Monte's 4thed (?)

[Christian]

So my 5th level cleric can cast Cure Light Wounds (in a party of 5 characters), 50 times per day?

In other words, I can run through the equivalent of an entire Wand of CLW each day of adventuring, or as an alternative way of looking at it each 5th level character effectively has an additional 95 hit points.

Um, no.

The catch is that no character can receive magical healing of any kind more than twice their level per day.

So each of those fifth-level characters can benefit from no more than 10 total hit points of magical healing each day. That fifth-level cleric can use his ability only once or twice (if he gets a bad roll the first time) on any one of his allies each day with his 'unlimited' use ability. The increase in effectiveness he gains in going up levels is almost entirely limited to allowing him to provide healing support to a larger group ...

 

[Celebrim]

So each of those fifth-level characters can benefit from no more than 10 total hit points of magical healing each day. That fifth-level cleric can use his ability only once or twice (if he gets a bad roll the first time) on any one of his allies each day with his 'unlimited' use ability.

That's not how I read it. If that were true, the first level characters in Monte's example could only benefit from 2 hit points worth of magical healing of any sort each day. That wouldn't be an advantage; that would be a serious drawback. Rather, I read the example as a character can only recieve twice his level in magical healing attempts. In otherwords, you can only attempt magical healing on a 1st level character twice, and on a 5th level character you can attempt it 10 times.

 

[kenmarable]

One can only hope that Monte is still influencing WotC via Mike.

Wow, and since Gary Gygax has been secretly operating the MonteBot for a couple decades does that mean Gygax is the evil mastermind behind 4e? And to what nefarious purpose?!!

Personally, I think these guys can come up with their own ideas. Mike Mearls was writing shelf fulls of d20 material before he worked with Monte on... what a half dozen books (plus a few adventures for the website)?

Looking at his list of credits, it looks like AEG has more secret influence at WotC than Monte.

These are coincidences from different and talented people trying to solve the same problems. Spell level = class level isn't exactly some bizarre concept only one person could come up with (in fact, I've found quite a few people new to the game assume that until they are told that you have to be "9th level to cast 5th level spells"). Plus realizing the spellcasters typically run out of anything fun to do because of Vancian casting isn't a newly discovered problem only Monte could realize. Just because both WotC and Monte's homebrew are addressing it doesn't mean they are in cohoots or even have remotely similar solutions.

I really wish Monte was still working in the RPG realm as well, but positing conspiracies and hidden influences isn't going to make it happen. That's just silly.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

These are coincidences from different and talented people trying to solve the same problems. Spell level = class level isn't exactly some bizarre concept only one person could come up with ...

Yeah, especially since in one of his articles, Monte says that he got the idea from ... the very serious consideration they gave to doing that for 3E, but backed out of because it was thought too radical. (He has also said they should have made more changes than they did, because the fans of 3E showed that they would tolerate changes as long as the changes were good design.)

There is no doubt in my mind that the concept of spell level equal to character level was bantered back and forth in the 1970s among some designers. When you typically had campaign stopping in the 7th to 13th level range, a simplification of spells into roughly 6 useful levels is a good simplification. (Look at how few spells above 6th level were available, for a very long time). When you have hundreds of spells, spread over spell levels 0-9, the advantage of collapsing the spell levels mostly disappear. This is why Rolemaster, for example, was better served avoiding such.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I really wish Monte was still working in the RPG realm as well, but positing conspiracies and hidden influences isn't going to make it happen. That's just silly.

Just in case someone (you?) missed this - I was just being silly when I indicated some weird conspiracies.
(I wasn't silly on other occasions, for example when I said that D&D designers think alike...)

 

[Dave Turner]

These are coincidences from different and talented people trying to solve the same problems. Spell level = class level isn't exactly some bizarre concept only one person could come up with (in fact, I've found quite a few people new to the game assume that until they are told that you have to be "9th level to cast 5th level spells"). Plus realizing the spellcasters typically run out of anything fun to do because of Vancian casting isn't a newly discovered problem only Monte could realize. Just because both WotC and Monte's homebrew are addressing it doesn't mean they are in cohoots or even have remotely similar solutions.

Fair enough. It's one thing for two different people to recognize similar areas for improvement but if their solutions are also similar, then that's something else entirely. This thread is mostly about how the solutions are similar.

Yeah, especially since in one of his articles, Monte says that he got the idea from ... the very serious consideration they gave to doing that for 3E, but backed out of because it was thought too radical. (He has also said they should have made more changes than they did, because the fans of 3E showed that they would tolerate changes as long as the changes were good design.)

Could you cite to that article, please?