Is it possible to make magic users balanced?

"You truly are the wisest wizard cat"

I'm not too big of a fan of it, at least not as much as I used to, but World of Dungeons, a 2-page de-make of Dungeon World handles casters wonderfully: it works super simple, being a caster simply lets you summon and command a spirit that does the actual magic within one of the two domains each spirit gets. But the spirits are fickle, need specific wording of commands, COULD have their own wants and needs, and in fact could be their own NPCs. Kicker is, caster specific traits make it easier and can guarantee a degree of success, but technically speaking, anyone could attempt that, too. Oh, and summonning a spirit requires either a 1-hour long ritual, or having an enchanted item, or that you ingest actual fucking poison if you're in a hurry, so there. There's also a passing mention of rituals. Rituals are always cool.

Link to pdf because it's kinda big:
questingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/world_of_dungeons_1979_bw.pdf

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

You are truly the wisest, wizard cat.

fantasist.net/downloads/DQ3TSRFullRules.pdf

Here you go. Magic often has utility, but all the best spells are ones that take hours to cast, meaning that in combat, it's essentially useless. Spells are slow to cast (minimum of two pulses/rounds), don't always work, and are often just not that powerful if you're talking about the quicker ones.

The system tends to go for a situation where you need mages to see things magically hidden and crack certain long term magical protections, but they're fragile little shits who need to be protected by people who swing swords, and will continue needing that no matter how powerful they get.

GURPS (there are tons of magic systems owing to its modular nature, but I'll just be discussing the default system). First, the system gives martials options too, so it's not "casters can do whatever, fighters can just full attack." Second, spells require serious investment, making having every spell option under the sun impractical. Third, due to how the system works, there are a number of tiny factors that add up to better balance in general like lack of HP bloat keeping fighters' damage relevant, spells taking multiple turns to cast, sparse casting resources, and spells having a chance to fail.

I say fuck balancing magic. Magic should be retardedly broken, it's fucking magic.

Fuck it, in fact I'll just paste the bit of text from the pfd:

magic
Most magic requires summoning a spirit, demon, or elemental to perform supernatural effects. A wizard begins play with the occult knowledge to summon two spirits. A spirit has a name, an appearance, and two domains of power (flame, shadow, stone, lightning, secrets, fear, etc.). To summon a spirit you know, you require one of the following:
•1 hour of uninterrupted ritual.
•a dose of quicksilver —a mild poison and addictive drug. (10s per use).
•a magic item containing a bound spirit.
If you drink more quicksilver doses in a day than your Level you must attempt to resist its negative effects with a con roll.
A wizard may command a spirit to perform a single magical effect that falls within its domains (it’s a good idea to give specific commands; spirits and demons can be capricious and cruel). Magical attacks do 2d6+level or 3d6+level damage if they are especially suited to the situation (using fire against a frost wraith, for example).

WIZARDS get lore. you begin with two spirits you can summon (see magic, opposite). you get Summon and choose one other special ability: Cantrips (you know three simple magical powers: Candle, Shadow, Throw Voice), Command (you can attempt to command any spirit, demon, etc.), ritual (you may perform occult rituals—detailed in ancient tomes and scrolls—and begin with two known rituals)

It's actually not that hard. You just have to get rid of the idea that martials have to stay in the realm of "humanly possible" in a world full of wizards and monsters.
Whether you achieve that through making your martials like heroes of greek myth, supernatural martial arts, ki abilities or whatever is irrelevant, but as long as you limit martials to real world feats they'll always lag behind casters because the real world has no spells.

On the magical side you can make spells take longer to cast. Especially the more powerful ones.
Nobody cares if the mage can throw a flaming arrow every round, but if he can kill an entire army in the time it takes the warrior to swing his sword you obviously have a problem.

Personally i like the way Anima:
Beyond Fantasy did it.
Martials are powerful, have options and still play distinctly different than casters.

The problem with that is that it's no fun to play for the magical. If you have to spend most of your time as a commoner with a crossbow there's no point playing the wizard.

Also making abilities limited or annoying to use isn't balance. It just kills fun.

You are truly the wisest wizard cat

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

You are truly the wisest wizard cat

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

But also 4e did it perfectly.

Insert screeching about 4e being a trash system for plebs here. I can't be bothered today

Ive always thought that specialisation would be a neat way to go about balancing magic users. Rather than wizards having access to every possible type of magic, limit them to a fairly narrow domain. That way they will still need to rely on improvisation and teamwork for everything but their obvious strength.

WFRP does it well.

Magic is either really gimmicky or absolutely devastating, but every time you use it you have a chance of fucking up spectacularly endangering both you and everyone around you... and the best thing is that the stronger the magic you're using, the higher the chances of everything blowing up.

>Magical power comes at a cost

>as a wizard gains power, he sacrifices his health or his sanity

>at level 1, choose either str/dex/con or int/wis/cha

>every time the wizard gains a level, he loses a point from one of his sacrificial stats, growing physically frail or mentally broken as the magic current erodes canyons throughout his physical form

Play a game that has been created taking into account how spellcasters are different instead of trying to make others just as good. Like Ars Magicka or Mage: The Awakening.

Problem is that magic is always the most versatile option, even if you are a wizard who can only control fire, or create illusions, or talk to spirits or any other limited brand of magic, you can still do more than the muscle man who lifts mountains, simply because your skills can apply to so many things.

That's the worst possible way to do it. It has all the drawbacks of safe OP magic compounded with everyone getting raped by hell dicks if a spell fails.

And all magic users should be NPCs.

4e D&D had pretty good balance between martials and casters, but it fucking sucked otherwise so who cares.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

This AF.
You don't balance it, you either make it inaccessible to the player, or infuse it in everything, but there should be no dichotomy.

Sure, make internal an external magic (ki vs aether for example), or any other distinction you may, but if you are doing something extraordinary, have it be limited and managed by a system.

You can have different traditions, and classes and skills and what have you, but if we are going to try to balance a bazooka with a broomstick, we are wrong.

Want strong martials? Look towards things like exalted, or any of those other systems that you can burn energy to do cuhrayzee stuff.
Now condense that, make the rules even tighter, and make it easier to organize and access.

balance THAT with spell casting.
Don't bring spell casting down, push up techniques.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat!

4e is a trash system. AEDU is garbage. I want to play a ROLEplaying game, not a ROLLplaying combat sim.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

Exalted is a shitty system. Half the stunts in that game could be condensed into "spend Essence and get a bonus," but they layered them into "spend Essence, reroll 1s, now get a bonus success on a 10, now you have 8-again." Just garbage.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

>I didn't play it but I've heard

Easily. Just make sure there are things that can NOT be easily done with magic. Social situations? Well, casting spells is pretty obvious and everyone will be very suspicious if you try it without a good reason. Combat? Make all spells take a while to cast, or just make it so you can't directly harm people with magic without having a piece of finger nail or hair or something from them. And so on.

In my homebrew system, set in the brilliant sci-fi setting of Anarchy Online, wizards are nano technicians or programmers which script nanobots to do stuff for them rapidly. Since preprogrammed nanoprograms exist in the form of nano crystals, their only advantage over others is that they can make their own "spells" by putting together logical fragments. It makes them good at adapting to shit, and it's fun for the players, but their damage and effects always cap out at the same level as anyone else.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

"You truly are the wisest wizard cat"

play GURPs

You truly are the wisest wizard cat.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

We had balance, it was called 4e and it was perfect and then a bunch of weenies whined a lot

Make it so that you have to pay experience for spells, and the spells themselves are nothing world shattering like Gate or Time Stop. Savage Worlds and Shadow of the Demon Lord are pretty good in that regard.

Or just take the RIFTS approach and give martials something cool, like a giant robot.

Everyone's a magic user, powerful magic is hard to pull off, and magic causes more problems than it solves as a rule.

Boom, done.

Play Unknown Armies. Magic turns you into an OCD riddled schizophrenic who has to play out his "role" or lose his powers.

Have you tried not playing D&D

Exalted makes Sorcery slow and expensive, causing it to be more of a last resort than first answer to most problems and generally unsuited for close combat.

Of the games that I've played, D&D and PF are the only ones I've seen mess up caster balance so bad. Most games do at least a passable job of it. For starters, don't arbitrarily decide that casters get orders of magnitude more abilities than other character types.

Really just make more niche spellcasters instead of generic ones with broad powers. Having an illusionist or pyromancer is fine, but allowing a wizard to have a billion possible spells gives too many options.

Yes.
A) Remove noncasters (MtA, Ars Magica)
B) Give high level noncasters some almost reality-bending abilities not achievable via magic. (Savage Worlds, L5R)
C) Nerf magic to be expensive and/or limited enough to go on par with non-magical abilities of the same cost (7th sea, GURPS)

Most hell dicks are directed at caster. And magic isn't even close to DnD-level.

Most systems handle it fine. Including D&D, for that matter: you can run a game with whichever classes you choose, and there are casters in every tier, including the low tiers. Pick a tier or two, everybody plays within the tier, done.

Magic does as much and as little as the game designer wants. There isn't a ceiling or a floor.

>Implying the two are mutually exclusive
Getaloadofthisfag.png

5e falls apart in later tier play partially because caster start getting access to reality bending spells while most martials are left doing feats a strong man could do in real life. This is due to WotC doing surveys and finding most games didn't go past 10-12 so they didn't bother trying to make it balanced or work very hard on cap stone abilities. Oh and also grogs being grogs and throwing a fit about martials getting more than previous editions in the testing to try and bridge the gap a bit.

That's pretty good. You'd still need to severely limit what these spirits can do in such areas as mind control, shapeshifting and opponent-disablement magic, otherwise you're just making magic more fickle and not less powerful, but the time limitations are certainly hamstringing.

>the real world has no spells
Is that what you think?

That's not balance, that's clones clones clones everywhere.

Easy: everybody has magic. You can't be a Fighter, you have to be a Weeaboo Fightan Magic user. You can call it something else if you like, but it's still magic.

Anyone can pray for miracles. Dogs, heathens, trees, stones, anyone. Miracles have a small 1% chance of occurring or not occurring (not alterable by any factors whatsoever.) Miracles can do anything except:

1. Miracles are temporary (a year at most.)
2. Miracles don't change the status quo. They can save you from catastrophe but can't kill or change minds.

You are truly the wisest wizard cat

We call this the Runequest approach.

Play B/X. Magic-users start with exactly one spell. They can only know as many spells at each level as they can cast per day. Their spell lists are small, and the DM has the option of assigning what spells are learned (rolling randomly is pretty common, but not specifically endorsed by the rules, as far as I know). Given that attributes are generated by rolling 3d6, there are no fancy feats to buff hit points, they flat-out can't wear armor, and they have d4 hit dice, magic-users are extremely squishy. If they manage to survive to high level (which isn't easy), a magic-user does become increasingly more formidable, but enemies are more and more likely to make their saving throws, and he deserves to be powerful for all the shit he went through to get there.

If wizards have to learn spells from scrolls in D&D, why is a martial's power considered "Mother-May-I" from the DM if he has to get good magic items to round out his potential, while a wizard is entitled to get any possible broken combo of spells they want and it's never an issue?

>This again
For one, no. Someone went through and counted each charm, there are more charms that introduce new things then simply give you a bonus on a regular thing
And more importantly, that's how charms are supposed to work. They're supposed to actually interact with the system and enhance your abilities in regular ways. The whole reason 2e was so garbage is because they just gave you charms that instantly let you solve problems, like one investigation charm that let you see through basically every lie, one medicine charm that let you cure any disease, two socialize charms that let you rewrite how a society thinks with a few minutes of conversation with anyone. Stealth had four whole charms total because they couldn't think of what to do after they already wrote the charms that make everyone ignore you.

Sure. Anything magic can or cannot do, and any mode of using it, is arbitrary depending on the setting. I could write a game where magic is weak, pathetic, and utterly pointless as an option, and I could write a game where even the most trivial magic user outshines everything else.
Of course getting it 100% balanced is as hard as balancing anything else, making every single last option and choice precisely equal with every other option has yet to be done to my knowledge.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

You are truly the wisest wizard cat

Also, yes. It's really not hard

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

Then don't play literally any iteration of DnD.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

To answer your question though. has it right, the only real exception would be to have magic not have little to no influence in direct combat but multiple usages of utility that can more or less dictate the course of the game. Such as curses or geasa.

Another way is to make magical spells cost the same as an equivalent magical effect from a magic item.
If healing potions cost 100GP then casting heal costs 100GP. Fireball spells use up wand charges (that cost GP to recharge). If you want the system to be completely balanced you add upkeep costs to weapons and armor (both mundane and magical).
Economics is how shit is balanced in real life.

You truly are the wizest wizard cat

You truly are the wisest wizerd cat

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

>What are some systems that handle caster balancing well?
Anima beyond fantasy does it perfectly. Both "fighters should be gritty mc sword n board or sneaky dickheads only" and "I want my warrior to do crazy shit like hercules or beowulf" types are happy and have lots of options, mages are strong but have many clear weaknesses that don't simply act as "you don't get to have fun anymore" roadblocks and people who don't want to keep track of shit but want powers can just play a psychic, and the system is point buy so you aren't pidgeonholed into a single role if you don't want to be (while still rewarding people who specialize). It's basically flawless

The "tier list" as it is is extremely varried and balanced as a result

>Anima
Mah boy.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

You truly are the wisest wizard cat.

You are truly the wisest wizard cat.

Shadows of the Demon Lord had a pretty good approach - there are lots of schools of magic, but it's only really practical to learn from two. Since learning a new school of magic meant that you only got one level 0 spell in it, and you couldn't just find a spell scroll to teach you spells in it, you were limited by your choices in a fairly meaningful way. Also, higher-level spells were potent but you only have a small number of them.Level 0s had more uses than higher level spells but you could only cast them a limited number of times.

I don't know about specific systems, but I do know that the best way to balance magic-users of all stripes is to simply limit their options.

So, you can conjure fire. Fire-sprays, fireballs, fire-waves, you name it. Can you teleport? Fuck no, you didn't put points into teleportation. Can you levitate objects? Fuck no, you didn't put points into levitation. Can you summon Outsiders to fight on your behalf? Fuck no, you didn't put points into summoning. You can only conjure fire. If you put more points into fire magic, you can conjure more fire, more often, more effectively, but you're never going to gain the ability to do anything other that conjure fire. Or, you could spread your points out into multiple different schools of magic, and get a variety of spells. But then the most powerful spells in all the schools will be off-limits to you.

So what's it going to be: weak but versatile, or strong but specialised?

You truly are the wisest wizard cat.

Instead of giving a caster resources in which he spends to cast spells, give everyone resources for everything and make spells cost more resources than anything else. Also, don't make casters an archetype, give everyone the ability to cast magic.

Make your Wizards/caster the support class. Literally fixes every problem. They heal, cure debuffs, get advanced warnings/divination of danger, and have powers specific to the campaign to help them support the party. Everyone gets to play their part and your game is greatly enriched as a whole.

Low Fantasy Gaming does have a system in place for this. The games tagline is low magic, high adventure. It involves rolling on tables of increasing peril and consequence in relation to the kinds of magic you used. The stronger the magic, the worse the effects potentially are. From fatigue to masses of tentacles operated by otherworldly minds..

From Low Fantasy Gaming.
..-magic is rare and mysterious. Spell casters are extremely uncommon, most villages don't have one at all, and even the largest of cities conceal but a few. A commoner might go their whole lives without ever witnessing magic directly, but all folk have heard tales of sorcery, and most accept that mystic forces exist in one form or another.

you truly are the wisest wizard cat

You truly are the wisest wizard cat.

you truly are the wisest wizard cat

>joo.. drooly r thaa wyzee wizr cat!

>I'm not talking strictly about D&D.
True. 89% of the time, allowing for 10% variation, is not 100%.

Give the non magic users guns

Guns really are just magic for the thaumatically challenged if you think about it.

If magic users were balanced they wouldn't have the mindset to work with magic. Obviously being a magic user requires being at least a little unhinged.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat

If you're going for high level play, Mutants and Masterminds works wonders. Dr. Strange, Hulk, Thor and Iron Man on the same team. No problems. It can handle Gandalf, Merlin, Achilles and Hercules just as well.

You truly are the wisest wizard cat