Originally Posted by
Morphic tide
Well, let's look at your suggestions:
1. Mana pool. Usually going to end up a form of de facto cooldown, and it doesn't let larger-scale things stay rare in use later on. It makes scarcity of ability use much harder to work out, because there's nothing to prevent someone from using only the big, flashy things or only the small, efficient things. And most will default to one or the other. So, people will not be using a lot of their abilities at all because they have no incentive to use the smaller effects over the larger effects, resulting in a large chunk of the abilities being dead space. There's also the matter that it's a number that will be constantly re-written over and over with every single ability used and it doesn't support preparation of abilities without getting more complicated than Vancian magic.
I'm not sure how it would "end up a form of de facto cooldown". Just...what? How?
What? How are you imagining the mana system working?
I'm also not sure what the inherent problem of someone
only using either big, flashy things or small, efficient things is. I mean, you need to design the spells with those possibilities in mind, but it's not like that's inherently more constricting or worse to play than the restrictions imposed by forcing players to use a few big, powerful spells and loads off little ones. If it matters that much, just design spells which can't just be replaced by versions with bigger numbers, or spells which work best when combined with other spells, or something.
The last sentence doesn't make sense. Care to elaborate on what the eff you're talking about? Why is ability preparation so much more complicated? Is addition really
that terrifyingly complicated? For that matter, why is it important at all? (D&D is literally the only fantasy thing I've ever seen where preparing specific spells to use in a given day is a thing.)
2. Talisman/item-based magic. The DM has to place all those items and the players have to track all the ingredients. Every single item used has to be tracked and is a separate consumable, which makes it mind-numbingly complicated to make use of without defaulting to a Magic Mart. Because you have to track
every single item by
physically writing it down. And you have to give a list of ingredients for every single talisman/item in the entire game, no exceptions. It's also very external power, reliant on items that can be taken away with the players having little power to stop it, and it's
temporary power as well, lasting only as long as you have the items to craft with.
You seem to assume that the system I'm describing involves players going into town and buying scrolls. That's...not what I described. I could repeat myself, but instead I'll provide an example of how it might work in play.
Spoiler
Show
DM: "After an eventful day of journeying, you find a nice clearing. You know that by tomorrow, you'll reach the Burning Desert; this could be your last chance to stock up on provisions."
Ranger: "Alright. We set up camp. I'll go hunting, and maybe make some more arrows if I have time."
Wizard: "Neat. What talismen will we need? Heat resistance, obviously, but what else?"
Druid: "We're all out of healing elixers. Could you spend some of your downtime helping me with those?"
Rogue: "I'll pitch in. I've got plenty of lockpicks, and my other knicknacks won't be much good in a desert temple. Hey, could you ship up some invisibility powder?"
It
would require having players record what consumables they had made or used, yes, but is this really that much worse than having to record what spells they had prepared or cast?
And yeah, a **** DM could strip players of their power, and there's nothing the player could do. He could also take the fighter's weapons, the rogue's tools, or the wizard's spellbook, and force the cleric into moral catch-22's designed to make their god angry at them. Basically the only core classes which
can't have their dominant abilities stripped away by a malicious DM are the monk and the sorcerer. And that's not getting into designing encounters and challenges to specifically negate players' abilities. There is no mechanical solution to jerk DMs who want to screw you over.
3. HP-based casting. This is the only one where I can give a direct reason why Gygax' vision would not let this happen. He wanted to have casters be extremely weak and easily killed early on. Having casting based on hit points leads to casters diving into getting as much health as they can without sacrificing spell strength. World of Warcraft(it constantly keeps happening with Warlocks) avoids the issues this causes by having the ability to actually survive being hit rely on armor, but the Chainmail-based system of OD&D doesn't play nice with large damage reduction. Because it eventually translates to "immunity to scratch damage." Which violates the "everything is always a threat" nature of OD&D because Gygax loved screwing over players.
So, wait. Mages need health, because they burn lots of health to cast spells. So mages use some unspecified method (I dunno, a wizard prestige class with d12 HD that got written in by an idiot intern?) to get lots of health...a lot of which they burn to cast spells. This means that they're still not going to have a lot of hit points to spare on getting hurt. The only difference is that a wizard can hold back their magical power and survive longer, which is...bad, somehow? Worse than the 24-hour workday?
And again, these are just the first ideas off the top of my head. It's not good enough to try to debunk them; even if you did better than you have, you wouldn't have proved that Gygax
had to go with daily limits. You're engaging in what I like to think of as "the Creationist's Fallacy"—thinking that pointing out perceived flaws in alternate explanations/solutions proves that yours is best. It doesn't. I didn't ask "Why didn't Gygax pick X option?", I asked "Why
did he pick daily limits?" Trying to answer this without touching on the strengths of daily-limit systems is deeply misguided.
Re: The LA-assignment thread II: Where The Em Dash Doesn't Exist
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