Sword & Sorcery: Advanced Player’s Guide
May. 6th, 2011 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIn case you weren't aware, Sword & Sorcery is the D20 inprint of White Wolf Publishing. Which might explain a few things. White Wolf games tend to be full of cool ideas, that it's then up to the GM to translate into whatever works for his camapign. The theme of this book seems to be: Clever D&D 3.5 ideas that we had that we didn’t really have time to playtest, but made up lots of numbers for anyway. Most things in this book are interesting. Most things in this book wouldn’t work for most gaming groups without modification, because they’re either incredibly breakable or not up to snuff with even non-broken standards.
(Also, I’m not sure why this is a “Player’s Guide”. Half the stuff here is specifically for DM use, the rest would require significant DM buy-in for a player to use.)
Characters with very high ability scores getting “tragic flaws”: Brilliant. Characters with very low ability scores getting benefits based on their corresponding high scores: Terrible; it encourages and rewards min-maxing but doesn’t help players who’ve actually rolled really sucky scores.
An indication of the balance issues in D&D 3.5: They introduce “elite” prestige classes, intended for characters level 14+. The fighter class lets you apply enchantments to a weapon on-the-fly, giving it up to a +4 bonus, changing the material, or adding extra effects for up to 10 minutes. The wizard class lets you travel through time.
(I feel like, with some tweaking, the class that lets melee fighters muck with the powers on their weapons could be a great mid-level balancing choice, and a lot of fun to play. Instead of spells lists, summon charts or wild shape choices, the fighter gets the magic item list. It’d be hell on the DM, but fair if you set it up right.)
There is an elemental-summoning wizard class that's about as broken as most standard wizard prestige classes (provides benefits with no loss of caster levels), and a gemcaster wizard class which is basically trying to make drwaf wizards cool. There's a teleporting rogue class which looks pretty awesome and could actually keep rogues competitive a few levels longer.
There's "Dilettante", an all-rounder prestige class that is pretty much guarenteed to create a useless character in a standard party game. You need to have three different classes to get into it, can't concentrate your skill points, and don't actually advance the spells and abilities from those classes, instead getting a pick of watered-down versions of every core class's powers. Maybe you could make this work in a solo game, but for an all-rounder/hole-plugger character who can actually be useful, WotC already gave us the Chameleon.
There’s also a fighter prestige class that lets you craft massively powerful armor (up to +12 AC) and various armor attachments that could allow a 20th level character to push their AC into the 60s. Unfortunately, anything that’s trying to hit your AC at level 20 is already a joke, and the downsides (decreased mobility, huge skill penalties, even an initiative penalty) mean it’s even less useful. Unless you’re wearing Boots of Flying, which ignore your load, in which case you can do your best impression of Steel.
(I build a super-defender using the Knight class at one point, which was obviously the prototype for the 4E defender archetype. I couldn’t get enough enemies to attack him instead of his allies. I also built a high-AC Vow of Poverty monk at one point, but he was low-level and his AC was still no match for the breakability of low-level melee fighters’ ability to hit.)
Critical hit / fumble charts, new initiative methods, new combat sequences: Might be interesting to try, but they’re all more complicated that the existing system. If you like longer, more turn-based combat, these might be for you. Similarly, there’s a system for tracking armor damage which I’m sure made some hardcore simulationist cry, “At last!” but I don’t want anywhere near my games for the hell of recordkeeping it would create. I’ll admit, while the “fully heal with every extended rest” system in 4E isn’t realistic, it’s more fun and so much easier than trying to keep track of a dozen different wounds to various body parts that each take a different length of time to heal.
Mana-based spellcasting: Might be workable, but by this point I don’t trust their ability to create a balanced system. Skill/fatigue-based magic system: They tried to keep it simple, but the problem with the 3.5E skill system is that you can push skill checks up very high very easily, so you can’t just limit spells with a check. They tried to put a Band-Aid on that, but that basically makes it Vancian magic again…so why bother? Spell effect critical charts: Someone spent way too much time with these. They’d be kinda fun to apply to a Wild Mage if you don’t want the total randomness of a Wild Surge chart.
New classes: Again, with the lack of playtesting. The Aethercrafter, the most interesting of the lot, builds steampunk magitek devices that he can use to recreate spell effects. They go to great lengths discussing the cost, in time and money, of designing, building and maintaining the devices. They tell you you’ll need a full-round action to use one, and what the Use Magic Device check is for others to do so. And apparently there are charges for each device, but this gets kinda buried (they start equal to your Int modifier—I had to re-read the description three times to find that). As the devices start large-sized and you’re eventually able to miniaturize them (and activate them with a standard action), that means that a low-level Aethercrafter is a variant sorcerer who has to lug around a wagon full of 50 pound devices (one per spell), and a high-level Aethercrafter effectively has a gigantic wand collection that he can use each of half a dozen times a day. And he’ll need to make 30+ maintenance checks every morning.
The other classes include a variant druid that can “borrow” animal abilities, a geomancer (basically a wizard with a few extra ley line powers), and the Soulcrafter, who comes with great fluff text but utterly fails to deliver a coherent game mechanic from it. (Hint: Life-energy draining is already represented in D&D by negative level effects. Consider using existing elements rather than making up complicated new ones!) Actually, all four classes are great concepts that they weren’t really sure how to make work properly using d20 rules.
Finally, there’s a class-and-level design system for communities. This is clever from a design perspective—I probably should use some sort of sanity check flowchart when designing towns so I don’t build communities that can’t properly sustain themselves*--but I feel like you’d need to be a pretty hardcore stat-lover to need to stat out every town in your world, when those starts aren’t actually used for anything except to define the fluff text you’d need to write anyway.
*This is actually a lie. I have a degree in economics, which means I often spend far too much time thinking out the economic systems of my world. I’ll occasionally have rivers that couldn’t logically flow the way they do, but I always know where a town’s food is coming from and what their main industry is.
Overall, I’m underwhelmed. Kudos to them for having a lot of neat ideas of ways to make 3.5E more interesting or make a specific session a little different, but next time I wish they’d try them out before putting them in a book.
(Also, I’m not sure why this is a “Player’s Guide”. Half the stuff here is specifically for DM use, the rest would require significant DM buy-in for a player to use.)
Characters with very high ability scores getting “tragic flaws”: Brilliant. Characters with very low ability scores getting benefits based on their corresponding high scores: Terrible; it encourages and rewards min-maxing but doesn’t help players who’ve actually rolled really sucky scores.
An indication of the balance issues in D&D 3.5: They introduce “elite” prestige classes, intended for characters level 14+. The fighter class lets you apply enchantments to a weapon on-the-fly, giving it up to a +4 bonus, changing the material, or adding extra effects for up to 10 minutes. The wizard class lets you travel through time.
(I feel like, with some tweaking, the class that lets melee fighters muck with the powers on their weapons could be a great mid-level balancing choice, and a lot of fun to play. Instead of spells lists, summon charts or wild shape choices, the fighter gets the magic item list. It’d be hell on the DM, but fair if you set it up right.)
There is an elemental-summoning wizard class that's about as broken as most standard wizard prestige classes (provides benefits with no loss of caster levels), and a gemcaster wizard class which is basically trying to make drwaf wizards cool. There's a teleporting rogue class which looks pretty awesome and could actually keep rogues competitive a few levels longer.
There's "Dilettante", an all-rounder prestige class that is pretty much guarenteed to create a useless character in a standard party game. You need to have three different classes to get into it, can't concentrate your skill points, and don't actually advance the spells and abilities from those classes, instead getting a pick of watered-down versions of every core class's powers. Maybe you could make this work in a solo game, but for an all-rounder/hole-plugger character who can actually be useful, WotC already gave us the Chameleon.
There’s also a fighter prestige class that lets you craft massively powerful armor (up to +12 AC) and various armor attachments that could allow a 20th level character to push their AC into the 60s. Unfortunately, anything that’s trying to hit your AC at level 20 is already a joke, and the downsides (decreased mobility, huge skill penalties, even an initiative penalty) mean it’s even less useful. Unless you’re wearing Boots of Flying, which ignore your load, in which case you can do your best impression of Steel.
(I build a super-defender using the Knight class at one point, which was obviously the prototype for the 4E defender archetype. I couldn’t get enough enemies to attack him instead of his allies. I also built a high-AC Vow of Poverty monk at one point, but he was low-level and his AC was still no match for the breakability of low-level melee fighters’ ability to hit.)
Critical hit / fumble charts, new initiative methods, new combat sequences: Might be interesting to try, but they’re all more complicated that the existing system. If you like longer, more turn-based combat, these might be for you. Similarly, there’s a system for tracking armor damage which I’m sure made some hardcore simulationist cry, “At last!” but I don’t want anywhere near my games for the hell of recordkeeping it would create. I’ll admit, while the “fully heal with every extended rest” system in 4E isn’t realistic, it’s more fun and so much easier than trying to keep track of a dozen different wounds to various body parts that each take a different length of time to heal.
Mana-based spellcasting: Might be workable, but by this point I don’t trust their ability to create a balanced system. Skill/fatigue-based magic system: They tried to keep it simple, but the problem with the 3.5E skill system is that you can push skill checks up very high very easily, so you can’t just limit spells with a check. They tried to put a Band-Aid on that, but that basically makes it Vancian magic again…so why bother? Spell effect critical charts: Someone spent way too much time with these. They’d be kinda fun to apply to a Wild Mage if you don’t want the total randomness of a Wild Surge chart.
New classes: Again, with the lack of playtesting. The Aethercrafter, the most interesting of the lot, builds steampunk magitek devices that he can use to recreate spell effects. They go to great lengths discussing the cost, in time and money, of designing, building and maintaining the devices. They tell you you’ll need a full-round action to use one, and what the Use Magic Device check is for others to do so. And apparently there are charges for each device, but this gets kinda buried (they start equal to your Int modifier—I had to re-read the description three times to find that). As the devices start large-sized and you’re eventually able to miniaturize them (and activate them with a standard action), that means that a low-level Aethercrafter is a variant sorcerer who has to lug around a wagon full of 50 pound devices (one per spell), and a high-level Aethercrafter effectively has a gigantic wand collection that he can use each of half a dozen times a day. And he’ll need to make 30+ maintenance checks every morning.
The other classes include a variant druid that can “borrow” animal abilities, a geomancer (basically a wizard with a few extra ley line powers), and the Soulcrafter, who comes with great fluff text but utterly fails to deliver a coherent game mechanic from it. (Hint: Life-energy draining is already represented in D&D by negative level effects. Consider using existing elements rather than making up complicated new ones!) Actually, all four classes are great concepts that they weren’t really sure how to make work properly using d20 rules.
Finally, there’s a class-and-level design system for communities. This is clever from a design perspective—I probably should use some sort of sanity check flowchart when designing towns so I don’t build communities that can’t properly sustain themselves*--but I feel like you’d need to be a pretty hardcore stat-lover to need to stat out every town in your world, when those starts aren’t actually used for anything except to define the fluff text you’d need to write anyway.
*This is actually a lie. I have a degree in economics, which means I often spend far too much time thinking out the economic systems of my world. I’ll occasionally have rivers that couldn’t logically flow the way they do, but I always know where a town’s food is coming from and what their main industry is.
Overall, I’m underwhelmed. Kudos to them for having a lot of neat ideas of ways to make 3.5E more interesting or make a specific session a little different, but next time I wish they’d try them out before putting them in a book.
