paradox42's crazy cosmology

[Raithe the Dreamer]

Superb choice! XAOS from Greek mythology could be another potential example of such.

Other figures throughout Greek mythology could work here, too, depending on how you wanted to order a particular universe. They were rather fond of the personification of abstract principles, really. Chaos is the main one, but the Theogony also has a few more, like Eros and Eris. I'd have to dig out my copy to get the full list though. There's a whole handful of them that spawn from Chaos.

So where's Entropy on the scale? Were any of our First Ones actually Relationals or Fundamentals?

 

[paradox42]

So where's Entropy on the scale? Were any of our First Ones actually Relationals or Fundamentals?

The actual six First Ones were Fate (KR 18), Time (KR 18 but with more QP and HD than Fate), Matter (KR 19), Spirit (KR 20), Thought (KR 22 but split-personality so that each was effectively only KR 11), and Entropy (KR 24). As you learned in one of the last sessions, of course, all of the Sources were effectively Relationals with 120 DR and 11 KR apiece.

 

[paradox42]

...And Eternity

So at last, we reach the top of the pile, and the Demiurge and its progenitors are all the entities left to describe. Here, my pseudoscience explanations begin to fail, because beings of this level are so far beyond anything we mortals can directly deal with that mere words can surely not suffice. But, as the British say, let's have a go anyway.

Even during the full game, including the end session on January 30th of this year, the PCs never directly met the Demiurge itself- in fact, the only Eternals they did meet (if one doesn't count monsters like the Nehaschimic Dragons I threw at them, or the Neutronium Golem) were a strange old man whose true identity they never guessed (I intended him to be a Lipika- the ex-Supreme Beings who act as caretakers of the Akashic Record) and the progenitor of their own flawed Reality, who gave Its name as SEPHIROSOPHIA. The true nature of the Demiurge was also never explained to them, other than giving them the notion that it was sort of a "Sidereal" for all of Reality itself, but of course that's not accurate either given that it's actually of a different order of being altogether.

This is at least in part because I myself never really worked out the details. I'll digress here back into the history of my musings upon beings greater than gods, and explain what little is left to tell regarding Originals as I conceived them before the IH. My conception of these beings was deeply involved with a history I had for the "Incomplete Creation" that the game was assumed to be taking place in; I wrote a backstory which today looks suspiciously Judeo-Christian (though perhaps that's not inappropriate since the game concept of Eternals is heavily influenced by the Aeons in Gnostic Christianity).

Basically, I said that there was a massive "world" which was the first creation, dubbed simply Origin, and it was made by beings called Originals who came to this corner of existence from elsewhere (in fact, only they are allowed to travel into and out of Incomplete Creation and others like it in my old rules set). The Originals created a series or race of lesser beings to help them maintain and build upon Origin, called the "Secondaries" because they were second. Of course, the Secondaries rebelled for no explained reason, and destroyed Origin as well as most of the Originals; the Originals for their part annihilated all but one of the Secondaries (and that one escaped because it managed to hide somehow). The remaining 19 Originals repaired what little they could of the remaining portions of Origin, and this became the Voidsphere, the two Opposers, and the 19 multiverses, and they then created "Tertiary" beings (the Sidereals, in modern terms) who were later named Old Ones by the still lesser inhabitants of the reality-pockets they watched over. Eventually, the last Secondary showed itself, after turning a group of Tertiaries to its side, and started a new war which ended with its destruction (after being confined in the Positive Opposer, thus explaining why Positive energy is always proof against evil in any multiverse) and the destruction of most of its friends among the Tertiaries. Only 7 Originals were left after this, and they were tired of dealing with this existence after the war- so they left Incomplete Creation behind, "never" to return.

Reading the story today, along with the few rules I wrote to deal with the powers of the Originals, several things jump out at me. The most important of these is that I clearly didn't think much about what a being like an Original could actually do with power able to create worlds larger than whole multiverses- my rules did say that Originals could simply ignore any attack sent against them by Power Points, or Life Points, but if that was the case, then how did any of the Secondaries or Tertiaries actually kill them? On a related topic, this is the first inkling in my old rules that these entities were so powerful that they could deal with true infinities- a concept that UK also adopted for his Eternals. The third thing to jump out at me is that the notion of that one Secondary working in secret to corrupt others away from the "goodness" of the Originals looks a lot like the Gnostic idea of the Demiurge trying to keep humans from achieving "gnosis" with true Eternity and the Aeons who dwell within it. The last thing to jump out at me is that, if these beings were immune to attacks, and didn't have any possible method of using their own special points to attack (truth: the rules state that the Originals can't use their version of Life Points for any sort of attack or combat), then what the Hells would one base a game featuring them on, exactly? It doesn't really make for exciting story possibilities.

The rules written down in that old notebook of mine don't state point-blank that Old Ones are made of quantum probability, but I know that I had the concept in mind even then- and the rules do say that there are "theories" regarding it and that it's "more fundamental." I'm pretty sure I wrote them that way because I intended that if I ever ran a game featuring Old Ones vs. PC Immortals, I wanted to keep the secret of the true nature of the Old Ones back for an exciting in-game reveal, but that's irrelevant now. What's relevant is that, when the notebook gets around to discussing the nature of the Originals, all it says is "Originals, in their elementary form, are thought to exist as pure intelligence with no housing whatsoever." And that's the best I ever came up with to describe what they really are.

Today, given the science-looking puzzle I've cobbled together explaining the nature and existence of the Sidereals so well, I still have no good answer to the question- but I have one possible avenue for explanation. Modern information theory, as formulated by Shannon in the 1940s IIRC, essentially states that information is the reverse of entropy. Now, some scientists today suggest that our own universe may in some manner be a construct of "pure information" at its most fundamental level; that is, beneath all the talk of particles and waves and quantum probability and strings, what's really going on is a process of bits and qubits (the quantum version of bits, used in quantum computing) interacting with each other and somehow producing everything we see and think and are. If this (admittedly vague and unsupported) idea has truth in it, then this substrate of pure information would be the "next step" of "fundamental-ness" beyond the quantum probability that I postulated Sidereals to be made of. In other words, Sidereals and everything they create or do are merely "programs" running on some underlying substrate that gives them an arena to live and work in, and everything builds on that base of information exchanges to produce the Reality that we see. Of course, if that substrate can produce intelligence at all (which it demonstrably can, since the Sidereals are clearly intelligent, as are the beings such as gods and mortals that they create to live within themselves), then it's not much of a leap to suggest that it might be intelligent itself. It might be conscious of everything taking place within its own "body" of information.

This notion, of each Eternal being literally a "body of information," also gels well with what I (through SEPHIROSOPHIA) told the PCs at the end of the campaign: that if they passed through the Final Gate, the "stories growing within them" would have a chance to "grow" and "Become." Stories are really just constructs of information, after all. If the true meaning of Eternal existence is a move to becoming pure information, and the idea is that the information of one's own mind acquires life and Reality in its own right, then surely this explains SEPH's comment: any stories growing within the minds of a being who (literally) writes its mark upon Eternity must become as real and alive as the being who is doing the writing. Simply by passing through such a portal, and becoming Eternal, a being would begin to spin stories and lives living within the information substrate that is its new "body." This, then, is the ultimate meaning of Transcendence. Doesn't sound so bad, eh?

Enough of esoteric speculations. Most of you probably didn't do more than skim all that anyway, did you? You're wondering what rules I came up with for the Demiurge and greater Eternals. I adopted UK's "stages" of Demiurgedom for my Reality, and built on that to produce the Time Lords and higher ones. Here it is:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 26 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 27 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 28 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 29 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 600,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 30 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 800,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 31 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 32 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 1,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 33 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 34 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 35 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 36 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 37 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 38 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 39 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage II (120 DR, 40 KR, 2 TR): 60000 HD, 9,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 41 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 42 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 16,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 43 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 44 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 45 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 46 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 47 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 48 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 49 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 80,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Demiurge Stage III (120 DR, 50 KR, 3 TR): 80000 HD, 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Time Lord/Aeon (120 DR, 50 KR, 4 TR): 100000 HD, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Time Lord/Aeon (120 DR, 50 KR, 5 TR): 100000 HD, 120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
Time Lord/Aeon (120 DR, 50 KR, 6 TR): 100000 HD, 160,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
High Lord/Duad (120 DR, 50 KR, 7 TR): 200000 HD, 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
High Lord/Duad (120 DR, 50 KR, 8 TR): 200000 HD, 220,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
High Lord/Duad (120 DR, 50 KR, 9 TR): 200000 HD, 260,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
High Lord/Triad (120 DR, 50 KR, 10 TR): 300000 HD, 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.
etc...

Yes, I end the real Table stored in the file on my PC with that "Etc." It's open-ended, just like the IH system itself. Honestly, not much need be said here, except that "TR" of course stands for "Transcendental Rank," and you'd essentially use the IH templates except for adjusting as usual for the much higher divine bonuses involved in my system. DR and KR were explained before, but TR is easy enough to extrapolate from them: each TR grants a +36 divine bonus to everything, +72 to all six ability scores, a Transcendental Ability (or 6 Cosmics, or 36 Divines, or 216 feats), and +180 Level Adjustment. I also decided to cap the number of KR at 50, since that's the point where a Demiurge reaches maximum growth before it can take the 4th TR and become a true Time Lord. I opted not to add DR or KR to any High Lord, because my concept of those beings is that when multiple Realities merge to produce one, only one consciousness is dominant- and that consciousness would remember its own history as a Demiurge above any other, so it would only have the DR and KR that it had during that growth. The TR, of course, are additive, and open-ended.

No being with TR was ever given full stats for my game, though I did put in skeleton-stats for the Demiurge (just in case) and for SEPHIROSOPHIA its creator. SEPHIROSOPHIA was postulated as having 150,000 hit dice, 150 sextillion QP, and therefore TR 5. I never actually decided what Transcendentals it had, precisely, figuring that the players would be scared off from fighting it by its 150,000 HD and clearly overwhelming power (and of course, I was correct).

 

[Pssthpok]

too many feats....

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hiya matey!

Enough of esoteric speculations. Most of you probably didn't do more than skim all that anyway, did you?

I see everything.

You're wondering what rules I came up with for the Demiurge and greater Eternals. I adopted UK's "stages" of Demiurgedom for my Reality, and built on that to produce the Time Lords and higher ones. Here it is:

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 26 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP

I am wondering how the heck such a thing would be statted. I mean I thought after about 100 Hit Dice that things started to grind down (as regards creation).

Don't want to derail things, but i think when people see the new size rules in the Vampire Bestiary that they'll believe that finally there is a system which can handle the inherent ridiculousness of really big monsters without the need for really big math.

For me, the only element of contention at this point is where to ultimately set the cap (on both level and size).

So my question to you is "would the game be more attractive if you take all the math out of it (relatively speaking that is)?" I mean from what you have said about your campaign is that it was more about planning combat than actual combat itself. Just curious to hear your take on things vis-a-vis this thread/your campaign.

 

[paradox42]

I am wondering how the heck such a thing would be statted.

Carefully.

I mean I thought after about 100 Hit Dice that things started to grind down (as regards creation).

People who don't have the attention to/flair for details that I do often get bogged down in situations that I merely find enjoyably challenging/engaging; I'm a very unusual specimen that way. I only have one or two friends who honestly would want to bother statting up something that big "properly" (meaning, taking note of all the little details). The real key with it IMO is to make extensive use of shortcuts, such as having feat packages picked out, or knowing the "endlessly stackable" feats like Epic Toughness by heart so you can just easily add large numbers of them to whatever critter you need to fill thousands of feat slots for with simple multiplication. For a 40K HD critter, I'd likely spend most of the feats on Armor Skin, Improved Toughness/Epic Toughness, and stuff like that, and it'd really be a matter of deciding on the ratio I want for defense vs. offense. The feats granting individual abilities like Power Attack or Extend Spell are small enough in number that a creature with so many feat slots can be reaonably assumed to have them all, if you want to. That cuts decision time down considerably. Of course, this means that creatures that get big enough tend to all have the same abilities, but that's really how things should be when you're talking about things that are billions of years (or more) old and hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than gods. The differences then are not in the feats, but in the abilities that are appropriate to the being's tier: in this case, Eternal/Transcendental.

Don't want to derail things, but i think when people see the new size rules in the Vampire Bestiary that they'll believe that finally there is a system which can handle the inherent ridiculousness of really big monsters without the need for really big math.

Good luck! It'll be interesting to read the results.

So my question to you is "would the game be more attractive if you take all the math out of it (relatively speaking that is)?"

All the math? Certainly not. A certain amount of math is necessary to avoid the game becoming a case of rock-paper-scissors, or coin flips. It's a question of how much math is appropriate to deal with whatever situation is at hand. The primary reason I dislike 4th Edition, recall, is that it's too simplistic. I agree that 3.X needed simplifying at high levels, but 4E went way too far for me. It made everything homogenized such that the game doesn't "feel" different enough to be interesting at high levels vs. low levels. Oversimplification became the problem that broke the camel's back, for me (and for others in my play group who have since adopted Pathfinder for their new games). I like complexity. If the game isn't complex at all, then it doesn't feel "real," and suspension of disbelief (which the game really depends on to work) fails to occur.

I mean from what you have said about your campaign is that it was more about planning combat than actual combat itself.

Not actually true- the overplanning was really just the way my players preferred to do things. We had two or three serious powergamers, depending on how you define that term, and one of those guys was a type who was honestly in the game to "win," hands down. He hated to lose anything, and therefore would be unhappy if he didn't spend as much time as it was even remotely possible to spend making sure he had every possible advantage in a given combat. At ultra-high levels, this degenerated into spending several sessions using divination after divination after database access after clairsentient power-use after... (you get the idea) until he was satisfied that he had all the information about a potential enemy that he could possibly get in advance, and that all of that enemy's weaknesses were analyzed from as many perspectives as it was possible to analyze them from, and thus no matter what the enemy did he'd be ready with a counter for it (or better still, to prevent it from even being able to act in the first place).

In other words, this had nothing to do with the system I was using and everything to do with the players I had in the group. I'm quite certain that even if we'd been using a game where divinations didn't exist, this player would have been forming careful tactical plans with all the other party members and analyzing them to death for any situation he could conceive of, and altering said plans after every actual battle to refine them for the next one. He's just as detail-oriented as I am, in his way, so it's in his nature to plan things that precisely.

In the case of the now-finished game, the fact that the party did have access to powerful divination stuff meant that they analyzed all potential enemies in advance of actually deciding whether to antagonize them enough to attack/start a combat in the first place: the most egregious case of this was when they actually used time travel to go into the future by a few centuries, and once there, travel across the fifth dimension to get a statistical picture over 14,000 separate timelines of how various possible attack plans for one enemy worked out for their group. They ended up going back to their starting point and then using a different plan entirely to take the enemy out without giving it any chance at all to even notice their attack until it was too late (this was against the Hungry Void galaxy, if you were wondering).

 

[Raithe the Dreamer]

I am wondering how the heck such a thing would be statted. I mean I thought after about 100 Hit Dice that things started to grind down (as regards creation).

As one of the players in paradox's game that especially likes the numbers aspect (who is normally relatively on the power-gamer side of things, but failed at it time and time again due to overall unfamiliarity with Ascension), 100 HD is easy! Now sure, every time we gained a batch of levels (which was typically around 100-200 HD at a time), I spent 8-10 hours over the course of a week working out what I wanted to do with them, but I had fun with it. We were encouraged to "diversify" as deities, so that we could encompass more things and be appropriate deities for more types of characters, so it was a lot of fun digging through books and finding classes that fit a deity's flavor and expanded their "kit" in some way.

Now, we had at least one player who really never bothered to keep up. I just don't think it was that interesting to him. I believe his character never got officially statted up beyond about 100 HD.

So my question to you is "would the game be more attractive if you take all the math out of it (relatively speaking that is)?" I mean from what you have said about your campaign is that it was more about planning combat than actual combat itself. Just curious to hear your take on things vis-a-vis this thread/your campaign.

As paradox has already said: absolutely not. I look at 4E and it looks inherently *boring* personally. I do agree that high level play in 3E could get pretty ridiculous and that some streamlining would be welcome, but at the same time, 4E completely removed what made the metagame interesting. Characters are all the same except in flavor, primarily: what they can do mechanically is all essentially cut and paste with different names, with the occasional d6 traded for a knockback effect or some other such thing.

Sure, from a role-play perspective, you can still tell the same sort of stories with any system (though I do think in some ways 4E is a little handicapped because it castrated full casters so much--as a DM that feels rather limiting to me). From a roll-play perspective, though...there aren't really that many mechanical options that are exciting. Some players like all the complexity in the world and loved classes like the Wizard in 3.x, and other characters just wanted to say "I attack," and be done with it. They actually don't *want* powers and stuff to manage. 3.x (and previous editions of D&D) have embraced both of those desires in some ways, whereas 4E completely abandons any real choice in *how* you play as a player.

Sorry to contribute to the derail. >.>

 

[Khisanth the Ancient]

It's interesting how Gnostic a lot of computer/information technology people can sound ... there's a strong analogy between some of the transhumanist strands and the Gnostic notions of transcendence. The same idea of physical matter as something bad to be escaped, etc.

What's relevant is that, when the notebook gets around to discussing the nature of the Originals, all it says is "Originals, in their elementary form, are thought to exist as pure intelligence with no housing whatsoever." And that's the best I ever came up with to describe what they really are.

Cool. Makes me think of E. E. Smith's "pure intellectuals" in the Skylark of Space series, but that's because I read too much early science fiction

(In that series, there are six "orders" of energies; ordinary electromagnetic radiation is the first, cosmic rays [they didn't know that they were high-energy particles in the 20s] are the second, third and above are entirely hypothetical energies, with the highest order being pure thought; the "pure intellectuals" are beings entirely of thought that can 'transcend' humans into their own state.)

Most of you probably didn't do more than skim all that anyway, did you?

Nah, I thought it was very interesting.

Demiurge Stage I (120 DR, 26 KR, 1 TR): 40000 HD, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 QP.

So even the most basic Demiurge would have 120 + 26 x 6 + 1 x 36 = +312 divine bonus? Wow.

No being with TR was ever given full stats for my game, though I did put in skeleton-stats for the Demiurge (just in case)

What Stage demiurge was it?

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hiya mate!

Carefully.

People who don't have the attention to/flair for details that I do often get bogged down in situations that I merely find enjoyably challenging/engaging; I'm a very unusual specimen that way. I only have one or two friends who honestly would want to bother statting up something that big "properly" (meaning, taking note of all the little details). The real key with it IMO is to make extensive use of shortcuts, such as having feat packages picked out, or knowing the "endlessly stackable" feats like Epic Toughness by heart so you can just easily add large numbers of them to whatever critter you need to fill thousands of feat slots for with simple multiplication. For a 40K HD critter, I'd likely spend most of the feats on Armor Skin, Improved Toughness/Epic Toughness, and stuff like that, and it'd really be a matter of deciding on the ratio I want for defense vs. offense. The feats granting individual abilities like Power Attack or Extend Spell are small enough in number that a creature with so many feat slots can be reaonably assumed to have them all, if you want to. That cuts decision time down considerably. Of course, this means that creatures that get big enough tend to all have the same abilities, but that's really how things should be when you're talking about things that are billions of years (or more) old and hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than gods. The differences then are not in the feats, but in the abilities that are appropriate to the being's tier: in this case, Eternal/Transcendental.

That (bolded & underlined) to me seems little different than 4E's approach. In fact the only difference would be 4E doesn't add the headache of having to work out/factor/remember every feat in the game.

Good luck! It'll be interesting to read the results.

Thanks.

All the math? Certainly not.

Well obviously I meant comparitively. 4E still has math it just doesn't have 'silly' math.

A certain amount of math is necessary to avoid the game becoming a case of rock-paper-scissors, or coin flips. It's a question of how much math is appropriate to deal with whatever situation is at hand. The primary reason I dislike 4th Edition, recall, is that it's too simplistic. I agree that 3.X needed simplifying at high levels, but 4E went way too far for me. It made everything homogenized such that the game doesn't "feel" different enough to be interesting at high levels vs. low levels. Oversimplification became the problem that broke the camel's back, for me (and for others in my play group who have since adopted Pathfinder for their new games). I like complexity. If the game isn't complex at all, then it doesn't feel "real," and suspension of disbelief (which the game really depends on to work) fails to occur.

4E is plenty complex, but not overtly so.

Not actually true- the overplanning was really just the way my players preferred to do things. We had two or three serious powergamers, depending on how you define that term, and one of those guys was a type who was honestly in the game to "win," hands down. He hated to lose anything, and therefore would be unhappy if he didn't spend as much time as it was even remotely possible to spend making sure he had every possible advantage in a given combat.

Sounds like me playing 1E/2E. I was a big fan of prep.

I'm quite certain that even if we'd been using a game where divinations didn't exist, this player would have been forming careful tactical plans with all the other party members and analyzing them to death for any situation he could conceive of, and altering said plans after every actual battle to refine them for the next one. He's just as detail-oriented as I am, in his way, so it's in his nature to plan things that precisely.

See to me this is one of the reasons why 4E trumps 3E, because its FAR more tactical and thus better rewards smart play (as opposed to simply rewarding industrious play).

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hey there Raithe the Dreamer!

As one of the players in paradox's game that especially likes the numbers aspect (who is normally relatively on the power-gamer side of things, but failed at it time and time again due to overall unfamiliarity with Ascension), 100 HD is easy! Now sure, every time we gained a batch of levels (which was typically around 100-200 HD at a time), I spent 8-10 hours over the course of a week working out what I wanted to do with them, but I had fun with it. We were encouraged to "diversify" as deities, so that we could encompass more things and be appropriate deities for more types of characters, so it was a lot of fun digging through books and finding classes that fit a deity's flavor and expanded their "kit" in some way.

Let me just clarify; I'm talking about the creation of opponents from the perspective of the DM/Game Designer in that you must create multiple such opponents. Not from the perspective of the Player who only needs to look after a single character (for most players).

Design of the game at a certain point felt less rewarding and more of a chore. Many of the shortcuts I created (maven and omnicompetent for example) were an attempt to reduce the grind (for myself and DMs).

Now, we had at least one player who really never bothered to keep up. I just don't think it was that interesting to him. I believe his character never got officially statted up beyond about 100 HD.

As paradox has already said: absolutely not. I look at 4E and it looks inherently *boring* personally.

It might look boring but it plays brilliantly.

I do agree that high level play in 3E could get pretty ridiculous and that some streamlining would be welcome, but at the same time, 4E completely removed what made the metagame interesting. Characters are all the same except in flavor, primarily: what they can do mechanically is all essentially cut and paste with different names, with the occasional d6 traded for a knockback effect or some other such thing.

I think WotC have and are addressing the class diversity issue with the 2nd and 3rd Players Handbooks. While I agree a lot of the mechanical fundamentals of the Classes are similar in 4E, the clearer definition of their roles is refreshing. Added to which the vastly superior balance of 4E both in terms of classes and combat.

Sure, from a role-play perspective, you can still tell the same sort of stories with any system (though I do think in some ways 4E is a little handicapped because it castrated full casters so much--as a DM that feels rather limiting to me).

They really needed it. Casters were far too dominant in 3E.

From a roll-play perspective, though...there aren't really that many mechanical options that are exciting. Some players like all the complexity in the world and loved classes like the Wizard in 3.x, and other characters just wanted to say "I attack," and be done with it. They actually don't *want* powers and stuff to manage. 3.x (and previous editions of D&D) have embraced both of those desires in some ways, whereas 4E completely abandons any real choice in *how* you play as a player.

Seems to me, what you are saying is that if you want diversity in 3E play a caster and if you want no diversity play any other class.

4E is different in that all the classes have a measure of diversity existing somewhere in between the 3E caster - non-caster paradigm.

Sorry to contribute to the derail. >.>

Me too.

 

[Raithe the Dreamer]

Hey there Raithe the Dreamer!

Let me just clarify; I'm talking about the creation of opponents from the perspective of the DM/Game Designer in that you must create multiple such opponents. Not from the perspective of the Player who only needs to look after a single character (for most players).

Design of the game at a certain point felt less rewarding and more of a chore. Many of the shortcuts I created (maven and omnicompetent for example) were an attempt to reduce the grind (for myself and DMs).

See, as a DM, I want that complexity too. Generally, I only DM about half as much as I play, but my world is like a giant character to me, and I'm the sort that loves spending hours precisely statting up my deities and epic level NPCs. I also actually rather dislike the hard schism in 4E between monsters and characters in terms of mechanics. I prefer to play by the same rules as my players when I DM.

It might look boring but it plays brilliantly.

Other than a few snags, I always felt 3.x played brilliantly too, and thankfully, Pathfinder has addressed most of those snags. I'd rather have a game that is exciting mechanically and plays pretty well, and has room for varied playstyles and mechanical options, even with a few snags, than a game that *only* plays brilliantly.

I think WotC have and are addressing the class diversity issue with the 2nd and 3rd Players Handbooks. While I agree a lot of the mechanical fundamentals of the Classes are similar in 4E, the clearer definition of their roles is refreshing. Added to which the vastly superior balance of 4E both in terms of classes and combat.

2nd PHB, I'd disagree, though the 3rd one is finally starting to play within the design space, finally, with the Psion. I also despise classes being hard-wired with roles. It's nicer for newer players, I suppose, but I don't want to *have* to play my Fighter as a Defender. It should be perfectly viable to play a Ranger with a sword and shield that acts as the party's frontliner, or a Fighter with two big old longswords that's just a damage machine. One of the roles (battlefield controller) means almost nothing and has left the Wizard with an identity crisis, too. I don't think 4E's designers understood what battlefield control really was, since they eliminated most of the spells that actually got used for it.

They really needed it. Casters were far too dominant in 3E.

Yes, they were. The whole of the game didn't need to be neutered and reubuilt from the ground up to narrow that gap, either. Pathfinder's classes are much more balanced than the original 3.x ones. Fighters are absolute powerhouses again, and all melee characters have options available to them via feats that give the benefits of maneuvers without having to design sixty powers for each class.

Are the casters still ahead? In terms of raw power, yes. In some sense, they should be--a 20th-level wizard has mastered the fabric of reality. It's boring if the only thing he can do is do the same +10d6 (or whatever) that a Fighter can do with some high level maneuver. The balance is achieved in different ways. No one can match a Pathfinder Fighter in terms of raw damage output, but the Wizard's versatility is his strength. CoDzilla is a thing of the past, and while Clerics and Druids are still powerful, they can't do everything at once anymore.

Seems to me, what you are saying is that if you want diversity in 3E play a caster and if you want no diversity play any other class.

Well, if we're taking the whole of 3E into account here, you can play any number of classes, such as those from Tome of Battle, if you want a melee character with varied options. The nice thing about that book was it let players who like that style of play for their warriors have the option, while still leaving the simplified style for others.

In Pathfinder, combat maneuvers (bull rush, trip, disarm etc) are much easier to use and therefore provide a lot more options for non-casters at the table, and other feats let them diversify their combat styles as well.

4E is different in that all the classes have a measure of diversity existing somewhere in between the 3E caster - non-caster paradigm.

For the most part, the 4E classes don't feel diverse to me at all, with the recent exception of the Psion, and even that's still very much within 4Es narrow paradigm.

 

[paradox42]

It's interesting how Gnostic a lot of computer/information technology people can sound ... there's a strong analogy between some of the transhumanist strands and the Gnostic notions of transcendence. The same idea of physical matter as something bad to be escaped, etc.

I've never gone for that idea that matter is "bad," though. To me, that's shortsighted and elitist, perhaps even pretentious or arrogant. Matter is a part of our existence: and since time is a dimension, that means that no matter how far we transcend, it always will be part of it. But we can certainly grow past/beyond our current limitations. It's just as (if not more) shortsighted to say that because we're limited, we always will be- or worse yet, always should be. Few things get my goat faster than a traditionalist arguing one of the variations of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Cool. Makes me think of E. E. Smith's "pure intellectuals" in the Skylark of Space series, but that's because I read too much early science fiction

(In that series, there are six "orders" of energies; ordinary electromagnetic radiation is the first, cosmic rays [they didn't know that they were high-energy particles in the 20s] are the second, third and above are entirely hypothetical energies, with the highest order being pure thought; the "pure intellectuals" are beings entirely of thought that can 'transcend' humans into their own state.)

Never heard of that series before today. I may check that out in the near future, thanks.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if all this sort of speculation really is drawing on Jung's "collective unconscious" and therefore coming to us from some greater Entity in our own universe's future. Or one of our own futures, to be more precise. It'd be pretty cool, in my view, if such a being really were trying to get us to comprehend it (and perhaps even join it) by telling us about itself that way.

It also occurs to me that in that Sci-Fi thread, we only had one race of superbeings mentioned who were Eternals (or better) beyond any possible doubt or argument: the Downstreamers. And having read the three Manifold entries in that series, I know that the best way to describe what those beings actually are, is to say that they're processes of pure information running on a universe-spanning computer at the (effective) end of time. So there again, the idea that Eternals are really pure information in their "true bodies" comes up.

So even the most basic Demiurge would have 120 + 26 x 6 + 1 x 36 = +312 divine bonus? Wow.

What Stage demiurge was it?

I put those two quotations together because- yep, DABBATIALDABAOTH would have come onto the game stage as a Stage I Demiurge with a +312 bonus. See, it was just waking up, so there was no reason to suggest it should be anything but the lowest possible Demiurge status.

 

[Khisanth the Ancient]

I've never gone for that idea that matter is "bad," though. To me, that's shortsighted and elitist, perhaps even pretentious or arrogant.

I agree entirely; I was not saying that this is a good idea, merely that I see strong similarities. IMO this is one of the worst trends in Western thought, in fact.

But this is a bit off topic...

 

[paradox42]

Loot! ...er, Artifacts and Soul Objects

As has been mentioned in several other threads over the years, my campaign used different terminology for items than the "core" IH. There were several reasons for this, mostly stemming from the fact that my setting was designed from the days of 2nd Edition to allow PCs to (at least potentially) create artifacts; if you've read all of the above posts in this thread then you know already that I always did my utmost to preserve as much of my old games as possible when bringing the setting into new rules systems. I write this explanation now because it will be relevant to discussions about the powerful artifacts that shaped my game, as well as the setting it took place within.

So, to begin: in 2nd Edition the only official explanations which were offered for how items get created made it inordinately difficult and time-consuming to do so- it was essentially intended that PCs should not be given the ability to make items of their own, as far as I could tell. Characters were required to undertake quests for incredibly rare ingredients, up to and including physically impossible objects such as "essence of love" or the "heart of a cloud." Often, to construct even a fairly low-powered item such as Wings of Flying, multiple quests would be necessary. In addition, and this was the real killer, the Enchant An Item spell required the caster to actually sacrifice CON points to cast it and make an item- meaning that a PC would be making himself less healthy and more prone to die, and thus less suitable for adventuring in the first place, to make even one item. Finally, only Wizards had the Enchant spell- priests or other caster-types couldn't make items at all without a Wizard's help. Of course, all of this then begs the question: if these things are so hard to create, why the Hells would anybody actually go to the trouble of doing it? Clearly examples of such items already exist, so where did they come from? Something was badly missing.

3rd Edition solved the problem in what I considered an elegant and satisfying manner: rare ingredients were still assumed to be required, but it was all abstracted into a simple gp cost, which was directly tied to how powerful the spells were for making the item. Also, although a personal sacrifice was still necessary for the item crafting, it now cost XP rather than CON- which meant that not only was the cost much less severe in the short term (since most characters in a position to actually craft items would have lots of XP), but it wasn't a permanent loss, since more XP could be gained through adventuring. I wholeheartedly embraced the new approach and started figuring out how to translate my old items into the new edition's mechanics.

But I encountered a problem when it came to translating one of my critical 2nd Edition innovations into 3rd: the Enchant An Artifact spell. See, in 2nd Edition, I came up with rules to allow casting of 10th-level (and a few higher) spells; one of these was the artifact-creation spell. I was doing this translation before the Epic-Level Handbook was even a mote in WotC's collective eye, let alone announced, so I had to make my own system of beyond-9th-level spells and incorporate the artifact rules in with that somehow. That system of magic, which I called Ultramagic, was an integral part of my campaign, but it's not relevant here except in that I clearly couldn't make an Enchant An Artifact Ultraspell since the 3E paradigm had eliminated its lower-level antecedent. 3E item crafting was done through feats- so clearly I needed to make one.

But along with this a new snag reared its ugly head: artifacts were no longer a singular category! We now had Minor and Major Artifacts to deal with. What was the difference between these categories? Well, in the DMG, there apparently wasn't one, except that Minor Artifacts exist as multiple copies and Major ones don't. That was a most unsatisfying way to operate, for me, so I needed to come up with a proper definition between the categories- and not just that, but one which would let me decide how many new feats to make! My eventual solution was to define a "Minor" artifact as being simply an item that breaks the arbitrary limits of non-artifacts- that is, a +6 or better weapon, a wondrous item using a metamagicked 9th-level spell, and so on. A "Major" artifact would then be an item which really contained greater-than-mortal level power, in the form of an Ultraspell or psionic Ultrapower. I then created two new feats, Craft Minor and Craft Major Artifact, which would be "meta-feats" that affected how the character's other item crafting feats worked. That is, Craft Minor allows the character to break the limits of basic items, while Craft Major allows the character to put real earth-shaking powers into an item (like that cute little Nuke spell I've mentioned in other threads). Finally, every single Major Artifact- whether its crafter wants it to be or not- is sentient. They don't always (or even usually) communicate with people around them, even their own wielders, but they can use their own powers if it suits them, and they have a funny way of refusing to work or Just Going Away when their purposes call for such.

Enter the ELH. When that came along, it defined a new system for greater-than-9th-level spells which was radically different from my system of Ultraspells, and furthermore defined ways to create "epic" items which was fundamentally at odds with my own Craft Artifact feats. There was also the slight issue that the ELH actually defined a new category of items which were not artifacts (because PCs still couldn't make those) and yet were greater than normal items. I resolved the essential conflict by noting the congruence between these new "Epic Items" and my own definition of Minor Artifacts- basically, my Minor Artifacts were exactly what WotC was now calling an Epic item. So for my game, I postulated that the "Craft Epic [X]" feats were unnecessary, and that Craft Minor Artifact would still be used in the place of all of them; furthermore, because my rules for artifact crafting said that Minor Artifacts cost 5 times what a regular item cost, and Major Artifacts cost 10 times as much, I kept my cost multipliers in place instead of using the ELH ones- which suddenly meant that most of the ELH items cost only about half as much in my game. But I clearly needed a system, now, to deal with these newfangled Epic spells in items, since it would make no sense to allow Ultraspells to be made into items but not Epics (most of which were less powerful than most Ultraspells). Eventually I adapted the system of mitigating factors and reverse-engineered it based on spell-level equivalence, to come up with the new rules for putting Epic spells into items.

Now, enter the Immortal's Handbook. UK promised to eventually deliver rules for PCs crafting artifacts, and more importantly, put the rule in place to limit gods to only four items. Well, since I had my own system already, the artifact rules would clearly be irrelevant until I had them to compare with mine; of course, we never did see the rules he had in mind for 3.X, since that was to be part of Grimoire which was never released. But the second rule put a new snag into things- my own Epic NPCs and NPC deities already featured lots of items, in many cases already going way beyond the limit of 4. Clearly something had to change. Again.

The resolution to this conflict came when I saw the rules for Resonance- which among other things discuss items called "soul objects" which contain portions of the creator's power in the form of QP. Given my already-discussed pseudoscientific paradigm for what gods are, coupled with the fact that in UK's system the god's artifacts grow with the god as it gains DR and HD, it was immediately clear that the only possible way items could do that in my setting was if the "artifacts" were really part of the deity all along.

And so, the term "Soul Object" was redefined in my game to mean something quite different from what UK meant when using it: a Soul Object would specifically be an item that a deity crafted out of part of its own soul, which took the physical form of a Major Artifact with powers defined by the deity at creation time, and which would be capable (via the connection to the living deity) of growing and changing its power set as the deity itself grew and changed. Deities would be limited to having four Soul Objects, just as the IH specified, but there would be no limit on items or artifacts crafted in the usual manner with the preexisting rules. Furthermore, every deity would be capable of crafting Soul Objects for itself, but only those deities who had the standard feats would be capable of crafting items or artifacts that were not Soul Objects. Since Soul Objects were invariably Major Artifacts regardless of what powers they contained, they'd all be sentient and capable of independent action when necessary, but since they were literally part of the creator's own soul, they would never act against their creator under any circumstances.

So, to summarize the end result of all these years of cobbling stuff together: Magic Items < Minor Artifacts < Major Artifacts < Soul Objects. There's some overlap, power-wise, between the various categories, but over the long term that's how things work out. This was proven quite well in my divine game, wherein the majority of PCs after reaching a certain level of power never bothered with regular items, or even Minor Artifacts for that matter, but instead came to rely almost exclusively on their own Soul Objects and a few extra-powerful items (often Soul Objects of other gods or still greater beings) picked up on their travels.

Next post, now that I've explained the concept of Soul Objects in my game, I'll detail some of the most important ones that cropped up in the actual campaign. See, the most interesting part about Soul Objects or other artifacts is considering what happens when a being like the First One of Entropy crafts one.

 

[Raithe the Dreamer]

Next post, now that I've explained the concept of Soul Objects in my game, I'll detail some of the most important ones that cropped up in the actual campaign. See, the most interesting part about Soul Objects or other artifacts is considering what happens when a being like the First One of Entropy crafts one.

Dare I hope for the full capabilities of the Initial Enabler?

 

[Upper_Krust]

Hiya mate!

I've never gone for that idea that matter is "bad," though. To me, that's shortsighted and elitist, perhaps even pretentious or arrogant.

Well matter in and of itself is not necessarily evil, but matter = energy and energy = power and power ultimately corrupts. Though I suppose you could add the caveat that its Matter + Sentience that ultimately leads to evil (not matter alone), and thus since elementals are matter with sentience they would be (more often than not) predisposed towards evil.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Howdy Raithe!

See, as a DM, I want that complexity too. Generally, I only DM about half as much as I play, but my world is like a giant character to me, and I'm the sort that loves spending hours precisely statting up my deities and epic level NPCs. I also actually rather dislike the hard schism in 4E between monsters and characters in terms of mechanics. I prefer to play by the same rules as my players when I DM.

For me it just looks like a lot of complexity for its own sake rather than for any benefit to the fun.

Other than a few snags, I always felt 3.x played brilliantly too, and thankfully, Pathfinder has addressed most of those snags. I'd rather have a game that is exciting mechanically and plays pretty well, and has room for varied playstyles and mechanical options, even with a few snags, than a game that *only* plays brilliantly.

Having witnessed first hand the progress of D&D noobs (even if they were RPG gamers for some years) getting to grips with (low level) 3E showed me that the game has too many working parts,many of which are redundant.

These problems are only compounded at the high end of the game. Does 3E play well when die rolls are basically inconsequential...not sure it does.

2nd PHB, I'd disagree,

Well from what I have been told (and I'll state I haven't tried these classes myself) is that some of the primal classes (in particular the warden and shaman) play quite a bit differently in practice.

though the 3rd one is finally starting to play within the design space, finally, with the Psion. I also despise classes being hard-wired with roles. It's nicer for newer players, I suppose, but I don't want to *have* to play my Fighter as a Defender. It should be perfectly viable to play a Ranger with a sword and shield that acts as the party's frontliner, or a Fighter with two big old longswords that's just a damage machine. One of the roles (battlefield controller) means almost nothing and has left the Wizard with an identity crisis, too. I don't think 4E's designers understood what battlefield control really was, since they eliminated most of the spells that actually got used for it.

Not sure I understand the mentality of playing a class outside its given role...why not just play a different class, or multiclass if you want to spread yourself out a bit.

If you want to play a Fighter who is primarily a leader, just play a Warlord. If you want to play a Fighter with some leadership ability occasionally multiclass into Warlord.

Yes, they were. The whole of the game didn't need to be neutered and reubuilt from the ground up to narrow that gap, either. Pathfinder's classes are much more balanced than the original 3.x ones. Fighters are absolute powerhouses again, and all melee characters have options available to them via feats that give the benefits of maneuvers without having to design sixty powers for each class.

Well thats weird because the reports I have read suggest that all the classes were equally boosted so while fighters might be slightly more powerful than their 3E counterparts they are still as weak, relatively speaking, when compared to casters.

In the build I saw (upon Pathfinder's release) the Fighter looked about the same as a 3E Fighter (I think it was a Level 14 Pathfinder Fighter).

Are the casters still ahead? In terms of raw power, yes.

Ah.

In some sense, they should be--a 20th-level wizard has mastered the fabric of reality.

Should they though? If it takes x amount of time to become a great fighter or a great wizard, yet the great wizard is notably more powerful, why would people become fighters?

In 1E AD&D Wizards were pound for pound more powerful (after the first few levels). But this was tempered by notably higher EXP totals.

3E maintains the power disparity per level, but makes EXP required the same for all classes.

4E just reddresses that disparity.

It's boring if the only thing he can do is do the same +10d6 (or whatever) that a Fighter can do with some high level maneuver.

The difference being of course that the Wizard can generally attack multiple targets at once at range. Whereas the Fighter is generally attacking one target in melee.

The balance is achieved in different ways. No one can match a Pathfinder Fighter in terms of raw damage output, but the Wizard's versatility is his strength. CoDzilla is a thing of the past, and while Clerics and Druids are still powerful, they can't do everything at once anymore.

I'd be interested to see what the damage outputs are for Level 20 Pathfinder Wizards vs. Fighters...I mean don't they still even use iterative attack bonuses in Pathfinder?

Well, if we're taking the whole of 3E into account here, you can play any number of classes, such as those from Tome of Battle, if you want a melee character with varied options. The nice thing about that book was it let players who like that style of play for their warriors have the option, while still leaving the simplified style for others.

The Tome of Battle was of course a trial run for 4E martial class ideas.

In Pathfinder, combat maneuvers (bull rush, trip, disarm etc) are much easier to use and therefore provide a lot more options for non-casters at the table, and other feats let them diversify their combat styles as well.

I sort of like the 4E method that marries combat maneouvers to attacks.

For the most part, the 4E classes don't feel diverse to me at all, with the recent exception of the Psion, and even that's still very much within 4Es narrow paradigm.

Well I don't have the PHB 3 yet, I am very interested to see the Monk.

 

[Raithe the Dreamer]

Howdy Raithe!

For me it just looks like a lot of complexity for its own sake rather than for any benefit to the fun.

Complexity is fun for some folks, though. I happen to be one of them that enjoy a more complex system because that means you can do more with it. I'm also a rather simulationist player, and I like having rules for weird situations and the like. 4E is a rather gamist system, and it's very much not my cup of tea.

Having witnessed first hand the progress of D&D noobs (even if they were RPG gamers for some years) getting to grips with (low level) 3E showed me that the game has too many working parts,many of which are redundant.

I think that's going to depend on the individual players. I've introduced several people to 3E that had no trouble getting used to it and a number that at the same time had trouble with it. It's just not a game for everyone (and nor should it be).

These problems are only compounded at the high end of the game. Does 3E play well when die rolls are basically inconsequential...not sure it does.

Die rolls only become inconsequential in the higher tiers of epic, from what I've seen. 3E's epic system by and large had a ton of problems, which I'll be the first to admit (and I'm sure paradox42 remembers many times where I went on a rant about it, too!).

Pathfinder doesn't have Epic rules yet (other than a brief section on how to go beyond 20 if you want to, which isn't really supported or intended to be balanced), but they've already suggested that they won't have an entirely open-ended approach and will probably have a level cap (of perhaps 30th or 36th--for the nostalgia factor--level).

It was partly the attempt at making 3E's epic system entirely open ended that caused so many problems for it, and WotC learned from that with 4E in capping the game at 30th.

4E's epic play has other problems that are different, and some that are similar (from everything I've seen, once you get into the Epic tier, characters are nigh unkillable, much as they were in 3E).

Well from what I have been told (and I'll state I haven't tried these classes myself) is that some of the primal classes (in particular the warden and shaman) play quite a bit differently in practice.

I had heard that about the shaman at least. But that's still only a handful of classes, and you have to buy extra books for it to start getting interesting. The base game itself is so narrow it's saddening for me personally.

Not sure I understand the mentality of playing a class outside its given role...why not just play a different class, or multiclass if you want to spread yourself out a bit.

If you want to play a Fighter who is primarily a leader, just play a Warlord. If you want to play a Fighter with some leadership ability occasionally multiclass into Warlord.

Classes should have roles, but they should be suitably generic. A fighter's role should mostly be "does damage with weapons," and how the character decides to do damage with those weapons should be their own choice. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a Fighter-based Archer, for instance, but in 4E, you have to be a Ranger to be an Archer. That means a wilderness focus for the character and other things.

Well thats weird because the reports I have read suggest that all the classes were equally boosted so while fighters might be slightly more powerful than their 3E counterparts they are still as weak, relatively speaking, when compared to casters.

In the build I saw (upon Pathfinder's release) the Fighter looked about the same as a 3E Fighter (I think it was a Level 14 Pathfinder Fighter).

Spell selections for casters was pretty heavily nerfed in places. Divine Power doesn't turn Clerics into Fighters with full casting anymore. Polymorph provides bonuses to stats instead of replacing them, so a Wizard can't just dump physical stats if he wants to focus on Polymorphing and wading into battle. The Fighter itself doesn't look much different from the 3.5 fighter, but nothing can really stand up to it in raw combat/damage anymore. With the Weapon Training ability, his iteratives become very likely to hit, and the newer Fighter only feats are quite nice. Fighters are also the only class that can use two Critical Feats at once (your criticals can gain additional effects like causing Bleed damage, Staggering, or Stunning the foe).

Should they though? If it takes x amount of time to become a great fighter or a great wizard, yet the great wizard is notably more powerful, why would people become fighters?

Because they don't have the Intelligence for it? D&D is about playing characters in a world, and not everyone is "born" with the Intelligence to be a Wizard, just as not everyone is "born" with the Strength to be a Fighter. Yes, Wizards still have a handful of show-stopper spells, and they rock at battlefield control. Save or Dies have largely been nerfed across the board, and a Wizard all on his own is going to be in trouble if he doesn't have his front-liners to let him be "god," (as Treantmonk likes to say).

The powers that Wizards and spellcasters in general possess comes from their versatility, and 7th-9th level spells, mostly. The spells jump up in power there, but they're never optimally used for damage.

The difference being of course that the Wizard can generally attack multiple targets at once at range. Whereas the Fighter is generally attacking one target in melee.

In theory, sure. The Wizards only going to be able to do so a few times per day if he's even remotely trying to diversify his spell selection, and a Wizard that does nothing but prepare blasting spells *should* be good at it. He's still not going to outpace, say, a Fighter-based bowman, generally, in terms of damage per round.

Statistically, Wizard damage is cut about in half over time (whether it's from Spell Resistance, successful saves, or misses on attack rolls), whereas Fighters are mostly contending with DR, which they can now bypass with enhancements to weapon alone again (a weapon counts as a special material if it has a high enough enhancement value). With Weapon Training, Fighters hit far more frequently with their attacks than they used to (their base full attack at 20th is at +25/+20/+15/+10 before enhancements and ability scores).

It's true that the Wizard has more AoE capabilities than a Fighter does, but there's not really much of a way around that. In return, the Fighter's much tougher, will generally have higher AC, and the Wizard can even make him better at everything he does. Spells are often most useful when using them to make the specialists do better at what they specialize in.

Haste, in a group with a few people making regular attacks, is almost always going to outdamage a Fireball for a Wizard.

I'd be interested to see what the damage outputs are for Level 20 Pathfinder Wizards vs. Fighters...I mean don't they still even use iterative attack bonuses in Pathfinder?

They do, yes. It has to do with a lot of things, but Fighters got some rather nice boosts. Power Attack adds a useful amount of damage without actually killing chance to hit that much (with a two-hander, it's -1/+3, with a one-hander -1/+2), and there's actually a ranged equivalent in core in the game. The Vital Strike chain even allows them to get a single attack roughly equivalent to a full attack as a Standard Action, allowing them to remain mobile (not *quite* there because they don't get to multiply Str bonuses and such with the attack).

It's honestly completely all right for a caster that focuses on AoE damage to shine in those situations, though. The Fighter gets to keep his damage per round whether it's an AoE situation or a single-target one. The Wizard's is generally going to drop off quite a bit.

The Tome of Battle was of course a trial run for 4E martial class ideas.

Correct. What was nice about it was that it was compatible with everything else we owned, and gave people more options. What 4E alone does is give people *only* the Tome of Battle option, which is a poor way to go.

I sort of like the 4E method that marries combat maneouvers to attacks.

I don't. I hate the dissociative nature of 4E's power system. Why can a Fighter only (for instance--I don't have a power to directly correlate here) Bull Rush or Trip once per encounter? That's ridiculous in my mind. I can put up with it to an extent, but when martial maneuvers start having Daily limits, I have to throw my hands up and walk away.

 

[paradox42]

Well matter in and of itself is not necessarily evil, but matter = energy and energy = power and power ultimately corrupts. Though I suppose you could add the caveat that its Matter + Sentience that ultimately leads to evil (not matter alone), and thus since elementals are matter with sentience they would be (more often than not) predisposed towards evil.

Now, now. No need to defend Gnosticism in my thread. I've already said what matter and energy are to me in the posts on physics. Platitudes like "power corrupts" are excuses, not explanations- I know what Evil really is, and power is just a derivative of it, not the actual "animal" (so to speak). The fact of the matter is, true Evil is a function of the universe (or more precisely, consequence of living in it) that's far more fundamental even than concepts like matter or energy. Matter and energy are tools, nothing more. The correct question is not whether a tool is inherently evil (no tool is, in fact) but rather how they get used. Evil comes, ultimately, from sapience that does not properly respect other sapience.

 

[DamienWilacoth]

Very cool thread, all around, paradox42. I know you've posted several things from your campaign in the custom powers/porfolios, so is there a chance that we can see the rest of the stuff you and your group came up with?