Skills and Powers

[tjasamcarl]

Having only come into the hobby with 3rd ed, i was not privy to the uproar that this and DM's options created. So, who here would like to give me a general overview of some of the options this thing provided, or atleast a Table of contents?

And, given that, i would also appreciate hearing some war stories and/or straight examples of what people were able to create with S&P..

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

Oh god. Well, here's the first one.

All the 6 basic stats could be split eg Strength was split into muscle and stamina. This meant, if you rolled an 18 Str it was legal to split that into a 20 muscle, which gave the associated Str bonuses to hit and damage, and a 16 Stamina, which gave you the carrying capacity.

This meant all fighter types immediately did more damage. The same thing applied to all other basic stats. Therefore you could be better at ranged combat at the expense of AC bonuses (and how many decent archers rely on their AC not to get hit?) etc etc etc

this is just the tip of the iceberg. Don't even get me started on mastery of weapons, which was just asking for uber-munchkin trouble.

 

[Psion]

The staple books were the skills & powers and spells and magic. C&T added combat options, but weapon mastery pretty much catered to the fighter.

The character building approach gave you points for race, class, and proficiencies. Any points you didn't use early on you could use later. This was pretty much the first attempts at REALLY making humans a worthwhile race, since humans usually ended up with more points to put in their class.

Races and classes had a list of abilities and points that you could use to buy them. In some ways this worked better than GURPS or its ilk, because you couldn't spend your points backwards. Thus to gain fighter class abilities, you pretty much had to give up fighter class abilities.

Where it fell down IMO was that the classes were not themselves balanced, and some classes had big wads of points that were intended to be used on one thing, but you could spend on other, more productive things.

Cleric was the biggest offender on this score. Cleric had like 125 points. The intent was that you would spend a big chunk of your points buying clerical spheres. In reality, it was a lot more economical to only buy a few speheres, and then grab the abilities that gave you fighter abilities and wizard spells instead, making you an uber munchkin.

IMC, I limited the abilities you could buy according to your deity and required you to spend most of your points on spheres, and it worked like a charm. I did various other tune-ups and it worked great for a long time.

I really felt like PO was "the system" to play D&D under for a long time one you blocked off the loopholes; the fact that S&P separated abilities into bins made it far better than GURPS and its ilk IME.

But two players who were determined to abuse the system convinced me that to run point based systems will always require GM intervention, even when you improve the situation with "bins" like PO had. Which is probably why I am such a big fan of classes to this day.

Still, I could see 3e/d20 using some elements of PO. Not building it from the ground up as PO did; I am absolutely convinced that is prone to abuse. Rather, I think you could take half a step in that direction, assigning a point value to all the class abilities, and then allowing the player to swap out limited numbers of the class abilities for optional abilities. That, IMO, would work.

Spells & Magic also had a lot of variant magic systems and was probably the best magic book for 2e.

DMO: High level campaigns had lots of good advice for keeping campaigns challenging, and the scion/paragon "templates" were intrumental in keeping my campaign running to that end.

 

[Tsyr]

The ONE thing I liked about the whole fiasco was the split stats, actualy... I agree it was a bit prone to munchkinism, but it DID let you customise your character more. I've thought about trying to use it in 3E.

 

[BobROE]

I would like to point out that the stat split was still limited by racial limits. Thus you could only have a 20 in mus if your race was aloud to have a str of 20.

 

[Psion]

I would like to point out that the stat split was still limited by racial limits. Thus you could only have a 20 in mus if your race was aloud to have a str of 20.

Ah, but there was some fiasco about strength subabilities not being limited to 18 pre-modified for racial stats. Thus you could always bypass the hurdle of percentile strength and put all of your points into the muscle subability. Which was stupid, as it allowed the creation of musclebound combat gods.

That "exception" got nixed by me in short order... that was shortly before I nixed percentile strength altogether and adopted modifiers much like those of 3e when I got ahold of the playtest rules.

 

[tjasamcarl]

interesting

What was the most out-there/broken thing you've seen?

 

[Al]

The most amusingly broken thing was the C&T Weapon Grand Mastery. It increased the base damage dice of your weapon by one step (so d6 becomes d8, d8 becomes d10, etc.)

Doesn't sound so bad...does it?

But the amusing thing was that the base damage of the No-Dachi against Large creatures was d20. So this would take it up to the next dice...d100!

If you were a dual-classed fighter/rogue, you could backstab with one of these babies for 5d100+bonuses damage. Not bad, eh?

 

[Hammerhead]

Also, when creating characters at higher level, the Spells and Magic addon for S&P was hideous. You could delay all your abilities for reduced cost. So you could make a cleric, buy fighter powers, and maybe a school of magic, and then delay all your cleric spheres a few levels. Because you'd generally buy lots of spheres, the 1 or 2 points you saved for delaying things added up when used on all your spheres. Add then you buy more spheres with those points, and delay them too. Fear the clerics with all the fighter powers and then evocation.

Also, you could get disadvantages that weren't. Taking Spell Talisman - you need a certain object to cast spells - gave you 8 bonus points. However, wizards could do nothing without a spell book anyway, and clerics needed a Holy Symbol for most of their spells. Since those classes would already be screwed without certain objects, spell talisman was essentially free points.

I always thought that the split stats were more broken than the weapon mastery rules. At higher levels, weapon mastery was about the only thing that made fighters worth playing. You could get the stat bonuses for "free" and from first level, while by the time you get Grandmastery, the wizards could have flying, Imp Invis, the uber stoneskin, etc.

I was always interested in creating the XP machine. I'd pick the 5% bonus XP option in the human race section, have a 16 prime stat for another 10%, and then I could find some kits that gave bonus XP as well. Using the registered wizard kit from FR, I think I could get 25% bonus XP for a wizard.

 

[Orco42]

But the amusing thing was that the base damage of the No-Dachi against Large creatures was d20. So this would take it up to the next dice...d100!

I had a character like that! But the DM said that it should be a d30.

IMO clerics could become super munchins. They only choose a few domains and had MANY CP's left over. I think they could make spells up to 6th level effect them permanatly.

I need to find my Thri-Kreen Cleric I made using that. It was the first time a friend DMed I told him he should limit what we could do but he said everything goes. Hehe my 3rst level character had no problem killing giants or just about anything.

I was just making a point but the DM got upset and quite after on session.