The only way you can remove caster supremacy from any system is to make casting fully ritual. No casting in combat, no preparing spells, no always having the spell you need the moment you need. Every spell must require time, components and preparation. That is the only way you can "balance" limitless magic utility - by making it's supply a really short one.
The only way you can remove caster supremacy from any system is to make casting fully ritual. No casting in combat...
Christopher Foster
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Nathaniel Clark
Please don't associate DCC with your Carcosan filth.
James Robinson
>That is the only way you can "balance" limitless magic utility
Or you could make magic not limitless utility. Just a thought.
Blake Campbell
Fucking love that image. DCC manages to attempt balance by making using even the simplest magic spell a gamble. Sure, you can cast and create immense mayhem, but the possible costs of doing so should make any rational human think twice.
I've always considered making mage's go through complex, time-consuming rituals to cast spells, but best case scenario will result in mage's becoming the Shadowrun 5e Deckers of D&D; useful and capable of things most others wouldn't be able to, but they're basically playing another game in itself.
What if magic was cornered into utility/support? Casting Light or Detect Life isn't game-breaking and still let's other classes shine.
Ian Morris
The utility stuff is exactly what breaks the game and overshadows other classes.
Jeremiah King
Are you retarded? Serious question.
Because a lot of systems have already had casters alongside martials without any problem. There are already solutions, and what you're suggesting is a shitty one.
Thomas Taylor
Begone.
Colton Bennett
Or you could just allow warriors and martial artists of sufficient skill to break the rules that apply to lesser mortals.
Charles Morales
>limitless magic utility
Or, you know, don't give magic limitless utility in the first place.
Jaxson Martinez
Not much point in having magic then if you is going to restrain it to a few effects.
Ayden Gutierrez
Alternatively, you can avoid a staggeringly stupid false dichotomy and design magic that has utility properly balanced against its cost, giving them a different but equivalent amount of potence in the world compared to non-magical characters.
Y'know. Not shitty, lazy game design.
James Miller
You don't need to restrain the magic to a few effects. Same way you don't need to restrain skills.
You need to restrain mages. As in singular individuals. So that they won't be able to pluck everything they want without a care in the world.
Owen Gray
There is a point, multiple different systems have done it, and you'd know that if you weren't busy being fucking stupid.
Adrian Moore
Well shit with that mindset why even have magic?
Blake Barnes
Skills are already restrained by being skills. There is only so much you can learn to do. For example, you can't learn to fly no matter how hard you clap your hands. And if you do allow to - you are just making magic without calling it such.
Aiden Gutierrez
And that's last part is where you step over into being retarded. Myths and legends from around the world make that exact step, and treat it as something distinct from and coexisting with magic. Doing so has far, far more precedent than trying to treat absolutely everything supernatural in a fantasy setting as a form of 'magic'.
Parker Evans
>You need to restrain mages. As in singular individuals. So that they won't be able to pluck everything they want without a care in the world.
This.
I am curious if anyone tried to restrict classic dnd mage to single school of magic and see if this works.
Daniel Nguyen
Magic is what counts as magic within the world.
If you want to have gritty semi-realistic characters competing with wizards you could try GURPS. Disarm has a very literal meaning there.
Liam Davis
It doesn't. Conjuration and transmutation are still too good.
Eli Lopez
It doesn't matter how they treat it; it's still what we call magic.
GURPS is my favorite system, and it have total caster supremacy with all magic systems, unless you use magic as powers, and then you literally can't play mage on low points.
Easton Anderson
Nope. I don't call it magic, because I'm not stupid and actually respect the meaning of words.
Jaxson Rivera
OP's clearly fine with some restrictions, but I guess being adamant about that one is a given, since that's the one that creates the entire problem in the first place, and solving the problem isn't what you're after now, is it? Of course, since we're probably looking at DnD-like shit here magic is already limited to a finite number of effects, since we only have a finite number of spells and they are generally all specific in what they do. WotC may try (and unbalance shit to hell and back in the process), but they're never going to write an infinite number of DnD spells.
Still, you can limit the fuck out of casters without limiting magic. A mind can only contain so much, different ways of understanding magic will only get so far, yadda yadda. So you get schools or traditions or ways of handling magic that all end up limited in the effects they can bring about. Or just skip the in-game explanation and just have the caster classes or whatever limited here. Then it's just a matter of seeing how much a non-caster can do at a certain power level, and making sure the caster is as capable, instead of giving the caster a much, much larger toybox to pick and choose from. So magic could, in theory, do almost anything, but any one magician cannot.
Mason Murphy
I did something similar once way back in the 3.5e days. Didn't work super great, but playing a Transmutation-only wizard was kind of fun. Still pretty busted though.
Jayden Thomas
It has caster supremacy if wizards allowed to pluck exactly the spells they want. With prerequisites it becomes much harder. And they are still very vulnerable - where warriors have armor, HP and active defences - wizards are almost completely reliant on spells. Thing is unlike in D&D in GURPS getting a targeted antimagic ability is not that costly or hard. Which means that there is always a possibility of being hit by an antimagic arrow flying through all the spells like they were not even there.
Isaiah Sanchez
Just make them use the Verbal, somatic, and component costs. Lots of spells have item components or hand gestures(or plenty of homebrew requirements) that you can make them have to acquire, and you can make it -hard- for them to acquire it. Plenty of times the wizard in my games have ran outta resources halfway through the dungeon making him have to completely retool is play right there.
Parker Morris
You could go the Legends of the Wulin route: everyone is a martial & everyone has magic
Grayson Cruz
No.
Den is no epic llik Deee en deee.
Deee en dee is most epic.
all game must dee en dee.
Liam Harris
The latter is inaccurate, though. Daoist Magic exists in setting and is metaphysically distinct from how a Xia cultivates Chi. By the metaphysics of the setting, refining your skill and empowering your Chi is entirely mundane, just an extension of the natural way of things.
Lincoln Gutierrez
I've done it, but had to rewrite a lot of the spells and invent new ones to make the schools more thematic and not game mechanical. Necromancy, elementalism, flesh-warping, diabolism, nature magic, that sort of thing. It worked pretty well. I /did/ allow players to learn spells from other schools, but it took a long time and a big investment and they would always kind of suck at casting it.
Michael Taylor
youtube.com
Not much point in having anything without restraint.
Owen Wright
The classic dnd mage plays fine. Things started going wrong at the wotc knock-off dnd.
Hudson Cox
>he only way you can remove caster supremacy from any system is to make casting fully ritual. No casting in combat, no preparing spells, no always having the spell you need the moment you need. Every spell must require time, components and preparation.
Actually the most busted magic in D&D is the magic with components and takes a long time to do. Also, that would make Wizards ostenbisly an NPC class.
Also, you don't fix broken/overpowered mechanics by making them unfun to use
Aiden Barnes
>The only way you can remove caster supremacy from any system is to make casting fully ritual.
Magic is NPC only
Magic is used by all classes to generally equal degree
Magic only offers different applications, and has only firepower equal to mundane weapons
Magic has extreme firepower but lacks finesse
Magic doesn't exist
Casters cannot learn more than a handful of techniques, or cannot deviate from a closely-curated theme
Mundanes have ludicrous/mythic abilities that are not explicitly magic
The system is mostly for pacing narrative encounters or otherwise does not simulate tasks
Genre conventions are enforced by utterly invulnerable demons
DM has a big stick and is allowed within the rules to hit players on the genitals with it for cheesy magical uses
There are some alternatives.
Isaiah Edwards
SHALL
NOT
BE
INFRINGED