Scenario - 6 PC's need to get through a fairly well defended gate with a gate captain and 18 guards.
1. The PC's try to talk their way through. In pre-3e D&D this is going to be almost entirely free-form. Perhaps a Reaction check to set the initial scene, but, that's about it. As such, the players aren't actually playing any set system anymore. Because it's freeform, you could be playing AD&D, or GURPS or FATAL and there's no way to tell because you're not actually engaging any rules. In 3e or 4e, there might be two or three die rolls occur - a bluff check or two, maybe a diplomacy check - and that's about it.
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2. The players decide to storm the gate. Now we have dozens of dice rolls, no action can ever be narrated completely before the dice are rolled, and there is virtually no free-form play.
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the rules govern everything in a fine grained system
You're right that combat resolution, even in 4e, is much more dice-rolling and rules intensive than non-combat resolution.
Still, I think you overstate the contrast. In 4e, at least the atempt to talk past the guards would normally be resolved as a skill challenge. In this
social skill challenge, of complexity 5 (12 successes before 3 failures) around 30 d20 rolls were made. And they were mechanically structured - group checks, secondary checks to augment primary checks, skill checks to settle some minor point outside the framework of the skill challenge itself, etc.
That's more than two or three dice rolls, and it's a long way from freeforming.
As for combat, the most recent combat I ran was a bit of an epic (it straddled two sessions, and involved 23 levels worth of opponents against 5 18th level PCs). In the course of the combat, at least the following "freeform" moves took place:
* The invoker-wizard permanently expended his Ritual candle in order to shift the location of his already-cast Arcane Gate to another point within range. Success was adjudicated using an Arcana check; the fictional logic was that the character sucked all the power out of the candle in order to use his knowledge of the Linked Portal ritual to close and reopen his Arcane Gate.
* The same PC, in desperate straits as he lay on the ground next to his Gate being hacked down by fire archons, spoke a prayer to Erathis (one of his patron deities) - after speaking the prayer, and after the player succeeded at a Hard Religion check, as the PC looked up into the rock cleft high above him, he saw a duergar standing on a ledge looking down. The PC already knew that the duergar revere Erathis (as well as Asmodeus). The duergar gave the Deep Speech hand sign for "I will offer you aid", and the PC replied with the sign for "The dues will be paid". The duergar then dropped a potion vial down to the PC. (I had already decided that I could place a duergar in the cleft if I wanted some sort of 3rd-party intervention into the fight. The successful prayer was the trigger for implementing that prior decision.)
* The sorcerer PC, cut off from the other PCs by a pack of archons and salamanders, out of encounter powers and low on hit points, called upon the ambient chaotic energies from all those elemental monsters (including a flamekiss hydra spawned from the primordial Bryakus). After an Arcana check good enough to succeed at a Hard level 12 DC, he mustered enough chaotic energy to give himself 12 temporary hit points - but it also activiated the sigils of the Queen of Chaos permanently emblazoned on the insides of his eyelids, blinding him, and it had the same effect on his Robe of Eyes, so he couldn't see!
* The blinded sorcerer tried to escape down a tunnel as the archons and salamanders focused on the other PCs, but eventually they turned back to him. After being taken hostage by the last standing archon, his throat was slit (fatal coup de grace against the unconscious PC) when the paladin PC tried but failed to rescue him. The paladin wondered what he could do to help his friend. Removing his Diamond Cincture, he tried to imbue its healing energy into the sorcerer. A successful Medium Healing check brought the sorcerer back to life (but still unconscious) but the paladin himself fell into unconsciousness, drained of his own life energy, and the diamond is not going to come back after anyone's Extended Rest - it is permanently drained. (A Diamond Cincture, at 10th level, actually has the same value as the components for a paragon Raise Dead, which made this particularly easy to adjudicate.)
They're the ones I remember, but there may have been a couple of others. It's freeform within a structure (Page 42, augmented by my own sense of the mechanical "balance" of the system), but it's not just "the rules governing everything".
If I did this in 4e I would likely make the person play a lazy warlord/bard hybrid or multi-class build (Int and Cha) with Vile Scholar, Seer or Oghma's Faithful Theme. Ritual Caster + Feats and skill powers to support Lore Mastery and Leader components of combat support by proxy of "lazy-buffing."
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A fate point (which affects combat) for playing to archetype (cringing, cowing in fear, being the runner like Corporal Upham, etc) and then using that fate point for some type of fictional advantage (like a "lazy buff") for your group within the domain of combat might work.
Agreed with all of that. That's the sort of thing I've been trying to get at with my references to the linked test/augment mechanics in BW and HW/Q; and the "lazy warlord" is another mechanical variant on a similar sort of theme. Another possibility would simply be that the sage functionally "disappears" during combat (in the fiction, s/he cringes at the back and the opponents disregard him/her, and s/he is never caught by stray arrows or in the radius of AoEs).
In the two scenarios you put forward, JC's mooted role for the sage was a whole lot of research/influence to augment the other PCs' activities. This is a type of action resolution that is hard to handle in D&D, at least outside the context of something like either a skill challenge mechanic or a buff-type mechanic, both of which are metagame rather than simulationist mechanics, and hence are liable to the "dissociated" tag.
The likelihood of D&Dnext having any of these sorts of mechanics strikes me as slim in the extreme, given its stated design goals plus its post-4e context. And without them I think the PC is a liability to standard D&D party play. In combat s/he will be hugely vulnerable, plus a potential source of conflict as per your own account. And out of combat, without some sort of metagame mechanic to handle the research/influence augments, there is the Shadowrun-style "decker" problem.
I suspect that by now people understand my antipathy for unconstrained Divination and its accompanying plot circumvention so the design of these types of characters need to be well tested and QCed.
That's also an issue.
It seems, to me, that you don't think feats like Linguist should exist, then. It's knowledge over a feat that would increase spell-casting, after all.
First, what do you have in mind by "feat that would increase spell-casting"? You contrast 5/1/1 with 3/3/3 but I don't have a particularly strong sense of what the units of measurement are. Is a fighter who takes Skill Training - Acrobatics still at the same level in the combat pillar as a fighter who, instead, takes Toughness?
If a sorcerer is a 3, and the sorcerer then takes Superior Implement to get a +1 attack bonus, or Implement Proficiency to get a damage bonus, is that sorcerer still a 3? I'm not sure what your thresholds are.
Second, a player can take Linguist without crowding out his/her spell ability. PCs in 4e get reasonably large numbers of feats, and Linguist is but one of them. My concern with the mundane sage is that s/he would have to be
significantly stronger at knowledge than the wizard in order to be comparable in play. The comparison would be building a class who is similar to the thief/rogue, but
only does hiding, searching and spotting. To make that class viable, you would have to significantly reduce the relative capabilities of the thief - who, in 3E and 4e, can be an expert hider, searcher and spotter
plus a strong combatant
plus a superior athlete. (Trained skills in Stealth, Thievery, Acrobatics, Athletics, Perception and Endurance - there's still a slot left, two if human! - before we get to skill powers, utility powers etc.)
My objection to the mundane sage is that, in a game which presupposes scholarly magic-users whose magic is a good part of their oomph in action resolution, the mundane sage, in order to have comparable oomph, would have to be so good that it would crowd out the magic-users' scholarship.
In 4e, for example, the Sage of Ages has, as a prerequisite, membership of any Arcane class. And it grants some abilities that enhance the PC's spell use. If the game included a mundane sage, unless it was done lazy warlord or bard buffing-style, the epic destiny for that class would have to be
more knowledgeable than the Sage of Ages. That is the sort of crowding out I'm objecting to.
My point is that you can make them more knowledgeable than those who use magic, or better than those who wear armor. And you don't need to water down those other archetypes to do it.
I don't see how that watering down can be avoided - as per my Sage of Ages example, plus other analysis and examples upthread and below in this post.
the game can still make magical knowledge the pinnacle of knowledge; it simply has to outpace Lore skills.
At that point, the sage class seems a little lacking in oomph. In what way is the envisaged class engaging the basic class build and advancement mechanics of the game?
Furthermore, this presupposes decent action resolution mecahnics for Lore skills. The game probably won't have such things.
I do think that trade-offs should optionally exist for those who want them.
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that sage won't exist if you stick to 3/3/3 (again, problem solved).
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how does the sage upset your game, even fictionally, if you stick to 3/3/3 builds? How does the option upset it?
Here's one version of the option: take a Human Commoner from the bestiary. Give it a background (Sage) and a specialty (Jack of all Trades). Now play it, with level giving you no benefits except unlocking your JoT skill training.
Or, if you think that's too punitive, then add in a bonus trained Lore or Social skill at every even-numbered level also.
That option does not upset my game. But I don't need WotC to publish it before I use it. Anyone can come up with that, from the materials WotC have already provided.
But if the option reflects some serious attempt at design, then
it will establish what lore skills are maximally capable of in the context of the game. It will also establish what range of and disparateness in PC abilities the core scene-framing and action resolution mechanics are intended to handle. And I'll be stuck with those assumptions and designs in my game. And the wizards in my game, who lack access to the relevant class features, will be correspondingly weaker in their scholarship.
This is something that doesn't relate to the 3/3/3 default and the opt-out. It could all be 3/3/3 and have the same scene-framing and action resolution you don't like.
It's true that I could get crappy rules even if the necessary condition for good rules is there. But I'm guaranteed to get crappy rules if the necessary condition for good rules is absent. It's the latter I'm concerned about - disparate PCs, in combination with an aversion to robust metagame mechanics to link that disparateness back into party play, is in my view a fairly sure recipe for weak scene framing and weak action resolution.
They can support this, still, even with the opt-out. Just explain in the opt-out how it will change the game. You stick to 3/3/3 and a wide variety of PCs, and get the game you like. Done.
I would be surprised if WotC publish material for D&Dnext that is at the same level of design as the old Rolemaster Companions, or Dragon magazine articles: "Here, try out this thing we made up, but we offer no guarantees that it will actually work within the core framework we're providing." Maybe I'm wrong.
I don't buy that the "sage" shouldn't have the ability to be better at the non-mystic areas of knowledge than the Wizard or Cleric could be
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Is it bad that rogue knows more about brands of locks, the bard about epic songs, the ranger about a particular area of the countryside, the dwarf about styles of stone work?
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The 1st edition DMG establishes that some NPCs who focus on knowledge are much more scholarly in their respective fields than the PCs who focus on spells first (although it also says that all Sages will have some random spells as a byproduct). The 3.5 Cloistered Cleric in UA is a demonstration that the standard cleric isn't a paragon of scholasticism (and all editions of the game have had the clerics expertise divided between spell casting and combat). At the least, the Cleric and Mage have at least one area they are less knowledgable than another class in... each others. Finally, if the argument is that the Mage and Cleric need to be the most scholastic, should the other classes be banned from having feats and skills that would give them at least as strong of knowlege backgrounds (or likely stronger for some versions of the bard)?
Bards are an interesting case. In 1st ed AD&D they have Legend Lore as a class ability, and there is some ambiguity over exactly how Legend Lore is meant to be adjudicated, and whether or not it gives the same knowledge as a sage. Even for magic-users, Legend Lore - with its vague descriptions and absurdly long casting time - is more like a class ability to do research, that unlocks at 12th level, than like a spell - it contrasts markedly, in this respect, with other Divination spells like Commune, Contact Other Plane and Vision.
I agree that 3E clerics aren't very scholarly, and I'm not surprised a cloistered version was published, but I don't think this will hold true for D&Dnext clerics: there is no such thing as "only 2 skill points"; it seems likely there'll be a Knowledge domain in due course; and already clerics (like wizards and warlocks) get a free Lore skill as a 1st level class feature.
Practical knowledge - like that of the rogue, or the ranger, or even the bard's memorisation of many poems and tales - is a different thing, although D&Dnext has some trouble handling it at this stage (the relationship and difference between Survival skill and Natural Lore skill, for example, is quite unclear to me). I don't think the sage archetype includes that sort of knowledge.
And of course there is scope for some wizards or clerics to be more scholarly than others.
But my concerrn is that, once you take away the spells from a caster, to make a PC with enough "oomph" you would have to make their scholarship so good that it would be in a completely different class from what the casters can do. Just like an attempt to design a rogue-ish class who did
nothing but hid and searched/spotted. Or desiging a specialist swordsman who can't wear armour, and therefore gets an attack buff.
The game has to make a design call, about what sorts of PCs it wants to support. Having decided to make scholarly spellcasters viable, or armoured swordsman viable, it doesn't have the design space, or the story space, for non-casting scholars who are noticeably better, nor for unarmoured swordsman who are noticeably better.
"The Black Company" d20 book by Green Ronin has Academician, Jack-of-all-Trades, and Noble PC classes, each with a list of characters in the novels with those classes (or multi-classes). The Academician has hp, weapons, armor, and attacks as the Wizard, but skill points as the Rogue. The primary abilities of the Academician include an extra Skill Focus feat at first level and every even level that have limited stacking (+2 the second time in a given skill, and +1 after that... ), extra intelligence boost that can be used a limited number of times per day, ability to add extra skills to their class skill list as they advance, and a special bonus when using books and libraries.
The Academician sounds a little weak, but 3E is not my game, so I could be wrong. In place of spells, the Academician gets +6 skill points per level, or in the neighbourhood of double the skill points of a wizard. (A bit less than double at higher levels, as INT bonuses grow but the base skill points to which they are added do not). The sage has greater breadth than the wizard, but the player who wants to build a sage-y wizard is not going to be crowded out, I don't think. With 6 skill points the wizard takes Spellcrafter and Knowledge (Arcana, Geography, History, Religion and The Planes). The Academician gets to add 6 more skills - say Diplomacy, Knowledge (Architecture, Local and Nobility), Perception and Sense Motive.
To me, this is closer to the Rolemaster model - the non-spell using scholar doesn't crowd the wizard out in scholarship, but has enough build resources to branch out a bit into other areas. But so as not to tread on the toes of Bards, Rangers, Rogues etc is probably going to be less than optimal in those other areas.
In D&Dnext you can get this by taking my hypothetical Commoner build above and adding d4 hit points per level. (Though what exactly these represent - why is my sickly and non-magical sage bulking up? - is a bit unclear to me.)
Then there is the Skill Focus feat, the INT boost and the library bonus. I can see two ways these can go. One way, they are mostly irrelevant, as DCs have already been set in such a way as to be viable for the wizards in the party, and the Academician is no better (or perhaps succeeds on a roll of 8 rather than 10 - D&D's out-of-combat resolution being what it is, as Hussar noted, this will be barely noticeable most of the time). A game that goes this way will reinforce my initial impression of the academician as weak.
The other way of going is that suddenly we build into scenarios situations with DCs that only the Academician can hit - that is, we change the fiction so that the wizard is no longer a superlative scholar. This is the crowding out that I expressed concern about.
And even if you stick the Academician in an optional module, the action resolution mechanics themselves still have to make a call on where DCs should be set, and what the range of expected bonuses for PCs is. (There are systems, like HeroWars/Quest, that are very flexible in this respect, and relativise DCs to party capabilities, with DCs being set approriately more-or-less on the fly - I don't think D&Dnext is going to be that sort of system, though.)
That's my concern. The core game has to be designed assuming numbers, including knowledge skill bonuses, within certain parameters. If those parameters anticipate mundane sages with superlative bonuses, the wizards etc have been crowded out. If those numbers are built to make the wizards expert scholars, than the mundane sage is, in effect, a wizard who trades spells for a slightly greater breadth of lore skills (my builds upthread do that too, in a lesser way, by taking Jack of all Trades rather than Magic User as a specialty). Which is very close to [MENTION=6684526]GreyICE[/MENTION]'s suggestion of "build a wizard, then ignore your spells".
