The cost of magic

[Mechalich]

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?

It matters in a specific mechanical sense. You can take a given system and model a completely non-magical character, or more likely several completely non-magical characters with different concepts, out to the edges of their capability both as the 'average build' and as the 'ideal build' and that provides you with a baseline to compare the magical characters against. This is important because the capabilities of non-magical characters vary significantly depending on things like technology level (D&D vs. d20 modern vs. Star Wars all give very different results), overall setting grittiness, shared basic character traits (in VtM the fact that everyone is a vampire and gets a basic vampire ability package makes a considerable difference compared to assuming everyone is a puny human), and even purely mechanical factors like how the RNG functions.

This is part of the nature of TTRPGs as a model systems issues. Different model systems behave differently and the breakpoint for human competence no longer matches magical capabilities will vary, sometimes quite significantly, between model systems. I mean, just between AD&D 2e and D&D 3.5 it varies drastically even though those systems are both nominally intended to support the same type of gameplay.

[NigelWalmsley]

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.

That's the big thing. If someone builds a character that doesn't work in a certain kind of adventure, they probably aren't interested in that kind of adventure. You certainly can give Daredevil a critical role in an adventure where Thanos or Darkseid is the big bad if you contort the plot enough, but that's not going to make Daredevil's player happy. He rolled a street-level hero because he wants to do street-level heroics, not because he wants whatever skill the rest of the team of S-tier supes happens to not have to be blown up to world-saving status by contrivance. You can solve these kinds of mismatches by tailoring things enough, but even you somehow manage to avoid anyone noticing what you're doing, chances are that you're not fixing the problems people actually have.

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.

If the game gives you a character concept of "does magic", and then expects you to figure out that you are not supposed to use magic to solve your problems, there's a design error in there somewhere. The Wizard should be casting spells, just like the Rogue should be sneaking around that the Paladin should be smiting evil-doers.

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.

I understand that's the intent, but people largely do not behave that way. People are going to treat any chance of character death as unacceptable. Humans aren't perfectly rational, so just because a spell poses an interesting tradeoff from the standpoint of perfectly optimized play does not mean it's well-designed.

1. Its not semantics. If a setting something is or isn't something, it isn't that thing.

It is semantics. What labels the setting puts on things is exactly semantics. Insisting that abilities that are manifestly supernatural are meaningfully "not magic" just because they aren't in the spells section is just making the discussion more difficult. You need some general term for those kinds of things, and "magic" is as good as we're likely to get. And, ultimately, it's not actually helpful, because the thing that the "Fighters shouldn't be magic" side of the discussion wants isn't for Fighters to have a bunch of obviously magical abilities we all loudly insist aren't magic, it's for Fighters to not have those abilities at all, regardless of what they're called. Because, again, whether or not we call the abilities magic is semantics.

screw ever being overshadowed by anyone just because they chose a "better" class which shouldn't even be a thing

The way to make that not a thing is to allow all classes the same range of tools. The reason Wizards overshadow Fighters is that Wizards are allowed to have abilities that are magic and Fighters aren't.

the conception of magic you speak of is a limiting nonsensical idea that I do not want any part of.

The conception of "magic". I'm using is literally the least limiting one it is possible to have.

[Lord Raziere]

It is semantics. What labels the setting puts on things is exactly semantics. Insisting that abilities that are manifestly supernatural are meaningfully "not magic" just because they aren't in the spells section is just making the discussion more difficult. You need some general term for those kinds of things, and "magic" is as good as we're likely to get. And, ultimately, it's not actually helpful, because the thing that the "Fighters shouldn't be magic" side of the discussion wants isn't for Fighters to have a bunch of obviously magical abilities we all loudly insist aren't magic, it's for Fighters to not have those abilities at all, regardless of what they're called. Because, again, whether or not we call the abilities magic is semantics.

The way to make that not a thing is to allow all classes the same range of tools. The reason Wizards overshadow Fighters is that Wizards are allowed to have abilities that are magic and Fighters aren't.

The conception of "magic". I'm using is literally the least limiting one it is possible to have.

1. No. It isn't. Whether something is supernatural is entirely setting dependent, and again if your denying that, your not respecting the setting. Magic is not a universal term, it refers to spellcasting, and continuing to insist that everything is magic will only continue to ensure wizard dominance by making people think only wizards have the right to define things in their favor, thus continuing to keep wizards strong in comparison to everyone else. it enforces the status quo that you claim to be against.

2. While I agree the same range of tools is needed, erasing the badass normal is no way to solve it.

3. No, superpowers is a much better term as it covers things outside magic. Its much more general.

[NigelWalmsley]

1. No. It isn't. Whether something is supernatural is entirely setting dependent, and again if your denying that, your not respecting the setting.

Again, you are missing the point. You can call things whatever you want in-setting. That doesn't change the argument at hand, because the objection people have is not actually that these things are called "magic". The objection people have to giving the Fighter high-level abilities is what those abilities do, not what they are called.

Magic is not a universal term, it refers to spellcasting, and continuing to insist that everything is magic will only continue to ensure wizard dominance by making people think only wizards have the right to define things in their favor, thus continuing to keep wizards strong in comparison to everyone else. it enforces the status quo that you claim to be against.

What? I don't understand what you think the mechanism here is at all.

2. While I agree the same range of tools is needed, erasing the badass normal is no way to solve it.

The badass normal is the problem. There is no amount of "badass" your normal can be that beats The Lord Ruler, or Nicol Bolas, or whatever your favorite high-end villain is. At a certain power level, you need magic. It's fine to not want to play at that power level, but if you're going to do it, you need to have the tools to do so, and those tools are magic.

3. No, superpowers is a much better term as it covers things outside magic. Its much more general.

It's also from an entirely different genre, and would also exclude the badass normal by any reasonable definition of either term.

[Pex]

Call it superpowers, but the argument remains. Some people don't want fighters to have superpowers, to always be Guy At The Gym, yet be the same game as the wizards who do and then complain the fighters can't keep up. Some people want the solution to be punish wizards for their super powers, such as a 5% chance your character dies every time you cast a particular spell, or otherwise make you wish you never casted the spell at all. The better solution is to give the fighter superpowers of his own and accept the concept at some point he's no longer just a Guy At The Gym. If you maintain you only ever want Guy At The Gym, then play the game where Someone Else also doesn't get super powers instead of playing the game Someone Else does and complaining about how dare that player have BadWrongFun of superpowers the game sucks.

[Telok]

If the game gives you a character concept of "does magic", and then expects you to figure out that you are not supposed to use magic to solve your problems, there's a design error in there somewhere...

...understand that's the intent, but people largely do not behave that way. People are going to treat any chance of character death as unacceptable. Humans aren't perfectly rational, so just because a spell poses an interesting tradeoff from the standpoint of perfectly optimized play does not mean it's well-designed.

There aren't design errors in AD&D wizards or AD&D Haste, you just don't like that style of play. It's a "use the right spell in the right way at the right time = win" style, where you want a "all spells all the time" style. That's fine, it's different styles of play is all. But it's not any sort of error.

[Anonymouswizard]

Some of us want hard caps on magicians' powers so that they don't outshine GymBro fighters. If there's no spell to control the weather then wizards just can't control the weather.

Another option is to let relatively reliable, cost-free spells be easy to access. I like the way Advanced Fighting Fantasy does this, just a single stat point and skill point gives you access to Minor Magic which gets a +6 bonus to casting, letting them easily grab a few utility spells. It doesn't help with the sheer power aspects, but can help mitigate some of the utility imbalances.

One thing that really annoys me are miscast tables, and how they tend to include results that'll kill the caster or worse the whole party. I'm fine with inconvenient, change my hair colour to neon pink, alter my sex, turn me into a toad for 2d6 minutes, but don't put in results that kill the caster, deal insane amounts of damage, or summon end game enemies. Yes, even Warhammer RPGs, because once I got a player to reroll because a) it would cause a TPK and b) I didn't have time to actually generate the daemonhost. And no I didn't have an unbound daemonhost lying around, the party were nowhere near that level.

[Mechalich]

The badass normal is the problem. There is no amount of "badass" your normal can be that beats The Lord Ruler, or Nicol Bolas, or whatever your favorite high-end villain is. At a certain power level, you need magic. It's fine to not want to play at that power level, but if you're going to do it, you need to have the tools to do so, and those tools are magic.

I broadly agree. More specifically, the Badass Normal is sometimes useful as a literary device but doesn't function properly in the framework of a TTRPG. For example, the Badass Normal is useful to point out some sort of strategic oversight made by an entire mystical society because everyone is used to using their powers to solve problems in a specific way and they've collectively misses some alternative that's obvious to someone with a different approach. It's also a useful way to point out how a society might be overvaluing the capabilities of certain powers versus commonly available technology (for example, the ability of firearms to kill people compared to magical spells). However this sort of thing is based on leveraging oversights or misconceptions in a setting that a TTRPG cannot reasonably expect other players to have.

After all, one of the major reasons caster vs. non-caster balance issues are so severe is that the design team overvalued direct damage magic and undervalued certain utility and SoS/SoD spells. 'Blaster' wizards actually are marginally balanced against fighters, it's only when people reach into the rest of the toy box that everything falls apart. But, of course, people actually do that in play.

It's also important to differentiate between the actual Badass Normal a character who legitimately does not have any abilities outside actual human limitations, and the character who claims to be normal but in fact has Charles Atlas Superpowers out the wazoo (cough, Batman, cough). That's a ploy narrative works can pull, and in fact the average action movie is a master class in 'just how superhuman can we get away with making our protagonist without it becoming obvious' but TTRPG's can't do that because character abilities have to be represented on character sheets and a PC cannot do what they don't have the points/dots/skills to actually do.

Call it superpowers, but the argument remains. Some people don't want fighters to have superpowers, to always be Guy At The Gym, yet be the same game as the wizards who do and then complain the fighters can't keep up. Some people want the solution to be punish wizards for their super powers, such as a 5% chance your character dies every time you cast a particular spell, or otherwise make you wish you never casted the spell at all. The better solution is to give the fighter superpowers of his own and accept the concept at some point he's no longer just a Guy At The Gym. If you maintain you only ever want Guy At The Gym, then play the game where Someone Else also doesn't get super powers instead of playing the game Someone Else does and complaining about how dare that player have BadWrongFun of superpowers the game sucks.

What people want is a quasi-medieval fantasy world where wizards have phenomenal cosmic power. The problem is that those two things aren't really compatible, because if you give PCs phenomenal cosmic power they proceed to change the world, and if NPCs are assumed to have the same range of power as PCs, then they changed the world eons ago and you never had a quasi-medieval fantasy world in the first place. It's ultimately a world-building issue.

Now, it is absolutely acceptable - I cannot ever stress this enough - to say 'screw world-building consistency, this world works the way it does because it does, that's fantasy, GTFO!' There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, such settings, like the MCU, are among the most popular ever imagined. In tabletop the settings that are more or less willing to admit this, such as Planescape, are just fine too. Sure, you need to boost the Fighter's numbers for things to work, but you can ignore any downstream consequences from doing so.

A big part of the issue involves cognitive dissonance. For reasons that have to do with how the human brain works people are generally willing to accept completely made-up rules governing the blatantly impossible, but significantly less willing to understand made-up rules for phenomena they are nominally familiar with (here's Schlock Mercenary making this point with more humor than I can). So we get scenarios where you can allow a wizard enough power to effortlessly massacre an army of millions of guys with spears and no one bats an eye, but if you let a guy with a sword effortlessly do the same thing, people say 'hey wait a minute' and start thinking about the consequences.

[NigelWalmsley]

Some of us want hard caps on magicians' powers so that they don't outshine GymBro fighters. If there's no spell to control the weather then wizards just can't control the weather.

Sure. As noted, it's totally fine to solve the problem by capping what magic can do. There are absolutely balance points where magic and non-magic are equal, and if you want the kinds of stories Lord Raziere appears to want, you can just play at those balance points. Conan is perfectly capable of beating up magic users and taking their lunch money, provided they're the magic users from Conan stories and not the magic users from elsewhere in the genre.

However this sort of thing is based on leveraging oversights or misconceptions in a setting that a TTRPG cannot reasonably expect other players to have.

It goes the other way too. It's not just that you can't expect the Wizard to misunderstand how good mundane options are, it's that you can't expect the Fighter to MacGyver together the right mundane fix. The things Badass Normals do are, largely, not things TTRPGs role-protect. In Avatar, you can have Sokka contribute by coming up with better plans than the rest of the Gaang. But in a TTRPG, there's no guarantee that the guy who played Sokka is going to have a better strategic mind than whoever's playing Aang or Katara or Toph.

After all, one of the major reasons caster vs. non-caster balance issues are so severe is that the design team overvalued direct damage magic and undervalued certain utility and SoS/SoD spells.

That's broadly correct, but I think you're misrepresenting the process a bit. It's less that they overvalued those things, and more that they didn't understand how hard HP bloat hit those characters. If HP/damage ratios were closer to what they are in AD&D, the imbalance (at least in combat) would be a lot less stark. You can see this at low levels, when HP numbers have not yet started to diverge from what they were in AD&D.

[zlefin]

Reading this thread makes me ponder what the possible 'costs' of magic are in a gamist sense, and how best to classify those. i.e. setting aside the role-playing issues and world-building, and solely focusing on what costs can apply to the player that affect the utility of magic. perhaps building a tree that shows such, though I don't know how to code that here, and it's probably not optimal for readability. at any rate:

Loss of character - whatever the fluff reason, there's a drawback which means their char is gone. Typically a point-based accumulation or decline one when used.

Permanent penalty to char - net effect depends heavily on how character growth works and rubber-banding, eg in DnD 3.5, XP costs, while permanent, often aren't quite so bad due to increased xp gain for lower level chars.

Real world cost - not used in rpg rules; may appear in highly monetized videogames, and even then rarely.

Resource pool - depletes when used, various refill mechanisms exist with some quite significant gameplay differences.

Temporary penalty to char - lots of varieties again, with very different effects in practice.

opportunity cost - most notably the build costs, wherein getting magic takes up build resources which limit your ability to do other things. can also be about the degree to which it takes up turns in combat or other such things.


what am I missing, even with braod categories I doubt these cover everything.

[Mechalich]

Reading this thread makes me ponder what the possible 'costs' of magic are in a gamist sense, and how best to classify those. i.e. setting aside the role-playing issues and world-building, and solely focusing on what costs can apply to the player that affect the utility of magic. perhaps building a tree that shows such, though I don't know how to code that here, and it's probably not optimal for readability. at any rate:

Loss of character - whatever the fluff reason, there's a drawback which means their char is gone. Typically a point-based accumulation or decline one when used.

Permanent penalty to char - net effect depends heavily on how character growth works and rubber-banding, eg in DnD 3.5, XP costs, while permanent, often aren't quite so bad due to increased xp gain for lower level chars.

Real world cost - not used in rpg rules; may appear in highly monetized videogames, and even then rarely.

Resource pool - depletes when used, various refill mechanisms exist with some quite significant gameplay differences.

Temporary penalty to char - lots of varieties again, with very different effects in practice.

opportunity cost - most notably the build costs, wherein getting magic takes up build resources which limit your ability to do other things. can also be about the degree to which it takes up turns in combat or other such things.


what am I missing, even with braod categories I doubt these cover everything.

The big ones that I would see as having the highest viability are Temporary Penalties and Opportunity Costs. Resource pools work well to measure the effects of magic but aren't a cost in themselves. They may be a mechanism for opportunity cost though. For example, if using magic requires you to spend points to buy up a 'mana pool' or something of that nature. Loss of character doesn't really work, it's far too costly to the player - the exception being allowing a character to nova in some act of massive self-sacrifice, but that's probably better handled as a fluff thing or GM ruling rather than part of the system. Permanent penalties are messy because they can create temporary inequalities and are generally difficult to balance or make relevant and they are also likely to produce choice paralysis in play.

I generally feel Opportunity Cost works best as a balance measure on the lower end of the magical power scale. The more powerful and flexible magic is in a given system the more likely it is to simply replace all other means of doing everything which tends to render any opportunity cost irrelevant. Any magical form that enables minionomancy, in particular, tends to override opportunity costs because minions can mitigate any deficiencies in builds. Opportunity Costs as bans are also an option, though they're tricky. D&D, for example, has long strictly limited the weapons available to wizards. However, this ban turns out to not be very useful because casting a spell is almost always a better option than using a weapon and tabletop struggles to facilitate enough encounters between rests to really run out the spell pool. Still there are cases were it could work. One could imagine an urban fantasy system were magic was opposed to technology and a 'wizard' couldn't use phones or the internet, which would be a truly substantial cost in the 21st century.

That leaves temporary penalties, which are going to be system specific because they depend on what sort of pools and stats and metagame currency a character has that can be manipulated in a temporary fashion.

[NichG]

Reading this thread makes me ponder what the possible 'costs' of magic are in a gamist sense, and how best to classify those. i.e. setting aside the role-playing issues and world-building, and solely focusing on what costs can apply to the player that affect the utility of magic. perhaps building a tree that shows such, though I don't know how to code that here, and it's probably not optimal for readability. at any rate:

Loss of character - whatever the fluff reason, there's a drawback which means their char is gone. Typically a point-based accumulation or decline one when used.

Permanent penalty to char - net effect depends heavily on how character growth works and rubber-banding, eg in DnD 3.5, XP costs, while permanent, often aren't quite so bad due to increased xp gain for lower level chars.

Real world cost - not used in rpg rules; may appear in highly monetized videogames, and even then rarely.

Resource pool - depletes when used, various refill mechanisms exist with some quite significant gameplay differences.

Temporary penalty to char - lots of varieties again, with very different effects in practice.

opportunity cost - most notably the build costs, wherein getting magic takes up build resources which limit your ability to do other things. can also be about the degree to which it takes up turns in combat or other such things.


what am I missing, even with braod categories I doubt these cover everything.

One that can be important is meta-agency cost, which is that there are side-effects that remove future control of the direction of the story from the player in exchange for control in the present. For example, to cast magic you need to make a deal with a spirit or demon to do a favor for them, so as a consequence of what you do now there are future things you will have to do. Another example would be the defiler mechanics in Dark Sun - killing plant life around you may not have immediate mechanical harm, but it does limit your ability to pursue a goal of making a green Athas.

This can be game-mechanical if controlling the direction of evolution of the story or setting is something that is part of gameplay. Gain magic, but you may never aid the interests of Lord Sedgwick for the insults he committed against the spirits of hospitality. Now you can't pursue that faction, etc. Another example might be something like a Wish effect where it will not be genied at all and you get exactly what you intend without limits, but your greatest antagonist immediately receives a Wish of exactly the same level of power as whatever it is you asked for and a knowledge of the circumstances of that exchange.

It's a kind of opportunity cost I suppose, but it feels distinct in that you're losing agency over something outside of the character, rather than balancing a character budget.

[Cluedrew]

I use fantastic abilities as opposed to superpowers or magic as it holds the least amount of genre connotations. Admittedly the reason it does is because it isn't a popular term.

what am I missing, even with braod categories I doubt these cover everything.

Only thing I can think of right now are partial "Loss of character" where you don't loose the character but some restrictions are placed on them. Of course you could think of it as opportunity cost or a non-numerical penalty but I feel it doesn't quite fit those groups either.

[Quertus]

Spoiler: 2e Haste

Show

Johnny, Timmy, and Spike encounter the 2e Haste spell.

Timmy: wow, this is so powerful! Yeah, there's a chance of failure, but when it works, it works *big*! What's not to love?

Spike: A chance to just die? This spell is simply unplayable.

Johnny: man, that's terrible to cast on your party. But it goes great with Undead or summons!

Quertus: what would it take to create a safe version of that spell?

Spoiler: 4e

Show

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.

Touché.

Yes. I'm humourously suggesting that 5e had no design goals.

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)

I'm glad that was good for a laugh. The world could use more laughter these days.

Now, you've used the words "design goals", so you presumably understand that basic concept, but do you grasp context? If I say, "this child's drawing fits better in an envelope than the original Sistine Chapel", you understand that as a different statement than, "this child's drawing is a better piece of art than the Sistine Chapel", right? You see that there's more words in that sentence than "child's drawing", "better", and "Sistine Chapel", right?

Because the point of that old conversation was responding to sometime who said, "4e met its design goals" with an example explicitly about how 4e had actual stated design goals, which they demonstrable failed to meet.

Scion Epic Dexterity is supposed to make you harder to hit. It succeeds at that goal.

4e skill challenges are supposed to get everyone to play the game. The Determinator says you're dumb if you allow anyone but the character(s) with the highest bonuses to touch the dice.

Thus, 4e skill challenges - by encouraging the exact opposite behavior from what they were intended to encourage - fail to meet their stated design goal much harder than Scion Epic Dexterity does.

For Epic Dexterity to fail that hard, it would need to read something like, "whenever you are attacked, get hit one additional time per point of Epic Dexterity".

There. Now, hopefully, we've shared a laugh in this thread, too.

However, my point in this thread wasn't to hate on 4e, but to see if the 4e fans could explain the beauty in 4e that I don't see. Sure, 4e fans have had their hands cut off (their edition killed off and laughed at), but that doesn't mean that the emperor can't ask them to explain the beauty of Jade when they keep going on about it.

But the response of "uh, I really can't" isn't exactly encouraging. It doesn't facilitate me liking Jade, or thinking that I was in any way wrong to reject 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'.

Have you considered, "because it's not an RPG"?

[Ogun]

I favor a system where spell effects cost fatigue or hit points.
The bigger the effect, the bigger the cost.
To add more uncertainty,instead of flat costs make use various sized dice.



I think the best kind if epic magic is the summoning of a thunderstorm or the release of demons or other things simply not explicable,nor inherently controllable.
These effects should cost more than any single caster can usually pay, leading to voluntary or involuntary cooperation, or ways to bolster aginst or mitigate the cost.

Below that scale, magic should offer something mundane methods do not, or it shouldn't cost anything.
If it's an offensive spell it should offer subtlety, range ,damage type or certainty that an arrow or a blade cannot.
Same goes for transportation or defenses.
Where it really should shine is in utility.
Becoming invisible or conversing with animals is beyond the bounds of reality.

I think mundane warriors should flex their epic via skill.
An arrow that fells a dragon is epic.
A rogue that scales a castle wall is epic.
A bard that sooths a savage beast is epic.
A ranger tracking a man across bare stones is epic.
Should a spell caster be able to duplicate these things?
Maybe, at a cost, one that keeps them from doing every shtick at once.

Should a barbarian be able to drop a meteor on a castle?
No, but if spell casters can do this,it better take all they got ,meaning they need their mundane allies to cover their ass afterwards.
You could give the barbarian hulk level strength and say its natural, but that sticks in a lot of craws, including mine.
Conan is strong enough to topple stone idols and burst free from chains, and that is plenty.
Hercules can divert rivers(how does being strong do that?)but he is demigod.
Most mundane heros are tricky, lucky and have a lot of mundane and/or supernatural help.
Actually thats covers most heros really.

[Satinavian]

what am I missing, even with braod categories I doubt these cover everything.

There is also the use of rare ingredients you can only get via plot and GM.

It is not something to power everyday magic or basic character abilities, but some systems use it for all of the more powerful or longer lasting rituals. The idea is that you get a very limited, not refilling supply of potentially gamechanging magical moments and have to think very hard where to use it. Is the current plot even worth it ? Aree there other options ? Maybe you don't to use it for plot at all, but for downtime stuff and character background ?

One example that sits a bit on the line between this and resource pool is the Vis of Ars Magica, because you are expected to have sources for it.


Of course you could just say that falls under opportunity cost.

[MoiMagnus]

I
No, but if spell casters can do this,it better take all they got ,meaning they need their mundane allies to cover their ass afterwards.

I'd add that this kind of "your turn to shine, my turn to shine" only works on TTRPGs that are fast paced enough. Rare are peoples willing to sit through a 2 hours long combat where they are useless because they expanded all their magic in the 5min scene just before.

Part of the problem of "the cost of magic" in DnD like games is that it mixes very badly with the long tactical fights some tables have.

[Anonymouswizard]

Have you considered, "because it's not an RPG"?

Yeah, if 4e isn't an RPG than no edition of Dungeons & Dragons is.

And despite what people like to claim, a clear focus on miniatures combat does not stop you from being an RPG. Especially when you also give more concrete mechanics (broken though they may be) for out of combat interactions than the next edition that doesn't get this claim made about it.

You don't like 4e, that's fine. But you don't have to complain about it's entirety whenever one mechanic is brought up. The parts of 4e we should be discussing in this thread should be rituals, the cost of combat powers (little beyond 'rest to recharge') and practically nothing else.

[Ogun]

MoiMagnus, excellent point..

I think I would put the nova moment twards the end of a combat for that reason.
The best comparison I can make off hand is the stereotypical shadowrun.
The street samurai get the decker into position for the hack and protect him during it.
A decker can use a gun, wear armor ,etc, but increasing his combat skills has to mean reducing his decking skills, to maintain balance.
In the case if a spellcaster, if you nova as an alpha strike, you should be prepared to be underpowered in the rest of the battle.

I would say a lot of people who play noncasters don't really want to bring massive destruction in a single fell swoop.
Fight off an army?
Yeah.
Blow up an army with your sword?
No.
Those that do want to destroy an army with their sword or balance on clouds or stealth so hard they can walk right past the guards are already wanting to play magical characters, even if they don't want to play spellcasters.

If this is your style of play, spellcasters usually become a "more flexible at the cost of limited use" choice.
A ninja can disappear at will.
A spellcaster can make the entire party invisible, x number of times, at the cost of not doing something else with those resources.
If the spell caster can do anything anyone else can, without limitation, he is Superman and everyone else is Flash.
I think that's bad for cooperative storytelling.



I think spellcasters with costly magic work alongside mundane characters.
I think they work alongside fantastically powered characters, if you reduce their costs a bit.
DnD could make warriors, rogues , paladins, barbarians monsters, etc, magically powerful, but not nessisarily spellcasters.
A ranger talking to animals needn't be a modeled as him casting a spell.
Paladins calling mounts should be a thing, but not a spell.
Maybe druidical shape shifting shouldn't be a spell, ah wait it isn't, not by default.
Often spells already do something that we want non spellcasters to do, so we give them the spell along with the times per day limitations.
Invisibility for instance, is given to sneaky characters.
What if we reversed this?
Instead of giving the ninja type limited access to the Invisibility spell, what if the Invisibility spell made the target(s) as sneaky as a ninja, but only for a limited time?


Start with the noncasters, give them cool abilities , without spells, then let the spellcaster imitate, enhance, share or alter those abilities, along side magical effects that are unique to spells, if indeed there are any.
Its up to the creators, official and tableside to decide their own limits.
I don't want to play in a game where fighters can punch a hole into another dimension, but I can get behind ninja that walks through walls, if its a high level ability.

Side note on clerics and druids.
I think they shouldn't cast spells.
Prayers and blessings, curses, invocations, whatever but not casting spells.

[Max_Killjoy]

Theme is difficult to enforce. The oWoD was supposed to be all about personal horror and degradation and the rode to destruction and so forth, but what people actually played was street-level supers who carried katanas under their trenchcoats. The design staff at WW got particularly cheesed about this and ended up in an active fight with a significant portion of the fanbase to the point of blowing up the setting and subsequently losing a very substantial portion of said fanbase in perpetuity, to the point that they went bankrupt in a very short timeframe thereafter.

Can confirm -- I was one of the those players who directly engaged with and infuriated the White Wolf crew with how I approached the game and a habit of laughing off their direct decrees that if we didn't munch on "personal horror" angstburgers we were "doing it wrong".

And it's hard to prevent subversion, of anything, in the TTRPG environment. Ironclad rules are difficult to write, especially as games continue to publish and rules accrete over time and interact with each other in various complex ways. 3.X D&D isn't supposed to have stacking metamagic reducers that allow the reduction of essentially all metamagic costs to nothing so casters can infinitely power-up their spells, but it does.

The cost of magic is an excellent device in storytelling, as it ties in with themes of sacrifice and scarcity and unwinnable conflicts. However such stories are difficult to tell in games, which tend to focus on escapist melodrama. Also because the distance between a player and PC is usually lower than that of a reader and a fictional character created by a third party the ability to actually make PCs suffer in meaningful ways while keeping the game going is limited.

You can design a game that explores these themes, but it's going to be very niche and require very mature players. That may be worth doing, certainly (in fact it's probably been done, effectively, in some game that hardly anyone knows), but it's a very specialized goal. Applying costs to magic is going to be ineffective in typical gameplay systems because it doesn't align with the actual goals of play and the actual maturity level people bring to the table (even very mature players often deliberately game in a distinctly childish fashion because they find it fun, sometimes to the point of outright trolling). So if you want to do a system that applies significant costs to the use of magic, and utilizes magic as a significant part of gameplay, you have utilize this as a central focus of the overall design.

One of the things that's bugged me about trends in RPGs for a while is this idea that they can be just like authorial fiction, despite being a very different medium. (See also, so many video game designers clearly being frustrated wannabe screenplay writers, directors, etc.)

Different media do different things better or worse, and trying to force an RPG to do what authorial fiction does is just a mistake.

As you say, unless a game is specialized, and the players all agree that they want what that game is offering, attempts at enforcing theme won't survive contact with actual gamers.

[kyoryu]

One of the things that's bugged me about trends in RPGs for a while is this idea that they can be just like authorial fiction, despite being a very different medium. (See also, so many video game designers clearly being frustrated wannabe screenplay writers, directors, etc.)

Different media do different things better or worse, and trying to force an RPG to do what authorial fiction does is just a mistake.

As you say, unless a game is specialized, and the players all agree that they want what that game is offering, attempts at enforcing theme won't survive contact with actual gamers.

100%. Play to the strengths.

I do think RPGs can present things moment-to-moment like authorial fiction, but trying to get the same narrative arcs/etc. of them is difficult as best because... well, multiple people pursuing individual goals vs. a single author (or even a group of people working on a shared piece of fiction), not to mention the very linear RPG process compared to non-linear writing processes.

[Max_Killjoy]

100%. Play to the strengths.

I do think RPGs can present things moment-to-moment like authorial fiction, but trying to get the same narrative arcs/etc. of them is difficult as best because... well, multiple people pursuing individual goals vs. a single author (or even a group of people working on a shared piece of fiction), not to mention the very linear RPG process compared to non-linear writing processes.

Yeap.

If the writer realizes that they've written themselves into a corner, or that their idea had unforeseen implications / consequences, they can go back and change other things, go in a different direction, etc. Changes are not retcons until the work has been published.

In RPG play, there are no drafts, it's on the table the moment it's done, and retroactive changes can't be hidden in the drafts.


Specific to this thread, that means RPG magic needs a lot more forethought and an established framework -- freeform magic runs the dual risks of "mother may I?" and establishing game-breaking precedents accidentally.

[kyoryu]

Yeap.

If the writer realizes that they've written themselves into a corner, or that their idea had unforeseen implications / consequences, they can go back and change other things, go in a different direction, etc. Changes are not retcons until the work has been published.

In RPG play, there are no drafts, it's on the table the moment it's done, and retroactive changes can't be hidden in the drafts.

Specific to this thread, that means RPG magic needs a lot more forethought and an established framework -- freeform magic runs the dual risks of "mother may I?" and establishing game-breaking precedents accidentally.

First off, I really don't worry about "mother may I". If your table is reasonable, it's not a concern. If it is a concern, fix your table.

That said, a good example is the usual trope of meeting the bad guy early in some way shape or form. It works in fiction for a great number of reasons. It doesn't work in RPGs because if the players think that it's the bad guy they'll try to kill them early on - especially if it's a mastermind and not a combat monster.

In RPGs, the general best advice is "don't put anything on the board that you're not willing to use." And that's horrible advice for fiction.

[Max_Killjoy]

First off, I really don't worry about "mother may I". If your table is reasonable, it's not a concern. If it is a concern, fix your table.

That said, a good example is the usual trope of meeting the bad guy early in some way shape or form. It works in fiction for a great number of reasons. It doesn't work in RPGs because if the players think that it's the bad guy they'll try to kill them early on - especially if it's a mastermind and not a combat monster.

In RPGs, the general best advice is "don't put anything on the board that you're not willing to use." And that's horrible advice for fiction.

Great example.

I don't want to go total derail, so... how to tie this back to the "cost of magic"...

[kyoryu]

Great example.

I don't want to go total derail, so... how to tie this back to the "cost of magic"...

One of the interesting costs in fiction for magic is plot costs in some way.... you make some agreement that screws you down the road.

This is really hard to do in an RPG because of pesky agency concerns :)

[Mechalich]

One of the interesting costs in fiction for magic is plot costs in some way.... you make some agreement that screws you down the road.

This is really hard to do in an RPG because of pesky agency concerns :)

It's also tricky because of continuity and attendance concerns. It cannot be assumed, in tabletop, that any given character will show up to any given session. The number of tables where every player makes every session is minute (in my experience the average table will be lucky to hit 80% attendance). Additionally, characters die and are replaced during campaigns even when their players make it to every session. Tagging a consequence for Act III of the campaign on character who is by no means guaranteed to even make it out of Act I is pretty pointless.

Games with significant power ramps, like D&D, also have the problem that any long-term consequence has a tendency to be grown out of relevance. 'The Half-Ogre crime lord vowed to take revenge upon us' might be a problem for a group of level 4 characters, but if they go to the dungeon and come back at level 8 (which could conceivably take under a week in in-universe time), suddenly that crime lord isn't a threat any more.

[MoiMagnus]

It cannot be assumed, in tabletop, that any given character will show up to any given session. The number of tables where every player makes every session is minute (in my experience the average table will be lucky to hit 80% attendance).

Spoiler: Derailing the thread

Show

That's very population dependent, and my experience strongly goes against it.

IME, you can assume that everyone will be there 80% of the sessions. Most tables I've been in would very rarely continue the campaign without everyone being present. Only exception being when one of the player is late but will eventually make it to the session, or when someone is known to be most likely absent for months in a row.

That does not mean that everyone will be there each time we say we meet, but we have plenty of other activities to do (boardgames, experimental one-session-TTRPGs, etc) if not everyone is here.

[ezekielraiden]

My experience is the same as MoiMagnus'. As a DM, particularly for a small group of deeply narratively-important characters, if we have someone missing I'm very likely to just call the session off. If we do proceed, I try to keep it a shorter session that focuses on just what those two can do. There have been times where we simply, flat, could NOT continue without a specific player present, and I'm okay with that. We're still able to have consistent sessions; we've had a couple weeks of absences recently due to the political turmoil here in the US, but prior to that it had been months since we'd skipped a single week.

[Quertus]

First off, I really don't worry about "mother may I". If your table is reasonable, it's not a concern. If it is a concern, fix your table.

Less than 1% of the GMs I've played with (ie, exactly 1 out of more than 100) would I trust to handle "mother may I" situations well. Granted, that's because I have high standards, and not all of those GMs have been *tested* yet.

Point being, "fixing" GMs to live up to my standards is hard!

One of the interesting costs in fiction for magic is plot costs in some way.... you make some agreement that screws you down the road.

This is really hard to do in an RPG because of pesky agency concerns :)

I mean, you borrow money from / get a favor from Vinnie. Later on… maybe you can pay him back, maybe you can't. Agency to tell the story of it causing you problems… or not. More possible stories, not less.

So, for this thread, the "cost" of magic would be *either* the bad thing that happened, *or* the steps that the character took to prevent those consequences.

Or both. Care for an egg?

It's also tricky because of continuity and attendance concerns. It cannot be assumed, in tabletop, that any given character will show up to any given session. The number of tables where every player makes every session is minute (in my experience the average table will be lucky to hit 80% attendance). Additionally, characters die and are replaced during campaigns even when their players make it to every session. Tagging a consequence for Act III of the campaign on character who is by no means guaranteed to even make it out of Act I is pretty pointless.

Don't build such fragile plots. If you know that a player might be absent, either don't build an encounter that requires them, or don't have that encounter only able to trigger at one specific place & time. Devil's in the details, but Devils could show up *any time* to collect.

Although… "it's a good thing that my <absence> corresponds with the session that we're returning to Waterdeep - my character owes some people there some money. Just have her… off in the woods, pretending to be a Druid or something." … is a pretty good way to act in character while not sitting out a session.

Games with significant power ramps, like D&D, also have the problem that any long-term consequence has a tendency to be grown out of relevance. 'The Half-Ogre crime lord vowed to take revenge upon us' might be a problem for a group of level 4 characters, but if they go to the dungeon and come back at level 8 (which could conceivably take under a week in in-universe time), suddenly that crime lord isn't a threat any more.

I can just picture it: the PC "Warlock 1 / 'Cleric of my own awesomeness' 42" pats the devil on the head. "You may have wanted my soul last year in exchange for that initial power boost that let me kill the goblins to kill orcs to kill Ogres to kill… to kill Dragons to kill gods to kill Titans, but, clearly, one doesn't need a soul to conquer heaven, Hell, and everything in-between, and become the god of Monotheism and awesomeness."

[Democratus]

Less than 1% of the GMs I've played with (ie, exactly 1 out of more than 100) would I trust to handle "mother may I" situations well.

That is very sad.

But I guess most of us have little control of the gamers in our local community.