Crafting
Not only have we limited focus items, we've ELIMINATED crafting focus items. The way it's written, you could buy thaumaturgy and then buy 5 refinements worth of Crafting Strength and Crafting Frequency to have Power 10; Frequency: 6 items. (that doesn't include any specializations)
Instead, you can only boost your enchanted items with enchanted item slots. One slots boosts the frequency of 1 item by 2 or boosts the Strength of one item by 1.
**by allowing specializations with focused practitioners, we're worried it makes evocation/thaumaturgy not worth the refresh. While Wizards can have higher pyramids, it only comes into play at very high refresh. There was a discussion of only allowing them focus specializations but you can't create a pyramid with only one specialization.
That would be a bit harsh in my mind, as the specializations still need to follow a pyramid.Well, at least the way I see it, the enchanted items per the rules were meant to be a supplement to your casting rather than a replacement. And they work very well in that regard. They only really become problematic when they are used in a crafting only built. Per RAW, you can easily outclass any spellcaster, while being able to do more powerful and more reliant and simply more spells. At that point, the rules sort of break apart.
Edit due to ninja post: Hm... You might be right here. Right off it feels like an over-nerf of crafters, at least the "one trick among several", not hyper-specialized crafters.
I'm also not entirely clear on the Focus specialization though. As it stands, it's a Thaumaturgy spec, but this would make pure evokers need to be able to buy it. Could then someone with both choose which pyramid to buy it in?I would say he can buy it in both, and would need to, depending on how many focus item he wants for each power.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I interpreted the focus item limit is that you can't apply more bonus than your lore to any one spell. So you could still have 2 different +5 focus items with 5 lore, but you couldn't use them on the same spell. For example, a +5 offensive control item and a +5 defensive control item would be fine, since they would never apply to the same spells.That's up for debate. I've seen more people come down on the "you can use 2 focus items on any spell, as long as you don't combine the same bonus" side of it. It would still give you a relatively cheap +3/+2 focus item for crafting, and the examples we built like this were only slightly less broken than the other version, because the loss of focus bonuses could be easily compensated with specializations.
I'm also not entirely clear on the Focus specialization though. As it stands, it's a Thaumaturgy spec, but this would make pure evokers need to be able to buy it. Could then someone with both choose which pyramid to buy it in?
You can’t have a +3 bonus until you also have a +2 and a +1. If you have two bonuses at +2, you must have two more at +1, etc.
The same goes for thaumaturgic types and complexity/control bonuses, but when you’re calculating, look at Evocation and Thaumaturgy separately - if you have a +1 complexity bonus to divinations and you want a +2, having a +1 power bonus in water evocation isn't going to help you. You need to take another thaumaturgic specialization at +1.
There are separate pyramids for Thaumaturgy and Evocation.
PirateJack beat me to the post, but yeah different pyramids.
My comments are under the assumption that you can not use more than one Focus Item at a time. If you want your casting to have +Power and +Control from foci it needs to be one item. (Or specific group of items, pair of gloves ect.)
I am quite biased on the topic, if my pseudonym isn't an indicator already, I love crafters. It's the human way to succeed. I will agree that frequency bonuses need to go entirely, but I would call Foci Strength and Enchanting Strength fairly balanced on their own. Has anyone tried just removing Frequency?
We could expand the Focus limit to make it separate for Thaum/ritual and Channelling/evocation.
So you have a foci limit for each power. You can use foci specializations to boost the limit for each power. In which case you would have it in each pyramid. hmmm....
so your pyramids would be based on
Channeling: power/control/offense/defense in one element and channelling focus specialization (5 specialties)
Ritual: complexity/control and Ritual focus specialization. (3 specialties)
I like that better.
It wouldn't make a difference. If you look at my Home-brew example, I'd just save all the enchanted item slots I used to boost Power and use them to add frequency to each item. After using my foci and specialties, I'd still have 16 slots. That's 32 uses to spread around. You'd end up with the same problem.
Channeling: power/control/offense/defense in one element and channelling focus specialization (5 specialties)
I hope this doesn't devolve as the topic of nerfing/buffing magic seems to do often.
This. I. like. Absolutely sensible rule.
First, I don't think your math is correct.That may be true. It often isn't and my kids were getting off the bus as I was typing. So let's figure it out.
Before you use your Foci you would have 18 potential Foci Slots. Five Foci slots devoted to Crafting Strength and now you have 13. That's not including any other Specializations you might take and those are less efficient for these purposes but I think a laser-focused crafter would go for the extra boost anyway.Let's repost this first:
Second without the assumption that you can use two foci at the same time, how does this compare to other casters who's magic refreshes on the scale of scenes as opposed to sessions? Or Resources heavy characters who can acquire a nearly infinite amount of gear. Lesser modifications would, in fact make a difference, just not as much as your original idea.
Specializations don't use offense/defense limitations only focus items do that, so it would still be 3 specialties.I knew this. I just missed the mistake when I posted. :P
However, if you wanted more, you could split the focus item limit into focus item power and focus item control giving 4 specialties. This broadens the pyramid, but can make it difficult to have equal power and control limits on your focus items. This would likely cause you to split power and control focus items for the same element rather than simply grouping them into one.
Overall though, I think you should be careful with the idea of adding this to the pyramid and giving Focused Practitioners specializations. Currently, specializations are twice as efficient as as focus items and can't be lost. Focused practitioners are forced to use focus items because they can't purchase specializations. I'm not positive about the math on this, but it may be more efficient to just use their refinements to purchase specializations and ignore the focus specializations except to bolster the pyramid and boost the elemental specializations and thus resorting only to focus items after they maxed out their pyramid. In a way this almost obsoletes focus items except where they're free.
You might consider separating the focus specialization from the pyramid and specializations in general and just allow spellcasters to use refinement to boost their focus item limit. It's a much simpler solution and changes the RAW less.
I knew this. I just missed the mistake when I posted. :P
That seems complicated
This is a good idea. Would you get 2 focus boosts/ point of refinement? It seems fair a good way to do it.
EDIT: With a +1 bonus to Lore per each
Lore = 4
-2 Channeling
-2 Ritual
-4 Refinement
-1 Stunt
2 Refinement to boost gives maximum focus item slots = 6
2 Refinements to focus items + 4 from spellcasting = 8 focus item slots
Trade in 2 for enchanted item slots = 6 focus item slots, and 4 enchanted item slots
+3 offensive power, +3 offensive control
1 enchanted item creating a 5 shift block with 5 uses per session.
With Conviction and Discipline = 5, that's still pretty good.
When I said I interpreted it to mean you couldn't apply more focus item bonus than your lore to any one spell, I was referring to your house rule.
Did you mean to say that you couldn't have more bonuses in focus items than you had lore, among all of your focci? Because that seems like it would seriously cut back on the ability to make characters with several types of powerful magic, whereas I thought your intent was to stop the +5 offensive control and +5 offensive power Wizard from blasting way too hard.
Limiting the amount of focus item bonus per spell solves that problem while still allowing a character to have Thaum control/complexity focci, or a shield bracelet and a blasting wand.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I interpreted the focus item limit is that you can't apply more bonus than your lore to any one spell. So you could still have 2 different +5 focus items with 5 lore, but you couldn't use them on the same spell. For example, a +5 offensive control item and a +5 defensive control item would be fine, since they would never apply to the same spells.
Currently, specializations are twice as efficient as as focus items and can't be lost.
Seems like a pretty sensible set of house rules.
Then again, it's not a bad thing to make focused practitioners less inferior to full casters.