Difference between revisions of "Rules talk:Magites"

Revision as of 09:52, 17 June 2008

I hope you just haven't gotten around to adding the disadvantages, or something. Tiryst 02:26, 24 February 2008 (PST)

It's a work in progress, yes. Dev and I just sort of yapped about it for a while tonight and came up with this stuff. That said, I certainly can't read your mind, so if you feel something's disbalanced, feel free to provide some constructive criticism! ^_^ It can be tough to negatively revamp a race you've already played for quite a while. Ideas are welcome. --Ice 03:08, 24 February 2008 (PST)

Take One!

This is essentially a modified Ki template, to be honest, given the lack of spells and the innate statistics. Let me go over the advantages and disadvantages as I see them:

Advantages:

• Good Bias
• Automatic Growth (major)
• Elementary (minor)
• Mana Font (moderate)
• Collected Thoughts (minor)
• Immortal (very minor)

Disadvantages:

• Intelligent Design (minor)
• The Stuff of Magic (minor)
• Saturated (very minor)
• Empathic (minor)
• Soulless (very minor)

Neither Advantage nor Disadvantage:

• Inherent Abilities
• Made Manifest (arguably an advantage)
• Essence
• Arcane Connection
• Ascendant
• Inorganic
• Mutable

Most of the “Neither” category is simply parameters by which the PL type can sense and be sensed, as well as innate statistics. Made Manifest is arguably an advantage over KiPL, as most Magites can simply focus on ranged attacks and benefit from Magic attack stats without caring about the physical attack stamina taxes.

Saturated and Soulless are minor disadvantages because a character with IMPL simply should not care about whether he may also have Magic or Ki. Soulless also provides a form of PL cloaking versus Ki, and its resurrection clause should almost never matter, given the way people play these days.

I believe the other advantages/disadvantages are fairly self-explanatory, though I will be happy to provide my thoughts on them. Automatic Growth, however, requires a little more discussion.

Automatic Growth is in no way or shape balanced. Even assuming that a Magite never does anything but socials plus the occasional plot battle because everyone goes to D’hennex on the weekends, the Magite character is “losing” PT to instead gain triple the number of tech days that any other character would earn. Even considering mage doubling and Saiyan preferred techs, the Magite comes out ahead. If the Magite were to spar every day, that’s seven times the tech days, which, obviously, is even worse.

I understand this is still a work in progress, but at the moment, it definitely needs a lot of work to become balanced. Tiryst 11:43, 24 February 2008 (PST)

Perhaps 1 TD for the social scene, and 2 for the combat scene, with a max of 2 per day? That way it's kind of like mage doubling. --Ff0ecaf 12:48, 24 February 2008 (PST)

I'm quite in favor of the passive magic system. I like that it's finally going to be defined, and it offers something new and different from what's out there now by altering the way PL and PT is gained. I have no qualms with what's being proposed save for the values; 7 TD's for a spar able to be done once daily is screaming for abuse. My BSometer went off the chart when I found out AI's can use magic. This just broke the needle.

The problem becomes the fact that if you use a smaller number, like 2 days for a spar, you can theoretically get more days than another racial template/PL type, but you actually DO have to RP every day. 2 almost seems like too little, but I can agree that 7 is way too many. Kyle mentioned being iffy about altering the room mechanics on this level, but I personally am not opposed to it. That's my biggest area of concern, though. As for the other stuff, the good outweighs the bad, but since the innate magic will make or break the deal, I'd prefer to concentrate on making that workable before moving on. Deeze

Yeah, that's true. How about a completely different approach? Set a weekly cap on it. So you can only get somewhere in the range of 11 days a week, so that it works a between PT and Mage Doubling. So if you play a lot you can get PL gains on the range of someone with 2x Enhanced Gain, but you don't get a ton of tech days. --Ff0ecaf 13:08, 24 February 2008 (PST)

That might work, Rick. I like that better than restricting gains from fights to once a week, at least.

Also, I have now changed the TD numbers to 1 for socials and 3 for spars and solos. I have also added the Minus Bias disadvantage, though I'm pretty sure it'll end up being seen as fairly minor. I'm still searching my brain for a significant disadvantage that would 1) not seem IC like the Magites just changed into something else overnight, 2) not cripple the race completely, and 3) also not end up being just another minor disadvantage that makes no real difference.

I would like to point out, as far as the stamina-tax on Made Manifest is concerned, it strongly discourages melee combat, making proficiency techniques very weighty on a character, which is something that ki fighters frequently rely on for cheap stat boosts.

Also, to be clear on where PT comes in, I do not consider every "enhanced" CT a power neutral tech (I can't seem to find the argument that brought this point up here, so it must have been made in the room). In fact, I can't really think of any other power neutral techs outside of Enhanced Eyesight, except perhaps Enlightenment, which is outlawed for IMPL anyway. Power-neutral techs, to me, are techniques that cannot be applied toward any one particular power type, as it goes to the whole character instead. In retrospect, I doubt that matters much >_> but whatever. --Ice 14:27, 24 February 2008 (PST)

Given that I dislike your alteration of room rules in the PT adjustment already, I'll have to say I'm even more opposed to also creating a new bias, haha. The Made Manifest stamina tax still doesn't really matter. Why get weapon proficiency when you can blast at twice as much damage anyway? Tiryst 19:57, 24 February 2008 (PST)

In review, Mana Font can probably be nixed, entirely. Maybe replaced with "minus bias doesn't apply to Enhanced Stamina" instead. --Ice 14:33, 24 February 2008 (PST)

A note from the Custom Races page: "No races that redefine an unreasonable amount of the rules, or work on a completely separate rules system." I believe that removal of the PT system AND the gain system, as expected of Magites, is sufficient to violate this clause. As Dev said, defining passive magic would be pretty cool, but that should be a power type creation, not part of a minor race template. The passive magic PL type could then be applied to Magites, of course, but it should have the honor of its own PL discussion (lol magictalk lol). Tiryst 17:12, 26 February 2008 (PST)

Eh, that's true enough, I guess. I'd have liked to get someone of current authority in the handling department to give it a look before I abandoned the concept entirely, but I really don't see them disagreeing with you on this. So, I'll have to go back to the drawing board. --Ice 17:27, 26 February 2008 (PST)

I've had a chance to look over the new Magite stuff, but it's hard for me to commit to either side of an argument over whether or not the race is balanced. It isn't blatantly broken, but I suppose the only thing that turns me off from the whole set-up is that it feels like they are nothing more than extremely complicated humans. Once I have good bias, that's the only major advantage I need. A better bias for stamina is something I'd consider major, and the incap rules seem fine from a story-based standpoint, but actually implicating them just kind of seems needlessly complicated.

Chronic Dystrophy is a little too stiff in my opinion, as well. Granted, when I think of people who would want to play a magite, I don't think of anyone who's not around at least every three days, but I think that halving the 14 day PT burn threshold down to 7 is preferable to dropping it to three days. Even I have trouble playing the same character every 3 days if my muse isn't running in that direction. --Snackycakes 13:24, 4 March 2008 (PST)

I've backed it off to five days instead of three. I think seven days is a little too liberal -- It is possible, after all, to backdate Magites if necessary, and being able to go a whole week without playing them scarcely seems like a disadvantage that is supposed to counter Good Bias. --Ice 14:36, 4 March 2008 (PST)

Review Me!

I CAN HAS ATTENTIONING NAO?

Your first piece of attention! If magites burn PT at 5 days, how much are you willing to allow for backdating? Three days, or something? -- Marcus

Backdating is unaffected, since that's an OOC construct, and wouldn't make sense for a race to alter it. Thus, 7 days as usual. --Ice 03:27, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

The only thing I don't care for is the implied immunity to poison techniques, even if healing techniques are completely ineffective. While some consider it a balancing issue, all it would take is Human Guy with a PL of 100,000 using a poison ability on Magite Gurl B with a PL of 1,000 and her resisting it for someone to overreact and blame THIS minor race for all of the room's problems. I'd say consider having both healing and poison effects work on the <agite, but both innately resisted up to 100% or 200% of the Magite's PL. --Snackycakes 17:10, 16 June 2008 (UTC)--Snackycakes 17:10, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm not too touchy about poison, since the broadness of the term could easily describe effects that don't necessarily flow through blood. So, I'm good with either putting a PL-based delimiter on it or just removing resistance to it entirely. Organic healing seems like a different deal to me, because it plays into the credibility of the Empathic disadvantage. Also, organically healing a Magite makes about as much sense as organically healing a robot.

I dunno, maybe putting a PL-based resistance on it would work for that too. It does make a little more sense for healing energies of any kind to provide some kind of positive energy benefit, the same as poison that normally runs through the veins would have a negative energy about it. Would those comparisons be target PL vs. source PL, or hit-point PL vs. resistance PL (ala the damage reduction techniques)? --Ice 09:20, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

While it doesn't make much sense for the organic healing or poison to hurt the Magite itself, the thoughts behind it probably would fall under the empathic thing, so I think the PL resistance makes more sense than just a blanket immunity. And I'd think that it should work based off the damage reduction tech, myself.

--Ff0ecaf 16:52, 17 June 2008 (UTC)