First, I am going for a medium amount of book keeping, about or just under d20.

As for commonality and difficulty of magic. This is not absolutely needed for the basic mechanics, as the base DCs can be adjusted for easy vs difficult, and features can be required for settings that magic can be used only by those born with it, etc.

At the moment I have skills in tiers which determines how easy they are to advance, the magic skills can be easily moved from one tier to another as needed.

Flexibility is important to me in this case. That is why I am designing the mechanics separate from fluff right now with plenty of thought on using them in various settings with different requirements.

I already have an idea how I want to do it with some other concepts as well, but mostly magic vs martial debates always begin so I figured I would get feedback to try to avoid that divide being as big.

I'm hoping to have magic power be proportional to the difficulty as such that it is on par with martial warriors, though, obviously capable of more flexibility.

I will post what I have so far in more depth soon.

"Oh, I'm not swinging a sword at nothing, I have several mannequins that I attack to practice forms and I practice katas and I put up notices at every inn and guild around town inviting people to come spar with me, and I spent 36 gold pieces to hire an unskilled laborer for a year to operate the ropes and levers to really make those training mannequins come to life... ok, he's trained, I'll pay 110 gold per year."

When you tie advancement to story goals, you give people a real motive to try to manipulate the story to allow them to meet those goals more quickly without having to advance the plot.

If advancement comes through a die roll, you run into two problems:
1. The player with really poor luck who has been at a weekly table-top game lasting 5 hours each session, for the past 6 months, who has yet to advance a single skill.  He keeps rolling 1's.  In the meantime, the rest of the group is getting better, which leaves this guy less chances to meaningfully contribute, which means fewer rolls to advance skill, which is just going to exacerbate the problem.
2. The player with really awesome luck who keeps rolling the max number on his dice... every stinking time.  He's really getting much more powerful than the rest of the group and his uber abilities make it so he solves problems before the rest of the group can contribute, which gives them even fewer opportunities to advance since they're not "meaningfully" using their skills, which is just going to exacerbate the problem.

The problem with trying to match up magical ability with martial prowess is that nobody runs on the same scale (well, maybe HackMaster does).  For instance, there's many types of magic, magic to change someone physically (transmutation), magic to change someone's mind (enchantment), magic to burn things, long range, short range, etc.  With martial fighting, there's usually just a generic attack.  It's not broken up into swipes with a sword, stabs with a sword, blocks with a sword, ripostes with a sword, etc., there's usually just a generic "attack with a sword".

To make martial warriors on-par with magicians, once everyone gets to higher levels, you need to give the martial users more options.  D&D is somewhat poor in this regard -- an item that lets you fly a few times a day is super expensive, although fly is only a 3rd level spell

As stated, I believe in GM fiat, if only because a creative player can do more with less which can throw balance out the window and the GM has to deal with that, additionally, GM fiat gives more options to players and can easily fix things that are difficult for mechanics to manage.

The idea of advancement by dice can be a problem in extreme cases, but at that point the GM should be taking a hand.

That said however, the setup I have makes "levels" a bit "thinner." Each level of skill is relevant over a broader spectrum of skill, thus a lvl 1 can still be helpful to a lvl 6 even if it is less helpful. I also have the cost of improvement at such a point that specializing requires real dedication to achieve skill that makes low lvl pointless. This isn't d20 where a lvl 1 against a lvl 3 is practically guaranteed to lose.

I actually have it setup that it is easiest to advance by gaining versatility, but yet leave specializing as a good, though expensive option.

(In fact I based this leveling off a design I made for leveling in an MMO that wouldn't have a skill cap because by the time it would be problematic, the player would die of old age. Though the MMO design didn't have the randomness. I added the randomness from looking at alternative ways to make INT affect skill advancement despite not having packets of skill points received on a regular basis.)

Also, I do have martial options, making maneuvers a real option in combat plus stances and other things, though these all eat fatigue as well, so martials have the advantage that their regular atk can be used when fatigue is too low for other options, while mages can't do that with magic.

The set up I have right now,

Magic has skills and features.

Magic features of various magic traditions grant access to magic skills. Each tradition (such as Wizardry, Sorcery, Witchcraft, etc) has different difficulty tiers for different schools of magic (aka, Wizardry has evocation as a lower tier then Witchcraft, thus wizards learn evocation effects easier) as well as the base DC for each school.

Each spell affect is treated as a skill except that they are all trained only skills. Changing the number of targets, the range, the duration, etc simply affect the difficulty and/or the cost of casting the spell.

To cast a spell has two elements, complexity (which is the base DC to successfully cast the spell) and cost (which determines how much fatigue is consumed by casting the spell).

For example, a mage using Wizardry want to cast a lightning bolt, so the mage rolls their Lightning effect skill. The DC is 14(evocation is base 10 for Wizardry, making a 5' line area attack adds 2 to complexity, range 60' adds 2 complexity) and the fatigue cost is 6 (evocation is a costly school with 3, area attack 5' line is 2, and 60' range is 1)


This method can easily be altered for different settings by changing the base DCs for spells, changing the schools, or changing the features required, etc, all without changing the base mechanics of actually casting magic.

This can be mitigated somewhat if there is a minimal amount of incremental improvement and if the required number of increments increases with the skill level.  Using 2 or more dice to create a curved roll instead of a linear one helps too.  Consider the following system:

1) When you initially purchase a skill it is Rank 1, written as 1/00.
2) After any day on which you 'practice' the skill (however you might define that), you get to roll 2d6 and add it to the number after the slash.
3) When the number after the slash equals or exceeds 10x the skill rank, you move up to the next rank and the number after the slash resets to /00

Let's say Unlucky guy always rolls double 1's, Average Guy always rolls 7, and Lucky Guy always rolls double 6's.


So yeah, Unlucky Guy is going to be behind, but not too far behind Average Guy.  And Lucky guy won't get obscenely ahead of Average Guy either, because each level requires more rolls than the previous one.

You could modify the dice rolled by factors such as the quality of your training.  Perhaps the most basic training you roll 2d4, if you're actually using the skill in a significant manner (like in combat) you roll 2d6, and maybe having an instructor with a higher skill rank than you lets you roll 3 dice instead of 2.

A problem with adding complexity to magic(or combat) systems, is the.. added complexity. Hehe. Sometimes it is in order, but make sure not to make it a necessity, or that can shoo away prospective players.

If you are forced to keep looking back at certain aspects, others will have similar issues, amplified with their newness to the system and concept.

If you are looking for ideas in complexity without shoe-horning the system into d20 mechanics, take a look at Ars Magica's magic system, at least for ideas and direction.

Using some concepts from Fate, such as placing aspects on a target through casting a spell could easily and efficiently be translated into a d20-type system as well, while also simplifying spell effects with something of an escalating penalty/save per effect level.

I wasn't trying to add complexity to the system, "complexity" is a term referencing the DC of casting a spell. So when casting spells, the "complexity" tells you the DC you need to beat for a successful casting, some options raise the difficulty by adding to the "complexity" which really just means a higher DC.

If you refer back up the mention of Ars Magicka, and take a look at the Arcana and Practices in nWoD it could give you a guide for how to divide up your Features and Magic Skills.

I've thought about this before as well. It depends on whether you want any overlap between the skills your Features use.

If you do, you could base the skills on spheres like Ars Magicka does: water, fire, animal, etc. Treating each skill as a speciality application.
nWoD treats it the other way around: the Arcana (Mind, Life, Matter, Forces) determine what you can affect and the Practises describe how it is affected (although the Practices in nWoD are only descriptor, not a stat).

So having the Feature Illusion and Evocations, and points in the Fire skill would make you good at creating fires and creating illusionary fires. Points in Animal with Illusion and Conjuration Features would make you good at casting animal illusions and summoning animals, but not necessarily good at illusionary fires.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 9):

These make sense game wise, but in reality one can sometimes gain amazing insight from even the simplest actions.

In reply to Merevel (msg # 23):

I think that fits though, you could still gain insight with easy skill use, just not very likely, but using a skill in a challenging fashion is very likely to lead to improvement, just like reality.

I.E. Most drivers are not very good despite all the driving they do, mostly because they never do anything extraordinary, and so they are not likely to succeed at some extraordinary driving, but drivers that do crazy driving stuff are very good at driving.

Where exactly does d20 WoD fit in with other WoD/nWoD? Cause that nWoD description doesn't sound like my WoD book at all.

In any case,

Finally found a description of the Ars Magica magic system. It is very interesting, but I don't think it meshs very well with what I have elsewhere in the system, particularly the core mechanic (d12 luck, + att die, + skill die, + specialization die[when applicable] + circumstance die[when applicable]).

I also prefer a variety of traditions, the use of which can easily be used for different settings, such as Wizardry and Sorcery in Greyhawk, Allomancy in mistborn, Racial magics and Arcano-science in Fallout: Equestria, and Psionics vs Magics from the Hell Hath No Fury book (I forget what its series is named). Thus changing a single feature instead of revamping entire lists of effects and interactions for each setting. Being simply reduced to verb/noun, makes it more difficult to adapt those various settings.

Mostly looking for pure mechanics that are versatile.

A minimal amount of incremental improvement will make it take longer for people to get really out of sync.  The second part won't really help as adding required numbers of increment increases within each skill level just means you're basically adding more skill levels.

For instance, let's take an unlucky person who on 2d6 rolls an average of 4's, an average person who averages 7's, and a lucky person who averages 10's.  I started each of them at 1/00 and put the following in an excel sheet:
A1:1 B1:0 C1:1 D1:0 E1:1 F1:0
A2:=IF(B2=0,A1+1,A1) B2:=IF(B1>=10*A1,0,B1+4)
C2, D2, E2, F2 were repeats of A2 and B2, but D2 added 7 and F2 added 10.
Then I highlighted A2 through F2, drug it down a hundred lines and hit Ctrl+D to copy the formula down.  After 10 skills checks, Unlucky was 2, Average was 3, Lucky was 4.  After 108 skill checks, Unlucky was 9/28, Average was 11/98, Lucky was 14/30.

However, if Unlucky was super unlucky and Lucky was super lucky (2's and 12's), then after 10 checks you still have 2, 3, 4 and after 108 checks you're going to have 6/54, 11/98, 16/00.  Lucky is two and two-third's times better than Unlucky.  In any skill checks meant for Average, Lucky is going to blow through them and Unlucky doesn't have a chance.

If you're trying to promote this system, get lots of people playing it, you're going to have some sort of forum or message boards or something for people to chat about the system, right?  People will want to give each other ideas, feedback, etc.  Well, presuming you have 1000 people playing this, which isn't too unlikely if you go to a lot of conventions and you get people from RPoL to spread the word, and you give the system away for free and try to make money selling adventures that'll run in the system, you're going to have super lucky and super unlucky people commenting on your boards.  There will be a small subset of players (presuming 6 to a group) that will have played with a super lucky or super unlucky person.  And all those people are going to talk about it, which could cause other people to think that your system isn't really balanced.  For those adventures that you publish, Lucky will blow right through any skill checks, while Unlucky won't be able to pass any.

You might be better off going with a "every player gets roughly the same xp and they can buy up whatever they want to get better" system like White Wolf, or "every player gets roughly the same xp and then increases in different areas by roughly the same amount" like D&D.  If you want people to roll dice to increase in skill, then more power to you. :)

Edit: Also, this system will really benefit power gamers as their shtick will keep getting better and better, while people who want to increase in new areas and learn new skills will never really be at a high level in anything, won't have any bonuses and will do really poor at any skill checks.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:06, Mon 28 Apr 2014.

The entire idea of advancement has another factor you are not considering. Difficulty.

Here I will describe the advancement in full detail instead of hinting.

At the end of an encounter where a skill was used, the player gets an advancement opportunity.

So the player rolls some dice against a DC, and for every 3 above the DC they get an extra point in that skill.

The player rolls their Int attribute die, which is sized based on their Int attribute (so an average Int is a d4) they also get to roll the luck die, a d12, and if they are trained a the skill already they add a d4. Thus an average roll is 11 with a range of 3-20. Though it is somewhat harder to learn a new skill, but you need far fewer advancement points.

The DC they have to beat is based on how difficult it was to use the skill successfully. So if they had lots of trouble then the DC will be low, about 5-8, but if it was a cake walk then the DC will be high, about 12-15.

So this acts as a catch up mechanic. The lucky player gets ahead and finds the battles easier, thus his DC starts going higher and he starts advancing less often, while the unlucky player starts having trouble and his DC goes down, and thus he advances faster.

The GM is the one setting the DCs so they can easily compensate for a player falling behind if they really feel the need to do so.

Additionally, the advancement points needed to gain a skill increase rises exponentially, so the third increase costs way more then the first. This encourages learning versatility, while specializing takes dedication. (this was desired by me as it helps keep everyone advancing, yet keeping them in the same tier so you don't have to go from commoner to demigod just so you can feel like you advanced your character.)

For every advancement point you earn on any skill, you gain a feature point. The feature points are used to buy features.

So do you still feel that it will be a problem? If so why?

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 25):

I wasn't suggesting you copy it out completely -.-, just that it might be useful to look at to help you decide how to deal with dividing the schools and skills - if that's how you want to handle it.


In nWoD you have the Arcana Forces, Prime, Fate, Time, Life, Spirit, Death, Matter, Mind, Space.

These are described in 13 Practices, which help determine the level of the Arcana required.
1: Knowing, Unveiling, Compelling
2: Ruling, Veiling, Shielding
3: Weaving Fraying, Perfecting
4: Patterning, Unraveling
5: Making, Unmaking
you don't have a Fraying skill or score in nWoD, but if the spell is classed as Fraying, you need to have 3 dots in the relevant Arcana.


In Ars Magicka you have your Verbs: Create, Destroy, Transform, Control, Understand as skills, with all the Nouns as separate skills.


My answer was you could say Witchcraft includes the schools X, Y, and Z (nouns/arcana/whatever) which do not themselves advance, but maybe each spell has a skill requirement. The spells call on skills A, B, C, and D (practices/verbs/whatever). If you took Wizardry as well it would give you access to V, W, and Z, still making use of skills A, B, C, and D.

Then you roll [d12 + attribute + A + buffs] when you cast a spell from the X list.
Or [d12 + attribute + A + buffs] as a spell from the Y list.
Or [d12 + attribute + B + buffs] as a spell from the Y list.
Depending on whether the spell is evoke fire, evoke lightning, or summon lightning.

So if you are good at fireballs and lightning bolts it's because you are good at the Evocation skill, not because you are good at fire. Your ability to summon storm clouds is still poor because your summoning skill is 1.

Or you could turn it the other way out with the Practice belonging to the Feature, and the Noun being the skill. Personally that makes less sense to me, but it's your game.


You don't have to use the exact layout extracted from either nWoD or Ars Magicka -.-. You should look at the spells you are using and determine what two lists make sense for what you are doing.
This message was last edited by the user at 09:58, Tue 29 Apr 2014.

I think they rise geometrically, not exponentially. :)

The GM setting the DC's may become a problem, because after a group has played for a while, you're going to have multiple people try to pick up a particular skill, at different times.
"Wait, Bob had a DC of 8 to learn that skill but at the exact same skill level I have a DC of 10 to learn it?"
"Yeah, Bob had been trying to learn that skill for a while, so I made it easier for him."
"So you're favoring Bob?  Does this have anything to do with Bob washing your dishes last week?  If I wash your dishes this week can I get the DC 8 this time?"

I think if you're going to have skill rolls to learn a skill, the DC should be tied to the skill level mechanically and not set by the GM, or it'll be harder to appear fair.  It would really suck to play for a month of weekly games, get a skill roll, fail it, and have nothing to show for that month while other people are making their rolls and getting new skills.  Yeah, roleplaying is its own reward, but it's hard to not get envious when other people are all getting something and you get nothing because you had bad luck on the dice.

To tie DC to advancement mechanically like you suggest though, you either A, need to make it always the same DC for a skill level, in which you start getting that earlier issue of the lucky vs the unlucky, or B, you need to mechanically discover how hard a skill was to use.

Additionally, the issue you described has less to do with the system and is more a combination of two things, 1, a poor relationship with the GM and 2, for lack of better term, selfishness. Wanting something just because someone else got it.

The GM has to balance things between players no matter what the mechanics are, so I am just taking advantage of that fact. And writing it into the rules will hopefully let everyone be fine with it, since it is expected, possibly even the ruleslawyer.

If you really want my thoughts on the GM balance vs mechanical balance you can read my rant below..

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Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)

Total balance through mechanics is impossible, (not to say you shouldn't have a fair amount though) because there is so much other stuff that applies, that comes from the players, no matter what system you use, the GM will have to adjudicate things to balance the players against each other, so everyone can have fun.

I.E. a group with a super optimizer, and an RP focused character, and a rules lawyer. This group will always have the super optimizer build the most mechanically viable combat character who will see the RPer as a pathetically weak useless character (and may even complain about it[I have had players complain about may characters not being optimized enough, and even once had them directly command me to build it better]), the RPer who has as many rarely used life skills as combat and encounter skills, and the rules lawyer who always trying to see what he can get by with and complains about any amount of GM fiat or houserules that were not perfectly stated and written in contract format ahead of time.

If your GM can't handle balancing such a group, no amount of system balance is going to make the problem go away. You need to be able to trust the GM to remain fair, and if the GM fails, you talk to her about it, and if the issue continues, you go find a new GM.  On the flipside, a GM needs to be able to accept such critiques from players and try to make the game enjoyable for them even when the GM is of a different opinion on the issue.

Honestly, the group relations are far more important then mechanics, and group relation issues won't be solved by any amount of rules balance. Even chess groups can get issues and that is so balanced that all the players have the exact same pieces and options.

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This message was last edited by the user at 19:36, Tue 29 Apr 2014.

Pretty much the same thing...

Exponential growth occurs when the growth rate of the value of a mathematical function is proportional to the function's current value. Exponential decay occurs in the same way when the growth rate is negative. In the case of a discrete domain of definition with equal intervals it is also called geometric growth or geometric decay (the function values form a geometric progression).

In the Camarilla, it was just understood that some people had a better grasp of how to use the rules.  So when you were building a character, you'd take your character to them, they'd do some number magic and you'd end up with the same character but with 30 more xp to spend.  In my old college gaming group, we had the same thing.  I've always presumed that real life gaming groups usually had someone like this that people utilized.

In reply to Genghis the Hutt (msg # 32):

In some games, such as DnD, it is difficult to do that and have the same character because so much of the outside-of-combat stuff has rules and are defined. The optimization comes from choosing combat options instead of non-combat options, such as using a rapier instead of a scimitar, taking weapon finesse, instead of craft [magical item], putting skill points into intimidate and perception instead of knowledge and profession. All of which leads to a different character that obviously has no life beyond slaying the next monster.

Min-maxing is a cross dimension from roleplaying, just like economic and social freedoms are a cross-dimension political axis: http://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2
The four axis are munchkin (min-maxed rollplayer), pansy (non-optimized roleplayer), powergamer (min-maxed roleplayer), and jerk (non-optimized rollplayer).

Min-maxing is all about choosing what your character is good at -- so when you create a character, think about what they're like, what they do, their hopes, their fears, what they work on, what their hobby is (or are), what they're familiar with.  If you want a profession-heavy knowledge-based character, like some sort tenured professor with Profession(teacher) and mass knowledge skills, then that's easy to min-max, since you've chosen to specialize in profession and knowledge checks.  If you want to "specialize" as a jack of all trades, then be a jack of all trades.  If fighting is your shtick, then fight.  If crafting or whatever is your shtick, then do that.  If it's ballet then focus on ballet.

I'm not the best at min-maxing for D&D.  I never came up with anything relating to Pun-Pun or the Diplomancer or anything else super crazy like that.  I never won any Iron Chef competitions on the Giant In The Playground forum.  I was a DM for WotC at conventions though and have played it for years, so just from familiarity I could give some pointers about how to min-max a 3.5 D&D character, but I'm not the best at that.  You can min-max in any system, though, and obviously a system with more options is not going to be able to make all choices be on par with each other for all scenarios, so the more options a system has the more a person has to work with for whatever it is that they do.
This message was last edited by the user at 08:42, Wed 30 Apr 2014.

Unfortunately, a large number of optimizing players (as in, enough for me to not have met one who breaks this mold) think combat ability is the only important thing, and thus all optimization must be for combat.

It is also these folks that have the most complaints about balance.

That is of course just my experience, though, it has also been my experience, that people in general life, for gaming and not gaming alike, don't usually follow the logically superior, or at least more sensible, approaches that thoughtful folks can easily theorize about.

In reply to DarkLightHitomi (msg # 35):

And then you get weirdoes like me who will gladly underpower their characters if it fits the concept. I often do not have more then clothes for my clerics armor for example.

Another concept first, type of person! We should start a club. :)

http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/U...t:_Cloistered_Cleric or Archivist.  I knew a guy who made a character like that.  He was a magical farmer.  He had a rake familiar (actually a divine metamagic extended unseen servant spell where the unseen servant was commanded to keep the rake from falling down and follow him), and all sorts of nifty out-of-the-box uses of different spells and things.  A person can purposefully make a mechanically weak character, but I don't really see the point when you can be mechanically strong with the exact same archetype.  In third edition, classes are invisible.  There is no trap that can trigger off a class, no PrC requirement for a particular class, no divination spell that can tell you what class a character is.  Class is meta knowledge that only us players know.  So if you want to play a character that never rages, then don't pick a class that has a rage ability?  Anyway, I thin we're getting rather off topic from the original post.

In reply to Genghis the Hutt (msg # 38):

Seems unbalanced. And yes you are right, sorry for steering the thread away from its purpose.