Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 9498965" data-attributes="member: 2209">A number of games handle this by balancing the magic against everything else. Magic takes character points in GURPS for magery and every spell/skill etc. which means comparatively fewer points that can be spent on advantages like beautiful or health stat or wealth or mundane skills than non mage characters. Shadowrun requires using a character creation priority category to get magic and it adds on an extra stat to spend your stat points on leaving less to spend on your abilities and skills and money and race.So while magic can do utility stuff and mages can do mundane things too, mages generally suck at a lot of normal stuff and in particular compared to non magical characters.Other games limit what magic can accomplish in various ways. D&D started off with mages being stand ins for artillery in a fantasy skirmish game and that chainmail wargame origin led to D&D fireball and lightning bolt being a baseline iconic spell and power level and setting utility spells to do that level of effect as well. On top of that over the D&D spells and abilities of PC magic kept expanding year after year. A number of non-D&D games though either require mages to specialize very heavily (7th Sea mages spending lots of primary character building resources to do one specialty of magic like teleport touch and nothing else) or tone down the magic that is done (Beyond the Supernatural comes to mind but it has been a while).Others try to balance things more directly. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the Slayer as supernaturally tough, super combat competent and dominating in battle, with the witch's magic being very useful in combat and out and the mundanes having action point type stuff so that plot/luck/framing works for them in a number of ways to compensate for the lack of super powers of the other two.</blockquote>

Verification