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Post by AxeMental on Aug 17, 2005 6:22:05 GMT -5
Crap Foster, I hate when you make me agree with you. Your reasoning does jive with the magic users and cleric types depicted in movies and books (at least Harry Potter Hogwart students and any number of priests in Dracula/vampire movies off the top of my head "the old, you have to believe for that to really work" line).
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Post by Lord Cias on Aug 23, 2005 1:22:31 GMT -5
Well, I must say that I may have come full circle. My line of thinking went something like this:
If wisdom doesn't affect a cleric's spell casting power, then what could it affect (that could also apply in some way to the druid class)? The obvious answer is that high wisdom would entitle the cleric (druid) to more "favor" from the gods (nature). What form should this extra "favor" take that would be both balanced and non-complex? Uh, spells?
There were, however, two things that came to mind that I'm still mauling over in my head. First, everybody wants intelligence to affect magic-users the way wisdom affects clerics. What if it was the other way around, what if wisdom affected clerics in a way similar to the way intelligence affects magic-users? "But intelligence only affects how many and which spells a magic-user can have, clerics don't have such limits . . ." No, but BtB they do have another annoying little limitation (one that I suspect is almost always ignored, but that is perhaps another discussion), spell failure.
BtB, a cleric with a wisdom score of 12 or lower totally sucks compared to a cleric with a wisdom of 13+. Not only does he not get the bonus spells, the spells he does get has a chance of failing entirely. Regardless of how sucky this rule is (and it really is sucky, not only because it makes low-wisdom clerics suck that much more compared to high-wisdom clerics, but because it also requires a die roll each and every time the cleric casts a spell), still, the principle that not all clerics can cast all spells is indeed founded within the BtB rules of AD&D.
So what I am looking at now is a way to kill two birds with one stone, i.e. fix the horrible (IMNSHO) spell failure rules AND the wisdom bonus spell issue. Afterall, spell failure currently is a part of the BtB wisdom adjustment paradigm as a whole, so any changes made to bonus spells should also take spell failure into consideration.
Perhaps (and this is just a thought here) the "failure" roll should be made at the time the cleric attempts to memorize a spell for the day. This could represent whether or not the cleric is able to muster up enough faith to truly commit the spell (for 1st and 2nd level ones) to heart or whether or not the servants of the gods finds the cleric worthy of that particular spell at that particular time. This would be easier than the BtB spell failure rules in two ways. One, it would get all of the dice rolling out of the way all at once and before the adventure really starts. Two, it would be a little more forgiving since if the cleric couldn't memorize his first choice then he could memorize another one in its place instead of not knowing until the time of the casting whether or not it would work and end up losing the spell. Note that if the cleric failed to memorize a certain spell it doesn't mean that he can never memorize that spell again, it just means that he can't memorize that spell until the next day.
Wisdom could affect this by either reducing the chance for failure OR the chance for failure could remain a constant (regardless of wisdom) but high wisdom guarentees that the cleric can memorize a certain number of spells of his choice without failure. For example, let's say that clerics have a 75% chance to successfully memorize any given spell. A wisdom of 12 - 13 guarentees the cleric 1 spell/spell level, 14 - 15 guarentees 2 spells/spell level, 16 - 17 grants 3 spells/spell level without a chance of failure, and 18 lets the cleric memorize 4 spells/level of his choice.
Or something like that.
The only problem that I can see with this is that, when combined with not giving clerics spells until 2nd level, this actually, in a way, reduces the cleric's spell ability below that of even an OD&D cleric. Of course the expanded spell list for clerics in AD&D may help offset this, and again the basic principle that cleric spells may not work is already founded in AD&D . . .
EDIT: (BTW, in addition to making AD&D clerics more like OD&D clerics with regard to spell casting ability, another reason I want to change the wisdom adjustments for clerics is because I want to reduce the gap between low-wisdom and high-wisdom clerics. Basically, I want to reduce the importance of ability scores.)
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Post by WSmith on Aug 24, 2005 8:45:56 GMT -5
FWIW, I am not sure the amount of work this would require would be worth it. I do understand the interest in reducing the importance of ability scores, though.
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Post by Lord Cias on Aug 30, 2005 0:41:44 GMT -5
Well, I've already put this much thought and effort into it, so I may as well continue.
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