The Campaign Builder's Guild

There are two ways to go about balancing magic, in 3E and 3.5E DnD. One is to make it prevalent enough that there are enough magic users available, all in different factions, so that they sort of balance out. There's a certain critical mass where the group almost becomes self-policing. Once that happens, magic becomes widely available by way of scrolls and magic items, and it becomes a question of who can afford what magic, rather than a question of how do we balance magic so other classes can compete.

The second is to make magic use more widely available across the classes. I had an idea to make summoning a feat chain and a series of prestige classes, rather than spells. Anyone could get the feats, and then get into the prestige class they qualified for based on what they could summon and what their stats were.

Quote from: Luminous CrayonIt's all relative, I guess. I disagree with this sentiment, though, and I find it somewhat logically inconsistent to boot.

After all, if you consider "allowing a magic-user [X amount] of power" to be gamebreakingly unmanageable and you consider "reducing a magic-user's power to [less than X amount]" to be undesirably punitive, you've got a bit of a conundrum.

Probably put myself too much in the shoes of my players :D . I've never tried anything too "out-of-the-box" with them, but I guess is time for them to grow up and leave the hack'n'slash!