Build Cap
- Thread starter Draven
- Start date
What build amount would make sense? 30,40,45,50?
I guess we would need to know how many are above a certain level to gauge. I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but if it does lower for a lot there should be some compensation for time/money/donations spent to get there.
I guess we would need to know how many are above a certain level to gauge. I wouldn’t be opposed to it, but if it does lower for a lot there should be some compensation for time/money/donations spent to get there.
Alavatar
Baron
I am of the opinion that a Hard Level Cap in conjunction with a Hard Magic Item Cap (either number of rituals or number of items) be created.
Unlimited growth in a Table Top is fine because there is no impact on players outside the group engaging the Storyteller. In a LARP, unlimited growth can intimidate new players due to continued power disparity between High Level and Low Level. Yes, a player may grow bored due to a stagnated character at cap, but honestly I feel that is a risk worth taking.
And Magic Items would need to be capped as well since they are effectively another form of power accrual.
Unlimited growth in a Table Top is fine because there is no impact on players outside the group engaging the Storyteller. In a LARP, unlimited growth can intimidate new players due to continued power disparity between High Level and Low Level. Yes, a player may grow bored due to a stagnated character at cap, but honestly I feel that is a risk worth taking.
And Magic Items would need to be capped as well since they are effectively another form of power accrual.
Draven
Count
The purpose of this thread isn’t to discuss implementation, but to discuss if there’s a need that warrants implementation to any extent.
I don’t want it to particularly divert from that purpose, because it’s easy to justify not doing it if people become lost in the specifics.
Sage of Legaia
Rogue
On a personal note, I'm indifferent to whether there's a level cap or not, as my current character stops having anything really useful to put build into after about level 30-31, and anything lower than that just means he has less ranks of Craftsman; however, I'd say that a hard cap of 35-40 would probably feel "right" to me if I was playing a more combat-focused character. That would be about the time I'd likely start looking to retire the character, or just put it on the backburner while I play a new one and only drag it out when other players asked me to (for plotline reasons or just because they wanted to see it again).
Muir
Fighter
Yes, yes, a million times yes.
The game is much more fun at APL 25 than at APL 40, and once the rift between the top and bottom of the APL gets that wide it becomes almost impossible for new PCs to work themselves in because the 'crunchies' aimed at the APL eat them for breakfast.
If people are dead-set on infinite progression, I'd at least prefer a hard cap on 'fighting' build, with anything over level 30 or so limited to only production/craftsman skills.
The game is much more fun at APL 25 than at APL 40, and once the rift between the top and bottom of the APL gets that wide it becomes almost impossible for new PCs to work themselves in because the 'crunchies' aimed at the APL eat them for breakfast.
If people are dead-set on infinite progression, I'd at least prefer a hard cap on 'fighting' build, with anything over level 30 or so limited to only production/craftsman skills.
Tantarus
Knight
I actually kinda like this idea.
That said I would be fine with a level cap. Assuming your over flow build goes into an alt.
Draven
Count
I have no issue with this.
Yssenia
Newbie
This is an idea that is alternative to the XP going to alts, or only to production/OCS.
I think that if they want to be able to still gain power, there is some power in the ability to be flexible with skills and ability. What if once a PC was capped, any XP they would game goes into a separate pool. They can't spend it to gain new skills, but rather, they can spend it to replace existing skills. This should only be able to be done between games. But this would let a PC who wants to slightly change how they fight to do so, which means they still get some progression even if their overall XP spend remains the same. It will let them remove skills they no longer use, and to spend them on things they will use.
Of course, spending XP in this manner must leave their entire build as valid, but the ability to change and tweak the build without require a spirit reforge gives the higher level players some level of optimization and progression at a much slower pace, while still capping the power to make it easier to balance encounters and help lower level PCs still feel relevant.
I think that if they want to be able to still gain power, there is some power in the ability to be flexible with skills and ability. What if once a PC was capped, any XP they would game goes into a separate pool. They can't spend it to gain new skills, but rather, they can spend it to replace existing skills. This should only be able to be done between games. But this would let a PC who wants to slightly change how they fight to do so, which means they still get some progression even if their overall XP spend remains the same. It will let them remove skills they no longer use, and to spend them on things they will use.
Of course, spending XP in this manner must leave their entire build as valid, but the ability to change and tweak the build without require a spirit reforge gives the higher level players some level of optimization and progression at a much slower pace, while still capping the power to make it easier to balance encounters and help lower level PCs still feel relevant.
Heidi
Newbie
I am not sure where to post this. Is there any way to have the mage guild identify celest and the earth guild identify earth magic. The in game structure as it is makes mages have a huge money advantage in the game. Identify is a automatic income for the guild. Healers have no such thing. In fact unlike mages healers are often tormented for not healing strangers while mages never get this. The change would be little. But it would be huge in pc's wanting to play healers. Seriously this has been a huge problem since 89. Please in new rules fix this. Since 89, the question why one and not both makes people play a mages more due to the physical imbalance?
Durnic
Knight
That sounds like a chapter culture issue. In Oregon, at least, we have not charged anyone for identification. When a new campaign started in Oregon and the government stated that healers had to charge for healing, the community actually rallied in-game and convinced the local government to rescind that requirement.
Muir
Fighter
Definitely sounds like a local culture thing. It's generally been pretty easy in most of the midwest chapters I've played to find someone who's invested in either circle and doesn't mind doing a quick ID.
As far as expectations of healers, well... I could go on about that one at length and have. I don't like that we have a whole class whose mandated role is effectively 'enable everyone else to have fun playing'. That comes with social pressure to just be a healbot, and would very much like to see (and have been pushing for years) a culture of relying on alchemy and potions for combat healing instead so Earth casters can mem curses and whatnot and have offense.
Unfortunately, there's no substitute for Life.
As far as expectations of healers, well... I could go on about that one at length and have. I don't like that we have a whole class whose mandated role is effectively 'enable everyone else to have fun playing'. That comes with social pressure to just be a healbot, and would very much like to see (and have been pushing for years) a culture of relying on alchemy and potions for combat healing instead so Earth casters can mem curses and whatnot and have offense.
Unfortunately, there's no substitute for Life.
Feldor
Adept
As far as expectations of healers, well... I could go on about that one at length and have. I don't like that we have a whole class whose mandated role is effectively 'enable everyone else to have fun playing'. That comes with social pressure to just be a healbot, and would very much like to see (and have been pushing for years) a culture of relying on alchemy and potions for combat healing instead so Earth casters can mem curses and whatnot and have offense.
Unfortunately, there's no substitute for Life.
It sounds like its not your thing, but I actually really like being a healer/buff-mage. My favorite role to play (and one I've played in many games) is "enabler of other people's fun". I am really looking forward to the 2.0 changes making it so that you can be an effective healer without being high level or with big magic items (and where random fighters and celestialists will no longer walk around with more healing than a midlevel healing-focused caster.) 2.0 will also let healers memorize offensives/situational_spells and convert them to healing in a pinch whereas now you are basically forced to memorize healing as if its the worst case scenario. So I'm expecting to see healers both get better at healing and more fun to play.
Though I do agree with your worry about life spells; but there is another thread about that. And to some extent, the answer may be "Trust your plot team" to scale appropriately.
Since the benefit of the a permanent COP is a NPC resource (NPC ritual only) we take all the coin from IDing magic items from our guild (3-5 silver) and it goes back into plot's hands as a coin sync. That way no one gains benefit and the game has a coin sink. This is in Denver.
More to the OP and less to the healing/resource use culture...
I've found that every game I've ever played has a "sweet spot" in the rules where one will have the most fun playing. This could be low, mid, or even high level - but there is always something! To that extent, games should emphasize getting people to that sweet spot of play experience, and not dwell much before or beyond. In less wordy terms, I think if Alliance's rule have a sweet spot (reportedly in the 10-25 range, but YMMV) then the rules and design should work towards playing in that range.
Note that this is rule set as a whole and not class-specific; my Pathfinder spell casters are rough to play at low level but awesome fun past Pathfinder's sweet spot, while the martial characters feel awesome lower than the sweet spot but take a bit of a back seat towards the end of the game. That kind of variation is totally okay with me, though the larger the overlap the better! Pathfinder even writes their adventure paths with this in mind; they usually go from 1-17, rather than 1-20. They save writing space, and avoid extra levels of very single-class emphasized play.
What could Alliance do about this? The discussion sparked a memory of a game I played, which I'll share here in the hopes someone might have some creative spark triggered. I'll spoiler it for TL;DR purposes.
I suspect adding any system to address a level cap/play extension would require a rework almost as large as the 2.0 rules. I do think it would be worth looking at, though!
I've found that every game I've ever played has a "sweet spot" in the rules where one will have the most fun playing. This could be low, mid, or even high level - but there is always something! To that extent, games should emphasize getting people to that sweet spot of play experience, and not dwell much before or beyond. In less wordy terms, I think if Alliance's rule have a sweet spot (reportedly in the 10-25 range, but YMMV) then the rules and design should work towards playing in that range.
Note that this is rule set as a whole and not class-specific; my Pathfinder spell casters are rough to play at low level but awesome fun past Pathfinder's sweet spot, while the martial characters feel awesome lower than the sweet spot but take a bit of a back seat towards the end of the game. That kind of variation is totally okay with me, though the larger the overlap the better! Pathfinder even writes their adventure paths with this in mind; they usually go from 1-17, rather than 1-20. They save writing space, and avoid extra levels of very single-class emphasized play.
What could Alliance do about this? The discussion sparked a memory of a game I played, which I'll share here in the hopes someone might have some creative spark triggered. I'll spoiler it for TL;DR purposes.
A long time ago, I used to play in a heavily modified CircleMUD that had one of the more entertaining character growth situations I've seen. The core of the game started with rules and a world based in 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, but diverged dramatically for gameplay purposes - a level cap of 49 versus the usual Dungeons and Dragons caps, for one thing. Without going too far into detail, the game had close to a dozen unique character classes and way, way more content than was practical for any character to experience at all level ranges, even extending beyond what was realistically survivable for a single character. Rather than having players roll a bunch of characters, their solution was to create a mechanical and storyline justification for the characters to experience more content across all levels.
Once a character hit level 49, they would find out about a unique quest via word of mouth or a few very limited in-game references to a process called "Remortalization." In order to perform this, the character needed enough experience to reach an equivalent level 50, and a significant amount of in-game currency. Once the character had this, they had to track down an NPC somewhere in the game's far corners - it spawned randomly and frequently moved - get to it, and defeat it. That goal finished, the NPC dropped a "Skein of Fate" the character would enter, and then be faced with a literal 10-question quiz about the area of the game world that is presumed to be usable for their relative level of power. If they passed this quiz, they would have their character reset to level 1. There were a few perks, though, that made this highly sought-after.
The most blatant perk to this was, upon remortalization, the character would be able to pick a second class. This was not a watered down second class - it was the full-featured, all skills and abilities accessible as-if-you-picked-it-first class. This allowed characters to explore the combination between their initial class and any of the several other classes in the game. The character could change their secondary class each time they completed this process - I know I personally tried Cleric/Mercenary, Cleric/Psychic, and Cleric/Physic on the same character. Some class abilities also only unlocked after remortalizing a certain number of times. Also, characters received a modest increase to the natural numeric caps that existed in the game. As per 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, the Human was limited to an 18 in any given ability score, with other races having their racial modifications adjust the ability cap accordingly. A remortalized character would, upon their "rebirth," increase all of those caps by 1, and have a modest increase to the caps of some behind-the-code numbers. On top of this, the "new" character would (with the foresight to hand off their gear to a trusted friend, or leave it somewhere secure that they trusted) have all of their high level equipment. The one downside to all of this was that experience gain was not quite reset - the more powerful character had to work harder to gain their experience towards their next level. Each time a character remortalized, the numbers went up and the experience got harder. On top of that, the cost of the next remortalization went up considerably. Remortalization capped at 10 iterations, and characters at that capstone were somewhat rare.
The net result of this was that the in-game content was much broader in scope - some "low level" content would actually be designed to be harder and more rewarding to the remortalized characters versus newer characters, and there was a great deal of top-level content that would be far too hard without the numbers cap increase. Between that was a vast amount of content that was usable by characters across the scope of levels and "generation."
So... how would something like this look in Alliance? I've got a bit of an idea after reading this thread and remembering that old game, but it's pretty half-formed and has problems to address. For instance, we don't use a hard-class system, so the reward of a secondary class wouldn't work. There are also not so many "behind the screen" mechanics that could be manipulated. There is also the problem of magic item creep, which can dramatically skew a character's relative power.
Once a character hit level 49, they would find out about a unique quest via word of mouth or a few very limited in-game references to a process called "Remortalization." In order to perform this, the character needed enough experience to reach an equivalent level 50, and a significant amount of in-game currency. Once the character had this, they had to track down an NPC somewhere in the game's far corners - it spawned randomly and frequently moved - get to it, and defeat it. That goal finished, the NPC dropped a "Skein of Fate" the character would enter, and then be faced with a literal 10-question quiz about the area of the game world that is presumed to be usable for their relative level of power. If they passed this quiz, they would have their character reset to level 1. There were a few perks, though, that made this highly sought-after.
The most blatant perk to this was, upon remortalization, the character would be able to pick a second class. This was not a watered down second class - it was the full-featured, all skills and abilities accessible as-if-you-picked-it-first class. This allowed characters to explore the combination between their initial class and any of the several other classes in the game. The character could change their secondary class each time they completed this process - I know I personally tried Cleric/Mercenary, Cleric/Psychic, and Cleric/Physic on the same character. Some class abilities also only unlocked after remortalizing a certain number of times. Also, characters received a modest increase to the natural numeric caps that existed in the game. As per 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons, the Human was limited to an 18 in any given ability score, with other races having their racial modifications adjust the ability cap accordingly. A remortalized character would, upon their "rebirth," increase all of those caps by 1, and have a modest increase to the caps of some behind-the-code numbers. On top of this, the "new" character would (with the foresight to hand off their gear to a trusted friend, or leave it somewhere secure that they trusted) have all of their high level equipment. The one downside to all of this was that experience gain was not quite reset - the more powerful character had to work harder to gain their experience towards their next level. Each time a character remortalized, the numbers went up and the experience got harder. On top of that, the cost of the next remortalization went up considerably. Remortalization capped at 10 iterations, and characters at that capstone were somewhat rare.
The net result of this was that the in-game content was much broader in scope - some "low level" content would actually be designed to be harder and more rewarding to the remortalized characters versus newer characters, and there was a great deal of top-level content that would be far too hard without the numbers cap increase. Between that was a vast amount of content that was usable by characters across the scope of levels and "generation."
So... how would something like this look in Alliance? I've got a bit of an idea after reading this thread and remembering that old game, but it's pretty half-formed and has problems to address. For instance, we don't use a hard-class system, so the reward of a secondary class wouldn't work. There are also not so many "behind the screen" mechanics that could be manipulated. There is also the problem of magic item creep, which can dramatically skew a character's relative power.
I suspect adding any system to address a level cap/play extension would require a rework almost as large as the 2.0 rules. I do think it would be worth looking at, though!
Saephis
Squire
I'm concerned that discussion like this leads us back to what made areas like the former "Rules Theory" and many sections of the Rules forums (at least seem) toxic, uninviting, or prohibitive to actual discussion. As posts get longer, or people voice their feelings in response to feelings, it feels that it would certainly push that way again.
Additionally, with many threads in the 2.0 forums, discussions between players have been spoken to by more than a couple of owners of having little-to-no meaningful feedback to owners directly, which could make these discussions come across as more complaint-y than perhaps intended or desired.
Additionally, with many threads in the 2.0 forums, discussions between players have been spoken to by more than a couple of owners of having little-to-no meaningful feedback to owners directly, which could make these discussions come across as more complaint-y than perhaps intended or desired.