Being an avid RPG player I run into the "Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards" complaint a lot, that warrior classes are useless at higher levels. After reading Order of the Stick I started to wonder just how enraging it would be for people in a world where spellcasters acted the same way some players do and wondered what might result from that. Then I was playing Diablo 2 and ran across the "Blood Mana Curse" which makes players spend their HP instead of Mana for spells, and this idea came about.
The backstory of this world is that the warriors and their gods god tired of spellcasters and their gods always lording their superiority over them and used the power of prayer to add a fundamental new law to reality, a law that causes all spells and spell-like-abilities to extract a cost in blood from their casters.
In this world, every time a spell or SLA is used the user takes lethal HP damage equal to the cast spells level (metamagic feats increase this cost up to the adjusted spell level). This damage cannot be negated or reduced in any way though it can be healed after it has been taken and it can kill a caster who uses a spell though the spell will still trigger before the caster dies or falls unconscious.
The Damage cannot be reduced by DR or SR or any other damage reducing effects, the caster must pay the HP cost each time they cast a spell or use an SLA.
Cantrips, Orisons, Knacks and other level-0 spells inflict no damage but still cause pain to the caster.
The pain caused may force a concentration check on the caster every time they use a spell
Yes even Kineticist's wild talents will inflict lethal damage in addition to the burn cost and nonlethal damage.
Supernatural Abilities are not affected so Lay on Hands and Channel Energy can still be used.
What does everyone think of this idea? What kinds of new feats and classes might come from a world where this was a fundamental law of the universe?
Yes I know this is a straight up nerf to all spellcasters as a punishment for "hubris" as it were but I wanted to see what people thought of this.
The concentration check is going to be forgettable to a dedicated spellcaster eventually, but will be difficult at first - probably enough to make a wizard played from level 1 impractical. The hit point cost will be minor but annoying.
How would magic items interact with this?
I'm going to be blunt and say this sounds like a horrible idea for several reasons, though I will mention some ideas for what might exist in this world as feats and classes.
1: Casters still only have 1d6 hit dice, which unless you're enough of a cupcake gm (like me) to just give them the maximum roll, the casters will become even squishier than they are already, which to me seems like taking a magic rebalance in the wrong direction.
2: Don't make Kineticists take this lethal damage, Kineticists are under-powered as is because of Burn.
3: You're punishing the player more than the character for playing a mage when some players playing mages might just like playing magic users
But, on something like you actually want (feats classes etc.) here's an idea or two.
Bloody Mitigation: halves damage taken from casting
Bloodied Resolve: When at half HP or less gain +2 to your CL
Bloody Phylactery (crafting feat?): (Requires bloody mitigation and Craft Potion) You can create a small container with your own blood. take an amount of lethal damage of your choice (but this cannot reduce you to less than 50% of your maximum hit points). However this phylactery has two major advantages. Firstly, when you cast you can choose to have the lethal damage given to the health pool within your phylactery instead of yourself (or give it to another caster to use its energy instead of losing their own HP) And secondly you can choose to void the contents of your phylactery to give yourself or another imbiber temporary hp equal to double what you put into it. you however cannot use this temporary HP to cast spells.
Classes
Blood mage: a d10 hit die 3/4 bab 6 level caster completely centered around this bloody idea, acting similar to the magus but replacing spell combat with Bloody Combination
Bloody Combination (Ex): you have learned to create special blades that can drain the blood of the opponent, and to use their blood in place of your own, when making a full attack action with a weapon that deals slashing or piercing damage you can make a melee touch attack, if this attack succeeds you deal your weapon's damage again, and if you cast a spell within your next round you can use the damage you dealt to your foe in place of the blood cost for casting (if your next spell takes more than the damage you dealt, you still take the rest). any excess blood left over by the end of your next turn is made mundane and useless.
I'm going to be blunt and say this sounds like a horrible idea for several reasons, though I will mention some ideas for what might exist in this world as feats and classes.
1: Casters still only have 1d6 hit dice, which unless you're enough of a cupcake gm (like me) to just give them the maximum roll, the casters will become even squishier than they are already, which to me seems like taking a magic rebalance in the wrong direction.
2: Don't make Kineticists take this lethal damage, Kineticists are under-powered as is because of Burn.
3: You're punishing the player more than the character for playing a mage when some players playing mages might just like playing magic users
But, on something like you actually want (feats classes etc.) here's an idea or two.
Bloody Mitigation: halves damage taken from casting
Bloodied Resolve: When at half HP or less gain +2 to your CL
Bloody Phylactery (crafting feat?): (Requires bloody mitigation and Craft Potion) You can create a small container with your own blood. take an amount of lethal damage of your choice (but this cannot reduce you to less than 50% of your maximum hit points). However this phylactery has two major advantages. Firstly, when you cast you can choose to have the lethal damage given to the health pool within your phylactery instead of yourself (or give it to another caster to use its energy instead of losing their own HP) And secondly you can choose to void the contents of your phylactery to give yourself or another imbiber temporary hp equal to double what you put into it. you however cannot use this temporary HP to cast spells.Classes
Blood mage: a d10 hit die 3/4 bab 6 level caster completely centered around this bloody idea, acting similar to the magus but replacing spell combat with Bloody CombinationBloody Combination (Ex): you have learned to create special blades that can drain the blood of the opponent, and to use their blood in place of your own, when making a full attack action with a weapon that...
I appreciate your feedback, again this was just an idea I had kicking around and wanted a larger feedback size than just my group.
1) Casters stop being squishy after a certain point, with many of them able to avoid damage outright or just deflect it with spells (one of my players plays a sorcerer who only takes damage 1/10th of the time). One of the complaints I hear is that with the right spells a caster can be a better fighter than a fighter and a better rogue than a rogue and so on which renders those classes redundant.
2) As much as I would like to agree with you, part of the issue is that this plays favorites and doesn't make in-universe sense that just one subset of SLA users gets excluded from a universal law. A compromise I can make is that part of burn becomes lethal damage instead so the damage from burn remains the same just with some lethal and some nonlethal. Also Kineticists aren't under powered as far as I can see, at least in my last game there was a kineticist who could nuke entire encounters without taking burn, thanks to infusion specialization and Supercharge, and only took burn when he Novaed during boss fights, also he managed to get his Con score to 50 so even with daily burn requirements to maintain peak elemental overflow he still had more HP than the other members of the party, other players complained he was Over-powered, granted on the same level as the other full casters in the group but he did have the advantage of never running out of his basic 10d6 touch attack every round by the end.
3) yes true, but then again this spawned out of complaints I heard in the real world.
As for the feat suggestions,
Bloody Mitigation: Nice idea but would probably need a higher level requirement (able to cast 6-7th level spells) and specify that it still rounds damage up (so 1st level spells aren't affected) that or it only affects a certain number of spell levels. I'm no game designer so I Can't say what is balanced here
Bloody Resolve: Great idea, no suggestions here
Bloody phylactery: another great idea and it strikes me as something in-universe wizards would create to try and use this new world to their advantage.
Blood Mage: too little to work with but a great piece of lore to go with the phylactery above as there are always people who want to make other people pay the cost for their risks.
I will say this in conclusion: that this spawned out of hearing people complain that casters weren't nerfed enough in Pathfinder and that combat focused characters still felt under-powered. I'd still be interested in hearing more ideas about this, again this is just an idea not some sort of mandate or permanent rule I'm using in my own campaigns going forwards.
One thing I'm interested in is seeing how this would change the actual world where this was a universal law, the cultural changes about how people think of magic, how guilds and churches would reacts and so on.
Well saying about how I said Kineticist was underpowered, I'd like to steal a few quotes from the net.
"The kineticist is a lot of things. It is an incredibly clunky, unintuitive, and poorly-designed class, full of trap options, complexity for the sake of complexity, opaque rules, and poor layout (worse than Magic of Incarnum, for those who’re familiar with 3.5)." From a discussion on kineticists in Stack Exchange. https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/105540/what-tier-is-the-kineticist
"t least, until the playtest came out. The playtest version of the Kineticist was a mess, suffering from almost every problem under the sun; lack of accuracy, lack of utility, lack of damage, and a powerset that required drowning the user in nonlethal damage just to stay vaguely competitive. Unfortunately, now that the full release is out, the Kineticist seems to have not gotten nearly as much of a boost as it needed to have. And yet, there’s plenty of awesome concepts lying under the mountain of fiddly details and terrible mechanics, so there’s still need for a guide."
"Now, I’m not saying that the class is quite as utterly broken as the Truenamer. Parts of the Kineticist are entirely functional, if not actually quite good. The main problem the Kineticist has is more akin to the Soulknife (the 3.5 version, not Dreamscarred Press’ much improved Pathfinder conversion), where the class features the class received were overestimated to the point of being arbitrarily nerfed into the ground." both from the guide 'Sucking counts as airbending, right?' http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?432093-Sucking-Counts-as-Airb ending-Right-A-Guide-to-the-Kineticist
You can make kineticist work of course, but a ton brings it down to the point that there are tons of bad choices, and effectively doubling their burn cost (+tax assuming even base blasts still proc blood magic) just turns them from bad but with potential into BAD
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This sounds a lot like C. S. Friedman's Magister trilogy. In this world, power their spells with their long life force, so every spell brings them closer to death. Magisters, on the other hand, get their power from the life force from a random stranger, slowly killing that person.
It's an interesting idea. I'd suggest allowing the spellcasters to regain all hit points lost from from spell casting after a period of rest so they're not dependent on the cleric blowing all of her hit points to save the other part members.
What's the point of making your own world if you can't make your own rules? I say go for it, it'll make for a memorable game even if it isn't particularly well balanced.
That said, have you ever encountered the Spheres of Power? There's a dearth of 3rd party material from Drop Dead Studios for making your own unique systems of magic, rather than the DnD default that might not work for all worlds. One of the example casting traditions is blood magic, which is both cast from hitpoints and, in my opinion, gracefully done and exceedingly well designed.
You can find the Spheres of Power for free on d20pfsrd, or on the dedicated wiki. If it makes your game more memorable, I'd recommend purchasing the material!
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What's the point of making your own world if you can't make your own rules? I say go for it, it'll make for a memorable game even if it isn't particularly well balanced.
That said, have you ever encountered the Spheres of Power? There's a dearth of 3rd party material from Drop Dead Studios for making your own unique systems of magic, rather than the DnD default that might not work for all worlds. One of the example casting traditions is blood magic, which is both cast from hitpoints and, in my opinion, gracefully done and exceedingly well designed.
You can find the Spheres of Power for free on d20pfsrd, or on the dedicated wiki. If it makes your game more memorable, I'd recommend purchasing the material!
I love that you mention Spheres, not just because I personally love the system but the fact that its system works great for this kind of idea... though at the same time there's a small issue with using this for the blood magic of the world anyway.
It sounds like OP wants casting to be a really big deal when it comes to draining any character, but blood magic in Spheres inversely affects different kinds of casters.
Conjurers with enough investment (Base Talent + Elongated casting to get the Greater Summoning talent and using one of your starting form talents for Lingering companion) you can have your companion up for 24 hours. meaning that the loss from blood magic is minimal because you spend maybe 1-2 hp at the start of the day and just heal it off with time.
Basically so long as you don't have to cast more than once per hour (which is possible) you don't lose anything from it.
Blasters get absolutely shafted by blood magic in any form because even though they're not putting in any investment of points into it they're taking damage constantly.
I will also say that you're right in regards to "it can be interesting so try it" but... To steal a quote from fawful's minion.
"There's no more of a b#~*% way to go than accidentally killing yourself"
He was talking about video game fall damage, but I feel that it applies here.
I can't help but think that if a player lost their character because they either spent too much on the spells they need, or because their healer didn't have enough hp to survive healing their wounds. Tables would be flipped
Edit/addition: Basically my point is that when I say punishing the player more than the character, the most un-fun thing you can do as a GM is to take a character and make them not good at the thing they're supposed to contribute to the party.
This could give rise to casters using other peoples’ hit points as well. Impractical during combat, but easy enough when there is time to perform a bloodletting ritual or a sacrifice. ;-)
Let me throw the OP a life preserver. You can offer this as an option.
You can also take away the second layer of bonus spells. For spells per day, you have the spells per day actually listed, spells granted by an ability stat, (Int., Wis., or Cha.), but no more school, bloodline, or domain spells castable per day. They can use them in an available spell slot, or use blood magic to cast any spell known.
It may be too late for this topic.
I see a few torches and pitchforks out there already.
Just some options to think about for future topics.
Let me throw the OP a life preserver. You can offer this as an option.
You can also take away the second layer of bonus spells. For spells per day, you have the spells per day actually listed, spells granted by an ability stat, (Int., Wis., or Cha.), but no more school, bloodline, or domain spells castable per day. They can use them in an available spell slot, or use blood magic to cast any spell known.It may be too late for this topic.
I see a few torches and pitchforks out there already.
Just some options to think about for future topics.
Not a bad idea, granted those second layer of bonus spells is minimal (and non-existent for sorcerers who get extra spells known).
As I've said from the beginning this was just speculation and looking for ideas, and I've received some good ideas and advice. I might check out spheres of magic in the future if I'm looking for something new to use. The blood magic idea was always speculation and here was just a way to get feedback, granted I wasn't aware that bringing up ideas and concepts would get people trying to hunt me down like Frankenstein's monster but I guess lesson learned.
As to the comment about Kineticists, this was more about the lore than the mechanics for me so that was just how I wanted to set things. It's possible that kineticists would be unaffected due to their own abilities already dealing with non-lethal self damage but again I can't think of a good reason, lore wise, for this to be the case.
I've seen a few topics locked because posters hated the topic enough to start posting whatever the moderators wouldn't tolerate. You are in no danger. It's certain monster topics that bring the angry mobs out.
Was I the one that made it sound like the angry mobs were coming? I wasn't trying to.. I just can't help but be worried about the book throwing that could happen from this mechanic.
Sorry, rough month for personal relationships. Thank you all for your feedback. I posted a new topic that I'm hoping to get some feedback on.
I'll look forward to it.
I'll look forward to it.
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2v1dh?Making-Magic-Items-feels-more-important