Rolling Back Flight

[torrasque666]

Consider this real life comparison. Why use a sword in combat when you can use a fairly accurate, high-capacity rifle/gun? Athletics skills just outmoded as a function of 'tech tree progression.' Climb, Jump, and Swim are just low tech, usually high-cost abilities compared to flight spells, etc.

Sword keeps swinging when the gun runs out of ammo, just like the skills keep working when the caster runs out of slots. And not all DM's allow for the 15 minute adventuring day, so don't give me that excuse.

[Mendicant]

just because they're influenced by that aesthetic doesn't mean the mechanics are beholden to their narrative structures. just because frodo didn't drop the ring into the volcano from atop a giant eagle doesn't mean your players shouldn't be able to.

Sure. The problem isn't that the game needs to stay at Fafhrd level forever, it's that it really doesn't support Fafhrd at all. Spells come along and nuke a lot of the things that make him cool just when you start being able to play a character that actually feels like him. Flight is one of the worst offenders. When we get down to wands, we'll see more of this principle in action. In short, 3.X strangling so many mundane skills when you're only one-quarter of the way through its core level space makes it *less* flexible, not more.

even if you make flight spells difficult to access, casters will bypass mundane obstacles in other ways (footsteps of the divine, spider climb, dimension

Dimension door is fourth level. It shows up at the same time my version of fly does, and it is not a replacement for fly. This change would put more pressure on a caster's ability to use dimension door without doing anything to the spell at all. Spider climb I am not nearly as worried about for reasons I put down above. Footsteps of the divine is exactly the kind of late 3rd-edition bloat that I wouldn't want to import anyway. It also grants fly, kick it up a level.

here's where I think the seed of our conflict stems from.

it's exactly like an example that's more well known and generally agreed upon.

by the same token of logic, you could say a rogue with open lock (assuming your dm is a grognard who won't let you use DD on locks) is a better use of resources than a wizard casting knock 5 times.

this isn't actually true. a wizard's (or other caster, whatever) spell slots are renewable resources. he gets new ones every day, and they can be whatever he likes: rope trick, baleful transposition, knock, etc.

a rogue's skill point are a nonrenewable resource. once he spends them at level-up, he's stuck with points in open lock (coming at the opportunity cost of points he could've spent on a good skill, like UMD) for life (barring psyref, doing the wight thing,or whatever, of course)

having a caster use knock to open some doors frees up more of the party's nonrenewable resources to spend on other stuff. that's a positive thing.

spiderclimb, like knock, is essentially CL-independent, so is a good wand. that means it won't even cost slots, just a few bucks.

Well, first of all, the magic-mart assumption that you can just buy a wand for every season is out. Spells are powerful enough without assuming you can pretty much always have whichever utility ones you need. This assumption is part of what fuels UMD's status as the ultimate skill. One of 3.X's deepest pathologies is that someone playing a rogue should always avoid putting her character resources into making a character who plays like Altair, because the ability to play a third-rate wizard is so much more valuable.

"I want to build a cunning rogue, who picks locks, picks pockets, and steals hearts while running the rooftops at night. I should put ranks in climb, disable device and acrobatics, right?"
"Mmmm, that's ok, I guess, but we're starting at fourth level. None of that is going to be really relevant for very long. Just put your skills in use magic device and carry a bunch of magic wands that do all of that for you."
"Oh, well, now that you point it out, I'd be kind of a sucker to do anything else, huh? If I'm just gonna use wands all the time, why not play a wizard?"
"Well, now that you mention it, are you familiar with the word tier?

Second, if you *don't* assume the caster has a wand of knock, because a DM who introduces wands of knock is crapping all over an already marginal class's niche protection, the wizard (we know it's not gonna be the sorcerer) prepping knock or spider climb can have renewable resources as the day is long, but the opportunity cost is still higher. Even if UMD is as good as high-op assumes it is, it's only one skill rank per level. Your rogue is getting 8, your ranger gets 6 and doesn't have UMD anyway. None of the individual skills that climb or DD is "stealing" from represents the same opportunity cost that using up a spell slot does--especially since climb can stop getting invested in at all once ranks, magic, a skill kit and abilities get it to +10 or so.

I think that pf's skill list is clouding your judgement somewhat. the skills are a lot more fragmented in 3.5, the skill point system works differently (you need to buy them each level instead of autoleveling class skills) and you don't get that many more points to spread around:

Yeah, I remember now. Skill points are a lot more precious with the 3.5 list. Any final system I come up with is going to have some skill consolidation though, so it's not exactly clouding my judgement so much as clarifying it.

sure, if you want to put in some houserules letting people climb on the mumakil, more power to you. people love to do stuff like that. hammer and piton is a nice starting point to think about mechanics.

I'm gonna check that out, thanks.

PS. Without going to far off topic, when I say you shouldn't need spells to get magic, I mean a wide variety of things, including ToB type stuff. At the most basic, I don't think crafting a lot of magic items should require spellcasting, especially weapons and armor. Wands, Scrolls and Staffs, sure. But an amulet of natural armor or a potion of CLW? Nah, you should be able to take a feat and the right craft skill and just make it. Say you're weaving lyrium into it, or learning specific enchantments, or quenching it in the heart of your beloved wife if you want to do the GRRM "everything is awful forever" thing. Class features at mid to high levels should do a lot of clearly supernatural stuff without there being any spells involved--the monk is a great example of how this might be flavored, even if it's a really depressing failure in terms of actual usefulness.

[Venger]

Sure. The problem isn't that the game needs to stay at Fafhrd level forever, it's that it really doesn't support Fafhrd at all. Spells come along and nuke a lot of the things that make him cool just when you start being able to play a character that actually feels like him. Flight is one of the worst offenders. When we get down to wands, we'll see more of this principle in action. In short, 3.X strangling so many mundane skills when you're only one-quarter of the way through its core level space makes it *less* flexible, not more.

right. D&D is not a good system to support low-magic. you need magic to do everything in this game.

Dimension door is fourth level. It shows up at the same time my version of fly does, and it is not a replacement for fly. This change would put more pressure on a caster's ability to use dimension door without doing anything to the spell at all. Spider climb I am not nearly as worried about for reasons I put down above. Footsteps of the divine is exactly the kind of late 3rd-edition bloat that I wouldn't want to import anyway. It also grants fly, kick it up a level.

sorry, got cut off. I meant dimension hop, since it's a 2nd. I didn't mention dimdoor, but your point's the same.

you don't like footsteps of the divine? okay. I just like talking about it.

Well, first of all, the magic-mart assumption that you can just buy a wand for every season is out. Spells are powerful enough without assuming you can pretty much always have whichever utility ones you need. This assumption is part of what fuels UMD's status as the ultimate skill. One of 3.X's deepest pathologies is that someone playing a rogue should always avoid putting her character resources into making a character who plays like Altair, because the ability to play a third-rate wizard is so much more valuable.

UMD is the ultimate skill unless your DM prevents you from buying stuff. yeah, it is. having little wands of ray of frost and stuff is pretty helpful for precision damage users.

"I want to build a cunning rogue, who picks locks, picks pockets, and steals hearts while running the rooftops at night. I should put ranks in climb, disable device and acrobatics, right?"
"Mmmm, that's ok, I guess, but we're starting at fourth level. None of that is going to be really relevant for very long. Just put your skills in use magic device and carry a bunch of magic wands that do all of that for you."
"Oh, well, now that you point it out, I'd be kind of a sucker to do anything else, huh? If I'm just gonna use wands all the time, why not play a wizard?"
"Well, now that you mention it, are you familiar with the word tier?

you're saying this like it's disproving what it's saying, but it's not.

]Second, if you *don't* assume the caster has a wand of knock, because a DM who introduces wands of knock is crapping all over an already marginal class's niche protection, the wizard (we know it's not gonna be the sorcerer) prepping knock or spider climb can have renewable resources as the day is long, but the opportunity cost is still higher. Even if UMD is as good as high-op assumes it is, it's only one skill rank per level. Your rogue is getting 8, your ranger gets 6 and doesn't have UMD anyway. None of the individual skills that climb or DD is "stealing" from represents the same opportunity cost that using up a spell slot does--especially since climb can stop getting invested in at all once ranks, magic, a skill kit and abilities get it to +10 or so.

I just used it as an example because RAW assumes pcs are allowed to buy stuff. you're of course free to prevent that, but I didn't take it into account.

Yeah, I remember now. Skill points are a lot more precious with the 3.5 list. Any final system I come up with is going to have some skill consolidation though, so it's not exactly clouding my judgement so much as clarifying it.

ok.

I'm gonna check that out, thanks.

PS. Without going to far off topic, when I say you shouldn't need spells to get magic, I mean a wide variety of things, including ToB type stuff. At the most basic, I don't think crafting a lot of magic items should require spellcasting, especially weapons and armor. Wands, Scrolls and Staffs, sure. But an amulet of natural armor or a potion of CLW? Nah, you should be able to take a feat and the right craft skill and just make it. Say you're weaving lyrium into it, or learning specific enchantments, or quenching it in the heart of your beloved wife if you want to do the GRRM "everything is awful forever" thing. Class features at mid to high levels should do a lot of clearly supernatural stuff without there being any spells involved--the monk is a great example of how this might be flavored, even if it's a really depressing failure in terms of actual usefulness.

yeah, sure thing, man.

ok. I agree with that. check out those ritual things in DMG2. you do special things and beef up an item. you can invest items by running a lot or getting hit with a fire spell. it depends on the thing, but it might be a jumping off point if you wanna let mundane make their own toys.

[Mendicant]

right. D&D is not a good system to support low-magic. you need magic to do everything in this game.

Which is bad, because that is neither how a lot of people want it to work nor how the game seems intended to work. If that principle were really a fully-conscious design goal, the core books wouldn't have so many non-magical classes. Like I said earlier, the spell subsystem has devoured the rest of the game.

UMD is the ultimate skill unless your DM prevents you from buying stuff. yeah, it is. having little wands of ray of frost and stuff is pretty helpful for precision damage users.

Which is fine, as far as it goes, but how many new people show up at a table and want to sneak attack with cantrips?

you're saying this like it's disproving what it's saying, but it's not.

Well, that was less of an argument that UMD is bad in a mechanical sense than that UMD is bad in a more, I don't know, moral sense. It subverts the game's ability to tell stories people expect it to be able to tell. It's like if you invited someone to come play a gritty survival horror game and then made calling the police really effective.

I just used it as an example because RAW assumes pcs are allowed to buy stuff. you're of course free to prevent that, but I didn't take it into account.

RAW assumes PC's are able to buy stuff, but--and it's been a while since I read the 3.5 DMG--I remember it specifically assuming that most magic would come as loot, the loot would probably be largely random, and that ready cash would not necessarily be enough of the character's wealth to assume they'd be buying just the right item whenever they were in a town with a big enough spending cap. For PF, 4,500 GP is a lot if the assumed WBL is 16,000 at 6th level.

In any event, I don't think the wal-mart theory of magic item acquisition is very good for the game, but I also don't think it'd have a huge effect at the levels I'm talking about. Trivializing skills with 16,000 or even 23,000 GP is just too expensive to be worth it.

I'm curious, do you play much at low levels? If so, how does your party deal with locked doors and high walls? Do they just not?

[Venger]

Which is bad, because that is neither how a lot of people want it to work nor how the game seems intended to work. If that principle were really a fully-conscious design goal, the core books wouldn't have so many non-magical classes. Like I said earlier, the spell subsystem has devoured the rest of the game.

3.5 is not a good sim for low magic games.

Well, that was less of an argument that UMD is bad in a mechanical sense than that UMD is bad in a more, I don't know, moral sense. It subverts the game's ability to tell stories people expect it to be able to tell. It's like if you invited someone to come play a gritty survival horror game and then made calling the police really effective.

morally wrong? that seems excessive. again, if you want low magic, 3.5 is a poor fit.

RAW assumes PC's are able to buy stuff, but--and it's been a while since I read the 3.5 DMG--I remember it specifically assuming that most magic would come as loot, the loot would probably be largely random, and that ready cash would not necessarily be enough of the character's wealth to assume they'd be buying just the right item whenever they were in a town with a big enough spending cap. For PF, 4,500 GP is a lot if the assumed WBL is 16,000 at 6th level.

that philosophy is more from 1/2e where you could not sell items so were stuck with what you got. it's less true for 3.x, but it depend on what generator you use.

In any event, I don't think the wal-mart theory of magic item acquisition is very good for the game, but I also don't think it'd have a huge effect at the levels I'm talking about. Trivializing skills with 16,000 or even 23,000 GP is just too expensive to be worth it.

I'm curious, do you play much at low levels? If so, how does your party deal with locked doors and high walls? Do they just not?

why not? it lets you pick up spells to help your party specifically so you don't end up with say, a wand of water breathing in the desert.

yes. the same way you deal with anything, via application of spells, class features, items, or other similar abilities (e.g. blink shirt, dissolving spittle, abrupt jaunt, mountain hammer, shapesand, phase cloak, wild shape, etc.) there is no point in this or any game where a locked door should be an insurmountable obstacle.

[Honest Tiefling]

An odd idea, but what if utilizing the skills WAS the only way to get magical gear? Banning it outright really hurts mundanes, but what if there was an evil monopoly of casters that kidnapped anyone else capable of making magical goods, so the first task is to break into one of their warehouses or to ambush them in a small chasm to get magical goodies? Outright buying the items won't work, but you don't have to worry as much about a mundane needing items and failing to get them. The heists can be structured in such a way that finding the right items and acquiring them needs a bit of skill, such as Diplomacy, Sleight of Hand, Intimidate, Stealth, etc.

From my experience, some rogueish types (And I do NOT count Wizard/Rogues in this category) giggle like...Well, Haley Starshine does when they have new toys to harass their enemies with. I think it depends a lot upon the character/player. I'd also suggest less powerful but still amusing items like Grease (Okay, maybe powerful, but making people fall down is hilarious), Jump, and Prestidigitation. Heck, even that bag of tricks can be fun at times.

Hopefully, the skills are still useful as there is no reliable way to get the magical goodies (especially since the wizard WILL have problems scribing new spells into their spellbook...), and the skills lead to the magical goodies for everyone.

[Mendicant]

3.5 is not a good sim for low magic games.

Nobody is talking about a low-magic game here. LowER magic maybe, but expecting flight to be widely available halfway through is in no way a low magic expectation. You can have quite a bit of magic without making the power progression so steep that certain concepts never really work.

morally wrong? that seems excessive. again, if you want low magic, 3.5 is a poor fit.

Moral was the wrong word for what I was trying to convey. UMD is bad if it subsumes the rest of the skill list, not because that is a bad choice for a character to make, but because it is the only good one. Reducing the number of interesting choices is bad.

why not? it lets you pick up spells to help your party specifically so you don't end up with say, a wand of water breathing in the desert.

Because it feeds the vicious cycle of spells being the answer to every problem, and the ONLY answer to a majority of problems.

A cooperative game needs resource scarcity at some level in order to provide a challenge. DnD has scarcity of a few things built in--hit points, actions per round, etc. Easy to purchase wands, with an unlimited selection, takes a key part of a caster's scarcity--spells per day and especially spells known--and breaks it in half. There's still some limit if WBL is enforced, but between wands and scrolls casters can wiggle free of their limitations much more casually than noncasters. Noncasters with UMD can spend ranks to be not very good casters who fuel their spellcasting with money.

[Zordran]

You could always nerf flight itself into sort of a tactical superjump, where every move action has to end on a viable surface. This greatly simplifies combat with flying creatures and doesn't require you to look through every single potential mode of flight to see if you like it or not. This is a gamey choice for sure, and it's up to your table if they like the feel or not.

[endur]

What would the consequences be if access to magical flight were pushed back a spell level? I've always hated how quickly so many skills become trivialized in 3.X, and possibly the biggest single offender on that count is Fly, along with fellow travelers like Levitate

First question is what level is your party now and what level are you going to? i.e. are you just delaying flight, or are you basically eliminating it by never reaching the level at which flight will be?

World of Warcraft is trying to restrict/eliminate flight to make climbing/jumping more relevant, so the idea of restricting is not exactly a new one.

My recommendation is to try it and see what your group thinks.

I can think of plenty of fantasy novels where the protagonist rarely or never fly (unless hitching a ride from giant eagles, etc.).

[endur]

The entirety of D&D is built around spells. At higher levels, if your weapons are not magical, they are worthless. If you do not have magical items, your options are sorely limited. The most powerful effects, whether offensive or defensive, are magical. A party without magic will fail, absent a specific decision in the course of designing the campaign to make it low-magic.

Random party of 4 PCs ... 2 fighter types, 2 rogue types (wizard and priest didn't show up that day)

at low level: no impact from missing spell casters.

at mid level: lack of healing and utility spells, minor impact on combat (no save or suck spells)

at high level: lack of healing and utility, also high impact on combat (save or die, save or suck, etc.)

If the campaign is low or mid level, lack of magic shouldn't be a big deal ... if the campaign is high level, lacking magic will hurt

[Philistine]

@OP: Have you asked yourself whether maybe D&D 3.X is just plain the wrong system for what you want it to do? It might be that you can find an alternative system faster and easier than you can compile a list of houserules running to more than nine thousand pages (and which still won't fix everything that WotC broke).

[Mendicant]

I mean, to a a certain extent that is what I'm trying to do, since a house ruled game is no longer the same thing. Long-term, I want something that looks an awful lot like erd edition, but heavily customized to the needs of my particular table. Starting from a wholly different system just means I have to modify that system in the opposite direction.

D&D has a whole lot of things I do want, and 3rd especially has been picked at extensively by home brewers, optimizers and third-party publishers for a decade and a half now. It is a known quantity in a way that few systems are. That's very valuable as a starting point for customization.

[Philistine]

And yet, despite all the skull-sweat that's been dumped into 3.X over the years, there's still no consensus on how to turn it into the kind of game you want. Perhaps it's worth considering that most systems don't need fifteen years' worth of being picked and pried at just to function as intended (never mind still falling short of their original design goals even after that much work).

Out of curiosity, what is D&D bringing to the table that makes it such a trump card, even when it's clearly just ill-suited to your preferred play style?

[Mendicant]

Out of curiosity, what is D&D bringing to the table that makes it such a trump card, even when it's clearly just ill-suited to your preferred play style?

Well, first and foremost, it isn't actually that ill-suited for my preferred playstyle at all, so long as the levels cap out around 6th to 8th and I'm not chained to every single splat ever written. I'm playing an e6 campaign right now and I'm about 85% to 90% happy with it. Like I said above, you can think of D&D as two or three different games that share some core assumptions and mechanics between them. I want to expand the low-level game that I am actually quite happy with upwards a few levels.

As far as what D&D/Pathfinder brings to the table, there are all kinds of things, not least of which are personal familiarity and this website. There is a large, established community available which is willing to evaluate and critique my proposed changes. I don't need there to be a perfect consensus on them, because I'm ultimately just working for one table. It's enough if I'm aware of the potential consequences of my design choices. d20 and 3rd edition has a deep ruleset which allows for a lot of simulation without relying on too much DM fiat and magical tea party. When that ruleset starts to break down or produce weird, silly outputs, there is almost always a menu of third-party and homebrew fixes to browse and incorporate. For instance, I have a couple players this time around who want to craft a fair amount of stuff, so I eventually landed on a 99 cent PDF that fixes pretty much everything I objected to about the core rule's borked crafting system.

I like class-based levelling and character building, and I like 3.X's a'la carte multiclassing. I like the theme. I like that there are thousands of available monsters available, and that the CR system, for all its faults, gives me a really handy way to eyeball encounters, especially since I have enough system mastery to recognize dangerously wonky enemies like shadows and night hags.

[P.F.]

It looks like you have thought through this really well. Easy access to tactical flight trivializes a lot of otherwise good challenges, and as you so aptly put it earlier, flying characters turn interesting battlefields into featureless football fields. The primary themes I have noticed and the solutions so far:

delayed capacity to fight flyers	... increase CR of flyers
diminished capacity to cast fly on the party	... make fly et al group spells
climb/swim/etc. still become useless once people can fly	... they remain useful longer after which nothing will have changed
climb/swim/tumble aren't terribly useful anyway	... include more terrain where they apply
players will use non-spell means to fly	... the equipments etc needed are already sufficiently expensive
if lazer-cannonss are banned, uzis will be used to play tennis	... gun metaphors will also be unavailable until higher levels
non-fly spells can mimic good climb/swim/athletics	... spells are used per day whilst skills can be used at will

This all seems really solid to me. If your players are game, I'd say go for it!

[Mendicant]

Yeah, I think I've got a pretty good idea of how this'd affect a game and what I should do to adjust to that. Thanks for the clear thread summary.

if lazer-cannonss are banned, uzis will be used to play tennis ... gun metaphors will also be unavailable until higher levels

Hahaha, yeah. Maybe make them higher-level bardic performances. "I torture this analogy until it is unrecognizable. Everyone who can hear me needs to make a will save or become nauseated."

[Endarire]

Mendicant: May I get a link to that 99 cent crafting system solution? (Not pirate stuff, but storefront stuff.)

[Mendicant]

Sure:
http://paizo.com/products/btpy8ffg?Making-Craft-Work

[daremetoidareyo]

It looks like you have thought through this really well. Easy access to tactical flight trivializes a lot of otherwise good challenges, and as you so aptly put it earlier, flying characters turn interesting battlefields into featureless football fields. The primary themes I have noticed and the solutions so far:

delayed capacity to fight flyers	... increase CR of flyers
diminished capacity to cast fly on the party	... make fly et al group spells
climb/swim/etc. still become useless once people can fly	... they remain useful longer after which nothing will have changed
climb/swim/tumble aren't terribly useful anyway	... include more terrain where they apply
players will use non-spell means to fly	... the equipments etc needed are already sufficiently expensive
if lazer-cannonss are banned, uzis will be used to play tennis	... gun metaphors will also be unavailable until higher levels
non-fly spells can mimic good climb/swim/athletics	... spells are used per day whilst skills can be used at will

This all seems really solid to me. If your players are game, I'd say go for it!

The OP can always go with a gentlepersons agreement about flight being delayed till eighth level also,while changing nothing. "Hey guys, here's the reasons I don't like flight, I promise not to abuse flight capable enemies if your main PCs don't access flight til then." Players tend to be pretty cool about requests like that, (except for one dude usually, and its the dude who struggles with social cues and ego simultaneously, and if its not flight, it'll be something else).