Veeky Forums has talked "casters vs martials" to death...

Veeky Forums has talked "casters vs martials" to death. A fair number of people have come to the conclusion that casters are more potent in a fight, but less capable of fighting multiple times without rest. I don't want to talk about the design of that though. I'm curious how Veeky Forums would balance a system that can't use that as a means of balancing. You can either assume that everyone is able to rest for as long as needed after each fight, or that casters need to be as good at martials at fighting many fights without rest, either is fine.

TL;DR how do you balance casters in a system that can't use "spells per day" as a means of balancing?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtu.be/jXAcA_y3l6M
spheresofpower.wikidot.com
d20pfsrd.com/magic/variant-magic-rules/spheres-of-power/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Make caster spell weaker but wider, I.E. AoE focused.

Imagine an pitched skirmish, with three possibilities of combatant setup.
>Single fighter with some degree of competence (level, skill values, etc)
>Single wizard, of equivalent competence in wizardry as previously mentioned fighter is in fighting
>Bunch of mooks, significantly less competent than those above, but numerous

If you pitch fighter vs mooks, he'll lose. He can only focus on single enemy at once, while the rest, despite being weaker, can encircle and flank him.
If you'll pitch wizard vs mooks, he'll win. He can attack all of the mooks at once, and they are weak enough to be killed or otherwise incapacitated by wizard's magic before they will endanger him.
If you pitch wizard vs fighter, though, fighter will win. He's tough enough to dodge or resist the magic being only moderately hindered instead of killed or incapacitated, get into melee range and proceed to kick wizard's sorry ass.

That basicaly creates paper-rock-scisors triangle of martial prowess/magical power/numbers.

And it is also compliant to common literary tropes, since in fantasy literature, martials are protagonists more often than casters, who in turn are often antagonists. And protagonist martials often win by resisting evil magic by the power of their outstanding will and fortitude. Obviously nec hercules contra plures is another trope it complies to.

Warlock style; not a particularly damaging spell list, but unlimited use.

Forget about balance, there's no satisfactory way to balance people who warp reality with people who are pretty good at hitting things with a sword. Instead I'd make a game that's explicitly about wizards.

Strip casters most of the damage spells, they are now only utility casters. Give them pretty hardcore prerequisites to be able to be a caster so they suck at being anything else. Have most of the spells have a long and careful casting process so they can not spam that shit in combat.

Being a caster and breaking the laws of reality will always be more powerful than swinging a sword or shooting an arrow. The thing is, being a wizard should mean much more than spamming fireballs, it should be an important and unique role in the party.

The main problem is the disparity of power levels.

Either make a low magic game, where Wizards are more about trickery and subtlety, alongside "realistic" fighters;

Or go full high magic, with wizards changing reality and fighters cleaving a dragon's breath to avoid it, or use its shields to reflect (even magical) projectiles.

Or fucking look at how 4e did

Make a caster have channeling skills, to prevent him from being solo fighter unless he chooses to be so. Make him spend a shitton of gold or risk his life to get rare books and knowledge. A mage should be balanced by the setting itself, not the combat system

>Le wraping reality maymay
KYS, you're the cancer killing both the medium and the genre

>4e
He'srightyouknow.png

But that wont stop people from REEing and arguing about how Clerics, Druids, and Wizards were "totally balanced"

>martials are protagonists more often than casters, who in turn are often antagonists
I'm currently writing a subversion of this trope, framed within the context of a post-apocalyptic society that forbids literacy or organized academia of any kind, enforced by a zealously pious ruling class of mechanized barbarians.

It's relatively derivative, but I'm enjoying it.

>Or fucking look at how 4e did
Make it so no one can do anything cool?

Everyone always talks about how to nerf casters, but I feel like a more fun option is to leave them where they are. Don't try to balance casters around the other people surrounding them. Being able to shoot lightning at will should always be cool and effective. Instead crank up the weaboo in your setting and make it so people can run at very hihg speeds and hit really hard so then higher level characters can just run around, having a chane to dodge lighting and being able to punch down buildings.

Congratulations, you have now rendered one of those two classes completely unplayable.

Either everyone will play casters and stay out of combat, turning it into a social game while fighters sit around with their thumbs up their asses, or you end up with teams of nothing but fighters while one guy sits back and serves as a skill monkey. FYI, this is how clerics used to function and nobody fucking played them.

Problem with this is every time you try it Martial players go fucking ballistic. Martial players tend to be your tryhard history nerds and hate the idea of things not being period accurate mideval simulations.

The first thing to ask for any setting's magic is: "is magic a tool or something to be awed by it?" The more rules, the less awe but less of a tool.

If you can't actively engage in combat other than damage spells maybe you shouldn't be playing a wizard in the first place?

And if your fighters are only walking swords without any abilities other than different ways of swinging a sword, you should be playing a different system, a one which preferably isn't shit bag.

Make magic expensive. You need this component that you can only find by harvesting the flower that only grow on the mountains of Shiverpeaks at 10,000 feet.

In my system magic is mostly support. Casters do buffs, debuffs, alter the terrain, utility, take control of a willing ally. They also have a few methods of doing damage, but they all either only work in a specific situation or require at least a turn of preparation.

Things like summons and reliable ranged damage left a caster perform the same role as a fighter or ranger, and thus shouldn't be the domain of a caster. Even though I love the theme of summoning it's not good for balance of the roles.

It's also not a good idea to make balance reliant on rests, since that makes which class is very useful or nearly useless depend on whether or not there's been time to sleep recently, and it's extra book-keeping.

The reason why there's systems where magic-users are better than martials is because magic-users are given too much versatility in them. The magic-users get to a have a list of a dozen spells which they get to switch through, meanwhile a fighter is stuck with having the same armor and doing up to things and hitting them with whatever weapon he has proficiency in.
I think the best ways to solve this are to decrease how many different spells a magic-user can have, or to make fighters able to switch playstyles more easily (such as by having appreciably different weapon and armor options, or by combining fighters and barbarians into specializations of the same class, and combining rogues and rangers into specialization of the same class.)

Whenever you add a spell to a system, consider carefully whether the spell makes things more interesting, or if the spell makes a more interesting solution become pointless.

Magic is only as interesting as its kryptonite. All good Superman stories is either about being weakened, fighting an equal or women.

Magic can be limited by:

What it can do.
Economy.
Moral cost.
Fatigue.
Danger to use.

youtu.be/jXAcA_y3l6M

That's lame though.
Noone wants to put a pause on an adventure to go get the same component over and over again.
It can be cool if it happens once per thing, but anything after that would be just a chore.

That sort of thing works well more getting new abilities tho. Like if you want to learn how to cast fireball you have to get something that has a mythological association with fire, or find someone willing to train you in it, or get access to a rare book or scroll that details how to do it but requires you to know a certain language.

fpbp, I really like this approach. I'm basically picturing a level one wizard as having unlimited casts of , and fighters have more HP, better speed, etc, but typically having attacks like . Provides a nice balance, gives the two types different things to focus on, makes balancing encounters easy because you just plop down one big enemy for the fighter and a bunch of gremlins around for the caster. Plus you can keep them intermingled by letting the wizard buff the fighter, and letting the fighter protect the wizard.

Sounds dope.

Without more extrapolation, this just sounds like "make casters magic martials"

This would probably work, but I always worry about balance systems that put one character type too much into the limelight. This sounds like "fighter + support" in the same way other systems devolve into "caster + meatshields"

These ideas seem to have the same issues as the spells-per-day solution, the wizard gets to be crazy amazing some of the time and totally useless other times.

The issue of diversity of options is definitely a tricky one, I'm not really a big fan of either "take away caster options" or "let fighters do a thousand things", but I don't have a better solution. Giving the wizard a ton of utility but keeping their "DPS" down works sometimes but it also feels a little wonky.

>Things like summons and reliable ranged damage let a caster perform the same role as a fighter or ranger, and thus shouldn't be the domain of a caster.
Really? Damage stacks with the fighter's efforts; save or lose utility makes the fighter's efforts irrelevant. Letting the caster soften people up with an aoe for the weapon users to finish off is pretty much ideal in my book.
>The reason why there's systems where magic-users are better than martials is because magic-users are given too much versatility in them. The magic-users get to a have a list of a dozen spells which they get to switch through, meanwhile a fighter is stuck with having the same armor and doing up to things and hitting them with whatever weapon he has proficiency in.
This is correct. Want to play an Enchanter in D&D? Congratulations, you still get all of the Conjuration spells at pretty much full power.

Actually give magic reasonable limitations, don't let the casters do anything they want because "lol magic". Maybe you can't affect people(or living things) with spells without a focus (that used to be part of them, such as a few strands of their hair or something) or their true name. Maybe powerful effects can only be achieved through lengthy rituals taking hours or even days. Maybe magic is subtle, and can't accomplish much by itself. And so on and so on. There are endless possibilities, you just need to figure out what you want from magic first.

>What it can do
Yes. This is the best way to balance it.
>Economy
Becomes irrelevant if the caster is wealthy and in a center of trade, but is punishing if the caster is poor and in an isolated area.
Also heavily affected by GM fiat.
>Moral cost
Makes no difference to a murderhobo
>Fatigue
Irrelevant if the players have time to sleep between every fight or 2. The most logical decision becomes running away and hiding at the end of every fight, even if they weren't actually injured.
>Danger to use
That actively punishes players for doing what they're character is useful for.
You'd have players casting a healing spell, rolling a 3, getting lit on fire from too much holy light, get knocked unconscious by themselves even though they were doing the best thing they could, and then avoiding using that spell in the future.

I am very much in favor of those costs being applied to something that steals too much spotlight from other classes though.
There's not much purpose in a fighter if a wizard can summon a golem, there's not much purpose in a ranger if a wizard has reliable ranged damage, there's not much purpose in a rogue if a wizard can make themselves invisible, etc.

But if you apply those extra costs to things that should be a caster's bread and butter then you've gone too far.

so now its Money vs martials. Or everybody busting their ass to do sidequests to help the wizard not suck?

I'm personally thinking through more of a game balance perspective, rather than narrative. Limiting a typical aspect of magic works OK, thought I don't know if it fully solves the problem. Lengthy rituals are sort of interesting, but leave the caster totally useless during an ambush. Plus, during combat, they don't get to do caster things, which seems totally antithetical to the role. Ritual casting I think would lead to a lot of "I buff myself in these ways which make me equivalent to a fighter but better" which sort of puts things back at square one.

Putting high costs on things that reach outside a classes bread and butter works fairly well I think. Martials can use magic items at a lower success rate, casters can create martials to fight for them but only if very skilled and a bit lucky. Makes a fair bit of sense to me.

The secondary problem this sheds light on, however, is nobody seems to agree on what the caster's bread and butter is supposed to be. This applies more specifically to arcane casters, since everyone knows divine casters are undead rebukers and/or healbots. Some people say arcane casters are damage output, which relegates fighters to a less satisfying meatshield role and overlaps a bit with archer classes. Some say casters should be martial-buffer, which is similar to cleric/druid material, and has the opposite problem of putting the martials front and center instead. Some say arcane casters should be a swiss-army-knife, which turns them into arcane skill monkeys, which put rogues and wizards at odds.

Some thoughts on that coming in a second comment

I suppose summoning is fine if the thing has really low attack, or really low defense, or only lasts for a few turns.

Giving casters aoe damage is a bit of a grey area.
On the one hand, magic is the most logical thing to get aoe damage unless if there's bombs and poisonous gas, and has a convenient explanation built into it for why it doesn't hurt allies and why not everyone can have an aoe kill-fest is their backpack.
But on the other, aoe damage is slightly more clunky in an ttrpg than in a video game, makes crazy shit like rapid-fire arrows or a beyblade-like fighter redundant, and varies from incredibly useful in a fight with lots of enemies to nearly pointless if there's a bossfight.

I do feel like I'm grasping for straws here with this argument, so you're probably right tho ;_;

>Without more extrapolation, this just sounds like "make casters magic martials"
That's the thing. You can pick two of "equally useful", "unique mechanical identity", and "no unfun resource gating".
It doesn't matter what the fluff is, you could just as easily have anime-tier fighters burning through limited ki pools and needing a nap while wizards can channel a wand for 1d8+INT a round all day. If not being able to use all your toys essentially at-will is off the table, and the greater D&D playerbase seems to have settled on that sometime around when Advanced launched, then your choices are "the big numbers player runs every encounter" or "there is no big number player".

The constant blinkered "I want everyone able to do something no other character can, but I don't ever want my character to be restricted from something" Ouroboros of dumb, which always settles on "no usage restrictions" as its core value, is like a wargamer arguing that he should be allowed to counter a marine rifle platoon of 43 men 1:1 with 21 Minuteman crews and the President.

This. Weaboo Fightan Magic was a great balance to 3.5, but God forbid that the fighter get access to incredible feats of strength or skill in a universe where Kobolds can shoot lightning and literal dragons.

(cont)

I think the synergy between rogues and fighters is really nice. Fighters rush into the enemies, rogues come in second to flank and deal amazing damage. But rogues can't deal their damage if there isn't a fighter to flank against, and fighters get swarmed if they don't have support from a rogue. The fighter gets to feel strong and brave for taking the challenge head on, the rogue gets to feel skillful and stealthy by moving into exactly the right position to deal as much damage as possible. The two classes need each other, and they respect each other. There are also certain encounters that are better suited to one of the two classes. A single unaware enemy? Easy pickings for the rogue. A horde of easily dispatched enemies? That's better for the fighter (assuming the system supports multiple attacks at higher levels, or some sort of whirlwind attack).

I just wish the same sort of synergy was present within the relationship between arcane casters and other class archetypes.

I'm sorry, I misread your comment, I thought you were proposing casters be given a small-damage unlimited cast ability, which sounded to me like you were just proposing casters basically also be consistent damage types.

What you've said though, I'm not sure if I agree with. I think you can absolutely have those three together. Just look at what I've said above about fighters and rogues. Both need no resources, contribute to fights equally, and are very mechanically distinct. Later in what you type it sounds more like you're arguing more that a class needs to be bad at something/can't be good at everything, which I agree with, but your first point makes no sense to me.

Obviously if you refuse to allow fighters to perform superhuman feats, you're going to need to nerf wizards down to being mundane, which makes this all sort of irrelevant. Might as well just have the wizard be a magic-flavored skill monkey archer then.

Why in 3.5/3.PF the casters are extreme generalists? For example, as a martial you have to choose between skill mastery (including social), supernatural durability and athletics, capability with various weapons and combat tricks, stealth and so on.
While wizard can have invisibility, flight, polymorph, divination and mind control. A preparation is a simple matter of rest. While only sorcerers (less flexible, but still diverse) can rival them in raw power.

I definitely like my summons to be space-occupiers and time-wasters rather than serious offensive threats. Summons in 3.5/PF are the most egregious example of arcane casters actually taking over the fighter's role. Whereas backline nukers have plenty of reasons to want their fighters to stick around (especially in boss fights like you mentioned).

Because the system is very poorly designed, and only autists like me like it.

>I'm personally thinking through more of a game balance perspective, rather than narrative.
The problem is both. Casters have too many abilities that allow them to freely warp the narrative - that must be addressed before moving onto the game balance.

>Limiting a typical aspect of magic works OK, thought I don't know if it fully solves the problem. Lengthy rituals are sort of interesting, but leave the caster totally useless during an ambush. Plus, during combat, they don't get to do caster things, which seems totally antithetical to the role.
I did specify POWERFUL effects. A death spell should probably be a ritual. Magic missile doesn't have to be. One can solve an encounter or at least make it significantly easier, while the other lets the wizard contribute without overshadowing the other party members. The same applies to other effects: Powerful or game-altering effects such as teleportation and true invisibility should be rituals, while effects that don't fall into those categories can be available as spells.

>Ritual casting I think would lead to a lot of "I buff myself in these ways which make me equivalent to a fighter but better" which sort of puts things back at square one.
...then don't let the wizard have rituals that turn them into one-man army, or put restrictions into them that make them non-viable in most adventuring situations? Such a ritual might, for instance, take several days to cast, but the effect only lasts several hours. Can't do it in the middle of a dungeon, but might be useful if you're preparing for a siege, for instance. And even then, unless the wizard is a selfish dick who only wants to wank to his power-level, it would almost certainly be better to target the fighter with the ritual, not himself.

>might as well have the wizard be a magic-flavored skill monkey archer then

I would actually run a campaign like this, where magic takes intense concentration and is super difficult and produces usually mundane effects (probably closer to what it would be if humans had magic IRL). maybe some forms of magic would have practical use but the majority would be novelty and not have combat applications (conjuring a small amount of fire in your hands for light and heat, but can't cast fireballs; being able to mildly shock people consistently after a few seconds of magically generating charge similar to rubbing your socks on carpet; padding parlor tricks, generating smells, being able to make someone feel your hand after it stops touching them, maybe more complicated magic could do things like inscribe a tracking rune, project an illusion into someones mind for a second or two, constantly keep your body at a good temperature like Wim Hoff (but not effortlessly), or basically any other "boring power".

It would emphasize hand to hand combat by removing most combat magic yes, but it would make good magic something truly mythical, even to the players. it would also make spellcasting a lot more creative as players would need to find practical applications for mediocre spells. I dont know what it would mean for spellswords, I would imagine that a basic technique would probably just be an artificial acceleration of your weapon and durability over time through a very mild magic shield or something

I had good results in both 3.5 and 5e splitting the wizards into specializations (they already have the lines drawn) and cutting them (and anyone who casts magic) down to 1/2 casters (end at 5th level) and making gaining spells after that = level^28*10000 and they are only 1/day.

Makes the casters all specialized, limits their power and leaves room for powerful spells without making them too OP. I did have to eventually couple this with the higher level cost overlapping with previous level requirements (cant get 9th level spells until late) because of one minmaxer who convinced the party to pool all money to get him more badass spells really early but it wasnt necessary until he took advantage of it.

I really like spheres of power's solution to the problem. Effectively a massive nerf to a caster's versatility. The abilities a sphere caster gets may be equivalent to a vancian caster in power, but they can't change which magic they've learned after they've learned it. They'll have a relatively small number of magical abilities specialized along a small number of spheres, as opposed to the dozens of spells even a 6-level caster would know and be able to choose from in advance.

supposed to be level^2*10000 not ^28...thats too expensive even for my low-magic-loving self

You need to decide on a power level for your game.

Casters vs martials is only a meme because dnd designers can't figure out their power level. They want martials to be the bmx biker along side the casters who are summoning angels.

Just tone down offensive spell damage to be equivalent to martial feats and make casters specialize in either offensive or defensive/support magic. Give casters that specialize in defensive magic a means to defend themselves like quarterstaff feats or something.

Ritual casting is just the same problem as spells per day, but in reverse. Either you wait for several days for the wizard to recuperate, and then they can do whatever they feel like and overshadow the party, or they're stuck working with whatever is left over when the party has to fight on the move. This idea of downtime as a resource makes no sense except for in situations where it's being reinforced as a resource. Sure, you can construct every campaign to be a race against the clock, where your players have to make interesting decisions about whether they should rest to let the wizard get his big spell, or if they don't have enough time and need to move on, despite the detriment. But being forced into a particular narrative framework because of a single class seems totally unreasonable.

My complaint/concern is less with how to make wizards less broken, and more with "how do you bring their power level down without making it be based on downtime"? Because obviously a wizard who has unlimited spells per day would be ridiculously overpowered, but the solution of "they need a nap after" doesn't really solve the issue for me. Stuff like a smaller number of spells, a more specific focus of combat utility, or a different sort of resource management, all work better and mesh with a wider variety of narratives.

Limiting options is definitely a solid solution, but it's a little bit handwave-y. "Make the casters have a specialty" is sort of the ABCs of good role design, and basically only serves to point out that the problem with casters is their wide range of utility. You aren't wrong, but the solution is about as satisfying with "take casters out of the game and replace them with new classes that are balanced".

Besides this issue though, the idea that wizards are balanced because they have to rest makes no sense, and causes a very "swingy" power level.

The arcane caster's bread and butter was always emergency solutions. As long as the gameplay meta rejects emergencies, they're gonna be near-unbalanceable from that angle.

Instead, we could try looking at approaches beyond the trinity. I'm a fan of FFXI's, which assumes:
- meatshield, but in most metas favored hybrid meatshield chaining damage mitigation skills while taking attack actions in safe rounds
- martial dps, after building enough morale can combo with the meatshield for a variety of skills which amplify all magic that round
- debuff-focused caster who enables the martial and tank round by round before being enabled by the amp
- heals (dedicated, everything hit like a truck and nothing was very cooperative, admittedly hard to simulate on the table)
- aoe buffer who had a 3-square radius on all skills and could only apply two per target at a time (again, plotting how to do this in tabletop time is significantly less fun)

i'm saying that on a core level, it isn't a martials/casters distinction, it's a "does 2d6 every hit"/"does 20d6 every hit" distinction and it's just as easy to fluff that the opposite way. no matter how it's fluffed, though, there are only two ways to allow everyone to contribute similarly:
- 20d6 does it every 10th hit and 1d6 every hit in between. this has been rejected by the entire playerbase as boring and uninspiring.
- keep the fluff of both but give both the same mechanics (basically 4e for casters, and 3e+ for thief and fighter as unique roles into rogue as essentially a fighter kit.)

why were thieves cool with becoming rogues, fighters with crit scaling rather than base damage/attack speed scaling? probably because most of the interaction of playing a thief ended up being a really bad fighter with no scaling.

>take casters out of the game and replace them with new classes that are balanced
isnt this what youre asking for though?

>take casters out of the game and replace them with new classes that are balanced

Any solution is going to look like that if the goal is to actually have a balance between the spell casters and the weapon users, because the two are designed in such a way to make a balance between the two basically impossible from the start. The vancian system is broken and needs to be thrown out or heavily restricted, or else it's simply going to walk all over everything else.

Don't balance, boost martials.

Wizards are the perfect power level.

It's more fair to say that the Vancian system combined with a low-output but fatigueless system for martials is only suited to megadungeons and wilderness travel, two settings most groups haven't seriously played since the Reagan administration.

I just assume caster spells are the same as an arrow but elemental damage, aoe spells are the same as a fighter doing a whirlwind attack but elemental, etc. similar thing for buffs, I assume martials can buff themselves and casters have weaker/more situational buffs that can be placed on anyone.

But then I also encourage a classless system where characters either choose or are randomly assigned spells and abilities from a deck of powers. I guess the idea of caster vs martial is a little silly when every characters aren't defined in those ways.

Don't play DnD, pretty much.

Rogues are not just "fighters who scale differently", they serve a totally different function in combat, as I explained above. A fighter could not do what a rogue does, and vice versa.

Characters are not their DPS. You can have two classes that are both useful in combat while one does 2d6 every round and the other never does any direct damage. Maybe you make one class that does good damage when it hits, but has horrible accuracy problems, and another class that specializes in immobilizing enemies and making them easier to hit. The two classes are useless without the other, but are still doing their own unique thing.

I hate to give any compliments to the dogshit that is MOBAs, but they typically do a good job of making each role feel like it contributes something useful to the team. Though it's easier to do because every "encounter" (enemy team) has the exact same makeup.

I'm curious, though, about what you mean by "emergency solutions". Care to elaborate?
And yes, that party makeup is nice and well balanced, and I'd love to see classic rogues, fighters, and divine casters paired with some role for arcane casters that pairs just as well.

It is, but saying that's what you should do is not the solution, it's the problem statement. It's like I'm asking "how do I get past this dragon" and your solution is "move so that you're on the other side of it".

That's exactly what I'm saying. Vancian magic works horribly, and I'm looking for an alternative that doesn't require bookkeeping about who slept for how long.

The problem isn't power level balance, it's that the supposed leash on casters doesn't actually work in most campaigns.

This.

What magic systems do you enjoy, then? I'm speaking generally, though I admit a lack of familiarity with many other systems. My experience with vancian has been shitty, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on other systems you've tried.

To follow it up, in spheres of power there are many abilities can be used at-will. There is also a resource "Spell Points" that can be spent on empowering abilities. For example, many base abilities are at-will, but require concentration for the duration. For these abilities, you can typically expend a spell point for the effect to persist without concentration for a certain amount of time. Additionally, there are many times when you would enhance an ability by spending additional spell points, for example, to affect multiple targets or to provide a sort of effect to powerful to be unlimited, such as magical healing.

If you want an alternative to vancian magic, then spheres of power is basically the best thing out there. You can find it well-documented on different wikis. I prefer wikidot for how it's organized, but it's also been put up on d20pfsrd


spheresofpower.wikidot.com
d20pfsrd.com/magic/variant-magic-rules/spheres-of-power/

>what magic do you enjoy
My favorite RPG is FFG SW but my favorite treatment of casters is Mage the Ascension. But honestly, I've played probably close to 100 different systems and only /ever/ experienced martial/caster divide in the garbage bin games related to DnD.

As this is always d&d:
Limit them to 1 school of magic.
Maybe create general school with some spells that every wizard can learn.

Like WHFRP did over decade ago.

the point i was trying to make about rogue and fighters is that they ARE both just flat DPS in slightly different formats. it doesn't make them exactly the same, but i'd definitely peg the rogue as closer to fighter than even a ranger, never mind things like paladin - and depending on edition those are considered fighter variants.
a lot of this is just how bad the 3.0 skill system is, though, combined with the fading popularity of megadungeons meaning skillmonkeys were boring AND useless (barring the DM throwing them bones) rather than just boring.

as for "emergency solutions", basically that. the magic-user fought better than the fighter did, or disarmed traps better than the thief did, or at exceptionally high levels even healed as well as the cleric did - but only a few times a day. his unique hook was essentially "has fate points".

Here's my solution for the homebrew version of magic I whipped up for Song of Swords since they won't give us that yet:

Casting magic takes time, guess what, you don't have time in a fight, so you have two options, sacrifice stamina and therefore lose CP and mobility fast for it, but still get hit with a sword if someone's close, or, roll the dice and risk burning your mind and body to a crisp to loose that vital spell to save your life.

Man I loved that show

You realize I'm not even talking about casters in relation to martials? I'm only talking about how much vancian magic systems suck. Care to explain how the system in Mage the Ascension works instead of cranking out the tired old "D&D sucks" non-argument?

Again, the choice to limit the wizard's capabilities seems to work fairly well, but preferably outside of a vancian system. So instead of being able to incinerate one person every six hours, the wizard has access to a number of spells, similar to a fighter's weapons, that exist within a single school and can be used an endless number of times. Hell, I think it would still work if you allowed the wizard to have a wide range of spells, but only pick three to have access to each day, I just can't stand having to make resting matter to keep casters balanced.

They aren't flat DPS at all though. A rogue has worse DPS than a fighter does, but has better DPS with the fighter supporting them. Two rogues or two fighters aren't as good as the combination of the two. Casters deserve that treatment as well.

I get your point about emergency casters, but in my opinion that doesn't suit most games very well. First of all, a character who is only occasionally useful but otherwise ineffective is textbook bad design, and when the limiting factor for using that absurd power is "we have to rest", it's not very interesting, and at worse, if downtime isn't punished, doesn't serve as a limit to that power at all.

DnD heroes are literally just fantasy superheroes...trying to pretend that they're "grounded".

I just skip the pretend and play Mutants and Masterminds (2e even has a supplement for DnD esque fantasy, and it's not even necessary to use in 3e). That way, everyone gets the chance of being overpowered and an actual unique concept rather than the same tired archtypes.

Hell, you wanna be a fucking dragon? Sure, just take growth, flight with wings flaw, and some Cone Area Damage. So many fun concepts that are a part of fiction that are so easy to make in MnM, and I'm sure other systems as well, cause a DM a tantrum in DnD.

Play WFRP, or at least look at its magic system. Every spell requires a skill roll, and if you fail nothing happens. On top of that, a little more often than 10% of the time bad shit happens to the wizard, which can range from spooky noises or their eyes turning red to things like daemons popping into reality and trying to kill the caster or being instantly killed.

Basically wizards in WFRP are the kind of guy that you don't want to fuck with, but using magic is intensely dangerous and they'll drop like anyone else if you pop 'em with a crossbow bolt or two.

Add in the much narrower focus that each wizard has, ie Bright Wizards have a whole mess of Fire Magic, Shadow Mages have a load of stealth spells, etc etc.

Another benefit of the warhammer system is that there are 8 schools of magic, and wizards get access to just one. If a wizard wants to throw fireballs, he will never be able to divine the future or cast illusions or transform into animals. The power level is still good, it's just that their versatility in anything other than their chosen specialty will be the same as anyone else.

>little more often than 10% of the time bad shit happens to the wizard
That is why you play celestial and start your adventuring day with divination that lets you reroll any check.
Plus better wizards can roll on 1 die without much fear as their WP will allow them to save, but you can't cast more powerful spells in that way. Luckily best spells are at around 10 CN or lower.

Also WFRP have neat optional feature that lets GM throw demons at wizard if he abuses his powers.

In general you want to either limit wizard's capabilities or give him some kind of risk-reward mechanics, without punishing player to hard or making it to random.

Honestly I hate fantasy superheroes.
It works if the game is going for an ancient myth and legend kind of thing, or if there's a clear explanation for why the characters are so much more powerful than everyone else.
I hate how almost every DnD campaign is you meet a bunch of other superhumans by sheer accident, solve a bunch of problems that it seems like a nobleman's army, or a peasent militia would've solved themselves, and for some reason after a few skirmishes you're all even superer humans, meanwhile a guy who's trained and served in the lord's army or whatever is only a fraction as powerful as your party's fighter.

I much prefer systems and campaigns where the pcs were in the right/wrong place at the right time and because of that are able to do something important.
If not that, then at the very least there should be a damned good reason for why they're so powerful. Why does this particular man of god have the power to bring people back from the fucking dead? Why is this guy the strongest dude in the land? Did this wizard really only have to read some books to break the laws of reality?
And if adventurers are superhuman and a regular fact of the world, then why aren't armies composed of 5-man adventurer squads so that all of the common folk can focus on important and relatively non-deadly shit like farming and operating siege engines?

>Honestly I hate fantasy superheroes.
Power creep is a terrible thing, how many CRPG games it ruined for me.
>I just defeated nation ending threat of epic level wizard in hell, killed countless demons, regained my soul, I am a Hero with capital H
>launch expansion
>lel random guards in some prison are threat to my party tank.
Fuck you BG ToB

While scaling of BG 1 was very good and reasonable.
Maybe dnd should not be played after level 10 if you don't want to go anime?

what game haves buff martials?

Golden Sun (JRPG series) did it best. Martials get weeaboo fightan magic skills that goes off their STR and can be used every few rounds. Magic is fixed damage ranges. For most of the game both types are competitive, but in the late game the martials become stronger than the mages, with even normal attacks beating most spells and the weeaboo fightan magic being your nuke equivalent. Mages then focus on support roles like heal/buff/debuff. Both types can summon but that's getting into fairly setting specific stuff.

what tabletop games have martials that get weeaboo fightan magic, excluding anima because i dont like it

Pretty much. Level 20 is absurdly powerful, and too complicated to make and play.
I also don't understand how a group could realistically play with eachother long enough to reach level 20 without leveling every single session.

Yeah, but what if you roll doubles while casting your spell that lets you reroll doubles? Checkmate, wizards.

>Again, the choice to limit the wizard's capabilities seems to work fairly well, but preferably outside of a vancian system. So instead of being able to incinerate one person every six hours, the wizard has access to a number of spells, similar to a fighter's weapons, that exist within a single school and can be used an endless number of times. Hell, I think it would still work if you allowed the wizard to have a wide range of spells, but only pick three to have access to each day, I just can't stand having to make resting matter to keep casters balanced.

I don't really get what you're trying to say. Are you saying you like vancian but hate resting? Are you saying you want the wizard to have a small number of at-will spells? You hate the idea of resting, but then how does it matter if there's still a huge number of selections but only chosen in advance once each day? What do you want from your magic system? Parity with non-magic users? If that's it, then you not only need to extensively constrain a caster's options, but also greatly increase the non-caster's versatility. They're so far apart that to begin to fix the problem, you have to work from both ways, I.E use spheres of power for magical classes and path of war for non-magical ones.

First off, DnD sucks. It is pure, flaming garbage. That's a fact, live with it or don't Drone.

Second, to answer how magic works in Ascension, well, I think it might shatter your feeble DnD NARPer brain. But basically, there are no spell lists and no fixed magical abilities. The players declare what they would like to do and the GM checks to see if they can try.

Joke on you my trusty familiar have a voice of reason ability just for occasion like this.

Also you can cast first portent of Amul on 1 dice, and having high WP and Luck Point at start of the day means that in event of auto-fail you will still make a WP test.

Also magic circle if they were not so prohibitively expensive.

my point with rogues/fighters is that they're the same mechanical archetype. if you had elemental wizards and esper wizards, and they were expected to both be in party so they could combo for a freeze into pk punch for bonus shatter damage, they'd still both be casters fluffwise and burst/resource-gated dps mechanically, right? the fighter and rogue are both martials fluffwise and sustained/action economy-gated dps mechanically.
thief was a skillmonkey first and a different archetype, even when backstabs were bolted on, but skillmonkey-first suuuuucks to play mechanically because you're literally just a walking set of percentile dice made mandatory or useless depending on dm whim.

What I hate is resting, because it's meant to stop casters from abusing their spells, but most games don't actually track it and it ends up being a hassle more than anything else. What I'm proposing is that a wizard having a small number of at-will spells solves the issue of the wizard being best at everything, because it brings the wizard's options down to something more similar to the fighter's. The wizard and the fighter may both have a go-to offensive option (Fireball for wizard, Greataxe for fighter, for example), and other options for special situations. The point being that having a few simple spells on par with another class's features balances the caster in a way more palatable than having to worry about resting. It's not a complete solution without determining what those spells are, but it feels like a better constraint than resting.

I had additional thoughts there that I wouldn't mind the wizard being allowed to swap out their options during a rest, such as replacing single-target fireball for multi-target arc lightning, in the same way that I don't mind if a fighter swaps weapons or armor.

Mostly I want casters to feel as though they have a specific role in EACH combat, and not that they're the nuke the party holds off to the side until a problem gets to big, OR the living god that disposes of all problems so long as the party doesn't mind pretending to nap after every encounter.

So yeah, my main complaint with Vancian is probably just that resting is a joke of a kryptonite as it isn't kept track of in many games, and doesn't really keep combat balanced encounter-to-encounter.


Edgy. I'm not going to defend D&D, I just mean that it's an irrelevant complaint that's been discussed to death already. What you're talking about is obviously too freeform to really have much to do with what we're talking about. On-the-fly game balance isn't really relevant here. Get back to me once you've played a game of Big Mutherfuckin' Crab Truckers

You do realize that he's talking about how to reign casters in, not how to make them even more broken?

Generally most systems that step away from the 'classic' HP mechanic. Bonus points if they have explicit mechanics for presumed competency, a 'minimum' ability level in their niche that you can't really take away from them.
Mutants & Masterminds, True20, the Cortex Plus systems, Fantasy Craft, even Fate so long as the combat dude knows how he wants to describe his actions outside of "I Attack action with the Fight skill".
Wushu and Feng Shui/Feng Shui 2 are both very good at having bombastic fight scenes and interesting characters who are good at fighting.

In Rule of Cool's technically unfinished Legend--which is rad and I recommend it unconditionally--everything is mostly based on d20 System stuff, but they took a firm hand to excise inflexibility and stratification that normally happens, and in doing so killed a lot of imbalance and frustration.

>Bonus points if they have explicit mechanics for presumed competency
Derp; by "they" here I mean "player characters".

What I'm trying to say is that having some party members be resource-gated and some be action-gated, especially when the resource in a Vancian system is something the DM doesn't really bother tracking. I'd rather all my party members be action-gated. 4e tried out all members being resource-gated, which was interesting, and honestly preferable to the mismatch of 3.5, but I don't find "we're out of dailies let's stop for the night" to be terribly compelling, because again, there aren't often any consequences to resting.

That's why a caster class that has at-will spells, but a smaller variety appeals to me, because it meshes better with the other players.

Resource-gated characters make sense in megadungeon campaigns where you're keeping track of how many lockpicks the rogue still has and how many arrows the archer has used, but I don't think very many campaigns are built that way anymore. My main point is the supposed consequences of resource-gated characters don't actually end up mattering.

yep, i definitely agree with you on that. the only resource-gating i think has a place in how campaigns tend to be run nowadays is consumables vs. permanent loot.

so i guess if i was homebrewing something general-purpose for typical players, i'd try to adapt the ffxi mechanic i mentioned, which is essentially a magical backstab. tying it to charged powers from the martials also has the advantage of forcing encounters to go a few rounds.

only fantasy craft is fantasy of those ones

In that case, make your casters like Clerics.

>Clerics meditate or pray for their spells. Each cleric must choose a time at which she must spend 1 hour each day in quiet contemplation or supplication to regain her daily allotment of spells. Time spent resting has no effect on whether a cleric can prepare spells.

Additionally, you may choose either to use or discard the Recent Casting Limit rules, which applies to all casters by default, which basically says that all the spell slots you've used in the 8 hours before preparing spells are still expended.

What part of that doesn't sound resource-gated to you? The whole point of changing the system is to avoid situations where the fighter and rogue are ready to go but the casters need to nap because they already spent their load.

Legend is explicitly D&D-style fantasy; there's an explicit Eastern fantasy component to Feng Shui; and Wushu, Fate, Cortex Plus, M&M, and True20 are all generic systems that are effortless to run as contemporary Western fantasy.

Oh, well then. Vancian casting is resource gated by definitions. Changing that in any meaningful way would make it into something else, like the aforementioned spheres of power. There will be no satisfying way to 'fix' vancian casting because it's core design is designed for a different sort of game than what you want to play, and it's many flaws are in fact the system working as intended.

As an addendum to if you want a system that is similar to vancian but which is action-gated as opposed to resource gated, then you could model it on martial initiating. Take a number of readied spells: Fireball, haste, Stinking Cloud etc.

When entering an encounter, the wizard can cast all of their readied spells once, before having to spend some sort of action to recover cast spells and make them usable again. There's still downsides to this, since you will have to heavily restrict spell choice or else you will have the current disparity, only worse because the wizard can and will dominate every encounter forever. Additionally, there are still the problems with out of combat utility. A wizard is basically capable of filling every role in a party, all at once, and sometimes is better at some roles than entire classes dedicated to that role. This entirely comes down to the spells a wizard has available and the low opportunity cost to spells in general. For this sort of encounter based vance/lite system to work, you'd have to rewrite large parts of the spell list.

Why bother? Martial fags are bitches who insist that claymores and zweihanders should be completely different weapons with different stats. And that's not hyperbole, that's an actual session ending argument one of my players started. They want realistic swordsman with no supernatural abilities to be as strong as wizards who shit fire and buff themselves into the stratosphere. These people should just find other games that let them whack off to a billion different types of pointy stick. Magic isn't an exclusive club, everyone has access to it, even martials. Get on the magic train or stop complaining.

I like how DCC does magic. It's the old school logic of "Magic is powerful, but also scary as fuck to use" There's no spell slots, no magic points, you can use a spell as many times as you want.

HOWEVER, everytime you use want to cast your favorite spell you gotta roll and see if you can pull it off. When you fail it might fizzle as a dud at worse, a lot of times you'll burn out so much you "lose" the spell and can't cast it until you sleep it off, and if you REALLY bone it up you might end up blowing yourself up or your party, depending on how close they are to you.

WHFP does this to a lesser degree, but I think DCC really makes being a magic user an exciting and white knuckled experience. It's a gamble.

Also the idea of having to steal spellbooks from other wizards in order to get new spells makes a hilarious dynamic when two wizards meet in the middle of a dungeon

>that's an actual session ending argument one of my players started.

You sound like a terrible GM.

You sound like a tremendous fag.

Guilty as charged.

How about fixing the martials instead?
I've been toying with a fix for my home brew for a while now.
Now this only works for a non level exp baced game but I let players spend some of there exp on there wepon, or wepon class but that costs a lot more.
First they can take mastery levels with the wepon untrained/bace, amature, component, capable, exceptional, master
Each level provides a basic atack percentage bonus, 5-10% and have increasing costs.
Now at each of these levels you can also buy "perks" for the wepon itself baced on its traits, and it's class so, say you have a pollarm with the reach and hook traits, and you're at mastery level capable with it, you can get wepon perks up to capable level in the polarm set and hook set.
The perks cover basic stat increases like damage and attack ratings, but also special combat menouvers, unique attacks, and gaining additional wepon traits.

I also fix critical fails with this system

Yes that's another good point. Any effort spent wrangling the wizards power will fall short for as long as classes like the rogue are still around. Rogues and Fighters are infamously inflexible in their abilities. In the best cases they can do one thing decently, but most of the time they'll end up falling flat on their faces when they try to do anything outside of their focus. This is one of the reasons I like combining Path of War with Spheres of Power. It comes at the problem from both sides and manages to narrow the disparity by a large degree.

There are already so many posts in this thread, and more about actual content and ideas for balance then just bitching and le pointy stick man maymay.

Is Veeky Forums finally coming to a consensus and getting over the caster v martial bullshit? Is it finally time?

Veeky Forums will never get over it as long as D+D reigns supreme, since it's a problem inherent to that system.

This thread has gone much better than others of the same subject.
REJOICE MY FAMILY; WE ARE AWAKENED

Or 5e Warlock where you have a small pool of quickly recharging spells cast at the highest level they can be cast at.

Or Mythras Miracles where you reserve a small pool of spells at a source of power at the level you want them cast. In fact, it’s even more Vancian than D&D.

Actually, Mythras Sorcery also works as a better magic system with metamagic that could be Vancian Adjactent where you cast a spell that is like a cantrip and then load up effects to increase the power of the magic. Makes for much more compelling blasting at least. And Animism is infonately more interesting than just summoning stat blocks.

The main problem is having casters that can do ANYTHING. Put school limitations to use. Make acquiring or researching spells harder or at least have a chance of failure. If learning magic is such an obsession and takes so much time, they should barely ha e any skills outside of that.

Exalted is one of them.

Fantasycraft PC's... I dunno if they count as Weeaboo fightan magic but martials remain very good throughout the entire game.

Tianixa from Fate Core is all about weeaboo fighting.

Weapons of the Gods/Wulin is wuxia fighting.

>They want realistic swordsman with no supernatural abilities to be as strong as wizards who shit fire and buff themselves into the stratosphere

Yes I do want my fighters like that! I don't want this weeaboo garbage or other crap forced down my throat! I feel like a Fighter should be the type of person who doesn't rely on magical tricks or secret techniques from the scroll/school of Wa Wa Jing Jong. I feel like Fighters should be the people that just out there and fight really well with a sword. That's it, that's all I want from my Fighters.

As muh party's resident fighter....please? I'm playing a fighter/barbarian/ect to do awesome physical stuff because stronk. I'd love it if I could hulk jump 30ft in the air or bench press a good damn house. You have an fart who can shoot fire out of his dick, don't tell me I can't do superhuman stuff because it's not realistic.