Why is D&D-style magic so obsessed with an arms race over magical countermeasures?

Why is D&D-style magic so obsessed with an arms race over magical countermeasures?

>How do you detect and overcome the Alarm spell? Cast Detect Magic to find it and then use Dispel Magic!
>How do you hide from a host of divination spells? Cast Nondetection!
>How do you see past an Invisibility spell? Cast See Invisibility!
>How do you get past the thicket of countless illusions that can confound even the sharpest of senses? Cast True Seeing!
>How do you remove someone from a Geas or a Flesh to Stone? Cast the right restorative spell!
>How do you prevent someone from being possessed by a Magic Jar spell? Cast the right Protection from X spell!
>How do you break someone free of a Mass Suggestion spell? Cast Dispel Magic!
>How do you prevent someone from teleporting into an important area? Cast Forbiddance!

Is there any way for this to NOT devolve into a series of hard counters and cops-and-robbers-style "I have a bullet-deflecting force field!"?

Why does it not just discard the magical countermeasures and give each spell ways to be reliably (yet challengingly) counteracted with mundane measures?

>is there any way for this to NOT devolve into a series of hard counters

It's called not playing DnD.

Anyone else mistake the bookmark for a penis? Just me?

Okay.

Magic must defeat magic!

Power creep of magic in supplements + martials can't have nice things.

True Seeing clears most of the illusions in general.
Dispel Magic is also a general dispel thing.

As a general rule nobody fucking uses spells like Nondetections, Forbiddance or Protection from X, they're literally just for lairs.

Most of the spells on this list have been core, basic PHB shit since 1st edition, OP is just being stupid.

>Most of the spells on this list have been core, basic PHB shit since 1st edition
Doesn't that make the arms race even worse?

>As a general rule nobody fucking uses spells like Nondetections, Forbiddance or Protection from X, they're literally just for lairs.

You joking?

Nondetection and Protection from X are personal buffs.

>not just casting Counterspell to counter their spell countering your spell

You're going to have an arms race literally anywhere you have arms. The MiGs are outperforming our Sabres? Let's stick missiles on them! The falx is cutting through our armor? Reinforce the helmet and sword arm! It's how conflict works.

And this arm race tends to turn to "Throw magic against it!" as the solution because...?

Like, a martial has absolutely no way to reverse a petrification. Or prevent someone from being possessed. Or prevent teleportation into an area.

Well, back in ye olden times non-casters had the best saves, and even though it's not a great solution there always magic items.

IIRC even in 3.PF there were some really raunchy anti-magic feats that could save you from all sorts of situations.

Because user, imagine for a second.

Flesh to stone ? You lose one roll, and you disappear forever.
Invisibility ? I'm casting greater and permanency. AH ! I can do/kill whatever/whoever I want, because nobody will never know I'm here.
A ruler want to make plans and intrigues ? Nop ! All the divinations spells already figured that out, and he is spied on 24/7.
A ruler wants to be safe in his palace ? Nop, assassins are teleporting 24/7.

I'm stopping the examples here, because I think I made my point. The counters are here to ensure that the society can keep running even with magical murderhobos.

>Why does it not just discard the magical countermeasures and give each spell ways to be reliably (yet challengingly) counteracted with mundane measures?

You could also try reading the OP.

"Magic is the only way this magic can be countered" is ass.

There are many things that aren't realistic in D&D... this is not one of them. This is how technology works: you create an attack (or defense), and somebody who doesn't want to die (or who wants to kill you) creates a way to get around it. That's just how this shit works, that's how the real world works, and it makes perfect sense for that to be how magic works as well.

Now, you can argue that there should also be more nonmagical ways to deal with this stuff at the same time, and I'd agree with you. But the "magical arms race" isn't a problem in itself, it's just a natural outgrowth of how things would actually happen in a world with magic.

Sorry, I didn't read that line.

And I think to the RP for one second. How the fuck can a non-caster comprehend magic, and counter it ?

PS : I don't know about divine magic, can it counter the arcane ?

Well there' always shit like using lead linings to fuck with divination spells, throwing a brightly colored powder around that will rest on invisible dudes and reveal them that way, etc.

>And I think to the RP for one second. How the fuck can a non-caster comprehend magic, and counter it ?
"That guy's invisible, and I have a bag of flour (because it's the most important tool an adventurer can have with him, that's why). Coating him in flour will make him visible!"

I mean, for some forms of magic, the mundane solution isn't really that hard to arrive at.

>tfw beat you by two seconds

I like to think that D&D is basically like The Stick of Truth with a mix of LARP rules where a lot of spells are indicated with icons and crap. Except healing potions would be juice boxes and magic items are made by drawing on things with markers and crap. Because of that you got tons of "Nuh-uh! I did this!" "Yeah but I have these so it doesn't count!"

It's literally apples to oranges. Why should a martial be able to undo magical effects? They aren't operating on the same frequency.
The gameplay balance should come from casters not operating on the same frequency as martials, either. 5E works like this just fine; Barbarians, Monks, and Fighters will blast through enemies and shrug off or completely avoid damage in ways casters can't really compare. Fighter can't dispel an illusion, but he can bisect the illusionist in one round instead. Magic can't replace the fighter, and the fighter can't replace magic.

First post best post familia.
/thread

Filename should be something something azorius or Blue Eyes White Waifu

Yes, the mundane solution exist. Except that the rulebook will not take the GM by the hand and note every effect that could affect (if it's raining, if there is mist, etc etc). It's up to the GM to determine if the idea is good or not.
On the contrary, Spells, are explained in great detail and you need to know the exact effects (because DD...)

>Except that the rulebook will not take the GM by the hand and note every effect that could affect
Yes, this is a major feature of every RPG ever made. So astute of you to notice. I'm not sure why you felt the need to bring it up, but it's good to know that you have a basic understanding of how tabletop roleplaying works.

> On the contrary, Spells, are explained in great detail and you need to know the exact effects (because DD...)

Whoops, you ruined it... since this is not, in fact, the case. There are tons of ways to use spells that aren't specifically listed in their descriptions, and the GM still needs to make a decision for those uses. Grease and fire effects, ice spells and water, fire spells and water, earth spells underground, and all sorts of things like that that aren't covered in the specific spell, that the GM has to come up with a ruling on in the moment.

In fiction magic is often overcome with resolve, quick thinking and stuff like this. But it's hard to translate into an RPG.

And your point being ?

Double trips confirm.

I didn't tell that that spells are not open to interpretation, but clearly described in their effects.

The initial point of why are all antimagical stuffs magic is still covered by the fact that Magicians saw their spells, and said, "Man, if someone cast this on me, I'm in trouble. I need some defenses." And Poof, a spell to counter another one is created/worked on.

For spells like teleport, what can the ordinary man do ? Throw spikes on the floor where the enemy could tp, add traps...
Or you could cast a spell designed to impair a tp. That counter may or may not work, but is designed to.

You wanna know the best way to translate that into an RPG?

Give some mundane defenses that can disrupt/dispel/destroy certain forms of magic.

Like from the Codex Alara series, where rock salt can disrupt air furies or how in the Dresden Files where an ordinary piece of chalk could produce a magic circle that seals out magical energy.

Give even the most mundane equipmment a way to counter a specific form of magic and allow players some openendedness in how to utilize the effects.

>For spells like teleport, what can the ordinary man do ?

Maybe there's some matter that can't be teleported and someone latches some onto a mage so he's dimensionally locked?

I mean, considering all the weird metals and materials in a standard D&D verse, there has to be something.

>For spells like teleport, what can the ordinary man do ?

You make that spell more limited.

Like the caster needs to place a marker or an object that belongs to him at the teleportation location and maybe make the teleportation temporary. Like it only lasts for 1-2 hours and if the object he's using as his vector is destroyed then he's instantly banished back to wherever he teleported from.

Aren't bags of flour kind of shit for countering invisible enemies precisely because you don't know their rough location to begin with?

If you just toss the bag the fuck around, chances are, you'll be throwing flour at empty air.

In a world with magic a pure fighter shouldn't exist in the same way that in the real world people don't go out swinging blades on sticks against people with guns. If tools exist to make someone more powerful everyone should use them if they're able. That's why modern infantry uses guns (ranged attack spells) and have radios (communication spells) and body armor (durability buffs). They can also use things like night vision goggles to fight at night. This doesn't change what they are, however - they're still normal infantry fighters. Knowing how to use magic DOESN'T mean they should just become a wizard or druid instead. They should use magic to augment their job.

A fighter should be a specialized individual that focuses on getting into melee and shrugging off hostile effects. They should dish out real damage close up and be able to survive in those close quarters. They live to move close to others and chop them up. They shouldn't be failing resistance rolls (or if they do the effects should only be partial) and they should be monsters in close combat.

Spells that would benefit fighters:
Short ranged teleport to close to melee.
"Buffing" spells to make them tougher, stronger, and faster.
Resistance spells to make them shrug off magic effects and status attacks like save-or-dies

The issue is that these abilities exist but are mostly tied to OTHER classes. A fighter should have these options built in.

A wizard has two roles. They're artillery with big flashy spells and snipers with save-or-dies that kill big tough things fast. Even though a fighter uses magic their role is completely different. They're there to get stuck in the thick of things and take and deal damage. They jump into enemy groups and take everyone on and survive. They tank the save-or-dies. They'll never do area damage like the wizard or kill really big things in one hit. Their job is just to get in someone's face, beat the shit out of them and not die.

That's generally why you disperse the contents along the floor.

Even if someone were to fly over it, their movement would still cause slight disturbances in the powder that someone could uncover with a decent perception score.

Unfortunately, a cleric or druid is the only classes that can actually do that job without requiring a third party to assist them.

I know that's subjective, but weird materials counts as magic in my book.

how do wizards work as artillery? Discounting that 9th circle monstruosity of meteors, offensive spells have ridiculous range compared to ordinary siege weapons.

It's generally accepted that magic equipment does not count as magic in the sense that a mundane swordsman with a magic blade is still just a mundane swordsman.

Literally 4E D&D, aka "everyone is a spell caster now" meme.

Twinned, maximized fireballs cast by a row of ten mages at the same time will most likely kill most infantry troops in a few rounds.

Not even getting into how effective magic missile can be when you're shooting dozens of them shits.

>Even if someone were to fly over it, their movement would still cause slight disturbances in the powder

Not how magical flight works.

>Why does it not just discard the magical countermeasures and give each spell ways to be reliably (yet challengingly) counteracted with mundane measures?

Give examples. I can't think of that many ways to counter things like alarm, geas, petrification, etc that are reliable and mundane, but not to the extent that everyone is able to use them thus rendering the spells completely worthless.

This is why the party is supposed to work together. The wizard isn't just supposed to be lobbing fireballs and disintegrating people, but is also there to buff and assist the party in other ways, like battlefield control. Not to mention being the out-of-combat 'smart guy'.

You can get powder to shift just by lightly moving your hand over it.

It's the same principle, though if someone has access to magical flight, it begs the question of why he wouldn't just fly out of range and just assassinate someone since most people won't have the means to hit you anyways as opposed to going invisible.

Maybe because there's a fucking ceiling in the way

>Alarm

Send in false positives like fallen branches and animals summoned by a bag of tricks so the spell is spent and the wizard has to reset it or waste more of his spell slots.

>geas

Maybe just mundane chants or other forms of meditation that improves mental fortitude and helps to recognize when someone has mental control over you?

I mean, most forms of mind control are only effective because most creatures don't recognize when they're being controlled (it's also why you get a Will save whenever someone tries forcing you into doing something you wouldn't normally do).

>petrification

I dunno, antidote made from the venom of a basilisk or cockatrice or other supernatural reptile demon capable of turning you into stone?

I mean, it's not like getting that kinda crap would be easy since you'd have to milk the venom from a mythological creature that's stronger than most squads of mundane humans anyways.

In practice, the wizard/cleric/druid is a three man squad that's capable of dealing damage, controlling the battlefield, and (de)buffing enemies with save-or-lose/save-or-die spells.

Meanwhile, the martials in the group have to deal with about half a dozen obstacles just to deal straight damage to most CR10+ creatures and the damage they deal is less efficient than just hoping the enemy fails their will save and just outright die.

Absolutely true, though Paladins can sorta half-ass it. A druid is really what a fighter should be; just replace "animal transformation" with "combat mode" or something.

Wizards have a lot of area-attacks, that's why they're considered "artillery". They're not like modern artillery, obviously. They're more like ye olde volley guns and light cannons used on battlefields. Think Renaissance era artillery, not modern.

Right and wrong. 4e did some things right but the big failing is how homogeneous things feel. The classes weren't really separated well enough. Even when a wizard takes some features to survive close combat they shouldn't outdo a fighter in it and a fighter shouldn't outclass them in their normal area of expertise. 4e let any class do basically anything, removing the reasons for having classes in the first place.

Sure, but it's a flaw of the system. Druids shouldn't be able to melee better than the fighter, cast as well as a cleric and do AoE spells like a wizard. Yet they can. Fighters really should be the best at fighting WITHOUT party support. Mages should be the best at blasting without support. Clerics at healing, rogues at stealth and damage bursts. Fighters should be able to buff themselves up to a basic level. Mages should be able to cast their spells without getting support from the fighter.

I mean imagine that every time a mage wanted to cast spells they had to get a piggyback ride from the fighter to do it. It's silly and it'd be funny to see, but the point is classes should be able to perform their core aspect just fine without external support. A group can enhance that performance but shouldn't be necessary to perform it.

Even if the wizard was able to close the distance with invisibility up, how's he going to take out the target without immediately giving away his position anyways?

>Why does it not just discard the magical countermeasures and give each spell ways to be reliably (yet challengingly) counteracted with mundane measures?
Do you not understand D&D style magic or something? you're asking why people don't just get under their desk when a nuke is coming instead of shooting the nuke out of the sky with another missile.

>Alarm
I like that one.
But it tips off the wizard to the fact that someone wants to break in.
This is a method that becomes self-defeating as it gets more popular: if everyone knows this trick, wizards will get really suspicious of anything setting off the alarm. Especially if they place it in an area that intruders have to pass through but very hard for animals to accidentally enter.

>Geas
Your solution here is essentially just 'have a good will save'. And it's not a cure.

>Petrification
Makes sense, but in a land where there are wizards who can petrify, and basilisk/cockatrices are rare, then the right restoration spell is the only practical answer anyway instead of spending a week to hunt down the right creature.
Well either that or if the GM doesn't care and you can go to the local potion shop and buy the venom/antidote. Which is probably suspiciously similar in price to a restorative scroll/potion.

It's harder than it sounds to find the right balance point that OP seems to want.

>Even when a wizard takes some features to survive close combat they shouldn't outdo a fighter in it
They really don't. A wizard has less hit points and armor usually, and limited melee options.
>and a fighter shouldn't outclass them in their normal area of expertise. 4e let any class do basically anything, removing the reasons for having classes in the first place.
Fighters don't get fireballs or area control in 4e, so I think the wizard is safe. And wizards get free ritual casting and rituals, so they can do teleportation and all that with much less investment.

>Send in false positives like fallen branches and animals summoned by a bag of tricks so the spell is spent and the wizard has to reset it or waste more of his spell slots.

Alarm only triggers on Small+ creatures.

>Right and wrong. 4e did some things right but the big failing is how homogeneous things feel. The classes weren't really separated well enough. Even when a wizard takes some features to survive close combat they shouldn't outdo a fighter in it and a fighter shouldn't outclass them in their normal area of expertise. 4e let any class do basically anything, removing the reasons for having classes in the first place.

Fighters and wizards play completely differently in 4e.

One is a melee single-target defender, the other is a ranged area controller.

4E allows everyone to do everything, but no one could say a Fighter could out-Striker a twin-shot greatbow Ranger. They divided the clases into four expertise groups and then within those groups the different classes did their jobs differently. I don't think classes feel similar in how they actually play. A Rogue doesn't work like a Ranger, a Warden isn't the same as a Fighter. Wizards are experts on ranged control, especially with zones and AoE management. Each class can overlap others, but it is hard to outshine the others in their clear role.

If you have played 4E you can clearly tell even the tankiest Wizard build is nothing compared to how beefy any Defender becomes, and vice versa with the control of the battlefield aspect of Wizards.

>This is a method that becomes self-defeating as it gets more popular: if everyone knows this trick, wizards will get really suspicious of anything setting off the alarm. Especially if they place it in an area that intruders have to pass through but very hard for animals to accidentally enter.

That's generally why you don't leave survivors but I understand what you mean.

If the area that they're warding is in an enclosed area though, you could use that to your advantage by throwing in several AoE shit like smoke bombs and sleeping gases.

>Your solution here is essentially just 'have a good will save'. And it's not a cure.

It is when there are reliable methods to raise a mundane's shitty Will save and most wizard spells target willpower anyways.

No seriously, like 80% of the spells in the PHB targets willpower, a good save will render subtle spells worthless in the long run.

>Well either that or if the GM doesn't care and you can go to the local potion shop and buy the venom/antidote. Which is probably suspiciously similar in price to a restorative scroll/potion.

It'd pretty much come down to whether or not the players have the means to afford it or the initiative to go on a side quest to save a petrified party member.

It's still a solution though, albeit an expensive and time consuming one but that's the price (no pun intended) a mundane has to pay in a world where magic is real and can easily fuck your shit up for days.

>Why is D&D-style magic
aaaaaaaaaaand i didn't read any further.

>That's generally why you don't leave survivors

Even if you're in the wizard's demiplane?

>Why is D&D-style magic so obsessed with an arms race over magical countermeasures?
Because mages must mage

Why would a martial be able to do any of those things. They're non magical sword swinging folk, not do-all super heroes.

2/10 bait, got me to respond.

>Because mages must mage
Will explain better, some players think that if they selected mages, they must be allowed to make mage only stuff.

Thats why some players run as fast as they can trying to find a way to sleep whent hey run out of spells

Personally I would introduce some kind of "folk magic" as an ordinary skill anyone can learn, the equivalent of knowing that hanging a iron horseshoe above your door will keep away the fey, or the way Aragorn knew how to treat Frodo's magical illness with a common herb. With sufficient skill, and the right materials, your character would know - for example - how to identify and short-circuit a magical alarm by sprinkling silver dust over it in just the right way, or use a certain plant to treat petrification (maybe that would be rolled into Medicine, to make non-magical healing more useful). Obviously this would be a skill-check and failure would have a cost (setting off the alarm, for instance). Kind of like an applied Arcana or Spellcraft check.

Alternatively, let characters attempt to cut through spells if they have magic weapons, slicing through the weave of magic. Likewise this would involve a risk of failure, and you still need to identify the magic first, requiring some kind of skill check.

Have you ever seen what happens to a bag of flour that is violently burst open? That shit's a massive fucking cloud of floating white dust.

And bonus, once you see the invisible guy, you can toss a match into the cloud to make sure he has a REALLY bad day.

>Why would a martial be able to do any of those things. They're non magical sword swinging folk, not do-all super heroes.
Because people would try to learn magic too, or get magical items or run the fuck out of the challenge.

The problem is
1-Some martial players wouldnt want to multiclass to get magical abilities
1.1- This is the equivalent of some modern soldier or bodyguard not training with guns instead just training with melee weapons and thinking they are ok.
2-The dm may rairoald the thing making impossible to run out of the battle or players may think its a pussy thing to run from battles.

Some will say that fantasy stuff that is not of the hard fantasy sub-genre doenst need to be very logical and etc..
The thing is, many times, melee guys on fantasy stories (non hard fantasy ones), get out of their problems by something that shitty tropes site call Contrived Coincidence, a thing wont happen on rpg, unless you include rules for that or dm fiat do the job.

>The thing is, many times, melee guys on fantasy stories (non hard fantasy ones), get out of their problems by something that shitty tropes site call Contrived Coincidence, a thing wont happen on rpg, unless you include rules for that or dm fiat do the job.

Fate points per day for martials.

I like it

Could give Fighters some sort of narrative control power. No PC is truly mundane, just having the class levels raises them into the extraordinary, the impossible. Some channel this power into spells, others warp the world in more subtle ways.

Say that once per minute the Fighter can dictate something like "The dragon lands to fight in melee rather than strafing or casting spells," or "The wizard chooses to laugh and taunt us instead of use magic as we approach" or "a rocky outcropping up ahead provides cover from aerial enemies and the gaps between rocks are too small for the giant to enter" and have that actually happen, with the target(s) adopting it as their current strategy/terrain/etc.

I said it was a subjective and personal opinion. What's your point?

I'm not talking about damage, I said range. If optimized for range, sorcerers can reach almost 100 meters. That leaves them beneath anything mkore powerful than a scorpio.

Ballistas, catapults, onagers, trebuchets, all these have greater range (besides more shots than a arcane user has spells).

If we use renaissance artillery as an example, mages become outclassed in range and lose the privilege of firepower. A culverin can reach 450 meters and kill an entire row of soldiers. A whole battery...

I'm amazed this thread was made.

I actually homebrewed a simple system for this.

The material components of a spell are used to DISPEL it as well as cast it, but dispelling requires no magic. This, of course, makes spells that have no material components very powerful, and they HAVE to be dispelled with magic.

These are some terrible examples, I get what you're saying but "The dragon lands to fight in melee rather than strafing or casting spells" does not solve the fighters problem.

The fighter being able to adapt to the dragon getting up in his face, or engaging from the air is a far better solution. Something like he focuses all his strength and heart into his weapon and throws it at the dragon crippling it's wing and sending it into the ground.

Or rather the fighter knows the dragon will engage from afar, so he picks up a different weapon like a ballista or gun and retrains his bonus feats to accommodate it.

you can't cast permanency on invisibility post 2e.

The dragon landing to fight in melee sans spells actually helps the fighter quite a lot. Hitting and dealing lots of damage in melee is actually something that fighters are pretty good at, plus they've removed the ability of the dragon to cast spells. Throwing your sword? Hope your backup weapon is as good as the primary. Retraining feats? Good, go sit in the corner until you're done, you're not slowing things down while picking out feats.

I'm not really sure what's terrible about examples of forcing magical foes to play by the rules that allow martial types to beat them in all those stories that inspire so much of ttrpg ideals. Did St. George's dragon fly above and rain down attacks and spells from beyond his reach? Did Thulsa Doom cast 17 SoD spells at Conan as he approached the stronghold?

Thulsa Doom didn't have the perks of a max level D&D spellcaster or spells that basically allowed him to outright murder someone so long as they failed a will save.

Believe me, if the average wizard in fiction was as powerful as a level 20 3.5 edition D&D wizard, and they behaved like a power gamer with a small dick and hardon for bigger damage numbers, none of those ancient heroes would've ever won their fights with one because by the time they tried to come up with a solution, they'd already be dead.

Also, the only reason why Dragons are dumb enough to fight in melee with a dude with the big stonking sword is because the dragons are behaving like video game mobs that must get into melee so the precious little mundanes don't shit their pants and complain on the gaming forums about how imbalanced the game is.

Believe me, a smart dragon would fly out of reach and pelt you with every ranged attack they own before they even consider dropping into melee to fight someone, and even then they'll do it in a way that still gives them an edge.

Area attacks are nice for small groups at best, but at typical early modern or even classical battlefield densities, they'd fail to actually make more than a dent in a manipular legion formation or in a 7yw infantry formation.

People weren't that tightly packed.

They're more expensive, rarer, and more annoying to deal with than a 10-man artillery crew.

In some of the attempts to put rules to more advanced settings like Mighty Fortress and Gothic Earth, there was one thing that made the very nerfed mages still very good at artillery.

The skill needed to control cannons was Int-based and the whole process was treated as a subsystem different from attacks.

Fucking perfect.

>Control
>Tank
>DPS
A guy at my old gaming shop got fed to hyenas for using those fucking terms like they meant something to tabletop.

Why not use them? I can understand DPS since most tabletop games work on turn-based combat, but what's wrong with using tank and control?

These can all be countered martially. It's called "Hitting them very hard".

For Controller? I understand the other two, but controller is a widely recognized role.

How does one tank in DnD?

Because there are far more interesting things with which to define a character than how they kill other characters on chessboards.

You tank in D&D as a character with high durability, ok attacks, and a "fuck you you don't get to disengage no stop fuck you" ability at level one that scales to max level.

>"fuck you you don't get to disengage no stop fuck you" ability at level one that scales to max level.
What

Compelled Duel, Taunt, etc. There are a small handful of tank-lite powers.

By having skills/abilities that deter enemies from attacking other party-members and having the health to take the resulting punishment.

But most tabletop RPGs have mechanics centred around combat, and inevitably somebody's going to ask 'hey, what are fighters and paladins like in a fight?', whereupon describing them as being tanks or tanky will give them a very basic gist of what they're like: tough and aggro-grabbing. They're perfectly legitimate/cromulent words for describing combat mechanics.

It's a thing in D&D.

There is more than one thing that has the D&D label on it, despite what the internet told you.

>There is more than one thing that has the D&D label on it
That's a terrible benchmark, pretty much anything the utilized a d20 could get a D&D label on it.

>mfw Control is literally a 4e term and not even used in MMOs, but is apparently bad language in a game shop
Elitist oldfags are cancer.

Because d&d's Magic is not actually magic at all but rather a technology that happens to work through your mind, some abstract power cosmic kind of deal and some implements.
Military technology is allways the first to innovate, since the Enemy is allways studying new ways of murdering you. After a while you get a milion spells of wich like 99% are weapon spells and countermeasures spells while the remaining 1% is civilian use and utility, usually developed studying the former.
There's a reason wizards go around with mercenary companies searching old spells and developing new ones.

I get your point. Magic can do anything. The big game breaking offenders in d&d are the utility spells which make all mundane challenges solvable with the right spell. That was technically the original purpose of spells, back in od&d. If you look at the od&d spell list, many soells are there to solve mundane problems. What other purpose would you give spells, if not to solve problems?

I agree that there is a problem in later editions, and characters always seem tp have the riggt spell handy to solve every problem. Possible solutions are:

Add uncertainty: give spells the possibility of catastrophic failure. For example, divinations can lie, dispells can have all sorts of crazy effects, etc...

Add costs to magic. You can enforce material component rules and be really anal about it, or you can add all sorts of costs (hp costs, costs for bargaining with magical entities for power, etc.)

Make spells rarer and limit the numelber of spells a character can master. That way, there can be a counter for many spells and a spell for every purpose, but only that crazy old wizard a continent away knows the one you need, and he's not sharing it cheaply.

it's 4e

The only edition in which teleport doesn't have a chance of catastrophic failure is 3.5, same for a lot of utility spells that 4e decided to make commonplace.

5e is the first to put the lid on utility spells as hard as it did, to a point where they're now effectively useless to anyone but an unsubtly evil party.

>5e is the first to put the lid on utility spells as hard as it did

No, that was 4e because of the ritual system.

4e made them "commonplace" but then made every one of them cost big money.

>The ritual system
The ritual system doesn't put the lid on anything, it just makes the magic solution easier for everyone.

In 5e knock will wake up most of a city block, most enchantment spells will let the victim know they're being mindraped, and a ton of spells that were utility solutions are concentration (fly) or only vaguely enhance a skill (disguise self)

>it just makes the magic solution easier for everyone

Knock in 4e:
- Requires you to be able to cast rituals
- Requires you to be level 4
- Costs 175 gp to learn in the first place
- Costs 35 gp, 1 healing surge, and 10 minutes to cast
- Basically just replaces your Thievery check with an Arcana check +5, which isn't THAT good

You're telling me this is easier than just bringing out thieves' tools, which ALREADY come with a +2 bonus to Thievery checks by default?

Thats a very good example of giving a cost to magic and a fine solution to the problem of magic as an omnipotent toolbox.

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I don't see why any of this is necessarily a problem. It doesn't make sense to me for there to be a commonly-used spell in any setting without people developing spells to counter it. It's like cybersecurity -- there are encryption techniques and hacking techniques, and large-scale systems that have to have a weakness somewhere. After a few years, someone might find a bug in the system and try to exploit it, after which people will develop ways to defend against that until it gets patched, and then people will try to find away to get around those defenses, and so on.

As long as there is neither a way to form a completely unassailable defense, nor a way to form a completely unblockable attack, a magical dance of lunge, parry, and riposte seems all well and good. Of course, developing a system where such and elegant dance is even possible, let alone the norm for competition between casters, is easier said than done.

A wizard has no need of subtlety. You will know if they demand entrance.