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Why is magic so strong in most RPGs?

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,701
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
Magic missile, lightning bolt and fireball are juste meme material in AD&D, there are not supposed to be what you are actually picking.
Direct attacks consistently work. There's very few enemies that are outright immune to all direct attack, but save-or-die is pretty much at the whim of the dice. You can target 5x save-or-die at at enemy and some might end up surviving by pure chance. If you bombard the area with 5 nukes, they will die, period, even if they make every saving throw, because even if they save, they still take damage, and therefore, the strength of your artillery bombardment already assumes this as a baseline, whereas save-or-die means total binary failure. In all the IE and similar games, I would just nuke until they were dead. Always worked.

Your post basically summarizes my normal combat strategy in games like IWD, NWN or BG. I select spells to wipe out enemies or weaken them so my warriors have an easier time. And I always consider AoE spells like Evards Tentacles

But I also choose spells to protect me from magic and to weaken powerful enemies with spell resistance like Globe of Invulnerability and Mordenkainen's disjuction
 

Sarathiour

Cipher
Joined
Jun 7, 2020
Messages
3,262
Magic missile, lightning bolt and fireball are juste meme material in AD&D, there are not supposed to be what you are actually picking.
Direct attacks consistently work. There's very few enemies that are outright immune to all direct attack, but save-or-die is pretty much at the whim of the dice. You can target 5x save-or-die at at enemy and some might end up surviving by pure chance. If you bombard the area with 5 nukes, they will die, period, even if they make every saving throw, because even if they save, they still take damage, and therefore, the strength of your artillery bombardment already assumes this as a baseline, whereas save-or-die means total binary failure. In all the IE and similar games, I would just nuke until they were dead. Always worked.

And at which level will you be able to launch a barrage of 5 fireball ? Mr. Magniloquent already put it in better term than me, you pick damage only once you reach a certain level, and that's more for convenience's sake, because once you're reached this level, you probably already have a lot of tool to deal with small fry.
 

Tihskael

Learned
Joined
Jun 22, 2020
Messages
315
Victor

Magic is a violation of physical laws. I suppose one could design a setting in which it's useful for nothing more than parlor tricks, but it invariably leads to questions like "If I can teleport across a room, why can't I teleport over a mountain range?"
"You see that mountain range? You can teleport over it."
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
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Turn right after Alpha Centauri
Magic missile, lightning bolt and fireball are juste meme material in AD&D, there are not supposed to be what you are actually picking.
Direct attacks consistently work. There's very few enemies that are outright immune to all direct attack, but save-or-die is pretty much at the whim of the dice. You can target 5x save-or-die at at enemy and some might end up surviving by pure chance. If you bombard the area with 5 nukes, they will die, period, even if they make every saving throw, because even if they save, they still take damage, and therefore, the strength of your artillery bombardment already assumes this as a baseline, whereas save-or-die means total binary failure. In all the IE and similar games, I would just nuke until they were dead. Always worked.

Oh yeah, especially in 3rd ED when Improved Evasion and Evasion exist.
 

Pulse

Educated
Joined
May 11, 2022
Messages
82
Magic missile, lightning bolt and fireball are juste meme material in AD&D, there are not supposed to be what you are actually picking.
Direct attacks consistently work. There's very few enemies that are outright immune to all direct attack, but save-or-die is pretty much at the whim of the dice. You can target 5x save-or-die at at enemy and some might end up surviving by pure chance. If you bombard the area with 5 nukes, they will die, period, even if they make every saving throw, because even if they save, they still take damage, and therefore, the strength of your artillery bombardment already assumes this as a baseline, whereas save-or-die means total binary failure. In all the IE and similar games, I would just nuke until they were dead. Always worked.


I'm not a D&D expert, but in BG there are enemies with very high magic resistance, or with protective spells like spell shield, or nullifiers like spell trap. So you can't really just nuke, because they are actually immune. You first have to peel off their layers of defense, lower their resistances and saving throws and then nuke. In fact, nuking is the fastest part. Once they are vulnerable, you can chain contingency 3 Abi Dalzim's Horrid Wilting, skull traps etc. So they go down fast.

I would agree that against high level enemies save or die spells generally just don't work. Either they have very high saves or the game has made them immune to those spells so that you can't finish off a boss with imprisonment for example.
 

Pulse

Educated
Joined
May 11, 2022
Messages
82
Magic missile, lightning bolt and fireball are juste meme material in AD&D, there are not supposed to be what you are actually picking.
Direct attacks consistently work. There's very few enemies that are outright immune to all direct attack, but save-or-die is pretty much at the whim of the dice. You can target 5x save-or-die at at enemy and some might end up surviving by pure chance. If you bombard the area with 5 nukes, they will die, period, even if they make every saving throw, because even if they save, they still take damage, and therefore, the strength of your artillery bombardment already assumes this as a baseline, whereas save-or-die means total binary failure. In all the IE and similar games, I would just nuke until they were dead. Always worked.

In fact, thinking about it, I think it's important at which level/part of the trilogy we are talking about. In late BG2 and Throne of Bhaal, nuking alone won't work. In BG1 however, just a greater malison and then nuking I assume works for most enemies.
 

Cryomancer

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
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Messages
14,476
Location
Frostfell
I would agree that against high level enemies save or die spells generally just don't work

As I've said in my thread about my solo legacy of bhaal run for ee

By putting in a sequencer/contigency two lower resist + a greater malison, you can reduce up to 60% of enemy MR and make him deal a save vs spell at -8 penalty(-4 from malison + -2 from necromancer specialization + -2 from FoD spell itself), so, against Firkraag, the Red Dragon, great malison has a 95% chance of sticking. 65% chance of Firkraag failing his save against the FoD if the malison is on, 45% if it isn't. Combined, that's a 64% chance of failing his save. Then it's 95% to beat the remaining magic resistance with the FoD, for an overall 60.8% chance of the two-round kill vs the dragon. If you try to kill the same enemy using damaging spells, would take far more time on LoB with far less chance of success.

Even without considering LoB bloat, no way that a "nuker" could get 60%+ chances of destroying a high level dragon with very good saves.
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
5,874
Devs are generally piss poor at balancing classes, myself included. The problem is that magic users have a huge amount of flexibility, while martials generally just either hit harder, or take hits better. Even worse, they're restrained by whatever devs think of as "realism."

Player characters are supposed to be power fantasies. High-level barbarians should be able to literally beat people with small mountains, rogues should be practically invisible and fighters should be super saiyans.
 

Larianshill

Arbiter
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Feb 16, 2021
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SX0n7KP.jpeg
 

BruceVC

Magister
Joined
Jul 25, 2011
Messages
7,701
Location
South Africa, Cape Town
Devs are generally piss poor at balancing classes, myself included. The problem is that magic users have a huge amount of flexibility, while martials generally just either hit harder, or take hits better. Even worse, they're restrained by whatever devs think of as "realism."

Player characters are supposed to be power fantasies. High-level barbarians should be able to literally beat people with small mountains, rogues should be practically invisible and fighters should be super saiyans.

Hi Tyranicon

How is your adult Vampire game going, do you have an ETA ?
 

Fenris 2.0

Augur
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Jan 1, 2013
Messages
181
Location
Franconia
Weak Magic wouldn't make Sense. My personal Solution is to make Magic powerful but complicated, mysterious and difficult - edit: and maybe dangerous.
 

Cryomancer

Arcane
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Frostfell

Wrong. Lots and lots of people like to play as caster in D&D and work out hard. Myself included.

I have a very nerdy profession(remote developer), love to play as a mage and yet, work out every single day from many years.

dangerous

Dangerous would be cool. If being interrupted while casting a fireball can lead to ... It blowing up in your own hands. If you could lose control over created undead and so on.
 

Humbaba

Arcane
Joined
Aug 12, 2021
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2,939
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SADAT HQ
Wrong. Lots and lots of people like to play as caster in D&D and work out hard. Myself included.

I have a very nerdy profession(remote developer), love to play as a mage and yet, work out every single day from many years.
The average codexian is 6'5 and benches 3 plates, it is known.

Dangerous would be cool. If being interrupted while casting a fireball can lead to ... It blowing up in your own hands. If you could lose control over created undead and so on.
Wizardry 6-8 has that and it's really annoying. Even late game with high casting skills, you still run a non-zero risk of fumbling the spell at the very least. Not as bad in 8 because magic is a lot less powerful in general but then you'd have to discuss whether or not that tradeoff is worthwhile.
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
5,874
Devs are generally piss poor at balancing classes, myself included. The problem is that magic users have a huge amount of flexibility, while martials generally just either hit harder, or take hits better. Even worse, they're restrained by whatever devs think of as "realism."

Player characters are supposed to be power fantasies. High-level barbarians should be able to literally beat people with small mountains, rogues should be practically invisible and fighters should be super saiyans.

Hi Tyranicon

How is your adult Vampire game going, do you have an ETA ?

Still in pre-development. It'll go into dev once my current game is done (sometime in the summer probably).
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,819
Location
Italy
For example, with the strength domain a cleric can boost his Strength score to absurd levels for one round (we're talking about a bonus equal to his level.) Combine this with Righteous Might, Divine Power, Divine Favour, charging, using a two-handed weapon (preferably a +5 impact Minotaur greathammer,) pounce, a +5 inherent bonus to Strength, and expending as much to power attack as he can get away with; the damage done with a full attack would be enough to kill 99% of the monsters in the monster manual in a single round and put a serious hurting on anything that can survive. This, of course, is far from the most optimized CoDzilla build."

 

Cryomancer

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
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Frostfell
Ainz in Overlord still way weaker than "Touch Me" which is the Paladin.

Anyway, people downplay the dependency of scrolls in AD&D 2e.

I'm playing Menzoberranzan, got to lv 7 before reaching underdark and ... Couldn't found a tier 4 spell scroll. In the first dungeon of the underdark, only found a non offensive tier 5. HEre is my memorization screen

IozrQYJ.png
 

Nikanuur

Arbiter
Patron
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Ngranek
From the boring "close to reality" point of view: First of all, I suppose the answer is in the definition. Magic, magical. Further elaborated, it means anything mundane, physical attributes in particular, has got limits. Magic, on the other hand, is described as being able to go beyond these limits. It mostly has no bounds, or it has bounds only limited by knowledge/intelligence/experience. These you can have in virtually unlimited amounts.

As for why the game designers/fantasy book writers don't depict magic as being closer to the extent of mundane feats is probably for the same reason. I suppose it wouldn't be as believable. People generally always want something more, it's in our nature, in our drives. It would soon become unconvincing that this strange, unfathomed power wasn't mastered way beyond its initial usage.
 
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Cryomancer

Arcane
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Frostfell
And this is why so few wizards live past level 5.

LOL.

In D&D you just don't use fireball in close quarters. In GURPS is worse, to cast fireball, first you need to learn how to create fire, then shape fire and only after it, you can cast fireball. And if you have very bad "throwing" skill and rolls badly :



Note that compared to IRL destructive devices, there is no "timer" , delay, "arming distance" or safety mechanisms in a fireball which makes things more interesting :troll:
 

ERYFKRAD

Barbarian
Patron
Joined
Sep 25, 2012
Messages
28,240
Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
In D&D you just don't use fireball in close quarters. In GURPS is worse, to cast fireball, first you need to learn how to create fire, then shape fire and only after it, you can cast fireball.
Only a wizard can be so intelligent as to study enough to cast a fireball while simultaneously being so dumb they cannot use Molotov Cocktails instead.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Really if you have difficulty balancing a game yourself you should probably consider playtesting more heavily and soliciting feedback. Just remember that balancing isn't about stamping out whatever's labeled "overpowered" or making everyone perform at the exact same level for every task. (That undermines the point of a class system.) You should make sure that every class matters, and that every class has something interesting and fun to it at least. After that you need to ask yourself whether you have any difficulty-related goals for each class (ie. which classes should be better at which tasks) and see how well you're upholding that and how much of a problem it is if people find ways around that (which will typically depend on the circumstances). The end goal of balance isn't performance equalization. That's just a means to an end at best. It's preserving the meaningfulness of choice by making sure that players have a wide variety of options without feeling pigeonholed into specific ones if they want to perform well. The other goal of balance is to preserve some level of challenge so that players are typically pressured to use their options at least somewhat intelligently. If combat (or any other such challenge mechanic, for that matter) is too easy, there's little point to it and there's little point to the options you have to handle combat. But the goal isn't to make it mindlessly hard. It's to make sure that people experience the value in their options and are motivated to use them intelligently.

Also, about that Fireball topic, in D&D using Fireball is a bad idea in general since it destroys all unattended objects, anything held by a person if he rolls a 1 on his saving throw, and things like walls. With a decent caster level Fireball you can pretty much expect it to destroy everything except the guys you were trying to kill, including parts of the floor, ceiling, and walls. Gets very fun if your GM knows what a load-bearing wall is. And in GURPS you probably shouldn't be using the standard magic rules (which imitate D&D somewhat, causing balance problems) but one of their variant rulesets instead.
 
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ROARRR

Savant
Possibly Retarded
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Feb 26, 2015
Messages
336
Location
Nirvana
to much logic
in magic
destroys the magical in magic.

Right balancing means fun to play, not shitty sawyer balance.
Hard to do? Yeah, but I earn my money also hard!
 

Cryomancer

Arcane
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In 2E, you also have the magical resistance problem. Many creatures has a high chance of outright ignore your magical spells. However, by some reason, weapon based spells ignore it. Baldur's Gate 2 Minute meteor is the best way to deal with such creatures at low levels. I'm playing Ravenloft : Stone prophet and the best way to deal with such creatures is stoneskin + claws of the Umber hulk and go mole them with your magical bare hands(each hand dishing 2d6 damage + mods)

Claws of the Umber hulk for those who don't know, in P&P has 1001 utilities mainly in underdark. You can dig at insane high speed allowing all types of traps, sabotage and so on. In both Ravenloft games and in Menzoberranzan, it is merely a combat offensive spell.

No CRPG can have the same utility that a caster has in P&P. And this is not exclusive to D&D. See Tremere Thaumaturgy - Path of Conjuring.
 
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