How is the Wizard vs Warrior Balance Problem Handled in Fantasy Literature?

[Banshee16]

I like the way GURPS handles it. Casting magic is physically tiring, so it requires you to use FP (fatigue points.) Tougher spells are more physically draining. Losing too much FP might mean you pass out. I think that's a good way to imitate what I see in movies and read in books with the wizard giving one last ditch effort to save the day; putting his own body at risk to weave powerful arcane energies.

There was a system for that in 2nd Ed. in Players Option. It was the Channeling system. Basically, it relied on spell points instead of slots. When you cast spells, you had to roll a save to avoid becoming fatigued.

It worked pretty well...made spellcasting very difficult and it became a choice. Yes, you could rip off a powerful spell...but you might be reduced to half movement for the next hour and have a -4 to hit anything.

3E had something similar, but simplified. It was in Monte Cook's 20 best d20 articles or whatever. A book that came out maybe 5 years back. Characters have to roll a spellcraft check to cast spells successfully. If they succeed, it goes off, but if it fails, they become fatigued. If they fail a second time, they become exhausted. I think the way it was structured was that you could keep casting spells of a level......more than you normally could by using vancian spellcasting. However...every time you cast a spell of the same level, the DC to avoid become exhausted goes up....so eventually you *will* fail.

Systems like that tend to prevent wizards from casting spells indefinitely. They have to be more choosy.

Banshee

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I agree with Hussar - this is tending to push the game out of the "heroic fantasy" genre and into something slightly different. Which is fine in and of itself, but I think that D&D is well served by also supporting heroic fantasy play.

You mean you can't think of a way in which someone might be convinced or forced to commit an untruth under oath in heroic fantasy play? Or that heroic fantasy is immune from having divinations being wrong, misinterpreted or messed around with by other casters?

What about a curse by a trickster god that makes divinations completely wrong under conditions X, Y, and Z? What if the clerics are being held in thrall to the will of another being? Or perhaps like in Legend of the Seeker, there is a secret sect of evil holy persons hiding within the religion of the good?

Maybe the accused has been magically framed, and what is revealed in lesser divinations is simply the illusion that the framer wants diviners to see, and only the most powerful of divinations conducted on the site of the crime will see otherwise.

 

[pemerton]

A question then: how would you design "backlash rules" that were more enjoyable for all concerned?

<snip>

I would very much appreciate your thoughts though on a workable backlash mechanic even if it is to repeat that it could not work effectively. You seem to have a very astute eye for such things.

Thanks for the vote of confidence! - I'm not sure I can say very much that lives up to it, though.

What regular and mild backlash effects would you think reasonable (on let's say a 30% - 6 or below on a d20 - chance of miscasting and suffering)?

<snip>

what if you reduced the chance of success quite dramatically to let's say 10% (19+ on a d20)? And then you reduced the chance of death down a little but so it was still significant at let's say 25% (5 or below on a d20)***. In between these you might have one of the mild backlash effects such as needing a round to gather back the power to cast or perhaps more severely fatiguing the caster for the encounter. In other words, you are reducing the incentive to cast the spell based upon chance of success. Reducing the incentive means that the overall chance of losing the character is significantly reduced (to perhaps an acceptable level play-wise) but in the mind of the player and his or her caster the danger of the situation is still very much there and this spell will thus be used very much as a last resort.

I think this turns very much on what sort of play the game, overall, is meant to support. Here's one way of looking at it: in a typical fantasy RPG, the player of the fighter's distincitve way of affecting the gameworld is by having his/her PC fight monsters in close combat. This generates a certain risk of dying - and at least in some systems (eg RM's attack/parry rules, or 3E if the fighter has and uses the Expertise feat), the player of the fighter can make choices that trade off defence against attack, thereby choosing to increase the risk of PC death in exchange for the chance to have a greater impact on the gameworld.

Balancing these mechanics is (in my view) non-trivial. Does the party have ready access to raise dead or similar, or not? If not, what happens if the PC dies (in terms of bringing in a new PC, replacing magic items, etc)? Is the player risking time out of the play session, or ingame stuff like XP and treasure earned, or both, or neither (the latter is true if, for example, the party has access to in-combat resurrection).

Now when we look at your spellcasting mechanic, how is it going to work? Presumably, if the sorts of ingame effects the caster can achive are more impressive than the fighter's, then the chances of backlash/bad consequences have to be correspondingly high - it might be a bit like berserker rage, or something even stronger and hence riskier than that.

(Random factoid: Rolemaster has a fairly strong Frenzy (= berserker rage) skill, but no player in my games ever took it over 20 years of play, because they didn't want to run the risk of losing their PC.)

Is this going to be a useful balancing tool? Well all the questions we asked about the fighter player become even more pressing - what are your healing rules, your table rules for new PCs or raising dead or whatever, etc etc.

My personal view is that spells should not be stronger than the comparable effects that players of fighters could get if they invested comparable amounts of character building resources: so, for example, if learning to use plate armour costs X skill points/feat slots etc, then learning to cast a comparable armouring spell should cost something like the same number of build points; charm person should be an alternative to learning bluff skill, not an overwhelming option that makes the bluffing PCs redundant, etc. (4e and HARP both take something like this approach, though I think 4e probably is closer to the ideal.)

What gets tricker - and I guess it's obvious - is where spells can do things that are quite different from what martial PCs can do - eg teleport, transmute rock to mud, etc. I half want to say that learning to do that should be a significant enough choice, in terms of character building resources, that it precludes the wizard PC also being as good as the fighter at attack, defence, mobility, etc. But this then creates wizards who are more vulnerable in combat (think AD&D 1st ed before stoneskin) and once again raises the thorny issue of risk of death as a balancing issue. If party play will work to mean that a wizard who is vulnerable is not a liability to the player in question but rather a challenge for the whole team to deal with, though, then this can avoid individualising the risk in the way that backfire mechanics do (and, again, this is roughly the 4e approach).

Bottom line: I've got no coherent answer for you. But at a minimum, I wouldn't make backlash produce consequences worse than what the fighters face in fights of comparable difficulty to the circumstances you envisage the powerful magic being used in response to - because at least then you have a better chance of having consistent rates of PC death and so on to build your game around. But even here, what happens if the group decides to have the wizard nova more often, and to have the party develop the capabilities, resources etc of supporting the wizard when the nova backfires? The player of the wizard still, then, has a type of power/option that the player of the fighter lacks, if there are no comparable nova mechanics for the player of the fighter to deploy.

It becomes the classic piece of dark and mysterious arcane knowledge that an upstanding wizard would never trifle with, but the more curious wizard might weaken and study and eventually cast like a moth to a flame. The decision to cast such a spell would be a very interesting piece of role-playing I think within that context.

I agree that this is desirable in a game, but for the reasons I've given - especially the last two sentences above, about the incentives the players have to regularise and efficiently operationalise wizard nova-ing - I don't think backlash mechanics are the way to achieve this.

I don't have a radical alternative suggestion as to how to do this - I can only talk about how I try and get some approximation to it in 4e. First, I tend to locate this sort of option in skill challenges rather than in combat, where the "backlash" can much more easily be handled in narrative terms rather than just in terms of hit points/fatigue points/risk of death. Second, in combat, you can set up hazards and similar that the wizard can tackle in a way very different from the fighters (eg when I ran a combat with a black dragon, the PCs had just recovered a statue of the Summer Queen - the wizard was using this statute to channel his Light cantrip in order to dispel the dragon's darkness - making increasingly harder Arcana checks - which then made it much easier for the other PCs to actually engage the dragon; another time, in a room full of elemental creatures dating back to the Dawn Wars, an elemental wind was blowing all the PCs further and further into the room while the wizard tried to shut it down as a mini-skill challenge). At least in my experience, these sorts of approaches preserve the distinct feel of wizards vs warriors, while keeping the stakes, and the level of contribution, somewhat comparable across the PCs.

 

[triqui]

3e?

In any event, the important point is that they chose. And, when they chose that, they probably felt good about "winning".

Sure, just like if Gandalf cast scry-teleport in the second paragraph of.the return of the king its becouse he choses to. But it makes it for a story. Plus it leads to two points I have addresed.


A) it completely trash any other single character but the sorcerer and the wizard for the encounter. Its not like they take the spotlight. They became the only Pc, rendering the rest into Npc status.

B) starts the nuclear arms race. Not only the drow did the same next night. He rrpeated it later to hunt down characters and kill them. Do you know whats the only thing that prevents .every. BBEG out there to cast scry+teleport on unsuspectings players at midnight and kill them all? That it makes for a crappy story. Sure, Gandalf might not teleport to Mordor becouse fear or Sauron will. But whar stops Witch King of Angmar to cast scry+ teleport without error and kill every one? The fact that the author knows Shiny Magic makes for Crappy Story. Hence he cut down magic level to a more usable level. One where magic and martial prowess are balanced. They dont need to be equal as in 4e. But they need to be balanced. Essentials showed a way.

 

[pemerton]

You mean you can't think of a way in which someone might be convinced or forced to commit an untruth under oath in heroic fantasy play? Or that heroic fantasy is immune from having divinations being wrong, misinterpreted or messed around with by other casters?

I can think of it. But I'm not sure I want the system to require me to think of it.

If I want to run a mystery in a fantasy RPG, I'm just as likely - perhaps even more likely - to want to run it while not having to introduce the question of clerical corruption. At the moment I can only think of two mystery scenarios that I've run. One was mid-level RM, and the party didn't have any diviners, so it played out well (and the priests weren't corrupt) -
the PCs followed the suspicious character, found the hideout, broke in, learned the Awful Truth, and then got mostly wiped out by a guardian lightning elemental. The other was high level RM, with some divination available, but there were ingame reasons why it couldn't help. This second one did involve a corrupt advisor to a daimyo, but that corruption became fairly obvious when the advisor fled the daimyo's ship after killing a number of guards (I can't now remember exactly what made him think that the PCs were closing in on him, and whether or not divination magic played any role in that particular subcomponent of the mystery).

My 4e game is not entirely divination free - the wizard PC has the Object Reading ritual. But while fairly powerful, it does give me as GM a fair bit of control over what sorts of visions are received. It's therefore as much a GM as a player tool. What I'm glad is not in the game (or, if it is, I haven't noticed it and neither have my players) is mind-reading magic.

As I said in my earlier post, it's an open question who likes what sort of game. (And I may have wrongly implied that the "mega-magic" divide is a bright line, whereas it is presumably in fact quite blurry, and highly sensitive to individual player and GM preferences, habits and unspoken understandings.) My main point is that the issue is a real one.

 

[triqui]

You don't follow politics much, do you?

If you get a chance, I'd recommend reading The Three Musketeers.

I hate to break it to you, but there are lots of reasons that those three top clerics might lie. If you doubt that people in positions of power have reasons to lie, I suggest you obtain and read any newspaper anywhere in the world.

RC

Yet once again, that has nothing to do with magic itself. It does not make magic any less gamebreaking. Just make it rely on the social nature of the game setting. Sure, assuming the king is not confident on the PC, or assuming the king *needs* for some motive a real proof to hang the count (which they often did in a whim in Dark Ages when the cleric said "God think he's a demon-worshiper" WITHOUT any real divine magic to support it, btw), or if we assume the PC are working for the King, yes, they *might* need some other proof (although the king might dismiss any other evidence just like he can dismiss magic. Sure, the PC might be lying about his divination spell, but the PC might be lying about that letter they found, or the blooded knife there was behind the count bed might been planted there by the PC too)

But that DOES NOT work for evey setting and every game. The PC might be a band of outlaws, like Robin Hood, wanting to know who killed the merciful countess, and willing to apply the Justice by their own, not relying on a king (who could be the Villain of the Campaign). The players might be fully trusted "knights of the Round Table" for his king. The players might be the kings themselves. Or they might be, as was the case, the ultimate Law Enforcers of a Lawful-Neutral to Lawful-Evil town, with a PC as Paladin of Death Goddess being the one who decides who to hang, no question needed to ask to the King. Yes, that means they could have hanged anyone else, and nobody would refute. The thing was the PC wanted to hang the *right* person, and thanks to magic, they did.

That's my point. If Magic is so powerful, it permeates everything. If magic "can do anything", then EVERYTHING must be done with magic. Why would any BBEG hire an assasin to enter into King's room and poison him at night? First, that would be useless: neutralize poison and raise dead and there you go. Second, it would be non-efficient. It's way easier to hire a caster that cast scry+teleport at night, kill the king, and teleport back. Sure, the king's room might be teleport-protected. THAT'S THE PROBLEM. In order to "survive" in a magic setting, the king *has* to be a magic user, or use a magic user hireling. It kills the freedom of choice from the setting author (the DM). You can't have a king that mistrust Magic (like Conan the King). If he does, he's doomed. Becouse Magic is the end-all nuclear weapon. Either you have magic, or you don't matter. At all.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I can think of it. But I'm not sure I want the system to require me to think of it.

I'm not saying the system does. I'm saying it's campaign dependent.

Remember, I'm was saying that what happened when Divinations were used in court depended on how reliable they were deemed to be.

In a realm in which Divinarions were known to be completely reliable, casting one ends the mystery (your setting). In realms in which it was known or believed that Divinations were occasionally wrong, there would be reason to doubt them as absolute proof, but may still view them as strong investigative tools (RC's setting). If they were wrong 50/50 or worse, they may be practitioners who are more accurate than others...or they may not be considered evidence at all.

 

[Hussar]

Funny, because so is casting a divination spell. I don't know about your table, but everyone wants input at my table before the spell gets cast (to help formulate the questions) and after (to decide not only what the answers mean, but, far more importantly, what to do with them).

And the problem is that you are missing the point. The doppleganger may be your problem right now, but that hardly means that the doppleganger is the only one in the room who will ping to your Detect Evil.

Frankly, I think you'd have a hard time trying the solutions you propose in any game that I was running. For that matter, in any game that I would enjoy playing in.

Not necessarily all of the time, but certainly enough that the idea of an ESP spell identifying who the murder is would no longer seem like such an "I Win" button.

(But, then, I suspect this is similar to how you thought Sleep was an "I Win" button in 1e, until we went through the T1 moathouse encounters and discovered how many there were that left our poor magic-user folded, spindled, and mutilated after he supposedly "won".)


RC

Ok, you've banged this T1 Moathouse drum a few times, so let's set the record straigh. What was being discussed at the time was the fact that sleep in AD&D is essentially an auto-win spell. You went on and on about how it only works 50% of the time in T1. That ignores the fact that the OTHER half of the time, it works perfectly fine and the wizard autowins the encounter.

The ENTIRE point of that conversation is that the non-casters get ZERO autowins ever. Not one. Not a single one. It doesn't matter if the wizard only autowins 1% of the time, it's the fact that he autowins AT ALL that was the point.

Which bring it back around to this conversation. The alignment rules are pretty specific. If you are a good aligned cleric and you protect a murderer that you KNOW is guilty (and you know because your freaking GOD just told you), you're not going to be casting any spells anymore.

It's going to be pretty obvious that you're lying when all of a sudden you can't so much as cure a paper cut.

Now, you can adjust these rules to fit a different setting and that's fine. Might be lots of fun. But, I'm getting rather tired of trying to discuss people's homebrew settings who then try to frame the conversation as if this was standard in the rules.

Divinations DON'T have failure chances. Detect Evil works 100% of the time, and it's trivially easy to get around any defenses. Know Alignment is even better. There's a list of plot destructing spells as long as my arm and I have zero interest in going line by line explaining how each one has to be accounted for in order to run a particular kind of adventure.

The fact that you, RC, admit that the game changes because of these spells is pretty much proof of how intrusive these spells are. My murder mystery switches to a court intrigue plot game, not because the players want to play that, not because I the DM want to run that, but because the rules constrain me in what can be played.

I'd much rather use a system that doesn't dictate what I can play. 1e works rather well in this regard, simply by not having a lot of divination available. 4e works in exactly the same way - most of the plot destructo spells aren't available. The big problem came in 2e and 3e where you had spell lists as long as your arm.

In a realm in which Divinarions were known to be completely reliable, casting one ends the mystery (your setting). In realms in which it was known or believed that Divinations were occasionally wrong, there would be reason to doubt them as absolute proof, but may still view them as strong investigative tools (RC's setting). If they were wrong 50/50 or worse, they may be practitioners who are more accurate than others...or they may not be considered evidence at all.

See, my beef at the moment is that Pemerton's setting is the default for 3e. That's how the game is written. RC's setting is a homebrew that has started whacking the wizard with a nerf bat to limit what the wizard can do. That's certainly one direction to go.

But, it's not what the rules say. If RC wants to discuss his homebrew setting, great. I'm just getting tired of him trying to pass it off as how the rules are written.

 

[Raven Crowking]

A) it completely trash any other single character but the sorcerer and the wizard for the encounter. Its not like they take the spotlight. They became the only Pc, rendering the rest into Npc status.

I will agree that this could be a problem, especially in slower-playing games, such as 3e. OTOH, if you follow the guidelines in 3e, almost anyone can gain some form of non-detection device that should prevent your (B).

Yet once again, that has nothing to do with magic itself. It does not make magic any less gamebreaking.

The first sentence is correct (but, as a reply to the meme that it takes magical GM handwaving to deal with the problem, it shouldn't). The second sentence is wrong. Consequences to using magic, and magic not simply solving the problem (but adding a layer of complexity/decision points) does make magic less gamebreaking.

BTW, in your examples of the "real Dark Ages": In the feudal system, the Count is the vassal of the King, and owes him both allegiance and military duty. The King is always making sure that the Count cannot amass too much power, while at the same time making sure that the Count has power enough to fulfill his obligations. Again, rather like the mafia in The Godfather.

The Count's ambition is always to raise his own standard; the King knows this, and the Count knows that the King knows this.

Unless the Count is a problem to the King, though, it is never in the King's interests to take him out. For this reason, in the real Dark Ages, as in any place in the world right now where similar conditions apply, the Count really can and does get away with murder. He doesn't even have to hide it; he just has to avoid broadcasting too loudly so as to become a problem to the King.

Conversely, if the Count is a problem to the King, it doesn't matter that he is guilty. It only matters that justice seems to be done, so that other nobles don't rebel, while everyone knows that the Count has paid the price for his actions, so that other nobles don't get ideas.

In such a scenario, the Count isn't the killer. The killer is in the King's employ, and has disguised himself as the Count. Either he fooled the horse or, in a D&D world, the horse is in the King's employ as well.

But that DOES NOT work for evey setting and every game.

Obviously.

And, it should be equally obvious, you should seek a game and a magic system with which you are comfortable.

I am not saying that people do not experience these sorts of problems; I am saying that people do not necessarily experience these sorts of problems. They are an artifact of the convergence of the ruleset and playstyle expectations, where the two do not harmonize.

When that happens, it is a lot smarter to change the ruleset than play in a way you do not enjoy.

BUT that doesn't mean that a ruleset that meshes with your playstyle expectations is going to mesh with mine.

Options are good. Dogmatism about what options should exist, IMHO at least, is not.

If magic "can do anything", then EVERYTHING must be done with magic.

Sorry, but that doesn't follow. One can have a system

Ok, you've banged this T1 Moathouse drum a few times, so let's set the record straigh. What was being discussed at the time was the fact that sleep in AD&D is essentially an auto-win spell. You went on and on about how it only works 50% of the time in T1. That ignores the fact that the OTHER half of the time, it works perfectly fine and the wizard autowins the encounter.

Significantly less than 50%, if memory serves. But, by your definition of "autowin", I am not at all convinced that "the non-casters get ZERO autowins ever." After all, in EVERY case in the Moathouse, the magic-user must not be surprised, and must get his spell off before he is struck in combat.

Which bring it back around to this conversation. The alignment rules are pretty specific. If you are a good aligned cleric and you protect a murderer that you KNOW is guilty (and you know because your freaking GOD just told you), you're not going to be casting any spells anymore.

It's going to be pretty obvious that you're lying when all of a sudden you can't so much as cure a paper cut.

Here's a few things.

(1) Your "pretty specific" alignment rules do not say "If you lie to protect a murder you KNOW is guilty, then you become Evil"). As a point of fact, they say nothing remotely close to that.

(2) The King has no way of knowing whether or not the clerics are actually casting the spell. It is entirely possible that they simply do not, and lie about that, because they do not want to know.

(3) It is also possible that the cleric's freaking GOD wants them to protect the Count, because the Count is integral to his own plans (unknowable to mortals) or because he also talked to the Count, and told the Count to commit the murder.

(4) If protecting a murderer that you KNOW is guilty makes one Evil, then I am guessing that most PCs are evil.

(5) In fact, an argument can be made that, if the clerics believe that the Count was justified and/or necessary to the stability of the kingdom (i.e., a necessary evil), that they are obligated to lie. Likewise, if the clerics know that telling the truth condemns the Count to death, and actions directly leading to the death of another (sanctity of life and all that being a Good trait) are forbidden by their religion.

(6) The clerics, of course, could simply be Neutral.

But, I'm getting rather tired of trying to discuss people's homebrew settings who then try to frame the conversation as if this was standard in the rules.

Then you might want to brush up on the rules.

Divinations DON'T have failure chances.

Absolutely sure about that, are you? Under which version of the rules?

See, my beef at the moment is that Pemerton's setting is the default for 3e. That's how the game is written. RC's setting is a homebrew that has started whacking the wizard with a nerf bat to limit what the wizard can do.

You presume too much. I've played plenty of bog-standard 1e, 2e, and 3e. With the exception of mentioning what is happening in my campaign right now, where divination magic exceeds that of 3e and still causes no problem, I haven't stepped out of bog standard D&D at all. And, because the example is one in which the level of divination exceeds that of bog-standard D&D, the fact that it causes no problems in play is relevant to the question of whether or not such magic must damage play.

OTOH, you are right about one thing: If a ruleset doesn't mesh well with your playstyle assumptions, you should change rulesets to one that does. Even if you have to build it yourself.

But, it's not what the rules say. If RC wants to discuss his homebrew setting, great. I'm just getting tired of him trying to pass it off as how the rules are written.

How very "Boom, crush. Night, losers. Winning, duh." of you.

AFAICT, you are making a claim that taking NPC motivations and resources into account is a violation of the rules? Please tell me, specifically, what I have said that violates the rules, Hussar. I await your wisdom with bated breath.

Using a ruleset wisely is not a violation thereof.


RC

 

[I'm A Banana]

Narrative control, I feel, should either not be in the hands of a class at all (the 4e solution), or it should be in the hands of EVERY class (no D&D has used this solution).

One possibility is that divination is like treasure. If you go to the Gypsy Woods you might find the Crystal of Seeing, and then any character can use divination to scry.

One possibility is that it is like a power or spell: protected by role. Clerics get Divination. Wizard get Teleportation. Fighters get Charm. Rogues get Invisibility.

One possibility is that everyone gets something to help them fill any role. Wizards get Teleportation, Charm, Invisibilty, and Divination; Fighters get mounts or vehicles that make travel easy, intimidation that inspires complexes, agility that makes them undetectable, and combat knowledge that seems prescient (BATMAN!).

The important point is just that spellcasters aren't the only ones with these powers.