Should Magic Work Better?

[No Idea]

I'm definitely not a numbers person. I never have been. This makes playing DND troubling at times for me but I adjust. One thing I seem to continue to have a hard time wrapping my mind around is spell DC's but not so much for the math.

Maybe I'm looking at this totally wrong but I think being able to simply shrug off a spell should be a fairly rare occurrence. It seems like its easier to save vs something than it should be. I'm not going to begin to get into the massive amount of arithmetic involved in this question (you are all welcome to of course) and try to address it from more of an RP standpoint.

Consider the fact that a spellcaster has presumably spent the majority of his life honing his craft. Should it really be so easy to defend against his attacks? I'm not saying that a fighter should be defenseless against him, I just think if a caster throws a spell he should have a reasonable expectation that its probably going to work.

Any thoughts?

[Zaydos]

Believe me, save DCs are high enough. Others will probably explain why.

[Prodan]

Consider the fact that a spellcaster has presumably spent the majority of his life honing his craft. Should it really be so easy to defend against his attacks? I'm not saying that a fighter should be defenseless against him, I just think if a caster throws a spell he should have a reasonable expectation that its probably going to work.

Any thoughts?

No. No. Nonononono. If you want an explanation as to why, try DMing a game where the save DC of spells is much higher with me playing a spellcaster.

[Tyndmyr]

Magic is plenty good. If shaking off save spells becomes too rare, SoD's rule the world.

EVERYONE in D&D has spent their life honing their craft. So nobody deserves an autowin button.

[Dairun Cates]

You see that part where it says D&D is for 2-6 players and a GM? That's because it's a cooperative game. You put the DC's higher than any player can get and you risk just over-powering everything. It's already well-established that Wizards and other spellcasters are the most powerful classes in the game. They actually don't need the push. Some saves are only failed 1 in 3 times because the battle is over when they do.

On top of that, the saves aren't as low as you think. They can easily be buffed, and every person and thing is likely to have a low save. A 17 fort check is nothing for a fighter, but a bard or rogue might have a harder time with their 4 fort save.

On a side note, I actually fail to see where the concept that magic should be an infallible, omniscient solution to everything comes from really. It's not actually very well supported in anything other than D&D and a few rare cheesy things that are often intended for children. There's actually about as much literature supporting non-magical heroes outwitting powerful evil wizards with talent and agility.

[Tyndmyr]

That's a good point. The OP says that he thinks magic should work better, but he never explains WHY it should.

[Ragnarok'n'Roll]

If anything magic should be toned down :smallwink:

[Jarawara]

Consider the fact that a spellcaster has presumably spent the majority of his life honing his craft.


This is what I see as a big misconception, which undercuts the OP's proposal. The spellcaster HAS NOT spent the majority of his life honing his craft. Check around through the majority of D&D campaigns, and you'll find that in most the PC's go up in levels at a fairly brisk rate. In gameworld-time, it often takes only a few months time to go through a full range of levels, sometimes all the way to 20. It need only go to about 5-8 levels for the Wizard to dominate the game as written, taking only a few weeks of gameworld time to get there.

A person who spent his pre-game life honing his skills as a fighter could multiclass to wizard at 2nd level, then advance his skills within a few weeks to the point where he could singlehandedly dominate and overpower all of his classmates and his teachers back at 'big dumb fighter college'.

Now if it really did take *years and years* to hone one's skill - if level advancement was on the order of say, 1 level per year of playing (every week for a six hour session), then perhaps I could see how the Wizard player would expect a little more certainty out of his spells around the fifth or sixth year of playing.

But otherwise, becoming a high level wizard is a relatively short investment of time in a typical D&D game. Adding to their power and the certainty of their success... is a bad thing, IMO.

[Dairun Cates]

This is what I see as a big misconception, which undercuts the OP's proposal. The spellcaster HAS NOT spent the majority of his life honing his craft. Check around through the majority of D&D campaigns, and you'll find that in most the PC's go up in levels at a fairly brisk rate. In gameworld-time, it often takes only a few months time to go through a full range of levels, sometimes all the way to 20. It need only go to about 5-8 levels for the Wizard to dominate the game as written, taking only a few weeks of gameworld time to get there.

A person who spent his pre-game life honing his skills as a fighter could multiclass to wizard at 2nd level, then advance his skills within a few weeks to the point where he could singlehandedly dominate and overpower all of his classmates and his teachers back at 'big dumb fighter college'.

Now if it really did take *years and years* to hone one's skill - if level advancement was on the order of say, 1 level per year of playing (every week for a six hour session), then perhaps I could see how the Wizard player would expect a little more certainty out of his spells around the fifth or sixth year of playing.

But otherwise, becoming a high level wizard is a relatively short investment of time in a typical D&D game. Adding to their power and the certainty of their success... is a bad thing, IMO.

I'm honestly not getting the point you're trying to make here. Are you arguing that wizards should be overpowered because anyone with an int score can just take levels in wizard or are you arguing that level progression has nothing to do with life experience because it progresses fast in a campaign.

If it's the second one, the PCs are often considered the rare exceptions. That 13th level town guard captain probably has a few big adventures under his belt, but the vast majority of his experience IS just basic guard duty. He just learned more from those big adventures. Adventurers that go from a low-level to high in a short time because of an epic adventure are generally supposed to be people that DID train to become the classes they are and have to rise to the occasion in the face of great adversity. It's either learn years worth of learning in months or die. That doesn't mean that druid that's spent decades protecting his grove from mostly harmless low level peasants didn't take years to get to his level.

That said, even as a level 1 wizard or fighter, it really doesn't mean your character just picked it up over night. Furthermore, that doesn't really speak to the real problem here of why magic INHERENTLY should be more powerful than anything else instead of just another option. Why SHOULD Wizards automatically be more powerful than anyone else?

[Reluctance]

If the wizard is casting his spells at just some guy, "just some guy" in the D&D world will have a +1 to save at best. +3 if they really devote themselves to it. A 5th or 6th level wizard with minimal optimization will beat the average joe 3/4 of the time, and the focused commoner 2/3 of the time.

The mistake you're making is assuming that the opponents a wizard faces off against are some schlub off the streets. These are people who have trained themselves just as hard in order to be master martial artists, expert stuntmen, or equally powerful masters of magic. Others have covered the reasons why boosting DCs is bad for the game. It bears mention how treating the mundane as mundane also hurts it.

[Dairun Cates]

These are people who have trained themselves just as hard in order to be master martial artists, expert stuntmen, or equally powerful masters of magic.

Your D&D campaigns must be awesome.

[No Idea]

Thanks for the great insights. Maybe my issue with the way magic works isn't so much about the mechanics but the way I picture spells failing. Does anyone have any good ways to describe a saved spell other than, "The wizards charm spell doesn't work on you."

[AmberVael]

Think about it this way: It's not about the magic failing, but the character succeeding.

The charm is cast just fine, but the character shrugs it off. "You feel magic begin to creep into your mind, but force it away with an effort of will, barely managing to maintain control."

[Prodan]

You deflect it with your massive brain.

[BobVosh]

Thanks for the great insights. Maybe my issue with the way magic works isn't so much about the mechanics but the way I picture spells failing. Does anyone have any good ways to describe a saved spell other than, "The wizards charm spell doesn't work on you."

After a brief mental struggle vs his cantrip you manage to resist.

*cantrip as in the actual word, not the D&D term*

Your mind proves too strong for such a weak magic to oppress.
Your ability to hate the wizard proves powerful against his magic friendship ability.

[Mnemnosyne]

Yeah, they are called will, fortitude, and reflex for a reason. Will saves mean your will was strong enough to overcome the magic attempting to affect you - the magic is essentially trying to trick or otherwise subvert your will, but you see through it or fight it off.

Fortitude means the magic is trying to physically affect you, but your physical condition is good enough that the magic which would have destroyed a lesser person can't quite find a weakness in your condition to attack.

And reflex obviously means you deftly dodged whatever the magic was throwing at you, perhaps as simply as ducking and covering yourself with your cloak to take half-damage from that Fireball.

[lesser_minion]

Magic shouldn't be all-powerful. You should be able to do things no mundane can dream of, but you shouldn't be invincible. 3rd edition tries to make wizards capable of portraying every kind of wizard or sorcerer in folklore or contemporary stories simultaneously, which doesn't work.

Basically, magic should be limited enough that you don't have to weave completely ridiculous capabilities out of whole cloth for your mundane characters or risk them being blown out of the water.

To be honest, the game probably shouldn't discriminate between magic and the absolute pinnacle of 'mundane' achievement (even if only because it actually does make sense to think of said pinnacle as being magic in its own right).

[Zeta Kai]

Enchantment: "Your mind suddenly becomes flushed with thoughts of [utter despair/blind obedience/inexplicable friendship/paralyzing fear], but you find them foreign & unnatural. You shrug them off with a shudder, clearing them from your psyche through sheer force of will."

Illusion: "Something about the scene before strikes you as... just wrong. You can't put your finger on it, but you simply cannot trust what you see. Blinking & rubbing your eyes, you look again to see the world for what it really is, & not what others would have you believe."

Transmutation: "You feel a wave of arcane power wash over your body, pulling & twisting it into a new shape. But you are stronger than most, tougher & more resilient, so you are able to resist the warping energies before they are able to alter your form from its natural state."

[Snake-Aes]

It's more that your expectations are thwarted than anything else.
Remember that adventurers are statistically rare. One of the most over-the-top scenarios I know have 8% of the populace being adventurers. Levels are also hard to come by. Most people won't ever reach level 5 or 6 in an npc class. Those who do so in pc classes are even more rare.


People who have the power to shrug off spells like you are saying are heroes exactly because they already surpassed human capabilities. They're just that badass.

[awa]

also remember their are a lot of spell that do not allow saves (perhaps to many)

edit also you can often tell what a creatures good save is going to be and target it's bad saves drastically increasing the odds of failing the save.

[Greenish]

Remember that adventurers are statistically rare. One of the most over-the-top scenarios I know have 8% of the populace being adventurers.Sharn - The City of Towers mentions that about 8% of the populace are members of player classes, and says that "Cities represent the largest concentrations of non-commoners in the world". That is to say, only 80% of Sharn's denizens are commoners.

[Morty]

Bear in mind that because a magician spent years trying to figure out magic doesn't mean it should be easy. The very fact that someone can use magic to try and make a dozen people think they're monkeys requires lots of arduous study. Even if a half of them resist it, the other half will think they're monkeys becaue someone waved his or her arms around speaking some funny words. That's incredible enough, if you ask me.

[Aroka]

Thanks for the great insights. Maybe my issue with the way magic works isn't so much about the mechanics but the way I picture spells failing. Does anyone have any good ways to describe a saved spell other than, "The wizards charm spell doesn't work on you."

I think you do have a point, but to implement it, you'd need a whole new system that replaces all the spells and balances them against the options available to everyone else. Basically, you'd want something where spells always have an effect even when you resist them - just a lesser effect. Sleep would put you to sleep on a failed slave, or daze you on a successful save, and so on. This is actually implemented with a lot of powers in D&D 4E.

But just giving D&D 3.X/d20 spells extra effects on a successful save would only make spellcasters more powerful and unbalance the game even more.

[Morph Bark]

Levels are also hard to come by. Most people won't ever reach level 5 or 6 in an npc class. Those who do so in pc classes are even more rare.

This is why I think it is the funniest thing that according to something somewhere in the DMG in a table with highest-level NPCs in a certain class in a certain city or town says that the highest possible leveled NPC you can come across is a level 28 Commoner.

If I recall it right, that is. It was hilarious enough for me to bother try and remember it.

[lesser_minion]

This is why I think it is the funniest thing that according to something somewhere in the DMG in a table with highest-level NPCs in a certain class in a certain city or town says that the highest possible leveled NPC you can come across is a level 28 Commoner.

The highest level commoner in a randomly generated town has a level of 4d4 + settlement modifier.

It's just a bizarre quirk of the way the NPC generation works for towns, really.

[true_shinken]

The highest level commoner in a randomly generated town has a level of 4d4 + settlement modifier.

It's just a bizarre quirk of the way the NPC generation works for towns, really.

And it's not like anyone ever stats those commoners anyway.

[Snake-Aes]

Nor does that roll even make sense for anything smaller than a planar hub level of city.

[lesser_minion]

Nor does that roll even make sense for anything smaller than a planar hub level of city.

The rules for NPC-classed NPCs are just plain ridiculous however you look at them, but I don't think you'd need a planar hub for that to happen.

A city with a population of over 40,000 is utterly huge. Yes, even bothering to roll for commoners is a total waste of time, but NPCs with levels higher than 16th are certainly possible in a city that size.

[chiasaur11]

In a word?

No.

In more words?

Definitely no.

Positively no.

Decidedly no.

Nu-uh.

[Greenish]

A city with a population of over 40,000 is utterly huge. Yes, even bothering to roll for commoners is a total waste of time, but NPCs with levels higher than 16th are certainly possible in a city that size.Hmm, Sharn (according to the book) had at least one level 19 commoner mentioned by name in it, and I think a level 19 magewright.

Of course, if 40,000 is "utterly huge", Sharn at 211,800 or so is probably "utterly gigantic".

[lesser_minion]

Hmm, Sharn (according to the book) had at least one level 19 commoner mentioned by name in it, and I think a level 19 magewright.

Of course, if 40,000 is "utterly huge", Sharn at 211,800 or so is probably "utterly gigantic".

For Medieval European fantasy (i.e. the baseline before magic), a city with a population of 40,000 represents a lot. The entire 'baseline' world has a total population of 20 million.

The more influence magic has, the bigger the known world gets, and the more densely-populated areas become even denser (basically the same effect you see as you up the tech level).

So in some settings, 200,000 is freaking gigantic. Eberron is not one of them.

[Aroka]

For Medieval European fantasy (i.e. the baseline before magic), a city with a population of 40,000 represents a lot. The entire 'baseline' world has a total population of 20 million.

The more influence magic has, the bigger the known world gets, and the more densely-populated areas become even denser (basically the same effect you see as you up the tech level).

So in some settings, 200,000 is freaking gigantic. Eberron is not one of them.

15th-century Moscow had a population of over 200,000. Medieval London, Paris, Genoa, and Venice were in the 40,000+ range. So you could definitely expect great city-states or the capitals of large kingdoms to be that big.

[Snake-Aes]

15th-century Moscow had a population of over 200,000. Medieval London, Paris, Genoa, and Venice were in the 40,000+ range. So you could definitely expect great city-states or the capitals of large kingdoms to be that big.

Not much more than that, though. Villages could be wiped out with sword and bow with just a couple dozen soldiers and an evening.

[Aroka]

Not much more than that, though. Villages could be wiped out with sword and bow with just a couple dozen soldiers and an evening.

What's that got to do with city sizes? Villages aren't cities.

[Eldariel]

I'm definitely not a numbers person. I never have been. This makes playing DND troubling at times for me but I adjust. One thing I seem to continue to have a hard time wrapping my mind around is spell DC's but not so much for the math.

Maybe I'm looking at this totally wrong but I think being able to simply shrug off a spell should be a fairly rare occurrence. It seems like its easier to save vs something than it should be. I'm not going to begin to get into the massive amount of arithmetic involved in this question (you are all welcome to of course) and try to address it from more of an RP standpoint.

Consider the fact that a spellcaster has presumably spent the majority of his life honing his craft. Should it really be so easy to defend against his attacks? I'm not saying that a fighter should be defenseless against him, I just think if a caster throws a spell he should have a reasonable expectation that its probably going to work.

Any thoughts?

I thought the same, initially. But it seems living things have their own innate magic aura, so to speak. Kind of animistic if you think. The inner magic allows a living (or magical) thing to resist the effects of a spell should they so desire; basically, think of it like the Force in EU Star Wars. Only certain people master it, but everyone has the subconscious defense mechanisms.

Obviously people who train their lives for combat also develop stronger defense mechanisms and in particular, those with lots of mental meditation grow very powerful in controlling themselves and thus negating magic trying to affect them. Basically, they can control their inner magical fields to stop the influence of the foreign magic.


That would be a fluff view on things. Mechanically, of course, saving throws are necessary. Otherwise you simply cannot give spellcasters abilities like "Charm Person", "Dominate Person", "Hold Monster", "Finger of Death" or similars simply because said ability will wreck anyone without similar magical defenses.

And yes, saving throw are already quite high enough. The one thing they do is necessite spending the level-up increases and cash on increasing your casting stat to keep up with the increasing saves, but if you do it (as you would normally, for extra slots too), then you'll stay on top of the curve rather easily (and absolutely wreck anyone when targeting their weak save). Spell Foci also get picked up naturally (for e.g. Archmage entry) and add few extra points here and there for the more Save-or-X rich schools.

[AdamSmasher]

The magic system assumes you have SOME influence but, for the same reason you can't punch a hole straight through a man in real life, other people can resist it and stop you.

The wizard's charm spell is just a voice in someone's head, their Will save is how loud they let that voice be. An attempted Slay Living stop's a man's heart, their Fortitude save is whether or not their body can figure out how to turn it back on.

And another thing. The average commoner (Read: you and me) has a +0 in every stat and every save, with a little variation. Roll a 3d6 for each stat, and that's what regular people deal with. So those save DCs are a lot higher than you think, PCs are just awesome.

[Snake-Aes]

What's that got to do with city sizes? Villages aren't cities.

and "Cities" will rarely be more than 2 per kingdom. You'll usually have one or two big ones since they're in good trade routes, and that's it. Remember demographic changes caused by the industrial revolution? It's more of the same. Eberron went through its own industrial revolution, but other settings didn't.

tl;dr: Cities are rare.

[awa]

depending on the setting(in regards to cities or their lack) ive never played in what i consider a realistic midevil setting and i would bet that is the norm

[Aroka]

and "Cities" will rarely be more than 2 per kingdom.

Really?

Paris, Toulouse, Orleans, Rouen, Reims, Grenoble, etc.

Not all were the size of Paris, obviously, but there were plenty of cities in some medieval realms.

Villages were plentiful, too. They might have been small, but you'd find many within a day's ride of each other. Before the Black Death, 14th-century France had a population density as high as 100 people/square mile, with a population estimated at around 20 million (compared to 66 million now).

[Satyr]

Folks, the middle ages are a time period of roughly a thousand years. It is hard to generalize such a large time span, especially when some significant changes took place in this time.

And when it comes to the works of magic, it really shouldn't work any better, to the contrary. Magic in D&D 3.5 is way, way too simple. It is basically a lot easier to learn a few spells than it is to learn how to reliably hit somebody with a large stick, a task baboons manage quite easily.