Critical Absences

[chronoplasm]

But come on, what kind of wolf-man isn't cool?

This kind:
http://members.activecom.net/~cybercat/furry/WolfRing.jpg

If I recall correctly, there was a 3.5 module that featured a kind of teleportation trap.  It was a tower enchanted such that it randomly sucked in teleporting characters/groups from anywhere in the world, to be murdered and looted by the tower's creator.  I'm pretty sure it was called "The Tower of Deception".  Nice way of reminding the characters that they aren't necessarily all-powerful.

That's pretty cool. I like teleportation as an opportunity for dungeon crawls.

On another side note, it gives me an idea for a magic system;
the price of magic is that you must make a brief foray into hell. If you come out alive, the spell is cast successfully.
The difficulty rating of the spell determines the number of obstacles you encounter there.

[Vordark]

On another side note, it gives me an idea for a magic system;
the price of magic is that you must make a brief foray into hell. If you come out alive, the spell is cast successfully.
The difficulty rating of the spell determines the number of obstacles you encounter there.

Not precisely the same thing, but I've toyed around with a magic system in the past where all magic is considered perversion.  That is, it is the result of the mage imposing his will directly on reality to warp it to his design, an inherently "evil" act in the setting.  Because of this, with every spell he casts he gains a certain amount of Soul Corruption or Hubris.  As this number rises, Bad Things begin to happen.  Never got very far with it though.

[Daniel B]

On a completely different branch of conversation, though I realize the thread has aged a week or so ... healing, and clerics. A recent discussion on character death being tied up with "losing the game" got me thinking about this.

Doesn't magical healing and clerics kinda violate the idea of hitpoints?? If the challenge was "reasonable" for the party, the party wouldn't need to stock up a "Bag of Holding's" worth of potions. If magical healing is required to survive a quest, doesn't this imply someone's planning something badly? And by having them in the game, it sort of makes a party's statted power deceptively low. i.e. their ability to resist damage isn't 6d12 + 6d10 + 6d4, it's 6d12 + 6d10 + 6d4 + 20d8

I don't know .. just throwing that out there.

[chance.thirteen]

I see it as an expected violation of the basic set up. it is larger than the individual stats give some extra hit points, or some gear gives you more than average damage or damage at a range, likewise mages give extra damage output, often to many targets.

I think much of this particular things deal is about extending play by letting you recover between conflicts, and in part about the importance of healing seen in some fiction, such as how grievous wounds are handled in Arthurian stories. Being laid up is seen in this fiction, but it has to be big and special to merit such attention, so the cleric idea sorta borrows that support roll, while reducing the actual effect of wounds to a less game pausing one.

In the most abstract, I would expect many games to have a feature by which common parameters of a given player are altered. EG this player gets more turns, that player can look at your cards, this player can return from the dead, that player gets 10% more money each turn, etc. There is balance in exact duplicates, and there is differing qualities, hopefully well balanced as well.

[Brimshack]

I've been rather busy redrafting a few things, but I had a couple more thoughts on this subject, some spurred by the comments immediately preceding:

1) I'm disatisfied with the standard technique of creating a slight chance of something terrible happening on a teleport. This is for one very simple reason, when the chance that a teleportation goes wrong comes up, it provides a very unsatisfactory outcome for the game. I remember my days GMing 1st edition when it was a random roll. Sometimes it would come up that key party members were supposed to have teleported into a wall or something like that. In some instances, that should have been all she wrote, end of game, end of campaign. In others it would have meant a complete derail of the current story line followed by major efforts to rescue the characters that'd just screwed up. Either way it meant the end of whatever plot-line we were following at the moment. Plus it was a hell of a way to end a character. I never liked this and quickly came up with house-rules or magic items to prevent the random disaster.

What seemed much more satisfactory to me was the rule I made up for one campaign limiting the range of all teleportation, dimension walk, etc. to 1 mile per level of the caster. This enabled some skipping about, but it made it likely that players would actually travel around some. It worked for that campaig, not withstanding the ocassional comment about my nerfing a good spell.

Anyway, I prefer to either deny teleportation altogether or to introduce a constraint that works every time and effectively prevents the use of teleportation in ways that short circuit the game.

I'm also very conscious of the over-use of teleportation as a tactical option. It was fun in some cases, but it does (exactly as described above) ruin many other interesting tactical options in ways that now seem too costly to me.

So, for my current game, this is what I came up with. To appreciate the set-up here, you'll need to know that a good spell caster about 10 games into a campaign is likely to have about 10 spells at her disposal per session plus 10 back-up allotments (which may be used for spells, but which could also be used for other things). Also, such a character is likely to have about 4 Actions per Turn. My goal here was to accomplish 4 things:

1) Enable use of Teleportation to solve some practical problems (needing something from town, or to visit someone in a far away place, for example) and to do so for reasonably dedicated spell casters. This is not a spell. It is a Major Special Ability and a character 10 games into a campaign may have about 3 of these. Anyone who has taken this ability has made a major investment in the ability to travel this way.

2) Make use of Teleportation expensive. If you do it, you're down in power for the rest of the game session.

3) Prevent the teleportation of groups.

4) Limit Tactical use, both by the fact that only a truly dedicated caster is likely to have the power (hence he is unlikely to be effective in melee, especially all by himself), and by making the effect take up several actions, thus eliminating the instant pop-in-and-attack option.

Anyway, this is what I came up with:


   
   "Veil Travelling (Personal, Learned) (Wise): Prerequisite: At least one school of Magic.

   A character with this ability is able to travel briefly without transversing space. In a single action the character with this ability is removed from her original location. The Traveller must then pick a location she wishes to emerge onto in the next action. She then makes a Hard Task Roll with a Target number of 15. Success indicates that she will emerge from that point. Failure means that she will emerge 1" from his intended location per point off the target number. The direction of the error is determined randomly. The new location will always be at the same altitude as that originally intended by the character. Should the random location be occupied, the character will be placed at the nearest open spot to the obstacle.

   Note that if Character travels the veil (whether leaving or emerging) within melee threat range of an opponent, it does trigger a Free Attack.

   When a character uses the ability, Veil Traveling, it costs 3 points from her Spell Allotment for the game. Characters must also have been to any location to which they seek to Teleport, or they must see their destination clearly from their own vantage point when first triggering the ability. Note that altitudes may change from location to location, but the character will always come out on the ground or its most obvious counterpart when changing locations. Spell Casters and Familiars may both go together in the event that one of them has this ability, but they must be physically touching one another to do so.

   Note: Veil Travel must be completed on the same Turn in which it is begun. A Character may not leave on her last Action hoping to come out at the beginning of the next."

[Brimshack]

Another thing that I don't like is cross-over spell functions or alternative explanations for nearly identical effects. I still remember seeing a psionic ability in 3.5 that was supposed to trigger the memory of an injury. I thought that was really cool and quickly turned to the page, ...only to discover it did something like 1d6 damage. ...no special constraints, tactical effects, or conditions for creating the damage. Nothing special about the way it played. It was just one more way of doing a specified increment of damage with a little different explanation than the other ways of doing that damage. I was very disappointed. What I wanted was an effect that gave memory some bearing on the game (e.g. you get healed and then take the damage again). What I got might as well have been Magic Missile, or a blast from a Warlock.

Did I rant about this before? If so, I am sorry about the duplication.

Anyway, for this game I decided, not only to try and avoid duplicate effects with different narratives as much as possible. but also to try for radically different types of magic. There are six schools of magic, each defined in terms of the spell functions; Divination (learning stuff), Enchantment (changing the object world), Support (boosting ones abilities and those of allies), Offensive (direct attack), Healing (you get the idea), and Mind Affecting (mental manipulation of others). I've done my best to keep the schools distinct from one another by ensuring that each set of spells contains no spells identical to those of another school. Admittedly, a Character can take more than one school, but that's a choice with a cost to the character. What I didn't want was to have the schools function in nearly identical ways made different only by ad hoc explanations.

I found this was hard to do with my players, at least for a time. This came to a head when the players grew frustrated with the Divination school and began making suggestions for spells that would give them direct combat uses. So, you could cast a spell that would give someone an insight into his opponent, thus granting a bonus on attacks. Alternatively, you could boost defence by giving people intuitive defences. I was actually tempted for a time, but a +3 to attack is a +3 to attack whether it's due to personal insight or extra physical strength. In time I found myself going back to the idea that a diviner is there to learn things, not provide numeric combat bonuses. So, I trimmed out anything that didn't do this and brainstormed a bit about how to make that more interesting. Now Diviners can ask questions about opponents and learn important facts about characters on the field. The player must then use this knowledge to his own advantage. A Diviner can help a character gain a bonus by telling him useful information, but she doesn't have spells that provide numerical bonuses directly.

So, anyway, that's another absence that I find important these days, cross-over magical effects. It's a trap I've fallen into myself many times with house-rules, just adding abilities to classes that take away the uniqueness of other choices. Give the cleric enough offense and you weaken the significance of the mage. Now give the mage a way to heal and you've completed the dark night where all cows are grey.