What to do with D&D mages?

[rusty_shackleford]

It's bait.

[WaterMage]

About all approaches said in this thread, there is ANYONE here who disagrees that Warhammer Fantasy has the best implementation of Wizards?

Quoting a very serious site

taking all the good bits of D&D (brilliant lore, fun shenanigans with friends) without the bad parts (weeaboo DMs, overpowered magic, general ********). In your usual noblebright Dungeons & Dragons game

(...)

WFRP is also probably the only high fantasy universe in which magic is not (terribly) overpowered. Not so much because the rules don't have spells that can deal 4*1d10+4 damage with every hit having a chance to be critical, dealing another 1d10 damage, which keeping in mind that a PC min/maxed and lucky too can at most have 22 hitpoints and 13 damage reduction is quite a bit. No. It's because of the fact casting even a lowly fireball has the chance to open a rift to the realm of Chaos that sucks you in so your *** can be eternally ****** by Slaanesh (done by rolling doubles on your casting roll). There is a minor mishap table and a major mishap table for miscasts.

There are a lot of arcane Lores you can specialise in (Beasts, Death, Fire, Heavens, Life, Light, Metal and Shadow) and being a wizard means being inducted into the College at Altdorf to be sanctioned

https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Warha ... ellcasting

I like WHRP idea of making casters more specialized and dangerous.

But better than every other approach to """balance""" casters.

[Norfleet]

Save-or-die/save-or-suck spells are harder to balance against raw damage

The main problem with save-or-die is that it either never works against enemies that are worth using it on, or it becomes an exercise in savescumming until it does, thus trivializing the entire point. The battle ceases to be resolved through any particular tactical acumen, but simply by random chance. Ultimately, save-or-die is the same problem that plagues many design mechanics: Placing too much emphasis on a single instance of randomness. This forces the player to either savescum the issue, or consider the item useless.

- Balancing overpowered skills by adding a small chance of backfiring never, ever works - either the players can work around it and they're OP, or they can't and they will play something else.

Doesn't even matter if the backfire is chance-based (see previous issues with making outcomes dependent on single-RNG). Balancing extreme power with an extreme drawback just means that the player devises a workaround to mitigate the drawback entirely, or the item is a useless waste of dev time.

If you want the feeling of playing with danger, do it like most Wild Magic rules: your magic isn't really stronger than a boring wizard's, but it comes with a small chance of an uncontrolled effect that can be positive as well as negative

And more importantly, the effect should be relatively minor, and also, the list of effects should be large (and preferrably amusing). That disincentivizes trying to savescum for a specific effect.

[SpellSword]

e) Prebuffing. Does anyone enjoy this? Does it seem at all likely that one would have time to do this before catching a bolt in the teeth? If it's intended to be always-on, just let the player sacrifice a spell slot for a passive. Making these more user-friendly would draw attention to the problem.

People who play The Witcher seem to like prebuffing, but I myself do not. All it means is the entire party has to stand in place before every fight as each, and every, single, spell is cast on each character in turn.

[WaterMage]

or it becomes an exercise in savescumming until it does, thus trivializing the entire point.

What if you can't save scum? Eg - DDO. There are Save or Die spells https://ddowiki.com/page/Wail_of_the_Banshee

And as it is an mmo, you can't save scum

Balancing extreme power with an extreme drawback just means that the player devises a workaround to mitigate the drawback entirely,

Depends on how the player mitigates it.

[Boontaker]

Most of the time I think it's a good idea to make other classes more powerful, rather than make one weaker. But what do you do when one class has everything? In any video game adaptation of D&D that goes beyond the first few levels it is undeniable that the mage classes, regardless of edition, quickly spiral out of control. And this is with many D&D adaptations missing a variety of niche and more difficult to implement spells.

This also assumes a default, very high magic setting. It is difficult to make survival matter when your mage can just magic up some food. This was obvious in Solasta where the provisions mechanic was quickly made irrelevant. This also expands to obvious world building questions of why would there be farms, etc., .... This could perhaps be explained by rarity of clerics and mages... I suppose.

If someone wanted to grab the 3.5e SRD(or even something like OSRIC, an AD&D SRD) to make a familiar game, they'd inherently be hamstrung by this.

Just some passing thoughts I had about the various D&D adaptations over the years and how they've been shaped by, for better or worse, very powerful spell casters as the default.

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I'd probably start by creating a significantly cut down list of core spells, and make the mage class revolve around specialization. Similarly with clerics.

Bring back 3d6, straight down the line stat rolling. Anything besides fighters/rogues will be very rare, and big targets for the GM to kill

I think D&D (the system) has lost the plot though, it's a pseudo rpg larping as a tabletop wargame with outrageously poorly balanced units.

[Norfleet]

What if you can't save scum? Eg - DDO. There are Save or Die spells https://ddowiki.com/page/Wail_of_the_Banshee

Even in an MMO, there's a "Savescum" of sorts: You spam your load of the attack, and if it doesn't produce the desired objective, you ragequit the raid and try it again until it does. The end result is the same: A player that is otherwise not qualified to win can win as a statistical attack by trivial random chance. Of course, this is trivially countered by the devs simply making the intended target immune to it in some way...which renders the spell pointless.

Depends on how the player mitigates it.

The mitigation measure is rather secondary to the point: If the player can steer around the problem, he can exploit the blatantly overpoweredness. That's not to say that things should come with tradeoffs. Just that extreme OPness putatively balanced by some extreme drawback is pretty much never a good design, because this kind of design invariably calls for the player to either break the game in some way, or just never use this option, rendering it pointless for it to be in the game.

[Norfleet]

Bring back 3d6, straight down the line stat rolling. Anything besides fighters/rogues will be very rare, and big targets for the GM to kill

Not really a solid design for a vidya, because if you gate what the player wants behind random chance, the player will simply spam the attempt until he gets what he wants.

I think D&D (the system) has lost the plot though, it's a pseudo rpg larping as a tabletop wargame with outrageously poorly balanced units.

Other way around. D&D is a tabletop wargame larping as an RPG. It derives originally from Chainmail, a tabletop wargame. The wargame was first. The game was never designed as a "balancefag" RPG from the beginning, because in a wargame, heavy knights and spear infantry aren't considered to be equals either, yet both are core components of your army.

[Demonic Fate]

About all approaches said in this thread, there is ANYONE here who disagrees that Warhammer Fantasy has the best implementation of Wizards?

I would bring up Ars Magica and its lesser cousin Mage, but that's kind of cheating since those games are entirely about wizards and about making their lives as difficult as possible to challenge their ability to break reality in half.