Vancian? Why can't we let it go?

[Crazy Jerome]

A great deal of the point of my last post was that personal preferences should not dominate this gap in the game. And even in the example I used, I picked "8" for the attack bonus gap in part because it is not my personal preference, at least not most of the time. I don't think permerton, Danny A, or I, or anyone else should get this personal preference embedded into the game math such that it can't be easily tweaked.




So what are the implications of that? I see three critical ones:

1. D&D characters are specialists. In the things that are their main specialty, they should diverge more and more as they progress, as Danny has discussed.
2. D&D characters are also general adventurers. In general adventuring, they should remain more or less constant in relation to each other as they progress, though of course they may have individual strengths and weakness that are signifcant--and may become more or less so by their choices.
3. There are a lot of edge cases that can't be entirely accounted for by either of the above, due to stylistic preferences, limits of reconciling the specialization and generalization, etc. The system should allow for these, but not try to hard to make everything work out perfect. That means that it can't be too "tight"; it must leave room for error.

In the kind of system I proposed, it is easy for everyone to get what they want.

If someone like Danny has a concept for an extremely bookish wizard, high-level wizard that barely knows how to use his dagger, he can not take any of the relevant buffs--presumably trading them in for some utility magic that he finds more useful. Keep the Str low, and their you go--classic D&D wizard. Let the grunts up front handle cleaning up the orcs. And if someone else in the group has a more Gandalf-esqe attitude and wants to use a sword, then he can get that. If the group has decided they don't want the latter one at all, it is easy as pie to simply ban the relevant buffing magic--because it is explicitly in the game only to support these kinds of concepts. (Though I agree with pemerton's earlier point that my particular examples are not the best to present a Gandalf-esqe character in flavor.) In short, it is still entirely possible for a wizard in this system to totally suck at melee and/or ranged weapon combat, and not at all hard to see how to do it or even enforce it.

OTOH, if someone like pemerton wants to run a game with a more 4E-style "we are all competent adventurers", he can by banning those extreme bookish choices, or at least the group can strongly discourage them by social contract. You can do something very much like what 4E does by default--keep the attributes from being too extreme, silo some minor combat ability into the power choices, etc. Meanwhile, you can do this secure in the fact that the big guns of each class are still intact, and that the specialists niches are preserved.

That only leaves the soccer objection of divergence over time. My experience says this is too narrow a reading of reality, never mind genres. Because the range I am proposing is the range of reasonably competent adventurers. There are explicitly characters outside that range. That is, you go to put together a grade-school sports team, and you've got people that barely qualify, people in the middle, and people that excel. Then occasionally you get some bookish kid that doesn't even hit that minimum threshold. Or you get some monomanically focused, extremely talented kid that doesn't even belong on the same field. It's merely that in grade school, the selection is often limited enough that you may not have any of those extremes. The sharp divergence that comes later is part talent/ability, but also the human socialization form of "natural selection" that occurs when you expand the pool of candidates.

And again, I'm not in anyway claiming that exactly what I proposed is the exact way to go. In fact, I'm sure it is flawed. I am claiming that those three competing principles--specialization, general adventuring skill, and wacky edge cases left as wacky edge cases--must all be addressed by the system, if it is to cater to a wide audience.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

There are a lot of edge cases that can't be entirely accounted for by either of the above, due to stylistic preferences, limits of reconciling the specialization and generalization, etc. The system should allow for these, but not try to hard to make everything work out perfect. That means that it can't be too "tight"; it must leave room for error.

And what you're missing is that I'm asserting that we don't need to modify the wizard (or the warrior) to account for such cases. Generous multiclassing or specifically designed base classes- the Duskblade of 3.5Ed, the Mage Blade of AU/AE, Bladesingers, Swordmages, etc.- can do that just fine in a class/level system.

In my preferred system- HERO- all of this stuff is on a sliding scale. How "martial" or "mystical" your PC is is 100% up to you.

In a system with the bundling of abilities into chunks known as "classes" means you simply can't make certain PCs with any class you choose as its base.

I said that magic using warriors is one of my main FRPG types. Next on that list is probably the magic using rogue. Now...imagine if, instead of us going round & round about improving mages' martial abilities, we were discussing how to modify mages to be sneakier and stealthier.

Again, I'd assert that we don't need to modify Wizards to be sneakier & stealthier, I'd push instead for generous multiclassing and/or base classes that operate in the middle ground between wizard and rogue.

In short, let the iconic base 4- fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric- continue to represent the extreme specialists of their kind, and let other classes & nechanics fill in the gaps asopposed to making the classes bloat with options.

 

[mmadsen]

But there are all sorts of ways to model this other than just making the numbers bigger. Examples include the AD&D rule about fighters' multiple attacks vs less-than-1HD foes, or 4e style close bursts, or giving fighters access to tricky manoeuvres. As long as you don't allow multiple attacks to stack on a given foe, these sorts of things can reflect a fighter's competence without increasing raw output in a way that renders the wizard irrelevant.

Perhaps we should examine how we want the model to handle a few representative cases. How do we want a fight between N orcs or castle guards and one hero (mid-level Fighter)? One superhero (high-level Fighter)? Hero vs. superhero? Do we want a competent but unimportant character to have the same amount of plot-protection as a PC? Do we want a low-level PC to have more or less plot-protection than a high-level PC?

 

[Crazy Jerome]

And what you're missing is that I'm asserting that we don't need to modify the wizard (or the warrior) to account for such cases. Generous multiclassing or specifically designed base classes- the Duskblade of 3.5Ed, the Mage Blade of AU/AE, Bladesingers, Swordmages, etc.- can do that just fine in a class/level system.

...

In short, let the iconic base 4- fighter, wizard, rogue, cleric- continue to represent the extreme specialists of their kind, and let other classes & nechanics fill in the gaps asopposed to making the classes bloat with options.

No, I'm not missing the assertion. I'm disagreeing with it on practical and wide-spread audience pleasing grounds. Namely, that if you try to model the extremes with wizard and fighter specifically (i.e. fairly generic, iconic, presumably popular, early classes), then it won't work. Sure, if they embed your preferences in the game, it will work for you. And likewise, with different preferences, more or less for me and pemerton too. (We don't exactly share preferences, either. So that is two different sets.) I'm equally sure there are small but important preference differences from every person participating in this topic.

Heck, my preferences change from game to game, as I like to model the game we are playing. That's why I like Hero a lot too. It's great for when you want something specific. But there is a middle ground between Hero and, say, the 1st ed. AD&D locked-in preferences. You know full well--better than most--that Hero and GURPS only works for some groups when you carefully set thresholds for abilities, by campaign. Heck, 4th ed. Hero explicitly discusses it, and if I remember correctly in 6th, there is even some additional mechanical support.

Also, again, I'm asserting the principles that need to be followed. If you want to make a case for the things called "wizard" and "fighter" being built-in outliers, then I can see that, too. You'll need more starting classes than my way (speaking of bloat of options), but I'll readily grant that has its own advantages that my way doesn't. In that case, then I still assert the principles for some set of relatively general adventuring classes which need to be present--i.e. some wizard-type class and fighter-type class that meets the parameters that I have discussed--without extraneous stuff tightly bound to it, such as bardic music or ranger wilderness skills. That too has advantages and disadvantages, but any of those can be overcome depending upon how the rest of the system is put together.

These principles would also need to be applied to skills, such as sneaking. I used the combat abilities between wizard and fighter as a good example.

 

[Glade Riven]

Isn't this almost exactly the optional spell prep system presented in 2E's old Skills & Powers book?

Didn't know that. I started with 3e, so there's a lot of 2e I don't know about. I'm going to have to check it out.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

In a system with the bundling of abilities into chunks known as "classes" means you simply can't make certain PCs with any class you choose as its base.

[...]

Again, I'd assert that we don't need to modify Wizards to be sneakier & stealthier, I'd push instead for generous multiclassing and/or base classes that operate in the middle ground between wizard and rogue.

Now we approach the real philosophical foundation. You see classes as collections of abilities with multi-classing being a fundamental part of character building. While I don't oppose the methodology, It's never been the default assumption of D&D, and thus not the assumption I've been working with.

I'd love to discuss how classes should be shaped and interact at a general level, but that would be for another thread.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You see classes as collections of abilities with multi-classing being a fundamental part of character building. While I don't oppose the methodology, It's never been the default assumption of D&D, and thus not the assumption I've been working with.

From a purely mechanical standpoint, that is exactly what a class is: a grouping of mechanical effects.* Multiclassing lets you blend these groupings to model PC concepts not modeled by single classes.

As for It not being a default assumption for D&D, all I can say is "Huh?" At one point, the method of multiclassing known as "dual classing" was the only way to build a PC who was a Bard- it was the only way to have the right mix of abilities for entry.




* Especially in contrast to systems like HERO and GURPS, where any character can have any ability built into it.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

At one point, the method of multiclassing known as "dual classing" was the only way to build a PC who was a Bard- it was the only way to have the right mix of abilities for entry.

And then the bard became a class because the default assumption is that a person will pick a single class that will define their character for the entire game. Multiclassing is an advanced option for those who want to break out of the mold.

But, our butting heads is derailing this conversation, which is about considering ways to make the Vancian wizard less unattractive to those who don't enjoy previous incarnations. So back to it.

* * *

It's small pieces of magic that make a wizard feel, well, magical. In most games I play, cantrips don't have to be prepared, and we generally don't track their use, because they help represent the wizards ability to manipulate magic whenever he wants to make his life easier.

Spells that simply make the wizard a better fighter don't fit the image. I imagine a set of single target spells that cause stunning, fear, confusion, pain, or other effects that aren't damage; that aren't limited to a single use per day; and that don't stop being effective at higher levels.

These spells should take up spell slots so that having an indefinitely useable spell requires sacrificing a more powerful spell. Thus, we keep the Vancian concept of choosing your loadout.

The best thing about this approach is that it doesn't require a dramatically new mechanic. These spells could be added directly to any edition without having to alter the Wizard class text at all (excluding the problem with 3rd Edition spell saves).

Lastly, because none of them deal damage directly, an enemy that gets within melee range will still require the Wizard to try and defend himself with weapons, keeping the Wizard's primary weakness.

 

[pemerton]

Rolling a natural 20 really isn't that rare. It only feels too unlikely to matter when the resulting damage is too small to matter and you'll need multiple natural 20s to make a difference.

Compare needing a natural 20 in order to do 1d4 damage with needing a natural 20 to decapitate your foe with an old-school vorpal weapon.

I agree with you that results are important.

But I still personally feel that 1 in 20 is too low - and, acknowledging Crazy Jerome's point that my preferences shouldn't dominate, I thik that the system therefore needs to make it easy, without too much tweaking or PC resource investment, for a wizard to get to a point where they can hit on better than a 1 in 20.

The reason that I think 1 in 20 is too low is because, in any game, the wizard is not likely to be rolling very many melee attacks. (At least, this is my experience. Maybe my experience is unrepresentative.) In the typical fight in which it comes down to the wizard needing to weigh in with staff or dagger, let's say the wizard is going to make 3 attacks. With a natural 20 needed to hit, that is a (1-.95^3) = slightly more than 14%, or about a 1/7 chance, of hitting and thereby making a difference. If such fights occur as often as 1 in 3 (which seems a high incidence of such fights, in my experience) then the wizard will make a difference in melee in around 1 in 20 fights. At 3E/4e rates of advancement, on the (unreaslistic) assumption that all XP come from fighting that's once per 2 levels.

I don't find that to be often enough. 4e compensates by always permitting the wizard to make a difference via magic, and I gather at mid-to-high level 3E it's much the same. (I think this was [MENTION=6675228]Hassassin[/MENTION]'s point upthread.) So the issue doesn't come up except in extreme corner cases (like the time the wizard PC in my game took an OA with his fire tome as an improvised weapon, needed to roll exactly a 20 to hit, did so and therefore critted, incinerating his enemy - fun, but a one-off event for the campaign most likely).

But if the wizard is expected to sometimes have to somewhat regularly contribute to combat in non-magical ways (ie if these compensation mechanisms are not going to be present) then I think that the system needs to offer cheap and easy ways of boosting that chance above 1 in 20. After all, it's not as if a wizard who hits half as often as the fighter for half as much effect is in any danger of dominating the game, or of being tempted to try and tread on the toes of the fighter player.

 

[Hassassin]

And then the bard became a class because the default assumption is that a person will pick a single class that will define their character for the entire game. Multiclassing is an advanced option for those who want to break out of the mold.

I don't think it's useful to debate if single or multi-class is the default assumption. Both are definitely supported OOTB in 3.5, with the first step in level advancement being "Choose Class" in the PHB. Defaults vary from table to table.