Linear Fighters and Bullshit Wizards (Patreon)

You’re paying the money, so you get the straight dope. Last update turned out to be surprisingly zeitgeisty and folks engaged with it deeply in a way we haven’t seen with our design posts before. TONS of discussion in our Patrons-only Discord channel.

Now that may be people were talking a lot because we posted unformed, untested ideas and we may regret that. In which case, we learned something! But for now, let’s imagine revealing our inner processes (blimey) is a Good Thing. In which case I think it might be useful to talk about what happened yesterday and today.

We designed a Prototype Mage based on the new Casting Time idea, and then we tested it in a session yesterday. I was a player in that game, not playing the Mage but I felt like I learned a lot just watching.

The folks in these tests are fellow MCDM devs and friends and not professional testers, so these early tests are just making sure the whole thing doesn’t just immediately fall apart as soon as we roll initiative. No point wasting testers’ time if we can see it doesn’t work in an internal test.

But it didn’t immediately fall apart. That absolutely does NOT mean it will survive testing, that all remains to be seen. It might not even survive our next internal test! But it didn’t fall apart.

That gave me the opportunity to sort of put the problem down and take a step back and think about Wizards and Mages in the abstract again. Basically I wanted to be ready if it falls apart later.

And I started thinking: why are Wizards so hard to design for? I think I had some useful ideas. What I’m going to do, because I’m lazy and I think some of you might get a kick out of this, is post the actual messages I wrote into the Design Channel in our private discord. You want to know what live design looks like? This is it.

These messages were posted at around 2:30am. MCDM Never Sleeps. Don’t worry about the Wheel of the Web stuff, you’ll hear about that later maybe. 😀 [Brackets indicate text I have added just now to clarify my sleep-deprived stream of consciousness.]

Why Are Wizards Such A Pain In The Ass?

Matt — Today [Wednesday Night] at 2:13 AM

This is completely unrelated to all the different discussions here. But there's nothing that requires us to make our mage a generalist the way the d20 fantasy wizard is.

Like, I know we want this game to compete with D&D [At least in terms of quality design, presentation, and the fantasy we're trying to capture]. And part of that is making sure that we fulfill all the archetypes. But what if the wizard is just a bad archetype? What if the problem between linear fighters and quadratic wizards isn't an equal problem where the whole design is flawed. It's actually just the existence of the d20 wizard. Maybe that's the actual problem.

This comes from me thinking about throwing out the language idea, the interesting idea about the wheel of the web, which may not even work, that absolutely would not surprise me, but it is the kind of unorthodox thinking I find inspiring. And I think will inspire other people.

And I started thinking about the fact that right now I am trying to come up with a design that serves the lore. But the lore is entirely obscure to the vast potential audience of d20 players. What if the lore served the design? What if we could make the wizard whatever we thought was cool?

And that made me start to think what if our Mage was effectively a specialty wizard in d20 fantasy? What if our mage was just a conjurer? Or just an abjurist?

I don't literally mean those schools or ideas. But what if we had a…a fire mage? And that was a class with a unique name. And then we had like a time mage or something. And that was just a different class with a different name.

Really as I'm thinking about this I feel like we have sort of two categories of classes. And maybe all d20 fantasy has been like this and I just never really noticed. Where there's Martial classes. And within that category there's lots of different fun archetypes that are sort of ‘easy’ to implement. Barbarian, monk, rogue, fighter.

And then there's magical archetypes that are often also ‘easy’ to implement. Like the healer, or our idea for the summoner which we're excited by. The d20 warlock is pretty focused.

And then there's just this other weird class called The Wizard that is really like three or four different classes all mashed up together, and we just accept this unthinkingly. I guess what I'm saying is, what if we unmashed them?

Matt — Today at 2:32 AM

I suppose, technically, alternatively, armed with this knowledge it might be easier to design the mage? To make them sort of this weird omniclass where there are three specific things a mage can do in our game. I don't know what those are, they're categories. And it's impossible to do all three equally well. But you can either decide to be mostly one, or mostly the other, or a unique hybrid however you want.

So, in a sense, we could make our Mage the a la carte class. Like "how you build your mage" is what makes the mage special and the fact that there are these three (I mean I don't know if three is the right number, but it has to be a small number) archetypes within the mage, I guess like subclasses? Although I don't know if we would want to make these three classes hidden inside the mage explicit? The way you do a subclass. [Like, we don’t call this out, you can build a Defender Mage or an Offensive Mage, or a Buff/debuff Mage and the player just reads How To Make A Mage, sees these choices, and says “I get it.”]

Anyway the way you choose to build your mage is sort of like building a custom class.

That makes an alarming amount of sense here at 2:30 in the morning. We'll see if it still feels smart when I wake up!

If I'm right about this, then building your mage would have to be part of the playtest. We have to sort of give you a bunch of options and let you pick them and put them together and make whatever kind of mage you want.

I mean you can customize all first level characters I presume. And regardless of when you can specialize, all classes are going to have specializations. So how would the mage be different here?

Well I don't know exactly. The only thing I can think of is that the mages are uniquely able to decide to be a striker, or a defender, or a leader, or a controller. [And maybe you could change these during a Rest.] Or a generalist! Do a little of all of them!

Matt — Today at 3:19 AM

Whatever else it is going on I'm convinced that the issue is related to the fact that either the mage is a generalist and that has been difficult for us to design thus far [because we weren’t making it EXPLICIT in the choices the player makes], or the problem is that we assume the mage needs to be a generalist and breaking out of that mode gives us more and better options.

Anyway

Back to the present! 😀

None of this has anything to do with wizards having spells that take different numbers of turns to cast. It’s just me thinking about how we think about Wizards and what the “real” problem is. If there even is a problem.

Wherever we land, I think we’re going to end up with the Mage either being a kind of Specialist Wizard, the way our Summoner would, in d20 Fantasy, be a Specialist Wizard (Conjurist).

OR we design the Mage explicitly to be a generalist but instead of this crazy bucket of random powers like the d20 Wizard, we know what our archetypes are, and you get to decide which your mage is, or whether you do a little of all of them. Like, what if the archetypes were just the normal class roles; striker, defender, commander, leader, controller?

No idea when we’ll see these ideas in action, if at all. We’re hyperfocused on the Resource Economy right now and how Encounters fit into the Adventuring “Day.”

I just thought you folks would find some value reading our literal, actual thought process.