Evolution of a Game

The magic system has seen a number of interesting changes as I've worked on building interesting and dynamic spells, useful for a number of tactical situations.

A Bit of History

The decision to not include non-combat spells (and abilities in general) was one I made quite some time ago -- it would have been before Mikomicon 2006 -- for the purpose of simplicity at the table. The fewer trouble-making spells were available to players, the faster and more entertaining the battles would be, without the players ever needing to argue about the adjudication of a particular spell or ability.

I remember when Don and I first sat down to decide on the spells from the Player's Handbook to be included in or excluded from the game. It was my call to exclude spells from sources other than the PHB, and that was primarily to prevent players that had a greater knowledge of sourcebooks from having an overwhelming advantage.

In early 2006, I ran a short campaign based on material I had developed for a new genre/system that I was developing, called "SOd20" which was short for "Space Opera d20." It ran for a couple weeks, though it was by and large too complex to work without a more codified set of rules. My players did work with me to help hone the game some, but it never really got off the ground. I learned some interesting things about the skill system, though, and started working on tinkering with the base classes. A few months later, I tried again with another system that was intended to be both item-less and spell-less. Spell-like abilities were integrated into every base class, and each base class was a crunchy 10-level affair, chock full of interesting powers and abilities yoinked from various d20 System products across the spectrum. Each class was fairly generic (fighter, cleric, rogue, sorcerer), built to be primarily self-sufficient. The system had many similar problems, as I was trying to integrate everything from Magic of Incarnum to Expanded Psionics Handbook to d20 Future. The playtests eventually ended in and the project was set aside to make room for other prospects.

In the back of my mind, however, lingered this idea that I could integrate everything into the game if I could find the common links between the systems and erode away the major mechanical differences.

The New Thing

With the advent of Star Wars Saga Edition (which, admittedly, I didn't learn of until some time after the announcement of 4E D&D) it became apparent that some of the differences between class abilities (now "talents") and skills, and between spells and skills, could be eroded. Now that skills were based solely on level, ability and training, and that miscellaneous bonuses were gone, skills could actually be better integrated into the rest of the system -- and certain barriers that existed between class abilities and spells could be torn down. For example, the Jedi's "negotiation" ability neatly duplicates a charm person spell. It became apparent that many "0-level" and "1st-level" spells and psionic powers needn't be spells at all; they could be supernatural "talents" available to characters of a particular class, using skills, talents or feats as requirements for heftier abilities.

I went back to the idea of the fairly generic character classes, or "iconic" as Wizards of the Coast would call them, when another thought came up as I finished work on the fighter class -- this idea stemmed from my experiences with Guild Wars and was based in part on some reading I had done about the GW metagame.

Been There, Done That

There were concerns within the development team for Guild Wars about needing to constantly outdo themselves -- each campaign had to be bigger, cooler and offer more features than the last, all while building upon what was introduced in the previous campaigns. The original six professions got new skills with each campaign, and each campaign had two new professions, which in turn needed new skills in the next campaign, in addition to the original six. As more and more features were piled on, the development staff discovered what limitations they had placed on themselves based on certain decisions they had made up front -- limiting a character's race to human only, first, among other things.

My own observation of the Guild Wars professions was that the original six professions dominated the game, no matter how cool or well-balanced classes that followed were. My thoughts on the matter were that the six original professions were "two generic," at least, the warrior, monk and elementalist, and probably the necromancer as well. Whereas the mesmer and the ranger could probably be seen as the Prophesies "campaign" professions, being that they seem to belong to the setting better than the others.

Like a Rock

What led, of course, was the idea to create every "base" class as unique, like the mesmer, ranger, assassin, ritualist, paragon or dervish. If none of the characters served as "generic" pillars, then each one could fill a unique niche, and the combinations that could arise out of multi-classing would stretch on without ever needing to "outdo" the originals -- new niches could be created and filled, and old niches re-envisioned and expanded upon, similar to the aims of Guild Wars (and D&D to a large extent), but building on the core PvP concept of DEEP SEKH.

This led to my idea of the "1st-level Prestige Class" concept, which I will discuss another time.