Might Have Shove’d Too Soon

An interesting situation came up today. I was in a hand against Lizette, a house player who has little no limit experience. She sat down with a stack of $200 or so in the $100-500 NL game (with blinds of $2 and $5). She seemed to be playing a relatively straight forward short stack strategy reraising preflop for $60 or so, presumably in anticipation of an on-flop shove.

There was a hand we had played earlier where I raised her blind to $12 with J8 of diamonds. She had about a $200 stack when she called. The flop came 3s 4d 10d. She checked to me and I bet $12. She raised me to $60. I was pondering a shove her, because if a pair of jacks was good then I would have had 12 outs or so plus the fold equity of my all in move, but ultimately I folded. I later regretted this decision.

I picked up pocket nines and raised her big blind my traditional $12 raise. We both had about $400 at this point. She called and the flop came 89J rainbow. She checked and I bet out $12. Lizette raised my bet to $25. I stopped to ponder what she had here. There was about $50 in the pot and with my set I would like to put it all in hoping that she didn’t have a straight. I felt that she had some kind of hand that would prompt her to further action, so I hoped a min raise would prompt her to become pot committed, so I raised her to $50. She raised an additional $70. There was $170 in the pot now, and I felt that she was pot committed at that point, so I shoved. Much to my dismay, she folded.

In thinking about the hand, I think she had a 10 in her hand and had an open end straight draw that she chose to play aggressively. My going all in ruined the pot odds for her straight draw and she threw it away. This has left me wondering if I maybe should have raised her $70 another $140 or so. She would have had to call $140 to win $380, plus the implied odds of the rest of my stack for another $200 or so. I think that would be a correct call to make, so I think my shoving on the flop was correct in hindsight.

The Death of the “Big Hand, Big Pot” Rule

I’ve been listening to the “Deuce Plays” Podcast (which can be found at iTunes) and I think it’s really helped my game. The host, Bart Hanson, brings in a lot of people to interview and one of his guests recently commented that “Pot control was overrated.” Pot control, is basically a corollary of the old poker maxim, “Big hand, big pot. Small hand, small pot.”

That’s to say that, in no limit, you don’t want to put your whole stack at risk with a hand like AK on a board of A 10 7. If you’re a 100 big blinds deep or so, and you raise it 3 big blinds before the flop and get called and flop top pair, top kicker, you’ve made a good hand. However, it’s not good enough to put all your chips in according to conventional theory because a smart opponent can just call you with pocket pairs, hope to turn a set, on the same flop you make top pair, and take your whole stack. That’s why a lot of players play the small pocket pairs and “set mine.” So the “big hand, big pot” rule is there to protect players from getting all of their stack in with a hand as bad as top pair. According to this rule, you should seek to put all of your stack in when you get the “big hands” such as three of a kind, straights, flushes, and maybe, at the bottom end, two pair against a lone opponent.

The thing is that, for me, I’ve already had a sense of self preservation. I didn’t need some guidelines to tell me my hand wasn’t big enough for a given amount of action. For the most part, what I’ve learned with playing with donkeys is that if they’re putting money into the pot, they can only have one of two rationals:
1. They think your hand is weak and they can win the pot right now, OR
2. They think their hand is strong and they can win the pot right now.

That’s it. Now more sophisticated players have reasons for betting that include the idea that they think your hand is better than theirs and so they want to bet to knock you off your hand. That’s the kind of betting that we always suspect and want to call, but it only comes from more sophisticated players. Strangely, I’m able to play better against the more sophisticated players because I can am better able to put myself in their shoes.

The “big hand, big pot” rule works well against sophisticated players. If you’ve made a good hand, but a reasonably sophisticated opponent is giving you action, it’s probably not because they’re expecting you to fold a good hand. More likely is that they’ve made a bigger hand. So then, it seems logical to say that you should not put in more action than a given hand warrants. My problem is that it doesn’t work with a damn for donkeys. Let me run through a couple of hands than cost me some money over the last few weeks. Both of these hands are in the $100-$500 no limit game where the blinds are $2 and $5.

Hand #1: I’m in a six handed game with A9 offsuit. I enter the pot with a $12 raise (my traditional raise) and the big blind reraises me to $20. I call. The flop comes 4 5 9, so I have top pair, ace kicker. The big blind goes all in for $80. There’s already 40 in the pot, and the big pot big hand rule would say that having top pair, top kicker is sufficient to play a pot that’s only 20 big bets. But it wasn’t, he had a pair of jacks.

Hand #2: Another $12 raise with QQ and I get called by just the big blind. The flop is KQ6 rainbow. The big blind bets $15 into me and I raise it to $45, he calls. The turn is an Ace, and the big blind goes all in for $420. The big pot big hand rule would say that I’ve got a set in a headsup pot and to put the money in, but the problem is that I’m playing a donkey here and he’s probably not going to be putting that much money in all of the sudden on 2-pair. A straight is all he could have, so I should have folded.

I think I’m just going to go with the approach a lot of internet players use and that’s to trust my read on my opponent. It would have saved me a lot of money versus rationalizing why I should put the money in because my hand is X strong.

The Current Contents of my “Barbed Wire” Decks

Total 420 $85.45
Card Title Value Total Line Value
.44 Magnum/Sawed Off Shotgun $0.05 5 $0.25
4th Tradition $0.50 3 $1.50
Animal Magnetism $0.25 2 $0.50
Arson $0.05 3 $0.15
Bewitching Oration

$0.25

3

$0.75
Blood Dolls

$0.75

8

$6.00
Blow Torch

$0.25

2

$0.50
Bonding

$0.25

7

$1.75
Bribes

$0.05

4

$0.20
Cat’s Guidance

$0.05

4

$0.20
Celerity Strikes

$0.05

14

$0.70
Chantry

$0.25

1

$0.25
Computer Hacking

$0.10

5

$0.50
Con Agg/KRC

$0.10

16

$1.60
Con Boon $0.05

6

$0.30
Concealed Weapon

$0.25

7

$1.75
Conditioning/Threats

$0.25

7

$1.75
Cryptic Rider

$0.15

2

$0.30
Deflection

$0.75

6

$6.00
Disguised Weapon

$0.05

4

$0.20
Disputed Territory

$0.05

3

$0.15
Dodge

$0.05

2

$0.10
Drawing out the Beast

$0.10

2

$0.20
Elder Library

$0.05

1

$0.05
Elysium: the Arboretum

$0.15

1

$0.15
Fame

$0.25

1

$0.25
Flak Jackets

$0.05

2

$0.10
Fast Hands

$0.25

2

$0.50
Flash

$0.05

5

$0.25
Form of the Ghost/Gleam

$0.05

2

$0.10
Govern the Unaligned

$0.25

6

$1.50
Haven Uncovered

$0.25

7

$1.75
Hawg

$0.10

1

$0.10
Homunculus

$0.50

1

$0.50
Hunting Ground

$0.50

4

$2.00
Indomitability

$0.05

4

$0.20
Intercept Cards

$0.05

16

$0.80
IR Goggles

$0.10

2

$0.20
KRCG News Radio

$0.25

1

$0.25
Laptop Computer

$0.10

4

$0.40
Lextaleonix

$0.10

1

$0.10
Loyal Street Gangs

$0.25

3

$0.75
Majesty

$0.25

5

$1.25
Major Boon

$0.25

1

$0.25
Malkavian Prank/Game of Malkav

$0.15

1

$0.15
Melee Weapons

$0.25

4

$1.00
Metro Underground

$0.25

1

$0.25
Mob Connections

$0.50

1

$0.50
Minion Taps

$0.25

8

$2.00
Misdirection

$0.05

2

$0.10
Obfuscate Modifiers

$0.05

20

$1.00
Pack Alpha

$4.00

1

$4.00
Pier 13, Port of Baltimore

$1.50

1

$1.50
Phased Motion Detector

$0.10

3

$0.30
Poison Pill

$0.25

2

$0.50
Political Flux

$0.05

1

$0.05
Police Station

$0.25

1

$0.25
Powerbases

$0.25

2

$0.50
Praxis Seisures

$0.25

4

$1.00
Presence Bleeds

$0.05

10

$0.50
Protean Agg Hand

$0.05

7

$0.35
Protracted Investments

$0.05

7

$0.35
Pulse of the Canaille

$0.50

1

$0.50
Rat’s Warning

$0.05

4

$0.20
Raven Spy $0.50

2

$1.00
Read Intentions

$0.05

2

$0.10
Redirection

$0.25

4

$1.00
Restoration

$0.10

5

$0.50
Rumours of Gehenna

$0.25

1

$0.25
Rush Actions

$0.10

2

$0.20
Rutor’s Hand

$1.50

1

$1.50
Seduction $0.10

3

$0.30
Shattering Blow

$0.05

2

$0.10
Short Term Investment

$0.05

3

$0.15
Sideslip

$0.05

9

$0.45
Skill Cards

$0.05

19

$0.95
Skin of Rock

$0.05

4

$0.20
Skin of Steel

$0.05

2

$0.10
Sports Bike

$0.25

2

$0.50
Spying Mission/Change of Target

$0.25

4

$1.00
Table Hating Votes

$0.05

4

$0.20
Taste of Vitae

$1.50

1

$2.00
Telepathic Counter

$0.10

8

$0.80
Telepathic Misdirection

$0.25

10

$2.50
Thaumaturgy Strikes

$0.05

5

$0.25
The Barrens

$0.05

2

$0.10
The Labyrinth

$0.50

1

$0.50
The Rack

$1.00

1

$1.00
Theft of Vitae

$0.25

5

$1.25
Thrown Gate

$0.25

5

$1.25
Thrown Sewer Lid

$0.25

4

$1.00
Trap

$0.25

4

$1.00
Undead Strength

$0.05

2

$0.10
Unflinching Persistence

$0.05

4

$0.20
Ventrue Headquarters

$0.25

1

$0.25
Voter Captivation

$1.50

2

$3.00
Walk of Flames

$0.25

3

$0.75
Wolf Companion

$0.10

4

$.40
WWEF

$0.25

18

$4.50
Crypt Vampires for 7 Decks

$0.05

18

$4.50

An Indispensable Book on Poker

My friend (and blog reader) Taylor called me yesterday to ask me questions about what constituted an out and when he would know that he was getting odds to draw. I started to explain the “rule of two” (where you treat each out as 2%) and how to convert 1 in 3 to 2 to 1.

Then I realized that what he really needed to read was the Theory of Poker by David Sklansky. It’s a book that contains concepts that a professional player keeps coming back to over and over again, without realizing that they are coming out of this book. Taylor said he wanted to buy a copy, so I decided to write this little blog post and provide a link for him.

Rough Day at the New NL Table

For a time, my employer was trying to get a yellow chip limit Hold’em game going, so I ended up getting paid to play $15-30 Limit Hold’em with a kill. I loved this because I had already logged over 1000 hours of experience in that specific game. The game helped my bottom line for the time period that my casino was actively encouraging it, and I’m sorry to see them give up on it.

Still, it’s hard to deny the appeal of no limit. It’s what everyone sees on TV and what everyone wants to play. I feel I’m developing some skill at the game, but I miss the protection of limit where the bets and calls are fairly automatic most of the time and where your liability when you get drawn out of is just one more bet. So here are a couple of hands where I lost some money today.

I had about $500 in front of me, and I pick up AK of diamonds in early position. I raise it to 3 big blinds (my standard preflop raise) and get called by Tom, a somewhat reckless prop who can sometimes be easy to read, and a lose called who’s be playing a lot of hands and has more chips than I do. It was hard for me to imagine a better flop for my hand when I saw Ac 10s 7h. An ace high flop without a flush draw. The loose player checked to me, and I checked as well since the board was fairly safe. Tom bet $30 into the $45 pot and got called from the loose player, I raised the bet another $70 when it was my turn, to make it an even $100. Tom shoved all in for the rest of his stack, which was another $150 over my bet. The loose player folded. I felt obligated to call give the strength of my hand and the fact that I was now getting pod odds of $150 to $450 or three to 1. As it turns out, Tom had flopped bottom set.

I get sucked into the pot odds and the strength of the hand, but Tom is a donkey and I should not have paid it off. I’ve played with enough donkey’s to have mastered certain axioms of have they play. For one thing, a donkey may make a bet with nothing to steal the pot, but I’ve never seen one raise with nothing after the flop. A donkey can see the ace on the board, and figure that my check raise (particularly combined with my preflop raise) equated to a big ace. If they are still giving you action, you’re in trouble. I should have just laid it down there.

The other hand I played was against the loose player. He tended to play most every hand, and sometimes come in for a big raise preflop. He raised it to $30 preflop and I called him with Ah Js. It was a loose call, but he was a loose player and I had position on him. The flop came Ks 10h 8h. He checked to me, and I bet $30 which he called. The turn can with another rag heart. I checked it to me and I bet $50, he check raise me $100. Going back to the first rule of donkey poker, if they are raising you after the flop, they have a hand. That much I knew, but I also knew that I had the Ace of hearts, so he couldn’t have the nut flush, so I had some outs. It was possible that he could have had a flush, but since I had the Ace of hearts I couldn’t imagine that many suited hands he would make it $30 with before the flop, so I figured my straight draw was good too. Nine hearts in the deck, plus the 3 extra queens is giving me 12 outs. I wasn’t sure if my hand would have been good if an Ace hit, but I did figure that those extra ace outs had to figure for something. I decided that the hand was good enough to continue, and the pot odds offered on the call were three to one on odds of roughly three to one. But I figured, mistakenly, that this might be a good opportunity for a semibluff. So I shoved all in for the rest of my stack, a raise of another $250 which he called.

He had a set of 10s and I get no help on the record. This has led me to not the second rule of donkey poker: if a donkey could make a good laydown, he wouldn’t be a donkey. It’s OK to make a bet as a semibluff because they might not have much of a hand, but if they are raising you they not only have a hand, they have a hand that they are not going to let go of. Do not attempt any fancy plays from that point on. If the odds are there to try to draw out on them do so knowing that you have the implied odds of the rest of their entire stack because the simply can’t let go of the hand at that point.

Anyway, what a rotten run of cards. Still, it is nice to play a game that demands my attention. A worthy investment of my time.

Ethics and Professional Poker

The poker authors I read, Mike Caro, Doyle Brunson, and Bob Ciaffone tell me not to “soft play” anybody. That means that when you’re at the table, you take advantage of whatever opportunities for profit come your way regardless of who you’re taking this profit from. As the poker expression goes, “I’d check raise my own mother out of a pot.” If you really feel that bad about taking money from a someone, just give them their money back when the game is over.

Of course, these are the tactics and attitudes of a professional poker player. I’m learning that house players, despite technically being professional poker players, have a different set of attitudes. They are more akin to union workers: they’re all drawing a paycheck from the boss, so they are all content to try to do their best to look out for each other and continue to cash their checks every two weeks. Consequentially, house players by and large go out of their way to not take advantage of each other. It’s not an uncommon thing to witness a house player raise preflop, have another house player call in the blind, and then both of then check it all the way to the showdown.

As a house player who has come from a actual professional poker background, I don’t fit in with my peers. I have the attitudes of a professional card player. That is to say that I don’t soft-play anyone. If I’ve got an opportunity to make money at your expense, well, sorry about your luck. Eventually an opportunity will come along and you can make profit at my expense. Over a sufficiently long time horizon, who made the most from who over time is going to be determined purely by our comparative skill level. Which brings us back to our the most basic of poker truisms: good players make their profit from bad players.

I didn’t expect that these attitudes would make me the most popular guy amongst my peers. They realize that over time I’m taking their money and there’s little that they can do about it other than try to get better. Human nature being what it is, making an effort to improve one’s game seems almost as painful as asking a smoker to give up smoking. This allows me to rest easy at night knowing that most people are simply not capable of making the necessary adjustments to playing a better game of poker. Instead I’ve started to get some rather overt peer pressure from my fellow players to lay off.

Surprisingly, this message isn’t coming from the worst of the house players, but rather the better of them. I’ve been asked directly and in clear language by no less than two of the better house players to go back to chopping the blinds in the $15-30 game and to stop adjusting my seat choice so that I can sit next to the weaker of the available house players to better maximize the hands I play when the blinds don’t chop. In other words, stop being such a card shark and stop trying to work over your peers.

This is a bizarre message for me because it goes against everything I believe in. Yes, I do realize that the absolute worst house player there seems to have to little concept of how to play the game other than to play a very weak-tight game: she gives up way too many hands and if she’s playing back at you, you should throw your hand away because you can rest assured she’s got the nuts. I also realize that she’s a single mother who has two children to support. To the other players this means she should be coddled, but that’s just not how I see things.

There are other jobs out there that she could take. Hostess at a restaurant or, if she really wanted to stay in the casino business, she could just become a dealer. Both management and myself have had conversations with her where we’ve counseled her to seek a different vocation, but she’s having none of that. So we’re are left with this awkward situation whereby we are thrown together in a competitive game with someone who does not have the skills to compete. A lot of people are conflicted about this, but I just refer back to my basic poker training: don’t softplay anybody. If I felt bad enough for her at the end of the night, I could just give her some of her money back.

But the truth is that I don’t feel bad enough for her. No one forced her to be a house player. No one forced her to play as badly as she does. No one is forcing her to stay in that profession. And she also has the nasty habit of a lot of other bad house players and that’s that she disappears for rather long periods of time in the bathroom to avoid being called to a game. We get paid the same amount per hour, so in some ways I just look at it as a pay raise to myself for my good performance at her expense.

Another situation that came up was that I sat in our $15-30 game for a free round towards the end of my shift with no intention of playing on once the blinds got to me. The house adopted the policy that new players don’t need to post, so I saw no problem with “abusing” (as the other players put it) the policy. I did not expect to find so many damn Eagle Scouts in a poker room, but it seems that they spend their time polishing their halos when they are not in a hand. I asked management and was told that, in order to avoid the “appearance of impropriety” that I should go ahead and take one more round after the free one, which I’m fine with. The other players feel that this still reflects some ethical abuses on my behalf, but long ago I decided that I wasn’t playing my game to make them happy.

Having Fun With the Sinking of the Lusitania


As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, there are a number of conspiracy theories regarding the formation of the Federal Reserve. Edward Griffin’s book “The Creature from Jekyll Island” contains most of the more colorful ones. My personal favorite out of that book is that then Secretary of the Navy Winston Churchill arranged for the sinking of the Lusitania by ordering it to sail through an area where a U-boat was known to be operating without naval escort.

The idea that political figures have knowingly allowed civilians to be targeted in order to incite war is not new. Many people believe that FDR allowed the Japanese to sneak attack Pearl Harbor in order to bring the United States into the Second World War. More recently, many suspected George Bush of allowing the terrorists to destroy the world trade center on 9/11 in order to bring on wartime conditions to launch a campaign for war in the Middle East. It seems that whenever events seem to play a contributing factor towards moving the United States to war that people suspect that there was a conspiracy behind these events.

In the case of the Lusitania, it’s impossible to rule out that Winston Churchill wanted the Lusitania to be sunk, be it seems highly unlikely. As another blogger points out the British warships were not equipped for submarine warfare and really presented more of a target than a deterrent. So the lack of assignment of a warship to escort the Lusitania is not the smoking gun that it might seem to be. Furthermore, numerous warning were sent to the Lusitania telling it to be on the lookout for German U-boats, but the most interesting detail in this drama was that the Lusitania received a message ordering it to alter course and sail for Queensland in order to avoid a potential U-boat attack.

Continue reading Having Fun With the Sinking of the Lusitania

A Funny Thing Happened When I Decided Not to Chop My Blinds

Normandie Casino, where I work, has been under new management in the past few months, and our new manager has really done an excellent job of turning the place around. Part of that has been bringing a yellow chip game (that’s a game with $5 chips for those of you who don’t play in LA much) to the Normandie. This week was the first week I got paid to play $15-30 at the Normandie as part of my regular schedule, and the difference between it and the lower games were striking. The players were, in general, far more aggressive regarding their involvement in a hand and would by a bit more reactive to your actions in this hand given the context of how you’ve acted previously. A reactive opponent is certainly something that takes a little getting used to when you’ve been paid to play blue chip games.

For instance, a player raised my big blind and I had Ah 7h. I am the most liberal defender of the blinds that I know of, a habit I picked up from Mike Caro. It’s served me well, and I feel other players are relatively easy prey when they give up their blind money so easily, but I’ll get more into that in a bit. At any rate, this player and I took the flop heads up. The flop was all rags, with two hearts. I check raised the flop, bet on the turn when the board paired, and then on the river when in paired again. My opponent called me all the way down with AK. My flush draw didn’t make it, but the two pair allowed me to get half the pot back. In a later pot, this player raised my blind again with pocket 10s. I called out of the big blind with Kc 10c. The flop brought a K and two suited rags that were not clubs. I check raised the flop and my opponent, figuring I was raising on the flush draw three bet the 10s, then proceeded to bet into me on the turn and river. I called all the way to win the maximum amount with my pair of Kings, because I feel he might have folded his 10s to me anywhere along the line had I ever put in any more action.

One of the ways that my new manager has managed to bring players in to play $15-30 at the Normandie is to offer the lowest house rake in town- $3. Things brings up something that I usually don’t give much thought to, and that’s chopping the blinds. In most forms of limit Hold’em, there are at least two blinds. If the actions folds down to just the blinds, it’s traditional that the blinds will simply “chop” or take their money back. The logic goes that it just doesn’t make sense for two players to play more or less random hands against each other when the house is going to take out a fair portion of the pot. For instance, in an $8-16 game, where the drop is $5 plus a $1 jackpot drop, if both of the blinds chose to play, then they will both start by putting $8 or so into the pot, and the house will take out $6. So you would have to outplay your opponent by quite a large margin to show a profit from this maneuver. Therefore, chopping the blinds makes sense.

However, in $15-30, where both blinds are putting in $15 and the house is only taking out $3 plus a $1 jackpot, you would only have to outplay your opponent by 10% or so to show a profit from this maneuver, and the amount you have to outplay your opponent decreases when you add more money to the pot in later betting rounds. I decided to take a very unusual path (particularly for a house player who are mainly concerned only with limiting their risk as much as possible) and not chop my blinds in the $15-30 game. Strangely, the first few days of my trying it, I’ve profited quite handsomely from it. I didn’t keep exact records, but I want to say that I seem to be winning a staggering number of blind pots- something akin to 90%.

I do this by positioning myself to the immediate left of players who are not comfortable playing short handed and who are too tight in defending their blinds. Their tendency is to just fold the small blind to me and allow me to win their $9 ($10 minus the houses take of $1 preflop) without a contest. I then have only to break even against the player to my left when I just call out of the small blind. I also try to make sure that the player to my left is not very aggressive in raising my blind when I just call out of the small blind. As strange as it may seem, these circumstances are not hard to arrange in the game I’m playing in. It seems as though most players are so conditioned to chop their blinds that they simply aren’t used to playing the hands out and fold when I put any action on them at all. This fundamental error on their part appears to be a huge potential windfall profit for me.

My Letter to Mike Long

Once, I was a Magic: the Gathering player, who had made the Pro Tour. The nature of the professional level of M: tG players forces players to make alliances with other players because you need to share information with each other on what strategies and decks best work in a given set. Obviously, you need to be selective in whom your sharing this information with, because if you’re not getting as good as you’re giving then you’re there’s a degree of inequity in the relationship. As such, these other players become close associations and friends that you wonder what became of them long after your game involvement has ended.

For me, Mike Long was one such person. He was a very controversial figure on the Pro Tour, and had attained a level of infamy for both his skill as well as his outlandish behavior at the tables. That, and he was caught cheating a few times. He was one of M: tG’s many “bad boys,” but I always enjoyed working with him.
I recently got back in touch with him again, and proof read a copy of a new book her wrote. A political discussion ensued, whereby I learned that Mike Long was now a huge devotee of Rush Limbaugh’s. I, of course, unsuccessfully tried to talk him down from the heights of political extremism.

Here is an email I wrote to him that I thought I would share with the class: Continue reading My Letter to Mike Long

A More Unified Magic System for Arcana Unearthed

My favorite thing about Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed rules, is the magic system. It’s a magic system that makes a lot of sense and is a huge improvement over the traditional D&D 3.x magic system with it’s separation of Arcane versus Divine magic, separate spell lists, etc. In the Arcana Unearthed system, magic is magic. There is not a separation between arcane and divine magic. It’s all magic and it comes from the same well.

Instead Arcana Unearthed has a the traditional D&D Spell Levels, with each spell assigned to a Spell Level. What Monte Cook does to give more advanced magic classes a more advanced “spell list” is instead to have spells sorted into simple spells, complex spells, and exotic spells. A Mage Blade (which is as close as Arcana Unearthed gets to a cleric) has access to all simple first level spells, whereas a Magister (Arcana Unearthed’s version of a Wizard or Sorcerer) has access to all simple and complex spells of the same level.

For multiclassing, you simply add all the spells that you can cast at a given spell level and gain access to all spells of that spell level that any of your classes would give you. Thus, if a Mage Blade took one level of Magister, he’d have access to all complex spells of first level, even for his Mage Blade “slots.” I love this concept, but I feel it doesn’t go far enough. You see, the martial classes add to each other rather nicely. If you had a level 20 character who had taken five levels of each of Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger and Rogue, you’d still end up with a pretty decent 20th level fighter. Granted, he may not be the best optimized “build” for a 20th level martial character, but he’s still be able to bring the pain in a combat. Continue reading A More Unified Magic System for Arcana Unearthed