PDA

View Full Version : Balancing magic and mundane/tech



Silus
2013-02-08, 07:52 AM
So I'm working on creating a world for a home game I may be running soon for some coworkers, and something is nagging at the back of my mind.

Now, these players have never touched a tabletop game beyond MTG, and last thing I want is for them to get any preconceived notions about power tiers and whatnot. That way only leads to madness and cheese IMO.

So I'm looking for a way to level the playing field without handing out class-crippling nerfs.

The world in question so far is "high magic" in that magic is part of every day life, but you still need training to perform it. At the same time, technology has advanced to Industrial/Eberron levels where armored trains, firearms, steam and coal power are all a reality, as well as clockwork creatures.

So aside from increasing the tech that can double as magic, is there any way that I can try to balance out the power levels at all? I want to try and take the game from levels 1-10 and have all the players feel like they're equally contributing to the situation instead of the Wizard solving everything all the time.

Jack of Spades
2013-02-08, 08:07 AM
Give magic a cost.

Make each and every spell a risk of some kind, or make spells take a non-trivial amount of time or preferably other resources to cast. Or, find some reason that magic makes one a pariah or enemy of the state. Effectively, the only way to balance magic is to give mages a reason not to use magic unless they have to.

Needing training to use magic does nothing for balancing, as a character will have that training written into their backstory already.

Unless you're locked into using DnD already. Then there's not really much recourse.

Silus
2013-02-08, 08:24 AM
Give magic a cost.

Make each and every spell a risk of some kind, or make spells take a non-trivial amount of time or preferably other resources to cast. Or, find some reason that magic makes one a pariah or enemy of the state. Effectively, the only way to balance magic is to give mages a reason not to use magic unless they have to.

Needing training to use magic does nothing for balancing, as a character will have that training written into their backstory already.

Unless you're locked into using DnD already. Then there's not really much recourse.

I'm actually using Pathfinder but felt that this was a broad enough topic to warrant posting in the main forum >.>

The "enemy of the state" thing would work I think, as there's a rather large divide between magic and tech in terms of nations and independent cities. So like in a mostly tech city, people that openly use magic that are not part of a government sanctioned force (which the PCs will not be) will, at the least, be distrusted with lynch mobs being the worst case. The inverse (tech in a magic based city) would be less so, treating the tech users as inferior and as sort of upstarts.

Just off the top of my allergy ridden head at the moment >.>

supermonkeyjoe
2013-02-08, 08:29 AM
The setting reminds me a bit of that from Arcanum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura), In that setting magic and technology were naturally anathema to each other due to magic working by bending and breaking the laws of physics while technlogy runs of and reaffirms the natural laws.

Magic had a chance of failing in the presence of machinery and machines had a chance of breaking down in magical areas or in the presence of powerful/lots of spellcasters (so much so that mages were banned from trains and other technological conveyances)

If you want to seriously nerf magic then give it an inherent spell failure chance depending on the location, in the wilderness would be 0% in a small hamlet by a water pump may be up to 5%, in a bustling city by a steam engine surrounded my people with guns and pocket watches could get up to >50%, you could also have a plot where an inventor creates a mechanical device so intricate that it produces an antimagic effect around it.

Grod_The_Giant
2013-02-08, 08:35 AM
So aside from increasing the tech that can double as magic, is there any way that I can try to balance out the power levels at all? I want to try and take the game from levels 1-10 and have all the players feel like they're equally contributing to the situation instead of the Wizard solving everything all the time.

Um... bring Tome of Battle into Pathfinder (easy enough)? Otherwise... the magic-verses-mundanes thing is so engrained in 3.5/PF that you'll never be rid of the potential without system-wide revisions, sad to say.

Silus
2013-02-08, 08:44 AM
The setting reminds me a bit of that from Arcanum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura), In that setting magic and technology were naturally anathema to each other due to magic working by bending and breaking the laws of physics while technlogy runs of and reaffirms the natural laws.

Magic had a chance of failing in the presence of machinery and machines had a chance of breaking down in magical areas or in the presence of powerful/lots of spellcasters (so much so that mages were banned from trains and other technological conveyances)

If you want to seriously nerf magic then give it an inherent spell failure chance depending on the location, in the wilderness would be 0% in a small hamlet by a water pump may be up to 5%, in a bustling city by a steam engine surrounded my people with guns and pocket watches could get up to >50%, you could also have a plot where an inventor creates a mechanical device so intricate that it produces an antimagic effect around it.

This may work, though I'll probably see about keeping it as a background kinda thing as opposed to making the players keep track of their proximity to tech or magic. I'm thinking that I may take a page from the 3.5 Planar Handbook and use something like the Law/Chaos/Good/Evil Planar qualities but for magic vs tech.

Maybe something simple like "Well you're around some steam engines. Make a concentration check" or "Background magic is playing havoc with your gunpowder. Your misfire chance has gone up by 1" or something.


Um... bring Tome of Battle into Pathfinder (easy enough)? Otherwise... the magic-verses-mundanes thing is so engrained in 3.5/PF that you'll never be rid of the potential without system-wide revisions, sad to say.

I totally would look into doing this, but I don't have a hard copy of ToB, and as these are new players, I'm thinking hard copies would work better than PDFs (And I don't know who has a laptop at this point).

FreakyCheeseMan
2013-02-08, 09:16 AM
Tough one.

Personally, I'd try a different tack than what's been suggested. Giving magic a fail chance or risky side-effects doesn't seem likely to accomplish much - it'll frustrate mages, but it's not like they'll stop casting high-level spells, so it'll just make mages less fun to play. If magic is dangerous to the caster... that doesn't do that much, in my experience. Players will just cast until their mage gets himself killed, then roll another mage. What else are they going to do? Plus, if magic is unreliable, that greatly increases the chance of a TPK (cause your mage fails to counter some nasty spell), and cuts out any sort of tactical/strategic planning (As plans almost always include spell-casting, and if that spell's unlikely to work...)

Making magic "illegal" in-universe is even worse - when do PCs ever obey the law? That one won't make magic weaker, it will just make your players criminals.

Arcanum is a great game, but having magic power vary by region might not be the best idea for a team game. Things will rarely be fun for everyone.

Remember, for the most part, casting spells is all that mages can do. So long as that's the case, they're going to keep casting every turn, regardless of the cost. I would suggest that the first step to balancing mages is actually to give them something new - something like Warlock invocations, maybe. Reasonable power-per-turn trade off, so when you nerf their other spellcasting, they're actually less likely to cast.

You might have some fun increasing the material cost of costing, or even adding a light XP cost to every spell. In my universe, the "Currency" is actually magical fuel crystals, so it makes sense for money itself to be a spell component. This might work to encourage mages to find other solutions, but still have magic there when they need it - again, so long as mages have anything else to do.

I'm not sure how you'd adapt it to D&D, but in my universe, a lot of the world-changing magics are done by groups, not individuals. So, "Genesis" would be the product of hundreds of low-level mages working in unison, rather than a single Godlike mage - so, those sorts of powerful magics exist, but they're off-limits to the party.

If you want to give the other classes (particularly fighters) something to do, I always felt that the way to do so was through magic items. Something like a ring of dimension door that can be activated with a move action can give fighters a huge bonus - and, best of all, you decide what magics items get given to the party, so you can correct the balance as you go.

One thing I've considered as a quick-and-dirty fix is to just limit how many levels of spellcasting classes characters can take - maybe to a portion of their total level. Basically, force casters to multi-class; they still get spells, but they have to find other things to do with their builds as well.

Silus
2013-02-08, 09:44 AM
Tough one.

Personally, I'd try a different tack than what's been suggested. Giving magic a fail chance or risky side-effects doesn't seem likely to accomplish much - it'll frustrate mages, but it's not like they'll stop casting high-level spells, so it'll just make mages less fun to play. If magic is dangerous to the caster... that doesn't do that much, in my experience. Players will just cast until their mage gets himself killed, then roll another mage. What else are they going to do? Plus, if magic is unreliable, that greatly increases the chance of a TPK (cause your mage fails to counter some nasty spell), and cuts out any sort of tactical/strategic planning (As plans almost always include spell-casting, and if that spell's unlikely to work...)

Making magic "illegal" in-universe is even worse - when do PCs ever obey the law? That one won't make magic weaker, it will just make your players criminals.

Arcanum is a great game, but having magic power vary by region might not be the best idea for a team game. Things will rarely be fun for everyone.

Remember, for the most part, casting spells is all that mages can do. So long as that's the case, they're going to keep casting every turn, regardless of the cost. I would suggest that the first step to balancing mages is actually to give them something new - something like Warlock invocations, maybe. Reasonable power-per-turn trade off, so when you nerf their other spellcasting, they're actually less likely to cast.

You might have some fun increasing the material cost of costing, or even adding a light XP cost to every spell. In my universe, the "Currency" is actually magical fuel crystals, so it makes sense for money itself to be a spell component. This might work to encourage mages to find other solutions, but still have magic there when they need it - again, so long as mages have anything else to do.

I'm not sure how you'd adapt it to D&D, but in my universe, a lot of the world-changing magics are done by groups, not individuals. So, "Genesis" would be the product of hundreds of low-level mages working in unison, rather than a single Godlike mage - so, those sorts of powerful magics exist, but they're off-limits to the party.

If you want to give the other classes (particularly fighters) something to do, I always felt that the way to do so was through magic items. Something like a ring of dimension door that can be activated with a move action can give fighters a huge bonus - and, best of all, you decide what magics items get given to the party, so you can correct the balance as you go.

One thing I've considered as a quick-and-dirty fix is to just limit how many levels of spellcasting classes characters can take - maybe to a portion of their total level. Basically, force casters to multi-class; they still get spells, but they have to find other things to do with their builds as well.

What is your opinion on doing away with a whole school of magic (that being Conjuration)?

I ask because, after some though (and breakfast) I realized that most of the Summon Monster type spells would not work as there ARE no real "monsters" in this world (dragons, griffons, ect.) and the world is, for the most part, dimensionally locked, so demon/devil/angel/elemental incursions aren't a thing.

And thinking about it, it would essentially eliminate the Summoner class unless I tweak it a bit...

Jack of Spades
2013-02-08, 09:48 AM
Personally, I'd try a different tack than what's been suggested. Giving magic a fail chance or risky side-effects doesn't seem likely to accomplish much - it'll frustrate mages, but it's not like they'll stop casting high-level spells, so it'll just make mages less fun to play. If magic is dangerous to the caster... that doesn't do that much, in my experience. Players will just cast until their mage gets himself killed, then roll another mage. What else are they going to do? Plus, if magic is unreliable, that greatly increases the chance of a TPK (cause your mage fails to counter some nasty spell), and cuts out any sort of tactical/strategic planning (As plans almost always include spell-casting, and if that spell's unlikely to work...)

Making magic "illegal" in-universe is even worse - when do PCs ever obey the law? That one won't make magic weaker, it will just make your players criminals.

Remember, for the most part, casting spells is all that mages can do. So long as that's the case, they're going to keep casting every turn, regardless of the cost. I would suggest that the first step to balancing mages is actually to give them something new - something like Warlock invocations, maybe. Reasonable power-per-turn trade off, so when you nerf their other spellcasting, they're actually less likely to cast.

My own experience suggests the opposite results from what you exist. So, my anecdotes against yours, meaning this will go nowhere but OH WELL INTERNET MUST ARGUE.

1st point/paragraph: If you're playing the game more than the character, sure, just have your fighter run into battle strapped to a wagon-full of powder kegs. You can just roll another fighter, right? Losing a character (or some level of effectiveness/freedom with said character) sucks. Thus, restraint. Also, there are risks other than life and limb. In Warhammer magic has a chance of opening a gaping portal to the Warp. In Deadlands magic has a chance of allowing the manitou to wreak some kind of minor havoc on the world or the character (or allies nearby). In Lovecraftian tales you go insane (not necessarily due to magic, just sort of all the time). As for the reliability bit, that's part of the balancing: if you want a sure thing, put a bullet in the guy. If you want magic, you'll have to gamble.

2nd point/paragraph: If your world doesn't have ways to convince the PC's to follow the law at least most of the time (ie guards/lynch-mobs/lawful outsiders), then you are being either lazy or sloppy as a DM.

3rd point/paragraph: That'd be reason #13,472.43a that I hate DnD. Not only should mages be able to do other things, it's downright silly that they can't. Then again, it's not like that's restricted to mages-- rogues are pretty much the only core class the rules expect to see doing anything other than using class abilities outside of combat. If mages deserve anything "new," it should be the ability to go without magic for a round or two. Not more damn magic for them to use to outclass everyone else in the room even more.

@Silus: Pathfinder, eh? Well, you're kind of screwed. The power disparity is even bigger in PF, from what I've seen.

Also, feel free to ignore me if my buzzing amplifies any discomfort you are experiencing. That's what folks do with me in real life :smallwink:

Silus
2013-02-08, 09:57 AM
@Silus: Pathfinder, eh? Well, you're kind of screwed. The power disparity is even bigger in PF, from what I've seen.

Also, feel free to ignore me if my buzzing amplifies any discomfort you are experiencing. That's what folks do with me in real life :smallwink:

Well the players are new to the whole D&D thing so I don't expect them to try chain-gating or using any loopholes in magic or rules. Honestly I've not played in games higher than level 9, so I don't really know what to expect magic-wise.

Suppose I could try glorifying the whole combat maneuver things for those wanting to play melee. Dirty Trick, Trip, Disarm, Sunder, ect.. At least that way it's not just "Ok, I stab him again".

FreakyCheeseMan
2013-02-08, 10:13 AM
My own experience suggests the opposite results from what you exist. So, my anecdotes against yours, meaning this will go nowhere but OH WELL INTERNET MUST ARGUE.

1st point/paragraph: If you're playing the game more than the character, sure, just have your fighter run into battle strapped to a wagon-full of powder kegs. You can just roll another fighter, right? Losing a character (or some level of effectiveness/freedom with said character) sucks. Thus, restraint. Also, there are risks other than life and limb. In Warhammer magic has a chance of opening a gaping portal to the Warp. In Deadlands magic has a chance of allowing the manitou to wreak some kind of minor havoc on the world or the character (or allies nearby). In Lovecraftian tales you go insane (not necessarily due to magic, just sort of all the time). As for the reliability bit, that's part of the balancing: if you want a sure thing, put a bullet in the guy. If you want magic, you'll have to gamble.

2nd point/paragraph: If your world doesn't have ways to convince the PC's to follow the law at least most of the time (ie guards/lynch-mobs/lawful outsiders), then you are being either lazy or sloppy as a DM.

3rd point/paragraph: That'd be reason #13,472.43a that I hate DnD. Not only should mages be able to do other things, it's downright silly that they can't. Then again, it's not like that's restricted to mages-- rogues are pretty much the only core class the rules expect to see doing anything other than using class abilities outside of combat. If mages deserve anything "new," it should be the ability to go without magic for a round or two. Not more damn magic for them to use to outclass everyone else in the room even more.

@Silus: Pathfinder, eh? Well, you're kind of screwed. The power disparity is even bigger in PF, from what I've seen.

Also, feel free to ignore me if my buzzing amplifies any discomfort you are experiencing. That's what folks do with me in real life :smallwink:

So, for Paragraph 1 - even good roleplayers are usually a bit riskier with their characters than they would be with themselves, and so long as the only way their character has to make a difference is risky, they'll keep doing risky things. A lot of what you described - manitous, etc - I would say makes the problem worse. It takes mages from "Overpowered Super-Beings" to "Overpowered Super-Beings who routinely cause TPKs".

On the issue of legality... you can convince the players to follow the laws, so long as they still have legal things to do. But, when their character's entire point is to do magic, telling them not to do magic isn't going to work. You might be able to make things interesting by getting them to find ways to hide their casting, though.

My big issue is that, so long as mages have nothing else to do, they *will* cast - regardless of legality, expense or risk. So, you either have to take that ability away completely, or give them some other way of making a real contribution.

Jack of Spades
2013-02-08, 10:25 AM
So, for Paragraph 1 - even good roleplayers are usually a bit riskier with their characters than they would be with themselves, and so long as the only way their character has to make a difference is risky, they'll keep doing risky things. A lot of what you described - manitous, etc - I would say makes the problem worse. It takes mages from "Overpowered Super-Beings" to "Overpowered Super-Beings who routinely cause TPKs".

On the issue of legality... you can convince the players to follow the laws, so long as they still have legal things to do. But, when their character's entire point is to do magic, telling them not to do magic isn't going to work. You might be able to make things interesting by getting them to find ways to hide their casting, though.

My big issue is that, so long as mages have nothing else to do, they *will* cast - regardless of legality, expense or risk. So, you either have to take that ability away completely, or give them some other way of making a real contribution.

I should've been more clear, I suppose, that the negative effects I used as examples generally manifest in-game as something other than damage (something important breaks, social skills are impaired, fear rolls are made, or the like)-- although looking again I realize that those do sound like violent examples.

But yeah, place me firmly in the "something else to do" camp. I love playing mages, but I would hate playing a mage whose only purpose was casting spells.

Oh hey, that conclusion is actually relevant to the topic at hand, I just realized. Silus, try figuring out a way to give mages a way to be effective in combat (or other stuff, but who are we kidding) without magic. Then, any nerfs you make to magic won't be so debilitating.

Silus
2013-02-08, 10:45 AM
I should've been more clear, I suppose, that the negative effects I used as examples generally manifest in-game as something other than damage (something important breaks, social skills are impaired, fear rolls are made, or the like)-- although looking again I realize that those do sound like violent examples.

But yeah, place me firmly in the "something else to do" camp. I love playing mages, but I would hate playing a mage whose only purpose was casting spells.

Oh hey, that conclusion is actually relevant to the topic at hand, I just realized. Silus, try figuring out a way to give mages a way to be effective in combat (or other stuff, but who are we kidding) without magic. Then, any nerfs you make to magic won't be so debilitating.

Think making Wizards and Sorcerers auto-gestalted with Fighters would be too much? I mean sans the weapon and armor proficiencies (Maybe proficiency with Simple and a handful of Martial weapons). Give'em a sort of Gandalf feel ('cause at least in the movies, he didn't shirk from using his sword and staff instead of magic).

Edit: To clarify, keep the caster saves, give them Fighter BAB and some of the bonus feats (restricted as per the Fighter class) and eliminate Bravery, armor and weapons training.

Kamai
2013-02-08, 01:59 PM
Since you're looking at Pathfinder, would it just be reasonable to ban the Wizard/Cleric/Druid/Witch/Oracle, since you want to add features to nerf magic? If there's the issue of specific spells you need, you can expand the Paladin/Inquisitor/Magus/Alchemist spell lists a bit, and all of those classes can do something besides cast spells.

Also, for playing up maneuvers, it would be worth getting a way to make people not take attacks of opportunity for multiple maneuvers without massive investment, whether there's a maneuver defensively option, or a feat that does nothing but get rid of Attacks of Opportunity for multiple maneuvers.

NichG
2013-02-08, 05:35 PM
Your players are brand new to D&D, so Tier imbalance is going to be a lot less of an issue overall. So its not quite as necessary to jump through hoops to balance mundane and magic, and it'd be desirable to do as much as you can without making the rules more complex for the players. For something like this I disagree strongly with the 'make magic illegal/make magic have horrible consequences so that no sane person would use it' point of view - thats going to feel really punitive to new players, and first impressions matter a lot. If they feel D&D is just MtG except one guy holds all the cards and just uses them to counter us, they're not going to want to keep playing.

I think the right way to do it is to buff up tech, and make tech use depend on other classes. The way to do it would be something like this:

Advanced technological items require a certain number of levels in particular class-categories as training. Lets say that roughly you sort classes into 'Caster, Infiltrator, Warrior, Medic' or something, where a given class might give advancement in multiple tracks if appropriate. You could have a Technician class that advances all tracks.

Where Tech conceptually has an advantage over magic is that it can be an all-the-time thing for everything but very high energy uses. So the caster can cast Sending at Lv7, but at Lv3 the Rogue has a subvocal transmitter that can constantly stream audio and video back to base or to the other PCs, and its only off when he wants it to be off. The caster can cast Righteous Might and be buff every so often, but the Lv7 Warrior might have a Clockwork Arm that constantly gives him a +4 Equipment bonus either to Dex or Strength (but never both at the same time).

Dsurion
2013-02-10, 07:38 AM
You could take a look at the Iron Kingdoms RPG :smallsmile: