Utility Talent/Racial Trait overhaul/revamp - New "Abilities" system

Magecraft opitinal would make it easier for DM's

If we're going to keep Honesty as is, I suggest we at least get a clear cut def on what "helpless" and "without distrtion" mean. I mean without those two details, honesty can only be as strong as the GM and PCs can argue it is. With the GM's opinion winning more often then not. Which just at a glance is really weak.

Xel Unknown wrote:Ok... One thing I dislike that I just noticed... WHY does the level up for new points be the same? Wasn't the point of this new system to allow for passive character growth for ALL levels?

That's another thing I forgot to mention in my original post. At the moment, you get 30 points at level 1, and then would get 3 points (the equivalent of a utility talent) at levels 2, 5, and 8.

We've actually discussed this a bit, and Dan brought up the point that characters really get a lot of stuff at the very beginning, and fairly minor improvements after that (other than destinies, but those usually involve at most one or two choices and the rest just plays out). There was a suggestion of reducing the amount of points at level 1, while simultaneously increasing the points you get further along. So you might start with, say, 20 points, but twice as many points each time you level up. That's just an idea we were toying with, though, no plans to make it official at this point because it would require a radical re-make of pretty much all current characters. It might be interesting to have as an optional alternate level-up scheme that would be easier for new players since they wouldn't have so many choices all at once at character creation...

ZamuelNow wrote:Requesting page numbers in the footer.  Considering a comment made earlier, I wonder if the ability names should stay 12 pt font while the descriptions should be 11 pt font.  It would be subtle but would lessen the amount of page space used.  Might require a page break here or there though.  Suggesting Times New Roman with either Modern Antiqua or Fredricka the Great as the top of page header for better standardization with the other system documents.

I can see about changing the font size. I really like my Droid Serif font, but standardization is good too.

Also, I meant to ask this yesterday and forgot, would people like abilities to be organized the way they were in the utility talents document (Utility Belt, Spellcrafting, Psionics, etc.) rather than by point-cost?

ZamuelNow wrote:I'm pretty surprised Villainous Laughter came back.  Considering how much its worth was contested, I figured it was pretty high on the list of things to get dropped.  Just realized that Audiomancy, Crystalline, Element Master, Minimize, and Sunderblade aren't in the new list.  Mixed on Many Tongues exclusion since it's one of those useful things that never gets used.  Perhaps it should be buffed to explicitly state "speak, read, and understand" so it's more useful for reading ancient texts.  Speak With The Dead seems more useful and worth keeping since its last buff.  Magical Attunement is another in a weird place since it could be argued that Magecraft's removal/revamp means the magic detection should just be lumped in Arcana's base usage since it loses a lot of worth as a flat Attribute.  There's other missing things that seem to either have mirrors available or seem more like NPC powers so I'm not opting to argue for them though I can see their use and probably wouldn't mind if they were back.

Villainous Laughter someone else requested for a character they have. I'm rapidly finding out which utility talents people really care about! Some of those others should definitely come back too.

ZamuelNow wrote:While reworded, Brawn and Precision are still mentioned in the flight tree.  While things like "I fly with my healing!" comes off like someone trying to min-max or metagame, alternate skills are sometimes used for the skill check.  It should really be restructured as "## penalty to skill checks made to fly" and state that they should pick a flight skill.  It's one of those forum errata things that either never made it to the documents or made it in but got overwritten.  That reminds me, both Flight and Weather-Crafter need to state that the user may treat clouds as solid objects.

I don't know why that got left in there, I must have been more tired than I thought when I made the change last night. Fixed now.

Interesting point about treating clouds as solid objects, I thought that Weather-Crafter said something to that effect but I guess not. Hmm. According to the show, birds can sit on clouds too (Find a Pet), so it would seem that the ability is tied to being able to fly...whereas Rarity was weather-crafting in Magical Mystery Cure, but probably wasn't able to sit on clouds at the time. So maybe it should just go under flying? Then you could have, say, unicorns with Weather-Crafter but who can't sit on clouds, and any pegasi with Weather-Crafter are going to be able to by virtue of being able to fly. Since Weather-Crafter specifically doesn't mention how you change the weather, whether by directly interacting with it or by using magic or what. I'll go ahead and add a line about cloud-walking to It's Almost Like Flying.

ZamuelNow wrote:

Philadelphus wrote:racial templates and stuff...

It mostly seems to work.  It's a little interesting that in more direct conversion from the old guides, I found that unicorns and pegasi were worth 12 points while earth pones were 10 points due to lacking a racial in the conversion and needing to use approximations.  I like the fact that while the old system had things that seemed to be approximations and guesses for the race templates, it felt like they really worked for the concepts.

Yeah, the assist bonus improvement stuff got bundled into The Most Dependable of Ponies and had a slight discount, so you can exactly recover earth pony racials from before and have an extra 2 points afterwards (compared to pegasi and unicorns).

Xel Unknown wrote:Also there is missing racials Personal Project and Thunderbird... (I can understand retooling Personal project will be hard, but still I love the silly thing. and the edit to my last post, I loved comboing it with magecraft)

I cut Personal Project when I first started on this project because at first glance it looked really hard to move over. On second glance, now that I have more experience with the new system, I think it wouldn't be too hard to do (it'd have a format similar to the Element of Magic, most likely). There's no real reason not to, so I'll look into adding it back in.

Thunderbird isn't in there partly because I dislike how half of its functionality is already in Thunderborn and I hate having redundancy (I also dislike having both Waterborn and One With The Waves when both of them offer super-non-drowning and water-protection abilities). On the flip side, I really like the second half the Thunderbird (the extra assist boost part), and I'd really like to take that part and make it a more flavor-neutral 1- or 2-point ability on its own. I'd meant to look into that but had forgotten about it, so thanks for reminding me.

Also, I agree that a clarification/definition of the terms in Honesty would be good, I'll see about nailing that down.

Personally I LIKE the reduncy of there being multiable immunite type x-borns in the system. I mean not everyone who'e want to be immune to X, would want to also be able to expel X from their body. If possible I'd enjoy there bieng an option for each of the x-borns to have a non-born option to be immune that type of thing. But I guess you got a point that the 5 a day charged bonus to skill checks thing is better off as a flavor nutral version.

Given how our old stats are given by 8 racial points and 5 utilties (1 racial = 2 ability points, 1 Utiltiy = 3 ability points.... Meaning we normally started off with 31 points total, In theory...)

I don't like the idea of less points at start up because that'd be a clear cut nerf to a lot of character who'd try to turn over from old to new... But it could work swimmingly in theory. I'll more be waiting to see the Arcana usage Buff and New Magecraft before I really feel like wanting to change to the new system that much.

One of the nice things about the current playtest doc is that you can pretty much have characters running *either* system in the same campaign right now. Sure, some things have different costs - and so will be stronger or weaker in either system - but overall you can do it if one or two people in a campaign want to try it out.

Of course. That goes for everything always.

Philadelphus wrote:

ZamuelNow wrote:Requesting page numbers in the footer.  Considering a comment made earlier, I wonder if the ability names should stay 12 pt font while the descriptions should be 11 pt font.  It would be subtle but would lessen the amount of page space used.  Might require a page break here or there though.  Suggesting Times New Roman with either Modern Antiqua or Fredricka the Great as the top of page header for better standardization with the other system documents.

I can see about changing the font size. I really like my Droid Serif font, but standardization is good too.

Also, I meant to ask this yesterday and forgot, would people like abilities to be organized the way they were in the utility talents document (Utility Belt, Spellcrafting, Psionics, etc.) rather than by point-cost?

ZamuelNow wrote:I'm pretty surprised Villainous Laughter came back.  Considering how much its worth was contested, I figured it was pretty high on the list of things to get dropped.  Just realized that Audiomancy, Crystalline, Element Master, Minimize, and Sunderblade aren't in the new list.  Mixed on Many Tongues exclusion since it's one of those useful things that never gets used.  Perhaps it should be buffed to explicitly state "speak, read, and understand" so it's more useful for reading ancient texts.  Speak With The Dead seems more useful and worth keeping since its last buff.  Magical Attunement is another in a weird place since it could be argued that Magecraft's removal/revamp means the magic detection should just be lumped in Arcana's base usage since it loses a lot of worth as a flat Attribute.  There's other missing things that seem to either have mirrors available or seem more like NPC powers so I'm not opting to argue for them though I can see their use and probably wouldn't mind if they were back.

Villainous Laughter someone else requested for a character they have. I'm rapidly finding out which utility talents people really care about! Some of those others should definitely come back too.

Magecraft and Sunderblade are two major things I'd love see back asap, I got a LOT of magecrafters and I'm not wanting to shift any of them till we get some type of magecraft back, Sunderblade is just an awesome thing that I'd love to try out in some future campaign or something. Also would put Crystalline and Element Master as two minor things I'd support returning asap. Personally I'm fine with the Point by Point ordering with the talents. That makes sesne to me. But I guess it'd help with the transion if we had it also with it odered like how it is in the Utitly Talents doc. And I don't really see any reason to remove anything in the system unless it can be argued as bad or meh...

The flavorless version of Thunderbird's 5-charge point thing is a sidenote of something I'd enjoy seeing returned to the rught draft doc.

You can houserule that Magecraft is worth any-amount-of-points-you-think-is-appropriate. The baseline for an old utility talent is worth 3 points in the current system (though now the spread of points gives us more flexibility to appropriately cost things by comparative power level).

All I'm really going to ask is that since this is functionally a new edition of PT, you keep the old-style docs around as well for those who don't like the new system, or simply don't want to have to try and convert everyone over on the fly because their campaign's already in progress.

...Because as someone who has played multiple editions of DnD, some are more suited for different styles than others.

The old docs will still be around.

I know this is really difficult to implement, but while we're revamping the abiltiy system a "variable cost" system might be cool.

Like, instead of talent A costing 5 minutes of preparation time and talent B having a limited range or application, both talents would have a specific amount of time they'd cost, a specific limited range or application, and at least one other cost to use that talent like maybe spending a magic point or taking a penalty to a certain check until their next extended rest, and the player could pick which limitation their powerful abilities would have, to create a character who is super-powerful but takes time to do things or a different one who's less powerful and does things interesting.

...that sounded even harder out of my head than it did in it. I'll still throw this idea out here in case someone likes it and thinks of a way to revamp it, but darn.

Arguably, it could be partially handled by taking the prep time manipulation options from Magecraft and allowing all skills to use it.

In thinking about whether or not Many Tongues should come back, I started contemplating whether or not it needed restructuring or any sort of prerequisite.  In that, I came up with a possibility though no clue if any would be interested.

Language:

AProcrastinatingWriter wrote:I know this is really difficult to implement, but while we're revamping the abiltiy system a "variable cost" system might be cool.

Like, instead of talent A costing 5 minutes of preparation time and talent B having a limited range or application, both talents would have a specific amount of time they'd cost, a specific limited range or application, and at least one other cost to use that talent like maybe spending a magic point or taking a penalty to a certain check until their next extended rest, and the player could pick which limitation their powerful abilities would have, to create a character who is super-powerful but takes time to do things or a different one who's less powerful and does things interesting.

...that sounded even harder out of my head than it did in it. I'll still throw this idea out here in case someone likes it and thinks of a way to revamp it, but darn.

If I understand what you're saying...

Have the core part of the ability have a reduced cost (always 1 point?), and allow players to spend additional points to increase the power, range, duration, casting speed, area of effect, and number of uses per day. This would be neat, as it would allow customization of abilities, although I feel it would be much, much harder to balance. I feel like it would need to be standard that getting enough upgrades automatically reduces the casts per day, requiring you get spend more points to get more casts per day.

Greywander wrote:

AProcrastinatingWriter wrote:I know this is really difficult to implement, but while we're revamping the abiltiy system a "variable cost" system might be cool.

Like, instead of talent A costing 5 minutes of preparation time and talent B having a limited range or application, both talents would have a specific amount of time they'd cost, a specific limited range or application, and at least one other cost to use that talent like maybe spending a magic point or taking a penalty to a certain check until their next extended rest, and the player could pick which limitation their powerful abilities would have, to create a character who is super-powerful but takes time to do things or a different one who's less powerful and does things interesting.

...that sounded even harder out of my head than it did in it. I'll still throw this idea out here in case someone likes it and thinks of a way to revamp it, but darn.

If I understand what you're saying...

Have the core part of the ability have a reduced cost (always 1 point?), and allow players to spend additional points to increase the power, range, duration, casting speed, area of effect, and number of uses per day.  This would be neat, as it would allow customization of abilities, although I feel it would be much, much harder to balance.  I feel like it would need to be standard that getting enough upgrades automatically reduces the casts per day, requiring you get spend more points to get more casts per day.

No, although that's a good idea too.

I mean more like...some talents have the cost of a magic point to use, or the cost of a preparation time of a minute or whatever. I was thinking more like at character creation, talents that have a cost have instead a list of potential costs...like, say, Talent A might cost a minute of prep time, or a magic point, or a penalty to Persuasion checks, or a specific range. When that talent is chosen at character creation, the player chooses one of these costs, which becomes the cost that one character needs to pay to use the talent.

Category Suggestions:
-Burrower and Webspinner for Woodsman
-The element born abilities for a new category called Elementalist.  Possibly move Element Master there as well.
-I'm wondering if Utility Belt category should be broken up due to how massive it is.

Wording revamp suggestion:

Forcefield Rewording:

Minor pet peeve about the doc: Could the font size/style, and general ability formatting be altered to match those of the other official docs (so copying/altering them and adding flavor is hassle-free)?

-How does the new Element of Magic work with preparation times? The old one had them count down within Magic's activation time which made a few unusable.
-Considering the new point based setup, why is Advanced Telekinesis split from Telekinesis instead of being an upgrade?
-What is the current cost breakdown for boons and destinies with the new system?
-Suggesting a new category, Fateweaver, to accommodate the racials added to the main document that manipulate rolls.
-In light of the needed loss of its passive stat boost, a proposed buff for Eagle Eye:

Eagle Eye Buff: