Your Favorite Spellcater weakness

[Orzel]

What are your favorite and least favorite flaws of spellcasters in RPGs and general fantasy?

Weak in combat? Magic turns you blind? Massive insanity? Faith based rules? Technology hates them? Demons think you're tasty?

[Gensh]

I enjoy it a lot of times when there's nothing wrong with magic in and of itself, but the big things and the not-so-nice things like necromancy have severe consequences for use. Each individual spell might not do much, but when raising an army of the dead can potentially open a portal to the netherworld, unleashing Lovecraftian horrors unto the world, things get a little more interesting for everyone.

[Snake-Aes]

A cost that most find too expensive to be worth studying. Usually that comes in the form of insanity or impracticality.

[Dark_Nohn]

My first instinct to respond to this from reading the title only was "Rogues," but I find that a sort of "Magic is its own price" tends to be one of my favorite themes, (a la Sorcerer's Apprentice.)

[SurlySeraph]

I always like spells that have hidden downsides, like Flight that can run out in midair or summoning spells that do not guarantee control over what you summon.

[Benly]

I like Unknown Armies, where magic is essentially a side-effect of either being a certain kind of crazy or living as if you were. On the whole you'll probably have a happier and more fulfilling life being sane and non-magical.. but who would want to not be magic?

[Quellian-dyrae]

I like your basic magic drains your energy/tires you out, at least for most combat and general utility spells. For the major ones, I like going into big, expensive, time-consuming, and maybe just a little dangerous rituals.

[Urpriest]

I've got a soft spot for the Discworld balance: Magic takes exactly as much energy as it would take to do the action via normal means. You want to lift something with magic? You can out with telekinesis, but it's as exhausting as if you happened to have a lever. This way, fewer catgirls need be sacrificed.

[MrLich]

Stun damage and possibly lethal if you try hard enough from SR 4ed. Though honestly the system could use a little twinking in my opinion. It was a little too rough unless you had ridiculous amounts of drain resistance even then you had to roll lots of successes.

[herrhauptmann]

I've got a soft spot for the Discworld balance: Magic takes exactly as much energy as it would take to do the action via normal means. You want to lift something with magic? You can out with telekinesis, but it's as exhausting as if you happened to have a lever. This way, fewer catgirls need be sacrificed.

More than just that, if you want to levitate to the top of a tower, you need something tha weighs as much as you to fall to the ground.
Long range teleport seems to work as more of a transposition effect. And if the thing is far heavier, you'll arrive at your destination at say 40 mph. If you're lucky, you go flying into a snowbank.
I also like how the discworld mages tend to be useless for magic if they're thinking about other things, say food, music, sex.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I like the "magic is intelligent" angle, like the original books off which Vancian magic is based. Whether this takes the form of beings that must be bargained with for power each time a spell is cast, minor spirits that actually carry out the magic, some sort of latent intelligence in magic itself (like if the Force had a tendency to meddle directly in things), or individual spells or sorts of magic with sentience and goals of their own, a "caster weakness" whereby the caster himself is perfectly fine but the magic might not do what he wants is one I find more appealing and, well, magical than one where it's a predictable trade of sanity/energy/health/etc. for power.

[Hague]

The way magic works in Mage is pretty interesting. If your magic conflicts too much with reality (or rather, the collective perception of reality) then it makes reality unstable and Bad Things(tm) happen.

[Kaww]

When I saw the tittle my first thought was golems.

From the list you gave I'd go with insanity - most interesting and most dangerous.

[Werekat]

As a DM? The fact that the more rope you give people, the more likely they are to hang themselves on it.

As a player? My favorite spellcasting archetype is the diviner, so the whole "Cassandra syndrome" thing works well. If not that, then: because you usually deal with stuff outside normal perception and\or spend most of your time with things others either can't or won't bother to comprehend, you are usually pretty maladjusted to the social world at large.

You're not insane; but you might as well be for all things that matter socially, and you don't even have insanity to shield you from that understanding. You either lie or live in seclusion.

[panaikhan]

Being asleep.

-edit- oh, we're not trying to kill the spellcaster? sorry

[Tyrrell]

I like wizard's twilight from Ars Magica.

Every time a mage screws up a spell or he is subject to powerful magic not attuned to him or he is under influence of a magical effect even a weak one for a long period of time they become a little less a part of the world and a little more a thing of magic.

After enough warping the magician can absorbed by his magic for minutes to weeks to months by a mishap and one day the magician will just disappear into twilight forever.

For this reason the more powerful magicians are often very hesitant to use anything but magical devices or very simple spells. They'll refrain from powerful rituals or adverse environments whenever they can for fear that their next spell will be their last.

[J.Gellert]

For me... no in-built weakness in magic. It isn't as if the universe is arbitrarily trying to enforce some kind of balance between magic users and normal people.

Instead, it's powerful. The most important people in the world are spellcasters. And the only penalty is this... power corrupts. I simply can't think of one single person who would have, for example, the power of mind-control, and he wouldn't abuse it.

Invariably, even when they are nominally "good", spellcasters are terrible people.

PS. And if you kill a mage violently, things go kaboom, so people don't mess with mages, too.

[Snake-Aes]

So your chosen weakness is that it's too awesome? :p

I find blaming people for putting limitations on magic to be rather... wasteful. Magic is as powerful as whatever writer is interested in making it be. If in some world magic is absolutely useless to keep mudkips from breaking into your lawn, then that's it. It's that world's absolute truth and saying "it shouldn't be like that" is like bitching IRL that "Gravity is too high".

[Coidzor]

Well, as an audience we get certain expectations and if it doesn't suit our tastes for magic to not be magical enough, there's not a whole lot one can consciously do about that.

We have people who balk at certain magic systems for being too much like psychic powers and balk at psychic powers for being too "sci-fi," after all.

[J.Gellert]

I am not pretending to say how it should or shouldn't be in every piece of fantasy written. But they taught me at school, so many years ago, that it's redundant to say "in my opinion..." in every single thing you state; assume that anything written by anyone is a personal opinion unless stated otherwise. Even more so on the intraweb.

[Xallace]

t's that world's absolute truth and saying "it shouldn't be like that" is like bitching IRL that "Gravity is too high".

Darn that gravity; Always keepin' the working man down.


And anyway I dunno how I feel about limitations on magic in RPGs. I feel like a lot of the time it's not particularly wondrous, and certain types of drawbacks actually take away from that more. At the same time, little to no restrictions on what it can do doesn't sit well with me either.

Perhaps I'd be OK with magic if one of its biggest flaws was rarity. D&D in particular just overexposes me to spells and spellcasters, and pretty quickly it becomes a science that stops feeling "magical" anymore. I'd like it if we had less spells, but more spells to the tune of Prestidigitation - broader effects that you can get creative with, rather than each spell having a rigid course of action.

And, from there you can add anything you want as a flaw, really. Insanity, exhaustion, magical intelligence, whatever. I'd probably be cool with it, so long as I'm not overexposed to it.

[Snake-Aes]

I also enjoy magic with long term transformations upon the user, to the better and to the worse.

[Gensh]

I am not pretending to say how it should or shouldn't be in every piece of fantasy written. But they taught me at school, so many years ago, that it's redundant to say "in my opinion..." in every single thing you state; assume that anything written by anyone is a personal opinion unless stated otherwise. Even more so on the intraweb.

Intraweb would imply your home network, just FYI. I agree with you, though; sometimes it can be awesome if magic is really fundamentally altering the laws of the cosmos. It just doesn't work out so well if you're dealing with a game rather than a story; the 3.X deity rules are possibly the best example of this.

[Kurald Galain]

What are your favorite and least favorite flaws of spellcasters in RPGs and general fantasy?

Most favorite? Paradox, hands down. Nothing like being smacked around by the global subconscious for doing things people don't believe are possible.

[Postmodernist]

I like Unknown Armies, where magic is essentially a side-effect of either being a certain kind of crazy or living as if you were. On the whole you'll probably have a happier and more fulfilling life being sane and non-magical.. but who would want to not be magic?

+1. Sure, you're utterly bonkers, and believe you understand the secret fabric of reality. Sure you have to get blackout drunk or inflict injuries on yourself with a straight razor or have tantric sex in a very specific fashion or give up your memories or play russian roulette while jumping out of a moving car to work your mojo. You get to rewrite the world with your will alone. That's worth it right? Right?

[J.Gellert]

Intraweb would imply your home network, just FYI.

Really? I was just using a joke name for the internetz

[Lapak]

From RPGs, probably Paradox. Administered correctly, it forces inventiveness and attempts to find roundabout solutions to problems while still allowing for raw power if rushed or desperate.

From general fantasy, I like the system that Bujold used in her Chalion novels: the source of a magician's magic has its own agenda. The only two ways to get 'magic' are to be inhabited by either a demon or a god. Demons are chaotic in essence, seeking to increase disorder whenever possible, and usually eventually take over their hosts. Strong-willed sorcerers can last quite a while and use the power for their own ends, but the source of their power is still entropic at its core - they can't create, but they can destroy and rearrange.

Saints who host the power of a god have exactly as much power as they allow the god to have - the gods in those books can't act directly in the world unless and until some great-souled individual surrenders their free will to let them in, and that decision can be reversed at any time. So god-magic by definition can be used only for the purposes that god and host agree on; neither can act without the other's permission, essentially.

[Christopher K.]

My favorite weakness is in campaigns like Dark Sun, where the very price for the magic is life itself, so all those filthy hippies come after you. Stupid Halflings.

[Benly]

+1. Sure, you're utterly bonkers, and believe you understand the secret fabric of reality. Sure you have to get blackout drunk or inflict injuries on yourself with a straight razor or have tantric sex in a very specific fashion or give up your memories or play russian roulette while jumping out of a moving car to work your mojo. You get to rewrite the world with your will alone. That's worth it right? Right?

What I like best about it is that it doesn't feel like an artificial restriction. UA magic is belief with sufficient force to cause the world to comply, and someone who believes provably untrue things that strongly is pretty much definitionally crazy.

[Abemad]

I always liked the spellcasting system from black company campaign setting. There were about 30 or so spells, that could be combined and edited to whatever effect you wanted, although anything coming even close to standard high level d&d spells, would require incredible skill checks, which in turn required you to be very high level and/or sarcifice other souls, while slowly going mad yourself... Even the number of magic items were scaled down, and replaced by a more intricate system of masterwork quality