Pre Made Decks

[Username17]

We all know gamers who are gearheads and would spend hours tweaking character that they weren't even going to play just to see it done. Also we know people who don't want to deal with character generation at all or merely wish to hold out for simple storytelling and do not wish to deal with mechanics at all. People like point base chargen systems, but they do not like to be asked to use them in any timely fashion. Especially not when the rest o the group would like to start playing any minute now. Character generation can be fun, and indeed should be fun. But it's probably a solo activity once you've learned the game. Even when teaching a new player, chargen is rarely to be enjoyed by more than one player.

What is to be done about this? Well, the most obvious answer is to simply make pregenerated characters that people can pull out and play. You know that in your supers game, someone is going to want to play someone who flies around with a force field and shoots energy blasts at things. You can make such a character ready to go right on page 97 of the book and people can whip it out and play it in game with a new name and possibly a new costume. That can seriously work. Th problem is: it almost never does.

Now the reason why it fails in almost every game ever made is somewhat complicated. Partly it's because such characters are almost invariably really poorly designed. Which in turn is in no small part because the characters packaged with the game were written during playtest, meaning that they are likely not even legal and in any case aren't designed with all of the changes made in the final game revisions in mind. But also because the metagme is immature when those characters are written up. Even if someone put the effort into figuring out what the right stat array for a Sorcerer was going to be, it's very likely that the sample characters will have glaring weaknesses based on the counters that characters "need" in the mature metagame simply not being there. For example: there are a number of sample characters in the Shadowrun book that don't have Perception or Infiltration but do have Dodge.

So what is to be done about that? My suggestion is to make character design more like selecting cards for a deck. More so even than 4e, in that the act of assigning attribute points is too much work and leads to stealth failure characters (like Sword Users who have to max Strength and Intelligence for whatever reason and then get to high levels and can't buy Sword Mastery feats).

The idea is that it is easier to go reassign a card selection later in the design process than to respend points or move attribute assignments around. Since allowed level appropriate choices trade at 1:1, you can get all of the sample characters at every level up to speed with th latest revisions with simple edits rather than having to rely upon essentially rewriting characters from scratch.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Demonstrate....?

[Username17]

Demonstrate....?

Fair.

The idea is that every part of character generation should be reducible to a single choice off a list. Even if you allow further customization of that choice, it should be in the form of a series of trades. Let's make a character.

We start with a "race" choice. We have a number of choices:

• Human
• Elf
• Dwarf
• Halfling
• Gnome
• Goblin
• Hob
• Orc
• Cambion
• Kobold
• Drow
• etc!

Where 4e falls down, and indeed most RPGs of this ilk fall down, is by making any of those choices have mechanical modifiers that change your future numbers or options. That makes swapping this card difficult. Instead we give each race an ability that is itself an activated power for combat and another one for tactical positioning and yet a third one for skill challenges.

What this means is that we can potentially create a new racial card by just remixing some of the other cards. Maybe you make a Half Elf who has Elven Grace for their Maneuver and Human Versatility for their Skill power. Whatever. But you don't have to do go through the entire list of 1331 possibilities (and inded, the DM may not let you combine Hob Carefulness and Dwarven Persistence no matter what character background you wrote), you can just pick one of those 11. And perhaps more importantly, if we need an NPC fast, we can just grab one of the pre-gen Orcs and swap it out for a Drow - because the card comes out and trades 1:1 with another card. For this character, we choose Halfling. This gives us Halfling Luck, Halfling Slipperiness, and Halfling Optimism. But since it comes as a unit, we can grab the actual halfling card and put it in front of us and it will list all three powers.

Then we grab a class. Similarly we make one selection:

• Hero
• Artificer
• Wizard
• Ranger
• Rogue
• Warlock
• Druid
• Necromancer
• Psion
• Monk
• Bard
• etc!

And again, the class gives a couple of starter powers. Our Halfling might be a Psion and get Psychic Awareness, Spoonbender, and Empathic Projection. We could even make a new class of potentially deubious balance by mixing and matching. But in this case we elect to make our Halfling a Druid, which means that he gets Beast Tongue, Woodland Stride, and Nature Sense.

And now we get to the dependent card draws for standard character generation. As a Druid, our Halfling is allowed to make one selection off of each of the two Druid Powers list. The two lists are:

• Pack of Wolf
• Murder of Crows
• Sloth of Bears

and

• Wrath of Tempests
• Grasp of Brambles
• Might of Earth

So we could decide to grab a Pack of Wolves (special effect: angry dogs) and mix it with Might of Earth and be some kind of hobo halfling druid from the dump near town who controls filth and has a pack of curs that he sicks on polluters or something, but in this case we elect to do something more traditional and grab a Murder of Crows and Wrath of Tempests. This choice is a little less optimal than some of the others, since if we decided to make a Psion instead we couldn't select Murder of Crows or Wrath of Tempests. We'd end up grabbing Telekinesis and Psychoportation or something like that.

Anyway, we now grab a Feat. This is a much longer list unfortunate, because it's supposed to be just generic character customization. None of it is stuff like Weapon Focus or even Improved Bullrush - because these things are not bonuses. They are going to be things like "Frost Magic Training" that allow us to shoot a frost bolt or "Feat of Strength" that let us do something heroically strong. In going with our cryptic Carrion Bird hawker druid theme, we decide to take the feat "Divination." But the big point is that if we swapped it for something else, we could just do that.

And now we take a Background. This is pretty open. And whatever we pick, we get a list of things we can do. So we look at the list:

• Street Rat
• Aristocrat
• Soldier
• Desert Nomad
• Forest Hunter
• Farmer
• Blacksmith
• Fisher
• Merchant
• Criminal
• Spy
• etc!

And since we are going for the whole crows aesthetic, we decide to go for Desert Nomad, which gives us Keen Vision, Waste Lore, and Endurance.

-Username17

[Crissa]

What do you do with abilities which are on more than one card? I would try to avoid it.

-Crissa

[Red_Rob]

I get how this is supposed to work, however you've essentially just modularised the creation process by lumping together several sections of the process. Won't this reduce character customisability?

Also, I was most interested to see how you proposed to work skills, as they are the least modular part of current character creation, however you seem to have skipped that part.

Lastly, is reassigning some points from Dodge to Perception really that much of a chore?

[baduin]

The basic idea has merit, but there are several problems with it. One is the matter of skills and other abilities which are difficult to describe as powers: the characters created in this way could play a 4ed adventure, but would find it very difficult to interact with the world outside of the battle-mat.

In addition, such characters are difficult to imagine. In essence, they are bunches of random powers, with the differences between eg halfling and ogre nearly non-existent.

I would therefore suggest giving each character abilities, but without numerical values. A character can be Strong, Weak, or neither, Stupid, Intelligent, Charismatic, Small or Big. etc.

Some races would give obligatory abilities: all Halflings are Small. Some classes would require certain abilities: Warriors cannot be Weak.

Abilities would be used, together with levels, classes and races, as bonuses to skills: Strong characters can pick up more even without special powers.

But most importantly, each power would have as prerequisites certain abilities: some powers could require the character to be Strong, other to be Intelligent or Charismatic. Some powers would be accessible to all characters which are not Weak etc.

[Crissa]

There's no reason you couldn't have a higher level of granularity for more advanced players as long as baduin's point of counteracting abilities was followed and you didn't get to choose more from each tier than the deck version.

-Crissa

[Username17]

What do you do with abilities which are on more than one card? I would try to avoid it.

-Crissa

Abilities can be on more than one card if you don't get the option of having both cards. It's OK if people with the Desert and Tundra background both have Endurance as an ability. But you wouldn't want to put Endurance down as one of the two things that a Feat did, because then players might get stuck wanting the rider ability but having to take it with an Endurance that they already had. These kinds of counter synergies must be avoided. But having similar races, classes, or backgrounds that gave some identical and some different abilities would be fine. Maybe you'd print up Wild Elves, who had the same "Elven Grace" ability that normal Elves did, but they had "Wild Spontaneity" instead of "Elven Persistence" or something.

I get how this is supposed to work, however you've essentially just modularised the creation process by lumping together several sections of the process. Won't this reduce character customisability?

Yes. However, this is a game, actual analog is not possible to achieve and may not even be a worthwhile goal to strive for. There will be a finite number of characters you can make. Having six different stats that range from 3 to 18 does not give unlimited adventurers, it gives sixteen million, seven hundred thousand adventurers. Which is more than you will ever see played in your whole life. But how much of that variation actually matters? I submit: not a lot. That's a lot of fiddly numbers to deal with, but honestly most Wizards have pretty much the same effective stats - in any edition.

Like with digital sound, the goal is to tighten things down to the point where the audience can't perceive the pixelation and no farther. To do any more is a waste of resources - an unconscionable sin when the processor cycles you would be wasting are actual humans at the game table who are trying to have fun.

And so it is that we ask ourselves, with about 10 races and about 10 classes and 3 A options for each class and 3 B options for each class, and 10 backgrounds, and 40 feats to choose from... are you ever going to run through those 360,000 characters before expansion options come out to make those numbers even more ridiculous?

Also, I was most interested to see how you proposed to work skills, as they are the least modular part of current character creation, however you seem to have skipped that part.

Skills are a classic example of where granularity is stupid. If you read about a character in a book, does it ever occur to you to even wonder whether perhaps an individual character is a +7 Sailor or a +8 Sailor? Of course not! What matters is whether they are a Sailor or not. Now I will admit that 4e D&D goes too far here. They just say "Ah fuck it, if you think you can convince the DM into letting you sail or do carpentry or whatever, fucking go for it." And that's not enough. No Blacksmith hero really feels like a Blacksmith unless they have some confirmation of their Blacksmithiness somewhere on the character sheet. But that's all it needs to be. You take the Blacksmith background, and among the other abilities it lists, it mentions that you can totally smith things. Go you.

Where things need to be expanded of course is people's ability to pick up such talents as they level. Which totally needs to happen, but shouldn't be as simple as grabbing new backgrounds, for the aforementioned reason that such a bonus would end up fucking people over who did thematically similar things, which in turn would cause people to min/max their character's life story. So probably you'd want some sort of "Experiences" card that you would get when you leveled (or maybe between levels), that would give you distinct portions of things that backgrounds do. And since these Experience cards would be stand alone, you would only have to avoid taking something like "metal crafting" when you already had the Blacksmith background and stick to shit like "swimming."

Lastly, is reassigning some points from Dodge to Perception really that much of a chore?

First of all: yes. Secondly, it's highly unmodular, because a lot of packages end up wanting the same bits. So if you decided to grab the Bounty Hunter pack and the Private Investigator pack, they'd both end up with points in perception, meaning that the total cost of both packages together would be some number that was more than the cost of either one but still less than both together. Meaning that you basically end up having to tally the points yourself.

I would therefore suggest giving each character abilities, but without numerical values. A character can be Strong, Weak, or neither, Stupid, Intelligent, Charismatic, Small or Big. etc.

Those are numeric values. You've assigned Strength a score of 1, 2, or 3. The fact that you've given them arbitrary names does not change that. Actually it makes it worse because I can almost guaranty you that whatever your number 2 name for Wisdom will sound better than your number 3 name to some people. So no, that's a terrible idea.

That being said, giving people "attributes" which are literally tags that you have or do not have is a fine idea. Having Halflings all carry around the "small" attribute, while all Orcs get the "strong" attribute seems pretty reasonable. Perhaps let people choose an attribute or even more than one attribute for their character. Although I like the idea of the race handing out one attribute and people getting to choose one more and possibly getting even more later on.

The big thing to run into is that under no circumstances should any of those attributes make your heart seeker attack do more damage or whatever. Because if that happens, you're right back to obligatory builds and synergies, and that is to be avoided for rapid modular character generation and development.

-Username17

[Parthenon]

Its probably just me but I can't see how you are supposed to have a level system or character development with this system. Its fine with creating a new character, but after that I have no idea how a character changes.

Whether its levelling up or getting points to put into new powers, what happens? In your example the Halfling Druid picks one power off each list- do they then add another power off one list? Bad idea because after some levelling up all druids start to learn all the possible powers and become copies.

Or do they add a new class card and have two powers out of four lists and choose three out of the six class abilities? Bad idea because if they increase in power more they don't have a power from each class card. And lots of players won't want a multiclass character, or no class card works for the PC.

Possibly when a character gets more powerful they add a class card from a higher tier of classes. Or even replace their current one and automatically have a tier system in place. But a lot of players don't like prestige classes now, and wouldn't want to change from being a druid.

Or does each class card have several levels of abilities in it? But wouldn't that mean that the class card is a lot harder to change around than any of the others?

And then is there any granularity at all in skills between a village blacksmiths assistant and the king's artisan?

[Zinegata]

This is the path that leads to WHFRP 3.0 >_>.

[Smeelbo]

When I was FATE-ifying D&D, I had Level ranked from 1-5, like any other skill. In a contested skill test, I applied the difference in levels as a bonus to the higher level character's roll.

Characters can evolve without becoming "higher level."

Smeebo

[RandomCasualty2]

Like with digital sound, the goal is to tighten things down to the point where the audience can't perceive the pixelation and no farther. To do any more is a waste of resources - an unconscionable sin when the processor cycles you would be wasting are actual humans at the game table who are trying to have fun.

And so it is that we ask ourselves, with about 10 races and about 10 classes and 3 A options for each class and 3 B options for each class, and 10 backgrounds, and 40 feats to choose from... are you ever going to run through those 360,000 characters before expansion options come out to make those numbers even more ridiculous?

The goal isn't so much in raw number of characters, but rather in the ability to represent character concepts. People will largely care more that there's no fire mage or swashbuckler than they will if you only have only 5 different Conan characters, instead of 30.

[spasheridan]

I can dig light weight game systems - my favorite hobbyhorse here is Savage Worlds. Attributes go from 1 - 5, same with skills. Edges are a little less awesome than you imagine, but a +1 in a world of 1 - 5 is a lot better than a d20 world. In this game I can handle fast character generation.

When I talk shadowrun though I like more crunch. I dig balancing capacity points and availability in my cyberarm, or deciding which mod I'm going to buy for my bike. And I care that I have a harley scorpion instead of a suzuki samurai bike. In this world I would not dig a fast character generation.

That aside, pre-generated characters that work are a must. Come on, put em on your website in a PDF that can handle the name being altered and let me print them out. Have them be legal and have them be good. Make 50 of them!

[Username17]

Its probably just me but I can't see how you are supposed to have a level system or character development with this system. Its fine with creating a new character, but after that I have no idea how a character changes.

There are two kinds of advancement that heroic fantasy embraces: larger numbers and larger ability lists. Both are problematic in their own ways. Larger numbers push the RNG to the end, larger ability lists become structurally unmanageable both to write down all of during chargen and to use during play. But both need to happen for people to "feel" like they are playing Heroic Fantasy.

So you're going to want two things to happen:

• Getting new cards.
• Having the cards you already have improve.

And you are going to want to play those two off against each other so that neither one strangles the game out of the sweet spot of playability you have presumably designed it into.

So right away we note that our Halfling Druid is not going to make an additional selection off the Animal Companions list. Because doing so would quickly exhaust all choices and make all Druids converge into one character. Instead, his Murder of Crows card would scale, giving a benefit at specific levels throughout the Heroic Tier. What is going to happen instead is at specific levels, additional cards can be chosen off of other lists. The Feat list is pretty damn long, and will get longer. So you can give people a fair number of bonus selections off that list over the character's life and be OK. But for the big advancement of Druiding around halfway through the Heroic Tier, you'd want to give out a selection from a new set of power cards. Something like this:

• Natural Order
• Creeping Doom
• Spring and Autumn

And of course, you genuinely want peoples' skill list to get really long over time. High level characters should be a scribe or a chef if the need arises.

-Username17

[Murtak]

This seems to basically boil down to a single design guideline: Total orthogonality. Or more wordy: No ability should influence the way another ability works (unless they are on the same card I guess). Additionally picking an ability should not influence your choices in picks later on. Note that "ability" includes race and class picks.

Now, these are guidelines, and as Frank said, class specific ability lists violate them, but that seems to be the core of his proposal. Looks pretty nice to me. You do lose the distinction between strength 13 and 14 (but keep the distinction between strong and non-strong guys) and you completely get rid of worrying about character diversity, since orthogonality mostly gets rid of specific character builds.

[Username17]

This seems to basically boil down to a single design guideline: Total orthogonality. Or more wordy: No ability should influence the way another ability works (unless they are on the same card I guess). Additionally picking an ability should not influence your choices in picks later on. Note that "ability" includes race and class picks.

Yes. Total Orthogonality is one of, and perhaps the most important design principles I am talking about. However, it is unfortunately not the only design principle that has to be cleaved to.

Now, these are guidelines, and as Frank said, class specific ability lists violate them, but that seems to be the core of his proposal. Looks pretty nice to me. You do lose the distinction between strength 13 and 14 (but keep the distinction between strong and non-strong guys) and you completely get rid of worrying about character diversity, since orthogonality mostly gets rid of specific character builds.

The class specific abilities do violate them, and do so because there are unfortunately more design criteria that need to be cleaved to. The first is manageability. There are ultimately going to be a lot of power packages available. Three Column As and three Column Bs would be 39 of each with 13 classes worth. Scanning through lists that are more than a couple dozen entries long is time consuming and exhausting. And I don't want to do it. Even more, I don't want to wait for other people to do it. So splitting it up into smaller groups makes sense just from a legibility.

But it's also for playability of different characters. That is, if you give people access to 3 Column As and 3 Column Bs from 13 classes, you have written 78 powers and enabled 117 different characters. If you throw open the flood gates and let people take any Column A with any Column B, you will have theoretically enabled 1521 different characters, but you won't really be able to test any of them, because each Column A selection will have 39 possible mates. Thus, the chances of getting all of those things even vaguely balanced it pretty much nil, and the result will almost certainly be that there will be a few combos that are very very good and those will be the ones that are played.

For example: let's imagine a degenerate character like "Dick in a Box." He is based upon Force of Will (which gives a psychic attack that does not require line of effect), and Might of Earth (that lets you trap people in stone). Now normally people expect Might of Earth to be used to divide and conquer on enemies, but Dick in a Box actually uses it on himself, and then voluntarily blows the defense roll so that it always works. Then he blasts Force of Will from inside a fortress. That kind of thing is gong to happen pretty much every time you make a really long list of abilities you can combine. And then end result is that taking Sloth of Bears and Grasp of Brambles together just isn't "viable." Thus, while you've nominally increased the number of characters by 13 times, very likely you've actually reduced the number of characters people actually use and made the lists harder to read.

For that reason, I think it is probably for the best to have a lot less Feats and split a lot of them off into Attributes, and then have player advancement give out one and then the other as you go up in levels.

Smaller, more manageable lists, so that playtesters can combine each of the two power combos so that you don't get bullshit like Dick in a Box.

-Username17

[endersdouble]

That being said, giving people "attributes" which are literally tags that you have or do not have is a fine idea. Having Halflings all carry around the "small" attribute, while all Orcs get the "strong" attribute seems pretty reasonable. Perhaps let people choose an attribute or even more than one attribute for their character. Although I like the idea of the race handing out one attribute and people getting to choose one more and possibly getting even more later on.

-Username17

This reminds me of MET oWoD's physical/mental/social traits system. I rather like that system.

[xechnao]

I agree we do not need a number of attributes and a range of attribute stats that D&D -and any D20 system- uses.

What I do not agree with or perhaps cannot fully understand is using just different powers to differentiate player archetypes. What powers should the more physical -aka non casters- classes have? Are you saying we are going here the D&D 4e way? Because this I do not like.

Moreover, I suppose that said powers you are talking about are special actions of an environment equal for every character archetype. The limits of such environment would influence power design by a great lot, up to a point that perhaps powers are no longer optimal as the core design choice. So are we talking about environment limits similar to the ones of 4e (tactical board encounter design) or environment limits similar to the ones of old school D&D (dungeon levels: strategic resource managment design) -or something else yet?

[Username17]

What I do not agree with or perhaps cannot fully understand is using just different powers to differentiate player archetypes. What powers should the more physical -aka non casters- classes have? Are you saying we are going here the D&D 4e way? Because this I do not like.

What I am saying is that the Tome of Weeaboo Fightan Magiks and 4e had the right idea, but did not go far enough.

Basically a Ranger or a Hero's abilities with a bow or sword matter in the same way that a sailor's do: what can they do in the story? Someone being +8 to-hit instead of +7 to-hit is not an ability. Not only are you statistically unlikely to notice it in any particular combat, but it fails to have any descriptive meaning. There's nothing you could put into a book about the subject to indicate that a warrior had a +8 to-hit save by contrasting him with another warrior who has a +7 or +9. But a player character needs to stand on their own.

In short, when a character does something noteworthy, as most actions in combat presumably should be, they should be doing something that is describable narratively. Which means that the metaphor of playing a card to take an action is a pretty decent one. Every time the Hero does something it should be as noteworthy as the wizard casting a spell. And as such, giving them a list of powers to use makes a lot of sense.

-Username17

[Alansmithee]

In short, when a character does something noteworthy, as most actions in combat presumably should be, they should be doing something that is describable narratively. Which means that the metaphor of playing a card to take an action is a pretty decent one. Every time the Hero does something it should be as noteworthy as the wizard casting a spell. And as such, giving them a list of powers to use makes a lot of sense.

-Username17

I'm not sure I agree with this. Looking at the majority of the genre stuff I've read Conan/Elric/Fahrfad/whoever don't really gain much in the way of new techniques-it seems the test of their abilities is mostly from their being able to defeat stronger/more opposition. And giving them a list isn't necessarily gonna make them more effective unless the power/ability is somehow better or mechanically significant

Removed extra quote tag. --Z

[Username17]

Well, Conan doesn't really gain abilities or power at all. Elric actually specifically cycles in power, gaining new powers until he is ridiculous and then getting his powers tripped and starting over with the basic throw fire bolts and stab people gimmicks.

Conan doesn't really ever stop being a 4th level Fighter/Thief.

-Username17

[Alansmithee]

Most of the powers Elric gains are more from magic items/actual spells, rather than combat prowess (he starts off a skilled swordsman according to the story). And I don't remember him much cycling (although in hindsight you're probably spot-on about Conan).

I guess my big thing is that with magic you can get fireballs, or tornados, or create illusions, or just melt someone. But really there's not many new ways to stick someone with a sword that don't devolve into torture porn. You can add targeted attacks which give status effects to make them equivalent or some such thing, but generally in the end it's just gonna be someone sticking a guy with a sword.

I honestly think 4th ed does a decent job with this, from what I can tell (I've just started playing it last week or so, so haven't had time to examine it much). Everything seems a little...blah compared to 3.5 but it seems in general everyone plays about the same game, with many fancy name for their dX+stat attacks.

[xechnao]

You do not necessarily need powers to model notewothiness. You could have the general system rules made in such a way so to model the noteworthiness of melee classes.

For example combat could not be "I go-you go" but rather "being engaged" and "having the offensive initiative or momentum or advantage to ba able to withdraw from the exchange". Modeling a system with stuff like this in mind could allow creative tactics for each character class that go beyod hit point managment. Making a system that allows classes being creative in their own way can be done with a system that is modeled exactly for this reason, a system that does not try to model creativity around hit point resource control. 4e tries to implement tactics with pushes, pulls and the likes but to me it feels too artificial due to the system's core limits of the board environment and its fundamental base of hit point managment. For such a system you do need powers to make what you are talking about. But you could totally change the system and make one that works out, that functions the way you are talking about without the need of powers.

[Username17]

What you got there is just a very slight variation on the "Fighters cannot have nice things" meme. Both Conan and Elric fit into it in their own way.

Conan is basically a 4th level Fighter/Thief in the grand tradition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He has a high Strength score and can backstab with a bastard sword, but there is basically nothing he ever achieves that would make triumphing over a manticore anything but a big deal. So when people hold up Conan (or Aragorn, or Theseus, or Percival, or any other literary character who is basically a 4th level character) up as the paragon of what a warrior should achieve - they are implicitly telling warriors that they can't aspire to completing high level tasks.

Then there is Elric. Elric lives in a campaign world not unlike Lord of the Rings, in which everyone who is high level is a Wizard. I don't mean that only wizards show up as high level characters (although this is true), I mean that seriously the act of becoming a high level character makes you a wizard. Just as low level Elrond is a spearman who becomes a powerful magician as he ascends to the ranks of bad ass, Elric' progression of power is marked by him becoming a more and more powerful magician. People who advocate Elric (or LotR) as a model for warriors have to come to grips with the fact that warriors in that model actually become wizards if they hear the level up music.

There are lots of warriors who can compete as individuals on a playing field that includes "high level" wizards. But these warriors are named things like Lü Bu, Hercules, Wonder Woman, and Thor.

-Username17

[xechnao]

IMO being able to portray what the prince of Persia and Perseus do suits the needs of high fantasy. Perseus used magic weapons that allowed him to battle unearthly creatures and the prince is such an acrobatic fighter that looks as awesome as magic.

And you do not need powers to make a system that can mechanically handle this.

The problem now becomes what natural casters could be allowed to do so that they are not fundamentally superior to Perseus and the prince. The answer to this could still be to the system itself. If there are mechanics so that a fighter can try to use his shield or something to reflect a petrification gaze or to be able to run from cover to cover and evade a caster's beams we are home. High fantasy and its casters need not be about dragonball super sayen to be fun. As fighters are supposed to try to avoid a caster's beams, casters should be supposed to try to trap, expose and open enemies to their special powers with equally tactical play.