I would love an opt in (through subclass or something) metacurrency, and martials that grow to mythic levels as at least close to a caster.
Oh, are you talking about consequences for casting that don't necessarily reduce the power of the spells? I apologize; I'm all for that, completely. Bring it on!
So what you're saying is, bring back aging penalties and a maximum life span? I am all for it! I really think casters should suffer for the ultimate power they should still potentially be able to wield. Not sarcasm.
i uh. i think his point was it wasn't actually a meaningful penalty even with those things.
No, lol. I'm saying that even if you did bring them back, it wouldn't change much; stat loss and aging penalties for spells just made people either end run around them (we'll be Elves!) or avoid those spells entirely. The fact that WotC doesn't feel that aging penalties are appropriate for their game is just the icing on the cake.
Then make casting penalties more meaningful! The principle is strong, in my view.
It just goes back to the idea that if you try to balance things by making them annoying to use, many players will just opt out one way or another, turning the whole affair into a "virtual ban" of those classes.
I don't know, I saw an awful lot of magic-users back in the day. Its a viable design tactic that has fallen out of practice in modern gaming (outside the OSR). Sadly so, IMO.
Tbh I don't need it to be a massive penelty. It can be 100% fluff (awful spry 70 year old human since you have the same stats as you did at 20) I just want the player to record that age, let it seep into there minds and there RP.
I never once saw an elf age a year or two and not stop to contemplated it... I guess to some the ageing only mattered if it lowered your str... but to most I knew in 90's the idea of ageing a year in 10 minutes was something you took serious. We never had dragon characters but I do remember the vampire character did joke about haste a few times.
okay. so then we can add the number and let people think and play with it as they do.
really? I saw permanency used at least 1 or 2 times any campaign that hit 15+ level... did people really freak about a point of con?
Really. At least in my play group, we took Con very seriously, as everyone wanted as many hit points as possible. Also note that the limit of being raised is your Con score, and everyone wanted the highest system shock possible, as our DM's were ruthless about making us check for it.
Kind of a non-sequitor, but Dragon #133 was one of my favorite issues. That was the one with the index right?
Indeed, on page 86:
I remember that! Sometimes seems like that would have been the way to do, huh?
again the con HP change is almost never something you saw unless you drop below 7 or start with a 15+
yup I know what a system shock is
we didn't
yeah I would call BS on no con score... but I will say we often had bad guy NPCs make up ways to steal con from others for permencay
Right, but if you did start with a 15+ Con (as most anyone with a d4 Hit Die would want to do), you can see not exactly being keen on casting permanency, right?
Well, you lost me there.
Hey wait, we have a thread for that!
I would say it a bit different... if you as a table say it's not worth tracking age, rations, or arrows that's great, if you decide it is that's great too.
Exactly, there are great narrative places to engage tracking but just not all time. But I wonder what DMs are doing to bleed off all the accumulated wealth? At least earlier editions had magic item costs you could craft and masterwork items.
