This "resting at 9:05 AM" business

[Brother MacLaren]

Gandalf was a Maiar, not a wizard or magic-user. He was an Outsider, in D&D terms something like a Deva or Planetar.

He specifically calls himself a wizard.
In Tolkein's world "wizards" were Maiar. Gandalf was a wizard. Gandalf was a Maiar. No contradiction.
In other fiction, "wizards" gain power through deals with devils or demons.
In other fiction, "wizards" have innate power honed through education.
In other fiction, anybody of above-average intelligence can be a "wizard" with the right training.

Gandalf was not a D&D wizard. With the exception of fiction based on D&D, no wizard in fiction, literature, or myth is a D&D wizard.

 

[dmccoy1693]

The soccer goalie analogy is a bad one: They're rarely standing around bored, hoping someone will head their way.

If I a soccer goalie, I hope I'm board, because I suck as a goalie. Defense, I'm much better. Intercepting, tackling, stealing the ball, etc. Goalie has a harder job. More pressure, having to antisipate which way the free shot is going to be kicked at the net, etc.

Kinda like my views on an "imbalanced" D&D. Not everyone should be good at every character type innately. Some people play a better fighter. Some people like the resource management aspect of the spellcaster and to make the judgement call as to whether or not now is the appropriate time for their "perfect" spell.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Fun cannot be measured by a funometer. What's fun for you is not necessarily fun for anyone else.

Seems the ever-growing trend to excise anything "unfun" out of D&D is trying to prove you wrong there...apparently, fun (and unfun) can be measured in decibel x topic supporters. Otherwise, we'd be stuck with what the game designers think is fun and unfun...and who would want that, right?

 

[Arthnek]

I have been using a homebrew spell point and channeled magic system for years which sounds very vaguely like what is coming down the road in 4e.

In my campaign all spell casters have a pool of spell points to draw upon based on their level. They still have to choose which spells they have memorized to use during the course of the day. Spell points are powered however by the ambient magic in the surrounding weave.

So basically if a Wizard has 10 spell points to use, that is how many points of magic the mage can draw into complex spells before becoming exhausted and unable to cast without resting. Each spell casting character class in my games also has one signature spell. This is a core spell that is what the character class is supposed to be best at. For clerics this is cure light wounds. For wizards it is a simple blast spell which can be defined in about a dozen different ways....different styles of blast based on the type of wizard being played.

The cleric and wizard in this example can keep drawing one point of magic out of the surrounding weave to perform their one signature spell until the weave is drained to the point where there is no more magic available to draw upon unless the caster...waits until the weave recovers...or decides to risk damaging the surrounding plane and have horrible aweful things happen to them by forcing more magic power out of the weave.

Again this is just homebrew but it has been fun. It enforces the flavor of the sort of setting I enjoy without wandering too far away from resource management. Ultimately the weave will run out of available magic in a very long combat involving many spells and what then...risk horrible mutations and destroying the fabric of reality in that location? Of course! This sort of structure can bring into the game all sorts of questions about magic and the benefits and consequences of its uses and abuses.

Per encounter abilities?

I have played in a LARP with that sort of thing going on (designed it myself) and it was ok. It did make characters more useful through a range of levels. At high levels however the combats went on and on and on. I mean think about it. How long does it take for a combat when the high levelers are already down half their spells for that last big encounter? An hour? Two hours? Can you imagine how long it is going to take for high level encounters when A. both the good and the bad guys have their full boat of spells ready to go... B. to make the final challenge a real challenge the DM is going to be forced to pile a lot more opposition mobs into the room to make the fight less of a sure thing.

They say combats are fast but in my own experience powers per encounter at high levels and fast combats does not compute. If they are then awesome. Personally I can not wait for 4e to come out. I am dying to see what they came up with.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Seems the ever-growing trend to excise anything "unfun" out of D&D is trying to prove you wrong there...apparently, fun (and unfun) can be measured in decibel x topic supporters. Otherwise, we'd be stuck with what the game designers think is fun and unfun...and who would want that, right?

Well, they have a corporate imperative to produce a new version every X number of years. Given that they're going to do it anyway, trying to improve the game isn't a bad approach to take with a new edition.

(Obviously, not everyone will view every improvement as an improvement -- I'm arguing the 3.5 weapon size rules were a fiddly "improvement" that just slow the game down to no productive end in another thread, for instance. Naturally, there are plenty of people who love them, the poor deluded fools.)

 

[Noliar]

When I play a wizard I don't want to use magic to plink away each round - that's for fighters and the like to do with their weapons (the boneheads). I want to find a way to use as few as possible of my limited but well chosen spells decisively. After that I might help mop up with my crossbow or just stand at the back and make unhelpful comments .

Of course people will run out of spells quickly when hitpoint inflation means it takes 3 fireballs to knock down a orc, buff spells end faster than a round of boxing and sleep affects only 4 kobolds of whom 2 make their saves.

 

[Hussar]

Well, I play MOST games the same way I learned them decades ago. Scrabble, Risk, Monopoly, soccer, baseball, basketball, card games, etc. Learned some new poker variations and mix those in with the old standby games; have tweaked the Risk rules on card trades. Why must RPGs be subject to this "perpetual revolution" idea? Is it that so many gamers are tinkerers, in search of a perfect system? Is it that computer games have convinced people that games have a finite lifespan and you should expect a new game every few years? I'd have been perfectly happy to stick with B/X mechanics, only exploring new settings, new parties, and new adventures.

So, your 3 point line is different from the one currently in use? You pitch from a mound that's a different distance?

Here's an idea -- why couldn't 4E scale down everything again? Reduce monster and PC HP, scale Power Attack way back, remove many of the stacking stat-boost spells and other buffs, and so on. Some things were never scaled up in the first place (Fireball, or the longsword's base 1d8 damage) and others not enough to keep pace with HP and damage escalation (Cure Light Wounds).

The reason you cannot do that has nothing to do with Reynard's proposed power edition creep. It's because 3e, unlike previous editions is meant to be played at high levels. 1e and 2e more or less capped out at 10th ish level. Very little was done beyond that. Yes, I know YOUR campaign went higher than that, but, and the market research backs this up, most people didn't.

3e, OTOH is meant to be played at 15th or 18th level. The expectation is certainly there that a given campaign WILL go that high. You can't have 100 hp dragons in a 20 level game unless you are willing to have some very, very dead spaces in leveling. Worse than 1e where a fighter at low level and a fighter at high level were pretty much identical, just with some more hit points and a better THAC0. We're talking spell casters getting a new spell even slower than sorcerers do now.

If you want a game that can explore the entire Player's handbook, then you need bigger bad guys.

 

[airwalkrr]

Stamp of approval.

Mine.

This thread.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

Yes, I know YOUR campaign went higher than that, but, and the market research backs this up, most people didn't.

What? No, it didn't, and I never claimed it did.

 

[Lanefan]

The reason you cannot do that has nothing to do with Reynard's proposed power edition creep. It's because 3e, unlike previous editions is meant to be played at high levels. 1e and 2e more or less capped out at 10th ish level. Very little was done beyond that.

However, the numbers you see in 3e around 10th-level still tend to be *way* higher than what you'd see in 1e around 10th level.

I noted this in another thread I started in General (no replies yet) with reference to a new FR module I bought yesterday called The Twilight Tomb. It's a 3.5e module for 3rd level characters. If I put 1e 3rd-level characters in there - even after removing the feats and skills from the monsters and replacing them with 1e-type abilities - they'd get slaughtered!

Lanefan