[Question] What don't you like about magic?

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

This thread is here to post what you don't like about magic.  I have an idea for skill-based casting, but I first want to see what problems people encounter when using magic/psionics so I know what to avoid that makes magic too powerful.  Keep in mind that I'm talking about game balance such as making skills worthless, or causing more damage than a sword.

[Epic Meepo]

Personally, I find that magic and psionics are both very well balanced in the context of the framework described by their designers (3-5 encounters per game day with the prescribed ECL distribution). They also remain fairly balanced when you append any number of roleplaying encounters on top of the base 3-5 encounters per day.

So long as combat encounters occur in groups of 3-5 when they occur (instead of having one lone combat encounter per day/week/whatever), I've found that magic and psionics don't overwhelm too many skills, and characters with swords (particularly Power Attacking barbarians with greatswords) often deal more total damage per day than spellcasters and manifesters.

[Tybalt]

I actually like the way that D&D magic and the magic in say the Chaosium game systems work, I find that they always cost something, that they place restrictions on their users, and that they aren't unbalancing at all unless you allow unrestricted spell research and that kind of thing. I'd be very interested in seeing what your system would look like but for me the D&D system works just fine. I tend to be rather strict on making sure that player characters actually have to find spells (on scrolls, in books, or via finding a teacher in magic of some kind and either paying them or performing services in exchange for spell tutelage) and that psionicists have to find teachers to study under, and that clerics have to demonstrate devotion to their faith.
But you see that's also part of the fun, it makes for interesting motivations to go to this place or that place as well.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

Maybe I should rephrase the quesiton:
Take out the coptious amount of magic items.  Now tell me if you think casters can still be balanced?

[Johnny Wraith]

If there are no magic items then the people who suffer are the melee-type ones.. If you go this way, I'd say you try and do something to make casters weaker (Supposedly, casters are already much more powerful than melee-types, so consider nerfing them a lot).

[brainface]

Take out the coptious amount of magic items. Now tell me if you think casters can still be balanced?

intrinsic[/i] about spellcasters that makes them unbalancing without the copious amounts of magic items, but it's kinda how it's set up now.

[Hibou]

What I've been thinking about for a while would be a system where the spells of the Abjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, Necromancy, Transmutation, and Universal(of course) schools would act as normal, but spells of the Evocation and Conjuration schools are very taxing on a caster. This might help balance the class system in the case of an absence of magic gear, though I don't know how much.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

What I've been thinking about for a while would be a system where the spells of the Abjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, Necromancy, Transmutation, and Universal(of course) schools would act as normal, but spells of the Evocation and Conjuration schools are very taxing on a caster. This might help balance the class system in the case of an absence of magic gear, though I don't know how much.

I've look through all the spells.  Certain schools aren the problem, it's specific spells.  Damage-dealing spells scale with level while a guy with a sword is lucky to get a bit of extra damage without magic.  In addition spells like protection from energy mean that casters eventually become immune to things that non-casters still have to worry about.  All schools have offenders.

It might be worth noting that in my Ah'rem setting I cut out all the core spells I thought were too game-breaking.  No one school was much more an offender than any other, but in the end illusion came out the strongest.  Maybe I should go with the idea of having magic be only trickery-type stuff.

[Hibou]

Trickery-type stuff is always the impression I got from the superstition of magic during the middle ages. The things I could imagine being used in terms of magic encompassed Abjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, Necromancy, Transmutation, Universal, and a tiny bit of Conjuration, while tossing around fireballs and firing cones of chilling cold seemed like it should be limited to a specific class, powerful creatures of the Outsider, Aberration, and Undead types, or removed altogether.

If casters were to be gifted with mainly spells that mislead and buff, they'd still have many advantages over melee characters but would probably be a lot more balanced against them in the case of a setting where magic items are scarce.

That being said, I don't really mind the D&D casting system. It has its flaws, but it's alright.

[Wensleydale]

Without magic items, you have Bob the Fighter with his 1D8 scimmy and Sam the Wizard with his magic missile. Both of them are level 2. Bob has a str bonus of +3, so he can deal 1D8+3 at +6 AB (or something like that.) He can go on hitting all day. Sam, however, can deal 2D4 damage at range to one or two targets, splitting damage between them. He can't even do as much damage as Sam can, and he can do it a restricted amount of times per day. If Bob had a composite longbow, he could still do more than Sam can as far as Sam can until he runs out of arrows.

Poor Sam.

But when Sam's higher levels, he can attack a lot, needs to rest a lot less, and has spells that can deal lots of D6s! Now poor Bob, without his magic items, has very little he can do. He uses his scimmy and deals 1D8 + str bonus unlimited times per day, but Sam can hit plenty of enemies a large amount of times/day, doing more damage than poor Bob.

Poor Bob.

The point of this was that the fighter is easily better at low levels than Sa- I mean, the wizard, but once the wizard gets to higher levels the fighter is left in difficulty if he has no magic items or magic damage on his weapons.

[Tybalt]

Ahhhh now I get you.

When I was thinking of lowering the amount of magic in my game, I had a few thoughts.

1. That regardless of magical items, an 18th level magic user can do utterly phenomenal stuff. Similarly, in a game like say the Elric game from Chaosium if you are a Melnibonean sorceror you can make pacts with elemental lords and such; you look at the game and think...who would want to play a sailor or warrior by comparison?

2. That therefore when I reduced the amount of magic common to the D&D setting in my campaign world I also reduced the number of people who could rise to higher levels in magic, clerical, magic user or otherwise. They should be a very small percentage of the population in such a world, in my opinion. So for instance in the small Republic of New Edom there is only one wizard of any significant amount of power, and 3 others who have some recognition of ability, while all the rest are apprentices and suchlike. Magic is known to exist, no one would go mad with horror if they saw it, but ordinary people see adventurers the way that the average person now would see astronauts or special forces personnel...you don't just see them walking down the street on a regular basis.

3. Not all clerics get spells; only those who have extraordinary faith do.

4. you also have to reduce the amount of fantastic monsters. I like the idea of them being rare; in my campaign world's legends once dragons were much more common for instance, now they are so rare that sighting one is a potential disaster.

5. I have made certain kinds of conjurations costly for the magic user. For instance, if to conjure an elemental requires such concentration and strain upon the body that you lose say a point of con, and it requires at the very least a full week of rest to recover after then the magic user will be wary of casually doing so. Or if say pacts or bindings involving the elemental lords was required in order to be able to do so per type. I like the idea that you have to sacrifice something to gain magical power.

[the_taken]

2. That therefore when I reduced the amount of magic common to the D&D setting in my campaign world I also reduced the number of people who could rise to higher levels in magic, clerical, magic user or otherwise. They should be a very small percentage of the population in such a world, in my opinion. So for instance in the small Republic of New Edom there is only one wizard of any significant amount of power, and 3 others who have some recognition of ability, while all the rest are apprentices and suchlike. Magic is known to exist, no one would go mad with horror if they saw it, but ordinary people see adventurers the way that the average person now would see astronauts or special forces personnel...you don't just see them walking down the street on a regular basis.

Um... Yeah. I'm gonna have to say that... *sips cofee* I don't agree with you on that.
It's not the world that's the problem. Saying that casters are rare in the world just means that a PC who is one is much more special. It's the mechanics that's the problem. Bob and Sam. As Sam grows in level, his power becomes mightier and scales acordingly. A Bob is stuck with a sword and sheild. If Bob fights Sam, Sam use stuff like Force Cage and other hold me downs, completely negating Bob.
What Bob needs at that point is some teleport capability, but he doesn't get any from his class. So in preperation to fight a full-fledged wizard, Bob buys some Boots of Dream Hopping. Three times per day, he can use Dimension Door from a use activated item. Sam can also make those boots for himself. He also has contingeant spells and quickened spells.
Bob teleports out of the cage and tries to hit Sam. Sam's contingeant spell triggers and teleports him 50ft away. Sam then cages Bob again. Bob uses his second teleport, and Sam uses a quickened teleportation spell again. Repeat once more. Now bob can't teleport. Sam pulls out his scrolls. Game. Set. Match.

Nerfing the world at large hurts the melee dudes. They need absolutely insane magic items to keep up with mages, which is the problem. A bare naked fighter vs a bare naked mage is not a fair fight past level 7.

[Wensleydale]

Yeah. Using the present rules, at low levels mages suck and fighters slaughter. As you get to higher levels, the mages slowly catch up to, and then take over, fighters and don't slow down, until at level 20 a mage can hammer a fighter to pulp without the fighter laying a finger on them.

Fighters need scaling weapon bonuses or something like that.

Now, if you take away a wizard's spellbook or put it in an antimagic field... muahahaha...

[Tybalt]

Forgive me for sounding annoyed, but it is MY campaign world, not yours. I'm not condemning what everyone else is doing, merely saying that these are my preferences and that they work for me. At the start of the thread, suggestions and ideas were requested,based on what we'd experienced in running our own games. I've never had a problem with my fighter characters feeling unbalanced. Yes, there are those moments when a particular powerful spell is used that is awfully impressive, but it always comes as a cost. Furthermore, if say there is a pivotal magic sword that has to be used it's going to be a fighter, not a magic-user.

[Epic Meepo]

Using the present rules, at low levels mages suck and fighters slaughter. As you get to higher levels, the mages slowly catch up to, and then take over...

I agree with this general premise. Casters do tend to be top-heavy compared to warriors. (The PHB II helped a little bit with its interesting feats for high-level fighters.) Then again, I'm not so sure that casters are as vastly superior at high levels as everyone assumes. They do have an offensive advantage in many situations, but they still break fairly easily.

Returning to the main point of the thread: what don't I like about magic in the context of a world where magic items are limited? Well, once you add that last stipulation, then obviously, something must be done to curtail spellcasters (and monsters and traps) by an equal amount. As to how exactly that must be done, I'm not sure I can help you with that one. Game balance is a surprisingly delicate thing, and when making radical rules changes, I'd recommend constantly making adjusments to the rules as you play. It's almost impossible to get things right just by looking at new rules on paper.

Everything in D&D is specifically designed and (at least in the Core rules) fairly well-balanced for a particular style of play, one where a specified amount of treasure is distributed and encounters occur at a specified pace. In my experience, outside of that framework, game balance is up in the air.