NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dbm" data-source="post: 9175521" data-attributes="member: 8014">Games which allow mixing are my preference by far; I love flexible characters. This might be achieved through a more points-buy approach (GURPS, HERO, Savage Worlds, Fate and many more) or through having a wide array of classes that mix magical and non-magical capabilities (RoleMaster is the king here IMO).Mixing magical and non-magical is fine as long as the two are balanced in some way. That could be through magic being inflexible (old skool spell slots for example), using a limited resource (like spell points of some kind) or having an inbuilt risk or negative (like corruption of the caster or their environment, or obligation to a higher being who may be demanding / inherently evil / socially unacceptable). That way, you can balance the increased ‘impact’ of magic (doing more damage to a target, large scale attacks, changing the environment, achieving the otherwise impossible and so on) against the generally more unconstrained application of non-magical methods.Factor in the impact of magic and its limitations then you can work out relative cost of character options - “what level of sword skill is comparable to being able to cast fireball?” etc. It’s tricky and quite a bit of work. The more flexible the system the harder it is to get the balance ‘perfect’ but perfection shouldn’t be the enemy of good enough.ETA: in my experience some people will play  non-magical only, some highly magical focussed and some more hybrid when given the choice as we all have preferences. This will be more ‘natural’ in distribution when the options are well balanced with no ‘obviously best’ option. So - in a well implemented system there will be variety and few issues.</blockquote>

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