Quote Originally Posted by Quertus View Post
Recent threads about Vancian casting have me wondering: how much diversity do various magic systems out there actually encourage in practice?

I can think of two different things out might be valuable to measure: build diversity, and play diversity.
Every system that has vuild diversity has good and bad options, even if designers heavily try to avoid it. One can try to fix them with errata or new editions.

MtG has those as well. And they use rotation instead of new editions. And they bring specific counters to the previous set in most new sets. And they have banlists. And it is still far from perfect. An RPG can't really reach the same level of balancing.

So play diversity would be lower - if people really did play the most powerful options all the time. But that is rarely what happens. More often players choose options in a power range where the system works well, some kind of sweet spot.


If you want diverse spellcasters, you want a system, where learning different kinds of magic does cost ressouces, maybe more that it is worth because of redundancies. Systems where you pay for schools or spells like skills work fine. Ars Magica, Mage, Splittermond, TDE Myranor, Ilaris and many others go this way and it works fine. Personally i like best if not each spell is a skill but each schol/theme is a skill so that you get thematically focussed spellcasters, not spellcasters who cherrypick from all spells in existence.


Not really interested in D&D2 vs. D&D3, they are pretty much the same anyway.