Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 244359" data-attributes="member: 537">Re the mage of the arcane order:The spellpool debt is a problem, but not because it's unbalancing. You still have limits on how many times you can call on the spellpool per day. The debt is a problem because you can dump spells into it without limit, and this makes a mockery of the concept of a "spellpool currency". The fact that it requires downtime is a trivial barrier; every party that has at least one item-creating character is going to have downtime, assuming you don't just want to screw your players out of a feat. So while the cleric churns out yet another wand of CLW, you pump all your spells into the spellpool.The full-round action to call on the spellpool is also a no-brainer. All it means is that you probably won't be calling on the pool in combat, but that leaves six million other uses for it. These uses are left as an exercise for the reader.That said, I don't think the class is irretrievably broken. It's a cool concept, and one that I'm planning on using in the Britannia 3E world. Note that wizards don't exist as a separate class in Brit 3E; the sorc is the primary arcane spellcaster (with a suitably tweaked backstory).These are the changes I've made to the PrC:The requirements to become a guildmage (mage of the arcane order) are: 10 ranks in Knowledge (arcana), 10 ranks in Spellcraft, any three metamagic or item creation feats, and the ability to cast 3rd level arcane spells (the Cooperative Spell and spell preparation requirements do not apply). Spells from the Spellpool cannot be used for the purposes of item creation. If the guildmage accumulates levels in the Spellpool in excess of his debt (if any), the excess isn't counted. Since arcane spellcasters in Britannia don't use spellbooks, the new spell ability doesn't apply. Repaying the debt to the Spellpool takes at least one full day, during which the mage cannot fight, cast spells, use magic items, conduct research, or carry out any other physically or mentally demanding task.Re spellcasting PrCs in general:The problem here is that a lot of the power of a spellcasting class comes through their spells. Either a PrC grants full access to those spells, and thus becomes overpowered, or it only grants partial access, in which case it becomes weak. The latter case is also hard to handwave: if a PrC is supposed to be a specialist at, say, healing, why should they get less and/or weaker healing spells than a regular cleric? Substitute any niche you care to name for healing.The wizard class doesn't have this problem so much as the sorc, since you get a metamagic/item creation feat every 5 levels. It's still a problem  though. Clerics and druids also have more at stake than arcane spellcasters, namely better saves, better BAB, turn undead/skill points. If a PrC featured a reduced save or BAB progression than the base class, in return for nifty abilities, this would be a good tradeoff. In practice, however, every cleric PrC ends up with exactly the same BAB and save progression as a normal cleric, and also has nifty abilities, so again nothing much is lost.One solution might be to limit spellcasting PrCs to casting spells from only particular schools. They would be like specialist wizards (which IMO should have been treated as PrCs in the first place). Or if the existing schools don't fit the theme, you could use any other classification scheme instead. This fits in perfectly with the PrC concept: you're better in your chosen niche, but you're not as flexible.</blockquote>

Verification