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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kelleris" data-source="post: 2793867" data-attributes="member: 19130">A bit old?  RW, this thread is ancient.  But, in honor of its resurrection, I’ll go back over the thread and mention how I dealt with some of the problems various people pointed out.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />If the teaser, or the book itself, or the recent review make you wonder about anything, this thread is as good as any to deal with your questions – just post and I’ll try to answer to your concerns.This is an understandable feeling, but I’d encourage anyone with an interest in technology in a fantasy setting to take a look at The Fantastic Science.  Anyone who wants to spice up their campaign with a new spellcasting tradition – analogous to psionic powers, although quite different in both form and function – can make good use of these devices simply by making them magical in nature.  There’s not a whole lot I could do to mitigate this, but there are guidelines included in TFS for exploring the interaction of technology and magic.  If you’re at all interested in including magic/technological tensions in the game, I think I have some good ideas that'll help you make that concept mechanically interesting to your players.Well, if technology is all you’re interested in, there’re lots of device effects you can use in TFS – about 230, in fact, and presented in a format that makes it easy to tweak their effects and quantify them in d20 terms.  Appendix A even includes guidelines for converting the spell-description-like devices into technology-based “magical items.”  You’d never need to use the class itself to get a lot of use out of TFS.On the flip side of the coin, the 200+ quasi-magical effects in TFS are simple to convert into spells for your characters.  And of course there are guidelines for that too.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I was never sure from the responses what precisely this worry consisted in, but there are several measures taken to ensure that the technologist is no more of a pain to deal with than the wizard (take that qualification for what you will).With the integrated use of craft points and the automatic acquisition of devices (like the wizard’s automatic acquisition of new spells – I don’t see why a device would be harder to design and build than a spell would be to research and master), you’ll never get a situation where the PCs spend a few months waiting on the technologist.  If you do have a few months to work with, of course, the wizardly item-crafter and the technologist master-worker will both be happy, but it isn’t necessary for balancing the class.The one thing that makes the technologist more of a pain than the wizard is the physical weight of the large number of devices to which a high-level technologist has access.  I personally don’t think this is a huge problem, but as I mentioned elsewhere you can completely ignore the weight of the devices and the class will remain balanced.  Just assume technologists are resourceful little packrats and you're good to go.I’m not sure why “demiplanes and defiling” are automatically magical effects, given that pocket dimensions of various sorts and reality-warping technology with unpleasant effects on living beings are both fairly common science-y items.Of course, I’d also like to think that I have some good mechanics for the technologist, but I can’t talk about it all here…  Is there anything specific you’d like to know, or problems that you feel go unsolved in current efforts?In Appendix A you’ll find the Shadow Technologist, useable for anything from a Jules Verne class to an insane, Cthulhu-inspired scientist.  In addition, those rules I mentioned for converting device effects into technological “magical” items include rules for determining the resulting device’s Modern-style purchase DC, so you can get all kinds of strange, lost technologies with which to populate such a setting from the material presented in the book.Whoops, I’ve already discussed this aspect.  You’ll have to do some work yourself, but I’m quite proud of the diversity and interestingness of the device effects I’ve produced.  There are surprisingly few reprints of PHB effects, and even a significant proportion of those have been tweaked to fall more in line with the theme.Heh.  No, that was an early mistake.  Things are much more balanced now – there’s a lot of math behind the balancing of things in this book, but without getting into the tedious number-crunching, you can get a good idea of my thinking by considering the material in Chapter 1.  Part of my goal with the book was to make it modification-friendly, and part of fulfilling that intention was making my thought processes as transparent as possible, making TFS easy to dissect and reassemble if you’re so inclined.I basically agree with you here - TFS isn’t really steampunk, though it could be pressed into service.  It’s much closer in style to da Vinci style creative science (and indeed we used some of da Vinci’s sketches as artwork), with an eye to fitting in alongside spells aesthetically.  You could use it for a steampunk setting, but you also won’t have to cut out a lot of flavor to take it outside such a milieu.And, Nellisir, your distaste for point-based systems and idea for a campaign setting actually ended up meshing in my solution – the Savant.  Savants are an optional variant of the technologist that are essentially inspired scientists (or madmen, as the case may be) who can use their devices at will.  They have a somewhat different subset of abilities, but can make use of almost any device in the book without recourse to tracking a pile of points.If that doesn’t sound appealing, an alternative would be to beef up the modified craft point system that the technologist already employs and allow it to use those to “buy” permanent or charged devices for use created using the mechanical-magical items rules.  The result would be much like the Eberron artificer, except that the class would be able to draw from a unique and extensive list of effects specially designed for it.  Simply enforce difficult prerequisites for creating these items and you retain the “lack of progress that is possible elsewhere” that is indeed a selling point for the book.  (A selling point because it means that TFS is useful in a number of ways that don't demand introducing a society-wide technological advancement into your setting.)So, those are my thoughts after finishing the work that I started before posting this thread in the first place.  I hope that helps satisfy everyone who voted “Yes, but I have some requests” or “No, but I'm willing to negotiate” when this thread first appeared.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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