11:06 PM Jacob: 3.0 and 3/5 have lots of things that make good sense-- but they still sometimes violate my old intuitions, and I find it easier to remember rules learned when I was 13 than rules that make sense.
11:10 PM me: Yeah, at first I questioned some of what was being given up by simplifying things like different classes going up at different xp rates, etc. But a lot of it is really good: many fewer tables, more careful balancing (hopefully) between classes, and stocking the complexity in the DM's xp calculations, rather than on the player's sheets.11:13 PM One notion I had was that a campaign could toddle along for a while, and then go through a wormhole to some mysterious land where everything works just a little differently. Eventually the players figure out that everything's working according to ye olde AD&D rules (or something), and you can feel the difference, if any.
11:14 PM Jacob: Order of the Stick's very first strip had the characters experience the 3.0/ 3.5 transition.
11:15 PM but I like it as a mystery for the players to solve, too.
makes it all quite meta
11:16 PM one of the big problems with a good-rules, good-mechanics RPG is that there' s never real mystery about the way magic works
me: Yeah, I thought OOTS was cute, but it's a pretty slight change really.
Hm. Whaddaya mean, precisely?
11:17 PM Jacob: have you read the damn Robert Jordan novels?
me: No, and I can't say I feel the worse for it, since they seem to cause y'all so much pain. :)
11:18 PM I've been burnt by Terry Goodkind, too, btw, but it's not his fault.
Jacob: hah
and I haven't read him. But generally...
11:19 PM Tolkien aside, because we don't meet the Wizards until they already know everything...
in magic-intensive fantasy literature, since magic screws with the rules of the universe, there's a struggle to learn what it can do and what it can't.
Early Tim Hunter.
11:20 PM or in a different way Earthsea
me: For God's sake, man, why aren't you posting stuff like this and your response to my book comments up on Trollkien, and keeping my vanity blog alive for me!? :)
11:21 PM Jacob: hee. gmail saves the chat; we could just copy and paste
me: Oh, don't think I won't.
Jacob: but do you see what I mean? people complain about the spell-slot system, but I think that's a symptom
11:22 PM the underlying problem is: for an RPG to work, you have to be able to just look up the spell effect-- and that's not how magic feels in fantasy
11:23 PM Jacob: and having the players occasionally not know, quite literally, what the rules are might be a fun way to get that feel back
me: I totally do see what you mean. Although I think people complain about spell-slots from the other side of the perspective me: That is, after you've read Harry Potter, you know how the spells work: they do what you want, whenever you say the words and wave the wand. None of these namby-pamby limitations that are just in there so the barbarians feel like they can compete with the awesome wizards.
11:24 PM Jacob: yeah, but screw Harry Potter's magic system with a ginsu.
me: Fine, but you know it's not the only one.
Jacob: you say two words of pig-latin. wtf?
11:25 PM me: It's not pig latin. Come on now.
Jacob: I know. It's pidgin-Latin.
me: But the idea of "learn a spell, you can use it whenever" is pretty widespread.
11:26 PM Jacob: that's fine. But Harry Potter spells are so precise, and easy, and limitless, that they feel much less like magic to me
11:27 PM studying isn't studying the fabric of reality, it's studying more pidgin-Latin
11:29 PM Jacob: I think abolishing spell slots, but making spell effects more unpredictable-- and, especially, making there be fewer basic "spells" that everyone can just look up in a book-- would generate the right feel.
me: Ok, before I go on, in response to HP, in fact there's a lot of uncertainty that goes unexplained and people tend to disregard -- all those classes, Ron is screwing up spells left and right, and Neville can't do them, etc.
Jacob: true
11:30 PM me: Harry (and Herminone, and anyone when they need to for plot reasons) don't have a problem casting spells, so it just looks like saying "Expelliarmus!" really fast.
11:31 PM But I'm not going to defend the Potter system of magic as the end-all and be-all by any means.
Jacob: and presumably the teachers do engage in research to create new spells (I wonder what the publication requirements for tenure are?) but we don't see that
me: Have you looked at the Mage part of White Wolf's World of Darkness?
That sounds a bit more like what you describe.
11:32 PM They are teaching in prep school.
And tenure doesn't seem to mean much, considering how often Dumbledore's job seems in jeopardy. :)
Jacob: we'll see how the wizards-are-c00l crowd like it when we abolish spell-slots but make most spells other than Light and Cure Light Wounds require a cauldron and a minimum of 1/2 hr casting time. :-)
11:33 PM heh
but,no, I haven't looked at that system
11:34 PM me: Well, that's the other side of the RPG coin -- you need to have some cool Gandalf stuff to do or they're not worth bringing along.
Jacob: I've got a kick-ass gaming store round the corner; I'll go browse the rulebooks sometime
But other than Light, Gandalf cast about three spells the whole series!
11:35 PM he had Power, even if he didn't cast twenty spells a day
me: I'm not intimately familiar, but I get the distinct impression that spells are more -- fuzzy. Like, you cast a spell and when it works, it helps you, but the actual effect isn't well-specified ahead of time.
11:36 PM True. I say "Gandalf" and I mean "Dude with a flowing beard in a storm with lightning coming out of his hands." It is the power of Tolkien that makes you think that guy's Gandalf.
("you" = "me"
)
11:37 PM Jacob: got to go to bed soon!
11:38 PM I should also look at the huge d20 system rulebook somebody published on a license of the damn Jordan novels-- see how it handles magic
no-- damn. It's the George RR Martin novels, where magic hardly existsme: Bummer. Like his writing, though.Jacob: Martin's?
11:40 PM me: Yeah. Haven't read any Jordan stuff. Only read the comic the Hedge Knight, actually.
Jacob: The Martin novels are much better than the Jordan, certainly.
But the first few Jordans are more addictive. crack is bad for you...
11:28 PM me:But what I was thinking about my dream campaign that relates to this is: as I've written before, magic seems very disruptive to society. ("How's a regular king supposed to rule without an army of wizards and clerics to help him?")11:39 PM me: Ok, so here's a notion of mine. Take as read that magic comes along and is disruptive: invisibility alone just screws up medieval society like crazy. So take the campaign story as the development of magic is similar to the industrial revolution, with new magic being developed all the time and winners and losers coming out of it, and strong social forces trying to control magic, restrict it, etc. And lots of people coming up with new spells to do things like build bridges and pump water, and run society, not just shoot lightning bolts.11:41 PM Jacob: I like the big idea
me: Okay, I'll let you go to bed. I just thought making magic more "new" to the society at large, and trying to force PCs to wrestle with making magic work to keep society from unraveling, might be similar to your idea that magic should be uncertain. Dovetail with it, at any rate.
Jacob: yeah, definitely.
11:42 PM ok, off to bed now, more another time
me: coo
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5 comments:
heh-- you did it!
I was hooked on Jordans series but i got fed up with the emasculation of men after 5th book. Goodkinds series is the only series ive read twice or more all the way through and completed it totally.
If they start treating clerical spells and magic alike, thats stupid. Totally different way of pulling spells out of thin air, in a way lol. I think i may agree with some of the "use spells you know on the fly" for a mage but not for clerics. Furthermore doesnt that make all mages now sorcerers?
God i hate wrinting something awesome just to have it deleted, i hate blogs. ANYWAY, jordan sucked after book 5. I was sick of feeling emasculated. Goodkind, my favorite fantasy series. Never re read any books except The Sword of Truth series.
Magic is fine the way it is for me. Isnt getting rid of spell slots turning all mages into sorcerers? Clerics need spell slots, or choosing spells, since they get them from a higher power and makes a bit more sense, to me anyway.
and you guys thought i didnt read this. HA
Grell, sorry for the apparent disappearance. I put on comment moderation to stop the spam, but it doesn't work when I don't check my gmail often enough.
Holy crap! You read this?! You're suspicion of my SHOCK is justified! :)
To actually respond to Grell:
My bad experience with Goodkind was that I heard an audiobook of "Wizard's First Rule" and it was awful. But I realized later that it was an abridged version and they'd hacked it all up, which is why the plot made such little sense. Also, the voice acting was ridiculous. The Dragon Scarlet was a guy saying "I do declah" in falsetto. You see how this would go awfully.
So, I'll give him another try sometime, once that taste's washed out of my mouth.
You're absolutely right that if you don't distinguish cleric-magic and wizard-magic, you just have generic "spellcasters" and that's lame. At the same time, I always thought spell slots for clerics were a bit weird -- why can't they just holler out "Odin, save your loyal servant!" or something? Spell slots for wizards made more sense -- they were memorizing something every morning.
Jacob's the one who wanted to institute a new magic system without spell slots, not me, but the key thing he wanted was for magic to be mysterious and unpredictable, things-man-was-not-meant-to-know type stuff. I think he only wanted to get rid of spell slots to balance out that he was making wizard spells more random.
It's true that in D&D rules, saying "no spell slots" basically just makes sorcerers. Ya gotta remember that back in our day, there weren't no sorcerers, so they're a new thing for us. 3rd ed. lets you have your cake or eat it too: you can have pre-defined spells, or cast-on-the-fly. That's new for us (me anyway), and I didn't think of it at the time of the IMing. Jacob was just suggesting a sorcerer-with-random-effects scheme for magic made more sense to him, or would be fun to play, or something. I think. I really shouldn't put words in his mouth.
So, since you bring up clerics, here's some more random thoughts about that:
If'n I run the circus, I was thinking that cleric-magic should be much more faith-based. Like, when you get healed, you don't actually see wounds heal up or anything (after all, only the last few hp are supposed to be tangible damage: the rest represent luck and blessings of the gods and suchlike.) You get healed (blessed) by a cleric, and have faith that it does something. (And it does, in game terms -- you get hp.)
There's plenty of cleric spells that're already intangible in their effects, we just don't make a big deal about it: blessings and buffs and healings and so forth mostly just affect dice rolls and stats, not something the characters would actually see. I think it'd be good to keep up that facade -- for the most part, you can only assume that cleric spells are doing any good. And maybe, if you're not a devout worshipper, they aren't...
Another thought I have (and now I see this should've been a front-page ramble -- I mean, post) is that wizard-magic is already a little random: how much damage does a fireball do? Depends on what you roll. Sometimes it's kinda lame, and sometimes it's really cool. Ramping up that randomness might achieve the chaotic effect Jacob's going for.
One thing that I always thought should show up more often is fizzling a spell. (Except when I'm casting it, in which case it should always work.) There's always been nods this way or that to provide the chance of spell failure, but the idea is so horrifying that it's usually watered down enough that it almost never happens in practice.
If (a) fizzling spells didn't waste a spell slot and (b) the wizardy classes have some balancing compensation for the fizzling risk, I think it would be really entertaining and make magic much more "wild".
Final note: "spell slot" is a little ambiguous (to me). A sorcerer has a limited number of spells/day, and in that sense has "spell slots", but usually I think of it as meaning "the number of predefined spells for the day I have". Because I'm lazy, I'm going to assume that you can figure out which one I meant wherever I used the term. And if using one meaning makes me sound dumb, I meant it the other way. :)
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