How should Wizards "pay" for their spells?

He can't spell? Well now we know he's not a wizard!

View it in the most basic level. John knows 10 things. His identical twin Bon knows 11. All things to know have equal value. Bon wins by default. Add cmplexity ad infinutum, it stays the same, until the persond themselve start differing. If Bon is a megalomaniacal asshole that uses hid knowledge to enslave any number if people fir example, he stays the "better" one powerwise, but us still shit tier on another scale.

Kniwledge is power^^

>>Can't spell
I see what you did there!

I can spell. My phone can't and I'm lazy.
Also
>dat hate for educated people
>the mark of the jealous

>not getting the pun

Magic withers your balls.

All and none of the above.

>"educated" lazy illiterate

Your credentials are a shallow status symbol; they haven't even taught you the concept of performative contradiction!

In my settings it's always psychological trauma and horror as the price for power.

As for this balancing debate, don't try to balance, just limit your players options at character creation so they're balanced. In WoD for example you have everyone play the same template 90% of the time, it's a good idea to apply elsewhere.

Despite your awful phoneposting, I have to agree, as least with regard to the classic scholarly wizard archetype. The "price" this archetype pays for magic is the years of hard study and risky research spent gaining the skill and knowledge to bend reality.

But of course that doesn't translate well to most RPG games... the only system I've seen represent it well is Ars Magica, where campaigns take place over the course of many in-game years and gameplay is balanced around the idea that each player has several characters (their mage character, a mundane supporting companion, and flavorful minor minions) so they can rotate which of the powerful mage characters gets to be in the spotlight for each session.

All magic is divine and you have to give your chosen godly/demonic patron spectral blowjobs for a hit of that magic crack, which they're stingy with.

That sounds intresting and civillized. In build spotlight rotation is something I would like to see

>cleric scum cant comprehend the glory if arcane secrets.
>clerics are just warlocks with more different patrons

Only a gay secular fundamentalist could reduce the value of a human being to their “knowledge”.

Anyway, in Savage Worlds there’s a variant that gets rid of mana, and replaces it with a penalty to your spell casting roll proportional to the mana cost of the spell. For example, a spell that cost 4 mana is instead free, but you have to make a “spell skill roll” at -2 (half the cost of the spell rounding down). Seems to work pretty well.

Ars Magica calls it "troupe-style" gameplay. And while it is fucking impossible to get together a group of people willing to play Ars Magica (the spell creation system is fucking awesome, but the rest of the rules are not, and the hardcore medievalist-pandering Mythic Europe has a very nice appeal), I think it would work well in other games as well. Especially if you have players who like to build/develop lots of different character concepts but have trouble sticking with any particular one.

>All and none of the above.

Why would you even respond with something like this?

So what, can they just spam spells an unlimited number of times? There's no energy or limit? This isn't even in game terms, story terms it works for too.

>reduce the value of a human being to their labor

Fixed, it's a synonym anyway.

Magic can work in futuristic settings where half the effects can be done through technology. Add a risk mechanic and you're gold.

A mesmerism spell costs having a giants bloodline and exerting a little mana.
A wish takes a once-a-century planetary conjunction in an abandoned city, hours of chanting, tens of thousands of gp worth of ritual incense, and lots of life force - measured in XP and Constitution, so much that it probably needs to be offloaded to a sacrifice or the caster will age into their 90s overnight.

Only someon who cant read would misinterpret this much. I clearly said "if everything else is identical", so this misunderstanding does NOT happen. But you pulled through, congrats :P
I value knowledge very high as from information many things can blossom. But some people are wo shitty, it completly overrides any positive aspect they have. You can be a genius with years of research under your belt. If you kick puppies anyone who dos not does such shit is better than you. Also, "valuing" life is shitty in itself, in my eyes.

Why the risk mechanic? To balance it cersus mundane actions? That proves my point than :(

Implying being gay ior secular is bad? The opposite is what reality teaches for the latter and the first is simply irrelevant for anything. Fundamentalism is bad when you are wrong I guess. Whuch secular people are not the last time U checked, mate

Good boy points

>Also, "valuing" life is shitty in itself, in my eyes

>So what, can they just spam spells an unlimited number of times? There's no energy or limit? This isn't even in game terms, story terms it works for too.
In Ars Magica, you mean? No, it has a mechanic where your skill in various forms of magic determines how powerful your spells can be (you have to roll vs. a target number or suffer a level of fatigue). So "energy" is a limit to your daily spellcasting, but the fundamental constraint is time -- the in-game time (on the order of seasons or years) your character takes to acquire those skills and develop efficient spells. It's not a system designed with extended dungeon crawls in mind, but rather long-term intrigues and challenges told through brief vignettes.

Secularism is garbage. Good luck deciding what is and is not correct when you are solely dust and geometry, and “truth” is an illusory social construct that literally doesn’t exist because it is not made out of protons or neutrons.

I have that hat but not that swag

Firstly, I would like to say that I'm not approaching this from a class point of view. Classes are swingy with balance at best.

Magic should cost resources of every kind. It should cost stat, skill & "merits/advantages/talents" points.
Then, it should be powerful but esoteric. WFRPG/Zweihander does this well with petty spells that stop the rain for hitting you, or bless a crop, to spells that drop meteors on things. Spells should not be like D&D, where there are a thousand almost the same attack spells. Magic should also run the risk of backlash, the severity of such should be based on the genre/setting themes. Magic should not be exhaustable but your ability to meditate backlash should.

This allows the wizard to spend his "build" points devoted to magic instead of a fighters talents & prowess. But the powerful & esoteric nature of spells makes it so that the mage doesn't always have a magic solution. Magic doesn't just run out but there is always a risk when using it
Spells should also get a bonus to its effects or backlash mitigation when you use up esoteric, uncommon or rare items

While that guy is an assclown I think you're being reductionist. You can be a completely moral person without chalking every belief up to what you think God has to say on the matter.

You’re also being reductionist. You can believe in object spiritual/metaphysical truths without thinking a magical being has spoken them into existence.

Objective*

If you need dusty text to know whts right or wrong, you ar the problem. Morality and ethics exist without supernatural shit. The are manmade I dont kill you because I think its bad and aoe do large masses of other individuals. Hence: Society and civilizations. If you only NOT murder every infant you com across because you fear repercussions, you need help and society as a whole needs security versus your type. You also forgot elctrons.
But lets end that discussion and back to magic. Fantasy and escapism are a more level and forgiving battleground for you I think

Congratulations, welcome to being secular.

Srsly this fucking phone keeps eating text. Sorry for the eyesores

BRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAP

Man made morals are not morals at all. They’re just preferences. I don’t kill people because it is objectively immoral. You don’t kill people because “you think it’s bad, based on your arbitrary subjective experience”.

Nah dude. You have a flawed understanding of what God is.

I think it is hard to conceptualize what a mana drain is like, since we cannot ever experience it.

I like to think of mana as a mixture of physical (stamina), mental (intellect), and spiritual (spirit) in a non-religious sense.

So where a warrior gets tired from swinging the sword, the magic user grows weary, split between his physical, mental, and spirit/ will states.

So a super powerful spell may make him physically weak, and not able to really recuperate, while afflicting his mind with a sense of dullness. Almost like when you have been doing complex problem solving all day and your mind shuts down, and all you can think about is sleeping to recharge. Almost like that zombified state.

To me, that is more interesting than just "this abstract concept of mana we have no way to really understand has yielded you unable to cast another firebolt, but feel free to run around like an asshole"

Yeah, we cant blame people for searching for answers in different regions(no matter if you think its Bullshit territory or not), you are free to think whatever you want. But when it comes to decisionmaking, especially when those decisions affect nit only yourself, logic and reason ( as long as its ethical) rule supreme

But subscribing to objective morality without attributing that to divine law IS secularism. That's where the modern concept of Human Rights comes from.

You cant understand something that gas enough contradicting definitions to cave in under its own weight. You dont need secularism for that, only sanity. Well, they are the same desu...

Yeah, because many if the "divine laws" are older than their corresponding religions and have non religious origin. Then bs got added for terrible flavour. Secularist take the tasty bits and throw out the garbage. Well they try but nobody is perfect

The source of my theism is purely rational, and absolutely logical.

I do attribute objective morality to divine law. I just don’t attribute divine law to a supernatural being.

You’re mistaking me for a bible thumper.

To do magic, you "bond" with a concept to fuel your magic. E.g. the concept of a stag deer, or a mountain, or a tree, or a particular building, it doesn't matter - as long as you've touched an example of it. And the grander and more majestic the thing you bond with, the more power there is to draw on - someone who binds themself to a mountain will be far more powerful than someone who binds themself to a deer. Bonding is strictly a once-off thing, and is completely permanent and irreversible.

(the touching thing is just to stop people from binding themselves to the sun, or the whole planet - more than one fool has tried and accidentally bound themself to a patch of clovers, or a few square meters of dirt)

The cost comes when you cast magic - by drawing power from your bound concept, you become more like it. This usually presents itself in mild cases, such as a person bound to the concept of stags gaining a coat of fur. While these effects do slowly reverse themselves, it requires completely abstaining from the use of magic and can take anywhere from days to months, depending on severity.

Further, the more powerful a concept is (such as a mountain), the more it increases the transformation. Someone who draws the maximum amount of power (limited only by their concentration and skill) from a mountain might find themselves transformed mostly to stone.

It is very hard to live when you are mostly stone (due to stone brains and organs, and consequent inability to breathe, digest, produce blood...), so most mages who draw too much power are doomed to suffer long, painfull deaths.

The power balance of the world is naturally managed by the fact that most people either refuse to perform magic and never bind (or turn their back to their binding if they do it), or simply destroy themselves. Thus, old wizards are a rare and feared sight.

Fedora fags go the fuck away, I want to participate in a discussion on how people view magic & it's limitations without you retarded fucking atheists shilling your shit religion on normal religious people

Wizards can't play young characters. They must eat the stat penalty that comes with age as a reflection of the Lifetime spent mastering their art

>I do attribute objective morality to divine law. I just don’t attribute divine law to a supernatural being.

Then what are you? Some kind of pussy fence-sitting "agnostic"? I'd consider you a Daoist, but Daoists are usually smart enough to not sincerely engage the guy writing poorly-spelled regurgitations of r/atheism fartsniffing.

Nog an ounce of truth. True Scotsmen and a miunderstanding what objective means. You dont know that murdering is immoral. You adhere to arbitrary moral guideline you dont know the origin of to tell you whats okay. You do exactly what you say its bad ^^

>Bible starts with the Big Bang. Chronicles the first murder & how it is bad

Fedoratipping entropy worshipper believes morals came independently before Cain & Abel.

And then simply buff thenselves up again.

You don't kill people because you think it's immoral, based on your arbitrary subjective experience. So do I, I just admit it.

Make martials really good at what they do to. And a warrior should be really good at killing people. It should work like Conan, the wizard is incredibly powerful and can destroy an army, but if a great warrior gets close that wizard will have their head caved in.

It did, because Cain and Abel never existed and you can therefore define anything as "before Cain and Abel"

I don’t know honestly. I consider myself a Platonic Diest with Judeo-Christian sympathy’s.

I’m engaging with typo-McGee over here because I’m starved for theological debate, and everybody I know irl want to talk about social justice and the Swift Kanye controversy.

I don’t kill people because I know that it’s evil through sheer rationality.

You created a setting where magic as a main power source thing is not feasible You either bind to something powerful and then go martial bug with a trump card or you have people being bonded to powerful concepts being kind of self sacrificing nuclear devices. Also, if touching the earth does bind you to a few m^2 of dirt, so does the mountain. Animal touching then binds you to a few cells. Water nog to the river or lake but to s few litres if water. Or the bacteria and stuff in the water etc. Hard to codufy into 'realistic' rules I guess.

Wizards start play in their 50s or older. And that's only if they've spent decades upon decades doing nothing but studying, day in and day out, since early childhood. They'll know a decent amount about their very specific area of study, a few cantrips and maybe one reasonably impressive ritual. If they spend the next 20 or 30 years hard at work, they'll maybe might learn a handful more rituals. Performing any of these is a whole other matter entirely since they require exacting astrological and atmospheric phenomena as well as access to specific locations and leylines. Let's also not forget reagents, sacrifices and all the proper preparations.

I've found that the best way to balance magic is to have it require external sources of power they they cannot just summon to them at a whim. Essentially, these magical reagents are like a sort of ammunition for them. A soldier can't just shit out 30-100 bullets after a full nights rest every day to make sure they always can use their gun, they have to come by those bullets by other means. The same should go for casters.

Examples in this vein are Gundo based magic from Chaika the Coffin Princess (where canisters of mana get loaded into complex magical guns to fuel spells, combat and noncombat alike) and Mistborn from the series of the same name (who can only use magical effects by 'burning' specific metals they ingest, so in an extended fight they need to chug more elixers of tin or steel or whatever flakes to replenish their supply. No handy supply of metal to burn, no magic). You could easily accomplish this with generic 'mana crystals' that get drained by spellcasting or what have you.

I'm okay with magic users having a number of weak arcane tricks they can use even without such resources, but a wizard without their magical resources should be as dangerous as a fighter without their weapons: not entirely defenseless, but much much less of a threat. And since this resource doesn't auto-replenish, it forces casters to make decisions outside of the 15 minute workday. A fireball today could mean no fireball tomorrow.

If studying and using magic causes impotence in males/vaginosis in females, that could help explain the whole "summon succubus/incubus" obsession, since only demons of lust are skillful enough to overcome the magician's "little problem"!

TypoMcGee will now be my new nickname. Im indebted to you for that. But: You can't be a theist through logic. You can't get to logic to anything if you already start dith something nit proven to be correct. Anything after thag step is purely hypothetical abd bears to weight in reality

Also Im happy this discussion c do something for your craving. I know that feel

What logic makes you say that?
You said that morality existed before religion existed. I gave an example of how that was false. I say religion exists before existance.

Go back to silently worshipping the void

out of interest, how is magic divided in Ars Magica? Like will someone be an 'Elementalist' or such. Since I imagine that it's got a heap of skills for different sorts of magic?

Then you repackaged magic as a martial with other names for the actions he uses. Thats DnD 4th Edition. Dont dirty yourself with that filth.

How is it evil? The most direct & beneficial outcome is one where I impose my will upon you. The only thing stopping me is fear of repercussions. This is completely logical. I want thing. I take thing. Anything less would be illogical.

Which example which proved that morality did not exist before religion did you give? I see no such thing

Cain & Abel. Can you not follow a chain of replies?

The old fashioned way.
Pureblooded humans are weak as fuck and non-magical.
The closest thing humans get to magic is convincing something that is magical to do magic for them.
This basically solves every problem magic systems usually have. Magic too powerful? The magic thingy decides it's too powerful to be bossed around by a human and leaves. Too weak? Find something that matches your abilities then. Too rigid. Find a different being with a different domain. Too chaotic? Well if you want to call down lightning you'll probably be looking for a storm spirit.

Thats a single ants logic. You simply stop thinking at that step and dont take into account what your decisions wiuld mean if everyobe else acted the same way. That is nit logical, thats dangerously simple minded

I thought he meant that placing more value to one life than another was shitty, not some kind of tween "i'm a nihilist" thing

I can. I simply cant be held responsible to see some weird anecdotal reference about unproven mythological murderbrothers as an "example" that proves or shows anything. By thar logic Disney movies are credible examples for a helluva lot of obvious truth

Not that user, but one could argue that the seamless perfection of natural law points toward an intelligent creator, existing in a higher dimension beyond matter, equivalent in complexity to us as we are to idly doodled stick figures.

The first one, yes. Nihilism is funny but kinda pointless for well, anything

>ITT contrarian dipshit wants us to worship their flavor of sky-daddy to save us from devolving into child-mudering lunatics.

This is where we are now

What? No. All because the wizard can't just asspull power from nothing doesn't mean they work like martials in any way.

Casters should be able to do things that mundane character cannot. But those things either need to cost something, either to the character or in the form of a resource that is not easily renewable. If your wizard is going to incinerate 8 dudes at once, there needs to be a REASON he doesn't do this all the time, otherwise you are overstepping your bounds.

The answers to that can either be "I can kill those 8 dudes, but if I do I might go permanently blind" disadvantage based, or it can be "I can kill those 8 guys, but if I do that now I am out of ammo if we run into a bigger problem in the next couple days" resource based.

DnD's daily spell slot approach PRETENDS to be something like the resource based example, but frankly after a certain point you get so many spells per day you almost cant run out of them, and its trivial to replenish them in most circumstances so you are just better with no downside.

Thanks for ruining my thread you worthless putrid fucking cunts.

>The source of my theism is purely rational, and absolutely logical.

Kidding aside, maybe you should expand on that?

The seamless perfection if natural whatever has your eyes build the wrong direction at your retina when other animals show that it csn be done more efficient without drawbacjs and has several nerves running loops in your body when they lead to targets actually only 3 cm besides them. There are mire examples from other fields than anatomy if course. Not only does reality mot hint at a creator in the planning kind of way, intelligent us way more out there.

And societies where people act like that get outcompeted by societies that don't. Even if you didn't have to fear lawful punishment for your crimes, acting like that would ultimately put you in more danger and result in a lesser quality of life than stable civilization offers.

>this level of strawmanning
Right, because going to jail is just the most rational thing in the world.

Taking advantage of other people is not a rational strategy for long-term survival of either a species or individual. Even if you're intent on exploiting others for personal gain, it's advantageous to cooperate with other individuals to do so to increase the power disparity between you and those you wish to exploit- it's also rational to team up with others for protection for the same reasons. Thus cooperation with at least SOME people, at SOME times is a necessity. So what do you do when THOSE people have what you want? Well, you could betray them, sure- but it's rational not to trust someone you know might turn around and betray you, so it'll never work on the same people again. Your pool of cooperators will slowly dwindle until you're an easy target.

If you assume there are at least SOME people out there who want to prey on easy targets, you have to stop from becoming one. That means keeping around people you can trust- so betraying at least people close to you is a no-go. That's a step up from just sometimes cooperating already.

You can follow this chain of logic yourself to it's logical conclusion: For simple reasons of self-preservation and self-benefit, trusting and cooperating with others (basically anyone who isn't known to be untrustworthy) is in everyone's net benefit. That's why humanity evolved to be naturally compassionate and empathetic: it's a great strategy for the survival of the individual, and thus, the species.

The basis of morality is perfectly rational.

No, it's a valid argument that you don't want to acknowledge because it doesn't subscribe to your own worldview

Where is your evidence of "pre-religious prehistory societies" then, o' priest of the blackhole?

I understand you, please dont take it as personal offence ;)
But if the cost high, there us no reason to bother. If you dont have the fallbacks if also being a martial to not die if your trumps played, you become a liability. Thats stuff better left to NOCs and magucal items

>I can kill those 8 dudes, but it'd require an 18 hour ritual that needs to be performed during a planetary alignment 3 months from now. No worries, there's a long list of reagents and artifacts we need to assemble before then, so that should keep us busy till then. Let's just hope it doesn't rain that day or we'll need to wait another 7 months.

An anecdote is funny but not an argument for anything. Its just a story, bro

Look at chimps today. No priest and still riles apply in the group. Not our rules, but earlx hominids also gad to start somewhere. The same goes for many animals dwelling in groups

I found both mana and vancian system stupid and boring.
The greatest magic system ever is in Ars Magica, the secon is at world of darkness mage. For a good reason, as many who worked on ars magica then formed White Wolf. House Tremere was in Ars Magica for example. Even though the current (5th) edition ars magica severed its ties with wod I still love the old heritage of it.
Play mage, owod-nwod-(hell, dare I say)m20 I don't care, but If you want a more deeper (and which requires more work and a longer campaign) experience, go for Ars Magica.
Bloody underrated game, sadly only has a niche audience.

Corporatations do this. Communism fails because of this. The top 1% exploit everyone else. Sociopaths are on average, more successful, by a wide margin. Our world literally runs on survival of the fittest. You can fain empathy, to exploit people. Hell how many grown ass adults get by in life by being predatory on others compassion to keep them alive?

Fucking Ayn Rand became famous for this. This is why y'all need Jesus

Still waiting for an example to back up your argument... are you too busy polishing your fedora for your weekly stare into the void meeting?

You can, and many people do igonore the medieaval titbits. For example, yes some game masters will give you a list of local languages spoken in 13th century Italy and chastise you for not knowing where Neapolitan is spoken, most will only simply go by latin/italian. Depends on the game.
The real problem with Ars Magica is the bookkeeping. Too many characters, too many record keeping, all the spells, the covenant being an entire character within itself, the lab records, the longevitiy rituals, the vis. The game really really needs a good software.

I found that to be the major deterrent of Ars Magica, not the mythic europe. The reputation of "you need to be a history grad student to understand the game" is wrong. Problem is the game requires devotion, more than likely longer campaigns, add to that the bookkeeping and people just don't want to invest the time.

We get it. You really, really love your sky-daddy and think they're the best sky-daddy of all the sky-daddies. Your sky-daddy could probably beat up all the other sky-daddies as well, I'm sure.

You mistake success with being right. Therefore playing their game how they want it. You literally played yourself. Astonishing. Social darwinism is shit and does not lead to longterm stability. And it declines when people get educated and have time and resources to think qbout more thn th next paycheck or if they already have enough good boy points for an afterlife that has no hint of being real

You know you can impose your will upon the world without being a blunt, explicitly violent person, right? Who still has empathy and emotions and is capable of love and lasting social relations that aren't just "I want thing. I take thing." If this is really how you think, you must lead a pitiful social life.

I wait for an argument that does prove religion is neede for morality. You didn't delivered. It gave you every social animl ever as example, thats more than enough of an example. Dont be greedy. What idiot polishs a cloth hat?Do you even wardrobe?