Magic In Vidya And How To Balance it

That's the sort of thing I meant when I said Wizardry did balance well.
Every class had its niche, with martial classes being on the front line tanking damage with their high AC and dishing it out with their swords/spears/whatever, while the mages hang back and get the fighters an edge through buffs, debuffs, disabling, and the occasional AC-ignoring spell for especially dodgy shit.

Because I don't know of a setting where melee fighters are also connected to magic users. The old man is channeling the power through his faith and invoking ancient scripture and runes to draw upon the power unseen in the world.

At the end of the day, most settings essentially boil down to mages bringing guns to knife fights.

Except the 'gun' in question is 9 times out of 10 either an augmented guy with a sword or only good if your target has less hit dice than a rogue.

And the swordsman is using techniques refined and improved upon over thousands of years that he's learned and practice for a long time to dodge an attack that would normally be unavoidable, or perform an attack with power far beyond the regular human capabilities. Same shit. You're already suspending your disbelief when wizards turn invisible or throw fireballs, it's about applying the same rules to everyone.

I don't like it.
Not one bit.
I don't like it because barbarians aren't barbarians anymore. Warriors aren't warriors anymore. All the warriors and barbarians are mages with swords. Instead of being a resourceful, charismatic, and cunning swordsman who beats the mage's hundreds of years of immortality's worth of research, planning, and scheming using the help of a crazy old witch lady, they're swordsmen with special martial powers that make them mages except really young and with a sword. It sucks all the life out.

In fact it works best in the following way: a duo, with the mage making the warrior superhuman, effectively using the warrior as a conduit of power, so rather than throwing fire at the enemy and wasting energy, he can just give the warrior a flaming sword, and make his skin bronze so he doesn't burn himself to death. Then the warrior can go nuts using his generations of hereditary martial ability and decades of training.

That way warriors don't feel neglected and redundant vs a mage, but they stay mundane so there's actually some real variety between characters.

Heres how you balance magic; you dont.
You form your universe and game mechanics around magic being really powerful, but challenging to master and maintain and then you make it so that the people of your games land are both suspicious of magic and its users and also likely to attack you just because you use it also make it so parties of people go out hunting for magic users, you then have more people to deal with and more problems. It may be cliche and it may be a trope but games gimp magic too much to make other play styles viable or better then it but what they should be doing is make those play styles unique and more powerful instead of lowering magics viability down.

There you go, problem solved.
also

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Face it: you're not talking about magic in video games. You're talking about magic in any other form of media.

Magic should be incredible, instead it's mundane. You want to be the wizard in the tower feared and misunderstood by all the peasants, the magical girl living superweapon trying to escape the clutches of the empire who want to use her for their conquest, or folkloric creature. Instead you're the DPS standing in the back row slinging 300 elemental damage fireballs and chugging potions.

Give me a setting and gameplay system that makes the magic special, or don't bother.

Make enemies ludocrously OP so you can justify being able to launch astral MOABs with your dick, and then scale everything up from here always ensuring shit gets only more insane each time.

This is the only way to truly balance anything

What kind of video games are you playing?
The worst magic system I saw was skyrim's "fuck you for wanting high-level magic."

Too fucking bad magic is OP as shit. If you can shoot fire, bring down lighting, or freeze stuff at will that's incredibly lethal and takes a whole planet's weather systems to normally do it. Also not every game has OP magic, it often is better in half the titles just to run up to people and smack them with your weapons.

I think if I have Linaverse as my waifu megumin can be my daughterfu

Just let mages be strong, who gives a fuck? The people who play them play them for escapist power fantasies anyway.

it's either going to be OP or total shit
balance is a myth, everyone should be broken as fuck

Why shouldnt the fighter be able to do the same by training while the wizard can do this by stroking his dick in his parents' tower

It's magic. You can balance it any way you want.

will toady make magic great again?

This must be something out of a movie, seeing how well animated it is. Care to tell me the source? This looks Dio as fuck.

What is this from?

a song of ice and fire

It's when Stannis Baratheon slays the she-devil Daenerys Targaryen from the Discworld movie.

fuken liars both of ya, but I found it.

One problem of games with magic is that the non-magic classes never seem to get any cool or interesting shit. They just get a bunch of generic and uninspired ways to hit shit for damage and maybe inflict a stun or shit while mages have a dozen ways to tear up the battlefield and mess with their enemies.

Dungeon Siege is a somewhat extreme example of this, since swords and bows are pure auto-attacks while spellcasting nets you a huge variety of options.

I know what you mean. The default of mages standing around spamming arcane bolts or whatever into enemies as a DPS annoys me. It's fine if you actually had to build your mage into being some kind of special DPS role, but it's a problem when mages just feel like uninspired damage dealers. If you make a mana pool stat then proceed to trivialize the shit out of it with easy regen, mana potions, and ye free bolts of magic out of your staff, I think there is something wrong with your design. If you have a resource there should be resource management involved. I think the default for mages should be to have a more limited reservoir of powerful and useful magics that possibly requires some setup rather than farting fireballs or lightning bolts nonstop, especially when you're trying to bill your setting as low fantasy. It's even more obnoxious when the default for mages is just that you collect your magic staff and start twirling free magic bolts at people like in Dragon Age. In that game your mage is well and truly a magic DPS archer with a bunch of OP spells on top and endless mana thanks to easily available instant mana potions and out-of-combat regen.

Was there ever any real logic behind the shit Skyrim pulled with magic? It feels like there are a thousand mods to fix the shitty "there are like 2 viable damage spells past the early levels, good fucking luck" issue.

If anything it tends to be disgustingly underwhelming.

Magic users get magic, and Warrior types get shit that ends up either slightly plausible, tactically sound or fucking DMC crazy.

IE Throwing a sword like a boomerang and moving very quick, or using anti-magic user tactics like not being detected and killing the magic user before he's sighted via sword boomarang.

The disadvantage of being an all out magic user is that everyone targets you and you're shit at physical stats and combat. You can either make magic shit for a not-fun game or you can buff everyone else and go full cuh-razy, without caring for realism.

Because when you get down to it in a combat situation, reality cannot compete with fantasy, so make it all fantastic.

You can do the aformentioned boomarang thing, or go full anime where the warrior has super strength and durability (can break walls and create earthquakes through striking) and the rouge has super speed and extra stealth (nothing personnel kid).

This shit isn't hard, when you're dealing with balancing on something that is designed to be pure bullshit fantasy, stop thinking you have to balance it by nerfing it, just make everything else as fucking sweet as magic is.

A mage lacks speed/dexterity and strength, but has magic.

A warrior lacks speed/dexterity and magic, but has strength.

A rouge lacks strength and magic, but has speed/dexterity.

If you want anything in-between, nerf one stat and put the strength of it in another.

So if you want a Magic Warrior type, say a Mage has 3 magic, 1 strength, 1 speed, make it into 2 magic, 2 strength, 1 speed. Versatility over specialization has it's own benefits.

And now it's all balanced.

This so much. Magic feels like underpowered BBs instead of a explosive or portable WMD.

Say what you want about it, but Fate has the absolute best balance in terms of magic versus other shit in one simple format: Magic Resistance. Sure, it's nice being able to teleport and blast magic and shit. It's fucking amazing for dealing with normal peasants. But against an actual hero? That sort of shit isn't going to sell. Heracles, King Arthur? You're going to need a lot more than a few cantrips to take them down.

In the grand scheme of things, the most powerful fucker the series has had so far was King Solomon, the Grand Caster. Though technically all of the shit attributed to him was actually performed by the Demon King Goetia possessing his body and Grand Caster is a class container with the specific requirement of Clairvoyance; both Merlin and Gilgamesh qualify for it, with Merlin taking over at the end of F/GO part one, with Gilgamesh remaining an outsider.

I don't remember any of that stuff happening in Fate.

best implementation of magic in gaming if you ask me. mages can learn tons of spells, but are mostly good at imbuing your weaponry with elemental effects and the occasional fireball or lightning strike. sorcerers are virtually helpless in any kind of martial combat, but after an extremely long cast time can do crazy shit like rain meteors onto the battlefield or create a tornado to throw motherfuckers around, or conjure a huge spire of ice that stabs shit and can one-shot gryphons. if you're caught or interrupted at any time during your cast you're likely going to die, but if you manage to pull it off and have the patience to stick with a playstyle that slow you will absolutely break some motherfuckers in half

it was a good movie

I can never decide if I actually like rotoscoped stuff like that or not. I mean, it's smooth and high quality but part of me feels like I'd prefer they just made a regular movie if they're going to that length to avoid animating it proper with talented artists as opposed to just tracing it and coloring it weird like some sort of sonic fan.

High magic has never been good setting-wise.

This. Dragon's Dogma is also probably the only game in which I've found archery fun.

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Except its useless against fast-moving high-hp bullet sponge enemies ;(

Your Fate is a lot more boring.

Magic is always for babies. The funniest part about the people who like to play these queers in dresses is that they like to pretend that there is actually some form of depth to dropping differing colors of AoE nukes on hapless enemies.

Of course, this is just one hilarious pathology that these transvestites in denial have. Another one would be how these barely closeted homos will argue in earnest that in a fantasy world where divine beings, magic, trolls, and all sorts of unrealistic nonsense exist, that a warrior who is strong enough to crush boulders with his fists knowing some techniques you couldn't pull of in real life is just beyond the pale.

Last but not least, if by some miracle the developer of a game makes it so that magic is not ridiculously overpowered, be prepared to hear the shrieks of a thousand autists crying out in pain at once. Magic in Dark Souls 3 is perfectly viable and capable of completing the game, but, if you listened to the wails of people who are used to 2 shotting bosses that make no attempt to dodge your spells, you would be led to believe that it is completely and utterly useless, incapable of killing even the weakest of mooks.

My advice is to avoid games with magic altogether as the nerds who enjoy it cannot help but to let their bias towards it be shown in their games.

wew lad

You are correct. Autists/closet trannies have always been whining about "muh control of laws of the universe", ruining games since the earliest tabletop RPGs.

I cannot believe you bunch of fucking tasteless cumguzzling plebeians still have not mentioned Arcanum yet. Useful utilities? Check. Decent damage? Check. Fair resource system? Check.

Also, not exactly vidya, but lore-wise. Shadowrunverse and oWoD has a sweet spot for magic. There is a reason there is this saying: "Geek the mage first" in-universe. They are not exactly god almighty powerful, but they can still easily buttfuck you 20 ways or more if he is feeling creative. A stray bullet will still kill the guy like any other.

Using magic to 'damage' the guy is the most retarded thing ever because anything you can do without magic, just do it sans-magic way, it is way easier. Sadly, magic=nuke is so ingrained into vidya these days and produced shit for brain fucktards like you guys.

IT'S LIKE YOU ARE THE WIZARD

The best balance of magic in lore is probably Brandon Sanderson's works. Magic is fiddly, weird, and different on every planet, but consistent in-world. There's costs and risks to using it, it's not available to everyone most of the time, and most of the time a skilled fighter can overcome those who use Investiture (the overall name for magic across the various planets) with skill and maybe a little luck.

Seems like an appropriate thread to ask, is this game any good?

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Not really, its worth a try though.

Why not have warriors buffed in-universe by magic users to be more efficient at their jobs?
Let's say that magic users need warriors to keep them from being fucked,so they buff/make magic steroids/magic equipment for their warriors/rouges/archers so they can be defended better with super-strength,-endurance,-speed or magic resistance?
That way Magicians are still the most important lore-wise but they need everyone else to be efficiently,the fact that they're all human means that they can't just go "insta-cast,self-buffing,barrier creating god mode lol" unless they're one-of-a-kind uber-mages,for which other mages will buff their warriors/archers/rogues in response to kill the mage before he can say "Allahu".

To stop wizards from buffing themselves,you can justify the above by saying that the body needs to be strong enough to withstand such strain from the buffs,which most wizards don't have as they're too busy casting spells.

Others would rather not be dependant on one or the other so they instead try a middle path,creating paladins/mage knights.With less traditional methods with the barbarians/beserkers will be buffed by the more spiritualistic and religious shamans.

The skill of the warriors is still important and the increased strength that they get buffed with allows them to pull crazier feats,like jumping really high to space to crash meteors upon hapless fools or shatter the terrain around you to fuck with the enemy's footing and such.

That way you can justify the warriors catching up to most mages without downplaying the might of magic.

Shit,wrong file

Are you my nigga?

Fun fact: God(s) are actually just really powerful magicians. How can other classes compete?

Magic is fucking retardedly overpowered in that game and you are fucking retardedly retarded for calling it decent and fair.

here you go

I agree with this completely.

If I were to view it as a conscious design choice, I'd guess the reasoning was that they wanted to promote the norse barbarian vibe

just pissed on your face, fag

Just take a look at how Grandia on PS1 handled magic, skills, attacking, combat, and level progression, and know that you can't beat how elegant that shit is. Grandia nailed it so good, you need to play it if you haven't

Balancing is overrated.
Make mages op.
Make alchemy broken.
Make enchantments godly.
Make warriors immortals.
Make it so these things start with being shit, and when you get to endgame you wreck everything.
Give the player the tools to break the game, that's what fun is about.
Balance should only be in multiplayer games.

The problem with magic in those kinds of games is like 1hko snipers. Developers are normally too retarded to figure it out that it doesn't matter if you give something secondary stats that are shit when it can dunk anyone instantly.

Only pretending?

You're the sort of person who, when presented with legitimate logical fallacies that shatter all believably within a setting, ignores it while claiming that because the game contains dragons or magic that means any attempts at realism are null and void, aren't you?

Grandia really did do that particular style of skill system the best. It wasn't just that using skills made them better, it was the fact that the stats associated with those skills grew as well, and the fact that skill types would mix together as well.

WTF, how come there's no bideogame set in Mistborn universe, shit's made for vidya.

Just don't be a retard and keep classes in the same sense of scale. If Fred the Fighter is chopping goblins up with an axe, Casey the Cleric and Waldo the Magician are sealing minor wounds and blinding flashes, not summoning golems and supernovas; when Fred is performing herculean feats and wielding the weapons of the gods, then you can start tearing reality a new hole as a Wizard.

Even fucking Dungeons & Dragons originally got around this shit by limiting magical items to classes like Fighters and Thieves while and giving different EXP scaling to Wizards and their spellcasting ilk, there's no excuse for poorly emulating tabletop in this day and age.

Mechanically speaking it is fairly powerful by default due to having high versatility and being ranged to add to it. While a bow, crossbow or simply thrown weapons are ranged as well, they don't have much to distinguish them beyond "hit X for Y damage at Z speed". Magic on the other hand has the ability to slow, debuff, deal area damage and whatever else you can think of with the trade-off being weak without it. A very good example of magic having the upper hand just out of sheer versatility can be found in Sonny 2: Biological is strong, Hydraulic is even stronger and Psychological is outright overpowered. Mind you, the boss in embed related is supposed to be unbeatable in conventional means, you're supposed to go through the battle taking advantage of the pre-determined openings he gives you to beat him.

Mechanically speaking in AD&D 1E:

A 1st Level Fighter (0XP) has 1d10 HP (avg6). He has about a 50% chance to strike a completely unarmored opponent in melee and a 35% chance to hit an average opponent in his level range, and assuming the best equipment and 16STR, can output about an average of 6 damage when most enemies will have an average from 2HP to 8HP. He is likely to be hit himself about 25% of the time, perhaps less, and will take an average of about 3 damage on any given hit.

A 1st Level Magic-User (0XP) has 1d4 HP (avg3). He has about a 45% chance to strike a completely unarmored opponent in melee and a 30% chance to hit an average opponent in his level range. He can has one spell per day - however, these spells can effectively neutralize an entire encounter if used properly (Sleep). He is likely to hit to be hit himself about 40% of the time, perhaps less, and will take an average of about 3 damage on any given hit.

Fast forward by a fuck-load -

An 18th Level Arch-Mage (3.1mil XP) has 11d4+7 HP (avg35). He can call meteors from the sky, bend reality to his will, disintegrate people, curse them into mazes, and make them dance for him. He has a limit to spells per day, but does that really matter when he has an unlimited supply of enchanted wands, staves, and scrolls to cast spells from? His armor is potentially a lot better with the right defensive gear, and equipment to absorb hostile spells is pretty much the expected standard. Truth be told, there is only one thing he fears - magic resistance. While he may be able to fireball a platoon of men, more powerful demons may outright shrug off his most powerful spells. And of course, most creatures from beyond will take reduced damage from magical attack forms in any case. But thankfully he has a friend:

An 20th Level Lord (3.1mil XP) has 9d10+33 HP (avg83). On his own he is a master warrior - he can strike down as many as seventeen dipshit peasants in a single round, and deliver at least two strikes against proper combatants. He is only 5% likely to miss a knight armored in plate mail, and against even the best armor rating, he will strike 35% of the time. His saving throws are high on their own, and he is quite combat competent. Then there are magic items. Given the best possible equipment - with the best possible armor and no Dexterity Modifiers, even the strongest monsters strike him only 30% of the time. His damage output is nearly doubled with a magic weapon, and employing something like a Vorpal Sword, he is about 15% likely to outright kill somebody in one hit by decapitating them. His magic sword is likely intelligent, and possesses other powers, such as disintegration or instantly restoring him to full HP. His armor makes it almost impossible for him to fail saving throws. Assuming a clever mind, he likely keeps a good stock of protection scrolls - including protection against magic, petrification, demons, or whatever else he feels like. He very likely has rings to regenerate his injuries or grant him slight magical powers, and possibly other gear like gauntlets or a belt to make his strength equivalent to a giant, possibly tripling or quadrupling his damage - a minimum of 20 in a single hit is quite feasible at this point. With these enchantments, it also dramatically raises his striking ability, potentially allowing him to hit even the best armored opponents over 75% of the time. In terms of raw output, he falls somewhat short of an equivalent mage, making up for it in extreme survivability and the very simple fact that magic resistance doesn't do shit against a sword.

Then 3rd Edition happened and magic-users could turn themselves into Fighters and shit. People who play that shit are literally braindamaged.

I don't remember if this was 1st or 2nd edition, but don't fighters get a fucking castle with servants and shit at some level?

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Real life has shit balance and is a shit game

If real life was good nobody would play video gaems

If real life was good there would be even better vidya

Is there a game like that?

If real life was good and games were even better then real life would be considered bad.

Wait a minute…

Magic is fun when it is overpowered.

archive.is/WjwA1
shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=30972

It’s an old quandary in RPGs, particularly computer RPGs: how do you create meaningful, rewarding differences between combat types without making any of them objectively better? The answer is always the same: figure out who’s picking that build and what they want.

Traditionally magic requires care, planning, and attention while physical combat requires one to be brave and in-the-moment. Someone who uses weapons wants a straightforward test of strength or agility; someone who uses magic wants to approach it academically, a problem to be solved using available resources. This difference was held up in TES games as late as Morrowind; back then a fighter needed only click the attack button and drink the occasional health potion. Mages had to specialize in schools, assemble a vast library of magics, craft their own spells, study strengths and weaknesses of some enemy types, and supply themselves both health and non-regenerating spell-fueling magicka . All this planning had to be done before even entering the same room as an enemy. Once in a fight, combat was less like pulling a lever and more like operating a tank. The trade-off was that magic users were ultimately capable of delivering much more pain, and suffering much less of it, than relatively straightforward and simple fighters.

Since Oblivion, the series’ increasingly complicated melee mechanics, simplification of the mage’s magicka (spells now use a resource that regenerates in combat) and complication of fighter’s fatigue (good attacks now use a resource that regenerates in combat) blurred the line between tactical mages and impetuous fighters. Destruction has gotten easier relative to physical violence and by Skyrim, has gone from “ultimately always better” to “almost always slightly worse.”

To generalize, the people who always play mages don’t just expect Destruction to be as good as using a big hammer. They expect it to be harder and better. They want to spend more time picking out good spells, getting a rhythm down, loading up on the right potions, buffing themselves, and picking out an angle of attack, and when they bring all that preparation together they want to make a tough fight much more easy. It’s an advantage you purchase in time and system mastery. Bethesda wouldn’t want to make all this necessary to play a mage–and that’s fine. But allowing players to maximize magic through clever optimization would do a lot to quell dedicated mages without making the system inaccessible to laymen.

I don't know, I like to play mages who focus on dealing tons of damage and not much else. Passionate sorcerers instead of scholarly wizards.

This.
Magic is done best when it's considered just something someone can do, like running very fast or having a great aim. Magical academies would be as much about sparring matches with friends and rivals as they are about research and book learning about theory. Shitty shonen though it may be, Fairy Tail's concept of magic was almost ideal to me.

I'd say it's fairly balanced in Fire Emblem to an extent. Casters have to lug around multiple tomes/staves for different spells, and each one is only a single spell.
As well, more powerful spell tomes have minds of their own and pick their users, or spells that only a specific gender/blood line can use.
There are OP super spells as well, but there's plenty of OP super weapons as well.
I mean, alone a lord's rapier can rape space marine tier knights and cavalry, Myrmidons can move so fast in crits that they teleport/make mirror images and heroes can toss their sword/shield in the air, jump, grab it in mid air, bring their sword down and then casually grab their shield as it falls down.

You don't know what the purpose of balance is.

Technically, Destruction is a terrible school in Morrowind since you'll drain all your magicka if you just spam fireballs and all your coin if you keep buying potions to regain magicka.
It only made sense when you started abusing Weakness to Magicka\[element] and other advanced shenaningans, like casting spells on yourself with Absorb Magicka to regenerate it instead.
It ended up being better and more versatile than melee combat due to how buggy it was, which some consider a feature while others just consider the game was badly done.

The problem with TES is how you adquire and empower your magic since prior to Skyrim it was about collecting magickal effects in a non-tangible way (just have a single spell with the required effect and you know it) and the only way to make them stronger was to re-craft a better version of them, Skill in that particular school only made it cost less magicka and before Oblivion, increased the odds of actually casting. Skyrim was even worse since spells are pretty much pieces of equipment you buy and it still doesn't adress spell progression at all.

It would be best to find runes\words you can use to write your own spells (pretty much the same system Morrowind has but with a syntax instead of a GUI) so you could remove spells from your spellbook, sell your old ones, find spellbooks that enhance the spells written in them, etc.
And then use your Implement (staff, wand, scepter, orb, etc) as the weapon, dictating half the magnitude of the spell, the other half being your own skill.
Really, this is something I never understood why Oblivion\Skyrim didn't try. A spell having magnitude 46+7 from the Silver Staff you are currently holding.

Also this, you need Sorcerers that never have much technical spells but instead can conjure elements and many a few elemental beings of their own into the world very easily so they can charge to battle like a warrior but with flashier moves and way less armor.

That reminds me of how things are in Daggerfall
The only time destruction becomes viable (and actually ridiculously overpowered, tot he point of breaking the game) is when you cheese magic absorption+aoe at a distance and set the spells off right in front of you. Spells cost mana and aoe at a distance spells damage you, but magic absorption absorbs the spell equal to the magicka cost to cast it. So you spend 64 magicka to get back 64 magicka when hit by your own spell, also taking 0 damage. The blasts push enemies away, but not you. This lets you nuke swarms of enemies and kill any enemy in the game starting at level 1, in addition to letting you train destruction for free, which lets you make stronger aoe spells, which leads back to more intensive training and thus free level ups…..

But even after taking a character to level 15 with this strat, and getting high willpower and int, and having ~80% destruction, I still get constant "save vs. spell made" messages from enemies (not that it matters when 7/10 200 damage death bombs get resisted if even one hits). My point is, TES magic has always been shit.

You know I never get how the ability to shoot fire, teleport, summon monsters etc. is balanced with medieval weapons. You'd think in any world they would've dropped such outdated equipment in favor of advancing their ability to manipulate the laws of fucking reality itself.

There's several reasons for that, depending on setting.

The first one is that not everyone can be a mage. You need something special in you that allows magic to flow. Be it genetic, a trait of your family, an event upon your birth, mages are not trained but instead a small selection of people have the potential to be mages and everyone else is stuck with swords.

The other is that magic, when not properly utilized (which is all the time) results in horrible backlash that can tear entire towns down to the ground or summon horrible creatures or at very least heavily disfigure and mutate the wizard himself.
You never heard about a sword that went back and started swinging itself at his wielder, have you? Unless magic was involved, which just reinforces the point.
Reliable vs Powerfull and all that.

Then there's the economic reason, if magic is limited somehow. Suppose there's mana in the air that's spent to cast magic. Or some crystals must be consumed. Having trillions of mages just dilutes the power over them, so it's better to have 5-8 super mages supporting a large army instead of a large army of wimpy mages.

Finnaly there's the somewhat realistic and humane side of it. You know Guilds in the middle ages were a thing right? Guilds were all about developing trade secrets that allowed you to make better products than the competition and share them with guild mates. Leaving with said knowledge or passing it to someone else was treason for the guild and several people were killed over this.

Suppose there's a Mage's Guild full of guys that know the places to tap mana, the runes that summon pillars of fire and the names of several powerfull daemons. You really think they are just gonna go out and share that with anyone else? And lose all the leverage they have over literally anyone else?

what a load of crap, in what game is magic op?

Generally magic will almost always be a little OP or a little UP depending on the setting.

Let's look at necromancy for example. Very, very few games get it right or even 'correct' in that language. It's about the manipulation of life energy of the dead and living, raising minions, and cursing people until they can essentially no longer stand. Pound-per-pound it is the second most overpowered form of magic next to time-based magic due it's absolute utility.

Utility is what makes magic hard to balance as with a crafty player can turn any utility to their advantage. Just look at tabletop games like most d20 based roleplaying games that allow total player freedom. The more free a player is the more they may surprise creators with their ingenuity and creativity. The more they may use random debris to block holes that shoot deadly darts from trap walls. The more they might convince the head henchman of a BBEG to rethink their ways. The more they may somehow get lucky and cause a jailbreak. These are things that can only truly ever be scripted events in video games as the amount of complexity with code is mind boggling.

So let's say you have total player utility and creativity with a game? This essentially leads to more than just the holy trinity of roles. You will have players that will enjoy simply being the group party diplomat, debuffer, or craftsman. Going back to the root of the situation, the reason that magic is generally impossible to balance (if done right) is that it allows a player to be creative. The more creative a player can get, the more imbalanced magic becomes.

Old time MMO's generally get magic right, but it's horrifically imbalanced at later stages due to player creativity.

TL;DR - It's never magic that's overpowered, it's the players aptitude and application of it that is.

I guess you're right, it seems every time a sorcerer becomes too powerful they either lose their mind or disappear to another plane of existence. Or they crash the game.

Every class gets followers at a certain point. Fighters and other Fighter-types get the largest amounts.

My dad's character sheet from the 80s includes two pages dedicated to the organization of troops and shit in the area his character ruled; how they are trained to react to intruders, what to do with monsters, etc.

I think there's room for both kinds of mages. I really like the distinction between wizards and sorcerers in D&D lore, and the possibilities it creates.

This is very true. I discovered it for myself when I tried to play Morrowind a while back. Magicka potions are also somewhat hard to come by, and the interface makes it very annoying to use them with any frequency.

I'm one of those who just thinks it's badly done.

On the other hand, with a few spell mods and a perk mod, Skyrim is my favorite TES game to play a Destruction mage. I like the way it handles the actual casting of spells, where you equip them in your hands and can charge and release them when you're ready. Holding spells in my hands makes it feel more like I'm actually wielding magic, and it gives me a lot better control over when the spell fires, which can help my aim. The system also offers a lot of new variables for how spells can work. Can they be cast with one hand, or do they require two hands? How long do they take to charge? Do they fire a single projectile, or are they delivered as a sustained spray/beam? Can you move while charging them, or do you need to stand still?

Well, in most fantasy settings, those medieval weapons are themselves often imbued with magic, at least at high levels.

Best way to balance magic is with gunpowder.

...

Not enough vidya try this combination of having something around 16th-17th century tech with magic

I really like this game, even though it cost me my ds' bottom screen.

I generally like the idea of tolkien-magic; a magically infused universe, but very limited control over it. Magic is more found than intentional, and the "wizard" simply has more nuanced understanding of it. (but still no real control) Basically explaining the extreme abilities a barbarian might have, or the special nature of a bow

After that, you have the shamanic wizard, still constrained to the magic available to his culture and peoples, and more a support/leader than anything else

and finally you have the worst kind of magic, the outright wizard, who simply has or doesn't have spells because its what the story requires at the moment.

The main problem in games being that they design the world with the idea of the second, but at some point realize that support is pretty boring, and tack on abilities until you have a fireball casting wizard

Tolkien wizards have magic because they aren't a part of the world, they existed before it and joined up with some help from the gods to play some role.
It's neat when they do this, makes the mage an entity that acts with very, very different goals and ideas that might not even make sense for a mortal.

Magic can be common or not, in the 1st case magic is usually limited to recolored exploding arrows and is retarded unless some effort haha is made to implement magic to the setting daily life and other weapons/tools.
2nd case is where magic is usually considered OP(or, sometimes, just magic tricks/illusion that most don't bother wasting time on) but because you're PC and got a story to be told you'll meet mage or be(come) one so it's accessible to player. Retarded way to implement it is to make mages as useful as archers so that player will not feel that magic is as powerful as absolutely fucking everyone in the game says to make magic feel speshul and will question why do those flashy fucks even exist if some crossbow peasant can do the same job. Usual way to implement is glass cannon, better is to make magic unique and capable of doing tricky shit which is otherwise impossible for non-magic peasants (that also means no pushing enemies away with warcry or other nonmagical magical ability bullshit) so that magic actually feels like fucking magic.
If the game has roleplaying elements or dialogues then it's possible to give mages way more unique abilities balanced by limiting nerds daily skills like not acting like a retard in front of girls which is used way more often than more unique magic stuff.

One of the best examples of magic is Nox, where magic is damn powerful and tricky but warriors can kick as much ass if they get closer, and that they do very well. Assault on the mage keep is one of the best moments where nerds teach you not to take them easy and kill them fast.

Well, I came up with a couple magical rule systems because I was bored. Here's one of the more interesting ones:
1) Magic, or mana, has mass. It is a physical object. It takes the form of crystals deep underground. They're formed by lava from the center of the Earth. It can be liquified by lava, upon which it floats. When cooling, it forms itself into small balls when unaided. (like mercury spilled on the floor)
2) Magic can do anything one can think of that is seperate from the supernatural (ie souls)
3) The complexity of the spell to be performed linearly increases the amount of mana required. The power of any spell increases linearly with the size (and therefore weight and mass) of the crystal.
4) To use magic, one must enchant an object, and provide that object with a mana crystal as fuel. (Artefact) One can grow their crystal by placing it in liquid mana.
5) Only a magical person can use magic. The only way for a person to become magical is to attempt to use an artefact. (Test of Will) If the will is strong, the artefact is destroyed and they become magical. If not, they die, and their body is converted to mana and absorbed by the artefact's fuel source.
6) The spell of the artefact destroyed becomes the new magical person's pocket spell, which they can cast at any time provided they have a free-floating mana crystal on their person.

Applied to a vidya: (Presumably an MMO or someshit)

Basically, there's not a ton of mages because you either get to have magic, which is OP, or you lose your character, and have to start over. Not to mention, new characters have an incredibly low to zero chance to succeed.
Becoming magical resets all your stat-shit.
1) Lets you level up properly but as a magical
2) still erases all your progress and work you just did.

Basically a bunch of different things to weed out the number of people playing magical characters, to make it valuable. Could also hard cap the number of magical characters that can exist, but then you have to add hiatus timers and such to keep them active.

Furthermore, since mana is a physical object, mages are limited by weight. Yeah, you can cast The Floor is Lava, but now you're out of mana and are totally useless.

Couple other things:
-Could put in enough effort to let players quite literally craft their own spells, force them too, actually. Have so much random auxilliary components and such to make spells with, and force mages to specialize to a kind of magic.

-Could eliminate a monthly subscription fee and simply charge 1$ or X$ per character, with permadeath. So the grind for a character isn't months and months of work, but if you die you do have to start over. This also makes it so you have to risk your $ to try to be magical, but it's ok if you don't want to, because there's tons of other playstyles.

Just my 2c. If you want MOAR I'll do more writefagging.

Not to mention general has about half a meter of steel armor in every direction and still manages to teleport his weapons into the enemy's face with his throws.

Make it only usable by Jews.

Except in TES III, where you can make some crazy ass spells and literally become OPopie as the planes of oblivion.

Not that I know of, unfortunately.

Yeah, keep going. Get it all out ,writefag it up.

We need more quality posts on this website. I cant see how it could hurt.

Because he's using magic to do it. Magic is beyond human capabilities. Dodging shit, as you used in your shitty example, still relies on what a human body can do unless you're also using magic for it.

What's with all these fucking retards who keep saying that it's hypocritical that magic has capabilities that (relatively) normal people don't? That's the entire fucking point of magic.

Magic is supposed to be OP and a spell caster should always beat a common fighter
So in settings with magic fighters should all implement some magic in their fight-style like magical body fortifying elixirs and shit

That sounds more like an Artificer than a Wizard (and there's an entire arc of Fairy Tail for this stuff)

Mana having mass has a problem. Wizards are not famous for being strong so you'd have this funny situation where fighters can have the biggest reserves of mana on their person despite being unable to use it. It would make more sense to have mana concentrate on crystals that always weight the same no matter how much mana they hold, your personal skill and the quality of the crystal influence how much it can hold however.
You can bring more crystals, even strap them in belts or encrust them in your robes for extra storage.

However if it's a liquid that can be stored, then you open up to Mana Mines and Mana Refineries and Mana Tanks and suddendly there's a whole industry surrounding the production of mana. You could write a lot of cool stories with this, like a sorcerer king that requires gallons of it everyday to stay alive and enslaves some population to produce it.

Killing your character if you fail the check doesn't work very well. It will seem arbitrary and RNG, not satisfying at all. Not to mention most players will have their martial character that they use all the time and then start making and remaking characters until they roll successfully and keep him around. It's just a matter of how patient you are so it enforces grinding for magic.

Charging for characters is even worse since that makes it entirely pay2win. A player that can afford more characters can afford more oportunities to be a mage and therefore outperform other players. Best to keep money out of this equation (and paying for characters in permadeath is a good way to kill it fast)

You really don't need further limitations if mana is already the limiting factor. There's no point in having 500 mages when there's only mana for 20 to work. Instead players are encouraged to cooperate and several will stick to melee to assist the mage while he provides utility for everyone else.
You can even have a cap on the mages equal to a percentage of the population, so if you hit 20% mages, everyone trying the check automatically fails.

Alternatively, some ritual that draws power from The Weave\Another Dimension is what creates mages and there's only so much to go around. Killing a mage reverts him to a regular mortal so PvP ends up about killing wizards so your faction can have more, but in order to prevent snowballing, you'd need a third NPC faction dedicated to hunting mages and the more you have, the more and harder they go after you.

Magic should be OP as you advance your magical capabilities through practice and research. A true wizard is basically a demigod limited only by his creativity and wealth of knowledge. He has 1000 ways to solve any problem he encounters, and even more if his universe's magic allows time travel, interdimensional shit, etc.

Problem is, that stuff just doesn't translate well in video game. Doing actual research and creating your own spells that actually have a vast range of effects that aren't just different flavors of doing damage is hard to do. Especially since the wizard is usually just another class alongside warriors, thieves, and other shit like that so his game play has to be somewhat similar to them. A proper wizard game would have to focus on wizards alone, and even then it would be quite difficult. A wizard needs as much open endedness and a realm of possibility that you can pretty much only get in IRL tabletop games with a good DM.

Longposter again.

Yeah, it is more of an artificer, but in this setting that is the only way to cast magic.
I came up with the mana having mass to satiate a friend being obsessed with the King in 8-bit theatre drilling for mana, so yeah.
As it is, mana would have a high concentration anyway. In this setting, mages are just as strong as anyone else, they're a regular person. You can carry quite a bit of mana normally, though certainly I suppose ability could play into reducing the mana you use for spells via efficiency.

There are no "levels", though you can acquire skills to use things, like swordfighting, shield fighting, ability to use armor effectively, though you aren't prohibited from equipping anything.

That being said there are, for a lack of a better word, two classes in the game. Regular and magic. Magic guys are can use their school of magic and very few regular type skills. Regulars can use everything but magic.

Armor would be realistic as all hell. Gambeson, maille, and plate with a shield would make you very difficult to be killed, except by magic, unless a different mage gave you some wards for that kind of magic.
-Plate literally bounces enemy attacks, unless the straps are cut and it falls off.
100% chance to bounce incoming attacks on covered areas. We're going for earlier plate, so arms, shoulders, legs, helmets, and some breastplates. (Plate is open at the back.)

-Maille stops attacks but doesn't prevent enemy chains/combos. Can only be damaged/ripped open by piercing attacks, so 100% chance to stop cutting, and % chance to stop piercing on covered areas.

-Gambeson is most important because kinetic force, or chip damage, goes through the other two and gets reduced by this. %chance to prevent cut, bleed, maim on covered areas. It's also common as all hell.

%'s as well as statistical values rely on quality, durability (A ripped open maille shirt isn't protective, now is it?), and type of item.

If you have no armor, cutting attacks will bleed you until you clot, bandage, or die.
Piercing attacks lower your max health with deep wounds, until you see a doctor.
Enough smashing and your bones won't exist, until you see a doctor.
Armor is very important.
Armor is very, very important.
Fortunately for you, it's fairly common, unless someone has a fetish for throwing armor in volcanoes.

Combat would be lock on style with no rolling. You get four guard stances in which you can equip actual sword-fighting stances into. A stance has a type (direction. Up, down, left, right), stances it is good against and bad against. A stance also has a light attack, heavy attack, and guard break option.
The guard break would be akin to For Honor, but much less frequent and easier to counter, since death means a lot more, and cliffs are just as deadly.

Say, wrath guard is a top guard that forgoes defense in favor of powerful strikes. (If you look at it, the sword is back over the shoulder, not much defensive potential there.)
Fool's guard is a bottom guard, which is also a resting stance, that allows defense of bottom, left, and right stances but forgoes offensive options.

When an incoming attack is covered by your guard, you parry it. This just redirects the enemy's attack, but does not cancel their chains or combos. So you're safe from the current attacks but not future, more deadly attacks.

Equipping a shield changes the stances you can use. (ones compatible with shields.)
Shields are fantastic since they block, and very well at that. Blocking prevents chip damage AND interrupts enemy combos! GREAT!
Blocking costs stamina, unlike parries. You can always just hit a button to sling the shield, unless its huge.
Also, blocks have no guarding stance, they just cover a surface area in front of you and bounce anything that hits it.
Basically, shields are great but you can't keep it up forever. They can also get hooked by axes and other hooked weapons. Flails have a chance to just ignore the shield. IE it has counters.

You can even have a cap on the mages equal to a percentage of the population, so if you hit 20% mages, everyone trying the check automatically fails.

I like this. I definitely think this is a better system, I just wanted to make sure the META isn't GO MAGE OR GO HOME.

Sure, why not. Let players join the Mage Hunters, too.

PvP at it's basic essence is about getting gear and getting mages for your guild.

I would want to charge for characters to make death mean something. When you die your character goes away, but it's not a huge deal since there is no "grind". You don't have to grind for a week to get to level 10, a month for level 30. Once you get some gear on you're good to go. Staying alive is the tricky part. There's rape hiding in every corner off of the beaten path, although if you have a party you can win with tactics.

On top of this, I would have the climbing mechanics present in Dragon's Dogma for said rape.

With some ideas presented here I think it'll be okay, especially if it is free to play otherwise. No charge for game content, just charging every time you die, so you can make a new character. (Obviously an option to select from a gallery of appearances you have created, so you don't spend an hour in creator each time.)
If you don't spend 60$ on game content, and another $60 every expansion, that is at the bare minimum 60 lives you get, in comparison.
If you're smart and play carefully, you shouldn't die so often. Griefing wouldn't be a massive issue because murdering players leads to a bounty on YOUR head (penalty free to kill them). (Hunters guild pays out. They hate magic and crime.)

Not only this, but I would want to give a gothic feel to the game, much like Dark Souls. The level design, gear, everything. No massive grass fields filled with goblins just standing around in this game. That would actually be scary, since being surrounded is the easiest way to die. The levels wound wind around, connect with one another, and have a sense of place.
Equipment has durability, but only degrades when actually damaged. This happens rarely, but most often to armors. Swords can get dull or chip, I suppose.
Equipment is created rarely, but it doesn't despawn much either. Finding loot from other dead player's corpses is a good way to get equipped, much like you find gear around the levels in dark souls.

Game would be cheap as hell to play, if you're skilled.
Especially since thanks to user, the character killing RNG is gone, I agree that is was an awful idea.

Start area is very interconnected to many other different low-tier spots, and start area, along with some low-tier areas, have PvP disabled to prevent spawn camping. The world would be designed to prevent players from trekking back to low-tier areas to farm new character's bodies. TBH, this actually isn't a huge problem, since the only thing to "level up" is your skills. Once you have gear you stand an equal chance to a guy with fully trained skills, but he might have more options than you. If you're good you can just kick his ass and take his shit, it doesn't matter if he has mommy's credit card. If he's farming people, he'll probably have a bounty on him anyway. Plus, if a GM sees somebody or somebodies getting away with this, there might be a sudden incursion NPC hunters responding to the high bounties, AKA unstuck the area naturally. I like the idea of brigands existing, but it should be risk vs reward, and not a massive operation. GM will be able to tell the difference between assholes and brigands.

A POST SCRIPT ON MAGIC:
Yeah, magic would be OP in terms of raw power and applied utility. When you BECOME MAGICAL, you pick a school of magic (there's lots of them), and start researchin'. All kinds of spellcrafting shit you can do.
-Objects
-Actions
-Modifiers

Basically you have something, which you do something with, and can also modify the what and the which of it.

On top of this, you get your pocket spell, which doesn't need to be the same school as your choice, but if it is you get an initial research boost.
You can have as many spells as artifacts on your person/equipped.

Yeah, I don't know, pull a full Dragon's Dogma and say iron shits on magic, but make it so it only affects the casting of magic. Interferes with the artifact's resonance to the rift/void/plane or something.

A WORD ON SKILLS:
In the case of regular hummins, skills are a booster to what you can already do. Sword skill? Wield sword BETTER. Skill for a particular group of stances? Get those stances, and git gud at them. IE, non-restrictive in nature. You get 4 of them.

Also no female warriors because that's a meme. Go play WoW or Tera if you want to play your waifu.

Gonna make a more formal document. Might PDF it and throw it in here later, if the thread still exists.

Holy shit, with the tiny reply window, I didn't realize just how much I wrote.

ENJOY IT I GUESS!

This tbh fam.

Somehow summoning a giant flaming meteor out of the sky isn't threatening enough for a skinny guy with an iron short sword.

This tbh fam.

But what if the gun user is a 5 year old with eye problems and the bare hands-y dude is a trained monk? Huh? Huh? HUH?

Magic should be more powerful than sharpened stick.

bumbp

I honestly think magic should be powerful and have utility and freedom, but maybe explode if you do it wrong. You do a teleport spell, but miscasting it puts you inside a wall, which obviously kills you.

Idiots want balance, but Bruce Lee fucking died from aspirin.

So Magicka Dork Souls?

Reminder that magic is real.

It's demonic/occult witchcraft.

The Bible warns us to stay away from magic.

Magic = selling your soul to the devil, in exchange for demonic spirits helping you.

mmmmaybe.
Had a thought, you could have regular players, which are allied together, and then mages. You can elect to be a mage. All mages hate each other, and regulars hate mages, who are actively antagonistic.

GIT YEW OUT OF MY TOWER AHM DOIN RESEARCH!
Just turn your opponents into newts if you're into transmogrification. miscast might newt you Cast a spell that magically ferments their blood so they die of alcohol poisoning on the spot.

When you die as a regular -> you could be randomly selected to play mage, accept or deny.
It's absolute power vs allies.
As a mage you pick somewhere in the world to set up shop, and essentially become a world boss.
When you die as a mage you spawn as a regular.
As a mage, make sure to not get found before you research some more powerful stuff and craft your spells. Literally give mages a billion options of spells they can make, did it pretty good with

Like I said, the end result is that you become a world boss and people want to kill you because you have a habit of abducting peasants for your research, or occasionally making the mountain explode.

Is this ironic or not?

not entirely. start at the bottom yuki.la/x/18692725

Magic is real and it stems from demons. Christians have spiritual gifts and the ability to request miracles through prayer to God, and have a strong edge in a direct conflict. High-tier demon worshipers like the Rothschilds remain hidden for the simple reason that their powers could be more easily opposed if exposed to the light of day.

A man of strong faith is capable of combating a demon as easily as he might a malnourished child, but men of no faith are merely pawns for the Dragon to control.

No user, you are the demons

...

Time for a thread bump.
Interested in feedback on
It's 3 posts.

...

Mate I'm of little faith and would be the worst nightmare for any demon.

That's what the demons want you to think.

*unsheathes signed Hitchens book*
*teleports Sam and Dean*
pssh, nothing personnel Ywingie Malsteem

That's pretty accurate.

I feel like you have a lot of neat ideas (didn't read through all of it because it seems pretty scattered), but you'd probably want to rethink implementing a system like this for an MMO. It might be fairly unique, but even a system like the one you've described would still fall into pitfalls that most MMO's encounter, not to mention balancing issues. You'd be better off making a game where the gameplay lends itself to the system you want to create rather than constricting it with traditional MMO bullshittery.

Demon is a code word for jew.

Really only said MMO for the sake of playercount. Ideally it would have a server size of 50, 100, or something. I guess less guilds and more small factionettes.
I haven't played a lot of MMOs (I mean I've played them, but not GRINDAN to high level or anything like that.)
Most MMO memes I know about are:
-level gind
-grind
-grindy mc grind
-chainmail bikini
-goblins in a field, waiting to die
-Oh boy, time for a massive ability bar, where are my macros?
Tell me which ones I missed.

This game would feel a lot more like dark souls the good one, but with plenty of other players in the world at the same time, real magic, and real armor and sword-fighting. If you looked at the global map top down, a lot of areas would look a bit maze-like. Lots of ruins, and the like.

It is scattered, yeah. I'm working on a consolidated write up, which I might make a thread for and post a PDF of it.