The cost of magic

[Lord Raziere]

yeah I generally don't even bother with those kinds of moral magic systems or see them as absurd. I just replayed KOTOR 1: I played my character as a selfish but reasonable smuggler who didn't much like the Jedi but didn't want the Sith destroying everything they loved either. they got nothing but dark side powers, mostly went back and forth on the middle end of the force alignment scale and was mostly grey at the end and making decisions based on what I thought was right rather than what the game thought was right was more fun than optimizing my light side points.....but was still an unambiguous hero in the end because the game wasn't programmed with any middle ending option so you can be the worst possible person in KOTOR 1, but if you choose light side at the last second when speaking to Bastila at a certain point? you'll be hailed as a hero despite using the dark side or taking a whole bunch of other corruptive options throughout the game. you can even make Bastila jealous of how well you stay to the lightside despite being dark side leaning but not fully mechanically. it was more fun than if I had been truly staying lightside the whole time because it proves the whole moral system absurd and unneeded. as long as I made the right important decisions, I could do whatever I want when it didn't count.

and sometimes I just want to play someone who has the dark aesthetics without any of the actual horrible things that come with y'know? I mean yeah sure, you can argue that actions should have consequences and being this thing should mean something and all that, but sometimes I just want to sith force lightning wookie slavers to death without a jedi moralizing me about the sanctity of life and state of my soul, is that so wrong?

[Satinavian]

Unfortunately this sort of thing is very tricky in games. For one, morality-based costs of magic are tricky generally because they rely on at least some moral consensus among the audience in order to function (the aforementioned Star Wars has fought fandom wars about this for decades). They also often rely on a very religious idea that what happens in this life is really only a test for the afterlife, which allows for systems where doing evil = increased power = increased suffering for the innocent and that's somehow okay because it's only the next life that matters. This is arguably even true in a setting like D&D, where an given person is likely to exist for far longer as a petitioner than they were alive, but it allows for a lot of really weird thinking that can get very disturbing (the Euthanatos, from Mage: the Ascension, possess a worldview whereby killing people can actually serve as salvation for the people you just murdered and well...that book has a lot of disclaimers in it for a reason).

Beyond that, it can be very difficult to manifest moral consequences in a game scenario. For one, many players simply don't care if bargaining for power makes their character horribly evil or that Asmodeus now owns the character's soul because they don't intend on that debt ever coming due during a campaign. For another, having a system where the GM is obligated to say 'doing X makes your character more evil' may be rather meaningless because the GM's ability to induce a player to active role-player character degradation is highly limited. This leads to scenarios wherein PCs accumulate an ever-growing number of dark side points or some other evil counters without changing their portrayal one iota until they cross some arbitrary numeric threshold and are suddenly turned into a NPC.

Not sure about that. TDE has had "trade away your soul for extra power" for around three decades now and, while considering it more as an NPC option still provides rules for PCs doing since at least two decades.
And hardly ever any player does it, even if it mostly just presents some mechanical upgrade. It seems that the cost of your soul is something players want to avoid even without mechanical consequences.
As for "changing portrayal", there even is something as the system has drawback-rules for certain vices and selling your soul to some demon lord does mechanically increase the vice associated with that demon lord. So that is there. But there is no snowballing, no "more evil points for more bad behavior", no moral meter thing.


But as i said, that was originally designed for NPCs, it never was meant to be part of the magic system as such. It is just something demons do, power for your soul and that kind of power does not have to be particularly magical, you can just sell your sould to make your martial literally stronger.

[kyoryu]

Nope. They feel just as different from each other as 3e or 5e classes do. Just in different ways.

4e classes feel different in terms of what impact they have on the battlefield, what choices they make on a turn-by-turn basis.

They do not feel different in terms of "what resources do I have to manage".

So it's a matter of where you're looking for differentiation.

That said, no, 4e does not allow the level of differentiation that 3e did. I don't think that was its goal. But there's a lot of daylight between that and "they're all exactly the same". The chassis/resource management bits are, for sure (see my first two lines).

[ventoAureo]

Anyone mention Dungeon Crawl Classics yet? That system has a really interesting take on magic, imo. Basically, most spellcasting is Wild Magic in that the manifestation and spell effects of a spell vary entirely on your Spell Check roll. Unlike Vancian magic, you can cast all day long but if you roll a sufficiently low enough result on the spell table for your Spell Check, you'll lose the spell for the day. And losing the spell for the day is the best case scenario for magic going wrong. The spell might backfire, or inflict some sort of corruption upon your wizard.

There's also Mercurial Magic, which is an effect you roll for each time you learn a new spell. It affects your spellcasting of that spell, and essentially makes it so that, even if you and a fellow party member both know Magic Missile, you each cast it differently. And it's quite risky, too, since your casting of it might require for someone you know to die while your teammate's casting might physically or mentally corrupt them unless they sacrifice ability score points to negate this.

There's a lot of costs to using magic in DCC, basically, but rolling high and using Spellburn (the aforementioned sacrifice of ability points) means the pay-off can be huge even if you pay a price. Even so, Mercurial Magic, can shift things up when it comes into play, for better or for worse.

[Cluedrew]

I did plan out a magic system that had an unusual cost for its magic system: your magic "skill" was also used as a penalty in other places. Where it is a penalty can really effect what the cost is. If it poisons your body take it away from your physical skills, if it twists your mind take it away from intellectual skills, if it separates your from other people take it away from social skills and if it leaves you open to the other world it reduces your magic defense. Whatever fits the setting.

As an aside its always weird to me when I see people complaining about 4th edition and can't help but think: "But isn't that every edition of Dungeons and Dragons?"

[Quertus]

Eh, it's closer to 'everybody has a fruit salad', there's likely grapes in there but not everybody's got apple or kiwifruit. Mine has guava, because I'm the weird guy who bought the 'American Plants' supplement.

Now there is less variety in 4e, bit not to the absurd degree that people claim. The four roles all benefit from different combat playstyles, each class throws some twists on how it executes it's role, and selecting different powers can make two characters of the same class feel different. Now 4e does focus on combat,

The argument was that all variety in 4e is basically minor flavour. Which isn't true, it's just a bad reaction to 1) 4e not providing as much diversity as 3.X,

Which is the reason for the fruit salad analogy, yes there's a lot of similarities between one fruit salad and another, but if I make two fruit salads with different fruits eating them is going to be two different experiences.

I've only ever seen 4e characters as bland paste, of the sort that "Create Food and Water" would make.

Sure, *part* of that could be the focus on combat abilities, I guess. And *part* of that could be the samey nature of the recharge mechanics - even red box probably had more diversity than 4e, with tables, at will vs Vancian vs % chance vs stat roll. Yes, I recognize the statistical, mathematical similarities of several of those, but they still *felt* different.

And that's my point.

I simply can't see how 4e characters *feel* different, even viewed as a minis war game.

Terrans think, Protos plan, Zerg feel.

An Awesome will stand and deliver and care about people getting too close; a Jenner will race behind terrain to get close, then dodge and pray nothing hits it while running for its life.

But *how* do 4e characters feel different? What's the vector that I'm missing to describe the difference in taste between these two(+) fruit salads, when I'm used to describing the difference between pizza, steak, croutons, and ice cream?

Unfortunately this sort of thing is very tricky in games. For one, morality-based costs of magic are tricky generally because they rely on at least some moral consensus among the audience in order to function (the aforementioned Star Wars has fought fandom wars about this for decades).

Beyond that, it can be very difficult to manifest moral consequences in a game scenario. For another, having a system where the GM is obligated to say 'doing X makes your character more evil' may be rather meaningless because the GM's ability to induce a player to active role-player character degradation is highly limited. This leads to scenarios wherein PCs accumulate an ever-growing number of dark side points or some other evil counters without changing their portrayal one iota until they cross some arbitrary numeric threshold and are suddenly turned into a NPC.

Nobody roleplays becoming more Green when they take a Green action?

Or, alternately, you go out, get drunk, come home, and flame people on some other website. The next day, should we notice that your alignment has become more "flaming" because you took a "flaming" action?

I think that human psychology is a bit too complex for this simplification.

As an aside its always weird to me when I see people complaining about 4th edition and can't help but think: "But isn't that every edition of Dungeons and Dragons?"

Insert my obligatory commentary here

[KineticDiplomat]

As a game design point, regardless of fiction, I strongly support hard costs on magic. Magic almost inevitably ends up more powerful than anything else in a system either through straight mechanics or because of “its MAGIC!” giving it vastly greater utility value than anything else.

If you try to constrain that with soft limits, you’re done for, because it’s a rare GM who will “get in the way of a player’s fun” even if said “fun” is miserably overpowered and negates entire swathes of core gameplay for other people.

The flip of which is when you don’t have hard costs, you try to balance magic by making somethings patently ridiculous, especially is directly measurable damage - of course you can be hit by lightning three to four times!

So let serious power come at a serious price, and make sure there’s consequences.

Because other wise you get D&D, and as we know, that’s a really crappy way to do magic.

[Segev]

As a game design point, regardless of fiction, I strongly support hard costs on magic. Magic almost inevitably ends up more powerful than anything else in a system either through straight mechanics or because of “its MAGIC!” giving it vastly greater utility value than anything else.

If you try to constrain that with soft limits, you’re done for, because it’s a rare GM who will “get in the way of a player’s fun” even if said “fun” is miserably overpowered and negates entire swathes of core gameplay for other people.

The flip of which is when you don’t have hard costs, you try to balance magic by making somethings patently ridiculous, especially is directly measurable damage - of course you can be hit by lightning three to four times!

So let serious power come at a serious price, and make sure there’s consequences.

Because other wise you get D&D, and as we know, that’s a really crappy way to do magic.

Perhaps suggest some costs? That's what this thread is about. The only counterpoints to having costs so far have been how they tend to either be nothing but fluff, or tend to be so crippling that magic is unusable. So if you have ideas and suggestions that thread that needle, they'd be of interest.

[Telok]

Perhaps suggest some costs? That's what this thread is about. The only counterpoints to having costs so far have been how they tend to either be nothing but fluff, or tend to be so crippling that magic is unusable. So if you have ideas and suggestions that thread that needle, they'd be of interest.

AD&D Haste, that worked. Or run it off some skills so one 'class' isn't able to be omnipotent, stick the ability to flex spells linked to raising the difficulty, and stick a penalty on rolling too well when casting. It works in other systems. Not going to happen in D&D these days though.

[NigelWalmsley]

The flip of which is when you don’t have hard costs, you try to balance magic by making somethings patently ridiculous, especially is directly measurable damage - of course you can be hit by lightning three to four times!

Ridiculous: surviving multiple lightning bolts.
Not Ridiculous: shooting lightning from your fingers.

The problem here is not magic. It's the idea that entirely non-magical characters need to compete with people who have abilities with names like "Finger of Death" and "Apocalypse From The Sky". You're not going to solve it by giving magic a cost, because any cost large enough to make "a regular dude" a competitive option in that environment is going to make playing a spellcaster absolutely miserable (not to mention deeply unsatisfying for someone whose idea of a wizard is someone like Doctor Strange or Harry Potter).

AD&D Haste, that worked.

You mean the thing where using it aged you? Because I would not describe that as "working". It's like having an XP cost (already a problematic mechanic), except even worse because the disparity in outcomes is even starker. At least if you spend too much XP, you get to keep playing your character at all.

[Lord Raziere]

Ridiculous: surviving multiple lightning bolts.
Not Ridiculous: shooting lightning from your fingers.

The problem here is not magic. It's the idea that entirely non-magical characters need to compete with people who have abilities with names like "Finger of Death" and "Apocalypse From The Sky". You're not going to solve it by giving magic a cost, because any cost large enough to make "a regular dude" a competitive option in that environment is going to make playing a spellcaster absolutely miserable (not to mention deeply unsatisfying for someone whose idea of a wizard is someone like Doctor Strange or Harry Potter).

No. both are ridiculous. some people just want the latter because it looks cool and thus ignore how its nonsense, which is how all fictional abilities work, magical or nonmagical.

On the flipside, the idea that magic needs to be superior or that any non-magical character needs to be a magic user in fluff to keep up is equally deeply unsatisfying to those want the martial equivalents of those things. if you can imagine hypothetical misery, perhaps you can apply such imagination to misery that already exists first?

also your continued use of "regular dude" is ignoring an excluded middle of highly competent nonmagical elites by insisting that the non-magical character in question is some mediocre incompetent and that any expression of competence is somehow magic.

[Telok]

You mean the thing where using it aged you? Because I would not describe that as "working". It's like having an XP cost (already a problematic mechanic), except even worse because the disparity in outcomes is even starker. At least if you spend too much XP, you get to keep playing your character at all.

I mean the part where the hasted side got two turns to everyone else's one turn causing basically an auto-win that was offset by the ageing triggering a system shock roll. Mind, it was still a 70% survival rate even at 10 Con that increased to 88% at 14 Con and 95% at 16 Con, but still quite a risk. It was not your 'cast it 4 times a day because it barely does anything' sort of spell, being rather more hardcore and powerful than a mere fireball.

[Anonymouswizard]

Didn't spells like Haste have a chance of killing you? I'm fairly certain magically aging a year forced a System Shock roll to avoid death.

I've only ever seen 4e characters as bland paste, of the sort that "Create Food and Water" would make.

Read the spell, you get actual, if bland, food items. Probably along the lines of some bread, unseasoned meat, and boiled vegetables. Or a bland stew and some bread.

But *how* do 4e characters feel different? What's the vector that I'm missing to describe the difference in taste between these two(+) fruit salads, when I'm used to describing the difference between pizza, steak, croutons, and ice cream?

Weirdly if this was actual food that might actually help you with describing the difference between two fruit salads. But I've done my best to explain, I'm not sure what else I could add.

Really, I'd just like 4e haters to realise that while the game isn't for them, other people do like it and sometimes for the very reasons they dislike it. And honestly the 4e fanbase is small enough that the likelihood of you being forced into a game is miniscule compared to other editions of D&D. There's no need to 'proove' that 4e is bland, broken, or anything else, WotC have already decided that well designed games aren't worth the effort and that they can just still us a half completed system that just looks a bit like the editions people liked. The 4e haters have won, there will never be actual design goals when writing new editions of D&D.

(Whether 4e should have been released as D&D is a separate issue.)

[Pex]

No. both are ridiculous. some people just want the latter because it looks cool and thus ignore how its nonsense, which is how all fictional abilities work, magical or nonmagical.

On the flipside, the idea that magic needs to be superior or that any non-magical character needs to be a magic user in fluff to keep up is equally deeply unsatisfying to those want the martial equivalents of those things. if you can imagine hypothetical misery, perhaps you can apply such imagination to misery that already exists first?

also your continued use of "regular dude" is ignoring an excluded middle of highly competent nonmagical elites by insisting that the non-magical character in question is some mediocre incompetent and that any expression of competence is somehow magic.

Nothing he said suggested non-spellcasters must not have Nice Things. The point is the better solution is to raise the power level of non-spellcasters to that of the spellcasters. There's no harm in lowering the power level of spells a bit, if that's a problem (5E did in comparison to 3E), but making it absolutely miserable to play a spellcaster via the high cost of casting a spell, i.e. punishing the character for do doing what he's supposed to be doing, is not a viable a solution. Players wanting to feel like, as in the examples given Doctor Strange or Harry Potter, are not doing anything wrong.

The misery that already exists is some players are not feeling like they're Conan, Indiana Jones, or Tarzan when playing along side with Doctor Strange and Harry Potter. The solution is to get Conan, Indiana Jones, and Tarzan into the game, not forbid Doctor Strange and Harry Potter.

[NigelWalmsley]

On the flipside, the idea that magic needs to be superior or that any non-magical character needs to be a magic user in fluff to keep up is equally deeply unsatisfying to those want the martial equivalents of those things. if you can imagine hypothetical misery, perhaps you can apply such imagination to misery that already exists first?

Magic doesn't have to be superior to non-magic. You could make magic weaker than or balanced with non-magic. But what you can't do is the reverse. There are magical characters that are balanced with non-magical ones. But there are also magical characters for which there aren't balanced non-magic characters. If your party is Doctor Strange, Caladan Brood, and Zorian, you're not going to fill in slot four with a non-magical character and get a balanced party. The best you can do is play a game of semantics and have the four character be someone like Ranger, who has abilities like "can cut things by thinking about cutting them" and "can cut holes between realities", but is nevertheless "not magic" because those abilities come from something that isn't called "magic" in-setting.

also your continued use of "regular dude" is ignoring an excluded middle of highly competent nonmagical elites by insisting that the non-magical character in question is some mediocre incompetent and that any expression of competence is somehow magic.

I'm ignoring the middle because it doesn't matter. We could go back and forth forever arguing about the exact point where competence stops being enough to compete with magic. But unless you want to argue that the point doesn't exist, the argument isn't worth having. Maybe it's Conan. Maybe it's Aragorn. Maybe it's Captain America. Maybe it's Logen Ninefingers. But does it really matter?

I mean the part where the hasted side got two turns to everyone else's one turn causing basically an auto-win that was offset by the ageing triggering a system shock roll. Mind, it was still a 70% survival rate even at 10 Con that increased to 88% at 14 Con and 95% at 16 Con, but still quite a risk. It was not your 'cast it 4 times a day because it barely does anything' sort of spell, being rather more hardcore and powerful than a mere fireball.

That still strikes me as absolutely terrible design. Having a 5% lose your character roll attached to an ability isn't really an interesting cost, and psychologically makes it very likely people will under-utilize the ability.

The 4e haters have won, there will never be actual design goals when writing new editions of D&D.

Have you ever listened to someone explain why they don't like 4e? It's not "because it had design goals". It's because it's a bad game. People don't dislike Skill Challenges because WotC laid out a bunch of targets for what they wanted them to do. They dislike them because WotC did that, missed those targets, then continued to miss them for iteration after iteration. Frankly, the worst thing about 4e is that it had this effect on the discourse. WotC made a bad, imbalanced game while talking a big game about balance, and now the entire TTRPG community is convinced that if you pursue balance as a design goal the only thing you can get is 4e. The reason people are still mad about the game is because it poisoned the well.

[Anymage]

AD&D Haste, that worked. Or run it off some skills so one 'class' isn't able to be omnipotent, stick the ability to flex spells linked to raising the difficulty, and stick a penalty on rolling too well when casting. It works in other systems. Not going to happen in D&D these days though.

AD&D Haste being a "you're awesome, but there's a small chance of you being dead instead" is too swingy even if it would be considered balanced over an arbitrarily long run. A character having a significant boost to damage output or having it drop to zero can have a major impact on how the overall encounter plays out.

You did touch on one thing that would be nice to change if it wouldn't cause fan outrage. Wizards and clerics are catch-all classes that do get too many effects, and that breadth plus a relatively easy ability to swap around their powers makes them a balance nightmare even if every individual power was balanced. More tightly themed caster classes could still get impressive effects without being able to bring all the effects to bear.

Really, I'd just like 4e haters to realise that while the game isn't for them, other people do like it and sometimes for the very reasons they dislike it. And honestly the 4e fanbase is small enough that the likelihood of you being forced into a game is miniscule compared to other editions of D&D. There's no need to 'proove' that 4e is bland, broken, or anything else, WotC have already decided that well designed games aren't worth the effort and that they can just still us a half completed system that just looks a bit like the editions people liked. The 4e haters have won, there will never be actual design goals when writing new editions of D&D.

(Whether 4e should have been released as D&D is a separate issue.)

The part that grabs me is that most of the time, even systems I don't like might have bits that I do think are clever or useful and might want to apply elsewhere. Whatever else people might say 4e did try to break some new ground, and many of its ideas are interesting additions to 5e. (At least in theory. Hit dice, short rests, and the Ritual Caster feat get overlooked a lot in active play from what I've seen, but that's mostly stylistic inertia.)

Never mind that anyone who's ever played a miniatures game or MMORPG can tell you how you don't need radically different mechanics to make two different things feel distinct. The part where any discussion of any 4e mechanic brings out such knee-jerk reactions makes me wonder why you have haters who are so invested in it.

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Edit:

Have you ever listened to someone explain why they don't like 4e? It's not "because it had design goals". It's because it's a bad game. People don't dislike Skill Challenges because WotC laid out a bunch of targets for what they wanted them to do. They dislike them because WotC did that, missed those targets, then continued to miss them for iteration after iteration. Frankly, the worst thing about 4e is that it had this effect on the discourse. WotC made a bad, imbalanced game while talking a big game about balance, and now the entire TTRPG community is convinced that if you pursue balance as a design goal the only thing you can get is 4e. The reason people are still mad about the game is because it poisoned the well.

There are a ton of legitimate criticisms for 4e. If anything, its first mention in this thread was how the ritual system was widely disliked, why that might have been, and what good and bad things we can learn about how to make magic balanced.

The criticism that did pop up here, and that tends to reflexively come up from the active 4e haters, was that it made all classes work the same. Which was a derail on top of being pointedly false. That goes beyond both "I tried it and didn't like it" and "meh, read it and it wasn't my thing".

[Anonymouswizard]

Have you ever listened to someone explain why they don't like 4e?

Yes. I'm humourously suggesting that 5e had no design goals. Which isn't far from the truth, it's main design goal seems to have been 'throw things at the wall until people start liking it'.

It's not "because it had design goals". It's because it's a bad game.

No, it's because it's a game they dislike. There is a difference.

People don't dislike Skill Challenges because WotC laid out a bunch of targets for what they wanted them to do. They dislike them because WotC did that, missed those targets, then continued to miss them for iteration after iteration. Frankly, the worst thing about 4e is that it had this effect on the discourse. WotC made a bad, imbalanced game while talking a big game about balance, and now the entire TTRPG community is convinced that if you pursue balance as a design goal the only thing you can get is 4e. The reason people are still mad about the game is because it poisoned the well.

WotC also spent a lot of time during 4e errataring the game to improve balance, so I'd argue that they were putting their money where their mouth is on that one. Sure, for some things they never actually got there, but it got a little bit better every time and at least there was a goal.

Also, unpopular opinion: I know people who enjoy Monopoly, therefore Monopoly is not a bad game. I don't like Monopoly and so will ask not to pay it, but that doesn't mean I should tell them that Monopoly is broken.

And honestly, I've not seen it affect discussion in communities about other RPGs, in fact they seem to be able to discuss balance without it coming up. It seems to be limited to a certain RPG fandom, where some people can't accept that other people might enjoy a certain edition.

The part that grabs me is that most of the time, even systems I don't like might have bits that I do think are clever or useful and might want to apply elsewhere. Whatever else people might say 4e did try to break some new ground, and many of its ideas are interesting additions to 5e. (At least in theory. Hit dice, short rests, and the Ritual Caster feat get overlooked a lot in active play from what I've seen, but that's mostly stylistic inertia.)

Oh, there's some great stuff in 4e. Reworking everything to 'attacker rolls', healing surges, rituals and skill challenges (although both need a cleaning up to add some more functionality). Even just letting Fortitude, Reflex, and Will work off the better of two stats was a great change.

Never mind that anyone who's ever played a miniatures game or MMORPG can tell you how you don't need radically different mechanics to make two different things feel distinct. The part where any discussion of any 4e mechanic brings out such knee-jerk reactions makes me wonder why you have haters who are so invested in it.

I don't know, it made more sense when it was the active edition and you were not likely to find a game of it. But while it's legitimate to dislike a game, I don't know why it gets so stereotyped with so many attempts made to lump it into 'not a working RPG'.

Remember the discussion about how Skill Challenges meant that 4e was more broken than Scion 1e? I do, mainly because I got to laugh at how Eric Donner is a hilariously badly built gunfighter again. But yeah, apparently Skill Challenges are worse than Epic Attributes (max Epic Dexterity. Nobody will be able to hit you and you'll get a bunch of extra damage from a really good hit) and Fatebinding (did you roll a godly power? Make a roll to see if a mortal assumes a role in the story, but probably only for twenty four hours and while in your presence. By endgame you're doing this at least every turn in combat).

[Segev]

There is a relatively common claim that gets named "the guy at the gym fallacy." That is, it doesn't count as nonmagical if it's too awesome. This leads to a claim that casters cannot be balanced against nonmages because players are expecting too much from casters and are by implication wanting to be too powerful.

This is an incorrect characterization of the situation.

What is being described as overpowered is high level play. What those saying they don't want their guy at the gym to have abilities they characterize as "too magical" is that they don't want to play in high level games. This is not a problem until they insist that the system is failing because it has levels above 5 or 10 or wherever they set the breakpoint.

The proper solution is to play games in the level range that gives them the power level they want. And to buff non-casters at higher levels without worrying that it is "magic" just because it's too over the top for a guy at the gym. Balance the levels of the classes and you can play your guy who is not too fantastic for your taste in games of a power level appropriate for them without demanding that the game simply not have more fantastic and powerful options.

[JoeJ]

Magic doesn't have to be superior to non-magic. You could make magic weaker than or balanced with non-magic. But what you can't do is the reverse. There are magical characters that are balanced with non-magical ones. But there are also magical characters for which there aren't balanced non-magic characters. If your party is Doctor Strange, Caladan Brood, and Zorian, you're not going to fill in slot four with a non-magical character and get a balanced party.

Non-magical characters do not have to be ordinary. "Batman is just dead weight on this team alongside Green Lantern, Zatana, and Superman," said no comic writer ever. Just the opposite in fact - Batman is frequently going to be the one who actually ends the threat while the others run intereference. This is due to a combination of Batman being awesome, and the universe being such that any team of superheroes whatsoever will repeatedly find itself confronted by problems that require the abilities of all of them to resolve. Both of those factors can be present in a game just as easily as they can in a comic.

[Pex]

Spoiler: 4E

Show

4E having attacker always rolls is part of how classes seemed samey. Yes, even in 3E and 5E spellcasters have spells that you roll to hit, but having the defender make a saving throw is a change of mechanics that makes a difference. Having different mechanics for things is what makes classes different. Everyone using the same mechanic all the time every time is the sameness. Labels may be different (fire damage, martial damage, radiant damage), but that's cosmetics. Everything is roll to hit to do damage. That's being samey. That's what was boring, to me.

[Segev]

Actually it's because the writers wrote it that way.

RPGs (ideally) don't depend on the DM writing them so that the less powerful are as useful as the overly powerful.

There's also a tendency for highly powerful supers to still have relatively narrow competencies. Dr. Strange can't hack a computer, or buy a space station, or deduce the key weakness to Darkseid's plan.

[NigelWalmsley]

Also, unpopular opinion: I know people who enjoy Monopoly, therefore Monopoly is not a bad game. I don't like Monopoly and so will ask not to pay it, but that doesn't mean I should tell them that Monopoly is broken.

Why not? No one is saying "don't play Monopoly" or "don't play 4e". They're saying "these games have flaws". You know what? People say that about most games! People say 3e has flaws. 3e fans do not respond by loudly wondering why everyone spends so much time hating on 3e. They just continue liking 3e, because 3e is a good game and they don't feel the need to silence any haters to continue enjoying it. Similarly, if you tell a Shadowrun fan "hey, the Matrix rules are kind of a mess", the response is going to be "yeah, but the game is still worth playing", not "how dare you imply that the Matrix rules are bad!".

There is a relatively common claim that gets named "the guy at the gym fallacy." That is, it doesn't count as nonmagical if it's too awesome. This leads to a claim that casters cannot be balanced against nonmages because players are expecting too much from casters and are by implication wanting to be too powerful.

I think that's misstating things slightly. It's not that "it doesn't count as non-magical". It's not that "cut a hole into the faerie realm and use it to infiltrate the lich's fortress" is actually a non-magical ability and the people who think that getting it would change the Fighter are being unreasonable. That's totally a magical ability. You can call it something else, but that's just semantics. The people who want to play Fighters who do not get these kinds of abilities are not wrong when they say these abilities are magical. They are wrong when they insist that non-magical characters are viable in high-level play.

The proper solution is to play games in the level range that gives them the power level they want. And to buff non-casters at higher levels without worrying that it is "magic" just because it's too over the top for a guy at the gym. Balance the levels of the classes and you can play your guy who is not too fantastic for your taste in games of a power level appropriate for them without demanding that the game simply not have more fantastic and powerful options.

This is absolutely correct. The solution to the problem, fundamentally, is to only allow character concepts that are viable in whatever environment you're working in. If you're running a gritty noir game, don't let someone be Superman. If you're running an epic fantasy game, don't let someone be Conan. This, incidentally, was a problem that 4e actually had a very good idea for solving: tiers. If you require that people upgrade their character concept from "Fighter" to "Angelic Champion" at the level where it stops being viable to rely on hitting people with sticks, you solve a huge portion of the problems people attribute to casters.

Non-magical characters do not have to be ordinary. "Batman is just dead weight on this team alongside Green Lantern, Zatana, and Superman,"

Batman is not a non-magic character. Batman is an Artificer//Rogue gestalt. Again, you can totally have characters that use abilities that are not called "magic". They can have technological powers, or psionic powers, or any number of other things. But they have to have some kind of powers. Also: Batman absolutely does receive massive power boosts in teamup comics relative to his abilities in solo stories. Batman doesn't break out the Hellbat when he's trying to take down the Riddler.

[JoeJ]

RPGs (ideally) don't depend on the DM writing them so that the less powerful are as useful as the overly powerful.

What an odd idea. Why would you not expect the GM to create/choose adventures that are good fits for the people at their table? An adventure that is too easy, or too hard, or that doesn't allow all the players a roughly equal chance to shine is a bad adventure for that particular group (although it might be an ideal adventure for a differerernt group).

There's also a tendency for highly powerful supers to still have relatively narrow competencies. Dr. Strange can't hack a computer, or buy a space station, or deduce the key weakness to Darkseid's plan.

In a well designed game, that should naturally happen during character creation.

[NigelWalmsley]

What an odd idea. Why would you not expect the GM to create/choose adventures that are good fits for the people at their table? An adventure that is too easy, or too hard, or that doesn't allow all the players a roughly equal chance to shine is a bad adventure for that particular group (although it might be an ideal adventure for a differerernt group).

The ability of the DM to tailor adventures to the PCs is not infinite. It's like the Simpsons Knightboat joke: yes, you can put a challenge that is reverse-engineered for every PC in every adventure. But it's better for everyone if PCs simply have ability sets that don't require you to do that. The game works better if the party is Superman, Doctor Strange, Green Lantern, and Iron Man than if it's Superman, Doctor Strange, Green Lantern, and Daredevil.

[JoeJ]

The ability of the DM to tailor adventures to the PCs is not infinite. It's like the Simpsons Knightboat joke: yes, you can put a challenge that is reverse-engineered for every PC in every adventure. But it's better for everyone if PCs simply have ability sets that don't require you to do that. The game works better if the party is Superman, Doctor Strange, Green Lantern, and Iron Man than if it's Superman, Doctor Strange, Green Lantern, and Daredevil.

Um... no it doesn't. Neither one works better than the other. Wait. Which game do you mean, because I guess in some systems that would be true, but it's by no means a universal principle.

[NigelWalmsley]

Um... no it doesn't. Neither one works better than the other. Wait. Which game do you mean, because I guess in some systems that would be true, but it's by no means a universal principle.

Why don't you tell me what system you think allows a character that requires contrived circumstances to be useful to not require contrivance to be useful. Don't make me tell you why you're wrong, tell me why you're right. Remember, the primary example here isn't even from a game, so it seems somewhat unlikely to me that you're going to make a compelling argument this is a system flaw.

[Anonymouswizard]

Spoiler: 4E

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4E having attacker always rolls is part of how classes seemed samey. Yes, even in 3E and 5E spellcasters have spells that you roll to hit, but having the defender make a saving throw is a change of mechanics that makes a difference. Having different mechanics for things is what makes classes different. Everyone using the same mechanic all the time every time is the sameness. Labels may be different (fire damage, martial damage, radiant damage), but that's cosmetics. Everything is roll to hit to do damage. That's being samey. That's what was boring, to me.

Because the rest of the 4e discussion is just going to go in circles:

Spoiler: 4e

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I personally like it because 1) it streamlines mechanics, and 2) it makes it feel more like magic I'd based on user skill than enemy resilience, even mathematically it changes nothing. It's also just a little easier to grok for new players, which is why most games try to stick to dice+mods, try to get over TN.

On terms of variety, maybe I'm less concerned with mechanical variety because I've played multiple point but games where everybody bright a face. It's just not as important to me that my attacks work in a different to weapons.

[MoiMagnus]

What an odd idea. Why would you not expect the GM to create/choose adventures that are good fits for the people at their table? An adventure that is too easy, or too hard, or that doesn't allow all the players a roughly equal chance to shine is a bad adventure for that particular group (although it might be an ideal adventure for a differerernt group).

Too much tailoring can be counterproductive. If the adventure is always perfectly fitted to the player's abilities, some players will feel like their choice at character creation don't matter. A player might want to be able to detect secret doors to access area he would not have access to if he didn't. But if the player doesn't take that ability, and that the DM simply make that secret doors not secret anymore to better fit the adventure to the PCs, doesn't that defeat the point of taking the ability to detect secret doors? It can last as an illusion of choice, but some players are particularly good at seeing through those illusions, and realise for example than taking a proficiency in disarming traps is actually a downgrade, as a tailor-DM will conveniently add traps that would not be there otherwise. Tailoring "on-the-fly" is even worse on this point, as the players might feel that winning or losing a battle is meaningless as the following one gets easier/harder to compensate.

It follows that some DMs will overcompensate, and flee away from tailoring the adventure to the table like if it was the plague.

Balance has too be found, and some DMs will inevitably fall to one of the extremes, or vehemently disagree on what is the good point of balance.

[EDIT: Note that in open-world kind of RPGs, the tailoring is done in part by the players themselves, that chose to engage with quests that they see fit to them, possibly investigating the available quests before accepting them to make sure they have a reasonable chance to win. The question of tailoring mostly happens when the players don't effectively chose the quests they engage on past session 0 where they agreed to join the campaign.]

[Telok]

That still strikes me as absolutely terrible design. Having a 5% lose your character roll attached to an ability isn't really an interesting cost, and psychologically makes it very likely people will under-utilize the ability.

Ad&d haste is actually an interesting set of choices once you stop assuming that it fills the same role as fireball & lightning bolt, and don't feel like you have to constantly cast spells to be useful. You have to weigh your opportunity cost of memorizing haste against other spells, if you expected magic immune or magic resist monsters, weigh the chance of pc deaths to monsters vs the shock roll (which comes after the spell runs it's duration), and choose who you're going to hit with it. The spell is definitely not for people who want to spam damage spells.

It also came from an edition that assumed henchmen, hirelings, and adventurers having reputations. Your reputation for loyalty and attracting more followers could increase if you went through the effort of raising a henchman from death, even if it was your haste spell that technically killed him. If you were the type to make golems or raise skeletons they hasted just fine and didn't suffer the drawback.

It was a strong spell with a serious potential drawback that could be reduced with proper planning. It just dosen't fit with today's paradigm of spamming damage and magic never having any drawbacks.

[Lord Raziere]

Magic doesn't have to be superior to non-magic. You could make magic weaker than or balanced with non-magic. But what you can't do is the reverse. There are magical characters that are balanced with non-magical ones. But there are also magical characters for which there aren't balanced non-magic characters. If your party is Doctor Strange, Caladan Brood, and Zorian, you're not going to fill in slot four with a non-magical character and get a balanced party. The best you can do is play a game of semantics and have the four character be someone like Ranger, who has abilities like "can cut things by thinking about cutting them" and "can cut holes between realities", but is nevertheless "not magic" because those abilities come from something that isn't called "magic" in-setting.

I'm ignoring the middle because it doesn't matter. We could go back and forth forever arguing about the exact point where competence stops being enough to compete with magic. But unless you want to argue that the point doesn't exist, the argument isn't worth having. Maybe it's Conan. Maybe it's Aragorn. Maybe it's Captain America. Maybe it's Logen Ninefingers. But does it really matter?

1. Its not semantics. If a setting something is or isn't something, it isn't that thing. Anything else is refusing to engage with the fiction. and if your not going to engage with the fiction, why are you playing? If a setting insists that someone can be badass and work alongside magical characters without having any themselves, that is that settings rules, its your fault if you can't grok it.

2. Yes it matters. It will always matter. Because I've had it up to here with "its all magic" meme, because sometimes the wizard looks like someone who is overreliant on magic and needs someone to take them down a peg, because the best kind of rebellion against a magical tyrant is an ironic one that ends with the wizard getting killed by mundane means because for all his planning and stupid assumption that somehow his magic will allow him to do anything because they bought into the even stupider assumption that magic is everything, because utopian tippyverses make me sick from their naivete and ridiculousness, because screw 3.5 god-casters/batman wizards, and screw ever being overshadowed by anyone just because they chose a "better" class which shouldn't even be a thing, screw any nonmagical character being retconned or fanoned into being magical, screw the very basic foundations of every assumption surrounding 3.5 wizards, because the last thing I want for any character concept is to be invalidated by saying its an entirely different antithetical concept just because someone somewhere can't wrap their head around Batman succeeding without an explanation that destroys the point of Batman. I will not stop arguing that the point shouldn't exist, because our imaginations do not need to be bound by magic to achieve wonder. the conception of magic you speak of is a limiting nonsensical idea that I do not want any part of.