Logic Vs. the Sacred Cow

I've been working on the spells for about a month now. My time is a bit curtailed since I have a full-time job, and summer's hit, so the heat kind of saps my enthusiasm a bit (plus wading through 600+ spells is mind-numbing). But I'm down to the S file in the SRD, and I've got enough for a design diary entry.

Those of you who know me from the ENWorld forums might know that I've had a rather amusing quote in my sig for some time now: "Their process of building each edition atop the previous ones has resulted in 3.5 being the Michael Jackson of RPGs, desperately improving itself to ward off obsolescence but attaining only a kind of perverse lichlike state as a mockery of healthier games." (Agamemnon)

The importance (and truth) of that quote never really hit me until I started working on the spells. Back when Gygax developed D&D from a wargame, elven units had been given immunity to ghoul paralysis to beef them up (or something along that line; I forget the exact details). So for 30 years, we've had elves who were immune to ghoul paralysis for no reason than that one. And monks... oh boy, monks. The 1E monk was a smorgasbord of oddball abilities that had absolutely nothing to do with monks in general (wuxia or otherwise). When they were brought back in 3E, the designers didn't bother to have them make sense - they just adapted the abilities for the new system. So now we have monks who are immune to normal diseases, all poisons, are resistant to magic, can speak to all living beings at will, and can dimension door 1/day. It doesn't make a damn bit of sense, but who cares, right?

The spells, perhaps more than anything, are the largest reflection of all the legacy crap that's come before. The guys who made 3E bear a smaller part of the blame here; some of the more broken spells (gate, wish, disjunction) should've come up in playtesting. The ones who did 3.5, however, knew those spells were broken and completely ignored them in favor of changing things that didn't need changed (like darkness). Of course, the 3E designers aren't off the hook, either - there are spells that were copied verbatim from 2E. Rope trick, for example; it has a caveat at the end about combining extradimensional spaces. Never mind the fact that the line made no sense in 2E - there were never any rules for it beyond bags of holding and portable holes - but apparently someone didn't read the spell description when they ported it over, and the line remained. And we still don't know what it means. Normally, something stupid like that, I'd just delete and not think twice about it... but this gets my creative juices flowing. What happens if you try to cast rope trick inside a magnificent mansion? Does it simply fail? Does it open a rift to the Astral Plane and suck everyone through? Does it actually work as described? Who knows? I intend to find out, though.

And then we've got things like the death spells. The following is a list of all the death spells from the PHB - name, level, range, and a summary of target/effects.

Circle of death: L6, Medium, 1d4 HD/level in 40-ft. rad. (max 20d4, 9 HD cap).

Destruction: L7, Close, single target, destroys utterly, 10d6 on save

FoD: L7, Close, single target, kills or 3d6+1/level (+25)

Implosion: L9, Close, 1 creature/round for 4 rounds

Phantasmal Killer: L4, Medium, two saves, 3d6 on save.

Power word kill: L9, Close, single target 100 hp or less, no save.

Slay living: L5, Touch, single target, 3d6+1/level (no cap)

Symbol of death: L8, 60 ft., scribed rune affects up to 150 hp total

Wail: L9, Close, 1 creature/level in 40 ft. rad.

Weird: L9 greater phantasmal killer, Medium (no 2 can be >30 ft. apart), no limit on # of targets, 3d6 damage + stunned 1 rd + 1d4 Str damage on save.

As you can see, the only real constant (besides the "fail a save and die" part) is that most of them are Close-range spells. We've got several spells that deal damage on a successful save (FoD, destruction, PK, slay living, weird), but even then, they don't follow any kind of pattern - FoD and slay living are +1/level, and the others are a flat amount. Symbol of death and power word kill work off hit point totals, while circle of death uses HD - the only three spells that have any kind of limit (to be fair, though, all the power word and symbol spells have hit point limits). Phantasmal killer and weird[/i] have TWO saves - if you die to one of those spells, you're probably either a rogue (low Fort/Will) or you're just plain having a really bad day.

My point: Where's the logic here? We have 10 spells that do basically the same thing (kill one or more targets) that have no cohesiveness. FoD, slay living, destruction - those all did damage on a successful save in 2E. Why? Who knows? They were brought forward with the additional damage in place, though. Implosion and wail of the banshee are new spells, and perhaps the oddest of the lot - implosion is an evocation, which means it works against everything, and death ward won't help you. Wail of the banshee will kill 1 creature/level in a 40-foot radius, no matter how many HD it has. This is, pound for pound, one of the most powerful spells in the book (disregarding the fact that death ward negates it). Not to mention the levels are all over the place - we've got PK at L4, slay living at 5, CoD at 6, and then everything else from 7-9.

So, I had to come up with a cohesive system for all these things. I had already come up with one in the revised spells doc, and it didn't need a lot of tweaking. Basically, death spells start at L6 (so PK and slay living got a boost), and their effects are based on their level - instead of insta-killing the target, it drops him to negative hit points (the total depends on the spell level), and he can't recover on his own. For spells with HD caps (circle of death), the cap is also based on spell level (interestingly, this was already in place - spells like cloudkill and circle of death use it). And of course, to compensate, I had to change the "life" spells - raise dead, reincarnate, resurrection, and true res. These all got bumped up a level or three; raise dead is L6, resurrection is now L9, and true res is gone (it'll make an appearance as a legendary spell). They also got made into rituals (more on that in the next diary entry).

Speaking of HD caps... Enchantment spells. God, those things made me tear my hair out. We've got some spells that affect creatures up to a certain HD (daze, e.g.) and some that affect up to a certain number of HD (sleep). Which would be all well and good... if they actually followed the same rules. And were effective beyond the level you gained them. This fix, at least, was fairly easy - just scale the HD caps a bit, and increase the base HD in some cases.

So, yeah... it's been an interesting journey through the spell archives, and it's not even done. I'll certainly be happy when it is, though.

Kerrick

Way back in my first DD entry, I talked a little bit about backwards compatibility. Now that I've had some time to work on things and see how they're turning out, I thought I'd address that point a bit more in depth.

Backwards compatibility is a make-or-break proposition if you're playing 3E or 3.5, and it's why many people haven't gone to 4E – it's too difficult, if not flat-out impossible, to convert their homebrew campaign settings, favorite classes, and/or PCs.

So how compatible with Project Phoenix be with 3.5? Very. It's a bit further than the change from 3E to 3.5, but not nearly as far as the one from 2E to 3E. There are a lot of chages, ranging from the major (the classes) to the relatively minor (the tweaks to the races) in terms of convertability. Some things have gotten dropped (Use Rope), but these should provide only a minor inconvenience, especially when I put out a conversion guide.

As I mentioned before, the classes have gotten an overhaul. As it is, most of them have very little to keep a player from multiclassing or "PrCing out" as soon as it's feasible or possible. Those that do (the druid, e.g.) are usually overpowered. And, of course, there's the infamous multiclass spellcaster problem. My intent here was to a) makes the classes interesting and fun to play, and b) give the players a reason to stay in the class for more than 5-6 levels. Multiclassing is not restricted in any way – in fact, the XP penalty (widely regarded as one of the stupidest rules ever) is gone – but I think that with more options available at the basic level, the players won't be looking further afield for outlandish combos to achieve their ends.

That being said, most of the classes are done, and the rest are 75% complete or better; mostly, they just add abilities (because there weren't any to begin with), so converting them will be easy. The druid and monk have been completely overhauled for balance and to bring them more in line with the other classes, and the paladin got the "holy warrior" treatment – I came up with a way to make a paladin (a divine champion, if you will) of any alignment, similar to the Divine Champion PrC, from which I stole a few things.

Several PrCs are gone – the Archmage (rolled into wizard), Blackguard (evil paladin), Dragon Disciple (now a sorcerer heritage), Eldritch Knight and Mystic Theurge (no longer necessary), and the Hierophant (rolled into cleric). Of the remainder, most of them have received minor to major changes – the Assassin, Duelist, and Shadowdancer were overhauled, the Dwarven Defender and Horizon Walker got moderate changes, and the Arcane Archer, Loremaster, and Thaumaturgist got only minor tweaks (mostly to fit the new rules). Of course, I'll be adding new PrCs to take the place of those that got dropped. Again, changes here were made in the interest of game balance and to give the PrCs a coherent suite of abilities instead of just a mishmash of stuff.

This leads into the second part of this entry: power level. The relative power level of this new revision will be roughly equal to, or slightly lower than, 3.5 – no more power creep. I don't agree with Pathfinder ramping the power up on all the core classes to keep them in line with later products – you should balance everything else against the core, not the core against everything else.

I've got a rough idea of how to proceed with the spells, when I get that far, too; since I have free rein to change whatever I see fit (within reason), I can overhaul some of the more broken spells (gate, wish, death spells) and make them more palatable. The revised spells doc has a bunch of spells in it, though I'll be looking them over again to make some more changes.

Part of the new power level is a coherent scaling system. Starting wealthis the baseline for this – if the PCs can't afford it, chances are they won't have it. A wealth table that has a set progression, instead of simply ramping up after 10th level, enables things like magic items to be better balanced. You can make assumptions about the bonuses of magic weapons/armor a PC will have at a given level, which (when added to other factors like class/level, stat boosts, and other magic items) can then enable you to balance monster ACs and scale threats accordingly.

And, of course, everything here is designed to take epic play into account. You might say "I don't like/want to play epic!" No problem – I won't force you. But, a lot of the problems inherent at epic levels (immunities, the wide gap between high/low saves, the increasing gap between the capabilities of melee PCs vs. spellcasters, lack of scaling skill DCs) start at low levels. By fixing these things from the start, I think it will make epic play a lot more balanced and fun, and it might encourage some of the people who don’t; play epic because it just plain sucks to give it a try. I will be converting the epic material, but that's a long ways down the road – after I finish the core rules.

Kerrick

I suppose I should've written this back before my two previous Project Phoenix posts, but since I didn't come up with the name until I was three months into the project, it's rather appropriate.

Project Phoenix is, as I said before, an attempt to fix many of the problems inherent in D&D 3.5, as well as add new rules and make some changes to things that may not have been broken, per se, but needed improvement (like the base classes). It was originally as a system-wide overhaul that would be complete in and of itself; that hasn't changed, really, but I've decided to make individual sections available for separate viewing and use, if you so wish. IOW, all of the rules can be used together as a broad system, or you can pick and choose parts to use separately. Of course, since changes to the skill system cascade down through every other system in D&D, you might have to do a bit of conversion to use the new rules with 3.5.

The name "Project Phoenix" came about because I began to see the need for a name of some sort. I couldn't keep referring to this as "my 3.75 revision" because it was unwieldy and not entirely accurate. Project Phoenix was the first thing that came to mind when I started thinking of names, and I decided it was rather appropriate. Not only was it a rebirth of D&D, but it also encompassed our homebrew campaign world of Shtar, which recently (a couple years ago real time) suffered a massive war where most of civilization (including all the major NPCs) was wiped out and a good part of the world itself remade. We fast-forwarded the timeline about 150 years to where people were starting to rebuild, and that's where the new campaign is set.

For anyone interested, you can find more information on Project Phoenix here - all of my Design Diary entries are there, along with various bits and pieces from the new system that I've released.

And speaking of releases... I'm a big proponent of the Open Game Movement. I write stuff because I enjoy it, not because I want to make money from it. Project Phoenix is now, and will forever be, free and completely, 100%, OGC. I encourage those who want to use some or all of it to do so. I'd love to hear feedback, comments, and playtest reports about anything I've written; you can post a comment on my blogs or drop me an e-mail (the address is on the site). I'm currently got two sections left - monsters and combat - and some minor bits and pieces, and it'll be done. After that, I'll probably move Project Phoenix to its own wiki, then start on the epic rules and all the material I've written over the years. Stay tuned for more posts about other parts of the system.

Kerrick

While I was working on skills, I decided to take a look at the sorcerer, that sadly underpowered and oft-neglected redheaded stepchild of the class pantheon. Now, don't get me wrong – sorcerers are one of my favorite classes, but they suck. Hard. They have no class abilities, are hampered with a delayed spell progression, have to spend a full round casting metamagic spells, and have a limited spell selection (even moreso since they can only swap one – one! – spell every other level).

And the sad thing is, they received no love in the revisions between 3E and 3.5. The bard and ranger, two other classes who were in dire need of beefing up, got some fixes, but the sorcerer, the class most in need of a power-up, got nothing. Apparently the designers thought the ability to use metamagic on the fly was enough to balance out everything else. Sure, it's a strong ability – pre-epic, a sorcerer who can spontaneously metamagic spells without increased casting time will wipe the floor with a wizard of equal level – but the increased casting time takes care of that quite neatly. There's no need for delayed spells or the severely restricted swapping rule they have now (though there should still be a limit; see below).

So I decided to give them a power up. I took a couple ideas that I previously didn't really like - the warlock and bloodlines – and mined them for ideas to apply to the sorcerer. I took the warlock's eldritch blast, mixed in a hefty portion of bloodline abilities, added a pinch of popular house rules, and stirred vigorously.

I had to redefine the sorcerer. They can tap directly into the source of magic (the Weave, the Source, the Power, whatever you want to call it), and I've always seen them as being able to wield raw magical energy (see the Spell Channeler for more on this). Sadly, despite this really cool ability, they were relegated to being "spontaneous arcane casters" with no real archetype and no distinct identity.

I decided to use bloodlines (modified and renamed as heritages) to define them – their power is inborn, drawn from one of several sources: celestial, chaos, draconic, elemental, fey, fiendish, or (as suggested by someone) shadow.

Each heritage gained a suite of abilities thematically tied to that archetype – for instance, fey sorcerers can charm and cast illusions; shadow sorcerers gain stealth abilities and can travel using the shadows, etc. Each heritage also gained an offensive ability (a variation on the warlock's eldritch blast with more limited uses) and a defense ability (which varies by heritage) for a total of four each. After some fiddling around, I also gave the sorcerer the ability to tap into his heritage, gaining additional minor abilities and power-ups in exchange for physical changes.

My point? Yeah, I did have one. See, the revised sorcerer (which turned out very well, thank you very much) gave me the idea of doing something similar to the other classes, as far as focusing on archetypes and scaling abilities. I've always been a proponent of scaling/related abilities, and I use them heavily in my prestige class design. I try to group simliar abilities together, so that as the character gains levels, he gains more powerful or different versions of the same ability (the Hunter is a good example of this) instead of just additional uses.

The sorcerer is the newest evolution of that design philosophy. It gains three sets of abilities: innate powers (the main heritage abilities), gained at 1st, 6th, 11th, and 16th; heritage abilities (the minor power-ups), gained at 3rd, 8th, 13th, and 18th levels; and general sorcerer powers that all sorcerers get at 1st, 5th, 10th, 15th, and 20th. What you end up with is a class that not only has no more than one "dead level" in a row, but has a series of class abilities that are thematically tied to the class' archetype and scale with level. Now, not only does the sorcerer get a nice power-up to put it nearly on a par with the wizard, but it's fun and interesting on its own, while not being overpowered.

I applied the same process to the fighter. Fighters fight, so I gave them a choice of different combat styles – Dex fighter, Strength fighter (two-handed weapon), sword-and-board, and grappler/close quarters – along with the ability to take Weapon Focus in groups of weapons (from Unearthed Arcana) and the usual bonus combat feats.

I think you see what I'm getting at here – I could make four different fighters and have them all be different], not clones of each other with a different feat selection. Sure, I could've easily done that before, but the differences are more obvious now. The trick is to identify the class' "shtick" – what it's designed to do, or its archetype – and expand on that to emphasize the class' strengths without giving it too much of a power-up. To use an analogy, it's kind of like weightlifting – you do fewer reps with higher weight to build muscle mass, or more reps with lower weight to build definition. What I'm doing here is building definition - refining what's already there without making it a whole lot stronger.

Kerrick

That's always the best place to begin, isn't it? For me, it was with the skill system. Like I said in the last entry, I got bored and started messing with the skills; 3.5 was on its way out, WotC wasn't going to put out any more changes to the system, so I was assured that any changes I made wouldn't be overridden (not that they messed with skills much anyway, but still).

So I went down through the list. Several sets of skills cried out for combination - Hide and Move Silently, Listen and Spot, Disable Device and Open Lock, frex. A couple others were candidates for getting dropped - Forgery and Use Rope chief among them (honestly - does anyone ever take ranks in those skills?). I'd already revised several skills - Craft, the speech skills (Bluff, Diplomacy, and Intimidate, which now work off the same ruleset), reading and writing, and Spot. These were the ones that received the largest amount of change; most of the rest (the ones that weren't combined) received small changes, mostly added tasks.

Also of note: synergy bonuses are gone. They're a part of the system that's best left to DM adjudication, in my opinion, and a real PITA when it comes to designing NPCs, because they're so easy to forget. Instead, I'm considering an idea I heard about - synergy bonuses are simply another use of the "aid another" action, where you aid yourself. If, for example, you wanted to make a Gather Information check, you could make a DC 10 Diplomacy check to give yourself a +2 bonus. It's kind of strange, but you can use Diplomacy (sweet-talking) in the course of gathering information. Or, if you're the big, strong, brutal type, you could go the intimidation route; either way, it's a much easier way to handle things.

Oh yeah - I came up with a way to eliminate cross-class skills, that bugaboo of the d20 system. Yes, it was my idea first - I came up with it about a week and a half before it appeared in Paizo's Alpha 2 release. I'll call it parallel development. I'm actually happy they thought of it too, because I feel vindicated - if it's good enough for Paizo, it's good enough for me.

After making up the list of skills and proposed changes, it was simply a matter of revising everything to fit the new system and incorporating some of the epic usages so that the DCs would scale higher. For example, Ride has several good epic usages - stand on mount (DC 30), unconscious control (DC 40), and attack from cover (DC 50). The first one is easily achievable at non-epic levels, and the second could be with a good roll and a dedicated rider. The third is probably the purview of an epic PC, but so what?

That leads me to my next point: whether or not groups want to play epic, the system should support it, from the ground up. A lot of the problems at epic levels are introduced at lower levels - immunities, large numbers of attacks, too many bonus types stacking with each other, spells that are more powerful than anything you could make at epic (wish, disjunction), etc. A large part of this is that the epic system is just poorly designed, "D&D turned to 11" - bigger monsters, bigger bonuses, magic items that are simply extensions of existing ones. Upper Krust has dealt (and is still dealing) with some of these problems, but he's building off the existing system and is doing strictly epic stuff (really high epic, to boot). I, on the other hand, am concentrating on pre- and low-epic - up to around 40th level, so we complement each other well, especially since I'll be borrowing a lot of his rules for monster creation and the CR/EL system. Once I get to epic, I'll already have fixed most (if not all) of the things that cause the problems in epic, so working with those rules will be much easier.

Kerrick

(I just recently discovered this blog feature, so I thought I'd try it out - maybe I can get some comments, and some more people interested in my work. If this stirs up interest, I'll post the other ones here for comments too.

This entry was posted on my site back in April, just to put things in perspective.)

I want to do 3.75.

Am I serious? Sure. Am I crazy? Most likely. Do you care? Probably not, but if you do, read on.

I've always had an urge to tinker with game mechanics - creating, tweaking, fixing stuff, like a greasemonkey working on his car. I've been playing for almost 20 years, and designing for nearly that long. d20 has offered an unprecedented ability to tinker with the rules, and to ensure that those rules are more or less balanced - before, you had to eyeball it, and even then it might only work for your group.

D20 (and 3.5) has its flaws, but at the core, it's still a very robust and fairly balanced system. The sheer scope of what you can do with it is amazing, as evidenced by the variety of games that have been made using the d20 "engine" – high fantasy, Modern, post-apocalypse, futuristic/sci-fi, and everything in between.

But, like I said, it has its flaws, which vary from minor annoyance to near game-breaker – the crafting system; the trap system; turning; some classes being way more powerful than others (druid vs. fighter) and some just sadly underpowered (the sorcerer); epic play (the less said there, the better); the CR system; nonsensical/pointless/broken feats (Dodge, Power Attack, Toughness); and on and on.

Over the past few years, I've offered up my fixes for many of these (crafting, turning, traps, movement/encumbrance, epic pricing) and added more elegant/expanded rules for other things that could use them (several skills, death/dying, temp hit points, starting wealth).

I started messing with the skill system a few weeks ago, just because I was bored and needed something to do. Midway through my work, though, I discovered something - skills inform just about every other rule and subsystem in the game, from races to spells to combat. Making serious changes to the skill system on the order of what I was doing (combining several skills, dropping a few others, and adjusting the DCs) would have a ripple effect over everything else. By the time I was done, I'd made a decision – since the 3.5 ruleset was now set in stone (no more errata, new books, or whatever from WotC), I might as well go whole hog and fix everything that needed it.

<b>My design philosophy:</b> If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it works and it makes sense, don't change it.

The two questions I ask myself when I make/adjust something are: "Does it work?" and "Does it make sense?" If the answer to either of those is "No," then it needs to be either dropped entirely or reworked so it does.
&nbsp; I don't plan to go the Paizo route, changing things without regard to the above rules (combining Sleight of Hand and Open Lock into the same skill, for example). I definitely don't plan to to the Wizards route and toss the entire system out the window and start over from scratch - that's way too much work for one person, and stupid to boot. I DO plan to borrow the best parts of other systems to which I have access - 4E, Pathfinder (yeah, there are a few good parts), UA, Upper Krust's epic rules, etc. - and adapt them to this ruleset. I'm also paying close attention to threads on several forums regarding what people think is wrong with the system (that isn't to say that I necessarily agree, or will even fix everything, but I try to keep an open mind).

This will not be 3.9. It will definitely not be 4E. It will start out as 3.6, but by the time it's all said and done, it'll likely be closer to 3.7. Basically, I want to keep the ruleset recognizable, fix what doesn't work, and add in new stuff that will make it work better. I want to make a system that scales well and can be used at just about any level of play (let's be reasonable here - very few groups go much beyond 50-60th level, because it's just insane after that, but if I can make a system that will work for the vast majority of gamers, I'll be happy).

To this end, I started with a flowchart of sorts. I opened Excel, made a list of rules and subsystems, and plotted them on the chart. I wonder if the folks who designed 4E did something similar – it's quite informative, and very handy for keeping track of things. It's also still a work in progress; despite my deep knowledge of the system and the rules, I find myself having to adjust things here and there to accommodate new things I find (like, for instance, when a forgotten facet of the rules pops up and says "Hey, you forgot me!" and I have to add it to the chart).

I tend to work on the low end of the power spectrum, which could be a good thing - we can all agree there's been a definite power creep from 1E to 4E, so I don't think 3.75 will be much greater, in terms of power, more than 3.5 (and might even be a little less).

Kerrick