Talk_Magic in Midnight
Interesting Point I thought I might bring up. With 3 healers, the party can actually heal at double the normal speed by adding the ritual effect "Affect one additional target" because the cure spell's effects are creature touched. Double speed healing (Triple if we actually spend an energy point), booya. --Pilitus 08:35, 26 July 2007 (EDT)
Has anyone noticed that you *must* pay the cost (if nonzero) in Con damage, regardless of whether or not you have energy points?
Seriously, is there any reason for PC's ever to use this system for spells other than Cure *** Wounds? And, of course, you need 1 helped per level of the spell, or else you'll take Con damage, which kind of goes against the purpose of healing; thus, with 3 channelers, we're pretty much limited to Cure Mod.
The examples they give are ludicrous. Double-area Mirage Arcana? These three casters couldn't quite fit whatever they're hiding in ten 20' cubes, so they need ten more? What, they're hiding a small elf village? It'd have to have a population of zero, since that spell doesn't disguise creatures.
Or, my personal favorite, a ritual casting of ''Bull's Strength''. I don't care how many times you double the duration. It's a minute per fucking level. The way duration-doubling works, you have to be 7th-level, then double the duration 4 times in order for it to actually last longer than it took to cast. Can you even do that? Can you possible justify a -7 Con to gain a +4 Str? Or employing 7 other 7th-level casters to bring it down to 0?
In my opinion, this system was very poorly thought out, and is typically of amateur system designers, their heads loaded with rhetoric about how the game "should" be played with no actual experience or wisdom that would aid in figuring out how the game *really* should be played.
There are many things I could say about this, but I can cover it with some simple advice to any aspiring game designer.
Taking power away from the PC's, then putting it back together in your own way, to whatever extent (less, equal, or greater than it was), will *always* cause resentment, to some degree, by PC's. Adding power will *never* cause resentment to those who receive it; all you have to do is make sure it's fair to all players (something you have to do anyway).
But, you ask, how do I make my "hard" setting actually hard if all I'm doing is adding power to PC's?
Simple. Do what seems unthinkable to WotC and 99% of the content creators out there: change the fricking ENEMY. The PC's don't know the monsters' stats, nor do they know their CR. You can make the PC's more powerful, make the enemies even more powerful, and somehow, magically, the fights are harder.
I respect the Midnight setting, but the authors failed to follow the correct process:
- Identify your goals.
- Determine ways to achieve those goals, while maintaining balance, challenge, and fun.
- Develop all necessary rule changes.
- Review rule changes to ensure they do not incur a net loss to the enjoyability of the game. If they do, they are not worth it.
- Publish your book.
I suspect they failed at step 1; it doesn't seem like they sat down and said "we should have a system were magic is really difficult and annoying to use", and clearly their rules did not result from the goal of "magic should be rare and special", because it's neither. It's just different.
As a wiser man than I figured out: the only way to make magic rare is to disallow spellcasting by the PCs. At minimum, this means removing spellcasting classes. Like the creators of Star Wars d20, d20 Modern, and Iron Heroes before them, they likely started out committed to having no spellcaster class, then wussed out and added one, thereby defeating the purpose.
How I think it should have been done is too long a rant for this page. Suffice to say, I'll endeavor to get the most out of ritual magic, but I won't feel good about it.
-Kenjura, 7/26/2007 4:45 PM EDT
