Is magic always overpowered?

[HereForOSSR]

I think a common theme in TTRPGs is that magic is really, really powerful. The basic ideas I keep seeing are that -

1)Mages have multiple options which can do things that surpass whole character concepts. The invisible teleporting mage who sees through walls is a better rogue than a rogue. A druid who who can summon five celestial dire ostriches or Asskicking Elementals can do more melee damage and soak up more damage, indirectly, than any two physical oriented party members... and it only takes a single action to summon those bad boys.

2) Disabling combat effects are often better than damage effects (like lightning bolt or stabbing). Incapacitating a group of enemies is basically as effective as killing them in combat, and magic users can often do that to entire groups.

3) Mind control is insanely powerful. This is underrated, I think, but straight up taking over other characters is often more powerful than anything anybody else can ever do.

4) Their tool box grows exponentially rather than linearly. They don't just get more spells per level or XP point, the spells they do get are usually better AND they often get ways to empower spells they already have. This combines to make them ridiculously powerful in non-combat situations. Maybe I'm just uncreative, but I had trouble coming up with adventure ideas that could be solved more easily by hitting people with axes or often even being a smooth talker than with the ability to see almost anything, be almost anywhere, and control almost anybody.

5) They can often do all of these things without having to specialize. The more the game goes on, the higher their ability to just do whatever the fuck they want gets.

Is this the experience the rest of you have had? If so... how could a person with the ability to control space, time, matter, and minds not be tremendously more powerful than somebody who can punch real hard? Is there a system that manages to balance this somehow, or could there even be such a system?

[angelfromanotherpin]

Sure. Champions does it, where you can buy any effect you want and fluff it as punchmastery in exactly the same way that the mage can buy any effect they want and fluff it as magicsauce.

[HereForOSSR]

Punching your way through time and space seems like magic to me, so it's not exactly what I meant. However, I can get behind the idea of punching the intervening space between two points so hard that it stops existing, based on comedic value alone.

[Ancient History]

The point of magic is that you can do something with it that you could not normally do without it. It is explicitly a cheat, a workaround, an impossibility. You want magic to do more than just replicate what punching or stabbing a dude can do, even if all it does is let you punch or stab someone or something that can't normally be punched or stabbed.

But magic also has a cost. If the cost is equivalent to the effect, and if magic has limitations to what it can do, then you can begin to say that magic is balanced - particularly if the limitations align in such a way that magic doesn't tread on other toes, so fighter-character and sneaky-character are still relevant and can meaningfully contribute at their given levels.

And that is very difficult and tricky to do, especially as the effects get flashier. A high-level fighter and a high-level wizard can both kill a hundred dudes, but Fighter-woman has to cut through dozens of mooks in an extended combat sequence a la Kill Bill while the wizard casts Meteo. That is the quadratic wizard/linear warrior issue in a nutshell, and it is very difficult to design a game around it so the magic does things you want it to do and also isn't the only effective way to do things.

[hogarth]

I'm not sure I understand the question. It's trivially easy to write a TTRPG where magic sucks, so I don't believe magic is always overpowered. But if you're defining "magic" as "the ability to do overpowered stuff", then the statement is tautologically true.

[Foxwarrior]

If you look through old threads in In My Humble Opinion from 5-15 years ago, it shouldn't take you too long to find a few about how fighters are so much wimpier than wizards, and how this is a tragedy, etc etc. Game developers in the post-3.5e age have often tried to make high level mundane heroes seem less pathetic by completely getting rid of things like divinations that give meaningful information, or summoning minions that have their own actions, and whatnot, but it's a bit like lighting your house on fire because you're jealous of your fireplace.

When I was writing up a Vanilla Action Hero class for Fiends and Fortresses to torment Kaelik with, most of their class features ended up being about various plot contrivances they could call upon to have contacts in high places, not actually die when it looks like they did, etc. It definitely still suffers from the Captain Hobo problem, but at least they don't have to whine "it's no fair that you can teleport, boo hoo"

[HereForOSSR]

I'm not sure I understand the question. It's trivially easy to write a TTRPG where magic sucks, so I don't believe magic is always overpowered. But if you're defining "magic" as "the ability to do overpowered stuff", then the statement is tautologically true.

Sure, good point. I suppose a better way to phrase the question is - "Is magic almost always overpowered in existing TTRPGs?"

[Suzerain]

If by "magic" you mean "classes that use spellcasting or similar abilities as their main schtick" then that's not the actual problem. I'll be approaching this from the perspective the question was likely asked from - talking about D&D and it's derivatives. I think a broader experience of non-D&D games would answer this question before it was asked.

First, it's the failure of GMs continually trying to throw low-level challenges at high-level characters and being surprised when those challenges fail. Think of bad high-level dungeon design where they just say "Oh and teleport and passwall just don't work here for [reason]", or any GM that thinks throwing an army of 1st level orcs against a 15th level party is going to do anything other than waste time (excepting D&D5 with it's overvaluing of mobs of chaff due to its shit maths.)

Second, it's the failure of designers to give level-appropriate abilities to classes that do not use spellcasting as their main schtick. This is usually in response to a few overlapping segments of the player base. Those who want a character that is simple to set up and play with not much thinking required, those that want a character that is not fantastical, and those that want an option that uses no magic in-world. The designers seem to think that these three player groups are the same despite their differing desires. Of these groups, the anti-fantastical are the ones that cause the core issues of balance in being pandered to, as in a mixed party a non-fantastical character simply cannot keep up with the fantastical ones conceptually.

If by "magic" you mean "anything that is not possible in our baseline reality" then you aren't really asking a question that can be answered because that particular point of difference exists in nearly every arena of every tabletop RPG simply due to the fact that the mechanics are abstracted from reality and hence will produce unrealistic results in many small ways for the sake of being easy to run at the table.[/i]

[TheGreatEvilKing]

Point number two is mostly true because of HP inflation. The high end of 3.5 optimization has both wizards and warriors going full in on damage because you can actually break people with big numbers. Megadamage is actually better because you don't need to have all the condition immunities/saves memorized and get fucked when you run into undead with sleep prepared.

The corollary is that in systems like 4e and 5e where Mearls inflated the HP to stupid amounts you absolutely DO want to grab 4e orbizards and Hypnotic Pattern because you cannot chew through enough hit points quickly enough for it to matter. D&D deciding that fighters are damage only really fucks fighters when massive HP numbers start rolling out and fighter damage doesn't go up to compensate.

[Unity]

Suzerain,

I'm mostly familiar with D&D, World of Darkness, and Shadowrun. In all three, at least the editions I know, magic users are so much more powerful than the rest that they make fighter/gunner types look weak at best and decorative at worst.

And by "magic", I think the distinction is pretty clear in most cases where the Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards trope is in full effect. I am not aware of any setting where causing someone to explode by boiling their blood with the power of your mind counts as a non-magical effect. Jumping twenty feet in the air may or may not count as magic from the perspective of the game, but the thing that makes me ask this question is that jumping twenty feet in the air is not of equal power to the unequivocally magical ability of being able to teleport the whole party twenty miles away.

That is the quadratic wizard/linear warrior issue in a nutshell, and it is very difficult to design a game around it so the magic does things you want it to do and also isn't the only effective way to do things.

What systems, if any, succeed at this task?

[Suzerain]

Suzerain,

I'm mostly familiar with D&D, World of Darkness, and Shadowrun. In all three, at least the editions I know, magic users are so much more powerful than the rest that they make fighter/gunner types look weak at best and decorative at worst.

And by "magic", I think the distinction is pretty clear in most cases where the Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards trope is in full effect. I am not aware of any setting where causing someone to explode by boiling their blood with the power of your mind counts as a non-magical effect. Jumping twenty feet in the air may or may not count as magic from the perspective of the game, but the thing that makes me ask this question is that jumping twenty feet in the air is not of equal power to the unequivocally magical ability of being able to teleport the whole party twenty miles away.

Okay, so you in particular are talking about the "people who have spells as a gimmick" type of magic, I'm glad that's clear. I'll use that specific phrasing to make my own point clearer. People that have spells as a gimmick are not overpowered, but people that have another gimmick are underpowered. I know this is a generalisation, and because this is the internet I have to acknowledge that this is a generalisation and that yes edge cases exist.

[MGuy]

During the many fighter threads (some of which are in my signature) I've seen this discussed at length. I'm going to reply based on what I think the heart of the question is. "Why is magic better in most games". The reason seems to be that there is more conceptual space for what magic 'could' do as opposed to what people without it can do. Same thing in any setting where tech, tech that acts like magic, etc can do vs anything that's not part of the setting phlebotonium. Since 'magic' is not bound by what people expect to see in the real world in 'any' way then there is a lot more room for magic to do the most stuff without pushback.

[Stahlseele]

The one System i know of where magic is not considered too OP is WH40K.
And that mainly because of its random nature and not because of what it does.

[Ancient History]

That is the quadratic wizard/linear warrior issue in a nutshell, and it is very difficult to design a game around it so the magic does things you want it to do and also isn't the only effective way to do things.

What systems, if any, succeed at this task?

Depends on the scale of play. Shadowrun is an example where magician and non-magician characters both have a lot of options and can work to a degree of parity...up to a point. There are still issues at the high end where adepts can always have more dice than you, and that's sort of the quadratic issue in a nutshell. Magic should make the impossible possible, but ideally it shouldn't make other characters feel small in the pants all the time.

Call of Cthulhu doesn't have overpowered magic because the magic system is damn near unusable by design (as much as you can call it design). Sometimes the only way to handle the threats is with a spell, not dynamite, and learning and casting said spell is usually a chore in and of itself. PC sorcerers are nearly nonexistent in most games, even if many effects are powerful, because there is no available or consistent path to learn and use them. It's all GM fiat.

So there's no one point of balance, it depends entirely on the nature of the game and the kind of play you're going for.

[erik]

I'm not sure what you're looking for exactly, even as you have scaled back the initial post to a more reasonable "Is magic almost always overpowered in existing TTRPGs?". Magic as in using specific spells to achieve super effects, or anything with the phlebotinum of it being maaaaagic?

Obviously in a game with magic and spells you're going to want to make it an attractive option since that's a big reason why people come to play. It's not overpowered if every player is expected to have it.

If magic is limited to only some characters and it is a tool to do the otherwise impossible, it is going to be overpowered compared to mundane options unless spells are impaired one way or another to not be superior to mundane abilities, or mundane technology is so advanced that it is functionally as useful as magic.

So looking for classes where magic can do impossible/powerful things, but isn't necessarily the best option.

I suppose Rifts is one. Spells for the most part aren't as good as alternatives.

Earthdawn has magic in everything, and spellcasters are good, but not always the best. I feel like this goes for Shadowrun too, especially if Adept doesn't count as magic since the aren't necessarily casting spells just have a different means of getting high bonuses.

Low level DnD casters aren't absolutely the best due to their fragility and low ammo on combat winning spells which are situationally useful/useless.

Deadlands has various drawbacks on casting such that Hucksters and Shamans and such aren't necessarily OP. Harrowed are OP, but whatever, being a magic zombie is cool.

There's also games where magic is just so wimpy that it's not a big deal as it isn't the main focus of the game. Hollow Earth Expedition. I'm not sure that Conan d20 spellcasting is OP either.

I imagine the various Fudge or whatever games where you just have a couple traits which you try and figure out how they are relevant to any roll wouldn't have "Magic" being any more overpowered than "Macguyver", but those are barely games anyway so meh.

Unknown Armies probably falls under same umbrella as Call of Cthulhu. The magic system is so stupid it doesn't feel overpowered in most cases.

[jt]

Folk tales, mythology, anime, and video games all seem on board with the idea that it's okay for purely mundane characters to break the laws of physics. TTRPGs are much more likely to make breaking physics synonymous with magic. In any game where this is true, magic is almost guaranteed to be OP.

I don't think this is inherent to the format or anything like that, it's more of a cultural thing that came in from D&D. If you discard the idea that mundane=possible then it's pretty easy for mundanes to keep up. But you need to be willing to do things like going into your Jump skill and setting a DC for jumping midair and/or actually flying.

[deaddmwalking]

In a lot of fiction, magic is not usable in combat-time. In RPGs, it usually is.

If you don't make it available in combat time you greatly limit the fun stories you can tell and you certainly gimp wizard characters. Making magic accessible is fun; making magic accessible tends to make it over-power non-magical characters. Giving people a wide-variety of magical access is one solution, but it means you won't have non-fantastic people.

[Unity]

Ahh, I see. So it sounds like it is sort of equal to mundane power, it's just hard to balance and especially hard to balance without making it cumbersome or dangerous to use. Thanks, guys. I'll have to check out how things work in Rifts in particular, sounds intriguing.

[JigokuBosatsu]

Have never played, but I wonder how meaningful the Riddle of Steel/Blade of the Iron Throne approach is? The way you have to prioritize the different categories of backgrounds, attributes, etc. at chargen means that if you want to start as a powerful sorceror you will likely also be starting as an unskilled degenerate caveman.

[Orion]

In an RPG where some PCs have "magic" and some don't (Or where some they all have "magic" but only some have "spellcasting"), there are basically 3 kinds of magic (or spells) PCs can get.

• Magic that cancels out or negates enemy magic, but doesn't generate its own effects.
• Magic that generates effects which aren't available to non-magic characters
• Magic that gives you a different way of accessing effects which are also available to non-magic characters.

Magic of the first type -- magic like See Invisible, Dispel Magic, Align Weapon, or Banishment -- pretty much can't be overpowered because it can never solve problems or progress stories on its own, only remove magic obstacles. As long as there are any tasks or obstacles that aren't magic, other characters will still be necessary.

Magic of the second kind can be balanced or even under-powered at character creation but almost always becomes over-powered in "high-level" play, because the magic characters will usually eventually end up able to do everything non-magic characters can do PLUS whatever only magic can do.

Magic of the third kind is basically a way to some accounting with skill points to create a generalist character. You to get to have one magic skill that duplicates the effects of many normal skills, but might be riskier, more costly, or less effective than the appropriate normal skill. This usually turns out to be really good, but sometimes it sucks. This kind of magic is perhaps the easiest to balance by just changing numbers around. It also tends to become wildly more or less useful based on factors like the number of PCs in the group and the length of a typical adventure.

[OgreBattle]

Jigoku, Riddle of Steel magic is "win hard or get crippled/die", but RoS swording and arrows is also "win hard or get crippled/die"... but I've never seen that game in play and I haven't looked enough into magic to see if it all mechanically works.

----

D&D says a fighter can't be Hercules, but a caster can do all of the olympians and titan's feats. So that's a problem.

Is magic a part of the natural world, and are humans a part of the magical natural world is another question. The mythology lecturer Joseph Campbell said a big part between the Christian tradition and Vedic/Tao was the former views nature as corrupt and salvation comes from beyond that, the Eastern traditions tend to not differentiate nature from man from supernatural so a demon or human can accumulate enough EXP to trade in for divine super powers, a stone monkey can learn taoist magic from a human taoist master.

Is power 'awesome' or an 'affliction' is another question. The X-Men are awesome handsome pretty model teens with melodrama, but the Doom Patrol are afflicted dudes being used by the government.

[Dogbert]

Depends on the game.

DnD is failed from inception because it divides people in "magic haves" and "magic have nots." Have nots are forever screwed, and while there is a "middle class," I'm sure you have heard the allegory of the stairs and the 1%. As long as your game allows for both "haves" and "have nots" as playable in the same party, the end result will still be the same shit show. Being the group's Hawkeye will always suck, and it's not Thor's player's fault.

While Doctor Strange looks OP even in a superhero setting, notice Doc Strange only has active participation in higher-tiered stories when he deals with Asgardians or The Living Tribunal and similar stuff. In any lower-powered story, Doctor Strange is a plot device rather than a character.

I actually mentioned this in a blog post (yes, shameless plug).

[Harshax]

I've been working on a pub-friendly Urban Fantasy RPG that is FATE based. It breaks down all actions into about 14 different skills. Magic is not one of them.

In this game, Magic, Gun-Fu, being a werewolf or a sparkly vampire is just a schtick. When a character Brawls with gangbangers, it doesn't matter if they're swinging a katana, evoking unseen forces, calling ghosts, raging as a loup-garou ... At the end of the day, a character with Brawl +4 is just better than Brawl +0.

The best skill results might be narrated as a car flipping over or a wall being blasted off the foundations. Thematically, the game is just gritty, low magic.

You could apply this same system to Wuxia style fantasy as well. But the thematic difference is that a Sneaking character is quietly running along tree limbs and over obstacles and a thief melds through walls when he picks a lock.

Maybe the rock-paper-scissors of the elemental system Frank proposed a while back could be tacked on for more crunchy mechanics, but I'm not going to bother in a game expected to be played over pints.

Linear fighter/quadratic wizard discussions has been so thoroughly done to death that the glue from that particular beaten horse has dried up already.

The only place for ongoing discussion of this paradigm is in existential horror games where "fighter" is replaced with "investigator" and "wizard" is replaced with "Cthulhu".


EDIT: grammar

[erik]

Ahh, I see. So it sounds like it is sort of equal to mundane power, it's just hard to balance and especially hard to balance without making it cumbersome or dangerous to use. Thanks, guys. I'll have to check out how things work in Rifts in particular, sounds intriguing.

Ehhh. Mentioning rifts wasn’t intended to be a recommendation! It is a glorious dumpster fire that just served as an example where spells aren’t the primary power lever of the setting.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I haven't looked enough into magic to see if it all mechanically works.

I think you are correct. It's been a long time since I looked at it, and I remember there not being a lot of spells- more like powers- and they were risky and inconsistent. Presumably like the combat?