No whining intended here, nor any disrespect to point-build systems. I
just
think that correctly pricing both general and specific powers within the
same system is an extremely tough problem, and one that probably does not
have general solutions, other than "don't do that."
The problem arises with non-overlapping powers as well as overlapping
ones,
though it is more acute with overlapping ones. If birds and mammals are
both pretty abundant and im****tant in the campaign world, it is hard to
correctly price Speak with Ravens versus Speak with Mammals. Speak with
Ravens is certainly of lower usefulness, but it's hard to rate how much
lower. You can, of course, forbid one or the other, which goes back to
"don't do that."
The problem becomes more severe if the character with Speak with Ravens
also
wants Speak with Doves, but does not want Speak with Birds. (She is, let
us say, a priestess of the Twin Goddesses, whose holy birds those are.)
There is going to come a point where it would be cheaper to buy Speak with
Birds (a sort of volume discount) but setting that point correctly is
challenging. It's almost surely not pro****tional to how many bird types
there are in the setting. Once a character can speak to, say, twenty
kinds of birds there is little additional use to having a twenty-first
(unless it fills a niche the others don't, such as being the only arctic
bird among them). Certainly reckoning that Speak With One Kind of Bird
costs 1/1400 of Speak with Birds (based on a rough guess that there are
1400 kinds of birds in the world) is going to make one of them impossibly
mispriced.
"Don't do that" is always an option. For these contrived examples it
is probably the best option. It would also be very reasonable to bundle
the Ravens and Doves together, on the grounds that you are unlikely to
have two characters interested in speaking with birds in the same party
anyway, and a consistent pricing structure is therefore unim****tant.
It gets, in my hands anyway, a lot uglier when the two powers involved
are Resist Fire and Resist Energy, or "+2 on Charm Saves" versus "+2 on
Will Saves." A non-point-cost system may not explicitly need to price
these but it still "prices" them in terms of their availability, the
cost of a magic item which can do them, etc. And it seems nearly
impossible
to price them in such a way that both are attractive.
One example is that as a cast spell, Resist Energy would be only
moderately
more useful than Resist Fire in D&D. There are only 5 energy types,
most foes use only 1, and the more specific spell is usually good enough.
If you have advance information that you are facing a fire dragon,
Resist Fire does everything that a (hypothetical) Resist Energy would do.
If you want both of them to be used, Resist Energy can be only modestly
more expensive than Resist Fire--if you make it 5 times more expensive,
in my experience everyone will prefer Resist Fire, and this may already
be true at 2 times more expensive.
However, as a permanent item Resist Energy is *much* better than Resist
Fire, possibly 5 times better or even more (since a single item is
always better than multiple items due to slot limits).
This makes hash of attempts to price items based on spell difficulty.
I don't think there's a solution. You have to fine-tune for the kind
of game you want--would you rather favor general or specific, and do
you care more about item costs or spell costs?
To my tastes, D&Dv3.5 pushes too much for the generalist solution: it
is almost always better to go for a bland general resistance, because
the specific ones are too costly (considering both gold and slots).
I would find it more interesting the other way around.
Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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