No place for a cleric?

[Duke Bushido]

Honestly, I think it is the existence of Skills Mechanics in games that draws me as well.  Traveller had them; at the time, D&D didn't.  A bit later, and Star Frontiers _sort of_ had them, and while I enjoyed SF for out-there space opera stuff (until I found Space Opera, which I liked a lot better), it had this periodic whiff of D&D as you played through-- it's been decades; I can't really give you any specifics anymore.  Still, I enjoyed it.  Hated Metamorphosis Alpha, yet enjoyed Gamma World (Dungeons and Mutants).

 

Looking back, I think it was the evolution of the Skills as an important part of game play that made me prefer certain games (though Traveller was always my favorite, mostly because there was a clear and concise "system" in place that could be scaled up or down if so desired, or even removed and put somewhere else:  Jim bought Boot Hill once, and we played it a few times.  Ultimately, we ended up just playing Traveller as a western.    Weird thing?  It completely _worked_.  There wasn't anything that really had to be "overlooked" or shoehorned; it just worked.  I didn't really think about it at the time, but I suspect this was because there was a functioning system at the heart of Traveller, whereas D&D really felt more like "and what can we do to include _this_ polyhedral?"

 

Love RollMaster (pun intended; I an't skeered!) and SpaceMaster, but found the endless charts and dicing to be a bit tedious.  Workable, but tedious.  _Thought_ I like Aftermath until I realized that we had spent three five-hour sessions resolving one group combat-- combat was fast and fatal in Aftermath, of course, but only in number of shots fired.   The tasks that went into the resolution itself where monumental (I am told Phoenix Command makes Aftermath look like Candy Land, which is why I have _never_ had any interest in trying to prove it for myself    ).

 

There is _one_ accolade that I can (and generally do) give to D&D, and that is that Vancian or not, D&D made magic feel like magic in a way that very, _very_ few games _ever_ did, and in a way that is absolutely impossible to do with HERO.  It was pretty simple, really:  It does this, period.  No; there is no explanation, no breakdown, and costs or averaging or value-matching: you learn it, you use it; it does this.  Enjoy.

 

RoleMaster and MERP (RoleMaster, now in color!) were decent at that, and Talistlanta was pretty good at it (Talislanta suffered an entirely different problem:  Want to make a new race?  Pick two Characteristics and add two points to each of them.  Viola!  Entirely new race.  Culture?  Society?  Eehhh... Sorry; we have too many races for that....)   Ultimately, a solid workout routine, under the Talislanta model, might accidentally change your DNA. Who'd'a thunk?    )

 

HERO can't make magic feel like magic; it just can't do it.  We can model all kinds of different ways of making it work, all kinds of ways of learning and using and wielding it.  At the end of the day, though, we have to break it down, balance it, and specify it's exact elements.  While the end results are the same, it's never going to _feel_ like anything but super powers with a laundry list of Advantages and Limitations, because that's precisely how we have to build them, buy them, and write them up.

 

 

[assault]

3 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

HERO can't make magic feel like magic; it just can't do it.  We can model all kinds of different ways of making it work, all kinds of ways of learning and using and wielding it.  At the end of the day, though, we have to break it down, balance it, and specify it's exact elements.  While the end results are the same, it's never going to _feel_ like anything but super powers with a laundry list of Advantages and Limitations, because that's precisely how we have to build them, buy them, and write them up.

A bit like sausages. Nice, but you don't want to watch them being made.

The Justice Inc Weird Talents and Psychic Powers were presented without much game mumbo jumbo. Maybe they could be a model for a "feels like magic" system. It just means that someone else has to make the sausages for you.

---
Having looked at them while writing this post, they would be really ugly if you did Steve Long-style writeups of them. So many modifiers... eww. The points would be right off, too.

But if you only saw the end result they wouldn't be too bad.

[Opal]

 

On 11/2/2021 at 11:47 PM, assault said:

A bit like sausages. Nice, but you don't want to watch them being made.

The Justice Inc Weird Talents and Psychic Powers were presented without much game mumbo jumbo. Maybe they could be a model for a "feels like magic" system. It just means that someone else has to make the sausages for you.

 

  

I mean, you can straight up model D&D (not model what D&D tries to model and fails badly at, but D&D itself, with all it's perverse mechanical foibles) in Hero.  The idea that being able to do so in a non-arbitrary way takes anything away from that seems silly to me, but I played & ran D&D for a long time, used lots of variants, made many of my own spells (and there is a method to the madness of D&D spells and 'balancing' them to their level), and so have long, long since seen behind that curtain.

 

If you were to cook up a magic system in Hero, and run a game using it sharing only the final point cost and a description of each spell, you could achieve the same sort of wonder-by-ignorance effect for the players. Because, really, that's all it is, it's not magic feeling really magical, it's just the cheap sense of wonder you get between encountering something for the first time, and eventually understanding it or just getting used to it.  

 

In contrast, I feel like a VPPs in Hero, or the magic systems of games like Ars Magica or Mage:  the Ascension feel more like they're 'really' magical, precisely because they aren't just a finite set of arbitrary spells made up by some ex-insurance actuary in the Midwest who figured magic-users should be something like wargame artillery.  

[Asperion]

20 hours ago, Chris Goodwin said:

Depending on campaign, I'd almost prefer requiring a combination of mundane medicine (i.e. setting a bone) before applying magical healing. Otherwise you could recover the BODY but have it heal "wrong".  

 

 

 

All forms of magical healing should have been doing this all along.  It doesn't matter if the healer is a cleric,  wizard,  paladen,  or any other spell caster. The magic would work with the body as is, not manipulate it to work the way it is supposed to. This will also mean that resurrection would require the body to be intact to function.  This could be a major reason such spells would fail, body is too strongly deteriorated for the spirit to inhabit. 

20 hours ago, Chris Goodwin said:

Depending on campaign, I'd almost prefer requiring a combination of mundane medicine (i.e. setting a bone) before applying magical healing. Otherwise you could recover the BODY but have it heal "wrong".  

 

 

 

All forms of magical healing should have been doing this all along.  It doesn't matter if the healer is a cleric,  wizard,  paladen,  or any other spell caster. The magic would work with the body as is, not manipulate it to work the way it is supposed to. This will also mean that resurrection would require the body to be intact to function.  This could be a major reason such spells would fail, body is too strongly deteriorated for the spirit to inhabit. 

[Duke Bushido]

6 hours ago, Opal said:

it's not magic feeling really magical

 

 

As the guy experiencing it and as the guy saying it, and as the guy it was being said about, I am going to have to pause a moment and say "Yes.  Yes, it exactly is about magic feeling magical"-- that is, it was it's own different and unique thing, and while effects were scalable from level to level, there wasn't any sort of comparison of "one fireball equals nine swords"-- it was unique to itself, and HERO can't do it because in the end, X fireballs in HERO will always equal Y swords because there is, ultimately, _one_ "I hurt you" mechanic.

 

We can dress it up with SFX and decide if it's PD, ED, or EGO, but it's one mechanic, and by HERO's nature, will always be expressible in terms of something else built in HERO.

 

I'm not knocking HERO-- it's one of the two games I still play forty years later, but I am not going to sycophantically gloss over its shortcomings and faults, either, and the biggest one is, ironically, the most appealing part of the system: the ability to build and unbuild things.  

 

You can _model_ anything.  I've got some pretty cool Car Wars minis, and they are ideal models of the cars they are--, well, modeled after.   But they will never actually feel like the cars themselves.  I suppose the end results are the same: neither will survive a hundred-mile-per-hour impact, and both will suffer horribly if set on fire-- but the feeling of using one is not the feeling of using the other.  HERO fans have a tendency to downplay any criticism about the "feel" of a game, and the typical reply (nothing personal: I have hashed this out with many of the fine people that have come and gone here over the years, and the replies are almost always one of these two) either "you can model X with the system" or "the end result is the same."  

 

Neither of those has anything to do with how it feels while playing.  Why is feel important?  It's an entire session of co-operative make-believe!  There is nothing here _but_ "how it feels."  If it felt bad, you and your friends wouldn't do it.  You do it because you like how it feels when you do it.  I play HERO and Traveller because those two systems consistently deliver high-quality feels.  It is simply that there is this one thing-- magic feeling magical-- that HERO can't deliver on, at least not the way that something else _does_.  Perhaps D&D (at least early D&D; I haven't played it since the early 90s, really) delivers a more unique feeling of magic specifically because it _is_ a disjointed mess: it has never had any real need within itself to make something rational, thus it has never attempted to make magic feel anything less than uniquely bizarre.  I don't know; I'm not a game designer.  I am a game player, though, and I know if I like how a part of game feels or if I would rather it felt some other way.

 

Each subsequent edition caters to the cries of "math must be even" and "numbers must be equal" and the mythical "perfect balance."  It gets so deeply into this minutia that each edition makes magic feel less and less magical and-- well, more like you used the powers from a superhero game to cobble a nifty ability and call it magic.   Does it stop me from playing?  No; not really. Outside the way magic felt, I have a dislike for D&D that boarders on passion.  I make do with HERO, and it serves well enough-- there are far too many "good feels" from other parts of the game to want to throw them all aside in favor of one singular and unique good feel.  As I said: Role Master did magic very well, but it didn't really provide any of the other good feels that HERO does, and so I still do HERO, but I am not going to suddenly not wish it could make magic feel more magic-y.

 

 

6 hours ago, Opal said:

The idea that being able to do so in a non-arbitrary way takes anything away from that seems silly to me,

 

See?  This is how you _feel_ about it.  I am willing to bet that nothing I can say will change the way you _feel_ about this.

 

For the record though, it is _specifically_ the "non-arbitrary" nature of HERO that removes the bulk of the whimsy from pretend magic.

 

 

 

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

HERO can't make magic feel like magic; it just can't do it. 

 

I disagree, its about how its presented.  If you have magic laid out with all the guts showing, sure, it feels mechanical.  But there's zero difference between "Fireball does your level in d6 damage to everything in a 10" radius" and "fireball does 3d6 KA to everything in an 8m radius".  Hero suffers from excessive writeups but those only need to show up if the GM wants them to.  Players don't need to see the guts unless they build their own powers.

[Spence]

20 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

HERO can't make magic feel like magic; it just can't do it.  We can model all kinds of different ways of making it work, all kinds of ways of learning and using and wielding it.  At the end of the day, though, we have to break it down, balance it, and specify it's exact elements.  While the end results are the same, it's never going to _feel_ like anything but super powers with a laundry list of Advantages and Limitations, because that's precisely how we have to build them, buy them, and write them up.

 

16 hours ago, assault said:

The Justice Inc Weird Talents and Psychic Powers were presented without much game mumbo jumbo. Maybe they could be a model for a "feels like magic" system. It just means that someone else has to make the sausages for you.

You can easily do magic like other games do it.

 

Fireball (6d6, 6" radius, 1 time per day)

 

Done. 

 

Or

 

Feather Fall (Reduce falling creature's rate of descent to 10 feet per segment, 1 time per day).

 

I can do this all day. 

 

The only reason Hero looks so difficult or not fitting a specific genre is everyone keeps burying the game under unnecessary annotation.  When my Fantasy Hero buys a sword I have yet to write down the lengthy stat block on how it was built.  I just write sword and xd6KA.

 

Spells and magic are easy if you model them like pretty much every other RPG out there. 

 

Unless of course none of the games out there can do magic right

 

[Duke Bushido]

How did you cast that spell?

[Opal]

1 hour ago, Duke Bushido said:

as the guy it was being said about

I was not replying to your comment.  I have no plans to reply to your posts in the foreseeable future.

[Chris Goodwin]

D&D magic was new, once upon a time.  DMs were encouraged to control players' access to it by various means, and there was a lot implied by it and how it was presented.  You started out with a few spells in your spell book, and if you wanted more you had to go find them!  

 

Where were they to find?  That's up to the DM.  You might -- might -- be able to meet other "magic users" and trade with them for spells.  You might find spell scrolls that you could, if you were careful and had the down time, lab, materials, and so on, copy into your book.  If you were very lucky you might defeat an NPC and get their spell book.  

 

The spells themselves, though, didn't have a history behind them; they just were.  Everything else in the game was something we could filter through things we already knew about.  Clerics, thieves, fighters... we could imagine those in our mind's eye, figure out how they got to be what they are.  Magic users, though, were new.  No background, nothing about how it works, just... here it is, I (the DM) will let you know when and how you get more.  

 

Duke, I would guess that modern D&D editions probably don't give you the same "sensawunda" or feeling of magic that early versions did.  Unless the DM specifies otherwise, and few do, a wizard's spells just sort of happen.  It's assumed that a wizard is always thinking about magic, making notes in their books, performing research in down time, and so on, such that when they level up they automatically already have access to whatever spells they're gaining.  (Modern D&D treats a lot of things like that; officially, when you level up, you can take a new level in whatever class you want; "it's assumed" that you were training in it, or had some past prior experience that's relevant, or whatever.  Same with learning new skills, languages, tool proficiencies, and so on.  I find it all feels kind of flat.)

 

De gustibus non disputandum.  In matters of taste there can be no argument.  

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

1 hour ago, Opal said:

I was not replying to your comment.  I have no plans to reply to your posts in the foreseeable future.

 

 

Excellent.  

 

We're on the same page! 

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

1 hour ago, Chris Goodwin said:

Duke, I would guess that modern D&D editions probably don't give you the same "sensawunda" or feeling of magic that early versions did. 

 

 

I honestly can't say, Dude.     I have never hidden that overall, I don't care for D&D, and the last time I played was in.. '92, maybe?  I was in a group that had been using AD&D since it was published.  It was a _bit_ different from the D&D I knew, but not enough that it caused anything to stick out as particularly different (though, admittedly, I didn't care for D&D; I was there just for a chance to sit on the colorful side of the screen, so I wasn't really looking to see which parts were "advanced" versus what I already knew.    

 

 

[Ninja-Bear]

Back in the day though I’m not sure of which editions this applies to but D&D characters could only regain HP at 1 per day at full rest so Clerics are really useful if they can help heal you in a casting. Also I heard that originally the Cleric was a in between of Fighter and Magic User . He could fight but still limited in choice of weapons and was the strongest and it took to 2nd level to actually cast a spell.

[Duke Bushido]

That is prerry much spot-on.

 

Crushing / blunt weapons only

Magic, but mostly either healing or defense until he gained a few levels.

 

It was akin To playing th Valkyrie in Gauntlet: dabbles in both; not outstanding at either; can soak hits.

 

 

 

[Spence]

15 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

How did you cast that spell?

The same as any other thing.  For my games I have either had them use "per day" or "mana". 

 

But I realize you are just trying to make it difficult. 

 

How do you cast a spell in D&D?

The same way. 

 

The play says they are  casting x. 

Every consideration needed to fill in the details for a spell in Hero are the same ones in D&D or any other game. 

Spell, cost to cast, range/targeting and end effect. 

 

No more no less.

[Chris Goodwin]

If I'm being honest, I'm not even sure what "feels like magic" even means.  "Sense of wonder," maybe?  

 

A lot of "old school" D&D play consisted of things like... 

 

Player:  "I climb the wall to get around the pit trap."  

DM:  "How exactly are you trying to climb the wall?"  

 

Then they go back and forth, with the player flailing around with something they may or may not know anything about (rigging ropes, pounding in pitons, ???) until the DM is satisfied, and the PC either makes it across or falls into the pit.  

 

This is the closest I can get to something "feeling like magic".  The GM should ask, "How exactly are you trying to cast ___ spell?"  and there's back and forth until the DM is satisfied, and the spell either works or it doesn't.  

 

The divide between "old school" and ... "not old school" is whether you can decide your character knows how to do something.  You don't have to say how you climb the wall, or cast the spell, or defuse the bomb, or whatever, because your character has a skill of some kind that you can roll.  

 

I can't see that there's much difference between a first edition AD&D spell writeup, with name, school, casting time, range, area, components, save, etc., and a HERO System spell writeup, with its name, effect, base cost, Advantages, active cost, Limitations, real cost.  In both cases, the GM and player need to know what's going to happen when the spell is cast -- the player so they can choose the right spell, get into position, make sure it's going to have the effect they want it to have, and the GM so they can adjudicate it and tell the player what happens.  

 

Where's the feel of magic in that?  

 

I'm not sure there's ever going to be a sufficient definition of feel of magic, any more than there is a sufficient definition of hard-core pornography beyond "I know it when I see it."  

 

Magic has to be systematized in some way if we're going to use it in games, in such a way that people who are using it don't feel like they're missing out by not wearing armor and swing swords, and in such a way that the fighty types don't feel like they're missing out.  

 

As far as what people prefer, or like, or don't like, de gustibus non disputandum.  If you like something, you like it; if you prefer something, you prefer it; if you don't like something, you don't like it.  Justifying why you do or don't like something is wasted energy, and gives people a chance to argue your definitions, your facts, whatever.  Yes, the thing is very orange; no, it is not a cube, it is egg-shaped.  I prefer zorbles to greemli because zorbles are orange cubes.  No, not all zorbles are cubes; some are egg-shaped and some are pyramidal.  

 

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

To a certain extent the magic feel of the game goes away in every area the more you play and get used to the mechanics and how it all works.  Going into a dungeon after 30 years of playing the game is nowhere near as exciting and mysterious as it was the first time.  Its still fun, or we wouldn't do it but its not new, fresh, or compelling as it once was.

 

So its very difficult to keep magic feeling as magical as it might, simply because the more you understand something the less mysterious and mystical it feels.

[Opal]

9 hours ago, Ninja-Bear said:

Back in the day though I’m not sure of which editions this applies to but D&D characters could only regain HP at 1 per day at full rest so Clerics are really useful if they can help heal you in a casting. Also I heard that originally the Cleric was a in between of Fighter and Magic User . He could fight but still limited in choice of weapons and was the strongest and it took to 2nd level to actually cast a spell.

Healing was, by the time I started playing D&D in 1980, one of the two big things the Cleric did (the other was Turn Undead).  You 'needed' a Cleric because modules put extra undead in  undead encounters because the cleric would just turn them, anyway.... but, more importantly, because without one you couldn't heal the party up.  Not in combat when someone was about to die, and not even 'back in town' where, yeah, 1 hp or so a day, depending on the exact rules in use, vs a whole slate of Cure spells from the Cleric each day.

 

Interestingly the Cleric went from no spells at first level in 0D&D, to starting with spells at first level, and getting *bonus spells* from even modest WIS, so most Clerics in 1e AD&D started able to cast 3 cure light wounds each day.  It seems like there was a recognition that the party really needed the Cleric's healing to keep the game moving.

[Ninja-Bear]

@Opal at one point I was trying to track down when the Cleric got first level spells because the Basic Fantasy I play has Clerics having spells only starting at 2nd which is like the Basic games it’s modeled on.  One thing for sure if any one is ever bored trying to track down D&D history is a BIG rabbit hole. 

[Christopher R Taylor]

The 1 hp a day thing always drove me nuts, because the description of hit points is that it is mostly "luck, skill, endurance and other factors" and not just physical damage.

 

Why does that take ages to come back, again??

[Greywind]

Because the gods say so?

[Ninja-Bear]

4 hours ago, Greywind said:

Because the gods say so?

Nah, Old Age!

5 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

The 1 hp a day thing always drove me nuts, because the description of hit points is that it is mostly "luck, skill, endurance and other factors" and not just physical damage.

 

Why does that take ages to come back, again??

It’s funny you mention this because the video I got the hit one a day was from watching Questing Beast. He brought up that some are looking at a simple hack of the system where you have Grit and Flesh. Grit is all the luck, endurance and etc. and Flesh would be straight out Body. So you could avoid the situation where at high enough level you got out of your armor and swam in lava then rested and BOOM! Back to normal. 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

So you could avoid the situation where at high enough level you got out of your armor and swam in lava then rested and BOOM! Back to normal. 

Yeah that was the flip side: you get high enough level and you can jump off a cliff and walk away with a shrug.  A few healing potions and bam! 

[Greywind]

One of the things that drew me to SPI's DragonQuest was the fact that characters don't get harder to kill. They get better at killing things before they get killed.

[Ninja-Bear]

21 minutes ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Yeah that was the flip side: you get high enough level and you can jump off a cliff and walk away with a shrug.  A few healing potions and bam! 

I converted a part of a module to Fantasy  Hero once and when it came to a (possible) fall, in D&D it was a straight HP and at low level a possible deadly fall but in Hero terms the 10 ft fall was something like 4d6 Normal damage. I ended up tweaking that part a smidge.

Oh and to answer Mr. R’s question, we are having a Fantasy Hero and I’m using a Dwarf Cleric. We based the “college” off the Fantasy Hero 4th ones. It Basically one Church and each College is a focus of the whole.