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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5513927" data-attributes="member: 42582">Thanks for the vote of confidence! - I'm not sure I can say very much that lives up to it, though.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.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.</blockquote>

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