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1) XP costs are just a supergargantuan PITA (and besides, there's nothing a higher level PFS character would love to do more than delay retirement).I always wondered how Living Greyhawk would have handled a character with 100% XP penalty...
I don't think anyone every tried (due to probably hideously suboptimal character builds required), but I would guess that it wouldn't be permitted as would be an obvious attempt to delay retirement (which was heavily frowned upon even if the mechanics of it were fairly arbitrary).
I do remember designing a barb1/cler1/figh2/rang2/wildrunner wood elf who, at 11th, planned to advance ranger to 3rd (incurring a 40% penalty) and then to 4th at 12th (incurring 60%), permitting me to play the APL10 to APL14 "gravy" range of top-tier mods for a long time (PCs retired at 15th in the later years of LG). (That character was so ridiculously overpowered that I quit playing him at 7th level; he could literally slaughter anything in a rage/frenzy with 26s in both STR and DEX. Pounce? Who needs that when you're killing things in one or two swats anyway. Standard LG point-buy, heh.)
As much as I would like to have a real penalty for character death in the game so as to make the players themselves a bit more nervous about dangerous situations, I'm even more interested in PC continuity. I'd rather my players have their dead characters resurrected than create new characters simply to keep the story and interractions going.
However, I do like the idea of having a cost for spellcasting and magic item crafting beyond just spending some gold. I've mentioned elsewhere that I'm not a fan of having fantastic elements like spells and magic items just being another part of the town's economy, and taxing the caster in some way for enchantments and wishcraft (fer instance) is one story-based way to enforce that.
I don't think XP drain is the right answer, though. Because I'm only looking to enforce the genre for storytelling purposes, I'm okay with a storytelling reason. In this case, the drain on spellcasters for crafting and powerful spells is a slight but noticeable drain on their own life forces in the form of aging them a certain amount of time proportional to the power of the spell.
Making a potion may only add an unnoticeable day to their practical age. Bringing someone back to life, though, could add 5-10 years. Basically this makes NPCs (and, I suppose, PCs) less willing to resurrect any dead villager they come across. They'd have to be pretty close or pretty important to get a spellcaster to give up five years of their lives to bring them back, I would think.
As a side effect, it would also speed along your PC spellcasters into the archetypal white-haired wizards you see in classic fantasy fiction.
To sum up, there is a penalty for powerful spellcasting, raising dead, and enchanting magic items, but it's a price the caster pays and is almost completely story-based, with only the age adjustment table serving as an actual mechanical enforcement to the rule.
Make sense?
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I don't think XP drain is the right answer, though. Because I'm only looking to enforce the genre for storytelling purposes, I'm okay with a storytelling reason. In this case, the drain on spellcasters for crafting and powerful spells is a slight but noticeable drain on their own life forces in the form of aging them a certain amount of time proportional to the power of the spell.Making a potion may only add an unnoticeable day to their practical age. Bringing someone back to life, though, could add 5-10 years. Basically this makes NPCs (and, I suppose, PCs) less willing to resurrect any dead villager they come across. They'd have to be pretty close or pretty important to get a spellcaster to give up five years of their lives to bring them back, I would think.
As a side effect, it would also speed along your PC spellcasters into the archetypal white-haired wizards you see in classic fantasy fiction.
To sum up, there is a penalty for powerful spellcasting, raising dead, and enchanting magic items, but it's a price the caster pays and is almost completely story-based, with only the age adjustment table serving as an actual mechanical enforcement to the rule.
Make sense?
It was there in 1rst and 2nd edition. Worst solution possible.
You can "gather" and spend the XP while currently there are very little way to get younger.Even if it has little real effect on the characters (and it will be not so little in the long run) the majority of the players will simply hate it ant try to find way to circumvent your rule.
Yeah, aging is a bad idea. First, it only hurt some casters - undead casters wouldn't be affected, among others. Dragons would actually get more powerful the more aging spells they cast.
And making it a set amount of years aged unfairly hurts some races. An elf has far more leeway in casting than a half-orc would, as they live far longer. Making it a set percentage helps, but is far too much work to figure, especially for creatures and races that don't have maximum ages listed.
Not to mention aging effects. Casters like the mental attribute boosts from aging. The physical penalties don't matter much. OF course, magical aging shouldn't help with mental bonuses, as those represent the experience (not xp experience, life experience) you gain over the years. So you would have to track two different ages - physical age (for determining the physical score age penalties, and death from old age), and mental age (for the mental ability score bonus from age).
In the end, adding in magical aging is far more work than it is worth. (Actually, the XP penalties could be seen as this. They remove a characters "life force", just as magical aging would remove some of the characters "life force". But using XP penalties has just as many problems as aging effects.)
Actually I wonder what if a pc did not want to come back to life and wanted to move on into the great beyond. So my character has to want to come back to life. What if a player had a will on how his gear would be distributed is an idea I have toyed around with.
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That's pretty much exactly the opposite of how I see the wealth-by-level guidelines. Basically, they're a guideline to how much gear you get when you create a high-level character (and I believe they're based on the average treasure awards minus a bit to compensate for consumables). Once the game is actually on, you get what you get, and if you take the feats and/or class abilities to get more out of them, good for you.
That is EXACTLY what the WBL guidelines are supposed to be for. But somehow that's got mis-interpreted over time, and it seems to be the default assumption now that it's a strict guideline on what the exact net worth of any given character should be.
It's gotta make for some depressing adventuring. You go kill a dragon and claim it's horde, but return home to find exactly the same gp worth of valuable has been stolen from you. :P
It's all relative. Compared to 2e, 3.0 and 3.5 are laughably soft on characters. Compared to the original edition, 2e was somewhat soft on characters. Compared to 4e, Pathfinder is crushingly hard on characters.
I never liked the XP cost to anything. I never could reconcile that against the verisimilitude of the system. It seemed to me to be exactly what it was, a means to control the magic economy through punishing the player through their character. It made no actual sense in any mechanical way. I say this as a player who had his main PC for several years be a wizard wholly devoted to creating magic items, since his major goal in life was to create artifacts.
Whether 3.5 is too easy on characters or not, the XP cost mechanic is one thing I am glad to see finally out of the game.
+1
I normally have a lot of respect for your posts, but here you are insinuating that what should motivate players to play the game (and, thus, characters to adventure) is increasing a decimal (gold count) on a crumbled up piece of paper.
It's gotta make for some depressing adventuring. You go kill a dragon and claim it's horde, but return home to find exactly the same gp worth of valuable has been stolen from you. :P
I don't read Kthulhu's comment that way. The "you" in his "You go kill a dragon" is his character I think, and to that character that "decimal (gold count)" is real gold and not some dried up graphite scratches on pressed and flattened wood fibers...
It's all relative. Compared to 2e, 3.0 and 3.5 are laughably soft on characters. Compared to the original edition, 2e was somewhat soft on characters. Compared to 4e, Pathfinder is crushingly hard on characters.
Mostly this. The one backstep that occurs to me is casting in melee combat; it's tougher in Pathfinder than in 3.5 (though not as bad as 2e).
I play with a group of old school players. Some of us have adapted to a post 1e/2e world better than others. I chuckle at their semi-mock outrage whenever a class or spell does something differently than earlier editions. It leads to exchanges like this:
N00b: "My rogue flanks with the fighter and sneak attacks!"
Grognard: "Rogues only get backstab when they have total surprise!"
N00b: "uh, no, they just need to flank now."
Grognard: "That's a load of. . .!"
I don't read Kthulhu's comment that way. The "you" in his "You go kill a dragon" is his character I think, and to that character that "decimal (gold count)" is real gold and not some dried up graphite scratches on pressed and flattened wood fibers...I normally have a lot of respect for your posts, but here you are insinuating that what should motivate players to play the game (and, thus, characters to adventure) is increasing a decimal (gold count) on a crumbled up piece of paper.
It's gotta make for some depressing adventuring. You go kill a dragon and claim it's horde, but return home to find exactly the same gp worth of valuable has been stolen from you. :P
Exactly!
granted every character has his own motivations to go adventuring, but finding fortune is very high on the list.
Im some ways the game is Softer. But to be honest? There is only one thing i honestly Miss.
I do notice Pcs never run away and Fights tend to be eiher wins or TPKs limping away scared for your lives does not seem to happen. I did find it made the game more thrilling.
But that Said, i honestly found alot of the stuff like Level drain and the whole number of Penalties you could get just were not fun.
A few years ago i was playing a 1ed Monk e was alot of fun and i got him up to around lvl 6 before the game ended. I was looking at the characters Future and realize dmy Dm was likely going to hav eme do that silly Fight the guy above me thing.
Id rolled a little below average hps on my 1d4's and while it was fine in actual play. in a 1 on 1 duel with no magic items or loose half my level? Wasnt going to happen.
Its design concepts like this that make me wonder.
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Short answer: yes.
While I'm glad to see the XP costs going away from crafting, I still keep them for wish/miracle spells. As one poster mentioned its a matter of giving part of yourself to your deity as a cleric.
So, technically, he forgets how he killed that dragon and how he and his friends freed that captured baroness from the evil wizard? Don't make me laugh. EXP costs never made sense. You cannot just unlearn something you learned barring brain damage.
If you don't think that the gold cost is enough, add something else, don't make them forget what they experienced.
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Don't make me laugh. EXP costs never made sense. You cannot just unlearn something you learned barring brain damage.
For me and the various groups I've gamed with over the years, it has always been a matter of these losses being due to the wrenching stress involved (on not just the body, but the very soul itself)...
Dying for example is not just like going to sleep and waking up from a nice afternoon nap (or at least it shouldn't be IMO). I would think that the shock of the soul/spirit being ripped from the body and travelling to another plane of existence should be reflected in the rules of the game…
Casting spells such a wish (or any other "reality shattering" type spell) would be HIGHLY taxing, as these extreme and primordial magical forces you (as a mere mortal) are trying to control and command are coursing and in fact, burning through you. I would expect anyone going through that to come out a changed person, and not always for the better...
But that's just my take...
-That One Digitalelf Fellow-
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The debate about should powerful magic have a cost, really should have it's own thread. While it is slightly related it is only one part of the whole of the thread.
Now with that said, my view on powerful magic and crafting magic items. I prefer a system where rolls have to be made and when casting powerful magic like raise the dead, wish etc or making magic items. Carries a small risk of something going wrong, not a xp cost. More just a risk like a magical backlash or the magic item is cursed. A really bad roll might cause serious problems. I would love a system like that myself.
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While it is slightly related it is only one part of the whole of the thread.
But that is how I see the cost of XP. It is the game mechanical effect of paying the cost for the privilege of being able to cast powerful spells, come back from the dead, creating items of magic, or what have you...
Power should have an in game price, and it is my opinion that this price should somehow affect the character in a very tangible, mechanical way...
Who's to say going through the stress of these things doesn't damage the brain in some minor way?
I see creating magic items as giving a part of yourself to the creation of them...
Again, my opinion...
-That One Digitalelf Fellow-
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XP costs don't work. Most mechanical reductions don't work. I would think DM's suggestion of a chance of failure better than being permanently reduced character-wise. Giving up Con to make items or cast powerful spells will discourage their use, and encourage players to find ways to negate the expenditure, rendering the cost moot. XP costs actually make characters better because they get more power while delaying their level, increasing the power they have. You should only have magic item creation/powerful spells/death cost a high price if you want them to be very rarely used.
My previous 3.5 game consisted almost entirely of casters of some sort and the number one spell used was alter fortune (200 xp cost per a use). It was normal to cast it 5 times or more during each combat. XP costs are insignificant in 3.5 since by delaying your level, while the rest of the party leveled was always in your benefit.
Not so in Pathfinder.