The Gaming Den

I'm actually fine with the idea that an Artifact item is something that is stored; while magic items are things that are used.

I don't actually see why you have to be an NPC, you can just be that guy who uses Soulcutter, and your character is motivated by soulcutter things, and does soul cutter things in that system.

It's not my preferred system for artifacts, but as it stands, why darkside point it when you could just have a guy be soulcutter, and if he loses it he goes back to being a fighter.

Kaelik wrote:I don't actually see why you have to be an NPC, you can just be that guy who uses Soulcutter, and your character is motivated by soulcutter things, and does soul cutter things in that system.

It's not my preferred system for artifacts, but as it stands, why darkside point it when you could just have a guy be soulcutter, and if he loses it he goes back to being a fighter.

The game can't survive one guy in the party having power outside the level-based system for longer than a story or two.

I mean, that's why we have levels. And, the reason artifacts feel so badass is because they let you break the rules for a while. That's why you can't keep them.

Now, you can just have magic items have cool-sounding names, and you give one to the whole party and even out the power, but at that point they aren't artifacts any more..... they are "my level 12 super magic item" and they don't feel special any more.

I mean, you could just be the Soulcutter guy who picks his class features off the Soulcutter list and have that be balanced, but then it doesn't feel like an artifact any more..... its just a prop for your class features.

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Now, as you why you need to go NPC.....

I'm all for heroic sacrifice. It makes for a good story, so I can totally see someone making the choice to lose their character with a bang. I mean, campaigns end and I can see wanting to go out on a big ending..... look, every published campaign basically does this anyway where the PCs end up with piles of wealth and weird asymmetric powers and you get one adventure to play with it all.

Traditionally, Dark Side points or taint mechanics haven't worked for one simple reason: characters can't survive using them, or they get some abilities to negate them and make the whole mechanic meaningless.

They can work of you avoid both extremes, which no system has done yet.

One of the simplest ways to make it survivable is to put each artifact on its own track. I mean, if you've used the Holocaust Ring often enough that your eyes glow like fire and if you keep using it you'll become the new Firelord, picking up Soulcutter will be whole new deal for you.

I mean, adventurers should just pick up demon hands and stuff with all the weird crap they dabble in. That's just fun. Where soldiers in the real world get scars and lose limbs, adventurers in DnD land get beholder eyestalks and blue hair.

K wrote:The game can't survive one guy in the party having power outside the level-based system for longer than a story or two.

I mean, that's why we have levels. And, the reason artifacts feel so badass is because they let you break the rules for a while. That's why you can't keep them.

Or, since you are explicitly giving up some of your characters abilities for artifact power, you can just have them be equal.

K wrote:I mean, you could just be the Soulcutter guy who picks his class features off the Soulcutter list and have that be balanced, but then it doesn't feel like an artifact any more..... its just a prop for your class features.

Except the whole point is that it's a prop for different class features than your actual class features, and that it is possible for a single character radically change over a short period from 100% Fighter to 100% soulcutter, and even more rapidly change back.

So you have Frodo, and he's got a ring that makes him invisible, so he's a badass rogue. And he uses it from level 1, all the way up, and then, when at level 12 he loses the ring, it turns out that his mind has been being badass to hold the ring's taint at bay, and suddenly, he can shoot mind lazors like the level 12 Psion he always was, just locked up in the ring.

And then he finds a Fire sword, and suddenly, bamo, he's 90% Psion, and 10% Fire Sword, and slowly becomes more Fire Swordy until he stops using it.

Kaelik wrote:

K wrote:The game can't survive one guy in the party having power outside the level-based system for longer than a story or two.

I mean, that's why we have levels. And, the reason artifacts feel so badass is because they let you break the rules for a while. That's why you can't keep them.

Or, since you are explicitly giving up some of your characters abilities for artifact power, you can just have them be equal.

Read my proposal more carefully. Artifacts are about power-ups above and beyond your character level. That's what makes them special.

Being forced to exchange some abilities for others is just a flavor change separate from the artifact's abilities that are higher level than you.

Some artifacts won't do that. My sample artifact does because changing an ability of a fixed power with another of the same power is merely a flavor change, and it was one of the many flavor changes I considered.

The claim that unfair power gains are indefensible is false. Unfair power gains are really the only ones worth writing down. A fair power gain is frankly insulting - it's just bigger numbers on your attack and the attacks of all your allies opposed by an equally larger defense on the enemies. It's a waste of time and a shallow piece of sleight of hand. An unfair bonus is where it's at - one player becomes demonstrably better at X, relative to the rest of the party and the opposition. They have gained an actual credible ability.

These unfair bonuses are divergent, yes. And that's bad if and when it pushes the RNG to the point of becoming unplayable. But they are in a sense necessary, because they are the only bonus that is in a final accounting real.

As for temporary artifacts, yes it can work, and yes it can be neat. But it's not a replacement for real, divergent, unfair, permanent power gain. And most of the time, players are just going to hoard those things. When was the last time one of your AD&D characters actually drank a Potion of Heroism? They were awesome, yeah even basically encounter shattering. But if you drank one, it was gone. And there was no WBL table claiming that you got stuff to compensate. And that meant that people mostly didn't drink them, on the grounds that whatever the dire straights of today, they might be in worse shape later on. Basically human psychology makes it very hard to cut loose with a ring of power that you can only ever use three times. No one uses wishes off of Luck Blades to do battlefield effects. They always wish for "permanent" bonuses.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:The claim that unfair power gains are indefensible is false. Unfair power gains are really the only ones worth writing down. A fair power gain is frankly insulting - it's just bigger numbers on your attack and the attacks of all your allies opposed by an equally larger defense on the enemies. It's a waste of time and a shallow piece of sleight of hand. An unfair bonus is where it's at - one player becomes demonstrably better at X, relative to the rest of the party and the opposition. They have gained an actual credible ability.

These unfair bonuses are divergent, yes. And that's bad if and when it pushes the RNG to the point of becoming unplayable. But they are in a sense necessary, because they are the only bonus that is in a final accounting real.

Hey, I know you don't like the level system. Why keep arguing against it? I mean, there are lots of ways to make people powerful but different, but at no point in a level-based system are you supposed to break the system in any permanent way.

So why keep arguing against the basic premises of the level-based system? Just go play a level-less game. Shadowrun and the Storyteller games are both playable, don't pretend to be balanced, and don't have levels.

Or play Rifts, where they have levels but they don't mean anything at all. That game is pretty fun as long as you don't care that some people have Runeswords and other people explode when hit by any weapon.

Its a fundamentally irrational position to say: "I'd want to play in a level-based system, but I don't want the game to ration power by levels."

Kaelik wrote:

K wrote:I mean, you could just be the Soulcutter guy who picks his class features off the Soulcutter list and have that be balanced, but then it doesn't feel like an artifact any more..... its just a prop for your class features.

Except the whole point is that it's a prop for different class features than your actual class features, and that it is possible for a single character radically change over a short period from 100% Fighter to 100% soulcutter, and even more rapidly change back.

This actually seems workable to me, so long as soulcutter offers stuff that you just can't get elsewhere. So, while you're still on the same level power wise as your buddies, you can do cool new stuff.

Although, this only seems workable if you explicitly make classes narrow enough that there are level appropriate things you just cannot do with classes alone. That could present it's own problems...

K wrote:Its a fundamentally irrational position to say: "I'd want to play in a level-based system, but I don't want the game to ration power by levels."

If that was the sum total of the position, I would agree with you. But of course, it's not.

The point is that in a level based system you do more than simply compare levels and award victory to the highest level. You roll dice, you maneuver your forces, you exploit weaknesses, you make choices, and the players win! The level system is not there to make sure that the game is fair, it's there to make for damn sure that it is always unfair in the players' favor - because if it isn't then you're going to hit a TPK sooner or later and the game is over. The game can therefore handle a metric fuck tonne of situational benefits that apply to the PCs without falling apart, because the only thing that actually ends the game is the players failing to win.

The game's ability to handle unfairness the other way is conversely extremely limited. If the PCs sneak up on a super powerful cyclops and gangster shiv it while it sleeps, that's not really a big deal. It might feel relatively anti-climactic if you've built that particular cyclops up as a major adversary, but that's the extent of your difficulties. The resolution of the gangster shivving isn't very long, so you go on to have more adventures that evening and the only possible difficulty is if you are one of those poor suckers who still awards kill XP and the players get a disproportionate reward for the amount of time they put in and they spend the next couple of weeks feeling undeserving. On the other hand, if the Cyclops sneaks up on the PCs during pillow time and uses their sleeping heads as rock anvils, the game is super over and the players will be super pissed - and rightfully so.

If you're going to have "stuff" in your game at all, it has to "do something." And the only thing for it to do that feels real is to grant genuine, unfair, asymmetric power. That's it. There's nothing else that it can do without making the PCs into pathetic small-in-the-pants enhancement junkies like 4e characters.

If you want to argue for a system that does not have "stuff" then I am willing to listen. Superhero games work better without acquirable "stuff." And modern games are mostly "stuff" free as well. But generally speaking, people want "stuff" in their D&D. They want to get to a treasure pile and rummage through it for some swag. And swag provides unfair asymmetric power. That's what it does. If it exists at all, that's what it is for.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:

K wrote:Its a fundamentally irrational position to say: "I'd want to play in a level-based system, but I don't want the game to ration power by levels."

If that was the sum total of the position, I would agree with you. But of course, it's not.

The point is that in a level based system you do more than simply compare levels and award victory to the highest level. You roll dice, you maneuver your forces, you exploit weaknesses, you make choices, and the players win! The level system is not there to make sure that the game is fair, it's there to make for damn sure that it is always unfair in the players' favor - because if it isn't then you're going to hit a TPK sooner or later and the game is over. The game can therefore handle a metric fuck tonne of situational benefits that apply to the PCs without falling apart, because the only thing that actually ends the game is the players failing to win.

What game have you been playing? This is DnD, where player failure means "get Raised, Resurrected, Reincarnated, or Wished back from the dead, sometimes by an NPC inserted into the narrative for just this purpose." This being DnD, failure and death aren't assumed to be even closely permanent unless your DM is an idiot or a douche.

Getting new powerful toys is part of the game, but it just means you fight bigger challenges outside your level range. It's a zero-sum game, where any increase in power is automatically negated by an increase in challenges. Heck, in 2e I had a group where we had so many lucky Magic Item Chart rolls that we were fighting a 18th level lich at 7th level.

If you are ever more powerful than your opponents in any real way, then combat and consequently your game becomes boring. Why even bring the minis box if your battles are easy? Why have a battle system at all if success is the assumption..... you can do RP without rules or a game at all, so wasting two to eight hours a session moving figures around is a waste of time.

I mean, how many pushover battles do you remember and how many closely fought battles are burned into your memory?

Squeezing more power out of your character and level through good choices is what makes this a game and not improvisational theater. The reward for bad choices is getting a temporarily dead character, and the reward for good choices is victory in the face of something as arbitrary as even odds.

The need for a balanced system is because you are playing against the game. Now, I'll admit that there isn't a game out that has 100% pulled this off, and most DnD adventures are about resource management where the part of the game you are playing with is not the "can we beat this guy at all", but "can we beat these four encounters between us and the solution to our quest without having to rest". This type of adventure assumes a specific inbalance, but you are still playing against the system for your victory even if you say "we are going to have to let the Shadow King go this time, because the last two battles were hairy and if we try it in our current condition we'll probably lose." While dying is not the price of failure in that situation, not getting the win and rewards of the win is just the same.

Again, I have to refer you to some other games to play if you just need the illusion of a system to get your improvisational theater or power fantasy fix. Storyteller games come to mind.

Heck, play Toon. I hear it's awesome.