So much in this thread (or actually two threads).
Thanks for replying. (and yeah, there are a few digressions. i tried to keep them separated with spoiler tags, so they didn't disrupt the main topic too much).
My main interest with this thread is the spell costs. Firstly, the actual costs used for spells in the books....but also the design of various spells.
There are, IMO, design "bugs" in most spells which come mostly from the duration costs being written for combat rounds. Which, also IMO, is solving a non-existent problem - the duration scaling options are fairly useless in combat anyway, because not many combats last for more than 10 or 20 rounds so even 2 rounds/rank is enough.
Outside of combat, 2 or 5 or 10 rounds (i.e. 4 or 10 or 20 seconds) per rank is almost completely useless for most spells, like
Tongues or
Animal Forms. Or
Invisibility - 5 rounds/rank is more than enough for sneaking past a guard in a dungeon or bandit camp or whatever, but useless for getting from one side of a village to another, or for scouting out a castle or waiting in ambush.
Same issue with the
Fly spell. 5 rounds per rank is more than enough for combat duration, but almost useless for even short distance travel - 4 ranks gives you 20 rounds (40 seconds), in which you can fly a total of 300 feet. At 6th level you could have 21 ranks, allowing you to scale it up to 45 mph (135 feet/round) for 105 rounds (210 seconds). 14,175 feet total (about 2.6 miles), for 20 PP with a casting penalty of -80. That's not entirely bad, but it's only "going to the shops for milk and bread" scale, not "there and back again" or even day-trip travelling. 10 or 20 mph (or more) for 4 or 8 hours per day is what's need for that type of travel - even if the spell lasts longer, you need to rest and sleep.
Water Breathing is yet another spell that's mostly useless because of low base duration. It exists partly to make underwater adventures possible, but to scale it up for 1 hour/rank to cover a party of 4 requires +22 PP (+10 for 1hr/rank, +12 for 3 extra targets). Minimum 8th Level caster with 27 ranks (54 DP cost), and a casting penalty of -110. (-80 if you take 6 extra rounds to cast it).
Like I said in a previous post, it's not hard to find spells with duration-related problems.
Duration costs are the only thing that's really broken with HARP spells, the Action & Object Aspect costs and the other Attribute costs are fine, and the system as a whole works extremely well. It's a good, well-thought out system.
IMO, durations below 1 minute or 1 minute/rank should be just scrapped and replaced with minutes, tens of minutes, and hours for the same attribute cost. There's little point in keeping the 2/5/10 round durations because in a combat situation it's rarely worthwhile to scale beyond 2 rounds/rank - if you've got enough ranks to scale up to 5 or 10/rank, you're going to get 10 or 20 rounds anyway. 10-20 rounds is almost always enough, while 50+ rounds is almost always wasted.
And it makes almost no difference to game balance if a character can cast Mage Armor or Steel Skin for 4 minutes (or 40 minutes. or all day), no more than it harms "game balance" for a Fighter to wear Chain mail or better all day.
IMO it wouldn't change "game balance" much at all if the CoM 2004 duration cost table were re-written as:
| Duration | Cost | Cost/rank | Cost/rank (C) |
|---------------------|------|-----------|---------------|
| Instant/No Duration | 5 | N/A | N/A |
| Concentration only | 10 | N/A | N/A |
| <= 1 minute | 10 | 20 | 10 |
| 10 minutes | 20 | 50 | 15 |
| 1 hour | 40 | 100 | 30 |
(Similar changes would work for CoM 2013 too, I guess)
Some of the
Boost spells might be problematic if scaled up to +20, but you need 15 ranks to do that (so, minimum 4th level) and my modifed table above says "<= 1 minute" so individual spells could still be written as rounds per rank. Or just write "can not be scaled beyond 1 minute/rank" in the description - that would allow casting
Boost Strength for long enough to lift a portcullis or fight an ogre, or
Boost Presence while haggling for a bargain or meeting the local Baron, but not to spend all day with +20 to Quickness (although couriers and messengers would love that).
For
Mage Armor etc, longer durations aren't that big a deal. Any player who spends a little time looking over the armor-by-the-piece lists can get a combination of Improved Superior Leather pieces that add up to +22 DB on top of 2 x Qu bonus, with no casting or minimum maneuver penalty: Rigid Leather Helm, Gorget, Gauntlets, Bracers, and Boots. Even at x10 cost (x5 for Superior Leather plus x5 for Improved quality from Martial Law), that costs only 15gp - average starting money for 1st level players. A Quarterstaff is 5 copper pieces, a short bow is 6 silver, and basic adventuring gear costs a few coppers or silvers per item, so they can still equip themselves with essentials.
That's much better than a full suit of Soft Leather (+20 DB, +2 PP casting penalty) and is affordable at 1st level with 1d10+10 gold. Later they can upgrade to armor pieces made from monster hides and/or replace with looted pieces. And optionally add an Improved Superior Soft Leather Shirt (+13 to DB) for 4gp if they don't mind a 1 PP casting penalty. They'll also need up to 5 ranks of Armor skill to wear all this, depending on St+Ag stat bonuses...same as they would for a Soft Leather suit.
tl;dr: The armor pieces that a spell-caster should avoid are Shirts, Cuirasses, Pauldrons, and Greaves.
Even
Fire Wall and
Stun Cloud and similar spells aren't excessively over-powered if they last for 1 minute/rank (or a flat 1 minute, there's no real need for the base duration of tthese spells to be 1 minute/rank). Stun Cloud might need a little tweaking in the description because of the way that the Crit size reduces over the duration, but it's an anomalous spell anyway. It would probably be better to scrap it and write a generic
Elemental Cloud spell to replace it that scaled crit size in the same way as Fire Wall and other elemental spells.
That would result in consistent Bolt, Ball, Wall, and Cloud spells for all element types.
(
Stun Cloud is a great attack spell for even 1st level mages. 6 rounds worth of Electricity crits over a 5' radius for 5 PP, and if a foe is stunned or knocked out in the first round they'll likely end up as toast. Combine with Breezes from CoM for more fun.)
And the
Light spell
should last for at least 10 minutes per rank as the base duration, even for 1st level characters (or 2nd level at most).
On the spell front, we held HARP Fantasy, College of Magics and Martial Law back so that we updated all three together. So HARP Fantasy is consistent with the enhanced version of College of Magics. That is *not* the case with the original 2004 books.
Can you make
Lifegiving with the rules as published in CoM 2013? Or are there still exceptions to the rules and special-case tweaks to force a higher/lower PP cost, as seems to have been done for
Cure Disease?
IMO if a system can't be used to achieve a particular desired result then it's better to adjust the system so that it can at least approximate what you want than it is to break the system with exceptions and special-case rules.
One of the things I've always liked about RM since the 80s and later HARP is that they both strive - and mostly successfully - to be coherent systems, rather than a collection of arbitrary and inconsistent (and often conflicting) rules and special-cases that need to be rote-memorised. Consistency means simple and easy to understand and learn.
Obviously I have spreadsheets with all the aspects for all the spells, including unpublished products.
Any chance that you could find the time to extract the Spell Name, Action, Object, and Attributes fields for HARP core only (not from any unpublished stuff) from the spreadsheet and upload it to the Vault?
Doesn't have to be formatted as a PDF, even just the raw data exported to a plain-text .CSV file would be wonderful - I'd be more than happy to do the work of converting the .CSV to a nicely formatted PDF and re-uploading it.
On the pdf front, RPGNow no longer sends email addresses to publishers. I only ever used and still only use the blind email facility to send out notes to customers when a pdf has been updated.
That's good news, and confirms what Peter R said.
Our pricing for printed books is the pdf price plus the printing cost. The pdf price has been set based on the page count, and the need to ensure that the company can pay its bills to all freelancers and make a profit. It is also predicated on the assumption that most of our sales come through pdf
Obviously, I'd prefer the PDFs to be cheaper but I'll openly admit that I have no idea how much it actually costs to produce a book of saleable quality. The economics of a publishing business are very different to those of a hobbyist like me who has lots of free time to spend writing stuff in html and markdown and LaTeX. I don't have to care what my time and effort costs because it's not "labour" or "work", it's recreational time.
I do know, though, that whatever a PDF costs to produce is a sunk cost - that money is already gone, it's been spent no matter how many copies you sell, so the more copies you sell, the more you'll get back to cover those costs and make a profit. rpgnow obviously takes a cut of each sale but, apart from that, each extra PDF sold has only a marginal extra cost - bits and bytes are effectively free. So, e.g., pulling numbers out of ... umm, a hat ... selling 1000 copies of a PDF at $10 profit each makes you $10K, while selling 5000 copies at $5 profit each makes you $25K. Even if some freelancers are getting royalties rather than a flat fee, both they and you are better off with more copies sold.
Printed books are different, obviously, because each printed book costs time and money to make and store and ship, there are no nanotech matter compilers or replicators in the real world.
(not print copies because shipping can be a killer for anyone not in US or UK - copies to Australia come from the UK.)
yeah, I know :-(
Shipping from the UK to AU is more good news. I already intend to get new print copies of all the books when the Bestiary and Something Wicked come out, so there's a good chance the shipping won't be extortionate.
In my experience, UK shipping costs tend to be reasonable, unlike US shipping. It's not uncommon to pay significantly more for US shipping than the actual item you're buying...e.g. last year I wanted to import some arcane spell cards for 5e D&D because they were out of stock at the AU distributor. I found them new on ebay for $12 USD. Shipping them to AU was another $52 USD. That adds up to $85 AUD. I decided to wait, and ended up getting them a few months later for around $35 AUD (approx $25 USD).
By contrast, in March this year I ordered some dice from the UK (some "triple-four" dice, 12-siders with roman numerals I-IV three times, much nicer than d4 caltrops). £7.50 for 10 dice, £2.99 for "Royal Mail Airmail" shipping to AU. The total cost to me was about $18 AUD.
I don't mind paying reasonable shipping costs. But US shipping rates don't even resemble "reasonable".
I just checked on rpgnow and it looks like shipping for all 5 of the current HARP fantasy-related books is $40.44 AUD for 2-7 week delivery time estimate. That's quite reasonable. A full set of PDF+Softcover books would cost me $262 AUD.
That's about $100 less than I expected - I'm very tempted to just click Buy rather than cancel but I have bills that need paying, my partner would probably be annoyed, and my cat would definitely want to know why I was spending money on things that weren't food for him.
I just spent some time looking into it in more detail...
I could get only the softcover books for a fairly reasonable $185 including shipping to Australia, so about $78 of that $262 is for the PDFs. Buying all the PDFs at some other time would cost $108, only $20 more. That's not much of a discount for buying the PDFs with the printed books.
Most publishers on rpgnow either include the PDF for free when you buy the softcover or hardcover, or charge only a little extra ($2-5 AUD, mostly. but almost always less than $10 AUD). This is true for big publishers like WOTC as well as medium-sized and small publishers, those with cheap $5 or $10 PDFs, and those with PDFs priced similarly to HARP books.
I know I'd be much more inclined to just buy the softcover set for $185 if it included the PDFs, or if they were only a few dollars more each. Knowing that it'll be another $78 or $108 if I want the PDFs too is a huge disincentive to me.
Your prices are what they are, though. And I'm not saying or implying I have any right to demand that they must be cheaper. I don't even think that. GCP can set whatever price they like for their products.PS: whoever decided that defaulting to black on dark grey for spoiler text was a good idea deserves a good flogging. Unreadable.
