The Wherefore and Whyfore of Sage Abilities

I had a chance today to crunch some numbers on my authentic wiki.  There are something like 1426 pages, of which 325 are spells, 88 are cantrips, 44 are sage fields, 171 are sage studies and 211 are sage abilities.  The remaining balance are largely monsters, details surrounding the player character and rules related to combat.

Checking the "wanted links" — pages that have been proposed but presently exist as dead links on the wiki — I can determine how many of these briefly discuss sage abilities that haven't been written yet.  The total number is 803.  Nor is that all.  There are numerous sage studies for which I haven't yet even proposed sage abilities, so probably the real number is closer to 12 or 13 hundred.

So ...

A couple of questions arise.  What the hell am I doing, obviously.  Does this even have any actual value, as another example.  I've spoken about how I got started on this, but since I haven't addressed that in years, and I've been digging into the wiki all month, now might be a good time.  For those who have never heard of a "sage ability," or those who have never quite understood what this is about, allow me a short recap.

In the mid-00s, I began to feel that characters whose class background involved a great deal of reading and study — spellcasters — ought to have a certain complimentary knowledge of the game world beyond the use of their spells and how to wear a nifty cloak and cap.  The inspiration came from pp. 31-32 of the original DMG, where a list of 69 subjects were listed, from art & music to politics, history, mathematics, mammals, mosses & ferns and medicine.  The rules proposed that if the player characters went to the right "sage," that sage would have a percentage chance of answering questions the players had, based on the sage's "fields."  The heading for this rule metric was "Sage Ability."

The role of sage was only ever intended for non-player characters, as Gygax and crew never imagined that player characters might want to actually KNOW things, or pursue knowledge ... thus there are no rules there for that.  But I always feel that players ought to be able to do, well, anything.  So I created a flimsy, poorly thought out rule system that would let players ask questions of themselves, roll a percentage die, and if the answer was indicated, great.

I was surprised to find that my players really, really liked this.  The metric, garbage that it was, got used all the time, so there was reason to flesh it out and try to make the numbers work better.  Unfortunately, the fundamental element of the metric — that a die roll was needed to learn what you know — always felt detrimental to the whole idea.  After all, it's not like my knowledge of the Punic Wars is random.  I know what I know, and I know what I don't know.

At some point around 2013, I wrote a post or two about this, and the online party I was running at the time wanted to know why only spellcasters got the benefit of this knowledge.  Shouldn't fighters, thieves and rangers know things also?  I fed this argument to my offline players and they, too, were adamant that the sage system, as it was called then, had to be expanded to include all the classes.

Long about then I made the jump from a random percentage across the whole field to a specific knowledge that a player would have about "a thing," whatever that thing might be.  In keeping with the DMG, I decided this knowledge would be called a "sage ability," and that it ought to follow a few basic premises.

First and foremost, this was a thing the character knew — playing and non-player characters alike.  If the character was familiar with "beasts," then it didn't matter what the player knew, and there was no need to roll a die.  The character ought to be able to point at that great big mass of flesh and say, "Oh, I know what that is ... it's a manticore.   Careful of the tail."

Next, because it was an "ability," and not a spell, then the character had to be free to use it as often as they could within a given time frame.  I can talk about geography all day long.  It's not like I'm only allowed to answer 4 geography questions in a 24-hr. period.  Sage abilities had to work the same way.

Finally, if there was a limitation on the ability, it had to do with how much the character could conceivably know at a given level of experience.  Some system had to be created that said, at 1st level the character might know a few things about architecture, but by 10th they would surely know everything about it ... especially when we consider that there was less architecture to know in the 15th century.

It wasn't long after, mid-2014 I think, that I realised it wasn't just what a character could know, it also applied to what a character could do.  It was this that cracked the problem of fighters, bards, monks and thieves.  Because these were more "practical" classes, their knowledge had to be of the practical sort.  What does a fighter know, beyond fighting?  Well, soldiers know how to fire artillery, they know how to dig tunnels, they know how to find food, they know how to lead, they know how to train other fighters and so on.

Problem was, I'd tapped into a host of subject material over which I had very little control.  I mean, once you decide that a character can do something because of their class, or their upbringing, where do you draw the line?  Are we going to argue that a character can fire a ballista, but they can't fix one?  Or that they can fix one, but they can't build one from scratch?  Or, if they can build one from scratch, that they can't build a better one after years of experience?  And so this becomes the issue.  To my mind, if it can be conceived that a character would want to do a thing, than this was an opportunity to build a metric, not based on random chance, for what a player could ultimately do.

Very quickly, I could see how this smashed through dozens of bad rule metrics throughout every edition of D&D.  Spell research?  No problem, its a sage ability, you get it at a certain level, after which it's not about throwing money at the problem and rolling a die, it's about doing a set amount of laboratory time with a guaranteed success.  Why guaranteed?  Well, because the player had earned the right to know how, through gaining levels and sage knowledge points, just as the player earns the right to cast a 5th level spell or attack twice every round.

This concept of earning ability is all-important.  The premise of nearly every role-playing game is to hamstring the player endlessly to keep the game "competitive" in some nonsense fashion based on the DM not being able to invent a more dangerous opponent.  Therefore, every little thing a player might try to do when wanting to improve their position in the world — like invent a new spell, or their own magic item — has to be opposed by a hundred frivolous bullshit hoops that amount to, "play the game as you're told and don't try for more."

Joke's on them, however, as the players weren't satisfied with that in the long run and now DMs have to give them everything they want, earned or not.  Which obviously breaks games ... but that's another post I've written somewhere else.

Another spell, when it's gained according to predictable premises, isn't going to break a game that's built for that expectation one day.  If I know the player's eventually going to get that benefit, then I'll be ready with game narratives where the player's going to need that spell, and enjoy using it, and feel that he or she really is in control of their game world, while my game is just as robust and able to manage the players' excitement and nerves the same as ever.  I'm a step ahead, because I'm expecting it.

And because, as a metric, every other high-level combatant can also do the same thing.

It was in this vein of thinking, between 2015 and 2016, that I realised every ability belonging to every class had to ultimately be folded into the sage ability structure.  Every thief could backstab, but the better backstabbers had the ability.  Every cleric can still turn undead, but those wanting to turn the higher level undead would need the ability.  There are exceptions — the paladin's lay-on hands and natural protection being two of them, plus spell use across the board — but many, many parts of a character's structure is now based on what field and study they chose to commit to.  Not everyone can ride a horse; not everyone knows how to cook; not every mage knows a pipette from a beaker.  Some druids know about animals, some know about plants.  Some thieves can burgle a house, some can't.  Some rangers are really good in a forest; others are really good in a desert.  It depends what matters to you, the player.

This, in fact, became a profound element of the system as it came into being.  As much as telling players what they were for certain able to do, it also established plainly what a character couldn't do.  No training in grooming a horse?  Then you can't do it.  Don't have the sage ability read & write?  Then you can't.  No knowledge points in swimming?  Fall in and you'll drown.  You can't "muddle through."  You can't roll a die and hope for a nat 20.  There are no dice.  Either you can swim, or you can't.  There's nuance, of course.  Even a few swimming points help immensely.  But you can't just put your head down and roll a die.  The system doesn't work that way.

When players know their limitations absolutely, it helps enormously in game play.  Of course players ask questions like, "Does my knowledge in construction tell me what culture built this tower?"  No, it doesn't.  It might tell you how to duplicate the feat, but it won't tell you who built it.  I'm used to these questions as a DM, however, and since I'm building this system, and have done the research for it, I understand the parameters around each bit of it.

But ...

Covering all the possible fields and studies of human knowledge is a gargantuan proposal.  Incomprehensible, really.  Especially when considering that most of its there but won't ever be used, because what player am I going to have that's hyper-interested in pottery glazes (a potential bard study) or the art of forgery (a potential thief study).  Much of the content I'm creating has no definite application for any player, much of the time because the actual study isn't based on combating monsters, inventing magic, identifying treasures or detecting where the bad people are.

Yet, the sage structure isn't just for player characters.  It also defines thousands of potential non-player characters.  The world is, after all, full of glassblowers, assayers, rat catchers, butchers, apothecaries and hundreds of other potential professions, all defined by those 803 sage abilities I haven't written yet, and the other 400 or so I haven't even conceived of yet.  The process, I have to say, is simply amazing.

The abilities themselves are classified in a manner that limits the most powerful examples to the most powerful people.  The way the system is made, 1st levels are able to be an "amateur" in something.  On average, a character becomes an "authority" somewhere between 3rd and 6th level.  "Expert" status comes in the neighbourhood of 7th to 10th, just as the amount of experience a character needs to go up a level really slows down ( based on the old game, which my world is based on).

"Sage," the highest status of knowledge, is most likely to emerge somewhere between 13th and 17th level.  If you want to create your own artifacts, or hyper-powerful magic items, or visit the outer planes with little difficulty, or even time travel, you need to be a sage.

Quickly, here's a base premise on how these stages work:

Amateur.  A dedicated newcomer to the craft, whatever it is; a base structure of knowledge exists, a certain amount of practical experience is given, but for the most part this is a "thinking" level of sage ability.  "That's a manticore," kind of thing, or knowing that yes, this is definitely a piece of gold ore in my hand.

Authority.  Well-rated professional, steadily becoming even better at it.  Has a complete familiarity of the base rational structure of the given study, can point to the right books, knows how the subject works and can speak with "authority" about it.

Expert.  As this is D&D, the boundaries of the subject material are getting pushed at this point, even to where the hint of supernatural gains the merest foothold.  This wine I've learned to brew can heal hit points, or I can make a +1 weapon, or gain a relationship with the animal I'm training that goes somewhat beyond the so-called "possible."  This supernatural, however, isn't powerful, is usually cosmetic in some fashion and is often beneficial to multiple people rather than solely the character.

Sage.  The bridle is off.  Go nuts.  Time travel?  Sure, it's just you need an enormous amount of knowledge to understand how it works.   Turn spontaneously invisible at will?  It's a trick a lot of 16th level thieves learn.  Build a working airship?  Of course.  Gravity is no problem.

Well, that's about it.  Make a sage ability for all human knowledge and capability.  Follow the baseline metrics.  Be sure to provide limits that are built into the game's limitations and not a die roll.

Never, ever finish the project.

 

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