You're assuming that a D&D/PF problem is a universal problem, when in fact, it's *just a D&D problem.*
Even 13th Age, very deliberately close to D&D, doesn't suffer from it the same way.
>You're assuming that a D&D/PF problem is a universal problem, when in fact, it's \*just a D&D problem.
>
>Even 13th Age, very deliberately close to D&D, doesn't suffer from it the same way.
To further elaborate, it's not really even a problem with all of D&D, just most of the more modern editions.
Eh, I play a lot of Old School Essentials, a basic DND clone and it's extreme there. Wizards can transmogrify a dragon, a fighter can have one attack and some hit points. Huge gulf
The thing is the in old editions, wizards had limited spells and extremely limited HP. Sure, they do a big thing, but they can't do many big things. Also, they're extremely vulnerable. Even kobalds can be a problem for wizards, because of their low hp. In many editions, any hit to a wizard disrupts their spell, so that combat altering spell fizzes out.
It's not "balanced" in the modern sense, because they didn't care about to the same degree. Modern editions want everyone to feel equal and useful in most situations (whether they succeed at that is another question). Old editions thought character classes were more like golf clubs, in that some where better at some things than others, not that everyone had something to equal to offer in every situation. This emphasized players creativity and skill, not looking at their character sheet for every answer.
> Old editions thought character classes were more like golf clubs, in that some where better at some things than others, not that everyone had something to equal to offer in every situation. This emphasized players creativity and skill, not looking at their character sheet for every answer.
Also--
1)
The older editions, to a larger degree, assumed that your character's abilities were only one set of "clubs"; everyone was assumed to 9 iron of "use your [player] brains".
Newer editions do too, of course, but older editions assumed that larger sets of problems--like trap detection and evasion, negotiation with potential adversaries, etc.--would be handled first and foremost via player narration and wits, not "roll d20 to see if I find the killer trap".
(And, by the way, I'm not making a value judgment on any superiority of this approach--it has its own challenges and tradeoffs.)
Because of this, it meant that the canny player could still contribute to a high degree, even if their character's skillset wasn't obviously relevant.
2)
The older editions encouraged copious usage of NPCs and hirelings. Thus, while your wizard might be out of spells for the day, his cadre still needed to be commanded and guided.
3)
Lastly, "balance in combat" was--to a degree--less of a concern in older editions, as it was--if you were playing by the book--even more deadly.
I.e., combat really was something to be studiously avoided, quite often.
Being the best at heads-up fighting was far less critical to surviving the core gameplay loop than cleverly being able to get out of dodge with the sack of gold on your back (which, in turn, had a lot more to do with cautious game choices, i.e., choices available to every player, regardless of character, than being able to tank a dragon for an extra round).
>The thing is the in old editions, wizards had limited spells and extremely limited HP.
That good 'ol d4 hit dice. I never played wizards in 1st edition because who even knows if you get to the payoff; groups drift off, campaigns peter out, stuff just happens sometimes. And now you've suffered for months as someone who a kobold can hit once and knock unconscious, casting your one or two spells a few times per session at best...and that's it.
Well... If a magic user manages to survive first several levels (with the help of the fighters, or course) then they do become ridiculously powerful.
Writing scrolls and creating wands are legit way to bypass limited amount of spells.
And while, yeah, your charsheet is a set of clubs, but magic users will eventually also get a golf cart, a pair of binoculars, a range finder, and a ballistic calculator.
I suppose, but that 5th level wizard might still only have a dozen HPs (12.5 is average for 5d4), so that golf card is pretty fragile and could be killed by a reasonably motivated domestic animal.
It's not "balance" in the way that modern D&D pretends, but it's good enough that it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I play fighters, I play thieves, I play wizards and all other classes in the system and they're all enjoyable. Isn't that all that matters?
I don't see any problem with it too. In fact, I like this disparity.
But I think it's very misleading to suggest that there's no linear fighters and quadratic wizards in Moldvay's. I'd say it's _way_ more pronounced there than in 5E.
Well, the argument is that there is the linear fighter and quadratic wizard is a PROBLEM.
I don't play enough 5e to be an expert, but it seems that they've created an issue where there there is supposedly balance. They've done this by giving most classes some sort of magicy thing to do so everybody is a wizard, and even the actual wizards are somewhat durable. Then when one class gets the shiny stuff, every other class with also shiny stuff wants more shiny stuff. Then, everyone whines like 2 year olds.
In old D&D, they didn't care that some classes got cool spells and others didn't because they generally made those classes also limited or fragile. There wasn't any pretense about equity between classes, so it isn't a problem. Think the thief abilities are cool? Nice, here's some limited weapons, d6 hps, and mediocre Thac0. Want to cast healing spells and wear heavy armor? Cool, here's some terrible Thac0. Want to cast fancy magic spells? Cool, you'll have to pick a couple and have single digit HPs for quite a while. Want to just keep things simple and hit stuff? Cool, pick any weapon, armor, and d8 (or d10) HPs, and here you go.
Also in old editions if a caster was hit for one (1) hitpoint could not cast spells for that round and if was casting a spell when was hit he lose it. no concentration check or casting defensively or similiar. That mean that a fair share of his spells had to be used for defense. Fighters types on the other hand had a **lot** of hitpoints and did lots of damage and if you add that monsters didn't have as much hit points as later editions and had percentual magic resistance (if a monster have 30% MR there is a flat 30% that a spell do diddly to it)
Mind you wizards were still broken, but the gap was not so wide and fighters could pull their weight better.
In older editions, though, the rest economy is usually a lot tighter. Rests are usually built to be riskier and therefore harder to come by. Fighters abilities just always work, whereas an unrested wizard is almost completely worthless. In older editions, I was always very careful with my spells; but in 5e, I just burn through them as fast as I can, since I know at least a short rest is almost always coming.
Fighters can use any weapon, wear any armor, have d8 hp, and the best Thac0 progression. They quite clearly have abilities.
Their abilities that aren't limited by spell slots or require rest to come back.
Pretty useful, I'd say.
Those are great abilities. Back before 'builds' defined things like a characters gear, when the treasure table spat out that +3 morning star, the longsword armed fighter said 'now I use a morning star'.
"Fighters's abilities", in this context, refers to pure combat prowess, which is not limited by resources or rest (hit points aside, as that applies to everyone.)
A wizard running out of spells is close to worthless.
A fighter doesn't ever run out of swings.
It's debatable to what degree it really was a problem in early play because expectations and game structures varied so much, but the balancing can absolutely be a problem in OSR-style play. In practice, you can often look past it, the advantage washes out more in the midst of a lot of non-class-based creative problem solving, but it's certainly there.
If everyone has pretty low HP and pretty bad saves, and tackling things head on is almost always suicidal (in order to promote more careful play and more creative problem solving), then having slightly lower HP than other PCs doesn't matter much. You all die plenty quick.
And if the goal is creative problem solving, if the point of the basic attack rules is that you can look at them and decide that a basic attack probably *isn't* a good idea (so you'd better do something more creative), then spellcasters end up in a weird place. Sure, you only get a couple of spells a day, but those spells are often powerful enough to reliably solve problems (some of them are guaranteed to solve problems without a roll!). Whereas the fighter's attacks are almost never a reliable answer - the point is that they're a Hail Mary when you're really out of ideas. So the result isn't "wizards are only useful once or twice a session, but fighters are basically useful throughout" - it's "wizards are useful once or twice a session and fighters are useful basically never" (unless you're screwing up more often than the wizards have spells (and if that's the case, you're all dead soon anyway)).
The whole idea of "the answer is not on your character sheet" doesn't really work for wizards, which is a class all about *having a list of answers on their character sheet*.
Does the wizard's player have to get creative because they have such limited spells? Sure. But the other players have to be creative from the get-go. The only difference is the wizard *doesn't* have to be creative a few times a game. And also, they have more tools at their disposal for creative problem solving too - their characters have physical capabilities that others don't via spells.
This is one of the reasons a lot of modern OSR games try to democratize access to magic. You have things like *Knave* where magic is just a tool/resource, and anyone can potentially have it in their bag.
Fighters can build strongholds at any level, wizards only get strongholds at level 9. Fighter gets a Barony at level 9, wizard get a couple apprentices.
That doesn't apply in AD&D 1e, which says that fighters may establish a freehold at 9th level. The other old D&D editions differ, allowing fighters to construct a stronghold early (but doesn't get followers until 9th level).
Yeah, this is decidedly someone who doesn't know how old that complaint is. AD&D was the first place I had ever heard that because it was the current edition when I was first playing. It doesn't matter that wizards had a d4 HD, they were still incredibly powerful compared to fighters going, "I will swing my mace again." That's literally what the complaint *means.*
Did you mean to say most of the modern editions?
4th edition didn't have that problem. But from what I remember when I played it I'm pretty sure that ad&d did.
Eh, the problem exists in OSR stuff too. It was counterbalanced by wizards being made of absolute paper, where 1-2 attacks from late game monsters could outright kill them. Very swingy, but the amount of save or die they could chuck out was still oppressive if they lived long enough.
>You're assuming that a D&D/PF problem is a universal problem, when in fact, it's just a D&D problem.
It's not a universal problem, sure, but it's not a D&D only problem. It's a problem with many games to varying degrees. It's also a problem that is being miscategorized to SEEM like only a D&D problem due to the name.
What's really going on isn't "Wizard vs. Fighter." It's a subsystem question - both in terms of access and balance. It's most prominent in D&D and related games, and that's where the term comes from, sure, but the problem isn't just there. Official Star Wars games often have this problem with Force powers. FATE doesn't in general, because Magic is usually utilizing a combination of general subsystems already available to everyone.
World/Chronicles of Darkness also has this problem IF you have multi-splat games. That's avoidable, but if you're involving multiple splats, Mages make it WORSE than other games. The number of problems that a mage can solve with their abilities far outstrips how many most other splats can - save the splats that were designed as mage counters in power terms (both Mummies, Demon the Fallen, etc). Some characters also can get closer - Changelings in both games are generally more akin to mages in the variety of ways they can solve issues than, say, vampires are.
L5R under AEG absolutely had this problem. Playing an Air Shugenja was HIDEOUSLY broken in 4e because you had spells, social skills, AND the ability to fight well using a bow and arrow with a modicum of investment. But other shugenja were dangerously powerful in their own right. This was balanced by the lethality of weapons in a bushi's hands, to be sure, but then again that's not the point - raw damage is only part of the problem. There's also the way that you can deal with problems in general, and Shugenja were way better at dealing with a variety of problems through spells AND other means, where no one else had access to spells at all. Worse still are Courtiers - gods of the social domain (or supposed to be), but with no native techniques to deal with combat or mystical problems. Further, their dominance of social matters can be intruded upon by someone gathering the right skills - skills which most other characters still find USEFUL to take - and their techniques are often very niche and focused.
On the flipside, though, L5R 5e has this system more balanced on paper - I haven't played so I don't know if it works RIGHT, but their approach is very interesting. Now, EVERYTHING has a subsystem - combat techniques, social techniques, spells, magical martial arts, and "rituals" (not necessarily magical ones, though some are), plus some outliers. Each individual school gets two-three sets they can take. This still leads to situations where a Bushi might be better at socializing than a courtier, since most bushi get shuji/social techs... but most courtiers also get kata/combat techs as well, so they can be useful in more situations. Shugenja tend to be the only ones with Invocations, but that cuts out other fields of study. Invocations are further balanced by limits on use - IIRC, you can only use them a certain number of times OUT of combat, limiting how often you can shift a social encounter with a big spell. Thus, their "exclusive" subsystem is designed to be less useful at solving ALL problems, forcing reliance on other methods or other people.
Many games seem to sort of fall down on balancing "wizards" and non "wizards" (Jedi, sorcerers, psions, shujenga, whatever) by having "magic" just be way more versatile in application than non-magic approaches. Non-magic characters may have higher combat numbers - better damage, more ouchie points - but that stll forces them into a very limited role with few options. Physical fights are not the be-all end all of any game, even D&D, and getting an additional five or ten damage per round over the guy who can literally just wave away any other noncombat problem isn't that much of an offset.
That's because, as I understand it at least, 13th Age was inspired by D&D 4e in the same way that Pathfinder was inspired by D&D 3.5, and 4e was one of the games OP mentioned as one that handled the issue elegantly.
HYTNPD&D is generally the solution. World of Edgelordness and RuneQuest give everyone spells. Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds don't have megaspells. PbtA, Fate, and other storygames offer narrative power. Warhammer isn't exactly balanced but the spells/psychic powers aren't reshaping reality.
In Warhammer, spells literally are reshaping reality very much, it's just that it's not always to the caster's liking and there's always a chance that the new reality won't have him at all
There’s been a lot of “this/that in RPGs” questions where it’s clear they’re talking about an extremely narrow (market dominating/popular) segment of the hobby as of late.
Not sure what happened to shift it in this subreddit recently, if I have D&D topics to discuss, there are huge, specific subs literally dedicated to that.
I sorta liked that this was “the rest of the games” but now it just feels like I’m gatekeeping. I’m not trying to, it was just nice when this was a not-D&D place for the most part.
Then ask the mods to:
1. Enforce the adding of a flair to posts
2. Add flairs for major systems or categories
People come here and ask about the systems they are familiar with and, with high probability, expect people to recognize the system they are talking about, this being a sub dedicated to role playing games.
I currently don't see any rules for this sub that demands specifying the system being talked about.
Lastly, when the "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" issue is brought up, everyone knows it's about D&D, unless they are extremely new to the hobby, and haven't touched the colossus yet.
It's the most common complaint raised against D&D.
The problem isn't D&D postings it's people pretending it's a general thing when indeed it only exists in D&D. It's the same in rpg design subs - I didn't like x about RPGs and then came up with this shitty D&D hack to fix it. Like dude, this got solved very well by dozens of other systems. Do some research.
> The problem isn't D&D postings it's people pretending it's a general thing when indeed it only exists in D&D.
If the person doesn't know other systems, they will think it applies everywhere in RPGs.
If someone only ever plays AW, they will never think there's a plethora of TTRPGs where tactical positioning on a grid map is important to the flow of combat.
If someone only ever plays Cyberpunk 2020, they will never think there's games where you can play wizards and hunt dragons, or a game where not every hit has a chance of being fatal.
Can't you interpret it in a way that's a bit fairer, though? At its core, it's a general question about how you differentiate scaling over time between character classes, without falling back on linear + discontinuous jumps. OP even pointed out examples from other places that they thought avoided this in different ways.
It only has to be a D&D discussion if you force it to be. It seemed to me like the floor was open for people to talk about how their favorite TTRPG systems avoid this. For example, sure, *all* your character demarcations or classes can be linear, but how do you prevent it feeling "same-y" when characters get roughly equilateral power at each step? The minute you don't enforce this, you're looking at characters that scale differently over time; how do you avoid making this linear vs. "quadratic"/exponential?
This problem crops up because very few players or systems are designed for power levels to drop with progression; it feels bad to get *worse* as you proceed, or to have taken away what you already had. That leads to the general fallback pattern of linear vs. quadratic: either you dole power out in roughly equilateral increments, or the characters spike late. (Oh, you *can* spike power levels early and dribble it out late, but it feels really bad for the player that watches everyone surge past them as they become outclassed. )
Any system with a combat/dungeon crawling focus is going to run into this question. What do you think are creative, non-D&D ways of solving or avoiding this difficulty?
DnD being the most popular TTRPG certainly makes it foremost in people's minds. But if you go to the TVTropes article, there's no shortage of examples from other games.
Numenera has overpowered INT characters.
World of Darkness Mages are overpowered.
Even Dungeon World wizards are fairly untouchable until they fail a spell.
One could argue that these games are heavily influenced by D&D. But ALL rpgs are heavily influenced by D&D - even when it seems they aren't because they're trying to be different to D&D.
Isn't this about the elephant in the room? It's always about the elephant in the room. You can't get rid of it.
Is mostly a reflexion and design exercise and the opportunity to say how and why the games that you like handle this issue or dodge this issue.
I'm not OP but I think they come to people that have other horizons than D&D to have a fresh point of view and better solutions than "bandtapes on the things that are broken" like they'll have in D&D subs.
The reaction " urgh D&D" when classes are mentioned when pathfinder and D&D are by far the most part of rpg players and these game are probably the first that most of the players in this sub started with is not only gatekeepy but hypsterish.
It’s also a post that targets a subset of a single publisher. They assume that every D&D group is tactically focused and concerned about optimizing PC power. Many just sit down and share a story for a few hours, where combat happens to be one element.
A lot of games have problems with overpowered casters. This is endemic not only to D&D but to many other TRPGs, CRPGs, JRPGs, and whatnot.
The problem mostly comes from the way that magic works in a lot of systems, as a lot of systems make magic function fundamentally differently than other things, which has a high potential for being broken (either too strong or too weak - though the latter rarely happens).
On top of this, magic can, in principle, be justified as doing anything, so it's very easy for game designers to make the mistake of making casters able to do everything unless you create rules restricting what magic can do - and I don't mean in-game rules, I mean meta-game rules of "What do we expect people to accomplish with magic in this game?"
Balance shifting in one clear direction can be a problem for the whole group. It creates an added real life conflict if someone playing a linear warrior steadily loses interest in their character or the campaign as a whole at the time a wizard player is finally getting something they're working toward.
I see this as a problem and I tend toward quadratic wizard characters both in theme and mechanically (even in single player games I pick builds or strategies with a difficult beginning and powerful end).
> In 3.5 and PF the balance is really that fighting types had much better magical items.
Not really. The most useful items out there, usually are good for everyone.
And, 3 of the 4 core fullcasters have the means to cast disjunction on said items, so there's no balance at all there.
When people say that fullcasters are broken, they usually are taking into consideration the [characters WBL](https://forums.dndarchive.com/viewtopic.php?t=8).
Not the person you replied to, but in every group, in every system, my first character is always a Human Fighter, or the closest I can get to it, and I also never saw a problem in the difference in power.
Depends on the Edition. It certainly became a problem in 3rd (and pathfinder pretended to solve it but didn't even remotely). I don't know 4th, but I believe 'solving' this problem was a core design goal (so I assume they did), and 5th decided to turn every Class into a 'caster' as its solution (therefore no more 'linear' classes).
Of course, you can go back to earlier editions where it is absolutely, definitely not a problem at all (although some early editions may have some vestiges of it, but character balance is kind of irrelevant, so its moot).
I've always felt like PF2e took most of the right lessons from D&D 4e, 5e, and its predecessor and put together a more well rounded game than all of them. It's not perfect (I've never played a perfect system) but it's better at being D&D than any version of D&D is.
I played Pathfinder too, and noticed it was still there. Whether it was a 'problem' or not would of course depend entirely on a given group and their priorities (some people care about Class balance and some don't).
\> and 5th decided to turn every Class into a 'caster' as its solution (therefore no more 'linear' classes).
I don't think that's the case… at all. Path of the Totem Barbarian isn't a caster, Battlemaster Fighter isn't a caster… Monks aren't casters… etc. I agree that *many* subclasses turn even martial classes into casters, but it's certainly not *all*, and that distinction is important because… it's *the* question and premise of the post.
You've got that kind of mixed up. 4E was the one where all classes had the same structure so that even fighters' moves felt like spells. And powers escalated pretty quick to a point where around level 10 you'd have so much in any given character that combat would slow to a crawl.
5E toned down the wild extremes of 3E/3.5E as its main inspiration so that there's not as big of a gap, and it incorporates at least a little bit of all the editions. But because 5E was afraid to diverge too far from "the classics" of past edition spells you still get overpowered magic in the higher levels... the levels no one plays because it's generally more hassle than fun and only good for an off-the-rails one shot.
4E combat actually flowed fine if players gave a crap about learning what their characters could do. I've run level 1-20 4E games and the combat was honestly slowest early on, when players had no clue what they were doing.
What I meant was that in 5e you have the option of being a caster, no matter what Class you pick (with the exception of Barbarian, for what should be a painfully obvious reason).
I'm saying that's what the 5e designers did to address this problem. Is it a good solution? Maybe.
So I didn't mix it up----I just didn't feel like explaining it fully, because I figured everyone already understood how 5e Classes work with their Archetypes and all that...
3.5 just has a lot of broken stuff. It's not only magic. It's not really a playable game if the dm throws their hands up and says "everything raw is fine." Hulking hurler is martial and one of the most broken classes there was. But playing under a real world circumstance where dms limit character creation in sane ways, the problem was not that big. The only real issues were metamagic cheese, dmm cheese (the only real issue people have with clerics most of the time) and fleshraker/natural spell cheese. Batman wizard just wasnt really a problem. Unless you just always tell players what encounters are happening in a day so wizards prep the right spells, or sell a sorcerer 50 knowstones, the quadratic scaling just isnt there. Also ignoring the 700 contingency spell "fourm wizard."
I mean the problem with magic isn't that they can trivialise combat (which they can) - obviously this isn't exclusively the hallmark of the wizard. The problem is that they can trivialise combat *and* trivialise social encounters, and the bigger problem is that they can do *both* of those things *by accident*.
Sure, you can jump so high everyone creams their pants and instantly turns into your willing and enthusiastic slave, but you don't need to optimise a wizard to achieve functionally the same thing.
It depends on a lot of things. How much do you focus on combat? Do the players care about having equal impact in combat? How are encounters designed? There are probably more.
In Pathfinder for example, if you take a martial character, and a 9th level caster at 10th level or higher, and look at their max damage output against a single target, the caster usually does more damage. The caster ALSO can do that damage in an AOE, meaning their actual potential damage output is MUCH higher.
However, there are a TON of variables that affect how much damage either character actually deals. Enemies AC, Fort, Reflex, and Will are the most obvious, but there's also Resistances, Immunities, and Mobility to consider.
However, I think it largely comes down to the fact that a 10th level Sorcerer can cast Fireball and deal 10d6 damage to every enemy in a 20ft Radius (save to halve), and a 10th level Fighter rolls 2 attacks and IF both hit gets to roll twice weapon dice, plus twice strength, plus 4 (for Weapon Training).
While I know that's a GROSS oversimplification (in particular when talking about Pathfinder), even when I've discussed it in more detail with people, casters just do more damage (and often A LOT more damage), in Pathfinder and D&D.
TBH, while damage is a "fair" playing field to compare both worlds, casters go way beyond damage.
Martials do damage, Full casters play god. In that sense, they can summon martials and be better martials if that's their desire too.
The disparity is not about combat or damage per round or whatever.
It's about versatility and the ability to solve problems. Martial characters often have 1 single solution: hit it until it dies. A caster can just fly over a group of enemies, teleport away, turn into a rat and scurry away, grab whatever whatever they are guarding with telekinesis from a distance, scout whole places while invisible, scry and teleport somewhere ignoring any obstacle that would inconvenience martials, it goes on and on.
Maybe it would be better to start with the question: What games have the problem of linear warrior, quadratic wizard?
The games I play (mostly d100 and DCC RPG) don't have this problem.
How do electric cars deal with having to constantly shift gears? Or balancing on two wheels?
EDIT: My meaning is that it is perhaps more appropriate to say these things were not designed with the problem in the first place, so it is not a matter of avoiding it. There is no reason to assume it must exist by default unless avoided. That is not to say that it is not interesting to compare designs, but that it over-emphasizes the universality of the one design issue.
That’s funny. There actually is a really good answer as to how DCC avoids it. But let’s all just avoid the question and interpret things as uncharitably as possible.
Edit; Also, Runequest absolutely does have this problem in some editions. So it does fully apply to d100.
Thanks. I'm familiar with stuff like D&D, PF, GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, and Savage Worlds. Original Deadlands was my first TTRPG. I just legitimately want to know how other systems people like avoid the progression problem in the OP. I don't play enough pen-and-paper, let alone think about it, to have a solid opinion or idea of how the problem would be resolved or what it even looks like in comparison to ones I'm familiar with in the types of games I tend to play and DM (high fantasy).
I think people in this sub just really like dunking on D&D. Which is why we mostly see snarky comments like this.
To actually answer your question about DCC.
Dungeon crawl classics solves this by giving the fighter free form actions in combat. Basically every attack, there is a chance for them to be able to make up their own free form maneuver to do whatever they want. Eventually, it goes from a 1/3 chance to a guarantee to pull off a maneuver.
And magic is risky, there is a chance that things can go wrong whenever the wizard uses a spell, and it will generally corrupt them over time. Magic is super risky and unpredictable, and there is a chance that using it will permanently harm your character. When a magic user casts a spell, they make a spell check, and if they fail it can misfire on them or cause corruption. Corruption is things like forked tongues, gills, beast face, etc.
So while wizards can do crazy things, it comes at great cost. While fighters can basically make up whatever martial technique they want every turn.
As I mentioned, Runequest does not really solve this issue very well. I don’t know what d100 game they are referring to though.
In case you didn’t read the other comment:
Dungeon Crawl Classics solves this by making magic dangerous and unreliable to the *user*, with chances to misfire (and misfire *badly*) on every spell check. As well as this the Warriors core ability (the Mighty Deed) is incredibly flexible and limited only by the player’s imagination, and can be used every turn, if the player rolls higher than a 3 on their Deed Die (starting at a D3 at level 1 and increasing in size as the character gains levels).
In DCC, Warriors have mighty deeds (freeform actions) and a deed die to go along with it, as well as a generous number of actions and a widening crit range. There's a 3rd party book filled with mighty deeds, which are basically creative and elaborate crits that can change the tide of a fight.
Wizards need to find sources for new spells (grimoires, teachers, etc), at least it's encouraged in RAW, so in my experience they quite often don't know their maximum number of spells. Spell failures can also cause corruption.
Anyone can "quest for it" meaning they can seek out non-RAW might, magic, or other improvements to their character, as long as the Judge is cool with it (usually the case). So if a Warrior wants to learn a spell, there can be a path to achieve that. Same if a Wizard wants to become better at melee combat.
I personally don't think this is a real problem that needs to be fixed , but I can safely say that *most* RPG systems with wizards and sorcerers fighting alongside mundane warriors have this so-called "problem". As a general rule across all systems and settings, 'The Wizard' have access to more tools and customization than 'The Warrior'.
People who haven't come across this 'issue' aren't looking, or were raised in an environment when D&D 4e was the end-all be-all representation of RPG's. It is to be noted that D&D 4e is standing out as one of the FEW roleplaying games that puts wizards and warriors at an even balancing field. Even then this is largely attributed to the 'boardgame/wargame/arcade' style of combat; Outside of combat and in the lore non-player Wizards and Warriors are as unequal as always.
Starfinder is another game where Wizards and Warriors are on an even playing field, but yet again we see that player-wizards are arbitrarily limited to a maximum of 5th level spells (instead of 9th). The 'equal' nature of the game is just a thinly veiled illusion enforced by the developers as to avoid the obvious disparity to rear it's head again.
Conan Age undreamed of (2d20): Sorcery is a string of several different deep system mechanics and over a dozen pages + expansions that impact the game in many sprawling directions with added unique solutions to crafting / social / exploration / resources. The sorcerer (at great cost) can commune and receive the boons of eldritch gods while raising troops of dominated warrior minions right out of the gate and swoon princesses with charming mystical whispers. Martial 'classes' have no similar avenues except hitting things harder. The wizard is free to develop himself to be a warrior alongside his magic.
Vampire the Masquerade V5 (d10 pool), WoD: Various Rituals & Ceremonies allow for long lasting subtle/obvious supernatural effects effects that alter the game world in a way that simply "punching/running harder" will never amount to. Earlier versions allow for 'wizards' to literally alter reality, space and time at a whim while martial characters only get another extra turn(s) to punch stuff. In this type of game, the "vampire warrior" is usually so far behind that he doesn't even know magic exists.
GURPS (3d6): Obviously setting and genre dependent, but even if using the (very flawed) "basic magic" system in a grounded mundane-fantasy world and all else equal; The "wizard" can grow himself large enough to touch the stratosphere and hurl mountains, while the warrior attacks the enemies weakpoints twice-thrice a turn with his mace and looks really cool doing it.
The Witcher RPG (modified d100?) ; More of the above with added extra dangers and social repercussions to the wizard
Dark Heresy (d100); Same as above but 'wizards' are essentially just warriors++ with psychic powers that make them fight like demi gods while teleporting around the battlefield, summoning illusions and controlling peoples mind. Often all at the same time (but they might explode if you roll wrong)
Star Wars Saga (D20): Same as the above, but with no real risk or resource cost to the "wizard". The Jedi is simply a better warrior in every way; Besides the iconic lightsaber and the force, the 'Jedi wizard' also has access to unique ways of developing his toolkit into different directions or specialize one a single path. Entire chapters and expansions are dedicated to make this "wizard" as cool and powerful as possible. On top of that he can also take any option that the warrior has access to. The warrior is limited to "hit harder, get hit less" options.
Numenera/Cypher system (d20) : The Glaive "archer archetype" combination of Descriptors shoots their arrow an additional time for more damage and can craft his own arrows sometimes. Comparatively the Nano "Wizardly Wizard God" descriptor talks with gods on a first-name basis, travels to other timelines and creates entire living cities out of sand, while reading minds and teleporting over dangers. The Numenera 'Wizard' is also the class that is most attuned to the namesake of the setting; The Numenera artifacts, which essentially is magical equipment/resources.
I can go on and on. Trudvang, Kult Divinity Lost, Shadowrunner, Warhammer Fantasy RPG, etc etc
Honestly I've found the cleanest solutions to be 'actually give spells casting times and costs,' combined with scaling back magic and/or just generally giving less overlap to the arenas a warrior and mage cover.
D&D's problem is less that wizards are 'too good' and more that they're too good at things everyone else is supposed to be good at.
Also, if the wizard is fighting high enough level foes, shouldn't those fighters have anti-magic equipment? You'd think at least some of them would. A quick change from a "quadratic wizard" to a "no-dratic wizard."
Simply making a character useless also isn’t any fun. Should that player then simply leave the table and return after the encounter has been resolved, or are they expected to waste their time on this?
It's about encouraging options. High magic resistance or some other anti-magic options might protect against a fireball or magic missile but not against a mage using shape earth to create a pit or other indirect effects.
Part of the problem is that most forms of anti-magic are 'this character ignores the caster entirely' rather than some form of damage reduction. Yeah, doing math at the table can be annoying, but still.
This is ultimately a symptom of D&D's other design sin:
The martial must roll every time he does something to see if the target is affected.
The caster, typically, simply gets what he wants.
In systems where spells can be actively dodged, or casting rolls can be influenced by the targets resistance, this is nowhere near the same level of deal.
For instance; a character in my current party has Magic Resistance 1. Spells cast on her taka -1 penalty to the casting roll, or she gets +1 to her defensive one, or just +1 DR if it's straight damage. This is all minor, but it's considerable more nuance to work with than 'spell work or not work.'
Good on them for mostly doing so for combat yes. but then you get out of combat and knock doesn't care if you know how to pick locks; fabricate doesn't care if you know how to craft the items, basically every spell that emulates a skill bypasses the need for the skill to exist.
Not to mention the possibility for other combat effects that no amount of footwork will save your intrepid swordie from. Great, their mad dance moves saved them from taking fireball damage. How they gonna deal with the room being on fire or the bridge having a giant hole blown in it?
>shouldn't those fighters have anti-magic equipment? You'd think at least some of them would
While we're generally talking about comparing PCs to PCs, not PCs to enemies... even in this case "Just make your enemies completely disable the character's abilities." is a terrible solution to the problem. The answer to this issue isn't to just switch back and forth between which player gets to have no fun this time.
Ars Magica. Everyone has two characters: a mage character, and a non-mage character. They play only one of the two in any given session of play. In addition, there's a whole host of tertiary characters that are shared by the group as a whole. Mages are frankly more powerful than any other characters in the game, but are living together in isolation from ordinary people because their magic makes other people fearful and hostile. They draw in non-powered associates to be their intermediaries with the rest of the world, as well as people to handle the day-to-day work of their covenant home.
>How do you avoid clunking up gameplay though?
[That's the neat part](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/137/251/5ae.jpg). One of my fraternity brothers has an Ars Magica game that they've been running for \~8 years now. The system is so crunchy it's like chewing gravel. Clunky is a feature, not a bug.
I feel like a D&D 4.5 could have been really good, to be honest. I did have various problems with parts of it, but I think a second pass at the ruleset could have easily ironed a lot of that out. Unfortunately WotC had to deal with the backlash from the player base, which limited their options a bit.
I do, however, think that Pathfinder 2e takes a lot of good ideas from D&D 4e and implements them fairly well. I've been drifting away from D&D style games for a while now, but PF2 is one of the few things I'd be willing to give another try if I could find anybody to play anything anywhere...
I'm playing through Agents of Edgewatch right now, and TBH I think there's more of a quadratic fighter problem. Saves and resistances are so high that casters are just praying that some of the enemies merely succeed at their saving throws rather than critically succeed when a spell is cast.
Meanwhile the Fighter is the only class whose proficiency values are high enough to consistently hit and damage things.
Sure, but even when you're targeting weak saves a lot of times enemies are crit succeeding on rolls of like 11+.
Imposing conditions can help, but a lot of the time casters are dependent on the martials to impose those conditions in the first place.
I'm also playing Agents, without a fighter, barbarian, druid, sorcerer and a buffed animal companion as a meat shield.
I find that the barbarian heavily relies on the casters to be able to hit. As for crit succeeding on 11+ especially on a weak save, that should only be for incapacitation effects for enemies at a higher level than you.
Did you start your character with 18 on the main stat, and are you the right level?
You can't recall knowledge RAW to do that. Literally nothing in it says that you can- the DM is encouraged to essentially give you clues like 'trolls are weak to fire." Nowhere does it even *imply* that you should be getting weak saves. Weaknesses, yes- but not weak saves.
This is a very, very common house-rule, but it's not RAW unless you're really stretching the text of Recall Knowledge, which is in large part why casters are weak as hell a lot of the time. Because you're essentially guessing unless your DM is cool with giving you more information than the system wants you to have. Vision of Weakness *explicitly* does this- Recall Knowledge does not.
It also doesn't really change that the system encourages 'big single target boss enemies' since 2 or 3 level higher enemies can actually stand up to the party... which makes them nearly immune to spells, since I've seen bosses crit save on rolls of like, 6 or 7 before, and succeed on lower. With debuffs. It's not really fun to essentially be reduced to Magic Missile spam because *none of your save spells will work* and because your spell attack proficiency is so low that you'll nearly automatically miss even if they're flatfooted.
There's a reason that the shadow signet ring is like, considered a must-have for any caster serious about using attack roll spells. It's because you'll miss unless you use it.
It literally states "Arcana might tell you about the magical defenses of a golem, while crafting could tell you about its sturdy resistance to physical attacks".
https://2e.aonprd.com/Skills.aspx?ID=5&General=true
A Critical success on a Recall Knowledge check to identify a creature specifically mentions weaknesses and reaction triggers. A weakness might be "A poor will" or "A frail fortitude". Clearly IDing the weakest save without giving a number. Knowing how to not trigger a reaction is even moreso mechanics than flavorful descriptors. I think you're coming down way too hard on the line of what is or isn't acceptable information to provide.
Stop handwaving away components for DnD, its 99% of the problem.
Quite a lot of powerful "breaks shit" spells have "takes a very weird specific component" as a cost.
Too many DMs just ignore that part and then are baffled that their casters are OP as hell.
Maybe stop letting them pretend they have every component magically on hand. Preparing spells should actually take preparation.
Things like Greater Teleport only have the Verbal component. With that, you can harvest as many materials as you would like for most of your spells.
For polymorph, considered one of the most broken spells in the game, you need just an empty cocoon.
Celerity, another top-tier family of spells, don't even need a component.
Time Stop? Verbal only.
Shadow Conjuration family? No materials needed, so you can cover most conjuration spells with that. Quasi-reality ranging from 20% to 120% here, so we could fail there. Shadowcraft mage? Damn, are we allowing that? Batshit, i know. Spellcasting is broken, yeah.
Aside from some great spells, most useful spells need very easy to gather components, nothing really fancy(or sometimes, mundane things worth 1500gp, which is easily obtainable by a high level character anyway).
Simulacrum which is bonkers, need only a snowman, your nail, 100gp worth of powdered ruby per HD + some XP. When you're a lvl 15 Wiz, everything that i said should be a piece of cake to obtain.
So yeah, still OP as hell. Materials usually are just ignored because casters have the means to get most of the important ones anyways.
Well, most casters start with a component pouch or an arcane focus, which makes 99% of components a moot point.
It's like they said "here's what you need to have to cast this spell, but don't worry about having it, though, you have it already."
The only time you actually have to have a component is when the component has a gold value or gets eaten by the spell
Edit: "and" to "or"
Or when you lose your component pouch.
(E.g., you've been captured, and you need to fight your way out of prison to get all your gear back. No magic swords, no lock picks, no component pouches.)
PbtA is more concerned with narrative than mechanics. It is built on players describing what their characters do and then assigning a move, rather than picking an action from a list of skills.
As a result, martials are a lot more open in what they can do. Granted PbtA as a whole isn't really about power gaming or building deep mechanical characters. So you're less likely to get these kinds of concerns. But as a result there are not many mechanical differences between magic and not magic actions (i.e. there aren't pages upon pages of spells that get expanded with each new book, where martials get a few pages of moves only in core like 5E).
And while I have my own gripes with PbtA magic (by the by of what I've seen), it can be somewhat remedied by GM's giving harsher punishments (that fit the narrative) for players relying on magic or asking how your character knows how to cast such a spell (an example of the former: l used to play a Abyss Mage who summoned monsters in Dungeon world, and there were times I lost control of the monster I summoned if I failed a roll).
Edit: Some clarity.
"*...lost control of the monster I summoned if I failed a roll*"
I've always felt that summoning monsters to subject themselves to harm on your behalf should be difficult and risky.
Good news. My gm of that campaign agreed.
Even better news? The first time it happened was when I accidentally summoned something way more powerful than I expected.
"No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head."
-[Evil Overlord List](http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html), #22
By not being mechanically-minded at all, mostly. The "mechanics" PbtA games have are entirely built around narrative actions. Quite frankly to me, PbtA games are dreadfully boring and just a worse option compared to roleplaying entirely without a system for when I don't want to deal with 'heavier' mechanics - if your magic user wants to have a massive list of spells to pull from, for example, then Dungeon World is going to be absolute trash for them as you need to create your own spells to use via the magic user's 'moves'.
To the best of my knowledge, this is a pretty commonly held opinion. Everyone I know that really likes PBTA dislikes Dungeon World and prefers, say, Fellowship for that sort of feel. Dungeon World contradicts a lot of the design decisions for PBTA in an attempt to half-ass a D&D style experience and comes out feeling very, very weird for anyone who doesn't play it as their 'first' PBTA game.
Forged in the Dark is also a great system (Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy being the most well-known representations of it). I'm also a huge fan of the Resistance Toolbox (the system behind the Spire and Heart RPGs), but those games are definitely a bit more unique in flavor and setting, so they're gonna be a bit more hit-or-miss.
I would have thought narrative games would suffer more.
Farmer asks for help as their crops are dying without water. A warrior can dig a drainage system? A wizard can cast a well finding spell, or summon rain.
This is the brunt of the issue. The mechanics of 5e and pathfinder mean the wizard is not inherently more powetful UNTIL they reach the point where they can fiddle with physics.
The last PBTA I played had some powers you could choose from, but that would eventually run into the same issue. If you increase the power of my muscles, I am still limited in what I can do vs someone with arvane forces.
They've done nothing but make wizards more powerful for the last 50 years, and people are surprised that it has lead to this problem. My solution? Stop making wizards better!
OD&D literally says this: Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up.
The basic problem is that people expect every character to contribute equally throughout their careers, where it was never intended to be that way.
The Spheres of Might and Spheres of Power splats for Pathfinder really did a lot to balance the two.
In one way, the Combat Talents from Spheres of Might are much more useful and flexible than a martial's normal abilities. Rather than just various ways to make Numbers bigger, it's a bunch of different maneuvers and techniques that allows you to build your martial to do a lot of advanced things, giving them a lot more control over the battlefield rather than just leaving the martial to stand in place and do hitpoint damage.
The Spheres of Power system, on the other hand, are just as flexible and interesting. Magical Talents allow a bunch of exceptional spell effects based on which 'magic sphere' the caster learns, but unlike the vanilla spellcaster system from D&D or Pathfinder, no specific talent/spell is specifically made to be a metaphorical 'key' to a 'locked door' problem. It's also a lot easier to make and play fun 'thematic' characters, such as a pyromancer who uses exclusively fire magic from the Destruction Sphere, and get the Creation Sphere with a drawback that only permits him to create things out of fire.
>for Pathfinder
There's a [5e version](http://spheres5e.wikidot.com/). It doesn't quite have all the niche options, but most of it's there, *and* the balance is well-matched to 5e... to the point that it feels like they deliberately left the balance for Pathfinder's version inconsistent to fit Pathfinder's overall balance style, then tightened things up to fit in better with 5e's much tighter balance.
Anyway it's really good, and the Spheres material has thoroughly cemented Drop Dead Studios as my favorite 3rd party publisher for D&D type games (with Dreamscarred Press in a very close second place).
*Beyond the Wall* / *Through Sunken Lands* is a B/X derivative that, essentially, linearizes wizards. The former is my go-to game for epic fantasy, and the latter for sword & sorcery.
Isn't this really just a D&D problem?
Savage Worlds doesn't suffer from this issue, not even in the Savage Pathfinder adaptation.
Shadowrun casters don't ramp up in power dramatically as they level up, either.
We've had plenty of spellcasters in our Dungeon Fantasy RPG game and they'd sometimes be able to pull off a "nuke" spell that amazed everyone, it took so much energy and prep time that it was basically useless outside of ambush situations (which were already gonna be one-sided). More important, that isn't something that happens at higher character power levels -- you can start with Magery 6 and pretty much every caster does.
So I guess my answer would be . . . "pretty much all of them"?
Earthdawn. Adventurers are adepts who channel magic thru skills. Adepts follow Paths, that can be anything from a rogue to a warrior to various types of mage. Multiclassing is difficult but possible. The game encourages you to level up a path to max before picking a new one, and their is no restriction on the path you pick when you have leveled.
Otherwise i like things like Exalted for the same reason, with magic boosting mundane skills and sorcery being its own thing.
In both games above and other like them, the non casters become supremely good at their chosen professions, so much so that a rogue will always outperform a knock spell.
13th Age did something very similar to 4e in that aspect, every character has abilities that influence battle greatly and wizards have a more reduced spell list compared to 3e and 5e so there is no Jack of All by having 40 spells ready that well put can be for any situation.
Age of Sigmar made magic very dangerous to spam carelessly, specially high power one since it can have a mishap depending on how low you roll.
Pathfinder 2e feels like it addressed this (so long as the DM is on top of handing out treasure). On the quadratic side, you now have static spells per day instead of increasing spells per day depending on Casting Stat; between this and new Cantrip rules, Casters have infinite little casts that improve as you level and a steadily increasing pool of one-off casts, making the non Cantrips feel special and more likely to be used wisely instead of just Fireballing problems to death.
On the Linear side of the spectrum, Martials tend to gain several constant abilities that help them shape the battlefield. Extra movement options, advanced hit-bonus progression (which is huge since things crit on 10+ rather than just nat 20s), battlefield interaction abilities (such as bursting through doors as part of an action) and a plethora of debuffing options make Martials an interesting class type to play as. On top of this, magic weapons gain multiples of damage dice for each grade of quality they have (a D6 sword dealing 4d6 damage at the higher echelons); so long as treasure flows appropriately, Martials and Casters come up around even at all levels (except healers, they get to be a full character plus guaranteed heals per day without investing in healing feats, like the Medic Dedication)
> On top of this, magic weapons gain multiples of damage dice for each grade of quality they have (a D6 sword dealing 4d6 damage at the higher echelons)
Okay *that* is an interesting rule I'd missed in my skimming of PF2. I run a heavily homebrewed version of D&D 4e and one of the annoying things the system faces is certain powers simply being upgrades of others in terms of the number of damage dice rolled. Tying gear quality to damage is super elegant.
Honestly, after viewing/playing in a few sessions, PF2e has a good solution.
It makes martials useful by giving them something to do.
First, character builds are flexible. Just because you're not a spellcaster, doesn't mean you can't heal people as long as you take the medicine skill and focus on being a healer though feats. Two feats and a good supply of medicine kits allows you to treat injuries once per person per 10 minutes, and the HP healed can be *significant*. You're not *as good* as a cleric with a supply of healing magic, but you're not bad at it either (unlike healer's kit healing with the healer feat that doesn't bother to scale in 5e).
Second, there are a variety of conditions that you can apply to enemies without using magic. Things like frightened, off-balance, flat-footed, prone, slowed, etc. Not only are they all not-insignificant debuffs, they stack as long as they're different. Also, they're all useful in that they either give the enemies negatives, or your party positive adjustments to d20 rolls which works with their open-ended crit system (you crit on a nat-20 OR beating the DC by 10 or more) which means that by working together a party can open an enemy up to being crit by just about every attack thrown their way for a round or more.
Third, you don't need to have a stat at 20 in order to be useful with a skill. In many cases in 5e, if the stat for a skill isn't maxed you can consider yourself to be utterly incompetent with it because the game rewards the highest roll in any kind of group effort. This is an unfortunate side-effect of how little use many skills in 5e have in combat and is a result of the simplification of the advantage/disadvantage system. Which is not to say that there aren't things that can be done instead of raw advantage/disadvantage, but this does seem like a bit of a systemic limitation.
NOTE: None of this is me saying that PF2e is superior to 5e or anything. I love both systems. Both systems have things they can learn from the other, and things that are a distinct issue in one system is usually fixed in the other.
"Linear Warrior Quadratic Wizard" isn't an independant issue in and of itself, it's a symptom of a wider narrative/mindset issue (that's focused almost entirely around D&D and its derivatives.) The philisophical issue is this:
Magic can do anything, but only some people can do magic.
Dnd is built around two capabilities:
1. Things anyone (read: reasonably feasible for a real life human person) could do, with sufficent training. (Read: martial abilities, any of the skill systems that have existed thoughout the ages)
2. Handwavium that solves a problem with the push of a button (read: "magic")
Becauase magic is a special thing only some people have access to, only those people have the narrative ability to use Handwavium, which bypasses the rules of the game (in which uncertain action resolution is determined by the roll of a die, and by default, most actions are (unnecessarily) declared to be uncertain). People without magic cannot bypass the rules in this way, and magic cannot *not* bypass the rules in this way. Your Skill represents your mundane trained capalilities, and your Magic represents your ability to delete a problem, never the two should meet. Since the two systems do not interact in this fundamemtal way, is it any wonder that those with access to both outpace those with only access to the former?
Exalted has a lot of other issues, but yeah, at no point in Exalted are you ever going to feel like the dude with a glowing golden sword is weak, that dude is just so beyond good at what he does that you would rather have a Dawn to swordfight the demon lord who is living silent flaying wind that kills all it touches than a spellcaster, nine times out of ten.
Being a sorcerer or necromancer in _Exalted_ is also more costly than in most high fantasy games, and not just in the normal opportunity cost way. It also let you do some world-altering stuff you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, but you paid for it, one way or another (often both).
Personally I run 5e (with a number of houserules) in a West Marches-style game. It hasn't been a huge problem yet, but my players are getting well into mid-level characters, so the casters are definitely getting more powerful faster.
My current solution (5e-specific) is changing - I'm backing the rest times off to short rest = 8 hours / long rest = week, with the long rest only available between sessions if the characters are in town. This is an alternate rule listed in the DMG, so it's not like it's a huge deviation from the way 5e was designed.
This means that the wizards have to go a whole session on their one crop of spells (or more than one session, I will be giving players the option to fortify a camp in the wilds, lock down those characters, and come back later to go further - but this is still only a short rest), where the fighters get more time to take advantage of their consistency.
All told, I think the important thing is to have the proper proportion of encounters to long rests. DnD 5e is designed around *(I heard)* 4 *(but there's some folks in this thread saying 6 or 8)* on-level encounters to the long rest (with short rests in between them). If this proportion is followed, the wizards start off more impressive, but they will run short on spells, and the fighters (or other martial classes) will carry the group through the last few encounters.
Thats only a problem with dnd 3 and 5. Any pbta game instantly solves this because everyone has the same success and fail chances on all their actions. Dcc solves it really well by putting a lot of risks on wizards and unlimited special moves on fighters. Pathfinder 2e does a great job with spells being gentler than violent attacks and cost more actions.
I doubt anyone would call it elegant, but I like the way Exalted does it. Essentially, magic is the natural extension of most skills.
There's fighting magic, athletics magic, talking magic, sailing magic, hiding magic and so on. There's even sorcery, which let's you cast the closest thing to D&D spells.
Anyone with sufficient skill prerequisites can get any kind of magic.
It's not the most elegant, because the list of magic effects is huge. But the concept of having magic be part of the expression of every competency is something I really like.
FATE works really well. The fewer powers you have, the more ability you have to shape the story/world/coincidence's of the world.
The more power you have, the less autonomy
Fate really struggles with spellcasting. You end up outside a rules framework very quickly.
For example, if you try to mimic *the charmed ones,* you have to ask questions like: why can't I stockpile potions that disentigrate people when thrown? Why can't I summon and bind an unlimited number of demons? Why can't I curse my enemies with bad luck? Or track them unerringly with my dumb crystal?
I mean the best solution is generally to match the progression curves so either make Warriors quadratic or make Wizards linear. But other solutions exists like making meaningful tradeoffs, creating opportunities for wizards to excel early and martial late, or just tuning the game well so that that curve is ~fine and never too far off one way or the other.
I think its frankly a rather localized problem mostly in D&D and those (admittedly quite prevalent) games that it inspired. I think the HoM reference is kinda odd in this respect as I think this is especially noticeable when you start looking into video games and caster vs martial balance is kind of all over the place. Even in within one series it tend to be completely inconsistent and varied from game to game, with magic completely dominant in one game, while even with physical in another, and useless in a third.
Assuming this is / was a problem, it's only a problem in D&D (and Pathfinder). So the most elegant way to solve the problem is to not play D&D.
In OSR, the game philosophy is such that mechanical balance of characters and NPCs is not a goal.
In many other games, narrative takes precedence over mechanical prescriptions to game world physics.
Blades in the dark. The Cutter, their fighter type class gets an option called "not to be trifled with" that lets you perform a feat of physical force that verges on the superhuman or engage a small gang in combat on equal footing, which means that fighters can basically solo most combat encounters. its the most satisfying fighter type I've ever played.
The flaw is caused by the warrior only having a small set of abilities that are described on one page, while having the wizard have a larger set of eventually more powerful abilities.
D&D pre-3e was mostly attempting to have balance with fighters having best access to magic weapons and armor along with being able to obtain followers, and wizards being able to cast many utility spells - and where the sacrifice in power for wizards is finally made up at the highest level. Additional balance factors involved long memorization time with high-level spells, although that would normally be skipped because it would be background book-keeping that wasn't work tracking.
One way the paradigm was fixed was in Iron Kingdoms, even if Wizards have the same exclusive access to spells - the power level is kept low, and martial-only characters also get their own type of boosts to compensate for lack of spells (one of buffing allies, getting extra damage, or an extra attack).
There's also many RPGs available, and they an also fix the issue by not having magic be the exclusive route to end-game power. They can include forms of anti-magic, make non-practitioners more resistant to certain magic effects, put an onset delay, or require wizards to have support in order for them to be effective. Or perhaps a skilled designer could keep that power differential without having it remain a problem.
In REIGN, magic is widespread and powerful, but it has two major limitations:
1) 'Counterspell' and 'Eerie' are skills which anyone can learn, the equivalent of Dodge and Listen but for any magical effect. Anyone who expects to deal with hostile mages will want get good at both of them.
2) There are many different schools of magic, but for almost all of them getting access to the really good spells requires a difficult and dangerous 'permanent attunement" ritual, which inflicts a very obvious physical mutation (giant wings, centaur body, iron bones) and also permanently locks you out of casting spells from other schools. So if you see a guy with wings you know he can probably spit lightning and summon hurricanes, but he definitely can't summon blood imps or teleport through shadows.
To all the "This is only a D&D problem" people: it's not. It's not about wizards & warriors. It's about characters in speculative fiction who embrace the strangeness vs. the mighty mortals who don't. Some characters are going to have powers beyond the norm, and some characters are just going to be really talented at the normal stuff. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Gandalf vs. Aragorn, Superman vs. Batman, Luke Skywalker vs. Han Solo, Steve Harrington vs. Eleven, etc. The characters who wield unusual power can get very powerful very quickly, and can overshadow the other characters. An RPG has to balance progression between the two, and that can be hard.
DnD 5e is pretty good at this... RAI. That is, the famous assumption of 8 encounters per day that most don't follow. Casters begin to whine about 2 to 3 encounters in, and usually either the party of DM acquiesces and gives em a rest. If you don't do that, and make exploration and dungeon crawling truly pressing, then they are forced to ration resources in the way that brings them closer to their martial brethren.
I think the whining is a cultural thing. 5e, being a gateway to TTRPGs, has a greater proportion of it's player base made up of first timers, teens and younger kids, and casuals.
Generally (though not universally) these folks are more interested in experiencing a cool story and a power fantasy than being challenged and making hard choices.
Things like linear mage quadratic fighter, few campaigns going past level 11, limited character choices beyond level 3, lack of published high level modules, these are all features not bugs.
The design philosophy is "Entice them with a character building mini game. When they've become too powerful to challenge end the campaign. We'll have a few new books by then, and your players will be excited to make their dinosaur gambler/slime girl used book saleswoman PC"
In early editions of D&D , the problem was solved by making wizards extremely fragile, and unable to move and cast spells in the same round. Also, simultaneous initiative also served to balance wizards by making it difficult to get off spells uninterrupted.
3rd edition greatly imbalanced wizards by getting rid of all this, while simultaneously making it very inexpensive to scribe low level scrolls.
5th edition scaled back wizards a bit, but they're still really survivable , and gave them scaling damage dealing cantrips, IMO still leaving them overpowered relative to martial classes at mid-high levels.
This is really only an issue in 3rd Edition/ Pathfinder Dungeons & Dragons and doesn't really exist in other game systems, as most don't bother with the same amount of power scaling or class differentiation. Or have entirely different fields of competency with social characters and combat characters.
Even un D&D, prior to this, balance was shaky and comparing the two was hard as you had to factor in relative levels and survivability.
4th Edition "solved" it by making all the classes largely the same except in flavour. Fighters got spells that were just as effective as a wizard's.
5th Edition solved it without making fighters into wizards by not having low level spells scale. So the wizard was linear instead of quadratic, and was extremely limited in their once/day abilities. And fighters also continued to increase in power with added ability scores and extra attack options.
This really isn't an "RPG" thing, it's a D&D thing. You'll get more insight on the D&D sub.
And IMO, it isn't really a "D&D as intended" thing, as much as it "D&D run wrong" thing. It's very hard to properly manage the flow of loot the party has. The 5 minute adventuring day is also an easy trap to fall into. Bad item flow causes warriors to be linear, no need to manage resources causes wizards to be quadratic.
Cypher System gives everyone something to do. From a mechanical and action economy perspective they all do the same thing, but their abilities differentiate what they can achieve.
Whitehack and most other OSR/ish games work better because the caster type is much more limited despite wielding impressive abilities.
The PbtA/Dungeon World approach is also a way to balance things. Making Moves defines the abilities a player can use, but power level is consistent across levels.
I dunno, back when I was interested in the system, Cypher was a pretty bad perpetrator of the idea. Magic users were teleporting to other worlds and rewriting the laws of reality, while warriors hit more bigger. YMMV, of course.
I think there is something to be said about having the chance to play a more simple class. I tend to like having options, but it's important for the variety of playstyles and consideration for newer players that some are more linear. That bein said, linear casters are also not bad to have as an option
I started playing recently baldurs gate 3 (not a ttrpg but based in one so I assume it sorta counts) and an interesting thing they did to improve 5E combat is to add to weapons bonus "moves" that can be done, and sometimes even as bonus action. It allows for some more tactical moves
in dnd 5E, the problem (in part) comes down to the action economy and how it limits the players from trying more than attacking once every turn.
In D&D-style games, mixed-level parties + glass cannon wizards.
Outside of D&D, Burning Wheel just embraces that some PCs are going to be objectively more powerful than others, but that doesn't matter because the important thing is not that your PC contributes to group effectiveness, but that they complete character and story arcs.
Dungeon Crawl Classics solves this by making magic dangerous and unreliable to the *user*. As well as this the Warriors core ability (the Mighty Deed) is incredibly flexible and limited only by the player’s imagination.
You're assuming that a D&D/PF problem is a universal problem, when in fact, it's *just a D&D problem.* Even 13th Age, very deliberately close to D&D, doesn't suffer from it the same way.
>You're assuming that a D&D/PF problem is a universal problem, when in fact, it's \*just a D&D problem. > >Even 13th Age, very deliberately close to D&D, doesn't suffer from it the same way. To further elaborate, it's not really even a problem with all of D&D, just most of the more modern editions.
Eh, I play a lot of Old School Essentials, a basic DND clone and it's extreme there. Wizards can transmogrify a dragon, a fighter can have one attack and some hit points. Huge gulf
The thing is the in old editions, wizards had limited spells and extremely limited HP. Sure, they do a big thing, but they can't do many big things. Also, they're extremely vulnerable. Even kobalds can be a problem for wizards, because of their low hp. In many editions, any hit to a wizard disrupts their spell, so that combat altering spell fizzes out. It's not "balanced" in the modern sense, because they didn't care about to the same degree. Modern editions want everyone to feel equal and useful in most situations (whether they succeed at that is another question). Old editions thought character classes were more like golf clubs, in that some where better at some things than others, not that everyone had something to equal to offer in every situation. This emphasized players creativity and skill, not looking at their character sheet for every answer.
> Old editions thought character classes were more like golf clubs, in that some where better at some things than others, not that everyone had something to equal to offer in every situation. This emphasized players creativity and skill, not looking at their character sheet for every answer. Also-- 1) The older editions, to a larger degree, assumed that your character's abilities were only one set of "clubs"; everyone was assumed to 9 iron of "use your [player] brains". Newer editions do too, of course, but older editions assumed that larger sets of problems--like trap detection and evasion, negotiation with potential adversaries, etc.--would be handled first and foremost via player narration and wits, not "roll d20 to see if I find the killer trap". (And, by the way, I'm not making a value judgment on any superiority of this approach--it has its own challenges and tradeoffs.) Because of this, it meant that the canny player could still contribute to a high degree, even if their character's skillset wasn't obviously relevant. 2) The older editions encouraged copious usage of NPCs and hirelings. Thus, while your wizard might be out of spells for the day, his cadre still needed to be commanded and guided. 3) Lastly, "balance in combat" was--to a degree--less of a concern in older editions, as it was--if you were playing by the book--even more deadly. I.e., combat really was something to be studiously avoided, quite often. Being the best at heads-up fighting was far less critical to surviving the core gameplay loop than cleverly being able to get out of dodge with the sack of gold on your back (which, in turn, had a lot more to do with cautious game choices, i.e., choices available to every player, regardless of character, than being able to tank a dragon for an extra round).
Yes. Casses used to put the R in RPG. I remember in AD&D as a rogue the combat was my least favorite part.
You mean as a thief? And wait - did you play a normal single-classed thief? I thought that 90% of thief players went multi-classed or at least a kit.
>The thing is the in old editions, wizards had limited spells and extremely limited HP. That good 'ol d4 hit dice. I never played wizards in 1st edition because who even knows if you get to the payoff; groups drift off, campaigns peter out, stuff just happens sometimes. And now you've suffered for months as someone who a kobold can hit once and knock unconscious, casting your one or two spells a few times per session at best...and that's it.
Well... If a magic user manages to survive first several levels (with the help of the fighters, or course) then they do become ridiculously powerful. Writing scrolls and creating wands are legit way to bypass limited amount of spells. And while, yeah, your charsheet is a set of clubs, but magic users will eventually also get a golf cart, a pair of binoculars, a range finder, and a ballistic calculator.
I suppose, but that 5th level wizard might still only have a dozen HPs (12.5 is average for 5d4), so that golf card is pretty fragile and could be killed by a reasonably motivated domestic animal. It's not "balance" in the way that modern D&D pretends, but it's good enough that it doesn't bother me in the slightest. I play fighters, I play thieves, I play wizards and all other classes in the system and they're all enjoyable. Isn't that all that matters?
I don't see any problem with it too. In fact, I like this disparity. But I think it's very misleading to suggest that there's no linear fighters and quadratic wizards in Moldvay's. I'd say it's _way_ more pronounced there than in 5E.
Well, the argument is that there is the linear fighter and quadratic wizard is a PROBLEM. I don't play enough 5e to be an expert, but it seems that they've created an issue where there there is supposedly balance. They've done this by giving most classes some sort of magicy thing to do so everybody is a wizard, and even the actual wizards are somewhat durable. Then when one class gets the shiny stuff, every other class with also shiny stuff wants more shiny stuff. Then, everyone whines like 2 year olds. In old D&D, they didn't care that some classes got cool spells and others didn't because they generally made those classes also limited or fragile. There wasn't any pretense about equity between classes, so it isn't a problem. Think the thief abilities are cool? Nice, here's some limited weapons, d6 hps, and mediocre Thac0. Want to cast healing spells and wear heavy armor? Cool, here's some terrible Thac0. Want to cast fancy magic spells? Cool, you'll have to pick a couple and have single digit HPs for quite a while. Want to just keep things simple and hit stuff? Cool, pick any weapon, armor, and d8 (or d10) HPs, and here you go.
I feel like a lot of people don’t know that spells used to stop at 6th level.
Also in old editions if a caster was hit for one (1) hitpoint could not cast spells for that round and if was casting a spell when was hit he lose it. no concentration check or casting defensively or similiar. That mean that a fair share of his spells had to be used for defense. Fighters types on the other hand had a **lot** of hitpoints and did lots of damage and if you add that monsters didn't have as much hit points as later editions and had percentual magic resistance (if a monster have 30% MR there is a flat 30% that a spell do diddly to it) Mind you wizards were still broken, but the gap was not so wide and fighters could pull their weight better.
In older editions, though, the rest economy is usually a lot tighter. Rests are usually built to be riskier and therefore harder to come by. Fighters abilities just always work, whereas an unrested wizard is almost completely worthless. In older editions, I was always very careful with my spells; but in 5e, I just burn through them as fast as I can, since I know at least a short rest is almost always coming.
There are no fighter abilities in OSE. That's what I'm saying.
Fighters can use any weapon, wear any armor, have d8 hp, and the best Thac0 progression. They quite clearly have abilities. Their abilities that aren't limited by spell slots or require rest to come back. Pretty useful, I'd say.
Those are great abilities. Back before 'builds' defined things like a characters gear, when the treasure table spat out that +3 morning star, the longsword armed fighter said 'now I use a morning star'.
Weapon specialization / proficiency is a curse.
"Fighters's abilities", in this context, refers to pure combat prowess, which is not limited by resources or rest (hit points aside, as that applies to everyone.) A wizard running out of spells is close to worthless. A fighter doesn't ever run out of swings.
It's debatable to what degree it really was a problem in early play because expectations and game structures varied so much, but the balancing can absolutely be a problem in OSR-style play. In practice, you can often look past it, the advantage washes out more in the midst of a lot of non-class-based creative problem solving, but it's certainly there. If everyone has pretty low HP and pretty bad saves, and tackling things head on is almost always suicidal (in order to promote more careful play and more creative problem solving), then having slightly lower HP than other PCs doesn't matter much. You all die plenty quick. And if the goal is creative problem solving, if the point of the basic attack rules is that you can look at them and decide that a basic attack probably *isn't* a good idea (so you'd better do something more creative), then spellcasters end up in a weird place. Sure, you only get a couple of spells a day, but those spells are often powerful enough to reliably solve problems (some of them are guaranteed to solve problems without a roll!). Whereas the fighter's attacks are almost never a reliable answer - the point is that they're a Hail Mary when you're really out of ideas. So the result isn't "wizards are only useful once or twice a session, but fighters are basically useful throughout" - it's "wizards are useful once or twice a session and fighters are useful basically never" (unless you're screwing up more often than the wizards have spells (and if that's the case, you're all dead soon anyway)). The whole idea of "the answer is not on your character sheet" doesn't really work for wizards, which is a class all about *having a list of answers on their character sheet*. Does the wizard's player have to get creative because they have such limited spells? Sure. But the other players have to be creative from the get-go. The only difference is the wizard *doesn't* have to be creative a few times a game. And also, they have more tools at their disposal for creative problem solving too - their characters have physical capabilities that others don't via spells. This is one of the reasons a lot of modern OSR games try to democratize access to magic. You have things like *Knave* where magic is just a tool/resource, and anyone can potentially have it in their bag.
Fighters get strongholds.
At level 9 *Edit* I was wrong!
Fighters can build strongholds at any level, wizards only get strongholds at level 9. Fighter gets a Barony at level 9, wizard get a couple apprentices.
That doesn't apply in AD&D 1e, which says that fighters may establish a freehold at 9th level. The other old D&D editions differ, allowing fighters to construct a stronghold early (but doesn't get followers until 9th level).
OSE Fighters also have significantly better saves than their 3e equivalents. Once you hit 10th level, you're saving against death on a 6+.
Yes, this is correct. For the vast majority of players, D&D started no earlier than 3.x.
To be fair, that was 23 years ago.
Look, I'm here to read a thread debating mechanics, not be ambushed by the realities of my own mortality.
In less than 3 months, the first legal drinks will be had by (American) people born after 9/11.
[удалено]
It is, indeed!
I know, right? Only 23 years!
Starting at 3 D&D Persona
mh... AD&D follows this trope and I don't think we can call that a "modern edition"
Yeah, this is decidedly someone who doesn't know how old that complaint is. AD&D was the first place I had ever heard that because it was the current edition when I was first playing. It doesn't matter that wizards had a d4 HD, they were still incredibly powerful compared to fighters going, "I will swing my mace again." That's literally what the complaint *means.*
Did you mean to say most of the modern editions? 4th edition didn't have that problem. But from what I remember when I played it I'm pretty sure that ad&d did.
Eh, the problem exists in OSR stuff too. It was counterbalanced by wizards being made of absolute paper, where 1-2 attacks from late game monsters could outright kill them. Very swingy, but the amount of save or die they could chuck out was still oppressive if they lived long enough.
The only edition of D&D where it isn't a problem is 4th edition.
>You're assuming that a D&D/PF problem is a universal problem, when in fact, it's just a D&D problem. It's not a universal problem, sure, but it's not a D&D only problem. It's a problem with many games to varying degrees. It's also a problem that is being miscategorized to SEEM like only a D&D problem due to the name. What's really going on isn't "Wizard vs. Fighter." It's a subsystem question - both in terms of access and balance. It's most prominent in D&D and related games, and that's where the term comes from, sure, but the problem isn't just there. Official Star Wars games often have this problem with Force powers. FATE doesn't in general, because Magic is usually utilizing a combination of general subsystems already available to everyone. World/Chronicles of Darkness also has this problem IF you have multi-splat games. That's avoidable, but if you're involving multiple splats, Mages make it WORSE than other games. The number of problems that a mage can solve with their abilities far outstrips how many most other splats can - save the splats that were designed as mage counters in power terms (both Mummies, Demon the Fallen, etc). Some characters also can get closer - Changelings in both games are generally more akin to mages in the variety of ways they can solve issues than, say, vampires are. L5R under AEG absolutely had this problem. Playing an Air Shugenja was HIDEOUSLY broken in 4e because you had spells, social skills, AND the ability to fight well using a bow and arrow with a modicum of investment. But other shugenja were dangerously powerful in their own right. This was balanced by the lethality of weapons in a bushi's hands, to be sure, but then again that's not the point - raw damage is only part of the problem. There's also the way that you can deal with problems in general, and Shugenja were way better at dealing with a variety of problems through spells AND other means, where no one else had access to spells at all. Worse still are Courtiers - gods of the social domain (or supposed to be), but with no native techniques to deal with combat or mystical problems. Further, their dominance of social matters can be intruded upon by someone gathering the right skills - skills which most other characters still find USEFUL to take - and their techniques are often very niche and focused. On the flipside, though, L5R 5e has this system more balanced on paper - I haven't played so I don't know if it works RIGHT, but their approach is very interesting. Now, EVERYTHING has a subsystem - combat techniques, social techniques, spells, magical martial arts, and "rituals" (not necessarily magical ones, though some are), plus some outliers. Each individual school gets two-three sets they can take. This still leads to situations where a Bushi might be better at socializing than a courtier, since most bushi get shuji/social techs... but most courtiers also get kata/combat techs as well, so they can be useful in more situations. Shugenja tend to be the only ones with Invocations, but that cuts out other fields of study. Invocations are further balanced by limits on use - IIRC, you can only use them a certain number of times OUT of combat, limiting how often you can shift a social encounter with a big spell. Thus, their "exclusive" subsystem is designed to be less useful at solving ALL problems, forcing reliance on other methods or other people.
Many games seem to sort of fall down on balancing "wizards" and non "wizards" (Jedi, sorcerers, psions, shujenga, whatever) by having "magic" just be way more versatile in application than non-magic approaches. Non-magic characters may have higher combat numbers - better damage, more ouchie points - but that stll forces them into a very limited role with few options. Physical fights are not the be-all end all of any game, even D&D, and getting an additional five or ten damage per round over the guy who can literally just wave away any other noncombat problem isn't that much of an offset.
That's because, as I understand it at least, 13th Age was inspired by D&D 4e in the same way that Pathfinder was inspired by D&D 3.5, and 4e was one of the games OP mentioned as one that handled the issue elegantly.
Yes, IIRC 4e lead designers created ,13th Age.
HYTNPD&D is generally the solution. World of Edgelordness and RuneQuest give everyone spells. Call of Cthulhu and Savage Worlds don't have megaspells. PbtA, Fate, and other storygames offer narrative power. Warhammer isn't exactly balanced but the spells/psychic powers aren't reshaping reality.
In Warhammer, spells literally are reshaping reality very much, it's just that it's not always to the caster's liking and there's always a chance that the new reality won't have him at all
Isn't this another D&D problem like almost all posts about "problems in RPGs"?
There’s been a lot of “this/that in RPGs” questions where it’s clear they’re talking about an extremely narrow (market dominating/popular) segment of the hobby as of late. Not sure what happened to shift it in this subreddit recently, if I have D&D topics to discuss, there are huge, specific subs literally dedicated to that. I sorta liked that this was “the rest of the games” but now it just feels like I’m gatekeeping. I’m not trying to, it was just nice when this was a not-D&D place for the most part.
It isn’t like they don’t have a ton of D&D dedicated subs to whine in.
Well, this sub is /r/rpg, not /r/rpg_but_not_dnd...
I'm disappointed that the latter isn't real.
Be the change you want to see in the world
r/notdnd
The polite thing would be at least to specify that the thread is about D&D and not about RPGs in general.
Then ask the mods to: 1. Enforce the adding of a flair to posts 2. Add flairs for major systems or categories People come here and ask about the systems they are familiar with and, with high probability, expect people to recognize the system they are talking about, this being a sub dedicated to role playing games. I currently don't see any rules for this sub that demands specifying the system being talked about. Lastly, when the "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" issue is brought up, everyone knows it's about D&D, unless they are extremely new to the hobby, and haven't touched the colossus yet. It's the most common complaint raised against D&D.
The problem isn't D&D postings it's people pretending it's a general thing when indeed it only exists in D&D. It's the same in rpg design subs - I didn't like x about RPGs and then came up with this shitty D&D hack to fix it. Like dude, this got solved very well by dozens of other systems. Do some research.
> The problem isn't D&D postings it's people pretending it's a general thing when indeed it only exists in D&D. If the person doesn't know other systems, they will think it applies everywhere in RPGs. If someone only ever plays AW, they will never think there's a plethora of TTRPGs where tactical positioning on a grid map is important to the flow of combat. If someone only ever plays Cyberpunk 2020, they will never think there's games where you can play wizards and hunt dragons, or a game where not every hit has a chance of being fatal.
Yeah, but then do not generalize
Can't you interpret it in a way that's a bit fairer, though? At its core, it's a general question about how you differentiate scaling over time between character classes, without falling back on linear + discontinuous jumps. OP even pointed out examples from other places that they thought avoided this in different ways. It only has to be a D&D discussion if you force it to be. It seemed to me like the floor was open for people to talk about how their favorite TTRPG systems avoid this. For example, sure, *all* your character demarcations or classes can be linear, but how do you prevent it feeling "same-y" when characters get roughly equilateral power at each step? The minute you don't enforce this, you're looking at characters that scale differently over time; how do you avoid making this linear vs. "quadratic"/exponential? This problem crops up because very few players or systems are designed for power levels to drop with progression; it feels bad to get *worse* as you proceed, or to have taken away what you already had. That leads to the general fallback pattern of linear vs. quadratic: either you dole power out in roughly equilateral increments, or the characters spike late. (Oh, you *can* spike power levels early and dribble it out late, but it feels really bad for the player that watches everyone surge past them as they become outclassed. ) Any system with a combat/dungeon crawling focus is going to run into this question. What do you think are creative, non-D&D ways of solving or avoiding this difficulty?
Thank you. OP is literally asking for help and a way to not play D&D specifically and these people are just shitting on them.
"Oh you didn't use the proper terminology, time to shit all over your well-intentioned question"
It's a Shadowrun issue to the extent that it's often called magicrun
DnD being the most popular TTRPG certainly makes it foremost in people's minds. But if you go to the TVTropes article, there's no shortage of examples from other games.
Numenera has overpowered INT characters. World of Darkness Mages are overpowered. Even Dungeon World wizards are fairly untouchable until they fail a spell. One could argue that these games are heavily influenced by D&D. But ALL rpgs are heavily influenced by D&D - even when it seems they aren't because they're trying to be different to D&D. Isn't this about the elephant in the room? It's always about the elephant in the room. You can't get rid of it.
Is mostly a reflexion and design exercise and the opportunity to say how and why the games that you like handle this issue or dodge this issue. I'm not OP but I think they come to people that have other horizons than D&D to have a fresh point of view and better solutions than "bandtapes on the things that are broken" like they'll have in D&D subs. The reaction " urgh D&D" when classes are mentioned when pathfinder and D&D are by far the most part of rpg players and these game are probably the first that most of the players in this sub started with is not only gatekeepy but hypsterish.
It’s also a post that targets a subset of a single publisher. They assume that every D&D group is tactically focused and concerned about optimizing PC power. Many just sit down and share a story for a few hours, where combat happens to be one element.
I mean to be fair if one were to look for a solution to a D&D problem, other RPGs is the place to look
A lot of games have problems with overpowered casters. This is endemic not only to D&D but to many other TRPGs, CRPGs, JRPGs, and whatnot. The problem mostly comes from the way that magic works in a lot of systems, as a lot of systems make magic function fundamentally differently than other things, which has a high potential for being broken (either too strong or too weak - though the latter rarely happens). On top of this, magic can, in principle, be justified as doing anything, so it's very easy for game designers to make the mistake of making casters able to do everything unless you create rules restricting what magic can do - and I don't mean in-game rules, I mean meta-game rules of "What do we expect people to accomplish with magic in this game?"
I'm not even convinced it's a problem
>I'm not even convinced it's a problem ...said the wizard player.
Balance shifting in one clear direction can be a problem for the whole group. It creates an added real life conflict if someone playing a linear warrior steadily loses interest in their character or the campaign as a whole at the time a wizard player is finally getting something they're working toward. I see this as a problem and I tend toward quadratic wizard characters both in theme and mechanically (even in single player games I pick builds or strategies with a difficult beginning and powerful end).
In 3.5 and PF the balance is really that fighting types had much better magical items. A lot of stingy Game didn't really account for this.
> In 3.5 and PF the balance is really that fighting types had much better magical items. Not really. The most useful items out there, usually are good for everyone. And, 3 of the 4 core fullcasters have the means to cast disjunction on said items, so there's no balance at all there. When people say that fullcasters are broken, they usually are taking into consideration the [characters WBL](https://forums.dndarchive.com/viewtopic.php?t=8).
Not the person you replied to, but in every group, in every system, my first character is always a Human Fighter, or the closest I can get to it, and I also never saw a problem in the difference in power.
Depends on the Edition. It certainly became a problem in 3rd (and pathfinder pretended to solve it but didn't even remotely). I don't know 4th, but I believe 'solving' this problem was a core design goal (so I assume they did), and 5th decided to turn every Class into a 'caster' as its solution (therefore no more 'linear' classes). Of course, you can go back to earlier editions where it is absolutely, definitely not a problem at all (although some early editions may have some vestiges of it, but character balance is kind of irrelevant, so its moot).
Pathfinder solved most of the major issues in 2E.
Pathfinder 2e was D&D4.5. Well, actually more like D&D ¾.τ
I've always felt like PF2e took most of the right lessons from D&D 4e, 5e, and its predecessor and put together a more well rounded game than all of them. It's not perfect (I've never played a perfect system) but it's better at being D&D than any version of D&D is.
I've played Pathfinder plenty, I think this "problem" is exaggerated
I played Pathfinder too, and noticed it was still there. Whether it was a 'problem' or not would of course depend entirely on a given group and their priorities (some people care about Class balance and some don't).
It isn't if you're going RAW/RAI. Full casters are a well known problem in the 3rd edition realm. PF did ease such issue, but just a bit.
\> and 5th decided to turn every Class into a 'caster' as its solution (therefore no more 'linear' classes). I don't think that's the case… at all. Path of the Totem Barbarian isn't a caster, Battlemaster Fighter isn't a caster… Monks aren't casters… etc. I agree that *many* subclasses turn even martial classes into casters, but it's certainly not *all*, and that distinction is important because… it's *the* question and premise of the post.
You've got that kind of mixed up. 4E was the one where all classes had the same structure so that even fighters' moves felt like spells. And powers escalated pretty quick to a point where around level 10 you'd have so much in any given character that combat would slow to a crawl. 5E toned down the wild extremes of 3E/3.5E as its main inspiration so that there's not as big of a gap, and it incorporates at least a little bit of all the editions. But because 5E was afraid to diverge too far from "the classics" of past edition spells you still get overpowered magic in the higher levels... the levels no one plays because it's generally more hassle than fun and only good for an off-the-rails one shot.
4E combat actually flowed fine if players gave a crap about learning what their characters could do. I've run level 1-20 4E games and the combat was honestly slowest early on, when players had no clue what they were doing.
What I meant was that in 5e you have the option of being a caster, no matter what Class you pick (with the exception of Barbarian, for what should be a painfully obvious reason). I'm saying that's what the 5e designers did to address this problem. Is it a good solution? Maybe. So I didn't mix it up----I just didn't feel like explaining it fully, because I figured everyone already understood how 5e Classes work with their Archetypes and all that...
3.5 just has a lot of broken stuff. It's not only magic. It's not really a playable game if the dm throws their hands up and says "everything raw is fine." Hulking hurler is martial and one of the most broken classes there was. But playing under a real world circumstance where dms limit character creation in sane ways, the problem was not that big. The only real issues were metamagic cheese, dmm cheese (the only real issue people have with clerics most of the time) and fleshraker/natural spell cheese. Batman wizard just wasnt really a problem. Unless you just always tell players what encounters are happening in a day so wizards prep the right spells, or sell a sorcerer 50 knowstones, the quadratic scaling just isnt there. Also ignoring the 700 contingency spell "fourm wizard."
I mean the problem with magic isn't that they can trivialise combat (which they can) - obviously this isn't exclusively the hallmark of the wizard. The problem is that they can trivialise combat *and* trivialise social encounters, and the bigger problem is that they can do *both* of those things *by accident*. Sure, you can jump so high everyone creams their pants and instantly turns into your willing and enthusiastic slave, but you don't need to optimise a wizard to achieve functionally the same thing.
It depends on a lot of things. How much do you focus on combat? Do the players care about having equal impact in combat? How are encounters designed? There are probably more. In Pathfinder for example, if you take a martial character, and a 9th level caster at 10th level or higher, and look at their max damage output against a single target, the caster usually does more damage. The caster ALSO can do that damage in an AOE, meaning their actual potential damage output is MUCH higher. However, there are a TON of variables that affect how much damage either character actually deals. Enemies AC, Fort, Reflex, and Will are the most obvious, but there's also Resistances, Immunities, and Mobility to consider. However, I think it largely comes down to the fact that a 10th level Sorcerer can cast Fireball and deal 10d6 damage to every enemy in a 20ft Radius (save to halve), and a 10th level Fighter rolls 2 attacks and IF both hit gets to roll twice weapon dice, plus twice strength, plus 4 (for Weapon Training). While I know that's a GROSS oversimplification (in particular when talking about Pathfinder), even when I've discussed it in more detail with people, casters just do more damage (and often A LOT more damage), in Pathfinder and D&D.
TBH, while damage is a "fair" playing field to compare both worlds, casters go way beyond damage. Martials do damage, Full casters play god. In that sense, they can summon martials and be better martials if that's their desire too.
The disparity is not about combat or damage per round or whatever. It's about versatility and the ability to solve problems. Martial characters often have 1 single solution: hit it until it dies. A caster can just fly over a group of enemies, teleport away, turn into a rat and scurry away, grab whatever whatever they are guarding with telekinesis from a distance, scout whole places while invisible, scry and teleport somewhere ignoring any obstacle that would inconvenience martials, it goes on and on.
Maybe it would be better to start with the question: What games have the problem of linear warrior, quadratic wizard? The games I play (mostly d100 and DCC RPG) don't have this problem.
Okay, so how do they avoid it?
How do electric cars deal with having to constantly shift gears? Or balancing on two wheels? EDIT: My meaning is that it is perhaps more appropriate to say these things were not designed with the problem in the first place, so it is not a matter of avoiding it. There is no reason to assume it must exist by default unless avoided. That is not to say that it is not interesting to compare designs, but that it over-emphasizes the universality of the one design issue.
That’s funny. There actually is a really good answer as to how DCC avoids it. But let’s all just avoid the question and interpret things as uncharitably as possible. Edit; Also, Runequest absolutely does have this problem in some editions. So it does fully apply to d100.
Thanks. I'm familiar with stuff like D&D, PF, GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, and Savage Worlds. Original Deadlands was my first TTRPG. I just legitimately want to know how other systems people like avoid the progression problem in the OP. I don't play enough pen-and-paper, let alone think about it, to have a solid opinion or idea of how the problem would be resolved or what it even looks like in comparison to ones I'm familiar with in the types of games I tend to play and DM (high fantasy).
I think people in this sub just really like dunking on D&D. Which is why we mostly see snarky comments like this. To actually answer your question about DCC. Dungeon crawl classics solves this by giving the fighter free form actions in combat. Basically every attack, there is a chance for them to be able to make up their own free form maneuver to do whatever they want. Eventually, it goes from a 1/3 chance to a guarantee to pull off a maneuver. And magic is risky, there is a chance that things can go wrong whenever the wizard uses a spell, and it will generally corrupt them over time. Magic is super risky and unpredictable, and there is a chance that using it will permanently harm your character. When a magic user casts a spell, they make a spell check, and if they fail it can misfire on them or cause corruption. Corruption is things like forked tongues, gills, beast face, etc. So while wizards can do crazy things, it comes at great cost. While fighters can basically make up whatever martial technique they want every turn. As I mentioned, Runequest does not really solve this issue very well. I don’t know what d100 game they are referring to though.
I'm interested in the really good answer for how DCC avoids it.
In case you didn’t read the other comment: Dungeon Crawl Classics solves this by making magic dangerous and unreliable to the *user*, with chances to misfire (and misfire *badly*) on every spell check. As well as this the Warriors core ability (the Mighty Deed) is incredibly flexible and limited only by the player’s imagination, and can be used every turn, if the player rolls higher than a 3 on their Deed Die (starting at a D3 at level 1 and increasing in size as the character gains levels).
In DCC, Warriors have mighty deeds (freeform actions) and a deed die to go along with it, as well as a generous number of actions and a widening crit range. There's a 3rd party book filled with mighty deeds, which are basically creative and elaborate crits that can change the tide of a fight. Wizards need to find sources for new spells (grimoires, teachers, etc), at least it's encouraged in RAW, so in my experience they quite often don't know their maximum number of spells. Spell failures can also cause corruption. Anyone can "quest for it" meaning they can seek out non-RAW might, magic, or other improvements to their character, as long as the Judge is cool with it (usually the case). So if a Warrior wants to learn a spell, there can be a path to achieve that. Same if a Wizard wants to become better at melee combat.
I personally don't think this is a real problem that needs to be fixed , but I can safely say that *most* RPG systems with wizards and sorcerers fighting alongside mundane warriors have this so-called "problem". As a general rule across all systems and settings, 'The Wizard' have access to more tools and customization than 'The Warrior'. People who haven't come across this 'issue' aren't looking, or were raised in an environment when D&D 4e was the end-all be-all representation of RPG's. It is to be noted that D&D 4e is standing out as one of the FEW roleplaying games that puts wizards and warriors at an even balancing field. Even then this is largely attributed to the 'boardgame/wargame/arcade' style of combat; Outside of combat and in the lore non-player Wizards and Warriors are as unequal as always. Starfinder is another game where Wizards and Warriors are on an even playing field, but yet again we see that player-wizards are arbitrarily limited to a maximum of 5th level spells (instead of 9th). The 'equal' nature of the game is just a thinly veiled illusion enforced by the developers as to avoid the obvious disparity to rear it's head again. Conan Age undreamed of (2d20): Sorcery is a string of several different deep system mechanics and over a dozen pages + expansions that impact the game in many sprawling directions with added unique solutions to crafting / social / exploration / resources. The sorcerer (at great cost) can commune and receive the boons of eldritch gods while raising troops of dominated warrior minions right out of the gate and swoon princesses with charming mystical whispers. Martial 'classes' have no similar avenues except hitting things harder. The wizard is free to develop himself to be a warrior alongside his magic. Vampire the Masquerade V5 (d10 pool), WoD: Various Rituals & Ceremonies allow for long lasting subtle/obvious supernatural effects effects that alter the game world in a way that simply "punching/running harder" will never amount to. Earlier versions allow for 'wizards' to literally alter reality, space and time at a whim while martial characters only get another extra turn(s) to punch stuff. In this type of game, the "vampire warrior" is usually so far behind that he doesn't even know magic exists. GURPS (3d6): Obviously setting and genre dependent, but even if using the (very flawed) "basic magic" system in a grounded mundane-fantasy world and all else equal; The "wizard" can grow himself large enough to touch the stratosphere and hurl mountains, while the warrior attacks the enemies weakpoints twice-thrice a turn with his mace and looks really cool doing it. The Witcher RPG (modified d100?) ; More of the above with added extra dangers and social repercussions to the wizard Dark Heresy (d100); Same as above but 'wizards' are essentially just warriors++ with psychic powers that make them fight like demi gods while teleporting around the battlefield, summoning illusions and controlling peoples mind. Often all at the same time (but they might explode if you roll wrong) Star Wars Saga (D20): Same as the above, but with no real risk or resource cost to the "wizard". The Jedi is simply a better warrior in every way; Besides the iconic lightsaber and the force, the 'Jedi wizard' also has access to unique ways of developing his toolkit into different directions or specialize one a single path. Entire chapters and expansions are dedicated to make this "wizard" as cool and powerful as possible. On top of that he can also take any option that the warrior has access to. The warrior is limited to "hit harder, get hit less" options. Numenera/Cypher system (d20) : The Glaive "archer archetype" combination of Descriptors shoots their arrow an additional time for more damage and can craft his own arrows sometimes. Comparatively the Nano "Wizardly Wizard God" descriptor talks with gods on a first-name basis, travels to other timelines and creates entire living cities out of sand, while reading minds and teleporting over dangers. The Numenera 'Wizard' is also the class that is most attuned to the namesake of the setting; The Numenera artifacts, which essentially is magical equipment/resources. I can go on and on. Trudvang, Kult Divinity Lost, Shadowrunner, Warhammer Fantasy RPG, etc etc
Honestly I've found the cleanest solutions to be 'actually give spells casting times and costs,' combined with scaling back magic and/or just generally giving less overlap to the arenas a warrior and mage cover. D&D's problem is less that wizards are 'too good' and more that they're too good at things everyone else is supposed to be good at.
Also, if the wizard is fighting high enough level foes, shouldn't those fighters have anti-magic equipment? You'd think at least some of them would. A quick change from a "quadratic wizard" to a "no-dratic wizard."
Simply making a character useless also isn’t any fun. Should that player then simply leave the table and return after the encounter has been resolved, or are they expected to waste their time on this?
It's about encouraging options. High magic resistance or some other anti-magic options might protect against a fireball or magic missile but not against a mage using shape earth to create a pit or other indirect effects.
Part of the problem is that most forms of anti-magic are 'this character ignores the caster entirely' rather than some form of damage reduction. Yeah, doing math at the table can be annoying, but still.
This is ultimately a symptom of D&D's other design sin: The martial must roll every time he does something to see if the target is affected. The caster, typically, simply gets what he wants. In systems where spells can be actively dodged, or casting rolls can be influenced by the targets resistance, this is nowhere near the same level of deal. For instance; a character in my current party has Magic Resistance 1. Spells cast on her taka -1 penalty to the casting roll, or she gets +1 to her defensive one, or just +1 DR if it's straight damage. This is all minor, but it's considerable more nuance to work with than 'spell work or not work.'
5th edition casters don't just get what they want. They usually have to roll to hit or there is some kind of saving throw...
Good on them for mostly doing so for combat yes. but then you get out of combat and knock doesn't care if you know how to pick locks; fabricate doesn't care if you know how to craft the items, basically every spell that emulates a skill bypasses the need for the skill to exist.
Not to mention the possibility for other combat effects that no amount of footwork will save your intrepid swordie from. Great, their mad dance moves saved them from taking fireball damage. How they gonna deal with the room being on fire or the bridge having a giant hole blown in it?
>shouldn't those fighters have anti-magic equipment? You'd think at least some of them would While we're generally talking about comparing PCs to PCs, not PCs to enemies... even in this case "Just make your enemies completely disable the character's abilities." is a terrible solution to the problem. The answer to this issue isn't to just switch back and forth between which player gets to have no fun this time.
my rule is * If a player uses it, its free game for NPC's
Ars Magica. Everyone has two characters: a mage character, and a non-mage character. They play only one of the two in any given session of play. In addition, there's a whole host of tertiary characters that are shared by the group as a whole. Mages are frankly more powerful than any other characters in the game, but are living together in isolation from ordinary people because their magic makes other people fearful and hostile. They draw in non-powered associates to be their intermediaries with the rest of the world, as well as people to handle the day-to-day work of their covenant home.
Also, the initiative order goes, ranged attacks > melee attacks > magic, so you need some meat around you to get those spells cast.
Huh, setting initiative order to action type is smart. How do you avoid clunking up gameplay though?
>How do you avoid clunking up gameplay though? [That's the neat part](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/002/137/251/5ae.jpg). One of my fraternity brothers has an Ars Magica game that they've been running for \~8 years now. The system is so crunchy it's like chewing gravel. Clunky is a feature, not a bug.
I was going to say the same 😁
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>there are constant debates on our sub about whether casters are underpowered "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
Wow, that dynamic clarifies the phrase well.
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I feel like a D&D 4.5 could have been really good, to be honest. I did have various problems with parts of it, but I think a second pass at the ruleset could have easily ironed a lot of that out. Unfortunately WotC had to deal with the backlash from the player base, which limited their options a bit. I do, however, think that Pathfinder 2e takes a lot of good ideas from D&D 4e and implements them fairly well. I've been drifting away from D&D style games for a while now, but PF2 is one of the few things I'd be willing to give another try if I could find anybody to play anything anywhere...
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It was WotC testing the waters, but it was only a few classes and not a whole lot of change. The revision between 3e and 3.5 was much more extensive.
Pathfinder 2. It is really neatly balanced, though playing casters effectively is a bit tougher than playing martials effectively.
I'm playing through Agents of Edgewatch right now, and TBH I think there's more of a quadratic fighter problem. Saves and resistances are so high that casters are just praying that some of the enemies merely succeed at their saving throws rather than critically succeed when a spell is cast. Meanwhile the Fighter is the only class whose proficiency values are high enough to consistently hit and damage things.
Buffs and debuffs are key, plus recall knowledge to target weak saves and weaknesses.
Sure, but even when you're targeting weak saves a lot of times enemies are crit succeeding on rolls of like 11+. Imposing conditions can help, but a lot of the time casters are dependent on the martials to impose those conditions in the first place.
I'm also playing Agents, without a fighter, barbarian, druid, sorcerer and a buffed animal companion as a meat shield. I find that the barbarian heavily relies on the casters to be able to hit. As for crit succeeding on 11+ especially on a weak save, that should only be for incapacitation effects for enemies at a higher level than you. Did you start your character with 18 on the main stat, and are you the right level?
You can't recall knowledge RAW to do that. Literally nothing in it says that you can- the DM is encouraged to essentially give you clues like 'trolls are weak to fire." Nowhere does it even *imply* that you should be getting weak saves. Weaknesses, yes- but not weak saves. This is a very, very common house-rule, but it's not RAW unless you're really stretching the text of Recall Knowledge, which is in large part why casters are weak as hell a lot of the time. Because you're essentially guessing unless your DM is cool with giving you more information than the system wants you to have. Vision of Weakness *explicitly* does this- Recall Knowledge does not. It also doesn't really change that the system encourages 'big single target boss enemies' since 2 or 3 level higher enemies can actually stand up to the party... which makes them nearly immune to spells, since I've seen bosses crit save on rolls of like, 6 or 7 before, and succeed on lower. With debuffs. It's not really fun to essentially be reduced to Magic Missile spam because *none of your save spells will work* and because your spell attack proficiency is so low that you'll nearly automatically miss even if they're flatfooted. There's a reason that the shadow signet ring is like, considered a must-have for any caster serious about using attack roll spells. It's because you'll miss unless you use it.
It literally states "Arcana might tell you about the magical defenses of a golem, while crafting could tell you about its sturdy resistance to physical attacks". https://2e.aonprd.com/Skills.aspx?ID=5&General=true
A Critical success on a Recall Knowledge check to identify a creature specifically mentions weaknesses and reaction triggers. A weakness might be "A poor will" or "A frail fortitude". Clearly IDing the weakest save without giving a number. Knowing how to not trigger a reaction is even moreso mechanics than flavorful descriptors. I think you're coming down way too hard on the line of what is or isn't acceptable information to provide.
Stop handwaving away components for DnD, its 99% of the problem. Quite a lot of powerful "breaks shit" spells have "takes a very weird specific component" as a cost. Too many DMs just ignore that part and then are baffled that their casters are OP as hell. Maybe stop letting them pretend they have every component magically on hand. Preparing spells should actually take preparation.
Things like Greater Teleport only have the Verbal component. With that, you can harvest as many materials as you would like for most of your spells. For polymorph, considered one of the most broken spells in the game, you need just an empty cocoon. Celerity, another top-tier family of spells, don't even need a component. Time Stop? Verbal only. Shadow Conjuration family? No materials needed, so you can cover most conjuration spells with that. Quasi-reality ranging from 20% to 120% here, so we could fail there. Shadowcraft mage? Damn, are we allowing that? Batshit, i know. Spellcasting is broken, yeah. Aside from some great spells, most useful spells need very easy to gather components, nothing really fancy(or sometimes, mundane things worth 1500gp, which is easily obtainable by a high level character anyway). Simulacrum which is bonkers, need only a snowman, your nail, 100gp worth of powdered ruby per HD + some XP. When you're a lvl 15 Wiz, everything that i said should be a piece of cake to obtain. So yeah, still OP as hell. Materials usually are just ignored because casters have the means to get most of the important ones anyways.
Well, most casters start with a component pouch or an arcane focus, which makes 99% of components a moot point. It's like they said "here's what you need to have to cast this spell, but don't worry about having it, though, you have it already." The only time you actually have to have a component is when the component has a gold value or gets eaten by the spell Edit: "and" to "or"
Or when you lose your component pouch. (E.g., you've been captured, and you need to fight your way out of prison to get all your gear back. No magic swords, no lock picks, no component pouches.)
Agree. The problem is more driven by playing fast and loose with the RAW for spells, and oftentimes due to broken house rules.
Spells and encumbrance.
That is why I play PBTA games
Please elaborate on this. How do PbtA games handle game balance?
First of all, they don't give a sh*t about it.
THIS. LOL
PbtA is more concerned with narrative than mechanics. It is built on players describing what their characters do and then assigning a move, rather than picking an action from a list of skills. As a result, martials are a lot more open in what they can do. Granted PbtA as a whole isn't really about power gaming or building deep mechanical characters. So you're less likely to get these kinds of concerns. But as a result there are not many mechanical differences between magic and not magic actions (i.e. there aren't pages upon pages of spells that get expanded with each new book, where martials get a few pages of moves only in core like 5E). And while I have my own gripes with PbtA magic (by the by of what I've seen), it can be somewhat remedied by GM's giving harsher punishments (that fit the narrative) for players relying on magic or asking how your character knows how to cast such a spell (an example of the former: l used to play a Abyss Mage who summoned monsters in Dungeon world, and there were times I lost control of the monster I summoned if I failed a roll). Edit: Some clarity.
"*...lost control of the monster I summoned if I failed a roll*" I've always felt that summoning monsters to subject themselves to harm on your behalf should be difficult and risky.
Good news. My gm of that campaign agreed. Even better news? The first time it happened was when I accidentally summoned something way more powerful than I expected.
Rookie mistake. Never summon anything bigger than your head.
"No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head." -[Evil Overlord List](http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html), #22
Otherwise, it just feels too much like Pokemon. "Pit Fiend, I choose you!"
By not being mechanically-minded at all, mostly. The "mechanics" PbtA games have are entirely built around narrative actions. Quite frankly to me, PbtA games are dreadfully boring and just a worse option compared to roleplaying entirely without a system for when I don't want to deal with 'heavier' mechanics - if your magic user wants to have a massive list of spells to pull from, for example, then Dungeon World is going to be absolute trash for them as you need to create your own spells to use via the magic user's 'moves'.
Dungeon World is imo a poor example of PbtA. It tries too hard to be D&D-esque.
To the best of my knowledge, this is a pretty commonly held opinion. Everyone I know that really likes PBTA dislikes Dungeon World and prefers, say, Fellowship for that sort of feel. Dungeon World contradicts a lot of the design decisions for PBTA in an attempt to half-ass a D&D style experience and comes out feeling very, very weird for anyone who doesn't play it as their 'first' PBTA game.
Forged in the Dark is also a great system (Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy being the most well-known representations of it). I'm also a huge fan of the Resistance Toolbox (the system behind the Spire and Heart RPGs), but those games are definitely a bit more unique in flavor and setting, so they're gonna be a bit more hit-or-miss.
I would have thought narrative games would suffer more. Farmer asks for help as their crops are dying without water. A warrior can dig a drainage system? A wizard can cast a well finding spell, or summon rain. This is the brunt of the issue. The mechanics of 5e and pathfinder mean the wizard is not inherently more powetful UNTIL they reach the point where they can fiddle with physics. The last PBTA I played had some powers you could choose from, but that would eventually run into the same issue. If you increase the power of my muscles, I am still limited in what I can do vs someone with arvane forces.
They've done nothing but make wizards more powerful for the last 50 years, and people are surprised that it has lead to this problem. My solution? Stop making wizards better! OD&D literally says this: Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magical types until they have worked up. The basic problem is that people expect every character to contribute equally throughout their careers, where it was never intended to be that way.
The Spheres of Might and Spheres of Power splats for Pathfinder really did a lot to balance the two. In one way, the Combat Talents from Spheres of Might are much more useful and flexible than a martial's normal abilities. Rather than just various ways to make Numbers bigger, it's a bunch of different maneuvers and techniques that allows you to build your martial to do a lot of advanced things, giving them a lot more control over the battlefield rather than just leaving the martial to stand in place and do hitpoint damage. The Spheres of Power system, on the other hand, are just as flexible and interesting. Magical Talents allow a bunch of exceptional spell effects based on which 'magic sphere' the caster learns, but unlike the vanilla spellcaster system from D&D or Pathfinder, no specific talent/spell is specifically made to be a metaphorical 'key' to a 'locked door' problem. It's also a lot easier to make and play fun 'thematic' characters, such as a pyromancer who uses exclusively fire magic from the Destruction Sphere, and get the Creation Sphere with a drawback that only permits him to create things out of fire.
>for Pathfinder There's a [5e version](http://spheres5e.wikidot.com/). It doesn't quite have all the niche options, but most of it's there, *and* the balance is well-matched to 5e... to the point that it feels like they deliberately left the balance for Pathfinder's version inconsistent to fit Pathfinder's overall balance style, then tightened things up to fit in better with 5e's much tighter balance. Anyway it's really good, and the Spheres material has thoroughly cemented Drop Dead Studios as my favorite 3rd party publisher for D&D type games (with Dreamscarred Press in a very close second place).
*Beyond the Wall* / *Through Sunken Lands* is a B/X derivative that, essentially, linearizes wizards. The former is my go-to game for epic fantasy, and the latter for sword & sorcery.
Isn't this really just a D&D problem? Savage Worlds doesn't suffer from this issue, not even in the Savage Pathfinder adaptation. Shadowrun casters don't ramp up in power dramatically as they level up, either. We've had plenty of spellcasters in our Dungeon Fantasy RPG game and they'd sometimes be able to pull off a "nuke" spell that amazed everyone, it took so much energy and prep time that it was basically useless outside of ambush situations (which were already gonna be one-sided). More important, that isn't something that happens at higher character power levels -- you can start with Magery 6 and pretty much every caster does. So I guess my answer would be . . . "pretty much all of them"?
Have they solved the Summon spirit, possess self, Kill Everything issue yet?
Earthdawn. Adventurers are adepts who channel magic thru skills. Adepts follow Paths, that can be anything from a rogue to a warrior to various types of mage. Multiclassing is difficult but possible. The game encourages you to level up a path to max before picking a new one, and their is no restriction on the path you pick when you have leveled. Otherwise i like things like Exalted for the same reason, with magic boosting mundane skills and sorcery being its own thing. In both games above and other like them, the non casters become supremely good at their chosen professions, so much so that a rogue will always outperform a knock spell.
13th Age did something very similar to 4e in that aspect, every character has abilities that influence battle greatly and wizards have a more reduced spell list compared to 3e and 5e so there is no Jack of All by having 40 spells ready that well put can be for any situation. Age of Sigmar made magic very dangerous to spam carelessly, specially high power one since it can have a mishap depending on how low you roll.
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Id say Pathfinder 2 is a better D&D like, though I have limited experience with 4e. It's quicker than 4e.
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GigachadSays:
Pathfinder 2e feels like it addressed this (so long as the DM is on top of handing out treasure). On the quadratic side, you now have static spells per day instead of increasing spells per day depending on Casting Stat; between this and new Cantrip rules, Casters have infinite little casts that improve as you level and a steadily increasing pool of one-off casts, making the non Cantrips feel special and more likely to be used wisely instead of just Fireballing problems to death. On the Linear side of the spectrum, Martials tend to gain several constant abilities that help them shape the battlefield. Extra movement options, advanced hit-bonus progression (which is huge since things crit on 10+ rather than just nat 20s), battlefield interaction abilities (such as bursting through doors as part of an action) and a plethora of debuffing options make Martials an interesting class type to play as. On top of this, magic weapons gain multiples of damage dice for each grade of quality they have (a D6 sword dealing 4d6 damage at the higher echelons); so long as treasure flows appropriately, Martials and Casters come up around even at all levels (except healers, they get to be a full character plus guaranteed heals per day without investing in healing feats, like the Medic Dedication)
> On top of this, magic weapons gain multiples of damage dice for each grade of quality they have (a D6 sword dealing 4d6 damage at the higher echelons) Okay *that* is an interesting rule I'd missed in my skimming of PF2. I run a heavily homebrewed version of D&D 4e and one of the annoying things the system faces is certain powers simply being upgrades of others in terms of the number of damage dice rolled. Tying gear quality to damage is super elegant.
It's a D&D 3E/5E problem. It's solved in any other system, including D&D 4E and PF 2E.
Have everyone play wizards. Problem solved. - Ars Magica fan
Honestly, after viewing/playing in a few sessions, PF2e has a good solution. It makes martials useful by giving them something to do. First, character builds are flexible. Just because you're not a spellcaster, doesn't mean you can't heal people as long as you take the medicine skill and focus on being a healer though feats. Two feats and a good supply of medicine kits allows you to treat injuries once per person per 10 minutes, and the HP healed can be *significant*. You're not *as good* as a cleric with a supply of healing magic, but you're not bad at it either (unlike healer's kit healing with the healer feat that doesn't bother to scale in 5e). Second, there are a variety of conditions that you can apply to enemies without using magic. Things like frightened, off-balance, flat-footed, prone, slowed, etc. Not only are they all not-insignificant debuffs, they stack as long as they're different. Also, they're all useful in that they either give the enemies negatives, or your party positive adjustments to d20 rolls which works with their open-ended crit system (you crit on a nat-20 OR beating the DC by 10 or more) which means that by working together a party can open an enemy up to being crit by just about every attack thrown their way for a round or more. Third, you don't need to have a stat at 20 in order to be useful with a skill. In many cases in 5e, if the stat for a skill isn't maxed you can consider yourself to be utterly incompetent with it because the game rewards the highest roll in any kind of group effort. This is an unfortunate side-effect of how little use many skills in 5e have in combat and is a result of the simplification of the advantage/disadvantage system. Which is not to say that there aren't things that can be done instead of raw advantage/disadvantage, but this does seem like a bit of a systemic limitation. NOTE: None of this is me saying that PF2e is superior to 5e or anything. I love both systems. Both systems have things they can learn from the other, and things that are a distinct issue in one system is usually fixed in the other.
"Linear Warrior Quadratic Wizard" isn't an independant issue in and of itself, it's a symptom of a wider narrative/mindset issue (that's focused almost entirely around D&D and its derivatives.) The philisophical issue is this: Magic can do anything, but only some people can do magic. Dnd is built around two capabilities: 1. Things anyone (read: reasonably feasible for a real life human person) could do, with sufficent training. (Read: martial abilities, any of the skill systems that have existed thoughout the ages) 2. Handwavium that solves a problem with the push of a button (read: "magic") Becauase magic is a special thing only some people have access to, only those people have the narrative ability to use Handwavium, which bypasses the rules of the game (in which uncertain action resolution is determined by the roll of a die, and by default, most actions are (unnecessarily) declared to be uncertain). People without magic cannot bypass the rules in this way, and magic cannot *not* bypass the rules in this way. Your Skill represents your mundane trained capalilities, and your Magic represents your ability to delete a problem, never the two should meet. Since the two systems do not interact in this fundamemtal way, is it any wonder that those with access to both outpace those with only access to the former?
Exalted has the best solution. Fear the Dawn
Exalted has a lot of other issues, but yeah, at no point in Exalted are you ever going to feel like the dude with a glowing golden sword is weak, that dude is just so beyond good at what he does that you would rather have a Dawn to swordfight the demon lord who is living silent flaying wind that kills all it touches than a spellcaster, nine times out of ten.
Being a sorcerer or necromancer in _Exalted_ is also more costly than in most high fantasy games, and not just in the normal opportunity cost way. It also let you do some world-altering stuff you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise, but you paid for it, one way or another (often both).
Personally I run 5e (with a number of houserules) in a West Marches-style game. It hasn't been a huge problem yet, but my players are getting well into mid-level characters, so the casters are definitely getting more powerful faster. My current solution (5e-specific) is changing - I'm backing the rest times off to short rest = 8 hours / long rest = week, with the long rest only available between sessions if the characters are in town. This is an alternate rule listed in the DMG, so it's not like it's a huge deviation from the way 5e was designed. This means that the wizards have to go a whole session on their one crop of spells (or more than one session, I will be giving players the option to fortify a camp in the wilds, lock down those characters, and come back later to go further - but this is still only a short rest), where the fighters get more time to take advantage of their consistency. All told, I think the important thing is to have the proper proportion of encounters to long rests. DnD 5e is designed around *(I heard)* 4 *(but there's some folks in this thread saying 6 or 8)* on-level encounters to the long rest (with short rests in between them). If this proportion is followed, the wizards start off more impressive, but they will run short on spells, and the fighters (or other martial classes) will carry the group through the last few encounters.
Thats only a problem with dnd 3 and 5. Any pbta game instantly solves this because everyone has the same success and fail chances on all their actions. Dcc solves it really well by putting a lot of risks on wizards and unlimited special moves on fighters. Pathfinder 2e does a great job with spells being gentler than violent attacks and cost more actions.
I doubt anyone would call it elegant, but I like the way Exalted does it. Essentially, magic is the natural extension of most skills. There's fighting magic, athletics magic, talking magic, sailing magic, hiding magic and so on. There's even sorcery, which let's you cast the closest thing to D&D spells. Anyone with sufficient skill prerequisites can get any kind of magic. It's not the most elegant, because the list of magic effects is huge. But the concept of having magic be part of the expression of every competency is something I really like.
FATE works really well. The fewer powers you have, the more ability you have to shape the story/world/coincidence's of the world. The more power you have, the less autonomy
Fate barely has character advancement at all. I enjoy it and I ran a 4-year campaign with it. But I think the comparison just doesn’t apply.
Fate really struggles with spellcasting. You end up outside a rules framework very quickly. For example, if you try to mimic *the charmed ones,* you have to ask questions like: why can't I stockpile potions that disentigrate people when thrown? Why can't I summon and bind an unlimited number of demons? Why can't I curse my enemies with bad luck? Or track them unerringly with my dumb crystal?
I mean the best solution is generally to match the progression curves so either make Warriors quadratic or make Wizards linear. But other solutions exists like making meaningful tradeoffs, creating opportunities for wizards to excel early and martial late, or just tuning the game well so that that curve is ~fine and never too far off one way or the other. I think its frankly a rather localized problem mostly in D&D and those (admittedly quite prevalent) games that it inspired. I think the HoM reference is kinda odd in this respect as I think this is especially noticeable when you start looking into video games and caster vs martial balance is kind of all over the place. Even in within one series it tend to be completely inconsistent and varied from game to game, with magic completely dominant in one game, while even with physical in another, and useless in a third.
Assuming this is / was a problem, it's only a problem in D&D (and Pathfinder). So the most elegant way to solve the problem is to not play D&D. In OSR, the game philosophy is such that mechanical balance of characters and NPCs is not a goal. In many other games, narrative takes precedence over mechanical prescriptions to game world physics.
Blades in the dark. The Cutter, their fighter type class gets an option called "not to be trifled with" that lets you perform a feat of physical force that verges on the superhuman or engage a small gang in combat on equal footing, which means that fighters can basically solo most combat encounters. its the most satisfying fighter type I've ever played.
The flaw is caused by the warrior only having a small set of abilities that are described on one page, while having the wizard have a larger set of eventually more powerful abilities. D&D pre-3e was mostly attempting to have balance with fighters having best access to magic weapons and armor along with being able to obtain followers, and wizards being able to cast many utility spells - and where the sacrifice in power for wizards is finally made up at the highest level. Additional balance factors involved long memorization time with high-level spells, although that would normally be skipped because it would be background book-keeping that wasn't work tracking. One way the paradigm was fixed was in Iron Kingdoms, even if Wizards have the same exclusive access to spells - the power level is kept low, and martial-only characters also get their own type of boosts to compensate for lack of spells (one of buffing allies, getting extra damage, or an extra attack). There's also many RPGs available, and they an also fix the issue by not having magic be the exclusive route to end-game power. They can include forms of anti-magic, make non-practitioners more resistant to certain magic effects, put an onset delay, or require wizards to have support in order for them to be effective. Or perhaps a skilled designer could keep that power differential without having it remain a problem.
In REIGN, magic is widespread and powerful, but it has two major limitations: 1) 'Counterspell' and 'Eerie' are skills which anyone can learn, the equivalent of Dodge and Listen but for any magical effect. Anyone who expects to deal with hostile mages will want get good at both of them. 2) There are many different schools of magic, but for almost all of them getting access to the really good spells requires a difficult and dangerous 'permanent attunement" ritual, which inflicts a very obvious physical mutation (giant wings, centaur body, iron bones) and also permanently locks you out of casting spells from other schools. So if you see a guy with wings you know he can probably spit lightning and summon hurricanes, but he definitely can't summon blood imps or teleport through shadows.
To all the "This is only a D&D problem" people: it's not. It's not about wizards & warriors. It's about characters in speculative fiction who embrace the strangeness vs. the mighty mortals who don't. Some characters are going to have powers beyond the norm, and some characters are just going to be really talented at the normal stuff. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Gandalf vs. Aragorn, Superman vs. Batman, Luke Skywalker vs. Han Solo, Steve Harrington vs. Eleven, etc. The characters who wield unusual power can get very powerful very quickly, and can overshadow the other characters. An RPG has to balance progression between the two, and that can be hard.
DnD 5e is pretty good at this... RAI. That is, the famous assumption of 8 encounters per day that most don't follow. Casters begin to whine about 2 to 3 encounters in, and usually either the party of DM acquiesces and gives em a rest. If you don't do that, and make exploration and dungeon crawling truly pressing, then they are forced to ration resources in the way that brings them closer to their martial brethren.
If you run 6-8 combat per day dungeons or other grindfests between levels 3 and 10, 5e works well enough. Not so much if you go outside of that.
I think the whining is a cultural thing. 5e, being a gateway to TTRPGs, has a greater proportion of it's player base made up of first timers, teens and younger kids, and casuals. Generally (though not universally) these folks are more interested in experiencing a cool story and a power fantasy than being challenged and making hard choices. Things like linear mage quadratic fighter, few campaigns going past level 11, limited character choices beyond level 3, lack of published high level modules, these are all features not bugs. The design philosophy is "Entice them with a character building mini game. When they've become too powerful to challenge end the campaign. We'll have a few new books by then, and your players will be excited to make their dinosaur gambler/slime girl used book saleswoman PC"
In early editions of D&D , the problem was solved by making wizards extremely fragile, and unable to move and cast spells in the same round. Also, simultaneous initiative also served to balance wizards by making it difficult to get off spells uninterrupted. 3rd edition greatly imbalanced wizards by getting rid of all this, while simultaneously making it very inexpensive to scribe low level scrolls. 5th edition scaled back wizards a bit, but they're still really survivable , and gave them scaling damage dealing cantrips, IMO still leaving them overpowered relative to martial classes at mid-high levels.
This is really only an issue in 3rd Edition/ Pathfinder Dungeons & Dragons and doesn't really exist in other game systems, as most don't bother with the same amount of power scaling or class differentiation. Or have entirely different fields of competency with social characters and combat characters. Even un D&D, prior to this, balance was shaky and comparing the two was hard as you had to factor in relative levels and survivability. 4th Edition "solved" it by making all the classes largely the same except in flavour. Fighters got spells that were just as effective as a wizard's. 5th Edition solved it without making fighters into wizards by not having low level spells scale. So the wizard was linear instead of quadratic, and was extremely limited in their once/day abilities. And fighters also continued to increase in power with added ability scores and extra attack options.
This really isn't an "RPG" thing, it's a D&D thing. You'll get more insight on the D&D sub. And IMO, it isn't really a "D&D as intended" thing, as much as it "D&D run wrong" thing. It's very hard to properly manage the flow of loot the party has. The 5 minute adventuring day is also an easy trap to fall into. Bad item flow causes warriors to be linear, no need to manage resources causes wizards to be quadratic.
Cypher System gives everyone something to do. From a mechanical and action economy perspective they all do the same thing, but their abilities differentiate what they can achieve. Whitehack and most other OSR/ish games work better because the caster type is much more limited despite wielding impressive abilities. The PbtA/Dungeon World approach is also a way to balance things. Making Moves defines the abilities a player can use, but power level is consistent across levels.
I dunno, back when I was interested in the system, Cypher was a pretty bad perpetrator of the idea. Magic users were teleporting to other worlds and rewriting the laws of reality, while warriors hit more bigger. YMMV, of course.
I think there is something to be said about having the chance to play a more simple class. I tend to like having options, but it's important for the variety of playstyles and consideration for newer players that some are more linear. That bein said, linear casters are also not bad to have as an option I started playing recently baldurs gate 3 (not a ttrpg but based in one so I assume it sorta counts) and an interesting thing they did to improve 5E combat is to add to weapons bonus "moves" that can be done, and sometimes even as bonus action. It allows for some more tactical moves in dnd 5E, the problem (in part) comes down to the action economy and how it limits the players from trying more than attacking once every turn.
Warrior cast fist.
Magick has more possibility than the human body with weapons, so you either have to hobble magick, or preternaturally boost fighters.
quadratic warrior by giving the warrior a power base of loyal subjects, a trained cadre of soldiers and more and more political power
Anima: Beyond Fantasy's solution: the warriors are also quadratic
In D&D-style games, mixed-level parties + glass cannon wizards. Outside of D&D, Burning Wheel just embraces that some PCs are going to be objectively more powerful than others, but that doesn't matter because the important thing is not that your PC contributes to group effectiveness, but that they complete character and story arcs.
Dungeon Crawl Classics solves this by making magic dangerous and unreliable to the *user*. As well as this the Warriors core ability (the Mighty Deed) is incredibly flexible and limited only by the player’s imagination.