inspired by D&D. You see it in everything from the magic system to the choice of monsters (anyone wanna fight some mindflayers? How about a drow?) to the
clericWhite Mage being restricted to non-bladed weapons only.If it has no spell slots, it's irrelevant to what I'm talking about. Because I'm talking about spell slots, not D&D in general.
...dude. It's right there in the part you quoted! I've mentioned multiple times now in this thread, including right there in the part you quoted, that FF1 uses D&D's magic system, and that its use of spell slots makes magic painful.
So maybe stop pointing out obvious obviousnesses and let's finally talk about why you think spell slots make it harder to equalize DPS of a warrior and a mage than a simple MP system. Because saying that quadratic mage problem is worse with spell slots is literally the same as saying that equalizing DPS of a warrior and a mage is harder, because quadratic mage literally means DPS is out of control.
...so now you're back to "balance = DPS and nothing else"? GAH! How did I get trapped in this sketch?
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@Mason_Wheeler I promised to not continue this so I won't. I have just one question. Are you doing this on purpose or did you simply forgot that we were talking about the quadratic mage problem - a topic that YOU have introduced?
And I'm still waiting for you to tell me where FF1 has spell slots. You said that like three times, and I asked this question three times, but you still haven't answered.
Imagine if there was only one spell rank and all spell slots were equal, but each spell took a different number of slots. Would you still call it spell slots?
Imagine if there were two separate MP pools for small fireballs and large fireballs. Would you say that's closer to single MP pool or ranked spell slots, balance-wise?
Do you even understand the words I'm saying? Do you even read what I'm saying? Do you even want a discussion at all? Or are you here just to post funny videos and berate anyone saying anything positive about D&D (which is the biggest crap ever made and set back the entire RPG genre by at least 40 years, BTW)?
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
positive about D&D (which is the biggest crap ever made and set back the entire RPG genre by at least 40 years, BTW)?
D&D created the entire RPG genre, almost entirely out of whole cloth. And is at the root of the vast majority of fantasy tropes in general. In fact, Tolkien is really most influential through D&D. So I strongly disagree with this parenthetical. And saying "D&D" these days is like saying Honda cars. Each edition is substantially different, with different strengths, weaknesses, contributions, and failings.
Even saying "spell slots" or "Vancian Magic" isn't well-defined--each edition treats those same words quite differently and has different patterns.
In early (OD&D through AD&D 2e), LFQW was an explicit design goal. A stupid one, IMO, but a (mis)feature, not an unintended side effect. "Balance" wasn't even on the developers' mind.3e (and 3.5e) tried for balance, but no one told the splat writers that. Or the core development team. 3e was a whole mess of a broken system...that lots of people loved for its very broken-ness. The sheer volume of player options that came out during the 3e era makes it the edition to use if you want do something (especially if you mainly want to engage in mental exercises that wouldn't see real play. It's basically a Turing-complete character build system, almost the C++ with full template shenanigans of the RPG world.
4e tried for balance. It made a great small-squad fantasy tactical simulator. Most of the complaints were from die-hard 3e players who didn't want balance in the first place. Did it have its flaws? Absolutely. Legions of them. Were they what people complained about? Not really. There wasn't a LFQW problem here at all. Doing away with it had other costs, though.
5e's tried to match the feeling of early D&D with some of the mechanical refinements of later editions, with more attention paid to toning down the shenanigans and making a core system that actually functions reliably. Spell slots in 5e are very very different (as is LFQW) from earlier editions. But the core changes (on this front) had to do with just reducing the numbers and scope, plus No Hidden Rules.
So in short, I believe that most "D&D is cancer" talk is really people jealous that their pet system isn't more popular. From my perspective, other systems don't do what I want to do. Sure, they may do some things better, but they only cover part of the whole game I want. Going from a solid 6-7 across the board to a 10 in some things and a 0 in other things isn't an improvement.
But more so, without D&D there wouldn't be an RPG genre, not in video games or at the table top. Literally. The entire sales of many other systems over their entire run is comparable to one year of 5e D&D core book sales, and most of the players got into TTRPGs through D&D. Those other systems (in the US, especially[1]) are free-riding on the popularity of D&D. If you removed D&D, they wouldn't get the overflow, it would go to non-RPG things. The vast majority of video game RPG tropes got their start in D&D, although they've evolved since.
[1] the one exception in the fantasy arena is TDE. But even that owes a lot to D&D, even just by reaction.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
positive about D&D (which is the biggest crap ever made and set back the entire RPG genre by at least 40 years, BTW)?
D&D created the entire RPG genre
I know. I'm just trying to think of the most outrageous and the most critical thing to say about D&D to create enough shock value that it finally gets through @Mason_Wheeler's thick skull that I'm not saying D&D magic system is perfect in every way and every new game should copy it in its entirety with zero changes. I'm just talking about one teeny tiny aspect of it all that has certain effects on game balance that OP would find desirable for their specific problem.
Now I regret mentioning D&D at all. I should've sticked to sterile theory without mentioning any real examples whatsoever - and ideally inventing a whole new glossary that doesn't have a single common term with anything ever written in any of D&D. No spell slots. Action po... Action allowance. Yes. Action allowance. Spells require certain amount of action allowance to cast. And action allowance comes in different ran... lev... tie... Layers. Stronger spells require action allowance from higher layer. And action allowance from higher layers grow MUCH more slowly than action allowance from lower layers. Yes. That would avoid any associations with bad D&D mechanics and make it SO MUCH EASIER to get my point across. Forget ranked spell slots. It's layered action allowance now.
Yes, I'm very fucking pissed off right now. Why do you ask?
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@Gąska ah. I
due to too many arguments with internet RPG hipsters. Sorry about that.
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@Benjamin-Hall it's fine. I'm sure some people write that unironically. After all, I've seen people writing unironically that C++ is well designed...
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
@Benjamin-Hall it's fine. I'm sure some people write that unironically. After all, I've seen people writing unironically that C++ is well designed...
Oh, they do. I think I've seen that exact phrasing before in fact. Probably posted by the guy who used to invade a particular 5e forum and spam stuff about how horrible it was and how everyone should play Savage Worlds instead.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
4e tried for balance. It made a great small-squad fantasy tactical simulator. Most of the complaints were from die-hard 3e players who didn't want balance in the first place. Did it have its flaws? Absolutely. Legions of them. Were they what people complained about? Not really. There wasn't a LFQW problem here at all. Doing away with it had other costs, though.
That's very interesting. And probably the counterexample @Mason_Wheeler was looking for. And IIRC he played 4e at least a few times himself? I wonder whether he encountered in it any of the problems he talked so extensively about.
As I never played any D&D whatsoever except that one very short campaign on this forum where the DM ragequitted just before the final fight (well, our final fight) - I know nothing about the changes between 3e and 4e except the alignment chart. Could you tell in short what do you think are the biggest changes that fixed balance? Do different classes still have unique feel to them, or was it about making everyone work about the same to prevent things from ever going out of control?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
In early (OD&D through AD&D 2e), LFQW was an explicit design goal. A stupid one, IMO, but a (mis)feature, not an unintended side effect. "Balance" wasn't even on the developers' mind.
Or consistency, for that matter. The whole era had a completely different mindset from today — go read old (1970s/early 80s) D&D adventures, for example. Most read as if everyone understands that the DM’s goal is to try and kill the PCs, and the PCs’ job is to try and prevent that, while staying within the game’s rules.
3e (and 3.5e) tried for balance, but no one told the splat writers that. Or the core development team. 3e was a whole mess of a broken system...that lots of people loved for its very broken-ness.
I think it only really became broken later on, when WOTC started releasing about six new books every week for it. When D&D3 first came out, everyone loved it because it wasn’t such a disjointed mess as AD&D 2nd Edition and tried to balance monsters against PCs better. I say this as someone who bought the original core rulebooks for it pretty much as they came out, and we played some games with it before the DMG or Monster Manual were even available, so had to make do with the paraphrased versions provided just for that reason in the back of the original printing of the PHB.
Of course, since then, when I play D&D these days it’s AD&D 2, because I’ve found that I actually prefer the disjointed mess :)
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
@Mason_Wheeler I promised to not continue this so I won't. I have just one question. Are you doing this on purpose or did you simply forgot that we were talking about the quadratic mage problem - a topic that YOU have introduced?
"Doing this"? Doing what? Discussing the problem? You sound as if you don't even know what the problem is. You're attempting to artificially restrict the problem to one extremely specific facet and for the life of me I do not understand why.
And I'm still waiting for you to tell me where FF1 has spell slots. You said that like three times, and I asked this question three times, but you still haven't answered.
What does that question even mean? "Where does it have spell slots?" Where does D&D have spell slots? In its magic system! Where else would they be?
Imagine if there was only one spell rank and all spell slots were equal, but each spell took a different number of slots. Would you still call it spell slots?
No, that's an MP system. That's literally the exact explanation I gave upthread, turned upside down.
Imagine if there were two separate MP pools for small fireballs and large fireballs. Would you say that's closer to single MP pool or ranked spell slots, balance-wise?
Where do all the rest of the spells go?
Do you even understand the words I'm saying? Do you even read what I'm saying?
This from the guy asking "where does it have its spell slots?" and trying to appropriate things I explained to you to explain them back to me? Dude, you're not even trying!
Do you even want a discussion at all? Or are you here just to post funny videos and berate anyone saying anything positive about D&D
Umm...?
@Mason_Wheeler said in Building an RPG system:
Gah, no! The Vancian magic system is probably the worst thing about D&D.
That kinda implies that the other aspects of D&D (the ones that aren't the magic system) aren't so bad. All in all it's a pretty great game, and as @Benjamin-Hall pointed out, without it we wouldn't even have an RPG genre in the first place.
I don't know where you grew such a raging case of
-grade reading comprehension, but please do something about it. It's making it extremely irritating to try to have a discussion in good faith with you, and you didn't used to be this way! 
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
4e tried for balance. It made a great small-squad fantasy tactical simulator. Most of the complaints were from die-hard 3e players who didn't want balance in the first place.
I dunno about that. Even people who started with 4e and didn't have 3e baggage to compare it to have plenty to say about its flaws as a gaming system:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpmUxfS4LF8
To me it feels like a classic case of "excluded middle." This system has flaws, so let's do the polar opposite and say it's fixed now, not realizing that all we've done is create something even worse in our extreme overreaction. (I could give plenty of examples, but most of them belong in the Garage, so I'll forbear.)
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Doing this, as in completely ignoring what I'm saying and replying to things I'm NOT saying. Also, completely ignoring the fact that the problem of quadratic mage is entirely about DPS (specifically, DPS growth over time compared to other classes - so, DPS).
I'm glad that at least you realize the point behind ranked spell system and aren't just thinking in names alone. Now, if you could actually point out what's your problem with them - an actual scenario that results in imbalance and how a simple MP system avoids it. I gave you several of those the other way around, and you haven't commented on any of it. You just kept mentioning how broken D&D is as if it was any relevant.
"Where FF1 has spell slots" as in where you can see this mechanic at play. The core idea behind a ranked slot system is that if you have 10 rank I slots. and 2 rank II slots is that you can cast either 12 rank I spells; 11 rank I and 1 rank II spells; or 10 rank I and 2 rank II spells. And that's it. Even if you have no use for rank I spells and would rather use one more rank II, you cannot do that, because rank I slots can be only used to cast rank I spells, period. An equivalent simple MP system would have to either give you an option to cast 3-4 rank II spells at the cost of not casting (almost) any rank I spells, or alternatively, letting you cast 100 rank I spells because of how cheap they are.
In FF1, the first scenario occurs never, while the second occurs all the time. FF1 doesn't have ranked spell slots. FF1 has simple MP system. If there is a limit on known spells at once (in remake there wasn't, but there could be in original, dunno) - that's a completely different system orthogonal to ranked spell slots.
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@Mason_Wheeler I don't fancy watching a 22 minute video that I don't enjoy (I skipped through just to see what it's about, and from what I've seen, I absolutely wouldn't enjoy watching it in full - just not my style) - but a quick glance looks like his main (only?) complaint is that it's too complicated, not that it's unbalanced. And nobody questioned that. @Benjamin-Hall's claim was that 4e has balanced gameplay between classes. Your video doesn't dispute that (or if it does, please give us a timestamp).
Do you think 4e is still unbalanced in late game? You haven't answered that question, and it's important for determining whether ranked spell slots inherently lead to unbalanced late game - which after all these posts STILL seems like your only complaint about them.
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
the fact that the problem of quadratic mage is entirely about DPS (specifically, DPS growth over time compared to other classes - so, DPS).
I'm glad that at least you realize the point behind ranked spell system and aren't just thinking in names alone. Now, if you could actually point out what's your problem with them - an actual scenario that results in imbalance and how a simple MP system avoids it. I gave you several of those the other way around, and you haven't commented on any of it. You just kept mentioning how broken D&D is as if it was any relevant.
"Where FF1 has spell slots" as in where you can see this mechanic at play. The core idea behind a ranked slot system is [skipped condescending explanation of system we both understand]
In FF1, the first scenario occurs never, while the second occurs all the time. FF1 doesn't have ranked spell slots. FF1 has simple MP system.
It took me literally 2 minutes of searching on YouTube to find and screenshot that. You are saying soooo many things that bear no resemblance to reality, and I don't understand why!
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@Mason_Wheeler the FF1 I played looked like this.
I knew they were different, but I didn't know they were so different. I take back everything I said about FF1. Turns out I was talking about a completely different game. Goddamn publishers and their marketing lies.
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@Mason_Wheeler but instead of
, could you give me an actual counterargument to what I said? Your ENTIREEEEEEEEEE argument here seems to be "D&D sucks" and a bunch of emoji. You never said EVEN A SINGLE SENTENCE about why you think MP system balances better than ranked spell slots. You just asserted that as if you read it in Holy Bible or in a papal letter and it was against your religion to acknowledge that ranked spell slots can ever be good for anything because of the Word of God and not any actual reason.
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
@Mason_Wheeler I don't fancy watching a 22 minute video that I don't enjoy (I skipped through just to see what it's about, and from what I've seen, I absolutely wouldn't enjoy watching it in full - just not my style) - but a quick glance looks like his main (only?) complaint is that it's too complicated, not that it's unbalanced.
...yeah. You didn't watch the video.
That was what he started out talking about, but there's a lot more to it. You can find the TLDR summation at 17:14. Basically, there are many flaws with 4e, and any given one of them wouldn't be all that bad, but all of them put together make the game an unplayable, unbearable slog.And nobody questioned that. @Benjamin-Hall's claim was that 4e has balanced gameplay between classes. Your video doesn't dispute that (or if it does, please give us a timestamp).
That wasn't the claim I was addressing. The claim I was addressing was that the only/primary reason to complain about it was from 3e munchkins who didn't like a more balanced system. So I showed a video from someone with no 3e baggage whose complaints were about all sorts of different things.
And their "balancing" was a big part of the problem. He addresses this around 9:31, where he talks about the class system, how they turned it into a hard role system. There are 4 roles and all of the classes are one of those four, with their powers just being reskinned versions of one another. That's achieving balance, but it's brute-force balancing by turning everything into simplistic drivel with no room for imagination or nuance.
Do you think 4e is still unbalanced in late game?
I wouldn't know. I'm not aware of any 4e campaign that managed to survive that long.
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
@Mason_Wheeler the FF1 I played looked like this.
I knew they were different, but I didn't know they were so different. I take back everything I said about FF1. Turns out I was talking about a completely different game. Goddamn publishers and their marketing lies.
Wow! Which version is that? I had heard they'd put out a few ports to newer systems, but I had no idea they overhauled the magic system like that.It really is an improvement, though. One of the big problems with the spell slot system is that you use them all up too quickly, and then there's very little you can do. There's no good way to make a MP-recovery potion for tiered spell slots. When they're all in the same pool, you can drink a potion that recovers your one MP stat and you're good to go, you can cast more spells now. But when they're broken up into multiple ranks, restoration involves massive levels of complexity, and the simplest solution is "yeah, you can't do that." (Out of curiosity, did the version you played have MP recovery potions?)
In D&D, where you generally have 1-3 combat encounters per day, and then at the end of the day you rest and regain your spells, that can be made to work. In FF1, it very much did not work because you had a new random encounter every dozen or so steps, but they had borrowed D&D's magic system. So you still had 1-3 times your casters could actually be useful in combat between visits to the inn, but an exponentially higher number of encounters, so the rest of the time they were dead weight because their melee stats were sucky and there's no good to recover spell slots in the field. (Which it seems like the publisher implicitly acknowledged by changing it for the remake.)
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Yes, I didn't watch the video. It's literally what I said in my post, that I didn't watch it. I really don't understand the reason you thought it's important to repeat after me that I didn't watch it. It just increases my doubt in whether you actually read my posts.
Now that you gave me timestamps, I watched from 17:14, and it listed many complaints, but nothing was about magic being too powerful, or any other aspect of balance. I also watched the part from 9:31. And you lied to me. Or maybe you don't understand what balance is - either way, contrary to what you said, that part doesn't mention balance AT. ALL. It talks about lack of choices. Which is valid point, but IS. NOT. ABOUT. BALANCE. Balance is about adjusting relative power of various abilities, items, classes, and so on. It is NOT about fun, it is NOT about choice, it is NOT about anything other than adjusting relative power. Stop calling everything "balance". This is not useful.
I'm glad that you finally admitted that you don't actually know whether 4e is unbalanced or not. Now, can we FINALLY talk about ranked spell slots WITHOUT constant references to everything else that's wrong with D&D that is NOT related to ranked spell slots? Pretty please?
(The FF1 I played was from Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls for GBA.)
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@Mason_Wheeler I agree that spell slots in FF-style game is a huge mistake, for the reasons you listed. Too few slots and too complicated restoration items. But that's exactly why tabletop RPGs and video games need to be treated separately. Like you mentioned - with only 1-3 encounters between rests, the numbers work out very differently.
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@Gurth 3e did try to unify the system (a generally good thing). But it suffered from the fact that the game the developers intended people would play and the game that people really played were two completely different things (at first, then the developers started catering to what people were actually doing).
Basically, in trying to standardize everything, they created endless loopholes. And the shift from AD&D's "the rules are suggestions, but the DM is in full control" to 3e's "DM's shouldn't really mess with things" RAW focus enabled rules lawyers and
(in a bad way). So all the restrictions they put on things were discarded as "just fluff".But core itself was broken. Shapechange (and that line of spells) was entirely, 100% broken. And core. The Summon Monster line (especially when you got to the planar binding levels was broken. Scrying and teleport were broken. And all core. The umpty-dozen splats just made it worse by having horrible quality control.
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@Mason_Wheeler @Gąska 4e certainly had its issues. Lots of them, especially early on (when that video was made).
- at high levels, the monster math ended up with too high HP and too low damage output, meaning it turned into padded sumo combat. That was fixed later (when MM3 came out and changed all the monster math across the board).
- the skill/non-combat rules were somewhat anemic, and suffered from specialization-syndrome (either you specialized or you couldn't contribute and were an active detriment). They tried to fix this later, but only sort of succeeded.
- Combat always ran long, because that was the main focus. Tactical, squad-based combat. It played like a hybrid of a miniatures game (ie WH40K) and an RPG. Which is ironic, because that's the mirror image of the origins of D&D.
- There were lots of feat taxes and trap options (things no one should ever pick). That wasted tons of space in the books and made the game painful to get in to.
- Too many books were published, making getting into it difficult and expensive, because all the "good" stuff was scattered through many books.
- The RAW-heavy (even more so than 3e) design made it so that you felt like you were playing the character sheet, not actually roleplaying a real character.
- I'm sure there are others.
But balance, especially magic/non-magic balance, wasn't an issue until very late in the game's life, when a few really weak classes were published (mainly because they just didn't have tons of support). And the most powerful builds? That was a purely Martial (power source) ranger build. There was no LFQW problem at all. You could build "broken" things, but compared to 3e (or even 2e), the difference was that one did 25% more DPS than the other. Not that one couldn't even play the same game. Look up the Tier System from 3e, where whole swaths of the classes were relegated to "can't even do its own job to an acceptable level without serious optimization" and others were "can casually break the game by accident."
But the complaint about being just re-skinned versions of the same classes? No. That's from someone who never really played it in detail. Yes, there was a role system. But a Fighter (Defender, secondary striker) and a Paladin (Defender, secondary Leader) played very differently. As did a Wizard (Controller, secondary striker) and a Druid (Controller, secondary Leader). And you could get away with quite a range of compositions. Having a primary-role Defender was important, but Controllers and Leaders were negotiable (and you could easily get away with only having someone who was a secondary one). And Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies made them even more different from each other.
And complaining about "re-skinning" is rather amusing, considering that 4e is the one edition with optional fluff. Literally. There was an explicit rule that anything in italics in the ability description was completely re-shapable at the player's desire, as long as the mechanics didn't change. That's something people try to do all the time in other editions without rule support.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
@Gurth 3e did try to unify the system (a generally good thing).
It did make the game much easier to learn and play, but in retrospect I also think it took away all the flavour. (Made a lot worse by WOTC then encouraging other people to use d20 System for their games, whether or not they benefitted from having D&D-style mechanics.)
But it suffered from the fact that the game the developers intended people would play and the game that people really played were two completely different things (at first, then the developers started catering to what people were actually doing).
I probably missed that part. We used it to play typical D&D-style monster-bashing games, which seems to be what it was designed for. But we never did get beyond level 6 or so with our characters in any campaign before we either all got killed or bored and went back to Shadowrun.
Basically, in trying to standardize everything, they created endless loopholes. And the shift from AD&D's "the rules are suggestions, but the DM is in full control" to 3e's "DM's shouldn't really mess with things" RAW
I don’t think that’s part of the original 3rd edition “ethos”. At least, I don’t remember it like that at all. In my memory, Games Workshop of about ten years ago was the main proponent of RAW at the expense of common sense.
But core itself was broken. Shapechange (and that line of spells) was entirely, 100% broken.
/me gets out a 3E PHBPage 250, level 9 wizard spell … We never got even remotely close to that kind of stuff. It does seem a bit overpowered on reading it, but it’s actually toned down (slightly) from the AD&D 2E version, which didn’t put any size limits on the creature.
And core. The Summon Monster line (especially when you got to the planar binding levels was broken. Scrying and teleport were broken. And all core.
I’ll take your word for it, but coming from AD&D 2E, most of what I see comes across as an attempt to balance things better and make the rules more workable :)
@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
- Combat always ran long, because that was the main focus. Tactical, squad-based combat. It played like a hybrid of a miniatures game (ie WH40K) and an RPG. Which is ironic, because that's the mirror image of the origins of D&D.
3rd edition already moved into that direction with its optional five-foot squares; 3.5 then made it the default, as I recall, and WOTC began selling al kinds of figures.
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@Gurth said in Building an RPG system:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
@Gurth 3e did try to unify the system (a generally good thing).
It did make the game much easier to learn and play, but in retrospect I also think it took away all the flavour. (Made a lot worse by WOTC then encouraging other people to use d20 System for their games, whether or not they benefitted from having D&D-style mechanics.)
But it suffered from the fact that the game the developers intended people would play and the game that people really played were two completely different things (at first, then the developers started catering to what people were actually doing).
I probably missed that part. We used it to play typical D&D-style monster-bashing games, which seems to be what it was designed for. But we never did get beyond level 6 or so with our characters in any campaign before we either all got killed or bored and went back to Shadowrun.
Basically, in trying to standardize everything, they created endless loopholes. And the shift from AD&D's "the rules are suggestions, but the DM is in full control" to 3e's "DM's shouldn't really mess with things" RAW
I don’t think that’s part of the original 3rd edition “ethos”. At least, I don’t remember it like that at all. In my memory, Games Workshop of about ten years ago was the main proponent of RAW at the expense of common sense.
But core itself was broken. Shapechange (and that line of spells) was entirely, 100% broken.
/me gets out a 3E PHBPage 250, level 9 wizard spell … We never got even remotely close to that kind of stuff. It does seem a bit overpowered on reading it, but it’s actually toned down (slightly) from the AD&D 2E version, which didn’t put any size limits on the creature.
And core. The Summon Monster line (especially when you got to the planar binding levels was broken. Scrying and teleport were broken. And all core.
I’ll take your word for it, but coming from AD&D 2E, most of what I see comes across as an attempt to balance things better and make the rules more workable :)
@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
- Combat always ran long, because that was the main focus. Tactical, squad-based combat. It played like a hybrid of a miniatures game (ie WH40K) and an RPG. Which is ironic, because that's the mirror image of the origins of D&D.
3rd edition already moved into that direction with its optional five-foot squares; 3.5 then made it the default, as I recall, and WOTC began selling al kinds of figures.
When played as a basic dungeon crawl, where Fighters fight, Clerics heal, and Wizards blast, there's very little imbalance. And that's how the designers tested it. But as soon as you go away from that, everything falls apart. Which is what people realized very fast. Later publications gave into this "playing as gods" thing and ran with it. In one sense, they actually were better balanced against what people actually played than the core, which had very bad assumptions about how people would play.
And compare the following statements about the nature of the rules:
From the foreward of the 2e DMG:
Take the time to have fun with the AD&D rules. Add, create, expand, and extrapolate. Don’t just let the game sit there, and don’t become a rules lawyer worrying about each piddly little detail. If you can’t figure out the answer, MAKE IT UP! And whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of believing these rules are complete. They are not. You cannot sit back and let the rule book do everything for you. Take the time and effort to become not just a good DM, but a brilliant one.
At conventions, in letters, and over the phone I’m often asked for the instant answer to a fine point of the game rules. More often than not, I come back with a question—what do you feel is right? And the people asking the questions discover that not only can they create an answer, but that their answer is as good as anyone else’s. The rules are only guidelines.
From the 3e DMG:
Good DMs know not to change or overturn an existing rule without a good, logical justification so that the players don't grow dissatisfied.
...
When you come upon an instance where there seems to be no rule to cover a situation, consider the following:
Look to any similar situation that is covered in a rulebook [and extrapolate from there].
If you have to make something up, stick with it for the rest of the campaign... [Note: the exact wording here is rather cautionary about "making something up"It goes on to give a checklist for things to consider when making changes, and has lots of cautionary notes, basically saying "don't do it unless you have to."
The spirit of the two is very very different. One says "here are some incomplete suggestions for how to play, but change it as you wish", while the other takes the opposite stance--"everything's here, change it at your own risk and only after careful consideration." And we have developer statements that they were absolutely trying to lock down the "bad DM" phenomena where DMs would make rulings just to screw over players. It failed, of course--no written rule can constrain the rule-maker. And other text in the 3e-era books encourages legalistic readings, including giving order of precedence instructions to rules (which caused all sorts of havoc later, ironically). It encourages close parsing and weaponization of rules. And made it seem like the RAW was totally the epitome of balance and that the issue was house-rules...when in fact the core books were all sorts of imbalanced.
4e took this even a step further. My books are in storage, but it tried to present itself as a complete game system that you'd not need to make any rulings on, and house rules were discouraged and legalistic readings were encouraged even further.
The broken with those spells starts well before shapechange itself--the polymorph line lets you dumpster dive into the MM (and thus grows exponentially more powerful as more monster books are published), gaining things that are just flat out broken for PCs but totally fine for NPCs. Things like casting as a higher level person than you already were, letting you bootstrap yourself. Same with the summon monster line.
The big issue 3e had was that it tried to systematize everything. Including things that can't be on the same footing, because they're not similar. PC-NPC transparency in a crunch-focused game means that clever players have access to things that are really designed for worldbuilding and thus way too powerful to fit the game concept.
As for combat length and "miniatures"--yeah. 3e started the trend, 4e took it to extremes. 4e's big issue was that they misread what people actually wanted. They made a good game, but not the game that anyone wanted.
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I see good discussions keep being made (as well as some
, but I kinda expected that would happen too), with a lot of suggestions and examples.So we got spell slots vs. MP (and similar resources). Essentially, is the limit on spell casting done through having a daily limit for each rank, or on having a shared resource pool? Or using a combination? Because either way, spells tend to be ranked somehow.
The problem, as I understand it, with older D&D is that mages would eventually get too many spell slots (especially high level ones), combined with spells being automatic success so there was no way to fail a cast. The auto-success problem being solved by DoD requiring a skill check against the spell itself for the cast, meaning the possibility for both crit and misfire on spell cast, like any regular attack.
What I feel is that an MP/resource-based system has a larger potential for strategic depth compared to a spell slot system. In either case there still are plenty variables to poke at for balancing purposes, but I feel a spell slot system does make some decisions for the player. I can use all my low rank spells and still have my high rank spell ready to go, compared to an MP system where using too many low rank spells may make you have too few MP for a high rank spell.
But yeah, it ends up being a few questions to look at. Should spell casting success be automatic or skill check? Should the skill check be against the skill in magic use itself (same chance of success for any spell the caster knows) or against the individual spell? Or something else?
Should spells be easy or hard to learn? Cheap or expensive? Increasing difficulty/cost depending on strength?
Should there be a limit on the amount of spells known or unlimited? Limit on the amount of spells prepared to cast or not?
Cost of casting a spell being on a per-spell or per-rank basis? Or same regardless of spell strength?
Should the caster be able to make a spell stronger by increasing cost/difficulty?
Should all spells be fully predetermined or should there be room to customize spells or make custom spells?
Should spells be instant or have a cast time?
Should spells have cooldowns?
And probably more questions to look at.
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
Later D&D editions fixed that so you have access to all your spells all the time, without the need to prepare them
5e still uses the concept of prepared spells for paladins, clerics, wizards, and druids. It's nice because those classes can modify their spell list at the end of any long rest, which means you can adapt to what you think will help for the coming fight.
EDIT: Based on my reading of older versions, preparing isn't what it used to be ...
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
What I feel is that an MP/resource-based system has a larger potential for strategic depth compared to a spell slot system. In either case there still are plenty variables to poke at for balancing purposes, but I feel a spell slot system does make some decisions for the player. I can use all my low rank spells and still have my high rank spell ready to go, compared to an MP system where using too many low rank spells may make you have too few MP for a high rank spell.
Yes, that's the drawback. But it's done to enable more balance - as I mentioned previously, the more options you leave to players, the harder it is to balance. You can try starting with MP, and only after you can't get it right switch to slots.
On a somewhat tangential topic, I think you should avoid "utility spells" as much as possible. Charm, invisibility, open lock, etc. - things that normally would need a specialized party member who's good at particular task. The more spells like that, the less reason to have those party members. I'd even go as far as to say that magic should only be able to do what cannot be done otherwise - so e.g. magic detection, artifact identification, telekinesis etc. So you can't substitute a good mage for other classes, but they still fill an important non-combat role (in addition to their combat role).
Should spells be easy or hard to learn? Cheap or expensive? Increasing difficulty/cost depending on strength?
Personally - easy, cheap, yes. Mid-level spells should be readily available (maybe with some forced specialization), but having to go on an epic adventure to learn how to summon an asteroid is simply very cool and will make the spell feel special. Kinda like you can buy good warrior gear from a merchant but the best gear always comes from questing.
As for in-combat cost - make it varied. Weak spells that are cheap, strong spells that are expensive.
Should there be a limit on the amount of spells known or unlimited? Limit on the amount of spells prepared to cast or not?
No and no. Except maybe for the most powerful spells if you want this extra character-building depth, but generally you should allow the player to know as many spells as they want and use them whenever they want. It's just more fun that way, and avoids a lot of frustration ("if only I knew we'd fight THIS enemy, I'd prepare spells that can actually help!")
Should all spells be fully predetermined or should there be room to customize spells or make custom spells?
No spell customization. At all. It's the easiest way to break any semblance of balance, in a way that's not actually as fun as it sounds. Same with item enchantments - there should be a fixed list of possible effects, with all power numbers and costs clearly stated.
@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
Should spells be instant or have a cast time?
Instant. As discussed above, delayed spells are just too annoying to use. Cooldown is okay, though.
Most of your questions have answers depending on what game you want to make. How you want to make it feel. Short or long combat? Complicated battle plans or keeping it simple? Team play focus or making players self-sufficient? And remember - game design is an iterative process. Throw together a prototype and test it out. Might be a short test session. Might be a simulator. But you need to test things often, and make a lot of changes.
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
@Mason_Wheeler but instead of
, could you give me an actual counterargument to what I said? Your ENTIREEEEEEEEEE argument here seems to be "D&D sucks" and a bunch of emoji. You never said EVEN A SINGLE SENTENCE about why you think MP system balances better than ranked spell slots. You just asserted that as if you read it in Holy Bible or in a papal letter and it was against your religion to acknowledge that ranked spell slots can ever be good for anything because of the Word of God and not any actual reason.I've given counterarguments. You've completely ignored them and just repeated the same assertions over and over even after I addressed them. I've pointed out multiple times that there's far more to game balance than DPS, and you keep coming back to DPS, even flat-out asserting
the fact that the problem of quadratic mage is entirely about DPS.
Well no. No it isn't. That's not a fact at all. Wizards become overpowered in plenty of other ways that have to do with the broader overall balance of the game. Like I said, a big part of the problem isn't just that high-level wizards can do lots of damage, but that they can do lots of damage and make themselves non-squishy, which screws up the balance of roles.
@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
Now that you gave me timestamps, I watched from 17:14, and it listed many complaints, but nothing was about magic being too powerful, or any other aspect of balance. I also watched the part from 9:31. And you lied to me. Or maybe you don't understand what balance is - either way, contrary to what you said, that part doesn't mention balance AT. ALL. It talks about lack of choices. Which is valid point, but IS. NOT. ABOUT. BALANCE. Balance is about adjusting relative power of various abilities, items, classes, and so on. It is NOT about fun, it is NOT about choice, it is NOT about anything other than adjusting relative power. Stop calling everything "balance". This is not useful.
...so you didn't actually read the post, then? Because what I said was that they achieved "balance" by brute force and ended up with a system that was balanced by way of being simplistic and unfun. In other words, yes, it was
balanced but that hardly matters if the rest of the system sucks so bad that no one wants to play it.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
@Mason_Wheeler @Gąska 4e certainly had its issues. Lots of them, especially early on (when that video was made).
That video was made October 2019, less than a year ago.
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@Mason_Wheeler for a moment I hoped the hyperlink is going to lead to a post where you made those arguments but once again it's just yet another shitty picture meant to mock me instead of actually making actual point. You've run out of the benefit of doubt. I'm saying you never made any counterargument because I sincerely don't remember you making them. And I'm usually very good at remembering who said what. If you weren't such a giant asshole in this discussion, maybe I'd go back and double check (hell, probably we wouldn't even have this problem because you would just say what you have to say instead of producing an endless stream of insults and pointing me to hours of incredibly boring video footage that isn't even on topic). But fuck you. You showed zero good will throughout this entire topic, so my good will ends too. Show the exact post in which you made a point that I allegedly ignored or fuck off.
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@Mason_Wheeler I missed that. Because it was all the same stuff said at the beginning, most of which changed.
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
But yeah, it ends up being a few questions to look at. [0a] Should spell casting success be automatic or skill check? [0b] Should the skill check be against the skill in magic use itself (same chance of success for any spell the caster knows) or against the individual spell? Or something else?
[1a] Should spells be easy or hard to learn? [1b] Cheap or expensive? [1c]Increasing difficulty/cost depending on strength?
[2a]Should there be a limit on the amount of spells known or unlimited? [2b]Limit on the amount of spells prepared to cast or not?
[3] Cost of casting a spell being on a per-spell or per-rank basis? Or same regardless of spell strength?
[4] Should the caster be able to make a spell stronger by increasing cost/difficulty?
[5] Should all spells be fully predetermined or should there be room to customize spells or make custom spells?
[6] Should spells be instant or have a cast time?
[7] Should spells have cooldowns?
My two cents, using the numbers:
0a: I prefer automatic, but then I like streamlined systems. Having a check to cast, plus one or more checks to see if it's effective (attack rolls or saving throws in D&D terms) runs the risk of some strange probability curves that penalize actually trying to use anything that won't fix everything. Plus takes double or triple the time.0b: If you have to have a check, I'd have it be vs some form of rank-adjusted target. Maybe by tiering the spells in some fashion (tied to cost)?
1a: depends on the rest of the system.
1b: Either hard to learn (1a) OR expensive, not both.
1c: meh. Don't go too complex.2a: limited. Absolutely. Having access to the entire set of spells all at once is the core of the LFQW problem--a fighter gets small numeric bonuses (or one feat) each level, while the wizard gets whole huge range of spells to pick from plus numeric bonuses.
2b: There are 2 models: either every spell you know is prepared, but you're limited in the number you know, or you have much looser limits on what you know, but can only prepare a few at a time. Choose one. Plus, having a huge library of "I can do this right now" abilities means your player turns will slow to a crawl as things level up--the number of possible actions grows super-exponentially. 3e D&D (and 4e D&D to a lesser degree) ran into this hard--a single caster's turn at higher levels could take 10s of minutes, sometimes as much as half an hour. For one turn. For someone moderately prepared. That's obnoxious.3: Increasing with rank. Having Flare cost the same as firebolt means you'll only cast Flare. I'd go a non-linear cost increase with increasing power--maybe start out with rank^2, or maybe ceiling(rank^(1.5)) and adjust as needed.
4: Sure, if that makes sense. 5e D&D lets you upcast a lot of spells, using a higher spell slot in exchange for a bigger effect. Works really well so you don't need to make fire I, fire II, fire III, ..., only differing in the cost. Keeps the spell bloat down.
5: If spells have power, they need to be locked in stone. Custom spells are a great way to break everything wide open.
6: Depends on the rest of the system. I strongly prefer that most of them require the same action cost as attacking (1 Action in 5e D&D terms), but some of them can be cast "off-turn" for small/reactive effects.
7: No (the cooldown is set by the cost, and cool-downs are annoying to track at the table), but having a limit on stacking is important. No spell with a duration should stack with itself, and you shouldn't be able to stack buffs or debuffs. I'd look into 5e's concentration mechanic. It's gone a long way to squashing LFQW.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
When played as a basic dungeon crawl, where Fighters fight, Clerics heal, and Wizards blast, there's very little imbalance. And that's how the designers tested it.
It’s also how we tend(ed) to play D&D :) I’ve found its system in any edition I’ve played or read, doesn’t lend itself to more free-style adventures, let alone ones where things like investigation are the focus.
The spirit of the two is very very different. One says "here are some incomplete suggestions for how to play, but change it as you wish", while the other takes the opposite stance--"everything's here, change it at your own risk and only after careful consideration." And we have developer statements that they were absolutely trying to lock down the "bad DM" phenomena where DMs would make rulings just to screw over players. It failed, of course--no written rule can constrain the rule-maker. And other text in the 3e-era books encourages legalistic readings, including giving order of precedence instructions to rules (which caused all sorts of havoc later, ironically). It encourages close parsing and weaponization of rules. And made it seem like the RAW was totally the epitome of balance and that the issue was house-rules...when in fact the core books were all sorts of imbalanced.
I must say I don’t recall the 3rd edition bit, but then, it’s been at least 15 years since I played D&D3 at all.
It’s all the more strange given who designed 3rd edition — I kind of wonder how one goes from about the loosest RPG ever to one where “don’t try to think for yourself” is the starting point.
4e took this even a step further. My books are in storage, but it tried to present itself as a complete game system that you'd not need to make any rulings on, and house rules were discouraged and legalistic readings were encouraged even further.
Never played that. Like I said, after D&D3 we went back to AD&D2. I think I browsed through one or two of the books in a game store once, and decided not to waste my money on them.
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@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
So we got spell slots vs. MP (and similar resources). Essentially, is the limit on spell casting done through having a daily limit for each rank, or on having a shared resource pool? Or using a combination? Because either way, spells tend to be ranked somehow.
You don’t need to rank spells as such — unless you consider increased MP cost (for example) to be a rank. I don’t see any problem with allowing any magician to learn any spell in the game, without spell levels or slots, provided there’s something more logical that puts limits on them anyway. Levels always feel artificial to me, but, say, an MP cost that’s simply too high for a beginning magician sounds much more reasonable.
But yeah, it ends up being a few questions to look at. Should spell casting success be automatic or skill check?
Skill check. This gives players a reason to build up their skills, but also forces them to make decisions on whether to invest in their magic ability or in something else that’s useful as well, etc.
Should the skill check be against the skill in magic use itself (same chance of success for any spell the caster knows) or against the individual spell? Or something else?
That depends on how you see the magic as actually working, I think. However, I would favour that the spell sets or influences the difficulty. If you’ve got a rules system in which skill checks are rolled against the skill itself rather than an external difficulty, then IMHO each spell should give an individual modifier to the check to reflect its casting difficulty.
Should spells be easy or hard to learn? Cheap or expensive? Increasing difficulty/cost depending on strength?
You’re the only one who can really answer that, but it’s more a world question than a magic system question. If you want magic to be rare and special, they should be expensive and difficult to learn, while if you want a world where magic is everywhere, they need to be cheap and fairly simple. (Incidentally, D&D usually makes it out as the former, then portrays the latter.)
Should there be a limit on the amount of spells known or unlimited? Limit on the amount of spells prepared to cast or not?
See above. You need to decide on what kind of world/magical theory you want the system to reflect, then these answers will follow automatically.
Cost of casting a spell being on a per-spell or per-rank basis? Or same regardless of spell strength?
Logically, I would say a more powerful spell should be more expensive to cast.
Should the caster be able to make a spell stronger by increasing cost/difficulty?
Should all spells be fully predetermined or should there be room to customize spells or make custom spells?
Should spells be instant or have a cast time?
Should spells have cooldowns?
For all of these, again, that depends on what your idea about the (in-world) theory behind the magic is.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Building an RPG system:
4e took this even a step further. My books are in storage, but it tried to present itself as a complete game system that you'd not need to make any rulings on, and house rules were discouraged and legalistic readings were encouraged even further.
If people wanted that, they'd use a computer to resolve combat. Computers are brilliant at rules-as-written (provided you write the rules in executable code). Oh wait, while there's a decent genre of such games (some of which are very profitable), there's also a big space of gaming for more flexible and narrative-based systems and that's where tabletop gaming thoroughly sits…
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@Gurth said in Building an RPG system:
@Atazhaia said in Building an RPG system:
So we got spell slots vs. MP (and similar resources). Essentially, is the limit on spell casting done through having a daily limit for each rank, or on having a shared resource pool? Or using a combination? Because either way, spells tend to be ranked somehow.
You don’t need to rank spells as such
You don't "as such" but you need to rank them somehow. Even just for your internal notes not for publishing. Some spells are simply more powerful than others. Some spells are meant to be acquired much later in game than others. There's always going to be some hierarchy. Now, whether to have this hierarchy as an explicit gameplay element is another matter.
I don’t see any problem with allowing any magician to learn any spell in the game, without spell levels or slots, provided there’s something more logical that puts limits on them anyway. Levels always feel artificial to me, but, say, an MP cost that’s simply too high for a beginning magician sounds much more reasonable.
But it's very hard to balance that way. How much more MP does a level 5 wizard have compared to level 10? If the level 10 can cast a powerful spell three times, then level 5 will be able to cast it at least once - won't that make them a god for a couple adventures?
I've just got another idea for balancing it. Skyrim has skills and enchanted items that allow you reducing MP cost of spells from a given group (e.g. adept-level destruction spells, or master-level conjuration spells). Maybe that could be utilized for balance. Make the high-level spells so expensive you can't even dream of having enough MP - but you can get a trait that reduces MP cost by half, and you can get an item that reduces it by half again, for a total of 4x reduction and making the spell actually usable. (Multiple items don't stack - that would make it way too powerful.)
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@Gąska Why have levels at all?
For example: give magicians a stat that is essentially their raw ability to handle magic and one or more skills with which to actually do the magic. Allow both to be improved like any other stat and skill. Have the magic stat create an MP pool to use for magic, possibly in combination with some other stats and/or skills (probably intelligence). Oh, and base the MP regeneration rate on some other values instead, to encourage magicians to also invest points in those.
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@Gurth fun factor. It's simply more fun to use a more powerful spell than to have the same spell throughout entire campaign that just does more damage with each level. It's the closest a magic user will ever be to finding an awesome sword.
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@Gąska But why would you not be able to get different spells in the kind of system I suggested? You’re just more free in which spells you take, but you’d still get to learn new ones at some point — just at points of your choosing rather than when you hit an arbitrary level.
Sure, levels give people something to aim for: “I want to get to level 8 so I can cast third-level spells and learn fireball!”
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@Gurth said in Building an RPG system:
@Gąska But why would you not be able to get more powerful spells in the kind of system I suggested?
I refer you to the 1st paragraph of my 2x previous post. That you call them more powerful alone already establishes that they're higher level. It's just that there's nothing in the mechanics that technically prohibits the player from using it at level 1 if their MP is high enough. But you as the game designer still don't want level 1 characters using that spell. I thought you're suggesting making all spells appropriate for level 1 characters and only increasing power of characters through developing skills, not through acquiring new spells itself. Which makes sense too, but isn't a system that I would personally enjoy.
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Another idea: make some spells free. Make the free spells the most commonly used and scale them with character skills. Make MP-draining spells really powerful, and MP very limited. Scale the power of free spells with remaining MP to make the choice of using an ultimate attack more interesting (you deal SHITLOADS of damage but at the cost of becoming weaker until rest).
- No need to abstain from using magic in minor encounters.
- You still want to conserve MP as much as possible.
- Easy to balance - just make them perform the same as archers and you're almost done.
- Sets up the player for having "awesome moments" where they suddenly unleash their power and save the day, but discourages the player from doing that too often.
- Easier to keep track of than spell slots.
I welcome everyone to point out everything I forgot about that makes it a bad idea.
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@Gąska said in Building an RPG system:
@Gurth said in Building an RPG system:
@Gąska But why would you not be able to get more powerful spells in the kind of system I suggested?
I refer you to the 1st paragraph of my 2x previous post. That you call them more powerful alone already establishes that they're higher level.
That was a slip of the keyboard caused by you saying “use a more powerful spell than to have the same spell”, which I corrected to “different” when I noticed, but apparently you replied to it before I did.
It's just that there's nothing in the mechanics that technically prohibits the player from using it at level 1 if their MP is high enough. But you as the game designer still don't want level 1 characters using that spell.
I as the game designer don’t want level 1 characters to have or do anything because I don’t want character levels at all.
I thought you're suggesting making all spells appropriate for level 1 characters and only increasing power of characters through developing skills, not through acquiring new spells itself.
What I propose is indeed pretty much that, except for there being such a thing as “level 1 characters”. But, of course, you’d still have beginning characters who have lower skills and whatnot as characters who’ve been around longer and developed their skills and other abilities more.
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@Gurth said in Building an RPG system:
It's just that there's nothing in the mechanics that technically prohibits the player from using it at level 1 if their MP is high enough. But you as the game designer still don't want level 1 characters using that spell.
I as the game designer don’t want level 1 characters to have or do anything because I don’t want character levels at all.
Goddamn you're so hard to talk to. You don't want minute 1 character to use
high-levelhigh-power spells. Better now?
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@Gąska The way DoD tries to solve it (being level-less) is to make the higher powered spells really expensive to level. Not the best system either, so one of the larger problems to solve is how to limit access to higher level spells from the start but avoid making it frustrating or a chore.
