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Homebrew and House Rules (D&D) / Re: "Tier 3" System Revisions
« on: September 14, 2021, 02:12:34 PM »
Regarding the armor styles, the revised versions look better, but they're still fairly hesitant to hand out anything worthwhile.
Since the trend you're going with here is "When in doubt, do what AD&D did," I'd say the bare minimum the base specialization should do is to remove ACP, Max Dex, and speed penalties entirely so fighters can do cartwheels in full plate, and then go up from there. AC bonuses and DR are always nice, but +1 and 2/-- are kinda lackluster; even if you specialize in heavy armor at 1st level before you can even afford any heavy armor, you're getting DR 2/-- at 5th level when anything less than DR 5 ends up being a rounding error.
Personally, even if you added every single one of those benefits to the first level of every martial class, I don't think that'd really increase their power or usefulness in a noticeable way.
I'd suggest two things here. First, throw caution to the wind and aim to make these on par with the strongest martial feats out there. If you want martial types to actually care that they're wearing scale mail instead of chain shirt (or whatever) then the benefits should be very noticeable. Second, numerical boosts are boring and martials get bunches of them already, so see if you can come up with more qualitative benefits like the Uncanny Dodge benefit or applying the AC boost to touch AC.
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Regarding the weapon styles, the feat-consolidating ones are on the right track (though the overlap with e.g. three of them getting Improved Precise Shot instead of different benefits for each isn't great), but the others are underwhelming. Not only is it mostly numerical boosts again, but the Two-Handed specialization just hands out "Power Attack, but worse" and the One-Handed specialization's AC bonus is strictly worse than Combat Expertise at the normal and improved level.
Again, I'd suggest going through these and balancing them all to the level of the strongest ones (at a glance, probably the Combat Expertise and Power Attack Specializations), otherwise players are going to largely ignore all the weaker ones.
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Regarding the metamagic stuff...I'mma be honest, the changes are bad across the board.
It's already the case that metamagic basically isn't worth using unless you have some way to mitigate the cost, because the feats with +0 and +1 adjustments are fairly niche or not even worth a single spell level adjustment and the higher-cost feats are usable "as intended" so late in the game that they rarely see play without cost reduction.
Increasing the casting time for metamagicked spells (when sorcerers, who have to do that by default, basically never use metamagic unless they can pick up something to ignore that), adding a cost to Eschew Materials (when costless spell components are basically flavor if you have your 5 gp component pouch and not being able to reach your components while grappled is such a niche problem as to not be worth taking a feat to mitigate), limiting the number of times you can use a given feat (when anyone who actually cares about e.g. Still Spell or Energy Substitution is going to want to apply them to most if not all of their spells), limiting the schools to which metamagic can be applied (when the feats become even less worthwhile if you can't apply e.g. Extend Spell to both your buffs and your summons)...all of those make metamagic strictly worse, and are tantamount to just banning them.
And, of course, if you're aiming for all classes to end up at Tier 3, nerfing metamagic isn't even necessary since stuff like DMM: Persist or arcane spellsurge are presumably going away anyway. Let warmages and blaster sorcerers metamagic everything to their heart's content, they're not gonna break anything.
What is the specific problem you're trying to solve by changing metamagic, beyond "casters don't need more cool toys"? Is it the action economy benefit of quickened spells and persistent buffs? The high damage potential of a maximized empowered energy-admixed ... fireball? Something else?
Since the trend you're going with here is "When in doubt, do what AD&D did," I'd say the bare minimum the base specialization should do is to remove ACP, Max Dex, and speed penalties entirely so fighters can do cartwheels in full plate, and then go up from there. AC bonuses and DR are always nice, but +1 and 2/-- are kinda lackluster; even if you specialize in heavy armor at 1st level before you can even afford any heavy armor, you're getting DR 2/-- at 5th level when anything less than DR 5 ends up being a rounding error.
Personally, even if you added every single one of those benefits to the first level of every martial class, I don't think that'd really increase their power or usefulness in a noticeable way.
I'd suggest two things here. First, throw caution to the wind and aim to make these on par with the strongest martial feats out there. If you want martial types to actually care that they're wearing scale mail instead of chain shirt (or whatever) then the benefits should be very noticeable. Second, numerical boosts are boring and martials get bunches of them already, so see if you can come up with more qualitative benefits like the Uncanny Dodge benefit or applying the AC boost to touch AC.
--------
Regarding the weapon styles, the feat-consolidating ones are on the right track (though the overlap with e.g. three of them getting Improved Precise Shot instead of different benefits for each isn't great), but the others are underwhelming. Not only is it mostly numerical boosts again, but the Two-Handed specialization just hands out "Power Attack, but worse" and the One-Handed specialization's AC bonus is strictly worse than Combat Expertise at the normal and improved level.
Again, I'd suggest going through these and balancing them all to the level of the strongest ones (at a glance, probably the Combat Expertise and Power Attack Specializations), otherwise players are going to largely ignore all the weaker ones.
--------
Regarding the metamagic stuff...I'mma be honest, the changes are bad across the board.
It's already the case that metamagic basically isn't worth using unless you have some way to mitigate the cost, because the feats with +0 and +1 adjustments are fairly niche or not even worth a single spell level adjustment and the higher-cost feats are usable "as intended" so late in the game that they rarely see play without cost reduction.
Increasing the casting time for metamagicked spells (when sorcerers, who have to do that by default, basically never use metamagic unless they can pick up something to ignore that), adding a cost to Eschew Materials (when costless spell components are basically flavor if you have your 5 gp component pouch and not being able to reach your components while grappled is such a niche problem as to not be worth taking a feat to mitigate), limiting the number of times you can use a given feat (when anyone who actually cares about e.g. Still Spell or Energy Substitution is going to want to apply them to most if not all of their spells), limiting the schools to which metamagic can be applied (when the feats become even less worthwhile if you can't apply e.g. Extend Spell to both your buffs and your summons)...all of those make metamagic strictly worse, and are tantamount to just banning them.
And, of course, if you're aiming for all classes to end up at Tier 3, nerfing metamagic isn't even necessary since stuff like DMM: Persist or arcane spellsurge are presumably going away anyway. Let warmages and blaster sorcerers metamagic everything to their heart's content, they're not gonna break anything.
What is the specific problem you're trying to solve by changing metamagic, beyond "casters don't need more cool toys"? Is it the action economy benefit of quickened spells and persistent buffs? The high damage potential of a maximized empowered energy-admixed ... fireball? Something else?