D&D 3E/3.5 Jonathan Tweet: Third Edition and Per-Day Spells

On the Third Edition design team, we were tasked with rationalizing the game system, but there were some big elements of the system that we didn’t question. We inherited a system in which spellcasters get better in three ways at a time as they level up; they get more spells per day, higher-level spells, and more damage with spells of a given level. In retrospect, that problem is easy to see, and we didn’t fix it. We also inherited a system that balanced powerful class features, notably spells, by making them usable once per day. The problems with that system are less obvious, and we didn’t fix this system, either. But the 3E system laid bare its own inner workings, and so soon enough designers saw that there were issues with this system, and over the years several of us designers have tried to address it one way or another.

In classic dungeon crawling, the default best strategy is to take each room one at a time and regain your hit points and spells after each one. That’s no fun, so people usually don’t play that way. For 3E, we spelled out that the game was balanced for four average battles between heal-ups, but actual practice varied. Whatever per-day powers are balanced at one rate of fights per day are necessarily unbalanced at faster or slower rates. Classes with lots of per-day power are too strong when there are one or two fights per day and too weak when there are five or more. Individual Dungeon Masters might be able to schedule the action in such a way that they maintain the sort of balance they’re looking for. If that works, it represents the DM’s efforts and not anything we on the design team could accomplish through system design. Many Dungeon Masters might find the per-day rules convenient precisely because they allow the DM to modulate the threat level up and down. DMs rule on how many encounters the party has in a day and whether they can suspend their mission long enough to reset their spells and other per-day powers. A dynamic I’ve seen over and over again, however, is that players with spellcasting characters are adept at talking the DM into letting the party rest. When the spellcaster is out of spells, they need a night’s rest a lot more than the other characters in the party need to press on. When a mission goes south and the encounters burn up more per-day resources than the DM figured they would, the party often simply camps out for the night and sets out the next day with spells reset to full.

Limiting spells by day also means that a spellcaster’s power level is different when they’re in a preliminary skirmish compared to when they’re in a climactic showdown. When it’s a high-priority battle or when the player knows that there’s a long rest afterwards, the spellcaster can use their best spells without worrying about holding back. This effect is something of a game-wrecker when the party arranges to jump the big bad guy after prepping up to full. With a well-placed teleport, the party’s spellcasters can unload all their best “per-day” spells for the one battle that matters that day (an “alpha strike”). Classes with at-will powers can’t “unload” the way spellcasters can.

The per-day system also changes up balance for NPCs. Generally, when a party attacks an NPC boss of some sort, that NPC is in a fight for their life, and they cut loose with every per-day power they can manage. Fighter NPCs aren’t particularly dangerous because they have no such resources to unleash. In my campaign, I found the psionicist NPC the most dangerous because they could use the point system to cast at full capacity every round. As player-characters, psionicists have all the balance problems of the wizard and then some.

Seeing the issues with per-day powers, the designers started experimenting with per-encounter powers in supplemental material. The psychic warrior, for example, had a “focus” that they could expend once in the battle in order to have a special effect. At that point, designers were still in simulation mode, and encounters that were “per-encounter” by fiat seemed too artificial. The psychic warrior had a believable, in-world reason for their “per-encounter” abilities. Tome of Battle: Book of the Nine Swords (2006) introduced special, limited-use powers for martial classes. By 4E, the designers fully embraced per-encounter powers.

Fourth edition established balance among the classes by giving all of them per-day and per-encounter powers. That’s one way to solve the balance issue. 4E is so well-balanced that it’s hard to make bad choices in character design. This approach had the unfortunate effect of making the classes all feel sort of the same.

With 13th Age, Rob Heinsoo and I took a different approach. We turned 3E’s four-fights guideline into a hard rule. You get your spells and hit points back not just by resting but only if you have engaged in a minimum amount of fighting. After your fourth fight (or after four fights’ worth of fighting), the party gets to reset to full. Alternatively, the party can admit defeat and get a heal-up without “earning” it, but admitting defeat entails a “campaign loss,” as determined by the GM. This system creates a lovely rhythm, with characters feeling flush and confident in the first fight, feeling hard pressed in the last fight, and then feeling good again when they heal up. I play a cleric in a 13th Age campaign, and the last fight before a heal-up is tough going. The last fight is so tough that we player all know that the decisions and rolls we made in the earlier fights all mattered in terms of what we have left for the last one.

 

[Lanefan]

No one wanted to use them though. And if your balancing requires rules that no one wants to use...that's bad design.

You're for some reason equating 'necessary' with 'bad'; they are not the same.

One could - and I happily will - turn it around and say relaxing and removing certain key restrictions is bad design. (but other restrictions that made no sense could easily go; you hit one of these in your next sentence)

How many people actually enforced demihuman limits for instance? And those who did, how many had campaigns where anyone got to the level where it actually mattered?

The demi-human level limits were the penalty to balance the extra things demi-Humans had going for them.

Tone down those bonuses and extras a bit and one can remove the level limits.

 

[Don Durito]

I really miss spell interruption as a real thing.

I like the idea that it takes a team to get off a fireball.

 

[Helldritch]

Was the first edition perfect?
Far from it.
Many things in the 1ed seemed illogical but they came from testing these limitations and guess what? It worked. Spell rules were there as a limiting factor so that fighter and other martial classes were on par with the spell casters. When you removed those rules, martial classes were left in the dust by the caster classes especially the wizard.

Demi-humans had level limitations for their power to combine two or three classes. The only class where demi-humans could advanced freely was the thief class. It should've been race dependant but the idea was to be sure that the demi-human would still advance (in levels) at a reasonable rate. Other classes took for ever when they multi classed. But with a favored class per race it would've alleviated a lot of the grudge.

Elite classes were there too. By making the Paladin too common it only forced some DMs to enforce the Lawful Stupid aspect of Paladins and thus the hate they see today. Remove the Lawful Stupid (i.e. allow any alignment) because of the hate, and you get more hate because they are too strong vs other classes. In 1ed when you were able to make a paladin, you were doing one. Making a ranger was a bit easier but still relatively hard. Same with druids and monks. The elite classes were there to give a sense of reward for good rolls. That was bad desing. The basic (companion set) had it way better. The Avenger, Paladin and Druids were available at level 15 (too high) and were kind of like the prestige classes of third editions. If third edition had limit prestige classes to only one per characters...

Limitations are not something that rise high on the popularity scale. Far, far from it. But when there is one, it is there for a purpose. By removing limitations on certain aspects, 3.xed caused a lot of balance problems. The aging aspect of haste was the ultimate limiting factor. Elves were almost laughing at it. Humans and others were not. That spell was used in emergency, not as the almighty, unavoidable solution it became in 3.xed. Even if I hate concentration, I will not remove it. I know from experience that it is there for one good reason: balance.

 

[billd91]

Elite classes were there too. By making the Paladin too common it only forced some DMs to enforce the Lawful Stupid aspect of Paladins and thus the hate they see today. Remove the Lawful Stupid (i.e. allow any alignment) because of the hate, and you get more hate because they are too strong vs other classes.

People were enforcing lawful stupidity right from the beginning. That didn’t start with making the paladin too common.

 

[Helldritch]

People were enforcing lawful stupidity right from the beginning. That didn’t start with making the paladin too common.

That good Sir entirely depended upon the DM you had. Paladins had enough limitations without making them complete morons. It was an elite class. The Unearthed arcana did a lot to show what a paladin should be with the knightly code of conduct. Dragon articles were all against the "lawful stupidityL" of some DMs. If anything, the paladin would not let evil things go because of Lawfull Good. It would simply grant a quick and merciful death. Were they powerful? Of course they were. They had access to one of the most powerful sword in the game (Holy Avenger). They could heal themselves, could cast spells, could cure diseases (and were immune to it). With the UA they could rise their stats, were immune to fear and many other powerful goodies. But these came at a cost. High Stats entry way (in fact, even when rolling with UA roll method, there was a chance that you did not cut it to the minimum requirement. You were simply a Cavalier (which was powerful too)), magic items restrictions, wealth restrictions and a harsh code of conduct. No need to make them stupid too.

But as paladins became more common. The tendency to do the Lawful Stupid thing became almost a requirement for a class that was really powerful.

 

[Aaron L]

No one wanted to use them though. And if your balancing requires rules that no one wants to use...that's bad design.

How many people actually enforced demihuman limits for instance? And those who did, how many had campaigns where anyone got to the level where it actually mattered?

We always did (and still do) when playing 1st Edition campaigns. After a certain point the focus of demihuman adventuring shifted to seeking ways to acquire more Wishes in order to increase their ability scores, and the other PCs (and players) understood the situation and would allow us (usually me and my Elven PCs) to claim any Wishes we found as our share of treasure.

And even then, once the Demihuman characters reached their final hard limits on gaining class levels, their increased ability scores (usually in the low-to-mid 20s by that point) meant that the Demihuman PCs were still viable in combat even compared alongside their higher level Human colleagues. Plus, those players like me who just loved playing Elves or other Deminumans quickly learned to always include Thief in our multi-class combinations so as to always have one class that could advance without limit. A Grey Elven Fighter/Magic-User/Thief being restricted to only 11/18/U (with sufficiently Wished-up ability scores) may sound very limited when all the Human characters were up around 25th level, but the versatility of the characters, combined with the fact that their ability scores had been magically augmented up to 19 Strength and 22 Intelligence so as to reach absolute class level maximums, made up a lot of the difference. Also, once we reached our final level limits we would just continue to focus our adventuring goals on acquiring ever more Wishes so as to increase our ability scores even higher in lieu of gaining further levels, something which actually worked out quite well; in order to get more Hit Points we would keep Wishing for greater Constitution; for better attack bonuses we would Wish for ever greater Strength, etc. (Our DM even allowed a one-time, well-worded Wish to grant a small bonus to permanent maximum Hit Point totals; if I remember correctly the wording was something like for "greater stamina in combat.")

We played one campaign up to the point where the Human PCs rose to about 30th level, and even though my Grey Elven Fighter/Magic-User/Thief was indeed limited to "only" 11/18/28, I didn't feel left behind or overshadowed by the other PCs whatsoever, and in fact my PC was arguably the most powerful character in the party, being able to fight on nearly equal footing with the 29th level Paladin, dishing out tremendous amounts of damage with his 25 Strength... as well as being able to cast Wish all by himself and toss Meteor Swarms when needed. My PC may not have had as many Hit Points as the Human Paladin, nor as many high level spells per day as the Human Archmage, but my Grey Elf still was an Archmage and could cast 9th level spells... as well as also being a Warrior Lord with his own castle and troops, and also also a Master Thief with his own stronghold and his own Thieves Guild (he became a master of espionage for the forces of Light and Good.) My Grey Elf actually had more effect on the campaign world than any other PC due to the confluence of reach of his multiple avenues of influence. In fact, in later campaigns we played set on the same planet a millennium later he was still an incredibly powerful force, one of the main champions of Good in the world, because he was a Grey Elf with a 2,000 year lifespan.

As I said before, I much, much prefer my D&D game mechanics to be a simulation of the Fantasy/Pulp/Weird Fiction genre, without so much worry about balance, which is largely illusory anyway. Game "balance" is achieved through the DM focusing the spotlight on PCs, and if the most mechically powerful PC in the party doesn't get the spotlight then all of their supposed power is basically meaningless. The DM can take the mechanically weakest PC in a party and make him the most important simply by focusing campaign events around that PC.

Besides, game "balance" is basically about balancing mechanical potency in combat anyway, and if a significant proportion of a campaign is roleplaying rather than combat then all of that "balance" is essentially meaningless. I vastly prefer game mechanics that work to create a convincing simulation of genre atmosphere to those that twist themselves into knots trying to chase mythical ideas of "game balance." That is the reason why I hated 4th Edition so much; it was perfectly "balanced" by making the game feel completely like... well, like a game, at the expense of not feeling at all like inhabiting a pulp adventure story, which is what I want from D&D.

And that's why I love D&D 5th Edition so much; the mechanics genuinely create an atmosphere that really feels like inhabiting a Conan- or even Elric-style Pulp Fantasy/Adventure/Weird Fiction story. And that is a spectacular accomplishment!