AlexAB

Hi again guys! So, after the cooldown thread(s), I thought I should breach the subject of what bothers me about them more broadly, instead of focusing in a simple mechanic or implementation. You see, one of the reason I dislike seeing PE move away from the importance of resting isn't that resting was well used in BG. Or IWD, or PS:T, or any of those titles. It is because I think it is a bit of a missed opportunity. By the way, I know we are getting resting after all, and that is great news, but I think resting can be made more interesting, by seizing an opportunity lost by these previous titles. Mr. Gygax used to say that tracking time in the dungeon was critically important. Things didn't stay static when you retreated or moved away. The reason resting is important is because few dungeons were supposed to be cleaned by the characters, much less so in a single go. I think I made myself clear how I think time could be an important resource in other threads. How I think quests and encounters can respond t the party taking too long by changing and complicating. But time is not the only long term resource that can be used. There are many resources you guys can use to keep track of the party in the longer game, and give us players though choices to decide on. Here is a small enumeration: Money. Gold is a joke in many RPGs, and the infinity engine isn't much of an exception. People will usually complain the reason for this is that there is little control of how much money you can make in the game, but I think the real problem is that there is little options of where to use it. Give the players interesting possibilities during the game. Give him opportunities during quests that will make people try to actually build up money. Make sure a player has enough things to do with his gold he is very unlikely to be able to do everything he wants to. Fame. Reputation is something Obsidian did well in the past. But still, your reputation is something that is hardly "at stake", and very rarely something you can use to do things. Fame has mostly opened doors in other games, like New Vegas. But it could be built upon. Make certain options easier or harder to achieve depending on how well known you are. Having a reputation of being a merciless killer can make threatening others easier, but it can also mean people won't trust a more pacific deal you might propose sometime, or that people who you have helped fear you just as much as the people you delivered them from. Power. XP doesn't need to be a straight jacked formula. Give people incentives to both accumulate a lot of it and to try to avoid getting more of it than they need. Also, I always loved the level draining idea of undeads. Maybe they shouldn't be able to rain it directly like in D&D... Maybe they could drain a set XP amount instead (though this makes them less scary). But still, it was interesting that they made undeads scary in D&D by allowing them to hit where it hurts most for the players. Also, you can have not so long term resource, but ones that still last more than one battle like: Spell memorizations. This one seems to be, thankfully, in! Selecting what spells to bring in to a dungeon and how to use them. I would, of course, like it more if this aspect was more emphasized, but at least it is there, right now. The thing about spell memorization is that you want to make it a hard choice, to know what to bring to a dungeon and the how and when of its use. Stamina. Fighting all day in heavy armor, trudging through group after group of hostiles isn't easy. Everyone needs to rest eventually, and having trouble doing this can be a great source of conflict and tension. Also, knowing when to use your reserves of energy and when to take a more calm, if slower, approach can be fun. This really would work best if time is an actual resource too. Logistics. I think there is little hope of seeing this kind of concern here, but I thought I should bring it up anyway. Part of the fun in old D&D was planning an expedition to somewhere barren and dangerous. You brought in people to help you, vehicles to bring back all that loot with you, materials to renovate safe areas of the dungeon, people to put there so it would remain safe, food for everyone, climbing gear, and a lot more. I think it would be nice to at least have some use for old favorites, like door spikes, chalk, torches and food. Specially if, rather than simply being limitations, these things can actually be used intelligently. Like burning a jelly type of monster with lantern oil, but them not having enough to go around in the dark for much longer. Have the orcs in the dungeon be willing to trade the PCs for their rations, possibly paying a good price for anything that isn't yet more mushrooms. We also have long and medium term resources that, rather than being universal, are situational. there is a whole lot of stuff here that frequently isn't ever used in CRPGs. Time. I've talked enough about it, but make it matter! Make it matter in timed quests, in encounters that change, in combats that have consequences according to how early or late they end, etc. How time will affect each part of the game depends on that specific part. For some things, time matters little. To others, it is of essence. Reactions. Most CRPGs have character reactions to your PCs scripted in. So and so is a villain, and will try to rob you bling. So and so will be a stalwart helper, no matter who you are. It would be more interesting if reactions were more up to the situation at hand. I think Obsidian has done some nice work here, Raul and Dog come to mind here as examples of companions who will change a lot depending to how you treat them. But at the same time, I think this could be nice if it was done to smaller NPCs in some simpler ways. For example, any dragon might attack you on sight if you use dragon scale armor, while goblins who would otherwise attack you might welcome you if you have the head of a bugbear visible anywhere in your person. Likewise, allow this to be used as a resource. If the goblins like you, use their good will to get a favor that will solve a quest in a different way than if you had just slaughtered everyone. Many, many more. In a certain quest, the number of votes you have in a council might be crucial to the next quest. Manage to get enough votes and you will get to coordinate an attack. Don't and they will put a bumbling fool in charge, who will cause the death of several NPCs. In another quest, a cemetery may be haunted by troubled souls. Problem is that, in the coming equinox, they will be able to wreck chaos into the living world. So maybe you want to calm them down, so when the equinox arrives, nothing bad will happen. But then again, maybe you want them to suffer. It is the perfect opportunity to get a new necromancy spell! Maybe putting the souls to rest may cause problems to people you like in the city, or take away one of your contacts to jail. So, I exposed all kinds of different resources here. What is the point of it all? My point is that you can make a game really interesting if you take these various resources and tie in them to the resolution of conflicts in the game. Don't have conflicts be binary! Or worse, unary (as failure in most RPGs mean you need to reload). Instead, make conflicts where you can use these resources to solve, or at least work on. Make it so that doing things differently lead to different outcomes. Bribing the orcs to leave instead of exterminating them doesn't mean you just lost money. Your reputation may be changed in a lasting way by choosing such path. Likewise, the orcs are still live out there. Maybe they would even look forward working with you! On the other hand, maybe the city up north, the direction they fled to, won't like that you didn't end them when you had the chance. All things I am talking about here I have seen in some manner in Obsidian's games. Mask of the Betrayer had a lot of this stuff. So did New Vegas. But frequently, it is done as part of a larger, more static, story line. I really would like to see as more part of the little things going on. Because, being so tied to the storyline, those things don't seem to be using resources. It feels more like I am just advancing the quest. Like they are the absolute exception and not the rule. I think it would maybe pay out to have more of these interesting choices to small things, like side quests and little encounters. The repercussions, of course, would need to be less drastic. But it would, I think, go a long way making the game feel more like the result of your actions rather than an arbitrary story written by someone else.

Of course. But my point is that leveling what the 12 first levels of D&D represent seems a bit too much, regardless if those 12 levels are represented as 4 or as 70 by PE. Which is what I understood from from Mr. Urqhart.

One aspect I would like in this game is a rather loose control of the XP points the party can earn. It would be nice if the player had incentives to both go after them or avoid them. For example, maybe if you want to get to the maximum level, you will need to use a smaller sized party, and you will need to do quests, or do them in certain ways, that aren't necessarily the best. For example, there might be a city somewhere with two factions vying for power. You could play them against each other and get XP for both quests, but doing so will escalate the conflict into an open war, killing hundreds of people. If this is made pretty much necesary if you want to get to the maximum level, it makes the choice of doing this or not actually interesting, I think. I really would prefer a smaller power increase for the game. The first five levels in D&D are very important. They mark your rise from a normal, clueless schmuck to an actual "hero". It is only by the 5th or 6th level that D&D characters are really larger than life. The following 5 levels, however, mar a different ascension. From a larger than life hero to someone with "name" level. That is, someone who is an actual mover and shaker in the world. That is why it is in the 10th level that characters would become able to build their own keep. It just seems a bit hushed to me. 12 levels encompass both journeys, when I think each of these is already a bit too big for a single game. Maybe PE will have a different philosophy to approach its levels, but I think the people in Obsidian should be careful. It is hard to do justice to 12 whole D&D levels in a single game, and if you are not careful, you may end up making them feel rushed and destroying the internal logic to character leveling. BG2 did this as well. but it is a fault that I think it would be worth not copying.

I just wanted to comment on Mr. Null's points about second and third edition D&D. It is a really good and interesting comment. But while the classes don't all level up together in that game, I think 3e threw away a game mode that was very important in the early editions. I don't know if it has an official name, but I usually call it the character stable campaign. In 3e, I think the default mode of playing was a lot like Baldur's Gate was played. You make up a party with a few characters and go facing a variety of challenges, slowly but surely earning levels, until some big end to the whole campaign. But in 2e, even though lots of people played it like this, there were a few that played it a little different. Players would usually have more than one character, and the ones they have frequently aren't in the same level. After all, one dies, you can make a new one... at first level. These games are far from a straight progression like, say, BG was. Instead, they usually take a more sandbox approach, where there are many different things going one with the world, and as the players start to finally get their character to a higher level, they can start messing with the worls in a larger scale. It was because of this mode that 1e had so many rules about retainers and what not. Why there were rules about getting keeps, towers or founding churches in cleared out areas. A lot of things people consider nonsense in the early editions work because they were made for this mode. For example, the much reviled demi-human level limits. It makes no sense to use those in a game like BG, people would all chose humans as race and be done with it. But in a stable campaign, it makes sense to, for example, have a hobbit thief. Sure, he won't get to reach very high levels, but he will be a lot of help early on and allows you to access the hobbit community later on. He is a safe bet that doesn't yield much fruits later on, but is at least interesting. The human wizard, on the other hand, is the least safe bet. He is really fragile, and takes a long while to really bear fruits. But when he does, oh, when he does, it is amazing. An efl cleric/mage is a much safer bet, on the other hand. But you will never get those juicy high level mage spells. Speaking of which, you can use those only if you have intelligence 18. Now, changing your int throughout the game was pretty common then (even if not through levels). But You would have a much better chance at it if you started with at least 16 or 15 int. Many of the optional classes had crazy high attribute requirements too. This is because you would cycle through a lot of characters. Until level 5 or 7, your characters really die easily. But when you got one with enough attributes to be, say, a paladin, it was really worth keeping him! If you played your cards straight, you could get him to high level, which was something no other player would probably be able to do. They would probably get their own high level special character, though, like a ranger, or a specialist wizard, and so on. My point, besides discussing D&D history, is that mechanics that may seem completely wacky when seen from a set of assumptions may actually do a wonderful job from a different point of view. 3e did away with attribute requirements, at least for normal classes. It made the usual character much more standarized. A level 4 rogue is somewhat comparable to a level 4 wizard. Something like the half giants from Darksun having double hp would never fly in 3e. And it makes sense, because by 3e times, few people were playing in the stable campaign style. But something was lost with it. People who prefer the wild 1e and 2e ways do have a point in doing so. So, I think it makes sense for us to try to discuss always the merits of something that may look like a silly duck at first glance. There may be more to this or that mechanic than meets the eye. What may be perceived as useless in a game might be a lot of fun if a supporting system existed to match it, just like very different xp tables make sense if you see your characters as "bets" and want to know the investment/reward of this or that class.

No. The punishment is that they do poorly in combat. Assuming they survive the combat and have learned that they used poor tactics (or strategy), why does the player need to be punished again? This is pretty much the sequence of how this goes down from a player's perspective: * Player selects a number of spells for any number of reasons, thoughtful or thoughtless. * Player enters combat with enemies that are poorly matched to his or her spells. * The player realizes that a different group of spells would be better for these monsters. * The fight is rough, but the player survives. * The player decides to switch his or her spells to something more appropriate. If the fight is hard, they already suffered for the choices they made. When the fight is over and the player has made a decision to switch spells, why should he or she be punished again? Sorry for replying to this post only now, but this thread is moving faster than I can keep up. The reason I want the player to be "punished" again, is because I don't want set challenge pieces in my game. Like, I don't want each combat to be a self contained challenge, having little effect in the world around you. This has been something most modern games have moved to, using regenerating health and other measures to make each combat a well defined challenge, with the designer having a good idea of what the player looks like when he runs in, what he will do, and how he will look like when he comes out. For example, look at Half Life 2. Valve seems to have taken special care to make sure what kind of weapons you would have at each point in the game. This is specially clear (and comic) with the rocket launcher, as you would only ever find ammo for that when a chopper was nearby. D&D 4e takes a lot from this philosophy too. But that is not at all how things were done in 2e. Oh, people always bemoan the trash encounters and how older dungeons had wacky balance. But that is how they were supposed to be played. The game wasn't about a series of disconnected, discrete challenges. It was one big challenge, with lots of pieces that could fit together in different ways. So, that player, he did something more impacting than simply playing a combat poorly. He may have doomed a few of the villagers, as they will now need to go back to replenish their resources. Or maybe he has asserted that, when the final fight comes in the dungeon, instead of crushing the opposition, the party will need to negotiate some resolution. Maybe they will let the orcs keep the slaves who used to be convicts in exchange for the rest and their safe passage. Or maybe they will need to spend a whole lot of gold to bribe the orcs. And that kind of thing is, I think, awesome in games. Having the small parts connect themselves in a bigger whole. The game's stories, its combats, the actions the players can perform, it all comes together in a single big whole when you play things like this. And this big whole is far more fun and interesting than the little bits of pieces that form them. Sure, this usually mean that the game is a lot fuzzier, a lot more chaotic. You don't rightly know what kind of party will walk in each combat, or how they will look when they walk out. But that is part f the fun, the game stops being a roller-coaster ride and starts being a kind of interactive world.

I don't find nothing much interesting in simply going back to camp, it is true. But what I would find interesting, and I still have a little hope might see its way into this game, at least in some form, is that, now, a whole day has passed. This can mean a lot of things! Examples could include: 1d4 of the kidnapped villagers you are trying to rescue die of exhaustion at the feet of the orcs who plan to sell the toughest ones as slaves. The three escaping goblins flee to the underground, retell about your party's attack, and this results in a new, tougher patrol in the upper floor and making it impossible to get the orcs by surprise now. The warlock in the underground finishes a serum that more than doubles the strength of a goblinoid who drinks it, but turns him into an homicidal maniac (well, even more than they normally are). From now on, a couple of this enemy type will appear in random fights. The sleeping dragon in the bottom of the cave stirs and detect your presence. Fortunately, he goes almost right back to sleep, but not before taking one of the most comely villagers as a tribute from the orcs. Another group of adventurers goes through the cave, picking up some of the magic items for themselves and taking a few of the monsters and traps down. A traveling group of performers comes to the inn. Their play, should the party watch it, contains subtle clues about the dungeon and its politics. The orc warchief might decide to move out and go back to the great underground. If the PCs can't save the villagers before they reach that, the quest is failed. Then again, maybe some of the villagers might appear later in the game as slaves to the monstrosities the orcs sold them to. The orcs could find the wooden cart full of booze the PCs left nearby. If they come back at night, the orcs will be drunk and partying. If they come back during the morning, patrols will be weakened and with a headache. Basically, there is room here to put lots of interesting consequences. Which is why I like the basics of the vancian system so much.

Sure! People were talking about this exactly in another thread.One of the vital points of games like D&D is that you need to be able to gather information about where you are going, what kind of challenge you should expect, etc. Old game modules were full of rumors, hand outs and what nots exactly for this reason. I really like doing detective work in games, so this is a good thing, in my view. The different systems in Ultima 8 were pretty cool too! Would love to see PE use something like sorcery or necromancy from that game. Though the comment I heard about separating combat and non combat skills doesn't lent itself very well for this kind of magic either...

Hello again! Sorry for making yet another thread about magic, but I thought this deserved to be discussed separately from cooldowns and even Vancian magic. Well, in another thread, someone commented that he thought the reason he disliked vancian magic is that it looks like an instant respecification of the character. Like, you have a wizard decked with only fire spells, like fireball, flame shield, summon elemental, and what not. Suddenly the next day, he could memorize completely different things, like clairvoyance, invisibility, phantasmal force, teleport and what not. If you have a system like, say, Diablo, or DA, or even like Arcanum, this kind of thing really wouldn't fly. If you compare the spells to other abilities, like they are in those, that approach really wouldn't fly. But spells in D&D aren't abilities. In setting, the ability to create a frozen icicle that you can hurl toward your enemy doesn't come from understanding "the true nature of ice and cold". Spells aren't like a field of science, like combinatorics or thermodynamics. Spells are much more discrete sets of knowledge. They are, in D&D, like a specific theorem or equation. The reason changing your spells every day isn't like a respec is the same reason a warrior exchanging his sword for a mace isn't a respec. Spells, in those games, are like items, not specific abilities. And I really like them for it. One of the really cool things about spells as items is that they allow you to go wild in designing them. Consider, for example, a spell that summons a dead shield maiden to yourself. These maidens all have specific names, stories, and all were buried in the same church, which the spell's creator desecrated and bound to him through this spell. Every time you summon one of the maidens, she is freed, to the point that the spell will eventually run out! Heck, if an enemy summons one of them, he will "spend" one of the shield maidens. If someone (maybe the party itself, maybe one of its enemies, triggered by a player action) was to cleanse the temple, the spell would fail completely. Now, about this example, actually taken from the DCC RPG (a P&P game). I really love this kind of approach, the one where spells are something you can interact with, instead of simply a combat option or a piece in an adventure game like puzzle. But this makes much more sense in a game that has spells as items. If you spent your sole skill point you got when you leveled up to get this ability, and suddenly it runs out, or is gone, or is modified because one of the shield maidens was possessed by a devil, it would be extremely unfair. At the very least, it would either lead to the more predictable abilities to be more worthwhile or to the unpredictable ones to be really unbalanced to compensate. Now, I don't want to sound biased. Obviously, I much prefer spells as items, but I expect some of you disagree. I understand most people who prefer spells as abilities like them because the game is more balanced, than when you simply let casters have lots of cool toys that can run amok. I don't care much about exact balancing however. I think having the game run amok is part of the fun. Having it be unfairly hard or easy sometimes, based on your decisions, is part of what makes it worth playing. But maybe there are things I am not seeing here, so I would love if people who disagree with me would chime in and explain their position. Of course, those who agree are also welcome to comment.

I just want to reiterate that I feel that cooldowns are a mechanic I would like to see nowhere near this game. Even if we are talking about long term cooldowns here. That is, say, an 8 hour cooldown for each memorized spell (which would make the system analogue to the one in Baldur's Gate), I still don't like the idea. As I see it, the only rason to do so was to remove the resting mechanic from that game, which arguably was really broken. the problem with resting in BG is that there is almost no consequence to it. The worst that can happen is a random encounter. However, the proposed solution is all about removing something of little consequence, instead of adding the consequence it should have. People have mentioned this before, but if this game used game time as a resource,not only would rest become a whole lot more important and challenging, but the game overall would benefit from it. Have quests time out. Or change as time passes. If you take too long to rescue the hostage from the brigand encampment, not only will she be pregnant, but she won't want to leave. If you clean up the goblin tribe in the dungeon and then leave before going further, when you come back you may find the orcs from below (who were relying on the goblins before to gather info) have set up an advanced post in the upper floor and are now planning to attack a nearby city. You can even make the character decisions important to time. Like, say, if the character needed to find a water cleaning magic item for his home town, that has a limited supply of it. He might, along the way, find some merchants willing to sell water to his home town, buying the player more time! But in doing so, they might draw the attention of the evil super ogres, who would invade the player's town earlier than if he had let it remain hidden. Also, I really want this game to have a huge variety of spells. I would like to find many different magics, each with a bit of backstory and personality of its own. I want to go about trying to collect them, understand them and interact with them.I also want them to have lots of strange a different uses. Much more than a combat tool, I want magic to feel as part of the world! This doesn't really have to do with cooldowns, but has to do with vancian magic. I want spells that, rather than feeling a niche (area attack spell with debuff, single person strong attack spell, strength debuff, speed debuff, etc), are more about their own thing.Delayed fireball wasn't a direct extension of the other attack spells in the game. It was thing int itself, that allowed for new approaches to be made to combat. It was, in certain ways, a game changer. I also would like for different dweomers to interact in interesting ways. For example, the protection from evil spell in D&D protected people from being mind controlled or influenced, but it didn't dispel these effects.

While I usually love spell creation system in games, I think this project might not be the best for it. One of the things I loved about IE games (and D&D in general) is that spells are quirky and complicated. A fireball isn't simply 1D6 of damage per caster level. It is a ball of fire! It sets things on fire. You can lose scrolls or other easily burned items if you a caught in one. It doesn't just become a dome of fire, it expands to fill its volume! If you aren't careful and you are in a low ceiling area, it may well burn you because you didn't account for the size. If the area is closed up, you might end up with superheated air lacking in oxygen as the only thing left to breath! Of course, most of these weren't actually implemented in IE, but still, a bit of the quirkness of the system showed through. My point is that games that allow you to build spells from basic elements yield basic spells. People sometimes complain about D&D having too many redundant spells. But they aren't redundant, they are each a little bit different than the next. Sometimes they even become part of the setting. I would much prefer if, for example, the game allowed us t research a set of spells, but the spells were pre-made by the designers beforehand to be as interesting as possible. Maybe a series of quests, or some weird system they provide us to experiment and understand (or maybe both). The results being somewhat guessable, but not predictable. Like, you might manage to mix the fire ball spell with the ice element (or maybe not), but the result isn't simply a blue fire-ball that does ice damage. It is something unique like, maybe, a snowball spell that becomes more powerful (bigger and faster) the more it gets to move, and which can get rid of opponents in open areas easily.

I think limiting the party size because of the specific situations at hand, like people not wanting to work with each other, or needing to go through a small tunnel to get to somewhere, a great idea, actually. I think the main issue would be combat balance, as you might, for example, have 20 people in a fight if you play some way and be forced into it alone, if you play it another way.I actually care very little for this, I think a game that has very different difficulties according to your playstyle is better for it. But I think a lot of people would hate it here. Another problem might be programming issues, such as the UI and having enough memory to deal with combats in any situation. Still, I think it could be worth it, exactly because it would make the game so much more unpredictable.

Just a note, going back to that combat as way thing. In this way of viewing combat, having a mage who doesn't do anything most of the combat is quite ok because the real battle was decided mostly beforehand. Preparation is where the fun is, no in execution. Of course this isn't true all the time, but it is mostly the case. It is more important to have the ability to, in one round, really change how things are going, than be able to continuously change things a bit each round. Because not doing anything most of the time is boring for anyone, though, these games do better with quick battles, (or at least, quick rounds) than with extended ones where you have to make dozens of decisions every turn, or round, or segment of time.

Hello! I haven't really been active in these forums, but I have been following a few of the discussions. This topic is one of my favorite, so I thought I would chime in. I much prefer the old D&D Vancian system. Not because I think it is the best possible, but because I think it is the best we have any chance of getting. People have already argued about the pros and cons of the system a lot, but I think the main thing has to do with this thing that was posted in ENWorld a while ago. Basically, I think people who want a vancian magic system want to be able to plan, to examine the situations and play lots of curve balls. In other words, they want combat as war. They don't care so much (or, at least in my case, at all) if the damage progression of a fireball follows that of a magic sword a fighter can use. They don't care if combat is all about a balanced conflict, where you have to use the right counters at the right time and keep track of specific strategies for your build. They want a much wilder thing, where a spell that can be absolutely devastating in certain situations is nearly useless at other times. They want to combine their abilities to invent new ways to win conflicts. In a way, I think combat as war games are a bit like Adventure games. It isn't about mastering certain, specific patterns and then using them well and flawlessly like tactics. It is much more about seeing how things could fit together at any one time and then doing it. Different from most Adventure games, however, combat as war people like to invent things, rather than finding the right solution someone invented, although this is hard to do in a computer game. It can still be "approached", though, by having many, different interactions and solutions for problems, as well as trying to rely in systems rather than static scripts. Magic in a few modern games, like say, the fourth edition of D&D, is very removed from this. It is all about making sure the math is a zero sum game, so you can master the overall system. I rather dislike this approach. In this mode, the game is all about trying to understand what is there, and then find the best ways to use then. While in combat as war, spells can be more of an exploratory element. They can be more of a part of a setting, because they are free from having to conform to "balanced" rules. In Planescape: Torment, Chromatic Orb and Missile of Patience were level 1 spells. That would never fly for most 4e players, but they were fun for that game. Chromatic orb worked a lot better in P&P because it cost a very expensive gem to cast. Not only that, but it also added a certain feel to the game. Since it is not the only spell depending on colors, (there were the prismatic spells too), it created a certain notion that those colors were part of a bigger thing. You could, if you wanted, build on them. They worked as a (minor) setting element. And while missile of patience was obviously broken, it was a setting element as well, something for the player to explore. Spells as setting elements, as something for you to explore, to use, to try out in different ways, are what makes mages fun for combat as war people, I think. Now, I don't really think everyone who voted for the vancian system prefers this way of playing, but I think at least a sizable chunk does. Which is why I am writing this post. Also, I wanted to comment on Mr. Sawyers earlier post: I really disagree with this. Yes, a low level mage could play the role of a rogue... for 5 minutes maybe. Then he would be out of spells for the day, and would be basically a torch bearer for the rest of the session. A high level magic user could play the role of a low level rogue the whole game, but he wouldn't be able to even touch what a high level one could do. Having a thieves' guild, access to informants and contacts and so on could cover a lot of ground that magic can't. Sure, the mage can summon allies, but what you can use an army of skeletons and an army of low level thieves for are very different things. Sure, the mage could get powerful divination spells, but those could cost his own mind, and didn't necessarily give the mage the insight into the human heart a high level rogue could get. And just like magic can always try to find a way to befuddle normal people, so can normal people try to confuse it. For example, in a game I ran a while ago, I had this locked door. It had a special lock that required two keys to be turned in sequence. Trying to turn both at the same time (or using a wrong timing) triggered a guillotine trap right before it. It was made so because I ruled the knock spell would try to turn both locks at the same time, if there was more than one, so trying to knock the door would trigger the trap no matter what. You can always come up with fun ideas to make the spells and abilities different. Maybe a certain surface is porous, so if you try to spider walk there, the little hooks the spell create will leave you stuck at each step. Maybe the basic invisibility doesn't erase your reflection from cold iron mirrors. And everybody knows that gorgon blood applied to a wall makes it impossible to ghosts and ethereal travelers to go through it. I also think the stuff about cool downs is related. Cool downs usually don't make sense, as it isn't you are too tired, or that you have used up some specific resource to trigger your ability. Instead, they feel like the game nakedly added a mechanic there to keep things balanced. It doesn't feel like a setting element, but a balancing measure that, obviously, can't be gamed. This goes against what people who like combat as war like in a game. We want there to be limitations, of course, but we want those limitations explained, expounded, and with little intricacies in themselves that we can try to game them to our favor. We want wish spells that try to interpret your words maliciously, so you have to play the lawyer to get what you want. We want magic missiles that, if manifested as an actual arrow, can be used to move a lever. But if its manifestation is a beam of light, then it can be reflected with mirrors. Grease spells that can be washed with soapy water, and will make you really unlikely to impress royalty if you just slipped on it. Shrink spells that, much more than giving you a bonus or penalty, can be used to make a plank into a bridge, or shrink that huge statue so you can move it out of the dungeon and get a lot of cash for it. Mount spells that, more than just calling a horse "made of shadows", summons a shadow horse with red eyes, who may whisper something disturbing in your ear once in a blue moon when summoned. We want Clairvoyance that not only shows you what is afar, but does so by parting the fogs in a hidden area of your brain, and once in a while show things that aren't quite there, but may be hints or portents of things to come. Finally, while I understand this is a big issue, and difficult to simply decide anything without making some people feel excluded, I would like to suggest that this too could be an option. I mean, you could have some classes that are very well balanced against each other, and that would make the game very challenging, tactically speaking, to play if only they are chosen. However, you could also make content for the people who like combat as war, making classes that act like old D&D ones. They could be marked in character selection, and if people choose them, they know the game won't be balanced, but they are the ones making that choice. Thanks for hearing me out.