Author Topic: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]  (Read 18978 times)

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats] (WIP again)
« Reply #20 on: June 25, 2020, 10:37:24 AM »
You two done overhauling everything so I can start my review?  :P

Haha, as of this moment I am, or close enough. The mechanics, classes, and feats are all updated now. The idea descriptions aren't as finalized, but the damaging ones at least are well-balanced as far as I can tell. I also added a second changelog since this became a WIP again, if that helps.

Please, review to your heart's content! Any feedback is appreciated.

Offline Garryl

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats] (WIP again)
« Reply #21 on: June 26, 2020, 04:20:58 AM »
Thought Magic

I'm making a proper pass through the core mechanics now (as opposed to the quick skim from before).

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Ideas as Cards

Nothing much to say here. I don't expect all that much more will change here (aside from clarifications) unless the core mechanics need another overhaul.

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Expressing Ideas

There's a timing mismatch for IP here. You get a new hand of cards at the end of your turn (which matches the timing of when immediate actions start applying to the following turn's action economy), but you get your 1 IP at the beginning of your turn. Does that mean that if you want to express any immediate action ideas, you need to generate IP for them in your previous turn and carry it over, despite the fact that you don't know what ideas you'll have, if any?

You may wish to clarify that IP from previous turns doesn't carry over into following turns. It sounds like that's the intent by "starts each turn with 1 IP", but it would be nice to have it explicitly stated so you don't have to parse the implications of that sentence to find out.

Can thinking classes be progressed by arcane- and divine-spellcasting advancing PrCs, or just the ones that allow for any spellcasting class to be advanced? You've indicated that though magic meets arcane- and divine-specific prerequisites, despite being neither, but not whether the classes themselves can be advanced as such.

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Ideas Outside Combat

I'd remove the part about losing the ability to express ideas without daily rest. Leave the rest requirement in for changing your deck and refreshing daily IP, sure, but it's unnecessarily punishing in some circumstances. Spellcasters don't lose their unused spells if they can't rest, they just don't get to replenish the ones they've used.

Daily IP is weird. You get very little of it, but there's also no need for it, since you still have your base 1 IP per turn outside of combat and by the time you can spend more than 1 IP per idea, you should have at least one idea that generates 2+ IP. I get the impression that this isn't the intent, though, that you aren't supposed to get that 1 IP/round outside of an encounter.

Outside of combat, I wouldn't bar the use of deck- and hand-modifying ideas, just state that those parts have no effects. There are a few ideas with deck- and hand-modifying rider effects.

I don't think you intended to have the free 1 IP/turn apply outside of battle, but if you do keep it or a mechanic like it, make sure it's structured such that players don't feel compelled to constantly refresh their short-duration buffs out of battle, either through a complete lack of free-use buffs that last more than 1 round or through some mechanism that inhibits that play pattern (ex: expressing a combat idea out of combat dismisses all previous combat ideas still ongoing) and/or obviates the need for it (ex: you can maintain 1/2/3 combat ideas out of combat, their durations remaining at maximum as long as their effects/targets remain nearby).

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Encounters

I'm not a huge fan of this section. All three things here (locking the deck at the 10 round mark, ending effects 1 minute after combat ends, and penalizing avoiding combat) feel arbitrary. I understand the intent behind them, but they just leave a bad feeling.

If you want to curb the power of a thinned deck in excessively long encounters, perhaps some sort of deck reset mechanism instead, where under some conditions retired ideas as reshuffled into the deck (ex: move it to the discard pile after 1 minute or 5 deck shuffles or something)?

If you want to keep players from picking fights with rats so that they can buff up, don't make long-duration buff effects as ideas. You may wish to separate long-term effects (minutes/level duration and longer) from more immediate in-combat effects. Say, for example, you could have your basic in combat ideas with instantaneous and short durations (I'm inclined towards fixed durations of 1, 2, 3, 5, or 10 rounds rather than 1 round/level, personally), but some of them also have "grand vision" effects that allow them to produce long-term effects when you spend daily IP (rename to "Grand Vision Points" or something), which would also let you cut down on some of the arbitrary distinctions between in-combat and out-of-combat expressing.

I don't see the need to penalize players for taking the time to thin their deck and prebuff if they know an encounter is coming up but haven't actually engaged. That's just the standard benefits of preparation for an immediate upcoming encounter, like spellcasters unloading all their round/level buffs. You also don't want to encourage DMs to penalize players for avoiding combat legitimately, such as during stealth encounters or when attempting to retreat or flee.

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Multiclassing

Multiclassing is a major nerf to a character, even without the lost thinker progression. You pad your deck with lots of lower-level ideas just by taking a single level of another thinker class. I'd just have each thinker progression give you a completely separate deck, rather than merging them all together, and have any deck manipulation from an idea associated with a deck only apply to that deck (ex: expressing Being Meta drawn from your Creative deck would only let you search your Creative discard pile). Hand size would either be separate for each class (ex: Creative 9/Strategist 4 draws 5 from Creative and 3 from Strategist decks each turn) or stacks class levels and lets you divide your draws between decks as you see fit (ex: Creative 9/Strategist 4 draws total 6 cards per turn divided as they choose between the two decks).

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Changelog

I like change logs.

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats] (WIP again)
« Reply #22 on: June 26, 2020, 09:33:41 AM »
Thought Magic

I'm making a proper pass through the core mechanics now (as opposed to the quick skim from before).

Alright, this is awesome! Thanks so much!

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You may wish to clarify that IP from previous turns doesn't carry over into following turns. It sounds like that's the intent by "starts each turn with 1 IP", but it would be nice to have it explicitly stated so you don't have to parse the implications of that sentence to find out.

Yeah, I'll fix that. IP doesn't carry over.

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Can thinking classes be progressed by arcane- and divine-spellcasting advancing PrCs, or just the ones that allow for any spellcasting class to be advanced? You've indicated that though magic meets arcane- and divine-specific prerequisites, despite being neither, but not whether the classes themselves can be advanced as such.

Alright, I'll specify. Yes, it's any type of spellcasting.

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Daily IP is weird. You get very little of it, but there's also no need for it, since you still have your base 1 IP per turn outside of combat and by the time you can spend more than 1 IP per idea, you should have at least one idea that generates 2+ IP. I get the impression that this isn't the intent, though, that you aren't supposed to get that 1 IP/round outside of an encounter.

Oh man, yeah, that's not the intent. 1 IP/round is supposed to be strictly a combat thing. There are all kinds of ideas that you really don't want people to have at will outside of combat (the Philosopher basically gets Polymorph, for starters). Will fix.

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Outside of combat, I wouldn't bar the use of deck- and hand-modifying ideas, just state that those parts have no effects. There are a few ideas with deck- and hand-modifying rider effects.

Makes sense.

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Encounters

I'm not a huge fan of this section. All three things here (locking the deck at the 10 round mark, ending effects 1 minute after combat ends, and penalizing avoiding combat) feel arbitrary. I understand the intent behind them, but they just leave a bad feeling.

Oh boy. This part. I have to say, there are no good answers here. Cards that modify the structure of the deck are an interesting mechanic that I definitely want to have, but the moment an encounter becomes non-standard, it just breaks. A combat with dozens of rounds of trench warfare, or a stealth encounter where you're picking off enemies one by one, or really any situation where you have long periods of time to improve your deck. Here, I'll respond point-for-point.

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If you want to curb the power of a thinned deck in excessively long encounters, perhaps some sort of deck reset mechanism instead, where under some conditions retired ideas as reshuffled into the deck (ex: move it to the discard pile after 1 minute or 5 deck shuffles or something)?

That doesn't feel less arbitrary to me, and it breaks things way more when you consider ideas like Mindscythe. In a long combat, you could rip up all of your high-level ideas constantly, knowing they'll regenerate before long. Plus, it would feel really unfair to have the deck reset and become much weaker in the middle of an important fight. Like I said, no good answers, but I think the one I picked is the least not-good answer.

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If you want to keep players from picking fights with rats so that they can buff up, don't make long-duration buff effects as ideas. You may wish to separate long-term effects (minutes/level duration and longer) from more immediate in-combat effects. Say, for example, you could have your basic in combat ideas with instantaneous and short durations (I'm inclined towards fixed durations of 1, 2, 3, 5, or 10 rounds rather than 1 round/level, personally), but some of them also have "grand vision" effects that allow them to produce long-term effects when you spend daily IP (rename to "Grand Vision Points" or something), which would also let you cut down on some of the arbitrary distinctions between in-combat and out-of-combat expressing.

I don't necessarily have a problem with long-duration effects though, I just don't want them to be abused with the rat-fighting you mentioned. And players will definitely want to cast some of the combat effects out of combat, like illusions to distract guards or summons to trigger traps, or stuff like that.

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I don't see the need to penalize players for taking the time to thin their deck and prebuff if they know an encounter is coming up but haven't actually engaged. That's just the standard benefits of preparation for an immediate upcoming encounter, like spellcasters unloading all their round/level buffs. You also don't want to encourage DMs to penalize players for avoiding combat legitimately, such as during stealth encounters or when attempting to retreat or flee.

The problem is that the ratio between a buffed and unbuffed wizard's power is a lot closer to 1 than a Creative's. No amount of pre-buffing will give a wizard more high-level slots, more metamagic uses, and a significantly higher CL, but thinker classes can effectively get that stuff given enough time to pare down the deck. I could set a minimum size that the deck can reach, but there's no good way to balance that - I want the benefits of resizing the deck mid-combat to be significant, without that benefit being too significant if done ahead of time.

I don't like having any of these rules. I just don't want players to abuse the system. I don't want to reward players (or bad DMs) for having their thinker characters do obnoxious strategies like staying invisible for the first minute of the encounter while they summon monsters just often enough to keep the combat going. This is the problem I really want a good solution to. If you come up with anything that can balance this for all these fringe cases, please let me know - I'm not happy with anything I've come up with so far.

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Multiclassing is a major nerf to a character, even without the lost thinker progression. You pad your deck with lots of lower-level ideas just by taking a single level of another thinker class. I'd just have each thinker progression give you a completely separate deck, rather than merging them all together

I dunno, dealing with multiple decks seems really annoying. What if I still mixed the decks, but added 1 to the hand size per additional thinker class? That makes it easier to shift through all the 0th-level garbage. I'm not sure if that's enough to balance it, I'd have to look at specific cases. Of course, I don't want Creative 5 / Philosopher 5 to be as good as Creative 10, but you're right that the penalty for multiclassing seems excessive at the moment.

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I like change logs.

Keep an eye on the second one. I keep finding dumb things I need to fix.

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #23 on: June 28, 2020, 09:45:17 AM »
Okay, sorry for the double-post, but I came up with a solution that avoids the convoluted mess of encounter rules and out-of-combat expressing rules and daily IP and stuff. Basically, I made a mechanic called "idle thinking," as opposed to regular expressing, which I called "intense thinking", and made both of them limited per day. I updated the first post of the thread with the new mechanics (as well as making the classes and feats match it). Let me know if you see any ways to break it.

Also, the idea overhaul is now done. Some of them might not be balanced in periods of idle thought, but I'm hoping to fix that on a case-by-case basis. Other than that, everything should be balanced now, and if it isn't, please tell me. Thanks! :)
« Last Edit: June 28, 2020, 06:28:12 PM by TheGeometer »

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #24 on: June 28, 2020, 10:08:55 PM »
And you told me that you were done overhauling.   :P

I'll give Garryl a chance to give more feedback before I start reviewing.

Offline Garryl

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #25 on: June 28, 2020, 10:15:24 PM »
Don't wait for me. I don't have a ton of time or energy for homebrew reviewing, so I'm going through this very slowly. If you wait for my back-and-forth with TheGeometer to finish before you start, you're going to wait for a while.

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #26 on: June 29, 2020, 08:01:22 AM »
And you told me that you were done overhauling.   :P

Now I'm actually done overhauling. For real this time. Really.

In all seriousness, the only hurdle I still needed to overcome was the question of how to make this system mostly at-will in combat and limited outside of it, especially in campaigns where the line between combat and not-combat is blurry. I had a hodgepodge of rules, but now I think I fixed it. Unless someone finds a glaring flaw in the current mechanics or suggests a better way to do it, I don't plan on overhauling anything else. You're free to look over it.

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #27 on: July 06, 2020, 03:59:07 PM »
Okay, I'll start with the basic rules of Thought Magic.

Why do uses for idle thinking scale and intense thinking don't?

Idle vs intense feels clunky but it works.

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #28 on: July 06, 2020, 05:12:59 PM »
Why do uses for idle thinking scale and intense thinking don't?

Intense thinking is intended for encounters, while idle is intended for out-of-combat casting. I don't want any poor DM to wait for a player to shuffle their deck over and over until they can express a buff with Extend Idea or whatever. That's mainly what I'm concerned will happen if I give the player too many periods of intense thinking.

So yeah, it's mostly because the number of encounters you get in a day doesn't seem to change much as you level.

Actually, what if I just give the player a set amount of periods of idle thinking (like 3 + hand size + 1/2 modifier), and then make it so that intense thinking counts as 2 periods of idle thinking? That way, the scaling doesn't seem as weird, and your magical options don't go unused in days with less than 3 encounters. I feel like that would also incentivize players not to needlessly enter periods of intense thinking, since it's generally better to save it for utility unless you're in combat.

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #29 on: July 06, 2020, 08:55:44 PM »
Given that the average number of encounters per day is recommended to be 4, 3 feels like a weird place to be.

Having everything come out of the same pool would simplify things, I like it.

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #30 on: July 07, 2020, 06:53:08 PM »
Okay, idle and intense thinking per day have been changed to pull from a single pool of daily uses. Thanks!

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #31 on: July 10, 2020, 01:21:11 PM »
On to The Creative.

Why isn't Sense Motive on the skill list?  It gets Bluff and Diplomacy.

What happens if your imaginary friend dies?  Can you choose to have it not progress (for example, if it being huge or garguantuan would make it useless because you spend all of your time inside)?

I'm not a big fan of Masterpiece.

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #32 on: July 11, 2020, 07:23:14 AM »
On to The Creative.

Why isn't Sense Motive on the skill list?  It gets Bluff and Diplomacy.

Fair enough. Fixed.

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What happens if your imaginary friend dies?  Can you choose to have it not progress (for example, if it being huge or garguantuan would make it useless because you spend all of your time inside)?

I actually addressed both of those questions, though I don't blame you for missing them in the wall of text:

Quote from: TheGeometer
Whenever the Creative has the ability to gain a new friend, she may select either the form made available to her most recently or any of the forms detailed at lower levels. A new imaginary friend can be created either when an old one dies or when the Creative dismisses it (a free action), but either way, the process requires 24 uninterrupted hours of concentration.

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I'm not a big fan of Masterpiece.

Alright, fine, I can take a hint. My track record is 3/3 reviewers not liking Masterpiece. I figured WBL is a cool thing to tinker with that not many classes address, but I guess it runs into too many issues. I swapped it out with a new class feature called Worldbuilding. Let me know what you think. I figured the demiplane could make a good setting for someone who wanted to run with that, and I don't think it's too broken at that level assuming I didn't miss an obvious loophole.

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #33 on: July 11, 2020, 07:37:47 PM »
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Creatures from her world that are brought outside the plane die within 1 minute.

How does the Creative and their party not die after a minute?

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #34 on: July 11, 2020, 07:42:50 PM »
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Creatures from her world that are brought outside the plane die within 1 minute.

How does the Creative and their party not die after a minute?

Good catch. I meant creatures native to the plane. Fixed now.
« Last Edit: July 11, 2020, 07:44:45 PM by TheGeometer »

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #35 on: July 11, 2020, 08:02:52 PM »
Ahh, that makes way more sense.

Other than this being the only written rules I've seen that attempt to codify an actual viable ecosystem I think it looks better than Masterpiece.

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #36 on: July 31, 2020, 07:10:18 PM »
Are people still reviewing this? Because from a balance perspective, I'm most concerned about the ideas, and nobody seems to have read that far yet

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #37 on: August 01, 2020, 08:47:00 PM »
You never responded and I forgot about it.   :lmao

Offline TheGeometer

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #38 on: August 02, 2020, 09:25:25 AM »
I just figured we were done with the Creative, so we were going to move onto the next thing

Offline Nanshork

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Re: Thought Magic [magic system, base classes, & feats]
« Reply #39 on: August 02, 2020, 07:24:43 PM »
I just figured we were done with the Creative, so we were going to move onto the next thing

I was done with the creative, you're right there.  However, I check all threads with new posts and forget about things I posted unless I am reminded that I wasn't done yet.