D&D 2E Player's Option as a DM's Worldbuilding Tool

[DammitVictor]

I love Player's Option. A lot has already been said about how potentially unbalanced it is in the unsupervised hands of players-- looking at you, Specialty Priests-- but less has been said about the virtually unlimited potential these books offer the Dungeon Master for tailoring their game and their world.

For instance, I've made repeated reference to my ongoing project to redesign nonhuman PCs from the ground up in AD&D, starting by changing the assumptions that nonhuman PCs use the same classes as human PCs and that every nonhuman race should have access to Fighter, Cleric or Druid, and Thief by default... with access to any Mage class and other Warrior/Rogue subclasses being rare.

So, instead:

• PHB Classes are Human classes. Humans may multiclass in almost any two-class combination that isn't prohibited by the classes themselves.
• Elves are always multiclass Warrior/Mage or Warrior/Priest. They have a "champion type" warrior and a "guerrilla type" warrior; a "light elf" and a "dark elf" mage; and an "eladrin", "wood elf", and "dark elf" priest.
• Dwarf Fighters, Clerics, and Thieves are all tougher than their PHB counterparts, with more HD, more weapons and armor, and so forth. Battlerager is a separate class from Fighter, Dwarves can be Paladins, Dwarves can multiclass Fighter/Cleric and Fighter/Thief. Practically no changes here.
• Gnomes are always spellcasters, always have access to Illusion and Mentalism (as Priests) and Animal and Plant (as Mages), may multiclass as Mage/Priest, Mage/Thief, or Priest/Thief.
• Halflings are a mess. Let's not talk about Halflings today.

But you can also wring a whole lot of definition out of simply replacing the Mage and Priest classes:

• In Rokugan, all Mages and Priests are replaced by what is essentially four different Shugenja classes. Each element gets a list of Spheres, each class gets all of them minus the ones for their prohibited element, each class gets the Mage school for their favored element. This can also reflect Athasian Clerics, or Dragon Shamans.
• In a more traditional D&D setting, using a limited number of religions allows you to design a Specialty Priest for each and every one of them.
• Magic doesn't have to be divided between Arcane and Divine. Maybe all spellcasting traditions are built as Custom Specialty Priests, differentiated by their different spell lists and different casting methods from Chapter 6 of Spells & Magic. I'll admit, I never did a lot with this because these rules weren't obviously not player-facing and my friends at the time barely played spellcasters at all.

Remember, as the Dungeon Master in this scenario, you're not limited to strict accounting of CP or which abilities come from which class.

• The book recommends allowing players to add abilities to an unmodified class for a 30% XP penalty plus 1% per point of extra abilities. You can use this as a guideline, but also remember that you're in control of whether or not your classes have certain prerequisites or whether or not they can synergize with other abilities. Also remember that the classes are only loosely balanced in the first place, so this is a loose guideline.
• Thieves and Bards aren't allowed to take Combat Bonus or Increased HD abilities like Mages and Priests because they use the Thief XP table.
• If the Monk AC Bonus costs 15 of a Priest's 120 Character Points, it is entirely reasonable that it can cost 10 of a Fighter's 15 or a Thief's 80, replacing the ability to have a -2 AC bonus for 10 points.
• Likewise, Priestly Wizard costs 15 of a Mage's 40 CP, more than a third, to allow the Mage to learn spells from a single Sphere the way the Mage learns spells from his normal Schools. Wizardly Priest costs 25 of a Priest's 120 CP, less than a quarter, to allow the Priest to prepare any and every spell from a much larger and more varied Mage School. Unless you're changing how these rules work, be generous with the former and stingy with the latter.

I didn't mention racial customization because I hate subraces. I think most of them are a waste of space and they lead to incoherent worldbuilding. All too frequently, especially in 3e and 5e, their primary purpose seems to be making sure there's an Elf perfect for every class... hey, wait, that's not a bad idea...

 

[DammitVictor]

If you want to have traditional subraces in your setting, the application of the Skills & Powers rules is pretty straightforward-- you look at the existing subraces, note what they all have in common, and then design your own, for whatever purpose you're designing them for. In first edition AD&D, when the subraces were introduced in Unearthed Arcana, subraces had different level limits, and even class options, from each other.

If you're following along with my fake race-as-class nonsense, you can also design races to have varying racial abilities based on their class selection-- for instance, maybe all Dwarves are proficient in chainmail, axes and hammers, and crossbows... but Dwarves whoses classes grant those abilities get something else. Maybe Shiny Elves get Song Magic for their spellcasting class, and Sneaky Elves get Shadow.

Most importantly, if you're linking race selection and class selection this way... you're opening both of them up to function in the other's design space. You can base a character's "subrace" on the classes they pick, like I've done with Elves, or grant specific class abilities through subrace selection.

 

[cbwjm]

I loved the players option books as a means of customising classes. While a lot of people talk about how overpowered clerics could be, I think that was because the books were listed as Player's Option. If used as a DM tool to create speciality priests it works really well as a means to roughly balance things (I say roughly, I don't worry about the exact 120 points, just keep it within +/- 10 points).

 

[DammitVictor]

Like I said before, I never really dug into Chapter 6 of Spells & Magic. Massive oversight on my part, and something I should rectify immediately.

Chapter opens with a Spell Points system. The common objection to spellpoints systems is that they encourage the spellcasting adventurer to blow all of their points in the first encounter of the day-- in which they're grossly overpowered-- and then either force the rest of the party to break for the day or carry them around like a cursed lodestone.

My objection is a little different: there are a lot of lower-level, mostly non-combat spells that are okay if you can cast them three or four times per day with their low-level slots, and maybe a couple more times per day with higher-level slots, but become utterly ridiculous when (the equivalent of) each higher-level slot lets you cast it three or four times. Spells like ESP or suggestion, many low-level divinations and enchantments.

This system has a nice bonus, wherein a Mage can prepare their spells in advance as fixed magic and leave however many points unallocated to spend on free magic-- any spell they know, on command, for twice its usual cost.

Our first alternative magic system is Channeling, in which casting arcane magic is mentally and physically taxing. Channeling Mages allocate fixed and free magics according to their maximum spell points, but this merely sets what their casting options are for the day, like a 5e Wizard. Actually casting your spells expends your spell points and automatically makes you fatigued, which you must recover to shake off. Casting spells at less than half HP or less than half SP increases the fatigue, and you can totally kill yourself to death if you're not careful.

Witches & Warlocks use a similar method of spell preparation and casting, but instead of the short-term risk of dying of fatigue, you run the long-term risk of getting cool superpowers from monster daddy, becoming evil and insane, and eventually having to hand your character sheet to the DM so he can kill your friends with it.

Defilers & Preservers is basically the same idea of the same name from Dark Sun, but it's twenty years too late for me to say if they actually work the same way.

Alienists is... more like Call of Cthulhu magic than the 3e class... same cosmic horror theme, heavily nerfed from the previous options, with my absolute favorite feature of practically every single horror roleplaying game of the 80s and 90s, rolling for debilitating mental illnesses on a random table to signify the slow chipping away of your precious "humanity".

We are moving on now.

Priests get the same spell point system, with an added wrinkle: instead of Minor Spheres being 1-3 level and Major Spheres being 1-7... the spell point costs for fixed/free spells of Minor Spheres are substantially (around 30-50%) more expensive than for your Major Spheres. I like this.

Priests get the same Channeling option Mages do.

Next up is Ritual Prayers which require extended casting times for higher-level spells-- modified by conditions like locations and divine favor-- and Conditional Magic which affects the spell's point cost and effects based on the conditions under which the Priest is casting the spell.

Finally, there's a note saying that Druids might use the Defilers & Preservers rules.

Obviously, these rules are entirely DM-facing, and other than Channeling, they're mostly pretty hefty nerfs to the standard spellcasting rules-- the ability to overcast notwithstanding. The simplest way to use these rules is to choose one of the Mage options for Mages and Bards, and one of the Priest options for Priests, Rangers, and Paladins. Or maybe one system for Cleric-priests and Paladins, and another system for Druids and Rangers, like that final note suggests.

But if we take a look at 3.X and PF for a moment... we have the Wizard, Sorcerer, Arcanist, Warlock, and Warmage that are all "arcane magic" but all have different systems for acquiring and casting spells. On the divine side, Clerics, Oracles, and Druids all have meaningful differences. If we look at 4e, the "martial" power source isn't of interest to us here-- but Arcane and Divine are joined by Primal and Shadow, and Pathfinder has psychic magic that is distinct from psionics.

That means we have three separate variables: how we learn spells, how we prepare them, and how we cast them. If we delve into houserules and draw from later games in the D&D family, we get a few different possible combinations. Changing these mechanics between classes in the same group, combined with changing their spell list, makes them feel radically more different than changing either variable alone.

 

[DammitVictor]

I haven't played with these rules a lot-- when I played AD&D on a regular basis, as I said, tinkering with the basic spellcasting rules wasn't really an option, and now that I'm running AD&D on a regular basis... I'm assuming that a big part of why people want to play AD&D is that they want to play AD&D and I have to keep my shenanigans to a bare minimum.

So we have to look at the fact that certain "class features" are baked into the customization rules, and that they are worth more or less character points when combined with other features.

For instance, in 3.X it is widely believed that preparing spells is more powerful than spells known, despite the developers clearly believing otherwise. (Don't get me started on how this is expressed in 5e.) Likewise, being able to prepare any spell from your spell list-- as a Priest-- is more powerful than only being able to prepare spells you've previously recorded... and the ability to use free magics is much more powerful under those circumstances. This disparity is even greater the larger and more varied your spell list is... and under the circumstances, I don't think Warmage casting-- treating your entire class spell list as fixed-- is necessary at all.

I think the best way to express this is not to charge for these class features individually, but as packages. The point cost of the default Mage package-- whatever we decided that to be-- should be added to the Mage budget, and likewise for Priest.

Also... there maybe some corner case I'm not aware of that justifies it, but I really don't like the combination of "Priests know their entire spell list automatically" with the Wizardly Priest ability.

 

[TwoSix]

If I was doing this, specifically, using the rules as a DM tool rather than a player-facing tool...I'd think I'd go all in. Just build a bunch of new classes to fit my campaign world, and use the specialty priest as the base for all of them. Pull some special features from the other class descriptions as appropriate for the concept, and try to cost them appropriately. As you say, balance would be loose, so just have fun with it. Maybe vary the XP table a little bit if it feels necessary.

 

[DammitVictor]

I like having the framework of the existing classes and class groups. Even if I'm going to make the occasional conscious decision to color outside the lines, it's still helpful to have the lines as a starting point.