8.0

Ability bloat.

It's ever-present, whether in 3e, 6e, or even 7e. How to finally fix it? The pokémon model: you gain a lot of abilities early, and few later, but the original ones evolve.

An example:

• A fire mage takes Elementalism 1. One of the powers is Fireball (aw std mr b1 med fire dmg). Great. Useful. Expandable, in that system 7 way, with Mana able to multiply damage, burst size, range, etc, out of the box.
  • He also got a bunch of frost and lightning powers. He may or may not even want those. For now, he has a manageable number, with decent coverage of assault, defense, utility, etc. Multiply that by 5? Not so much.
• He later takes Elementalism 2. He gains a couple new powers: Elemental Orb (creates a sphere lasting several rounds which shoots elemental effects at enemies) and Elemental Wall (wall of fire/ice/lightning). They don't directly compete with the rank 1 spells.
  • Additionally, he gains some ongoing burn damage with fire spells (and some other stuff for frost and lightning) that improves the rank 1 spells.
• At Elementalism 3, you gain a bunch of metamagic abilities specific to this school, such as:
  • Elemental Engine: Casting a Fireball, Ice Lance, or Lightning Bolt into an Elemental Orb with matching element type causes it to shoot an identical effect at each enemy within X squares. Using the wrong type of element causes interesting synergy effects.
• At Elementalism 4, you gain Elemental Node: each time you cast an elemental spell, you generate a minor node of that element in your location (or enhance an existing one), which further enhances summoning of that element (mana efficiency, bonus effect, etc).
• At Elementalism 5, you gain Elemental Orbitals: your head is circled by elemental spheres, each a miniature elemental node charged with terrifying magic. You can pop them out as ready nodes, draw on them for mana, make them interact with each other, or even release all of their energy in a devastating and chaotic burst. They are constructed and maintained by using your elemental powers.

The crazy thing, you don't even necessarily have to wait until level 20 to take rank 5. Maybe it's not available as early as level 5, maybe it is. The idea is not to necessarily force you to wait 5 levels between upgrades.

The general design goal:

• It should be possible to be a pure caster, taking nothing but new spell ranks.
• It should be possible to be a pure fighter, taking nothing but non-magical packages.
• It should be possible to reproduce a system 6 hybrid, more or less.
• It should be possible to hybridize without any actual spellcasting (i.e. Runeblade, but no Arcane, Elemental, or Dark Arts).

And that's just the Ability Packages. What about other stuff?

Ability Packages are very specific; when you're taking Infernal 1-5, you're learning about magic involving hellish dimensions...not learning better ways to weave baskets. Anything like a "talent" that is specific to a package belongs in that package.

For everything else, there are Talents. You get 1 per level, just like Ability Packages, but they are more general in nature. They can be implemented as Feats, since they work mostly the same way, but are best thought of as a way to access all of those cool secondary abilities that used to be buried in the Class Abilities chart.

For example:

• Spell Sheath: You bind up to 3 powers to a weapon. At will, while unsheathing the weapon, you may cause any or all of the powers to come into effect. The powers must affect you or the weapon, and must be enhancements or defenses.
• Overdrive: Each time you cast a std-action spell, you have a 10% chance (cumulative) to enter Overdrive mode, wherein you gain 1 temporary Mana per round (cumulative) which must be used or Overdrive mode ends. Cooldown: encounter.

These are really just feats, I guess, but the take home is that we can scour the 6e/7e lists for abilities that don't make the cut to Ability Package, or just ought to be more universal, and make them into good feats.