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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RealAlHazred" data-source="post: 6749893" data-attributes="member: 25818">Originally posted by rampant: The problem with your 'automatically adjusting artificer' is that the class becomes more and less powerful base don the DM's world building in a way that most other classes don't. Fighter, barbarians, warlocks, rogues, sorcerers, bards, the properly designed classes can be put into most game worlds and maintain both their overall potency, and their individual strengths and weaknesses. Even the iffy classes like the wizard and the cleric maintain fairly similar limitations in most game worlds. Although like you said in a world with scrolls on the rack wizards get a versatility boost. Clerics just get auto updated with everything which is about 3 times worse. Tomes? Do you mean like the wizard ability from 4e? Guess what, some major differences between the 4e books and the 3e/5e ones. 1st. Of all you could only have one extra spell per qualifying spell known (dailies and utilities if I recall correctly), although some feats would allow you to multiply this effect (however as you were paying with a feat that constitutes an opportunity cost). There were hard limits in place, and you were still picking off a pre-defined list of powers. Yes the 4e wizard learned more powers than any other class, that's completely ok, being the class with the most known powers is not in and of itself a problem. The problem is when you can buy permanent powers known via a non-character building resource without switching out old ones, and the other classes can't. Or in the case of clerics when you just automatically get the new powers for doing jack all. 2.) A 4e wizard had one book, he might make copies, but he couldn't have multiple books with different spells in them his known spells were his known spells, even if he managed to gank another wizard and decode the book he couldn't add them to his spells known until he opened up some spells known slots, either by leveling up or swapping out old ones (also at level up technically). 5e makes a big deal about how you don't have to have scrolls at every shop and such like, and frankly removing magic items form the game's assumed mathematical progression is probably a good idea. The flat plus aspects of magic items were always the least interesting bits anyway, more of a chore to keep up with than anything else. However, the fact of the matter is that in many worlds it makes sense for there to be scrolls on the shelves and in those worlds the wizard becomes a lot more versatile, just like your artificer does in a schema rich world, what you call 'automatically adjusting' is basically the problem because the class becomes vastly more or less versatile, and/or powerful based on the game world which is a major problem because it makes the class basically unevaluatable, you have to evaluate the game world for each campaign before deciding if the class is balanced, and whats more the class becomes more unbalanced the more appropriate it would be to the setting. You put the work of making the class balanced on the DM instead of the designer. Which means the designer isn't doing their job. What part of this is hard to understand? the fact that learning new powers via the scroll system is 'harder' in 5e is irrelevant, the class needs to give a balanced number of spells/powers known, and if you want to exceed that number you should pay an opportunity cost. You yourself are fond of pointing out that it's not guaranteed that you'll be able to add schema right? So if you have that sort of situation and you don't give them enough powers then the class is underpowered, if you do give them enough then when someone plays the class in a game where they do get the chance to expand they become overpowered. As for the spell scrolls I can sort of see the issue when you put it that way, warrior types get the weapon augment and the mages get scrolls, However weapon augmentation is a little sup-par compared to being able to hand off a scroll of just about anything. The artificer get's a nifty damage boost when using it but recall most of the other guys don't . Also even if the party does all pick up a scroll from the artificer and use them, that's not going nova, not at all. Yes you're chewing up a lot of artificer resources and the artificer is involved in a lot of stuff that round, but you're not actually being all that dramatic. See it's still spaced out over the same number of turns, and eats the same number of actions. The party is spending their actions to cast your spells, which can be incredibly useful I'd be the first to admit, but going nova generally means you're doing something unusually impressive for a single turn. Scrolls don't do that, they let you trade your turn for the spell in the scroll, yes it all draws from the scroll writer's resources so they probably feel like they went nova. However, the impressiveness over time equation for an artificer scroll alpha strike is not that high, because they're eating a lot of time. That said I don't actually care whether you limit the artificer's devices to themselves, or open them up to everyone at this point, just pick one, or if you insist that weapon augmentation is comparable for those who can't currently make use of scrolls then you need to do a lot better than energy damage when you cast it on others. I get not wanting to fix 5e with a single class, it's beyond the scope of the project I hear ya. The catch is you can't ignore the problems 5e has, you have to design around them.</blockquote>

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