The Gaming Den

You absolutely should give every class its own fiddly resource system. One of the great advantages of a class based system is that you can give people genuinely different resource management systems. It's important to remember that of all the bullshit classes they produced for 3rd edition, the ones that had actual traction were almost exclusively the ones with alternate resource systems. Compare how many people care about Psions, Martial Adepts, Warlocks, and Dread Necromancers compared to other classes of nominally equal weight. I mean yes, Tome of Magic failed hard, but people care more about the War Blade and the Warlock than they do about the Sohei or the Favored Soul.

-Username17

Important caveat to that: Don't do the Pathfinder thing where your class's "unique resource management system" is just Vancian Casting + Multiple Daily Pools of Fiddly Bullshit. Turning Attempts, Lay On Hands, Wildshapes, Bardic Music Uses, etc. were bad enough. When you get to the point where playing an Alchemist asks you to keep track of Extracts Per Day at multiple different levels, Bombs Per Day, Mutagen Duration Remaining, and multiple different Discoveries which all might have a finite number of uses per day or a finite duration per use, you have gone entirely too far.

If for any given game I'm only controlling one character (and that's generally a given) and the character only has one fiddly subsystem (this is generally ideal) then I absolutely want them to be as different as the Psion, the Crusader, the Tome Monk, the Kaeleric, the Ar Tonelico singer and the Essentia-user. There's only really a problem with a bunch of sub-systems when you have to pile a bunch of them together on the one character (or have too many abilities specifically target foes based on "How many Chakra they have bound" or whatever).

I agree that every class should have its own fiddly resource system. What I think is useful is having those systems draw abilities from common pools, so every class gets things from every book. Doing that successfully means that the pool has to know how often its abilities are supposed to be used; you can't just take something that was supposed to be used 1/day at level 1 and turn it into an at-will ability at level 7, because how much an ability benefits from spamability is highly variable.

One way to handle that is having separate at-will-appropriate, per-encounter-appropriate, and daily-appropriate pools as I mentioned earlier. Then your warlock/swordsage/sorcerer all do the obvious things, and your psion pays 4 power points to use a level 3 encounter-appropriate power with extra range, and your dragon shaman uses an encounter-appropriate power and can't use it again until they roll a 6 at the start of their turn.

But that's only one way to do it; you could make every entry look like psionic powers, so the psion does the obvious thing while the warlock at-wills the minimum-power version of everything and the sorcerer always maxes everything out. Though I think that'd be significantly harder to balance.

I do enjoy well made, cleanly written fiddly subsystems, but I also like having some kind of mechanics-to-fluff consistency. Like "sun domain divine magic" works a certain way for people who call themselves paladins of sunlight, clerics of pelor, and so on.

That's why I get a hardon for Fighter/Wizards multi/hybrid classing and Bladesingers as subclass to the Wizard archtype.

It's neat to have warblades, swordmages, and TOME stance monks as different mechanics, but I'd rather have "Wuxia ki kungfu guy" be one class, or an archtype that has a core ki mechanic and some subclasses that do variations on it.

Do you see monsters having certain 'class mechanics' based on their type? Like all elementals have the same subsystem, and the elementalist Player Class also uses that subsystem.

One way to handle that is having separate at-will-appropriate, per-encounter-appropriate, and daily-appropriate pools as I mentioned earlier.

It's about how those abilities voltron together so it's difficult to balance just by broad pools. A daily that gives you a big damage boost for every attack will greatly enhance someone with a "attack multiple times" at-will, an encounter that lets you fly enhances ranged at-wills more than melee at wills most of the time.

These were the kinds of things I was thinking of with the "fiddly resource system" comment:

Ancient History wrote:But they still had way too many bullshit little feats/class features that worked to create their own little resource pool *cough* FATESPINNER *cough*.

Grek wrote:Important caveat to that: Don't do the Pathfinder thing where your class's "unique resource management system" is just Vancian Casting + Multiple Daily Pools of Fiddly Bullshit. Turning Attempts, Lay On Hands, Wildshapes, Bardic Music Uses, etc. were bad enough. When you get to the point where playing an Alchemist asks you to keep track of Extracts Per Day at multiple different levels, Bombs Per Day, Mutagen Duration Remaining, and multiple different Discoveries which all might have a finite number of uses per day or a finite duration per use, you have gone entirely too far.

I'm totally on board with psionics and meldshaping and maneuvers and such, since all of those (A) have a single resource system as the centerpiece of their class (which may have multiple components like power points + focus or chakra binds + essentia), not having one system as a tacked-on addition to an existing core system or having a few "smaller" ones all jumbled together, and (B) have multiple classes per resource system so learning a given resource system covers 3-6 classes and different classes can be variations on a theme.

But I still like the idea of grouping classes by resource system and then drilling down to class and subclass to differentiate individual characters, rather than making one-off classes like the factotum, marshal, and truenamer that don't share resource systems with anything else.

The thing where in 3e you have "divine casters" and "psionicists" as groups, which break down to include clerics and shugenja for the former and psions and ardents for the latter, and then specialize further with domains, orders, disciplines, and mantles is better for extensibility and comprehension, I feel, than a setup like Tome of Magic--or 4e, for that matter--where all expansion material is written for one specific class and you either get lots of neglected classes or tons of bloat, neither of which you want in a classplosion scenario.

EDIT: Also, I agree with this:

I do enjoy well made, cleanly written fiddly subsystems, but I also like having some kind of mechanics-to-fluff consistency. Like "sun domain divine magic" works a certain way for people who call themselves paladins of sunlight, clerics of pelor, and so on.

That's why I get a hardon for Fighter/Wizards multi/hybrid classing and Bladesingers as subclass to the Wizard archtype.

I think if you're going to have umpteen different classes with similar themes, it makes sense that you'd have a similar resource system for the death priest/anti-paladin of Nerull/blackguard classes, one system for duskblade/hexblade/swordmage/bladesinger classes, one system for shadowdancer/shadowcaster/ninja classes, and so forth.

Having totally different paladin smites, cleric prayers, archivist spells, shaman chants, etc. all come from the same source yet take drastically different forms, or for aeromancers, geomancers, pyromancers, and hydromancers to have different resource systems just because, is nice for mechanical variety but irritating from flavor and learning-new-classes perspectives.

The problem with Voltroning is that D&D 3.x didn't offer enough character option slots to make it feasible, except for very limited character concepts. You only had so many feats. It wasn't like Earthdawn where you could literally learn as many Knacks as you had Legend Points to spend, every feat you pissed away in D&D 3.x was one you didn't have to keeping relevant to your character level. So while D&D 3.x absolutely offered a lot of different gish options, most of them sucked, the ones that didn't exactly suck weren't always compatible, and you had a very limited pool of resources (feats and levels) to spend on any of them.

Your basic Fighter/Mage, for example, was giving up half their Fighter feats/Base Attack progression and half their Wizard feats/spellcasting relative to other characters of the same level so they could be...a wizard that swords well or a sworder that can cast spells at half their appropriate level. The best you can aspire to in that scenario is a prestige class like Eldritch Knight, so that you're only three or four levels behind everyone else in terms of spellcasting/Base Attack progression - and that still doesn't give you any additional special utility beyond being a mediocre Fighter who also casts spells. You still have to spend more of your diminished pool of resources to get more out of that concept, like choosing to specialize in ray spells and taking Weapon Focus (Ray) feats. It's just a path where there's a lot of non-optimal options.

And this also holds true, to an extant, for a lot of the Theurge classes. It sounds really cool to have a broader pool of abilities to borrow from - sorcery and wizardry, divine and arcane, psionics and essentia - but the Theurge classes tend to focus only on very specific ability progression, and not on any actual crosspollination. Yes, you get a few of both abilities, but it's still inherent on the player to find a way to make them work together. Have to be the fighter that likes to throw lightning on their sword before they hit somebody with it, for example, or the evil wizard that uses psionic healing to pass as a good cleric, or the Soulborn/Soulknife that puts all their essentia into their soulblade or whatever.

And that's the kind of thing where D&D 3.x rarely has anything good to offer - True Necromancer, maybe.

I still think there is some value in just giving everyone dress spheres.

Want to do wizard stuff? Put on your wizard hat.

It certainly changes the flavor quite a bit, if classes are equipment that can be changed instead of essential aspects of your character, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Had a DM that tried to address that issue before, Ancient History. He was a lurker around here for a long time but he would pass out feats (either a fixed feat for something thematic or a bonus feat) as part of quest rewards. Most of the more Grognardian players at the table felt this was stupid idea because it deviated from the norm. I kinda liked it, but I've been partial to playing face stabby classes which don't really work in higher level DnD.