Topic: RMU spell: Change profession

[Cory Magel]

Brain is functioning even less optimal than usual... (made a few corrections)

As a Fighter he'll have paid 1 and 3 development points (total of 4) to get two ranks of weapon skill per level vs a cure caster 1 rank at a DP cost of 9.
- At a 5th level fighter he's paid 20 points to get 10 ranks of weapon skills vs the 5 ranks that would cost him 45 if he were a pure caster.  He's paid 25DP less for twice as many ranks as a pure caster.
- If he bought spell levels he'd be pay 25 point per level for just OPEN spell list. So as a Fighter that would cost 250 DP for 10 ranks in one spell list alone.  But he's not going to do that, cause he's not an idiot.

Now he become Bob the mage at 6th level.
- He's not going to pay 9DP per weapon ranks (which he could only do once per level) cause, again he's not an idiot and has 10 ranks already, which is far better than most pure casters.
- Next, he's developing Base spell lists, more powerful than Open and Closed, for 3 ranks per level at 3 DP per rank.  So we'll say he levels four Base spell lists to 15th level potentially for 180 DP.  So he's paid 80 DP less for three times as many ranks in four times the spell lists.

At 10th level Bob has, at minimum, twice as many weapon ranks for 28.5% the normal cost of a caster and access to six times as many, more powerful, spells for 72% the normal cost of a fighter.
And we haven't even talked about Body Development, Armor skills, Combat maneuver skills, Power Point ranks, etc, etc.

Is he as good at Combat as a 10th level pure arms user or at Casting as a 10th level pure caster? Nope, but he's nowhere near 'half' the character and incredibly more versatile.

Let's do this. You want in-game reasoning? In RM your profession is your learning aptitude. You don't get your skill costs because you are a specific profession, you are that profession because of your skills costs; Your characters natural aptitudes. You can't simply 'change' your natural ability to learn. I don't get to just decide I'm a math genius halfway through my life.

If we look at it from a game system balance perspective the only reason to change profession is to get lower skill costs. Basically, you're cheating.
You can say it's allowed in your game, but your screwing up the balance between both the characters themselves and their power level compared to foes.

[rdanhenry]

Brain is functioning even less optimal than usual... (made a few corrections)

You missed the big correction. This is an RMU thread and those costs are not RMU costs (and an RMU pure caster can double-developed weapons, though probably won't). It doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, being able to optimize DP spending by changing professions is very powerful, but the example as given is not right for the edition that the spell was proposed for.

And since Thot claims to be uninterested in game balance, the in-game reasoning you're offering is entirely right, so maybe that'll get through.

[Cory Magel]

You missed the big correction. This is an RMU thread and those costs are not RMU costs (and an RMU pure caster can double-developed weapons, though probably won't). It doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day, being able to optimize DP spending by changing professions is very powerful, but the example as given is not right for the edition that the spell was proposed for.

Yeah, I was being lazy.  I know the RMSS costs off the top of my head and was too lazy to look up the RMU costs, but the comparison holds pretty true.

[Thot]

[...]
At 10th level Bob has, at minimum, twice as many weapon ranks for 28.5% the normal cost of a caster and access to six times as many, more powerful, spells for 72% the normal cost of a fighter.
And we haven't even talked about Body Development, Armor skills, Combat maneuver skills, Power Point ranks, etc, etc.

I seriously suggest you try to make a full character like that, and compare it to a single-profession character of the same level. You will be surprised.

Is he as good at Combat as a 10th level pure arms user or at Casting as a 10th level pure caster? Nope, but he's nowhere near 'half' the character and incredibly more versatile.[/size]

Compare him to a pure Bard, and you'll see the problem with your reasoning.

You can't simply 'change' your natural ability to learn.

Please remember we are talking about magic. Which supposedly is anything but simple. We are not in the "allow multiclassing already!" discussions you may have had to suffer in the past, but in one about a new metalism spell list, and trying to figure out what the power level of such spells should be compared to other spells in the game.

To illustrate this, let me ask a different question: Suppose one of the spells on this list would be: The caster determines a profession that he wants to use for his spell, and then, the target changes its learning costs for each skill category to the worse of his profession or the one used for the spell, until the magic is somehow countered. This would obviously be a powerful curse, but 50th level? No way.

If we look at it from a game system balance perspective the only reason to change profession is to get lower skill costs.[...]

Please accept that the reasons for why one would want to have such a spell list in one's game may be unrelated to game balance.

[Thot]

[...]
I strongly disagree. The fighter-magician will be a much more powerful character than the semi. At best you are making an argument that pure casters are much more powerful than semis (indeed that they are better than all other professions), and the general trend in RM is that this is incorrect especially at high levels.

i haven't tested this general notion with RMU yet, but in my experience with RM2 and RMFRP, casters are generally a lot more powerful than arms professions in RM. I find your remark interesting: How do you figure that a Magician of 20th level is not more powerful than two characters of tenth level, one being a Magician, and the other being a Fighter?

[...] So you should be considering the game mechanics ramifications and let them inform your in-game narrative.

I really believe you also should make a character who uses such a spell, and is designed to do so, to see that your concerns are not all that warranted.

[pastaav]

[...]
At 10th level Bob has, at minimum, twice as many weapon ranks for 28.5% the normal cost of a caster and access to six times as many, more powerful, spells for 72% the normal cost of a fighter.
And we haven't even talked about Body Development, Armor skills, Combat maneuver skills, Power Point ranks, etc, etc.

I seriously suggest you try to make a full character like that, and compare it to a single-profession character of the same level. You will be surprised.

The subject of profession change is not a new idea and the math has never worked like the proponents claim. The claim is always that allowing profession change is just a minor benefit, but when you do the math it does not work as adverticed. Your claim that veterans on the forum who also are the actual designers of the game need to make more characters to understand the balance of the cost system is pure comedy.

Trying to make an argument that fighter + magician combo should not be evaluated compared to a semi spell caster, but compared to either the melee capability of the fighter or the spell casting, is weird at best. True, the spell casters are powerful in RM but that is just an argument for why any attempt to remove limitations for the spell casters is probably a bad idea. The magician has so high costs for non spell casting skills exactly to balance the power of magic and you want him to get rid of that limitation since magic users are more powerful?

Any kind professional change become a major way to cheat the cost system as soon as you hit diminishing returns. The novel thing about your proposal is that instead of the profession change being due to divine intervention or similar, you want to make it into a regular spell.

In some sense there is a system to your madness...if every character can cheat the skill cost structure no player can complain you are not fair. From another perspective I don't understand why you want to make it into a low level spell in the first place. Why don't simply allow free change of the profession if your goal is throw balance aspects through the window?

[Cory Magel]

I seriously suggest you try to make a full character like that, and compare it to a single-profession character of the same level. You will be surprised.

I don't need to. It's simple math and I have a pretty darn good understanding of the system.

Is he as good at Combat as a 10th level pure arms user or at Casting as a 10th level pure caster? Nope, but he's nowhere near 'half' the character and incredibly more versatile.[/size]

Compare him to a pure Bard, and you'll see the problem with your reasoning.

In general, a character is a sum of it's parts and one single aspect of that character rarely causes it to be more powerful than another character. Versatility plays a significant role and this is demonstrated over the course of a game (i.e. you can't cherry pick specific situations to demonstrate it). Having cheap access to both combat related skills and a wide variety of spell related skills will create a superior character.

At low levels Pure Arms users tend to shine because they can focus on one thing more easily.  At mid levels Pure Casters tend to shine because they start to have a boarder selection of spells that the they now have more power points to utilize.  At high levels Semi's tend to shine because they have caught up to both the Pure's, they aren't quite as good at weapons as the Pure Arms user and they don't quite have the spell selection of a Pure Caster, but due the combination they are more versatile.  Eventually they will all be powerful enough that it just won't matter, but you're talking very high levels at that point.

What you are doing is allowing a character to pick and chose from all of those things.  If at level 1 we build a Fighter and select arms focused skills, then at level 2 we decide we want to be a caster and pick spell focused skills, we've just paid far less than a semi would to do the same.  In addition if players can change their characters profession they could also simply start picking up base spell lists from multiple professions.  You're allowing a process with a clear and obvious benefit. If you don't (and won't) see that there's no real point in discussing it.

You can't simply 'change' your natural ability to learn.

Please remember we are talking about magic. Which supposedly is anything but simple. We are not in the "allow multiclassing already!" discussions you may have had to suffer in the past, but in one about a new metalism spell list, and trying to figure out what the power level of such spells should be compared to other spells in the game.

No, we're not talking about multi-classing... we're talking about you making it even easier than that.

To illustrate this, let me ask a different question: Suppose one of the spells on this list would be: The caster determines a profession that he wants to use for his spell, and then, the target changes its learning costs for each skill category to the worse of his profession or the one used for the spell, until the magic is somehow countered. This would obviously be a powerful curse, but 50th level? No way.

I don't see a point to that discussion. We don't need to speculate how the spell could be used offensively if it's beneficial use to friendly characters is unbalancing.

Besides, in this case, why not just make a spell that causes a characters learning to slow (skill costs to increase) and just forget about the whole 'profession' part of it.
Although I'd suggest you not do this as you players won't exactly find your game as fun as they did before.

If we look at it from a game system balance perspective the only reason to change profession is to get lower skill costs.[...]

Please accept that the reasons for why one would want to have such a spell list in one's game may be unrelated to game balance.

I am not going to 'accept' ignoring game balance regardless of your reasoning. What you are doing will screw up game balance. Period. No real discussion needed.
If you don't care about that do whatever you want. No need to ask people here how to do it. It's your game. Do whatever you want. Make it 1st level, make it 50th.
But if you're asking us you've got your answer.

I strongly disagree. The fighter-magician will be a much more powerful character than the semi. At best you are making an argument that pure casters are much more powerful than semis (indeed that they are better than all other professions), and the general trend in RM is that this is incorrect especially at high levels.

I find your remark interesting: How do you figure that a Magician of 20th level is not more powerful than two characters of tenth level, one being a Magician, and the other being a Fighter?

Two thoughts.
First: I strongly suspect having two foes of 10th level vs a single for of 20th level is more dangerous than you seem to think, but it's not really relevant. Because...
Second: You're talking about a single character with the skills and options of both combined battling that single 20th level character.
There is a difference.

I really believe you also should make a character who uses such a spell, and is designed to do so, to see that your concerns are not all that warranted.

jdale is one of the developers of RMU.  I'll eat my shorts if he doesn't understand what he's talking about better than you do.

The end point here, IMO, is what you're doing will be outbalancing. You're asking us to ignore that. If we do ignore that, then anything goes. Do whatever the heck you want.

[Thot]

I seriously suggest you try to make a full character like that, and compare it to a single-profession character of the same level. You will be surprised.

The subject of profession change is not a new idea.
[...]

I understand that a profession change is something like a hot topic for some people here, for reasons one might call historical.

And I am not there to antagonize people with strong opinions on the subject of such a spell list. I take note that several people here believe this would be undesireable. That's fine. But that wasn't exactly my question, which I tried to explain with this sentence:

Suppose one of the spells on this list would be: The caster determines a profession that he wants to use for his spell, and then, the target changes its learning costs for each skill category to the worse of his profession or the one used for the spell, until the magic is somehow countered.

This does basically the same thing as my original proposal, from a difficulty point of view: It changes the way of thinking and learning of the target. The only difference here is that no one will doubt that it is bad for the target, and not something some might fear could be exploited.

What level would you assign to this?

[Thot]

[...]
jdale is one of the developers of RMU.  I'll eat my shorts if he doesn't understand what he's talking about better than you do.
[...]

I apologize. It was not my intention to insult anyone. We have a difference of opinion on the matter of balance here, but balance wasn't my question anyway.

[jdale]

[...]
I strongly disagree. The fighter-magician will be a much more powerful character than the semi. At best you are making an argument that pure casters are much more powerful than semis (indeed that they are better than all other professions), and the general trend in RM is that this is incorrect especially at high levels.

i haven't tested this general notion with RMU yet, but in my experience with RM2 and RMFRP, casters are generally a lot more powerful than arms professions in RM. I find your remark interesting: How do you figure that a Magician of 20th level is not more powerful than two characters of tenth level, one being a Magician, and the other being a Fighter?

That's a completely spurious comparison. I did the math for you, for a Magician10/Fighter10 with 40 ranks of a weapon skill -- same as a 20th level fighter (resulting in rank+prof bonus of +130 for the Magician10/Fighter10 and +140 for the semi) -- plus 20 ranks in 5 base lists. This is not a character limited to the capabilities of 10th level. Plus, their resistance rolls, spell attack levels, and leveled spell effects are based on their 20th level status. They completely invalidate the semi professions.

[pastaav]

The subject of profession change is not a new idea.
[...]

I understand that a profession change is something like a hot topic for some people here, for reasons one might call historical.

It is not a hot topic at all. I am perfectly fine with profession change in HARP and many others game when the cost structure of the game was designed with that possibility in mind. The same is not true in RM when the cost differences are designed to balance profession against each other. The hot part of discussion here is on you that ignore the logically sound counter examples and claim the designers of the game does not know the rules.

And I am not there to antagonize people with strong opinions on the subject of such a spell list. I take note that several people here believe this would be undesireable. That's fine. But that wasn't exactly my question, which I tried to explain with this sentence:

Suppose one of the spells on this list would be: The caster determines a profession that he wants to use for his spell, and then, the target changes its learning costs for each skill category to the worse of his profession or the one used for the spell, until the magic is somehow countered.

This does basically the same thing as my original proposal, from a difficulty point of view: It changes the way of thinking and learning of the target. The only difference here is that no one will doubt that it is bad for the target, and not something some might fear could be exploited.

What level would you assign to this?

You are talking about a spell that basically makes a character being unable to take advantage of level up. I cannot see how to fit the effect on the lvl 1-50 scale. This is a hostile effect that I would never permit at my game table.

[Thot]

[...]
You are talking about a spell that basically makes a character being unable to take advantage of level up. I cannot see how to fit the effect on the lvl 1-50 scale. This is a hostile effect that I would never permit at my game table.

Well, they'd still be able to level their skills, just fewer of them per level.

There are plenty of hostile effects in the spell lists, some of which cause instant death. Certainly this is less powerful than that?

[OLF, i.e. Olf Le Fol]

Honestly, is this even related to any spell allowing a change of profession?
The way I see it, it's merely the eternal issue about how in any version of RM, allowing multi-classes breaks the system and that the RM "professions" aren't professions as defined by the English language but rather life templates or, better, born learning predispositions.

[Thot]

Honestly, is this even related to any spell allowing a change of profession?
[...]

If I just wanted to houserule multiclassing, I'd just do that (probably requiring the switch to cost 60 or more  DP, for the effort this would represent).

But this thread is about a mentalism spell list that changes the target's learning costs. For single skills, all skills, temporarily, permanently, to a new profession, to worse cost than any given profession, etc. It just seems logical and inevitable to me that some mentalism user would try something like that, and I am curious about the plausible levels such spells should have. My own assessment hasn't been completed, but "50th level" seems to be way over the top, in my opinion.

(At the time of writing the OP, it was a vague idea... other spells on such a list influencing learning costs is something that came to me while this thread ran.)

[rdanhenry]

Note that Misfeel Calling, a spell that merely lets one *temporarily* *appear* to magical/psychic probing as a different Profession exists in the game. On various lists, this is found at levels 6, 9, 11, and 7. Given that you are talking about a "permanent" (though any PC types or equally ambitious NPCs will make changes to optimize development repeatedly) change and a real one at that, it should surely be at least three times the level, which would mean 3 x 6 = 18th level. But that's for the Essence-based Illusionist, while the 7th level version belongs to the hybrid Mystic. The lowest-level Mentalism version is 9th level, so 3 x 9 = 27, round up to 30th. Not quite 50th, but even ignoring game balance considerations and looking at the most relevant existing effect, it ought to be quite a high-level spell.

[Thot]

Note that Misfeel Calling, a spell that merely lets one *temporarily* *appear* to magical/psychic probing as a different Profession exists in the game. On various lists, this is found at levels 6, 9, 11, and 7. Given that you are talking about a "permanent" (though any PC types or equally ambitious NPCs will make changes to optimize development repeatedly) change and a real one at that, it should surely be at least three times the level, which would mean 3 x 6 = 18th level. But that's for the Essence-based Illusionist, while the 7th level version belongs to the hybrid Mystic. The lowest-level Mentalism version is 9th level, so 3 x 9 = 27, round up to 30th. Not quite 50th, but even ignoring game balance considerations and looking at the most relevant existing effect, it ought to be quite a high-level spell.

Ah, yes, that does seem a sensible comparison! Excellent suggestion, thanks!

[Dreven1]

I'd agree with Nash. It is extremely powerful. Looks like a level 50 spell for me.

This is exactly what I was thinking, or make it a "godlike" ability like Treasure Law did with deities casting 75th or 100th level spells for divine items.
I would probably say 7th or 100th level, that way its unobtainable by the normal player but a special or godlike power could bestow it upon them or having it in an artifact style scroll or potion.

[Cory Magel]

There are plenty of hostile effects in the spell lists, some of which cause instant death. Certainly this is less powerful than that?

If you cursed a character of mine, causing their skills costs to increase, and I was unable to undo that curse before I leveled, you've permanently reduced the amount of skill points my character would ever get. There's a pretty darn good chance I'd just kill the character and make a new one or quit the game.

[Thot]

[...]
If you cursed a character of mine, causing their skills costs to increase, and I was unable to undo that curse before I leveled, you've permanently reduced the amount of skill points my character would ever get. There's a pretty darn good chance I'd just kill the character and make a new one or quit the game.

Ah. but all magic can be undone. It might take a level to find the caster who can help there, or a single combat to force the original caster to undo it, but it can always be done.

After all, what would be the point of malicious magic if you could not overcome it?

[pastaav]

[...]
You are talking about a spell that basically makes a character being unable to take advantage of level up. I cannot see how to fit the effect on the lvl 1-50 scale. This is a hostile effect that I would never permit at my game table.

Well, they'd still be able to level their skills, just fewer of them per level.

There are plenty of hostile effects in the spell lists, some of which cause instant death. Certainly this is less powerful than that?

Every condition, including death, can be overcome with later spells. The same is not true for your curse that creates a permanent loss of one or more level ups. Not something I would like to deal with at the gaming table so please knock yourself up and see what your players are ready to accept.

How about this: Tell your magician player he must pay 15/20 dp for closed spell he want to learn and he should not be sorry because he could have gotten rid of the curse before his level up. Can you please report back here afterward if the player stayed in your gaming group or he did quit?