D&D General What Should Magic Be Able To Do, From a Gameplay Design Standpoint?

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't think we need to speculate about what Gygax had in mind; we can check Chainmail (my version says 3rd edition, 1975; I'm quoting from p 30):

HEROES (and Anti-heroes): Included in this class are certain well-known knights, leaders of army contingents, and similar men. They have the fighting ability of four figures . . . Heroes (and Anti-heroes) need never check morale, and they add 1 to the die or dice of their unit . . . They are the last figure in a unit that will be killed by regular missile fire or melee, but they may be attacked individually by enemy troops of like type (such as other Hero-types) or creatures shown on the Fantasy Combat Table. Heroes (and Anti-heroes) may act independent of their command in order to combat some other fantastic character. . . . A Hero-type, armed with a bow, shoots a dragon passing within range over-head out of the air and kills it on a two dice roll of 10 or better, with 2 puls 1 on the dice firing an enchanted arrow. Rangers are Hero-types with a +1 on attack dice.​

So I think we get a pretty good picture from this: Conan, Lancelot, Arthur, Aragorn, Prince Imrahil, Eomer, Bard and the like are all heroes. Mordred is an anti-hero. Elric I'll leave as an exercise for the reader!

So his sense seems to have favored mostly the modern sense, with a little touch of the other--that said, I'm a little surprised to hear Lancelot being hailed an unequivocal Hero given his incredibly checkered moral status once he was added to the Arthurian cycle.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

While I acknowledge those level titles exist, I personally have ignored them as being anything other than pure fluff since day one.

Perhaps they are; perhaps they are not. Their presence is still valid evidence that this situation is way more complicated than "the game was clearly always focused on totally mundane folks". Evidence that there has always, even from the earliest foundations, been at least the intended direction of growth.

You might be misreading me a bit: gritty survival isn't the focus all the time, but more a background-hum type of thing that every now and then rears its head during their doing of everything else.

Alright. I guess I see that as...not that hard to implement? Like I'm not really sure whether any edition of D&D has failed to support doing such a thing if the DM wants to. 5e doesn't make it easy, but neither did 3e ~15 years before, so it's not exactly like it's a fresh problem.

Indeed, 4e seemed to have a flatter power curve at least in the low-mid levels.

My issue in that regard with 4e in particular is that the start point of that flat curve was so high - a 1st-level character in 4e was (relatively) light-years more powerful than a typical commoner, where I'd rather see the power difference between commoner (or 0th level) and 1st level be about the same as the difference between 1st and 2nd.

Well, that's precisely why I believe novice levels and "incremental advance" rules are so terribly important. The typical baseline is relatively high, so players can get to the Cool Heroics quickly; that players in general don't have much interest in being totally green, but rather favor those who have already "cut their teeth on" adventuring, and are now ready to do some bigger, badder things. But! Full-throated, emphatically not denigrated support is given to anyone who wants something different from that, and for folks who want the process of reaching further heroics (whether or not one starts green or experienced) to be a slow and methodical process, not major leaps and bounds.

Spoiler: Digression defining these things, just in case

Just in case the names aren't clear, "Novice Levels" (or other names) allow you to break down the spectrum from "functionally no power whatsoever" and "99% of a fully-developed 1st level character" into many chunks, preferably with a diversity of approaches rather than one single fixed progression. This can do all sorts of useful things beyond the extremely important support for folks who prefer a "zero to hero" arc! Frex, they give the designers the power to write well-structured adventures where players develop their class features rather than just picking everything all at once (e.g. you have the choice of picking up a sword or a wand, of wearing heavy armor or light armor or no armor etc., and these choices narrow down to a small set of "okay, what are you?" answers.) They can be super useful for developing NPC characters who progressively get added to stables of characters, and for "funnel" adventures where high lethality is expected but some progress still makes sense. And I'm sure there are more!

On the other hand, "incremental advance" rules are ones I first encountered with 13th Age, where instead of directly levelling up, every so often the DM says the party has gotten an "incremental advance", where they get to pick just one thing they would pick up by gaining a new level. In 13A, this can take the form of picking up a higher level spell, or (for Monks) getting more Ki points or a new Form, or increasing ability scores if your next level would do that, or getting the next level's HP, etc. Such rules empower DMs to spool out the levelling process almost indefinitely, while still giving players the feeling that they're going somewhere and making progress. It's, as far as I can tell, an almost pure win-win, and such rules don't even need to take up that much space either, so it's not like they're a huge design burden either.

Looping back to the green-vs-experienced thing, I know I've read stuff from Gygax on this whole greenhorn-vs-old-hand thing...that can't really be read as favoring the former. (Also, I promise I'm not citing because he's a ~special authority~, but rather because his words show us where D&D started, so we can speak of the historical trends and where D&D grew from; it's a history argument, not an authority one.) Even to Gygax, a 1st-level character wasn't just an ordinary commoner, they were already at least slightly a cut above, and this just intensified with level.

In the ideal D&D that exists in my head, there would be robust support for both characters and challenges in the Novice Level range, including "intro" adventures for more typical characters, funnels for old-school-style campaigns, and "West Marches" type campaigns that are meant to grow naturally over time. "Level 1" would start out, as you say, pretty robust--because many players need that robustness because they're going to make lots of mistakes, and getting burned every time you make mistakes disheartens and drives away many players, rather than inspiring them to try harder. There's only so many times you can fail before you throw in the towel, y'know?

 

[Retros_x]

Which class becomes the area-effect blast artillery, then; or how would a-o-e blast artillery be achieved?

good point AoE damage is fine and coincidently is fireball one of the few damage spells I use when I play a wizard. Although I use it rarely, only if I can hit 3 enemies and no friends or 4+ enemies and one friend. Or maybe two. But often its more efficient to control battlefield to get the action economy on your side. And that only magic users can do really well. Thats for me the fun part. And I would not complain if AoE damage would go more to martial side. Rangers with arrow rains or exploding arrows or something like that, barbarians cleaving through multiple enemies etc.

 

[Sulicius]

I think the answer is "whatever is fun to the players" and work your way back from there.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I think the answer is "whatever is fun to the players" and work your way back from there.

a nice idea but good luck getting anything near a singular answer to start working back from given all the opinions out there, just look at this very thread.

 

[Willie the Duck]

It isn't even about starvation. One of the fun things about encumbrance is players having to choose between gear and gold. Gear often means survival, and you can count rations in that. But rations are bulky and heavy, and the more of them you carry, the less loot you can carry.

As usual, the modern game has largely done away with the hunt for treasure as the motivating impetus behind play, so the "gear or gold" question is moot.

never said they did. I just don't like dealing with people finding food in my games. I don't have pet squirrels I have players trying to be the heroes. Nothing about that is fun on any level for me. I know a lot of people like those little mini-games within the game. They just annoy me. Have fun with it but It's never going to be a regular thing in a game of mine. Just no fun there for me.

and at some point they get bags of holding or portable holes. DND isn't really a game for worrying about survival resources.

So the conversation has moved past this in many ways, but I wanted to come back to it. Regardless of discussions of how things should be, or whether survival play is conducive towards heroic gameplay, I've come to a conclusion on a separate point. And that's that TSR-era A/D&D did a poor job of making the survival mini-game fun and interesting.

Now, there was some rules evolution -- AD&D shifted the encumbrance value of survival gear from a fixed amount to however much you wanted to bring along; the Wilderness Survival Guide made a bunch of overly complex rules which made you regret leaving your hometown; and it and 2e AD&D included non-weapon proficiencies, which specified that you were a fool to rely upon said skills and to pack enough supplies not to need to do so. However, in general, it all boiled down to, as Reynard put it, "gear or gold" -- encumbrance dedicated to supplies vs encumbrance dedicated to treasure. Number of rations going down towards zero until you resupply. Not unlike hit points. However, hit points have the advantage that:

1. There are plenty of interesting decision points in hit-point-risking situations that influence the outcome, and
2. There's a generally-considered interesting consequence of reaching 0.

To the former, there are the occasional 'do we cut short the adventure and head back?' or 'do we take the shortcut (we might get lost)?' decisions in wilderness travel, but for the most part the only decision is how much food and water to pack. To the later, regardless of one's opinion on character death in general, the whole party* setting out for a dungeon and never being heard from again (starving to death) is one of the most ignominious/least interesting TPKs one can imagine. *assuming the party generally all packs the same amount, and/or shares food until it is gone

I think I've seen a group that actually went through with that all of twice in 42 years of gaming. Some have come up with some kind of house-rule alternative consequences*. Most just over-pack food and water** and try to have backups*** asap, making it pretty much a survival-insurance tax, rather than an interesting part of the gameplay.
*"All but 10% of you wander out of the woods 1d3 weeks later, 1d4 towns over, with 1d6 hp left, and 1d8 lasting injuries. Make 1d10 item saves amongst your magic items. Those of you in the 10% group, roll on this chart to see why you aren't amongst them..."
**pretty inexpensive after a few levels, so not horrible if you have to jettison some in place of treasure on most adventures.
***magic items, create water/create food & water/good berry spells, or emergency go-home abilities.

Most other games I've seen do the same or less interesting*, although few advertise it as a major part of the game, either*. However, if someone wanted to make an interesting game around such things, there's no reason why you couldn't. My co-GM and I tried to do so with a homebrew game we were making -- simplifying supplies into 'cups' and 'candles' and adding weariness and morale metrics along with charts of wilderness events against which you could make various skill checks (depending on how you wanted to address the specified situations). The whole thing didn't get off the ground/past playtesting for reasons unrelated to this game aspect**, but I saw enough to know that a theoretical final product could easily have been engaging for those who wanted that kind of gameplay.
*even the much-vaunted 'low-res life simulator' GURPS generally abstracts survival to some skill checks.
**and those that do, like Forbidden Lands, do have some level of interesting mechanics.
***real life got in the way of the campaign starting.

BECMI had - in theory at least - a much greater playable level range than did 1e.

I certainly did play it to a lot higher levels -- at least once we got to the Immortal setting through actual gameplay all the way through*. There certainly were more books dedicated to levels 15+. However, I'm trying to think of any specific rules which support this and kinda coming up blank -- maybe the initiative rules or specifics on getting extra attacks or the like would alter if high-level games were actually survivable, but I think the variations in how people played likely would dwarf that. The Companion and Master sets had a bunch of extra rules for running kingdoms and hosting tourneys and such, but not much that required more than name level. Most of levels 19 (so after getting level 9 spells for Magic Users) were generally more-of-the-same -- maybe with a few more weapon masteries or skills (if using the gazetteers) and such. Did you have anything in particular in mind, other than the game describes gameplay as going up that high? *no idea on how loose we were with ease, xp rewards, etc.

That's very much counter to my own experience. In well over 40 years of 1e-like games the highest level PC of any kind I've ever seen is 15th and the highest I've DMed was 12th. The highest level mage I've seen is 12th.

Everything I've seen about high-level play in the TSR era can be summarized as 'by that level, it's all going to be table-dependent.' If not actual house rules, it will be which of the existing rules actually get used, or what aspect of the game is the central focus (and speed of advancement being one of the biggest question marks). Perhaps the MU does reach level 18, but they are mostly making magic items or sending others on quests (barely needing stats anymore). Or they are in adventuring parties, but really the player is playing their dragon pet/mount most of the time. Or they have an intelligent quarterstaff, and half the gameplay is a Statler and Waldorf back and forth between the two.

 

[Corinnguard]

Level Up expands the idea of spell schools greatly, opening design space for finer class and subclass granularity. IMO it's good stuff.

Level Up goes well beyond the 8 schools of Magic in D&D.

(1) acid, (2) affliction, (3) air, (4) arcane,(5) attack, (6) beasts, (7) chaos, (8) cold, (9) communication, (10) compulsion, (11) divine, (12) earth, (13) enhancement, (14) evil, (15) fear, (16) fire, (17) force, (18) good, (19) healing, (20) knowledge, (21) law, (22) lightning, (23) movement, (24) nature, (25) necrotic, (26) negation, (27) obscurement, (28) planar, (29) plants, (30) poison, (31) prismatic, (32) protection, (33) psychic, (34) radiant, (35) scrying, (36) senses, (37) shadow, (38) shapechanging, (39) sound, (40) storm, (41) summoning, (42) technological, (43) telepathy, (44) teleportation, (45) terrain, (46) thunder (47), time, (48) transformation, (49) unarmed, (50) undead, (51) utility, 52) water, (53) weaponry, (54) weather.

It's probably a good thing that there isn't a Wizard subclass for each and every one of these. Just one, the Wizard (Arcanist).

 

[pemerton]

So his sense seems to have favored mostly the modern sense, with a little touch of the other--that said, I'm a little surprised to hear Lancelot being hailed an unequivocal Hero given his incredibly checkered moral status once he was added to the Arthurian cycle.

I think Lancelot is always going to be the last to go down in his unit, and will take four hits to kill!

 

[Lanefan]

I disagree. I think it was most certainly brave. I don't think it was heroic.

The bravery part was their not fleeing. The heroic part was their not quitting.

Again, I disagree. It seems quite clear to me that Sam could have, because the Ring had nothing to tempt him with. How can you tempt someone who has no desires you can hook into? That was literally why Tom Bombadil was (briefly) considered by the council at Rivendell; Tom doesn't have any concerns or needs the Ring could possibly fulfill, so he's literally immune to the Ring and its temptations. The problem is, by having no concerns nor needs, he also cannot properly understand how dangerous the Ring is, and thus cannot act as a meaningful guardian for it. The very thing that makes him immune is the thing that makes him unfit as guardian.

I think the ring would have overcome Sam if given long enough; and that he only carried it for a day or two makes it a moot point in any case.

 

[Lanefan]

Level Up goes well beyond the 8 schools of Magic in D&D.

(1) acid, (2) affliction, (3) air, (4) arcane,(5) attack, (6) beasts, (7) chaos, (8) cold, (9) communication, (10) compulsion, (11) divine, (12) earth, (13) enhancement, (14) evil, (15) fear, (16) fire, (17) force, (18) good, (19) healing, (20) knowledge, (21) law, (22) lightning, (23) movement, (24) nature, (25) necrotic, (26) negation, (27) obscurement, (28) planar, (29) plants, (30) poison, (31) prismatic, (32) protection, (33) psychic, (34) radiant, (35) scrying, (36) senses, (37) shadow, (38) shapechanging, (39) sound, (40) storm, (41) summoning, (42) technological, (43) telepathy, (44) teleportation, (45) terrain, (46) thunder (47), time, (48) transformation, (49) unarmed, (50) undead, (51) utility, 52) water, (53) weaponry, (54) weather.

It's probably a good thing that there isn't a Wizard subclass for each and every one of these. Just one, the Wizard (Arcanist).

Just gotta say, even though there's still a few holes* in it that list seems like total overkill to me.

* - missing on first glance are Illusion, Emotion, and Polymorph (others, as opposed to shapeshifting oneself).