How do you, the person reading this, personally like to balance casters and martials in your games? What specific mechanics and character abilities do you use?
Reminder that if your post is;
>edition-war shitposting
>an opinion about not wanting to/not needing to
>le just don't play dungeons and dragons xd
Then you SHOULD NOT post in this thread and your post is off-topic. Thank you.
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If they're presented as equally valid options by the system, they should be equally valid options within the system. How you implement that varies a lot depending on the setting, tone and style, but if you're going to say both are options then they should have equal worth.
However, if you want to make a system absolutely dedicated to casters, or absolutely dedicated to martials, that's fine too. Just be honest about what your system is built for and don't give people a false impression of how things work.
I play with groups that don't actively attempt to shit on the game. It's a two way street, the GM needs to throw a bone to martials just as much as the casters need to not be planet-cracking turbo-assholes.
Push non-casters to Hero level until I've come to a more mechanically minded solution. People will deal with a degree of shonen bleach-tier bullshit for an edition
Caster supremacy has always seemed to be kind of a hypothetical thing that always happens in a vaccume, in my experience.
It seems to be only an issue when you're like level 14+ and are playing with the sort of people that 'optimise' their 'builds', and with GMs that exclusively use 'balanced' XP bought monster encounters in empty, blank rooms.
I've played in multiple 3.PF games, including my very first one, where caster players dominated the game entirely by accident. My very first game experience was miserable for basically all of us. The wizard player kept accidentally screwing things up just by using their fun toys, and ended up feeling like they couldn't actually use their character without causing problems, my fighter felt utterly ineffectual and our poor first time GM was miserable from constantly having to figure out how to make the system do what it claimed it was able to. Caster supremacy is absolutely not just a theoretical problem.
>How do you, the person reading this, personally like to balance casters and martials in your games? What specific mechanics and character abilities do you use?
Personally, I just make everyone a gestalt who is capable of using might & magic equally because in a world where dragons, magic, and the like exists, there's no reason why someone wouldn't have access to both in some level of capacity.
In every 3.PF game I've ever played in, the guy who had access to spells always dominated play once they realized what the fuck they were doing and sometimes when they didn't.
enforce spell failure rolls, make them priority targets, and if they are feeling really uppity i teach them about anti-magic fields but make sure they understand that they are walking into an area where something feels wrong or have an enemy that emits an anti-magic ray or something.
I let my martial players be the crafters.
If ever you think casters can get supremacy, you've never seen a martial character in a sci-fi turn themselves into Iron Man, holy shit.
Everyone's a wizard.
Wow, all bullshit that never works, good job.
High risk to casters or impose restrictions on them. Ex. magic uses up life force or requires organic components as catalyst. Furthermore using other sentiments causes deep psychological damage that caused personality resonance with the sacrifice, causing the caster to view memories or similar. In some cases intense personalities overtake the caster or physics morphing occurs due to corruption via sacrifice. Magic is powerful but you’re a fool for thinking you can control it.
By playing literally anything other than D&D 3.0/5/PF you quadruple faggot. You don't have to do the same, but it's what I do.
>What is 2 + 2? But don't say 4 or anything equal to 4 I want a real answer!
Easy: There shouldn’t be a balance between them. They should have different strengths and weaknesses in different situations. A setting where every wizard is better than every martial just falls into Dragon-Ball style powerlevel shit.
>There shouldn’t be a balance between them. They should have different strengths and weaknesses in different situations.
But having different strengths and weaknesses in different situations is central to the idea of balance? The whole point is to make sure those different strengths and weaknesses present interesting choices, rather than one just being clearly superior and rendering the other one obsolete.
By playing games where casters and martials are either already balanced or not a dichotomy in the first place.
Destroying the Spellbook does wonders. Usually can get a mage in early levels trying to break things in line.
Not a measure taken most of the time however.
Later on, I've made a few Quintessence-empowered enemies from a 3.5 book on godhood to deal with mages who think they are all of a sudden masters of the universe.
>an opinion about not wanting/not needing to
>le just don't play dungeons and dragons xd
Learn
To
Fucking
Read
Go fuck yourself
I like to do it the way 4e does where magic does very specific things and martials do some very supernatural things but neither is greater than the other.
Pardon me, I spoke poorly. In my idealized TTRPG that doesn’t exist, there are different specializations of caster and different spexializations of martial and they all interact in different ways that allow problems to be solved in different, interesting ways, rather than just “martials are fronline and casters are support,” or “casters are everything and martials are deadweight.”
To put it shortly: The difference between them, the thing that balances them, shouldn't be how they kill a thing, or how many spells they can cast, but the set of tools available to them.
>don't play with shitters
>material components, disallow things that replace the need for them
>"Geek the mage first!" should be a line that all enemies know
>don't play past level 10
>make new spells a fucking chore to get, a wizard ain't gonna sell spells for 50 gold when he's got a fucking monopoly on the shit and can make them dance around all day doing menial shit just to get a level 1 spell
>make enemies LEARN how to deal with their cheese tactics, give the player a reputation for how they cheese shit
>talk to the player and tell them to stop being a shitter
>kick them if this doesn't work
>don't play with shitters
This is literally the only thing you've said that will actually work without turning the game into a boring fucking slog for everyone involved.
Seriously, anyone reading this post, stop reading once you read this line.
I'm sorry that you have ADHD and can't focus on something for more than 10 minutes, user.
Ban OP spells
People keep coming up with these bizarre ideas for how to balance martials and casters without actually reducing the power of casters like . But really that's what you need to do.
I've found that the best place to start is to disallow all summoning spells
I'm sorry that you'd rather make things harder on yourself and others when there's already an easy solution available that's the most effective by default.
My problem with the inbalance, is that for a martial to say, open a locked door, they either need some kind of unlock skill, proficiency or set of tools or something, or they need enough strength to burst through it. A caster only needs a spell slot, which recharges.
Similarly, a difficult enemy can be rendered null by, again, a single spell slot that recharges.
(In most systems) a martial has to roll in order to achieve success. They get to add a mod to that roll, but a failure is still a failure. In combat is only where a caster can fail, but even then, (at least in 5e) they'll probably be using their rechargeable spell slot to cast something that requires a save, and any smart player will use something that the enemy doesn't have a great save for.
I would love to see them balanced by either, some out of combat spells costing more than just one spell slot and/or borrowing X World system, where there is a roll required in order to cast a spell (but this would probably require a more lax spell resource system)
What's so funny about these morons is how they think that nerfing casters automatically make martials stronger.
No retards, it just means that it's the difference between comparing 2:1 as opposed to 4:1
Casters are only supreme when they have spell slots, and even then those spell slots are pretty specialized day-to-day. Martials can keep on chugging until the end of the world (for the most part).
Just use enough threats so that casters are forced to treat their spells as a special resource to be used carefully. Also, on't make enemies dumb and blind. They SHOULD target the mage first, and they SHOULD play around spells too.
>le just don't play dungeons and dragons xd
Where'd you get that from?
I don't understand why casters can cast every spell in the book. There should be very narrow specializations of magic. A caster specializing in offensive shit isn't going to be able to cast disguise self (or whatever other configuration)
But if you have to warp the entire game around countering casters, isn't that just evidence that casters are OP?
>Martials can keep on chugging until the end of the world
Or until they run out of HP, whatever comes first.
>I don't understand why casters can cast every spell in the book.
Because Wizards are designed to be the "problem: there's a spell for that" class.
>Martials can keep on chugging until the end of the world
HP, fatigue, bad touch enemies, most martials are not more effective than a Cleric or Druid who's out of spells, and then you've got martials like Paladin and Barbarian that have limited use abilities and possibly spells themselves that get fucked if they can't rest. This is a bad assumption.
Step 1: Don't have global XP values. Spellcasters should level much slower than everyone else.
Step 2: Force specialization for casters / Have opposition schools. (IE Evokers cannot use enchantment/charm and conjuring/summoning spells, ETC)
Step 3: Limit access to new spells. Wizards, good or evil, are not going to simply sell (powerful) spells to people they don't know.
Step 4: When you get to higher levels, people are probably going to know how to counter spellcasters if not have their own equally powerful ones.
I agree with the material components part, but not "lol you ran out of flowers, go pick them" just have them have to restock on them in town, like an archer has to buy arrows.
I really like the idea of casters leveling differently.
Especially for wizards, who's "power" comes from countless hours studying their tomes.
>Step 1: Don't have global XP values. Spellcasters should level much slower than everyone else.
>Step 2: There is no step 2
FTFY
Every other step was trash.
Why's that?
Having not played in a long time, but followed the development of the hobby since the beginning, I have often wondered why the rules on material components for spells was not expanded or enforced (though IIRC things like metamagic came about even back in 2nd ed days (Dragon mag) that got around that if allowed).
Probably because people are so fucking lazy that they can't change their 18 eyes of newt to 17 eyes of newt every time they cast that spell
Basically the faggots that caused the overgeneralized """""Streamlined""""" mess that is 5e
Have more encounters and no fucking five minute adventuring day. Of fucking course the wizard is op when he uses all his bad ass spells and then everybody takes a nap so he can get them back. Hard core resource management is pretty good at balancing them.
He's a fag who doesn't think it's bad to have a level 20 Fighter and level 20 Wizard being wildly different levels of power.
Martials are like this
youtube.com
>Step 2: Force specialization for casters / Have opposition schools. (IE Evokers cannot use enchantment/charm and conjuring/summoning spells, ETC)
Shit because schools like transmutation and conjuration already carry some of the most versatile arrangement of spells while schools like Evocation are limited to one niche.
>Step 3: Limit access to new spells. Wizards, good or evil, are not going to simply sell (powerful) spells to people they don't know.
Wizards already get access to spells each time they level up and the spells that they're allowed to choose are already strong enough to offset whatever artificial limitation you impose.
>Step 4: When you get to higher levels, people are probably going to know how to counter spellcasters if not have their own equally powerful ones.
Pretty much an admission at how casters warp the narrative around themselves, which will also make the martials feel like shit once they realize how small their role actually is outside of combat.
Because material components were largely inconsequential busywork that only served to force more of the focus onto casters while martials were dragged along for the ride.
So people skip it because nobody wants to follow the adventures of the Wizard as he skulks around caves for bat shit and random patches of ground for dragonfly wings.
>Have more encounters and no fucking five minute adventuring day.
This kills the martial. No, seriously, the martials will run out of HP long before the casters run out of spell slots to use.
Step 2 is fair enough
Revision to step 3: Wizards do not get spells by leveling up.
Step 4 is fair enough too, I don't bother with level 10 and later since the game gets retarded around there
I would have no issues with the proposed fixes if they actually fixed something.
which is.....
>Revision to step 3: Wizards do not get spells by leveling up.
People will straight up riot if you start removing or altering class features user, especially for something as well known as a Wizard. You're better off banning the class entirely.
>le just don't play dungeons and dragons xd
Worth pointing out, even if you are committed to your favorite D&D implementation, there's nothing to say you can't steal ideas from other systems and import them.
As a DM, it can be a big help to try to keep your mind open by reading other systems' ideas for running games, even if you have no intention of actually running those systems. This is especially true for rules that are very different from what you're used to. Examples:
- Ars Magica
- Sorceror (esp the wonderful Dictionary of Mu setting)
- Dresden Files
- Warhammer FRP (2nd ed)
- Nobis
You can totally change how spellcasters function without changing their effects just by messing with the costs involved. Adding a significant time component (either prep or to cast), expensive materials, a significant risk to casting... even a "fluff" cost like having to repay a demon later for services rendered. You don't want to downplay the power level of magic, or it stops being cool. But there's a lot you can do to make it rarer as a crutch in-session.
That's absolutely not making the game centered around countering casters. If the game is five rooms in a row with perfectly balanced monsters who don't communicate or use any tactics and then everybody rests and heals up that's dumb.
If the game is you walk in and some sentry escape you into the dungeon, and then the leaders send a horde of low level minions to soak up your shit so you either retreat or are weak when you fight the bigger guys, that's playing like there's intelligent fucking creatures with a plan, and that happens to make wizards not so op.
>which is.....
Don't play with shitters. Fixes literally every issue with D&D and greatly improves the quality of your campaign to boot.
Cool shitty nonanswer.
in GURPS default magic system, wizards use fatigue points to cast spells. So the power of a wizard is defined by their fatigue pool.
That's why fighting men get followers and soldiers to serve them
It's only a nonanswer if you don't know how to filter properly.
>Reminder that if your post is;
>le just don't play dungeons and dragons xd
>Then you SHOULD NOT post in this thread and your post is off-topic. Thank you.
Well, I was going to post "I use Barbarians of Lemuria, which gimps full casters and relegates them to NPC status and has PCs capable of only minor magical feats", but never mind.
They can go play in a different fucking game then where we're not trying to cut down the disparity
Too bad that hasn't been a thing for three editions now and nobody wants to deal with the logistics of dealing with the party + their cadre of handpicked followers who exist only to soak up hits.
>"It's either my altered version or nothing, you don't have to play it if you don't want to"
>but m-muh build
Probably how it would go, if they riot and leave then I'm better off.
>Of fucking course the wizard is op when he uses all his bad ass spells and then everybody takes a nap so he can get them back.
That problem is more just an inexperienced GM allowing players to abuse the system mechanics. A skilled GM will rarely if ever give PC's an opportunity to rest "mid adventure" unless it's at an appropriate training-montage moment. Something is always chasing them, or needs chasing, or is attacking the keep, or whatever.
The heroes in adventure stories don't usually get a chance to kick back and relax until the adventuring is done. If they did, the (a) monster would catch up with them, or (b) the thief would get away with the magic sword, or (c) the kidnapped princess would get eaten by the dragon, or (d) the Great Enemy would defeat the Forces of Good and it would be too late, or (e) etc etc etc.
Did you miss the part where only 1/4 of your proposed fixes actually worked to cut down on the disparity? Once you start fucking with class features, it sets a dangerous precedent moving forward that not many people will want to deal with once they realize what's going on.
So make it a thing and stat them as monsters. Like it's so hard to run a few extra characters who have attack bonus, damage, ac, saves, and hp and nothing else.
>"It's either my altered version or nothing, you don't have to play it if you don't want to"
Well, that's a cheery way to start off the campaign.
>Like it's so hard to run a few extra characters who have attack bonus, damage, ac, saves, and hp and nothing else.
t. someone who has never run a game in his life
I'm not that guy and still, good for the not - not many people, they can go play another game.
Exactly man, it's DnD not a fucking crpg and if you're just thoughtful and think about things instead of mindlessly throwing balanced encounters one at a time at your party like the mooks in a Steven Seagal movie they're gonna wind up just like the mooks in a Steven Seagal movie
I tend towards lower power settings, but my general thought is that magic is very powerful, but also dangerous.
If i was making my own setting, I would probably have repeated spellcasting cause exhaustion and odd bleeding (nose, ears, eyes, coughing it up)
As it is I like the 40k and warhammer perils systems.
By comparison, a martial cant do nearly as much (or as horrifying) damage at one time, but can keep swinging for longer, and doesnt have to keep absolute concentration or risk miscasting.
The problem is two-fold. Casters need rests to restore spell slots while martials need rests to restore HP. So if you don't allow for a rest every so often, the martials will end up being slowly wound down by the creatures they fight while the mages are free to withhold spell slots until they feel their expenditure is warranted to the situation at hand.
I am forever dm and running non magical monsters could not be simpler in pretty much any edition (besides 3.5 because they're all statted up like pcs)
>they can go play another game.
And they probably will after the first session because you sound like a control freak. Not saying you are, but you gotta understand, a lot of people have seen GM's who will nerf your abilities if it interferes with their narrative too hard and that kind of image doesn't lend itself to a longterm game.
>the proposed change to the wizard class is a solid one sentence
>the wizardfag complains immediately
>"You don't have to play a wizard, I haven't changed the other classes."
>wizardfag chimps out and leaves
I'm better off without players like that, thanks.
It's not even that it's necessarily hard, it's the fact that you're practically playing with yourself as the PC's are stuck waiting to see how many of their cohorts ends up dying to the monster's attacks.
>not just giving the players the stats for their mooks so they can fight other mooks as their mooks
>My way or the highway
To speak to this for a moment - there's absolutely nothing wrong with restricting player freedom at character creation time. I actually think it's a great idea, and can lead to better campaigns. You just have to (as with so many things in life) try to not be an asshole about it. Get group buy-in. Convince them how much cooler it would be. Nobody likes GM Fiat, players like feeling like they have joint ownership.
Thing is, restrictions often go a long way toward fueling creativity. When you're building a PC within tight constraints, you work that much harder with the material you have available.
So, sure, ban wizards. Hell, go a few steps further and make the whole party start as L1 Fighters. Make them a squad of soldiers that get separated from their company in the mountains and stumble on an adventure. Now they have stuff in common AND a shared backstory AND they have to figure out how to survive with a limited toolset. And who knows, a few sessions down the road maybe they start to look less like a haggard squad of grunts, and more like a multi-classing squad of ex-mil specialist mercs, on the road, taking contracts, and... sorry, got a little carried away there.
The "Wizardfag" is complaining because your house rule is shit user, you being a passive-aggressive cunt only makes it more likely that you're a shit DM who is not worth playing with.
How do you plan on dealing with divine casters who have access to their full spell list? What about classes like Bard who get to choose two spells from any spell list? What about Warlocks?
The last time a class feature made players do that, it became one of the few classes that even PFS and the SRD outright called broken as fuck.
If you're wondering, that class was Master Summoner, who could spam summon spells the point where they could have 10-30+ creatures on the field.
You're absolutely right
This is just my way of saying it here on Veeky Forums in the least amount of time to get my point across.
I'll give them the hows and the whys of why I'm changing it if they care (which most people don't, unless they're the people who care about builds) and if they don't like it, they can explain why. I most likely won't be satisfied with their explanation and give them that ultimatum eventually if they don't stop arguing.
And to address the rest of the post, I find that when I limit my players to specific classes/backgrounds they make their most creative characters/personalities and such. When their characters aren't really unique at all, they have to find a way. It's nice.
My only issue with his proposal was when he started considering removing the two free spells wizards get upon level up. I don't mind people telling me that I can't play a race/class because of setting purposes but don't tell me I can play a class and then say "oh yeah, I'm going to remove a feature they normally have for reasons, don't like it, GTFO!"
This. Also, houserule heavily but flavourful. Steal and adapt game mechanics from every game you like, as long as it doesnt feel like you are trying to drain the fun out of spellcasters.
Yeah summoning ten immortal monsters from other planes is the same as having a few guys with halberds or whatever
It is when the action economy is so skewed that you actually have to hand people NPC stats just so they're not stuck watching you roll dice for 5-10 minutes for both the NPC's and the enemies.
>"oh yeah, I'm going to remove a feature they normally have for reasons, don't like it, GTFO!"
Because the feature directly unbalances the game? Why is that wrong? Letting Wizards pick their spells every level also means that they are allowed to KNOW what all the spells must be, at least at their level or lower. Removing spells like teleport, sleep, and some of the higher level divination spells are REQUIRED for letting campaigns actually go along at all.
>I'll give them the hows and the whys of why I'm changing it if they care (which most people don't, unless they're the people who care about builds) and if they don't like it, they can explain why. I most likely won't be satisfied with their explanation and give them that ultimatum eventually if they don't stop arguing.
If you don't tell people this as you're advertising your campaign, you're an absolute shit DM, sorry.
That much information in an advertisement?
It's more of a session zero thing, which is where I do it.
>Because the feature directly unbalances the game?
Y'mean the same game that's built around Wizards have the ability to choose new spells each time they level up?
>Why is that wrong?
Because you're allowing people to play a class, only to say "oh yeah, it's [class] but I'm going to remove X for [reasons]" which is a pretty shit thing to do if someone was looking forward to playing the class as it appeared within the book.
>Letting Wizards pick their spells every level also means that they are allowed to KNOW what all the spells must be, at least at their level or lower.
Why not just ask the player for a list of their known spells after each level up?
>Teleport
A sixth level spell.
>sleep
A level 1 spell that's only good against low HD creatures.
>divination
such as?
Tell them in the add there are houserules for magic balance. Don't spring it on them by surprise. But the ad doesn't need to say how. Get in to the nitty-gritty details during Session 0.
>That much information in an advertisement?
Yes, because some people will outright avoid campaigns that introduce homebrews and house rules to the base system due to all the horror stories floating around, especially on Veeky Forums.
Inviting a group to your campaign and then springing houserules/homebrew on them is like a chick using a 20 year old photo for her dating profile.
It sounds like you had a GM who interrupted you in the middle of building a cheese wizard and said "Oh yeah by the way, no spells upon level up"
I'm saying, before you even start making the character at session zero (if you have a character before session zero, fuck off) that changes I've made and the reasons why.
spells/magery mostly deals with the metaphysical, and combat is a very physical ordeal
I like games where Wizards AND Mages both use magic. They can even have the exact same spell schools, but just twisted about in the same way. Such as an elemental warrior making their sword on fire and an elemental wizard shooting fireballs.
>It sounds like you had a GM who interrupted you in the middle of building a cheese wizard and said "Oh yeah by the way, no spells upon level up"
No, I did have a DM who tried to nerf force powers because we (somehow) managed to beat a CR8 encounter with force stun while we were a party of three level 3 characters.
Amusingly, I've never played with a DM who sprang houserules/homebrews on the party who either didn't understand the rules he was altering or was a cock gobbling faggot who was mad that we somehow managed to avoid the railroad.
Oh, understandable.
I don't even put ads out for some faggots I don't know to come over. I already know people who play, so the concept of putting out ads for whats in your campaign is a foreign concept to me.
However, I fail to see how anybody who isn't concerned about builds caring about what houserules a GM has made.
Okay. What I've been saying is that If I even played worst edition of D&D I would stay consistent from session one unless everyone agrees that something is terribly broken and needs a fix.
>However, I fail to see how anybody who isn't concerned about builds caring about what houserules a GM has made.
Because the majority of houserules is imbalanced trash written by people who barely understand the game that they're writing for and nobody wants to deal with the inevitable fallout once it becomes apparent that the houserule either did nothing or made everything worse.
Believe me, I started playing around the time when 3.PF was the only games people were running, and the shit I've seen was enough to make me swear off homebrews/houserules for good due to how many times they nuked the campaigns that I was in.
Gotcha. I just have the view that anybody stupid enough to play (wotc) D&D in the first place is stupid enough to play heavily houseruled "Cracked window with a band-aid in the middle of it" games.
Your GM reserves full right to nerf/change character abilities during the game. If an unexpected combo or spell(s) effects can be manipulated in such a way that it trivializes a campaign then they SHOULD be able to pull the plug and rework it into something more balanced.
Why do you believe you are entitled to keep something that ruins the pacing of the game?
Thing is, even to this day people will argue left, right, and center that casters and martials are not as imbalanced as people claim, even when you explain the math behind it and how they function as a concept.
So getting everyone to agree that something if broken is easier said than done.