I've been thinking over this a good bit, and I like the accessibility of arcana, and the idea of making it more accessible. Currently anyone can learn it to 100, and there are some useful glyphs that can be learned by anyone as well. When I think about the broadest application of opening up arcana I imagineRias, game channel, 12/23/2020 wrote:And full disclosure, Arcanists are also the class I'm feeling the least. I like Arcana as a system, but I almost feel like its place would work really well as a supplementary thing that anyone can pick up, rather than as specialization. Given its rote pattern nature and all.
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I'm not saying Arcanists are currently on the chopping block, but I admit I'm side-eyeing them whenever I end up sharpening the axe
Keeping in mind that Arcana as a skill/concept would still exist, and Scholars would likely still have some exclusives as a guild. Just not an entire class dedicated to it.
Arcana is kind of like our more complicated version of spell scrolls. Occult powers made more accessible.
- Everyone can train arcana up to 200-400, no guild needed
- all scholars can train arcana to 700
- Classes with particularly beneficial glyph use cases might have caps at 500 even
- all currently Arcanist-exclusive glyphs are now Scholar-exclusive glyphs or available to everyone
That I think is the reason for the side-eyeing Arcanists. If any scholar should be able to learn glyphs they can learn, and any scholar can take the time to learn as much arcana as an Arcanist, why keep Arcanists? And perhaps more troublingly, what do you give them if you do keep them around?
Why keep Arcanists?
I like the pie-in-the-sky dream of arcana being like programming. It makes a useful analogy here. Is programming accessible to everyone? Not quite, but it is accessible to a LOT of people. It's available to everyone with a computer (and arguably also an internet connection), there are legit free online classes as well as a gloriously absurd number of tutorials on the internet. Does everyone program? Of course not, not everyone wants to make the investment of learning. That's ok, but it's available to the vast majority of the world. Do people specialize in programming though? Yes, yes they do. In fact, I think there are two kinds of programming specialists. There are professional programmers that take certification tests and make a living out of programming. Then there are programming enthusiasts who have a passion for it beyond just making a living. There is certainly some overlap between the two, and at the outsides of the Venn diagram where they don't overlap I think do have different skills, though admittedly I'm not either, I'm an amateur enthusiast. Is an Arcanist a professional or an enthusiast? I don't know, but it seems like there would be people out there willing to commit to it without also committing to other fields of scholarly pursuit (druidry, sorcery, or medicine), I'm certainly one.
If they stick around, what do you give them?
What separates Arcanists if not exclusive glyphs, or higher skill? What merit could make it worth it? That's the really hard question, and I don't have a great answer, yet. In part because arcana is unfinished and I really don't know what the future will look like for it. At present there are some things that I think would be nice boons based on arcana as it presently exists.
- A tiered effect for glyph retention. I'd love to see this as a stacking +1 per ability slot used, so Glyph retention gives 3 the first time, 4 the second, 5 the third, etc. The difference is a glyph complexity capacity of +63 vs +273. That might be a bit much. If it tiered with every three abilities (3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, ...) then the difference is +126, double the benefit of another scholar sinking 21 ability points into glyph retention. I'd love to see this in part because I anticipate the day with dread when a complexity 4, or 5, or 6 glyph is introduced and an ability point will get you part of the ability to do something cool. If the suggestions from this post get used, just multiply by 100, or even add +10 per (300, 310, 320, 330, etc. for 8400 complexity uses vs 6300 complexity uses, not stunningly good, but not horrible).
- Longer durations. The shorter lived glyphs currently have a maximum duration of 1,800 and the longer ones have a maximum duration of 7,200. With capped arcana I'm at 1,870 out of a potential 7,200. Affinities will fill in some of that, but to reach full duration an Arcanist will need between 150 and 110 ranks of affinity in whatever school they're hoping to hit it in. An ability that extends durations to 4, 6, or 8/rank instead of the base 2/rank might be really nice to help bridge that gap. The duration caps of 7,200 still fall short of druidry's 43,200 duration abilities and high-skill physicker's therapy durations, but I assume that's a lore thing with arcana just not lasting that long or a game balance thing because using arcana doesn't cause sanity loss and physickers can't give themselves therapy. Either way I'm good with that, I just want to reach the potential I already have.
- Studying the glyphs that others draw to learn glyphs one does not know. This is probably full of nope, because it creates too many loopholes if unintentionally forgetting of rare glyphs is a thing, but it's also the cool thing I'd expect an Arcanist to be able to do even when others cannot.