Massive damage can only be done with normal attacks:
A sword can slash you for massive damage, even a monk's judo kick can cause massive damage. But a fireball can't. Justify it RP wise as you want such as magic does not contain the same substance as physical things or whatever. But the point is, if only weapons and unarmed attacks can do massive damage, this gives fighters and such an edge because that's where they specialize.
To avoid spellcasters becoming buff oriented, the massive damage will not trigger if the sword contains magical enhancements. Such as +X. However, such buffs as bull's strength, can infact help massive damage because it's technichally not effecting the weapon itself. The massive damage threshold is up to you. Though personally I would think the lower the better. Sense magic enhancements no longer work for triggering massive damage. Only extraordinary abilities and non-magical modifiers. So massive damage equal to constitution score seems reasonable.
Vorpal is an extradorinary effect avaliable to most weapons:
Most weapons such as axes and swords, even daggers have a vorpal effect. 5% chance of activating, and the foe makes a reflex save DC. DC is different depending on the weapon, if they fail, they die. Again, casters aren't going to depend too much on weapons, and if they do, they're buff oriented.
Percentile spell function:
This required some thinking about, to simply make it a skillcheck would make spellcasting too easy at high levels and only balance them at low levels. Whether you use mana or spells-per-day doesn't really matter. This is a unique (though my players complain random) scenario where everytime you go to cast a spell you roll a d20. The DC you have to roll depends on the spell-level.
lvl0-2 or higher.
lvl1-3 or higher.
lvl2-5 or higher.
lvl3-6 or higher.
lvl4-7 or higher.
lvl5-9 or higher.
lvl6-11 or higher.
lvl7-12 or higher.
lvl8-14 or higher.
lvl9-17 or higher.
Even a cantrip has a 5% chance of failure, and a level nine spell only has a fifteen percent chance of working! The intent was to make spellcasting simple. As such, I decided to get rid of alot of the technichal crap such as matireal components, casting time that exceeded standard action, and concentration checks. Anything that would require a concentration check is instead done with a spellcraft check. (Cause I don't see why spellcraft is even a skill otherwise..)
The random and faulty nature of spellcasting doesn't make good for people trying to out peform the fighter at fighting. For example a sorcerer attempting to cast bull's strength may succeed, but there's still a 25% chance he may not. This combined with his low HP, BaB, etc. Buffers just arem't encouraged to cheat the system with massive damage. I'm sure someone could find a way around this, but then that happens with all systems..
This does however leave the sorcerer somewhat nerfed. (again, inevitable) As such, I propose an ability around I don't know, 9th level (to insure nobody takes a sorcerer level then picksup where was left off in another caster) that a sorcerer can either pay an amount of mana or give up a spell-per-day slot, to re-roll a previously failed spellcasting roll check. Considering their high amount of spd, this would be good synergy.
Rangers invariably get a boost all their own. Favored enemy is extraordinary. So massive damage applies with thier attacks, also I rule that the ranger's attack bonus increases as well as damage bonus, that helps more then you might think.
Paladins still suck, as their smite is magic based, so it wouldn't trigger massive damage, but then I believe the paladin is too alignment savy to be a base class anyway. A prestige class maybe, if at all. Alignment should have to do with the story, not the mechanics, so I don't really care about the paladin...
Hope you consider implementing these rules into your game, I havn't had time to test them out yet. If players think the d20 spellcasting rule is too random, I might replace it with 4d6. The difference being a slightly more realiable bell-curve.
And adding vorpal to melee weapons!? I have seen practical builds on the boards that regularly get 10-20 attacks in a full round, and if you actually used this rule, those kinds of builds would very quickly bust a game worse than polymorph abuse.
2) Expect high PC death since every armed foe they face has a vorpal weapon.
3)My DM makes us roll a d20 for spellcasting to set the DC. If you roll a 1, spell fails, though if you roll a 20 damage spells deal double damage and other spells may get something extra. I've told him many times this really, really sucks, but he refuses to change it. I've rolled a 20 a few times, but last campaign we had a TPK because I rolled a 1 trying to cast Miracle to get the party out of the crapshoot we were in. This really bit the big one. It doesn't matter if a bad guy rolled a 1 because he was meant to die anyway and is only on camera that one combat. Players characters are always on camera and one failed to cast spell means literally life or death for that character or the party as a whole.
There were other issues with that combat, but it was the 1 that screwed it all up to hell. He thinks it was the other issues. We have had 1's rolled this campaign, but so far no TPK because of it. I just know the most inopportune time for a 1 is going to come up again.
Massive damage can only be done with normal attacks:
Massive damage is a non-factor to begin with. You just made casters simpler to run because targets of high level fireballs no longer have to roll a d20 every turn just to not roll a natural 1. Besides, damage spells aren't what breaks casters--it's the non damaging spells that do that.
Vorpal is an extradorinary effect avaliable to most weapons:
Okay I guess this makes martial characters marginally better, at least until PCs reach the levels where they can't fail the Ref save except on a natural 1. Then its "I roll to avoid decapitation against the BBEG's nat 20." *yawn* "I make it."
Percentile spell function:
So spell casters now have enforces spell failure chances, which is just annoying at low levels and makes high levels spells basically useless. And it adds yet another die roll to combat. Yay.
Sorry if I seem snarky, it's probably because I'm tired and I want to go home. My firm belief about balancing spell casting is that the spells need the fixing. For a quick and dirty fix, all that needs to be done is to ban or modify the few really problematic spells. For a more fine tuned fix, I have actually begun a Spell Book as seen below.
TS
For example let's say slay living didn't kill you outright, but you had to make three fortitude saves, and if you failed all three you died. If you do succeed at atleast one, you instead take 2d6+6 negative energy damage and become stunned for 1d4 rounds.
That seems reasonable, if not underpowerd, but frankly unless you have every sourcebook on the planet to abuse, a fighter's still going to relatively suck. Maybe get a cleave attempt and get to fight first do to improved innitative. And wow, a +1 bastard sword, I ares scared lol..
James complains most about these new rules. That's why now we do this thing where I immitate James Woods in the snl skit of blue oyster cult.
"I got a fever...and the only cure is more dice!"
Cause I figure anything can be balanced if it involves more dice, incuring more random penalties.:P
I was however thinking about massive damage rule. And that's true, that if I use the rules as written, massive damage won't be happening very often unless you're wildshaping lol!
That's when I considerd changing a weapon's general appearance. Here's what I mean..
Bastard Sword
Damage: 1d10
Critical: 19-20
Confirmation: 7
Multiplyer: x3
Massive Damage: 15
What this means is whenever you use a bastard sword, you roll two independent d20s from your normal attack roll.
Even if you failed on the attack roll itself, if you rolled a 19 or 20 on the critical roll, the attack hits it's target.
Confirmation is the third d20 roll involving if or not you multiply damage dealt. You'd have to roll a 7 or higher. A 65% chance of dealing anywhere from 1 to 30 damage.
And if dealt massive damage, fort save DC 15 or die.
Because of this dramatic increase in damage output. I considerd raising the bar of HP that you gain an additional HP equal to your con-score at first level, and your negative HP max score is equal to your constitution score rather then a flat -10.
Thus even a simple thrust of the sword can possibly kill a foe. And now it explains why weapons get so costly when they're not simple.
And really, fighters are teh suxx0r even with all the splatbooks? Are you trying to start a flame war or have you honestly never seen a hardcore game, 'cause in those games casters are usually the first ones to bite the dust and the fighters can be really scary at times.
I see what you're saying, but even fixed spells would still be better then non-casters all in all.
That depends on how fine-tuned the fix is. If it's only making the very crude fixes like allowing a Ref save for Forcecage and removing the 'call creatures' option from Gate, than yeah spell casting is still usually better than non-casting. But if it's overhauling the spells completely (again, see my Spell Book below), then spell casters actually become roughly balanced with non-casters.
TS
Massive damage can only be done with normal attacks:
Massive damage was never an issue for spellcasters anyway, unless they were blasting, which is inefficient at best. Fireball and all its fiery, maimy ilk, were never problem spells. A well built (as in, maybe a splatbook or two, but no crazy min-maxing) fighter will do more damage in a round to a single foe than a wizard's blasty spell, anyway. Damage dealing spells are mostly used to clear out hordes of weaker foes.
But, you only want massive damage to occur from a weapon's base damage? Okay, you've made massive damage much, much less likely to occur... except for monsters, who often only have natural weapons that deal boatloads of damage. So your rule actually hurts all PCs and benefits monsters... I fail to see how that balances casters.
Vorpal is an extradorinary effect avaliable to most weapons:
Ah, as if the last rule didn't include enough randomness! As was stated by a previous poster, increasing the number of random die rolls (especially for instant death) almost always hurts the players more than the monsters. Sure, your rogue or fighter or what have you can kill a dragon in one hit with this rule... But the dragon was going to die anyway, since (presumably), it was a level-appropriate encounter that the PCs were going to beat without the random instant kill.
On the other hand, NPC foes now get a chance to randomly kill a PC outright, which isn't fun at all. Your high level character getting one-shotted by a lucky mook does not a good story make.
Percentile spell function:
This rule seems to be the only one that affects the balance of spellcasters in a meaningful way. Once again, it just adds randomness. It's no fun at all. This rule is like forcing all spellcasters to wear armor (a bad, bad tactical decision), but giving them no benefits! Just spell failure! Yes, it helps to lower the power level of spellcasters, but arbitarily failing spells is just aggravating.
Now, in my opinion lowering the power of spellcasters needn't even be done. Yes, from a metagame standpoint, a high-level caster is much stronger than a high-level fighter, but as long as everyone's having fun, who cares? Why should there even be any sort of forced equalization between guys who beat people with big, pointy objects, and guys who bend the primal forces of the universe to their will.
By the way, my favorite class to play as is the paladin. I'm not an arcane caster fanboi here to rain on your little balance parade.
James complains most about these new rules. That's why now we do this thing where I immitate James Woods in the snl skit of blue oyster cult.
"I got a fever...and the only cure is more dice!"
A little nitpick... James Woods is definitely NOT Chistopher Walken!
Christopher Walken is twenty different kinds of cool compared w/ Woods and I can't believe anyone would screw up one of my fav snl skits!!!
The "Weapon of Choice" video is one of the most awesome vids I've ever seen!!!
And then the only time you realy have to worrie about said wizard rampageing is if hes high enough level to cast broken spell X, which cant be counterd inless the player uses metagame thinking or uses something eles thats broken.
Wizard has to worrie about save DC intell high level when he only worries about SR. but then he worries about the anti magic build character. but this is the metagame thinking at work.
In short you dont need to do all this to "Balance" casters with none casters. on an "Overall" basic caster vs none caster is pretty Balance. Wizard may rampage at level 17-20
But Barbian rampage at level 1-8. and possibly even higher.
Over all? Fine balance. kinda. depends on point of view.
By the way, my favorite class to play as is the paladin. I'm not an arcane caster fanboi here to rain on your little balance parade.
This made me crack up. I'm sigging this.