Changes to the System

There are several major changes implemented to the basic system that I will detail here.

Change #1
Initiative - Is being changed. In larger missions the party and monsters will act in batches similar to how it was run before when folks initiatives lined up.

Mob A goes, Mob B goes, Mob C goes. Player 1 goes, Player 2 goes, Player 3 goes. etc.

The way it will work now is instead of all players and monsters rolling initiative all the monsters will go on the same initiative. Any player that beat the monsters will have a free turn in which to act. This is fundamentally the same system but it does have some flaws. The first is that mobs all acting at the same time could be devastating if they were to focus fire, however I tend to think I am not that dickish of a GM. If things do get out of hand or the new system doesn't seem to work we can always change it back to the old method.

The reason for the change is really for speed. Since ideally we will be having more people on the site we will have a lot more work cut out for us. In my past experience it is significantly faster and easier if everyone acts in one batch. Sitting down and hammering out all the monster stuff in one go then gives the players a full day or more to get their posts together. It should hopefully remove some of the wait time associated with waiting for a single player. If a single player is still delaying the group the GM has the right, and is encouraged to skip the players action.



Change #2 Spellcasting
Spellcasting is going to receive an overhaul. Casting rolls and such will remain the same although I will probably scale the IF and Miscast chances better. The main overhaul area is in Spellpower. I want your spellpower roll to directly affect how powerful or potent the spell is. Since Wp directly effects your spellcasting roll this should not effect the numbers statistically, all it should do is give spellcasting a little more spread. It would make magic resistance make a little more sense in context as well as benefit non-traditional casters.

All spells will be receiving an overhaul. Spells that are normally not required to make a spellpower check now will. And all spells will benefit from a high spellpower roll. This should give scalability and effectiveness to utility spells and summons.

While I do not have all the math exactly worked out yet. The intent is something like this.

Summon Skeleton

Summons this dude.

	Ws	Bs	S	T	Ag	W
Skeleton	10	0	10	10	15	5

For every 10 points you pass the spellpower roll by increase the S/T and W of your skeleton by 1 pt. This would both increase the power of summoning spells as well as make them a little more risky (with the addition of a second roll) like magic should be. Powerful but variable. More changes to this will be made as they are developed.


Change #3
PVP- Pvp is being added. Check out the PvP thread for details. I am personally pretty excited about it. We'll see how it goes. At the moment it is mainly for fun but I am certainly not ruling out a tournament in the near future...


Change #4
Although technically an old change it is worth noting here. 1. The default roll to succeed on a task will now be 60% instead of 50%. This should make the game more fast paced and less frustrating to those who roll badly. 2. Striking a foe in melee now "engages" that foe making it more difficult for them to ignore melee attackers. You can read that post for more details.


Change #5
Trees!

First off all the trees are getting an facelift. Second off is I will be eliminating Race Specific trees. Sounds crazy I know but finish reading before freaking out. Two new trees have been added to the general list (Engineering and Assassin). This puts us up to a total of 10 General Trees.

Alchemist
Assassin
Commander
Duelist (Formerly known as Grace)
Engineer
Fury
Guardian
Marksman
Juggernaut
Scout

All trees that don't fall under the general category will be magic lores. Any player may select up to one magic lore instead of one of the general trees. For those people who are incredibly inclined to take two lores there will be an opportunity to do so when you select your 4th tree and complete the associated quest. By reducing the number the trees and eliminating the race component this streamlines the process a bit and makes things aesthetically much more pleasing as well as reducing my work for the 4th tree quests. The following Lores will be implemented at "Launch".
Necromancy
Tzeench
Fire
And most likely Khemri and High Magic
plus any others I deem fit enough for launch

For those of you that were attached to your racial trees such as Vampirism or Lizardmanyness. Don't worry. The default racial traits for each race will be revamped and expanded upon slightly to 3-5 skills that are appropriate, iconic, and fitting for that race.

I believe these changes will be beneficial for the overall site as well as still allow a sufficient amount of variability in character creation.
Under the new system each character will be allowed eventually.
2-4 General Skill Trees. With the addition of the new trees every character should be able to find something appropriate.
0-2 Magic Lores. Both the magic lores and trees will have 40+ skill points to invest in.

More Racial Traits - Upwards of now 15-20 skill points to invest based solely on your race available at character creation. Each racial trait has effectively become a free mastery tree.

Up to 3 - Mastery Trees - Each granting 4 additional skills for a 20 pt investment.

In total this puts characters at a total of investing 240+ skill points given any specific build. Giving plenty of flexibility to even identical characters. If you want some stupid wonky math on the # of possibilities that means now for character creation.

There are over 110 million ways to select your trees alone. If you combine this with the ways you can spend your skill points there are well over trillions of ways to create your character.

Change #6
City Raids will be implemented soonish. Check the RP-Recruitment for details. I'm looking forward to them! In short enemy factions will be attacking our city. Over time we can team up to weaken or eliminate them.


Change #7
DR or Damage reduction now acts effectively like temporary Hp. They no longer reduce damage they simply soak damage. DR is calculated on an encounter level and does stack.
Example - If you possessed an item or passive granting you DR 5. You would absorb the first 5 damage dealt to you per encounter.
Note- DR does not actually effect your W total. So abilities that restore a % of W do not take DR into consideration.

Change #8
Epic Abilities - In order to increase the level of awesome. Each tree will be given an Epic ability. These abilities are usable once per adventure instead of once per encounter. Each tree will receive one of these Epic Abilities and Magic Lores Level 6 spells will now be Epic. Epic abilities may not be used in PvP.


Because of the massive changes each player will be required to remake their character. You can keep your earned stat points and ability points but I want each player to go through the character creating process once more and get them approved due to the massive changes that are taking place. Potentially your character is exactly the same, and that's fine, but I need to check to make sure everything checks out on both ends. I will be informing each of you when this will happen.


There are one or two more things that I can't think of off the top of my head.

These are all good changes. Regarding speed of play: We discussed the 24 hour thing, and you said you would leave that up to individual GMs. I agree, but I think we should state somewhere that the default behavior, for normal GMs, is 24 hours. Slower (or faster I guess) games should be the exception, and people should be aware coming into this that posting once a day is expected if you're in an adventure. It's not an unreasonable expectation, we're not asking you to write a page every day. Just something.

Also, let's talk about Epic abilities. If someone "pops their cooldowns" so to speak and uses an Epic ability, I think there needs to be some assurance it's going to do something. 4th Ed solves this problem by making basically every Daily ability either Reliable (not expended on a miss) or do half damage even on a miss. I think either of these are both good solutions, but there are certainly other options.

Are we changing the level 6 spells to make them epic? As is, they are very difficult to cast, for good reason. The fluff would have us believe that epic spells are more difficult to cast than normal spells, but for an Epic, I'm not sure that that's a good way to go (depending on what kind of reliability solution we use). If we keep the difficult casting roll for epic spells, they should probably be more powerful than epic abilities from other trees (which will be far easier to use), which also strikes me as a bad plan.

Thoughts?

You are correct I should specify 24 hours is the default. On the other hand the current admins are you and chair who i talk to on a regular basis so communication and intent are almost a non-issue. If interest peaks up I will also contact Forte to see if he has any interest in assisting. I agree once a day is not unreasonable to expect a post mid-adventure.

Epic abilities will be powerful enough ideally that they should normally work, but yes in theory they could fail. This occurs in 4th edition as well =D. Only the fighter abilities are typically reliable and many do half but not the majority at least in the core book. Hopefully the increased odds of success will decrease some of your legitimate paranoia about failed rolls. As for level 6 spells becoming epic the idea was not to replace level 6 spells with Epic spells but that many of the current level 6 spells would become the new epic spells.

Many of the level 6 spells atm strike me more as Epic spells. A new level 6 spell would be called in to replace them. I think we'll need to wait for more specifics before judging the power of Epic spells. First priority is the general trees.

Thankfully, thanks to the scale of the site I don't think we need to worry about the monsters all focus firing a single player to death unless the GM decides to be a jerk.

I don't particularly have anything to add that hasn't been said already.

Minor tweak to casting. The penalty for successive casts of the same spell, will be dropped from -10 to -5. We'll give that a try and see how it goes. Also if this wasnt clear before, armor adds its penalty to both spellpower and casting.