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Has anyone toyed with this?
Basic Premise
Anything that's X/Day (Spells or otherwise) gets altered to a different mechanic. Perhaps things recover with a short rest. Perhaps you have to make an activation roll, which gets more difficult the more often you do it, but again, recovers with a short rest.
Explanation
X/day abilities are balanced around the assumption of (the equivalent of) 4 CR appropriate fights per day. Each fight typically lasts 4-5 rounds, IIRC. So X/Day combat abilities are balanced around the idea of "I can do this X/16 to X/20 of the time."
Reasons to Change It
1. If changed, the Players cannot Nova their abilities. This is good most of the time (not all players have the ability to nova). And being able to do so can make the guys who can't have less fun.
2. X/day abilities tend to be more powerful than at will abilities due to their limited use. If those characters aren't getting pushed to do the equivalent of 4 fights per day, those characters are significantly more powerful.
3. This frees you up to have less, or more combat encounters, as you (the GM/Players) want, without buggering the character balance.
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Due to action economy it doesn't really matter by the time players reach level 10, they will want to use their action the most efficient way possible. Using powers/abilities x/day rarely ever run up because you most likely rather be doing something else during combat. Just like a paladin rather be doing swift actions to heal himself and use the rest of his action to full attack...cast a spell? why? Just justice smite down.
The issue is that not only do classes get more uses per day, but fights tend to get much shorter, as levels get higher. Now, I like this idea, as, of all the problems I had with 4e, encounter resources were far from one of them, but the issue I have is that stuff like this, where you vastly alter the base mechanics of the game tend to no work out too well.
Also, this only really works for combat abilities. Doing this for noncombat abilities would make them too powerful. And there are too many things that blur the line.
It is something that makes me wish I had the patience to write up a system of my own, since while I don't like 4e as a whole, a lot of the individual mechanics or decisions, I like. Sadly the only people who seem to be trying to use these mechanics are trying to recreate 4e as a whole, which I'm not looking for.
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How would it be a power increase to stop players from spamming noncombat abilities?
It seems pretty straightforward to me:
If you're wanting to transform them into per encounter powers:
x/day = (x/4)/encounter.
If x/encounter is fractional (which it will be most of the time) you need to determine how to handle that.
Alternately, use those rules for a mana pool, and take the total mana pool points/day it gives you, and divide it by four for encounters.
Personally, I would prefer to see the resources done away with, and instead have something similar to shadowrun or buffy rpg spellcasting.
The tricky/important thing is to try to maintain the same balance, while excising the assumption you want to be free of.
How would it be a power increase to stop players from spamming noncombat abilities?
It's not stopping them from spamming noncombat abilities, it's enabling it; If you can get back an ability with a 10-15 minute rest, that was designed for use some set number of times per day (lets just say 4), you can take two hours and double the uses and still have uses to spare, so long as you take a 15 minute breather. With combat stuff, this isn't much of a problem, but with stuff like Fabricate spells or other noncombat abilities, it gets out of hand quickly. Essentially, if it's not in a time-sensitive situation (like combat), there's very little that separates it from an at-will ability, and if it's broken as an at will ability, it'd be broken as an X/short rest ability.
It's not that I don't want something like this to work, but I feel like taking a system and trying to force it to be something else won't work. There's too much predicated on the assumptions of X/Day, that get messed up by removing that assumption.
I am not entirely sold on the idea.
Firstly, I haven't really encountered a problem with novaing due to X/day abilities, unless you count spells as such.
Imo, X/day abilities work, because they require the players to balance the ressource consumption. While there might be more or fewer encounters than four per day, not knowing if they'll need the juice around the next corner, tend to make PCs hold back on their ressources.
Having abilities reset after a short rest is more problematic, as I see it. Suddenly it doesn't become a choice of using them or not, but rather just using it once or twice in each encounter.
As a GM, I find it rather easy to make a set up, where the players can't take a 15 minute adventuring day, as the world around them isn't static just because they choose to wait a day or two. It requires me to put an whole other level of stress on the adventure, if I am going to make it a hard choice to take a short rest.
As an alternative, if you are concerned with X/day abilities going nova, you should consider putting a time limit on their use, like monsters' breath weapon. Whether 1d4 round, 1 minute or 1 hour, it derives the PCs the option to spam certain powers. You could keep the daily limit to avoid abuse in some instances.
But it is a huge amount of work, determining for each ability how often it is reasonable to use.
As for the activation roll, I can only see it work for certain abilities. Less powerful abilities is going to be a non-option in the game, if the is an actual risk of wasting your action trying to activate them.
I think it would be better to add a chance of a negative consequence of using said abilities. In some games, I've had use of magic be strainful to the caster. In the hard version, a spellcraft check was needed to avoid a con penalty when casting spells. In a milder version, said check gave non-lethal damage.
The point here, was more to do with limiting magic and make it a grittier business, but something similar might be used to limit the use of X/day abilities.
An alternative would be to make them an Ability check.
Replace something that is 3+Cha modifier per day with a Cha check to use.
Start at DC 12 and each time you use the ability the DC increases by 2. After a full night's rest the DC resets back down to 12.
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X/day keeps the wizards at bay.
If it were up to me, Sorcerers would use a mana pool, Faith characters would use an activation roll, and Wizards would do everything using limited resources. Those just make more sense to me as far as roleplay goes, but then again I have no idea about the complex algebra that goes into designing this stuff.
Again, this is something that's largely determined by roleplay versus rollplay, I'm big on the side of roleplay here. I am always, and likely always will be an advocate of the 3.5 rule Recharge Magic
I wouldn't be above a similar system being implemented towards other x/days, within reason. It does change up the balance a bit, but by applying this uniformly, it ends up becoming a great way to make sense with your character, and worry a little less about daily resource management, and more about your in-combat resource management.
"So you can call fire from nothing, and push lightning out through your nose, but you can't put together the levitation spell you already did twice today?"
"*Sigh* Yes, that's correct."
"Why?"
"Because REASONS THAT'S WHY GET OUTTA MY FACE!
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I've been experimenting with the following recharge time for abilities that were previously x/day. It has made things a bit interesting, thusfar.
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I am not entirely sold on the idea.
Firstly, I haven't really encountered a problem with novaing due to X/day abilities, unless you count spells as such.
Spells are the most obvious example of X/Day abilities.
Imo, X/day abilities work, because they require the players to balance the ressource consumption. While there might be more or fewer encounters than four per day, not knowing if they'll need the juice around the next corner, tend to make PCs hold back on their ressources.
That is, assuming on most days, there are 4 fights. If, on average, there are only 2 or 3 fights due to a slightly less combat heavy game, or if there are more than 4 routinely because of players playstyles (say if 5 or 6 fights a day becomes common) then the the balance of classes with X/day is completely thrown out of whack.
Having abilities reset after a short rest is more problematic, as I see it. Suddenly it doesn't become a choice of using them or not, but rather just using it once or twice in each encounter.
As a GM, I find it rather easy to make a set up, where the players can't take a 15 minute adventuring day, as the world around them isn't static just because they choose to wait a day or two. It requires me to put an whole other level of stress on the adventure, if I am going to make it a hard choice to take a short rest.
This is how I have managed this in the past. But that means you *have* to run that intense of a game. The GM may want to run something less combat heavy, and in that case, those X/Day powers are suddenly much better. I find myself about to run a different style of campaign, wherein I intend for about 1/3 of the game to be kingdom building, and the players may not have 4 encounters a day on average.
As an alternative, if you are concerned with X/day abilities going nova, you should consider putting a time limit on their use, like monsters' breath weapon. Whether 1d4 round, 1 minute or 1 hour, it derives the PCs the option to spam certain powers. You could keep the daily limit to avoid abuse in some instances.
But it is a huge amount of work, determining for each ability how often it is reasonable to use.
Hmm. That is an interesting idea, as well.
As for the activation roll, I can only see it work for certain abilities. Less powerful abilities is going to be a non-option in the game, if the is an actual risk of wasting your action trying to activate them.
Perhaps. People make attack rolls all the time even though there is a chance of a wasted action.
I think it would be better to add a chance of a negative consequence of using said abilities. In some games, I've had use of magic be strainful to the caster. In the hard version, a spellcraft check was needed to avoid a con penalty when casting spells. In a milder version, said check gave non-lethal damage.
The point here, was more to do with limiting magic and make it a grittier business, but something similar might be used to limit the use of X/day abilities.
That could work as well. You'd want it to get more difficult the more spells they cast, and the more powerful spells they cast, but you'd want them to also get better at it the more levels they have, the result being a 20th level wizard could spam 1st level spells with nearly no consequence, but would only be able to cast a couple 9th level spells.
Have you ever played Iron Kingdoms? They have this arcane pool thing and each spell costs a certain amount of arcane points to activate. With a lot of thinking you could turn spells from X/day into arcane points to activate, and then change how much damage things do. Like yea you can cast a fireball, but depending on how strong you want that fireball depends on how many points your willing to spend. And your allowed so many arcane points per turn. So whatever your casting stat is plus your caster level could determine your arcane points per turn and so on. Its a bit different but it works good in Iron kingdoms. I say arcane but you can use it for divine casters too. The problem with that is every round a wizard will just lob a crap ton of weak fireballs all over the place, or a druid will just stand back and chain lightning everything to death. Which is really what they end up doing anyways if they arent changing into some freakishly strong animal.
Personally i think the X/day is more balanced for gameplay, while an arcane pool is better off movie-like where sorcerers spend hours blasting each other with magic.
There's something like this available already, in the form spell points.
If it were up to me, Sorcerers would use a mana pool, Faith characters would use an activation roll, and Wizards would do everything using limited resources. Those just make more sense to me as far as roleplay goes, but then again I have no idea about the complex algebra that goes into designing this stuff.
That would certainly give them all a unique flavor, but it would not solve the balance annoyance I'm looking to get rid of.
Again, this is something that's largely determined by roleplay versus rollplay, I'm big on the side of roleplay here. I am always, and likely always will be an advocate of the 3.5 rule Recharge Magic
I wouldn't be above a similar system being implemented towards other x/days, within reason. It does change up the balance a bit, but by applying this uniformly, it ends up becoming a great way to make sense with your character, and worry a little less about daily resource management, and more about your in-combat resource management.
"So you can call fire from nothing, and push lightning out through your nose, but you can't put together the levitation spell you already did twice today?"
"*Sigh* Yes, that's correct."
"Why?"
"Because REASONS THAT'S WHY GET OUTTA MY FACE!
I was unaware of this mechanic. It's interesting, and may work well in the future.
I've been experimenting with the following recharge time for abilities that were previously x/day. It has made things a bit interesting, thus far.
Ah. I see that's for SLAs. That could work for them, though that seems to be assuming you have the same number of times per day, no?
Like, if an ability is 7/day at third level, how would that convert to your cooldowns?
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So, here are some of the options I'm seeing, if one wanted to get rid of X/Day.
I'm going to refer to people with X/day abilities as wizards, for simplicity. However, I actually mean wizards, sorcerers, druids, barbarians, paladins, etc.
1. Recharge Magic: This is fairly elegant in that wizards are powered down if you have less encounters per day, they're powered up if you have more encounters per day, and "out of combat" spells will have more of a cooldown than in-combat spells. The downside, is if you want to play a spellcaster who uses lots of wall of stone to control a battlefield, now you can't.
It would need some tweaking, and you'd have to figure out how to handle the cooldown times for other abilities, but I think it could be quite good. Likely the cooldown times would scale based on the ability's old progression and the assumed number of encounters and duration of encounters. So if you have an ability that is 8/day, based on 4 fights per day and 4 rounds of combat per fight (16 rounds total) you have an ability you can use 50% of the time, IE 1 round cooldown.
Da'ath has one he's using for SLA progression, which I think has potential.
2. Spell Points: This is still based around X/Day, but you have the points to decide what you use them for. It's granting increased flexibility. This could have potential as a universal pool for stuff. I think you'd want to figure out how to do a good job with it for multiclassing, and move basically all limited use abilities into this system, as well as provide 1/4 the points, and some means of recharging them. You may want to combine it with the cooldowns for some out of combat abilities you don't want people to spam in non-time sensitive parts of the game.
3. Drawbacks, such as potentially taking nonlethal damage, or ability damage that goes away or some such, which you would make a check to avoid based on your level and the power of the thing you're attempting, so you can still cast meteor storm several times in one combat, but you'll still really want to weigh your options to decide if its worth it.
4. An Activation roll, which means you're risking failure each time you cast it. I'm not necessarily convinced this is a bad idea. If you have 4 6th level spells per day, your first casting should have a 100% chance of success,the second a 75% chance of success, the third a 50% chance of success, and the fourth a 25% chance of success. However, if you were to get rest, you'd be back up to 100%. It becomes tricky if you have less than 4/day. If something is 1/day, do you want to risk 25% success rate to cast it? In that case, maybe the first use should still be 100%, but it takes a full day to recover, or something. Combining an activation roll with the recharge. You'd be recharging your success rate, rather than the spell in its entirety.
Hmmm. Perhaps by combining these things, or using some combination of them, it would be better.
Design philosophy-wise I agree more with a universal stamina/fatigue pool rather than per day abilities and spontaneous casting but I think this breaks down when it comes to spells. Particularly the non-combat spells that can completely bypass or ruin encounters. Spells are simply too effective to have them work on a rechargeable mechanic without rewriting them.
Yes but that seems to require a lot of rewriting because one would have to look at individual spells and make a judgement call or make a formula that does not work universally, which I'm not to fond of. not because of the work, someone else would be doing that work, but the fact that when third party material or material from campaign settings/player companions come online it's harder to implement those kind of house rules.
Yes, that's true. You'd have to come up with a formula for the general case, and then look at individual spells and see what they need for cooldown.
Recharge magic already did that here, though it's not fully balanced.
So, here are some of the options I'm seeing, if one wanted to get rid of X/Day.
I'm going to refer to people with X/day abilities as wizards, for simplicity. However, I actually mean wizards, sorcerers, druids, barbarians, paladins, etc.
1. Recharge Magic: This is fairly elegant in that wizards are powered down if you have less encounters per day, they're powered up if you have more encounters per day, and "out of combat" spells will have more of a cooldown than in-combat spells. The downside, is if you want to play a spellcaster who uses lots of wall of stone to control a battlefield, now you can't.
It would need some tweaking, and you'd have to figure out how to handle the cooldown times for other abilities, but I think it could be quite good. Likely the cooldown times would scale based on the ability's old progression and the assumed number of encounters and duration of encounters. So if you have an ability that is 8/day, based on 4 fights per day and 4 rounds of combat per fight (16 rounds total) you have an ability you can use 50% of the time, IE 1 round cooldown.
I also like it because it provides different cooldowns to classes who spontaneously cast, such as sorcs, and charts for paladin, bard, etc. I really think that this has the best baseline to achieve what you want, but it would take a lot of work (and more skill than I have) to balance other x/day abilities on a similar scale.
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Yes, that's true. You'd have to come up with a formula for the general case, and then look at individual spells and see what they need for cooldown.Recharge magic already did that here, though it's not fully balanced.
That handles all of the spells in the D&D 3.5 PHB. I was referring to covering all the other spells that people have from other sources, and all of the pathfinder exclusives.
Probably the easiest way to do it would be to assign cooldowns as things come up, and do it gradually.
Please note that as all my info comes from random watching of documentary’s and the odd wiki search. It should not be quoted, I'm no expert on these things. If you look up Mana, Ki & a lot of other stuff used in games/shows/ect as 'power sources' for 'spells' and/or 'magical ability’s' you will find that they are normally historically linked to some form of spiritual energy in their original source/belief system. A lot of magic incantations were prayers to spirits/gods/demons, so bringing Divine casters into the same system is also justified.
So making all the X/Day ability’s be powered by the same source is a reasonable idea. The problem I see with standard systems for this is multi-classing, if you take a level of wizard after taking 10 of fighter the MP you get is for a first level character and therefore likely less than fighter level 11 in spite of wizard being a higher MP granting class. My answer would be to make it so MP gain is much like HP gain, its the same no matter what level you are gaining. I think if you take the number of 1st level spells per day available at level 20 (halve it for the old halve casters like paladins/rangers, and Wizards don't get the bonus slot per day from being specialized) plus the caster modifier and maybe even add 2; then I think you may land up with a good starting point. Next problem is the fighter bonus MP from a high modifier, what do they use? Int? Wis? or Cha? Or do we give them none at all... I like the idea of switching the Divine casters to Cha (as paladins already are), making sorcerers Wis and then making all bonus MP be based off Wis. Most MP systems I've seen land up making all caster class's spontaneous, and then giving no/little bonus to the class's that originally were. I think having the stat that sets your spell DC be the same stat that give you MP is a good buff to replace the specialness they lose (Walking isn't a super power in comic books because most people can do it).
Wow that came out longer than I thought it would... Sorry for the wall of text.
Simple.
Every encounter is APL +4. Maybe +3 if your players are kind of new to the game.
That's it. That's all there is to it. Your barbarians will always be raging, your paladins always smiting, your wizards always casting their best spells, the bard will always be boosting the party, the monk will always be using ki to get an extra miss, the cleric will always have the party at full health, and so on.
That means every encounter needs to be a big deal. You can kid yourself that your party won't always be able to rest at all between encounters, but I guarantee they'll rope trick themselves a solution or two.
X/day abilities add a huge layer to the game; resources management. If you don't like it, removal isn't hard. It's just work.
I've been experimenting with the following recharge time for abilities that were previously x/day. It has made things a bit interesting, thus far.Ah. I see that's for SLAs. That could work for them, though that seems to be assuming you have the same number of times per day, no?
Like, if an ability is 7/day at third level, how would that convert to your cooldowns?
I apologize for it taking a bit for me to respond. Life is busy of late.
At the moment, we're using it exclusively for racial spell-like abilities. While my players weren't terribly interested in the idea originally, they really seem to like it now. I intend to expand it to class features and the like, but without a "direct conversion" of x per day to recharge time - I'll probably go with an 8 - 10 hour adventuring day model and base the average recharge time off this.
Looking at the 7/day @ 3rd level example you've provided, I'd probably give it a recharge time equivalent to that of a 0-level spell and use the same progression I used for it - eventually becoming an at-will ability. Due to action economy, these models haven't proven over-the-top just yet.
Hmm. Attempting to logic-train this ...
The game seems to be designed around 4 or 5 encounters between rests, so it seems you could simply divide the number of uses by 4 or 5 and give it that many uses per encounter.
Hmm. Attempting to logic-train this ...
The game seems to be designed around 4 or 5 encounters between rests, so it seems you could simply divide the number of uses by 4 or 5 and give it that many uses per encounter.
But that's how 4e sucked so hard, remember rage once a day?