Yeah, it's another one of THOSE threads...

[Psifon]

Ok, so we have all seen the "how to fix the fighter" thing done to death by now.

I have a simple suggestion to add to the pile, and so I started this thread to kick the idea around a bit.

Fighters' skills suck. This is a constant complaint of people who like the class, and the fact that they suck means that you have few options outside of combat.

On the other hand, you don't want to make a fighter's skills TOO good, since most builds only include a 2-4 level dip into the class for the feats anyway, and adding good skills on top of 3 feats in 4 levels is TOO good.

So what about we give the fighter the following class ability:

Skillbuilding- At 7th level, the fighter is allowed to choose 2 cross class skills which he/she can add to his skill list as class skills. The skills chosen must operate off of the same base ability score. In addition, the fighter's skill points increase to 4+INT/level. At 15th level he gains one additional class skill. This new skill must use the same base ability score as the first two.

For example, Tordek can choose Spot (wis) and Heal (wis) as two new skills to add to his list. Tordek could not chose Spot (wis) and Use Magic Device (cha) as they are don't both use the same ability modifier (wisdom in this case). At 15th level, Tordek may add Listen (wis) to his list, or any other wisdom based skill.

Regdar on the other hand choses Gather Information (Cha) and Use Magic Device (Cha) at 7th level. At 15th level he choses Diplomacy to add to his list.

Recognize that the fighter can simply dump all of his skill points into the new class skill to max it out, and thus spend less on the (crappy) class skills he started with. This is a nice little benefit that encourages players to stick with the class, and it allows you to further customize your fighter.

What do you think?

[Username17]

On the other hand, you don't want to make a fighter's skills TOO good, since most builds only include a 2-4 level dip into the class for the feats anyway, and adding good skills on top of 3 feats in 4 levels is TOO good.

What is that even supposed to mean? If you take the skill nerfs in Complete Adventurer as canon, you could just give everyone maximum ranks in all the skills and it wouldn't be TOO good. Hide doesn't really do anything, and the effect of having a maxxed out Use Magic Device is that you can use the same magic items that the Wizard already can for free.

I seriously don't see the problem with skills somehow miraculously being TOO good for anything. With the exception of Disable Device, there really isn't a single skill that can ever do anything more exciting than a 3rd level spell can - and even then only if they work. With most DCs sliding in around 20, there aren't any skills (again, except for Disable Device) that are going to do anything reliably that Wizards can't do better at a lower level. So what's the damn problem with just giving the Fighter some fgood skills?

So what about we give the fighter the following class ability:

Adding class skills at 7th level is like being handed a parachute after you've hit the ground. You are already ten skill points in the hole! You don't get 10 skill points a level. Even if you got 8 skill points a level (which I remind you, you don't) you wouldn't be able to actually have a level-appropriate amount of either of those new skills, so what's the point? Getting a new class skill at 15th level is even more meaningless. These aren't class features, these are slaps in the face. Reminders of how much the character sucks after it's too late to do anything about it.

What do you think?

I think that as long as people define Feats as low-level class features. And define Skills as low-level class features. There is never going to be any viable character at high level who doesn't have magic powers.

Feats suck. Skills suck. They don't do anything good, because only magic is allowed to do that. According to Complete Adventurer, a 1st level Rogue with maximum ranks of Hide can't even sneak across an open doorway without being automatically seen by anyone who is inside the room - even if they are currently drunk and in the middle of a game of shent - even if they have a -5 Wisdom penalty.

Fighters don't use magic. That's the whole point. People who can't use magic can't perform any high level actions because high level actions are by defintion magical. They can't even do most low-level actions, because non-magical tasks aren't even allowed to be impressive.

Everything a Fighter is allowed to ever do is by defintion underwhelming and inferior. We could just give it them. All of it. No more selectable skills. No more selectable feats. They could just do it. Every. Single. Fighter. Option. At 1st level. They could Spring Attack. And Whirlwind. And Great Cleave. And Improved Bullrush. And Hide, Move Silently, Diplomacize, and everything else you can think of. They could do it all. At first level.

And it wouldn't matter.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

On the topic of the fighter, I don't see 4 skill points actually hurting anything. A wizard gets more than that anyway, because he's definitely going to have 18 int. So if a wizard with 6 doesn't imbalance anything then a fighter with 3-6 shouldn't either.

1106637743[/unixtime]]
Fighters don't use magic. That's the whole point. People who can't use magic can't perform any high level actions because high level actions are by defintion magical. They can't even do most low-level actions, because non-magical tasks aren't even allowed to be impressive.

Half the problem isn't that we apply limitations to nonmagical stuff, it's that we don't apply limitations to magical stuff. People for some reason want stuff like invisbiility, flight and so on to be the be-all-end-all Then we wonder why hide and having natural wings sucks

I don't want the two to be the same. Because if they're the same the non-magical guy still gets hosed. Because the magical guy buys invisibility once, and gets a bunch of other things with it, where the rogue buys invisibility every single level, or it becomes useless.

As for why skills are so weak, that comes from the idea of huge skill bonuses from magic items and spells. When you're getting a +30 from a spell or a +10 or +20 from a cloak. You've got make DCs huge. Otherwise, having those ranks becomes meaningless. If you can go out and buy a moderately expensive cloak and be as good as a 15th level rogue, then why bother being the rogue?

Skill enhancing items should be just like magic weapons and armor, grant a bonus of +1 to +5.

Next, and this is really important.. magic needs limitations. It can't be the ever reliable miracle drug that cures all ailments and solves all problems. Magic is always going to be more "impressive" than non-magical actions, but that doesn't mean it should be more effective. Turning a guy into a rat or a statue is more impressive than just running him through wtih your sword, but in a game sense, both can be just as effective.

Now whatever those limitations actually are is probably going to be different per spell. Flight for instance doesnt have to allow you to attack while flying. Hell you could even throw in a "spell ends if you attack any nonflying opponent". There's no reason any magical limitation has to make any sense, and you can throw them in there solely for game balance.

The main thing about non-magic stuff should be is that it is reliable because it applies by the known laws of the world as we know it. If you have wings you can fly around and shoot people at the same time. If you have a flight spell, you may not be able to do that. But that comes with drawbacks too, such as being able to hide isn't being invisible. And no you'll never be able to just walk past someone when they're looking right at you, nor should you be able to do that.

The solution should come from separating magic and nonmagic even further, not from trying to put them together. Magic right now is too scientific and quantitative, and that's what makes it super powerful. It has all the benefits of being magically "impressive" with none of the drawbacks of being mysterious and unreliable. If we want to balance magic and nonmagic, lets start making magic less scientific.

[Username17]

The main thing about non-magic stuff should be is that it is reliable because it applies by the known laws of the world as we know it.

Really? Because mostly I see the opposite. Like, completely and totally the opposite. Every time. If you try to use a skill it becomes subject to DM interference because it applies by the whim of the DM as he recalls the known laws of the known universe to apply.

So Hide becomes useless because the DM can't think of how you could not be in the field of view of the guy in the middle of that 25 square foot area if you are in the middle of that other 25 square foot area. Climb becomes useless because everyone knows you can't climb glass. And so on.

The game mechanics describe what you can and cannot do with abilities. And then the magical abilties work exactly as described - after all, they are magic and

There's no reason any magical limitation has to make any sense

and then the skills work less well than described, because whenever they are described as doing something that the DM finds "unreasonable" - they are instantaneously nerfed. Because they aren't magic, so their limitations do have to make sense.

If DMs were out there spontaneously allowing people to Hide or conduct healing procedures because they were "obviously doable" despite the rules saying that they were not - then maybe we wouldn't be in this situation. But let's face it, they aren't. Even if magic and non-magic were given precisely equal shares of the game mechanical pie, the magic would still be better, because the non-magic would be getting hit with the stealth nerf stick.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1106643878[/unixtime]]
Really? Because mostly I see the opposite. Like, completely and totally the opposite. Every time. If you try to use a skill it becomes subject to DM interference because it applies by the whim of the DM as he recalls the known laws of the known universe to apply.

Yeah, right now it is like that. And that's the whole problem. Magic is so scientifically cut and dry and totally allowed total freedom to ignore realism and skills have vague parameters and aren't allowed to ignore realism.

The major problem I see is mostly the former though. Magic in D&D isn't magic. It's just power without limitations.

If DMs were out there spontaneously allowing people to Hide or conduct healing procedures because they were "obviously doable" despite the rules saying that they were not - then maybe we wouldn't be in this situation. But let's face it, they aren't. Even if magic and non-magic were given precisely equal shares of the game mechanical pie, the magic would still be better, because the non-magic would be getting hit with the stealth nerf stick.

Well, the stealth nerf stick should be factored in when balancing skills. That is we shouldn't be expecting skills to do magical stuff, and we should expect magic to be balanced with that in mind.

Magic is pwoer with no strings attached and that sucks. Magic should have tons of strings attached to it. And those strings don't even have to make any logical sense, because it's magic. Skills should have the "realism" string attached, because people are going to attach it anyway, and there's no point having magic and skills do the same thing anyway.

Balancing magic poorly is just a sign of poor game design, because you can do anything to balance magic, anything you want. It can be vague, it can be straight up, it can be whatever. You can even incorporate some kind of vague mystical rule of "fairness" where magic doesn't function well in giving you huge advantages against those not using magic. So you could only teleport into a wizards keep and assassinate him in his sleep. If you tried that against a fighter, you'd juist get teleported to the gates of his keep or something like that. Your buff spells could spontaneously end if you try to pre cast them and then teleport.

Because there's no logical rules that should apply to magic, you can limit it any damn well way you please, and those limitations don't have to make sense. Because there's no scientific reason why you should be able to throw fire from your hands, that ability should be able to be taken away from you without a scientific reason.

The whole problem with magic is the obscure iron clad scientific crap that we try to apply to it in the name of consistent mechanics. Magic shouldn't be consistent. It shouldnt' be reliable. Part of the price you pay for magic should be the uncertainty.

If people want magic that comes wtih no strings, then everything does have to be magical, it's really as simple as that. Because you either have the power with no strings attached or you don't. You can't go handing out abilities like flight, silence and invisibility that totally replace skills and not attach any strings. That's never going to work.

So long as a noncaster pays every single level for hide or jump and a wizard gets the power for free and then keeps getting more spells, the noncaster will get boned. Because it's not enough that magic and non-magic be "equal" in terms of what they do. You need reasons why non-magic is superior to magic, and "antimagic field" just ain't enough.

[Neeek]

Are you basically suggesting some sort of spell failure/backlash effect? Like, you cast a spell, you roll a die, on a 1, the spell backfires, on a 2-5 the spell just plain fails, ona 6+ the spell works as advertized?

[Josh_Kablack]

Wow, changing the skill list of a class and the number of skill points in the middle seems like a kick in the teeth to organic multiclasses to me.

[RandomCasualty]

1106651436[/unixtime]]Are you basically suggesting some sort of spell failure/backlash effect? Like, you cast a spell, you roll a die, on a 1, the spell backfires, on a 2-5 the spell just plain fails, ona 6+ the spell works as advertized?

I think it's going to take a variety of counter balances to deal with various spell effects, of which dramatic spell failure will likely feature prominently among them. But failure chances aren't good for everything, mainly because sometimes you can try as long as you want and don't especially care if you fail. What dramatic spell failures are nice for is effects like planar binding. Where you may just summon the thing and it attacks you immediately, gaining surprise. Or perhaps you summoned something more powerful than you expected. So if for instance you are summoning something powerful, you may accidentally unleash hell on yourself.

Spell botches are nice there, to prevent people from outright casting a spell too much. And if you want to limit use of a spell you can even throw in an added chance to botch the more the spell is used.

The thing with failure chances is that they have to exist on a level which is meaningful, and means that the spell doesn't merely fail when you cast it and you waste a slot. That's annoying but it's not that bad of a disadvantage. It has to be failure that's unreliable, like your invisibility spell giving out at a dramatically bad time, like right when you're sneaking through a courtyard. That's making magic less reliable.

And in addition you'd lower the scientific accuracy aspects of magic. Dimension door and locate object wouldn't work in scientific principle where you're saying stuff like "well my max range is 1020, so I keep backing up until I don't sense the object anymore then I dimension door down an amount of distance equal to my maximum range." That isn't magic, that's mathematical science. I'd prefer spells to be far less precise and accurate. Not in the sense that they'd directly screw people and teleport them into solid walls, but in the sense that you wouldn't always teleport to the precise area you wanted to, unless you could actually see it. Making teleporting into somewhere after a scry spell pretty risky.

Similarly you could prevent teleport ambushes by having a reasonable percentage chance 10%-20% that you'd arrive there unconscious or otherwise helpless. A knock spell may produce a loud sound sometimes that tends to alert people and so on. Buff spells may instantly deactivate if you're not in combat.

The main goal is to provide people with adequate reasons to use non-magical things. If your invisibility may not work, you're more likely to try hiding. If your flight is somehow more limited than natural flight, you're more likely to want a character with wings, and wings suddenly become worth the LA.

Now you probably wouldn't want to throw in complications with combat spells, unless you wanted combat spells to be truly better than fighter combat options, but there's really no reason to do that. About all I'd probably do with combat spells is perhaps give them a chance of missing or fizzling if you're firing them at a certain range, perhaps more than half of their max range. But that's more a flavor thing as opposed to a balance thing. I don't propose we need to hose evokers or anything, since they're already quite weak.

And if you had a chance for any spell to have weird side effects, not all of them would have to be PC screw. A lot of them could actually be plot hooks too. Suppose a botched raise dead accidentally inserted another soul in a resurrected character, giving the character a split personality as the two souls fight for control. Magic in literature is full of all sorts of botched attempts, and D&D magic is far too scientific and fool proof to include this flavor in the game. Overambitions spells going horribly wrong is actually something damn cool storyline wise. So you could have the guy who made an army of simulacrums yet one of his simulacrums became self aware and offed him without him knowing.

And the botches would for the most part be left in the DM's hands. While some may be suggested under each spell, the exact nature of each botch may very well be unique.

Basically the design goal is to take the scientific feel out of magic and put the mystical and unexplainable element back into magic.

[RandomCasualty]

1106652309[/unixtime]]Wow, changing the skill list of a class and the number of skill points in the middle seems like a kick in the teeth to organic multiclasses to me.

I wouldn't really care about that too much as it is. Organic multiclasses as written pretty much can't exist. At all.

If you're an organic multiclass in this game right now, you're going to suck badly. And I don't really know how to make organic multiclassing work in a level based system, because level based min/maxing is entirely about synergy, something that organic multiclasses lack. It dwells somewhere within striking a balance between class based abilities and level based abilities.

[Tae_Kwon_Dan]

1106642765[/unixtime]]
I don't want the two to be the same. Because if they're the same the non-magical guy still gets hosed. Because the magical guy buys invisibility once, and gets a bunch of other things with it, where the rogue buys invisibility every single level, or it becomes useless.

I think this is mostly where the problem comes from in that people don't want magic just to be flavor text when that is all it needs to be. You make a spell, magic item, skill, whatever and all that they need to have is an in game effect. Who gives a fuck if I fly because I cast Fly or because I can turn into a fucking eagle? The end result is the same. I am a flying character.

All that matters then is what SFX you associate with the ability and that determines whether or not it's susceptible to things like DM or AMF. It would make the game much easier if that was the case.

[RandomCasualty]

1106663856[/unixtime]]
I think this is mostly where the problem comes from in that people don't want magic just to be flavor text when that is all it needs to be. You make a spell, magic item, skill, whatever and all that they need to have is an in game effect. Who gives a fvck if I fly because I cast Fly or because I can turn into a fvcking eagle? The end result is the same. I am a flying character.

If casters buy the ability like everyone else and at the same price, then fine, it can just be flavor text. But considering one guy pays +1 LA for flying and the caster just gets it as part of his normal schtick, that's unacceptable. In fact the caster's flying can be put on others and disregarded when he'd rather have a fireball. The guy with wings is just screwed.

Casters get powers at a vastly cheaper rate than everyone else, and either you make powers available to everyone at the same cost, or you have to make there be a counterbalancing disadvantage to getting flying from "magic". Since apparently getting flying from "magic" makes it so its cheaper, there has to be something to counter that.

Now if you want, you can totally ditch the concept of getting things from magic and spells. But at that point I dont' think it'd still even be able to be called D&D.

But really until you start charging a caster who picks up the fly spell a +1 LA or requiring he gain max ranks in hide to pick up invisibility, things are not even, and magic isnt' just flavor text.

[Tae_Kwon_Dan]

I don't disagree that currently you can't look at it my way, because they still want to mix fluff and crunch in the game and have thus made it impossible to divorce the SFX of an ability from the mechanics of the ability. I'm more saying that is where they need to go and if we're going to go with the exercise of trying to balance magical and mundane abilities we might as well start from the ground up.

[The_Hanged_Man]

I agree w/ TKD. We're far away from the Fighter concept, though.

Applying it to the Fighter doesn't take that much. Just pick the most uberific damaging/killing spell out there at that level, and let the fighter do it. That's what Fighters do, after all. And throw in some buffs. How the fighter does it is irrelevant.

For example, give teh Fighter teh equivelant of Slay Living/Finger of death at . . . 11th level? 13th level? Call if Deadly Strike. Once per day, plus 1/3 levels, a FIghter who makes a successful attack forces teh target the save v. Fortitude or die. DC is 18+strenght mod.

There. Done. A kewl upper-level Fighter ability. Throw in some RIghteous Might effects, maybe some Divine Favors, maybe a Stoneskin, some other junk, and now you're talking. Pheer teh Upper Level Fighter!

I like more skills, too, though.

[Tae_Kwon_Dan]

THM I'm right there with ya buddy. If I were still playing D&D my Fighter redesign would include a list of bonus abilities and ability trees that the fighter could pick from at each level to help mimic combat abilities of other classes.

So you could take things like Orc Strength, Ogre Strength, Troll Strength, and Giant Strength as abilities adn in the end you'd have the same +X STR that a druid is getting in certain levels. You can even tie these with some NA and maybe bonus HP to help mimic what the polymorphers are getting as combat abilities.

Does it get you equal with them? No not really and I'm not going to delude myself into thinking it does, but it would at least be a step in the right direction.

[RandomCasualty]

It's not really particularly difficult to make a fighter numerically competetive. The hardest thing there is finding a baseline of what exactly constitutes competetive. BUt after that, giving him a pile of bonuses isn't a problem. The only controversy is how big those bonuses should be. But once you know your balance point, you just distribute the bonuses evenly across the fighter's levels and be done with it.

But really what skill points does is fix perhaps an even larger problem with the fighter and that's his non-combat ability. Right now fighter types as a whole utterly suck out of combat. At least duirng a battle your PC fighter is doing something. It may not be great, but at least its something. When he's not in battle he has nothing to do. Absolutely nothing.

And IMO, non-casters need tons of skill points. Because they don't have commune, charm, dominate, detect lies, detect thoughts or change self.

If anything, 4 skill points aren't enough, I'd give them 6. And their skill list should look about as big as the rogue's, minus some of the trap stuff and UMD. But we should definitely see diplomacy, sense motive, spot, listen, hide, move silently and gather information on the fighter's list.

Given that the average wizard has 6 points per level, I don't think it's unfair to want the fighter to have that much too.

[Tae_Kwon_Dan]

I agree there as well RC, but if I was running the zoo you'd just get to pick X (where X = some arbitrary number Dan has given no thought to) skills to be on your skill list at 1st level regardless of class. And I mean regardless if you want to Halston the Fighter son of Haldrek the Wizard and have spellcraft, but no spellcasting abilities then buy away. Having the fighter be able to indentify cast spells doesn't really mean a damn thing in the game and more options are always better.

[Username17]

By that logic, why not just let everyone have all skills as class skills? If you decide that your character is better defined by having some Balance, why the hell not?

I really haven't seen a good explanation why any particular ability set should restrict you to having or not having any particular other ability set other than game balance. And with the exception of the two Device skills - none of the skills are a big deal. So since none of the skills are particularly impressive, why am I supposed to care if someone wants some particular combination of them?

--

Of course, the skills are inherently pretty meaningless. When you put skill points into Balance it doesn't make you capable of level appropriate balancing unless you keep flushing points into it forever. Imagine if BAB worked like that. Every level you got to "select" whether you got a BAB or not - and if you did, you didn't get anything else. Essentially, every skill based character is being treated like a Warrior and told to like it.

-Username17

[User3]

Basically the design goal is to take the scientific feel out of magic and put the mystical and unexplainable element back into magic.

Is this really a laudable goal anymore?

After a bevy of new source material out, magic has definitely lost its 'edge' and I can't really say whether this is 'bad' that magic has lost a lot of its mystical stuff.

In games and material that aren't wed to games from anything before the 90's, magic isn't some separate mystical force. Or rather, it is, but how magic works doesn't put it on a different footing from superscience, psionics, alien technology, or good ol' fashioned hardcore self training.

In my experience, having magic be mystical and unexplainable is just a personal thing. Or used to justify bullshit.

[Tae_Kwon_Dan]

1106682402[/unixtime]]By that logic, why not just let everyone have all skills as class skills? If you decide that your character is better defined by having some Balance, why the hell not?

-Username17

Actually I have no problem with that either and if I ever was looking to run again I probably would do that very thing, but I find that you get a certian amount of sphincter clinchage when you suggest it in mixed company that I didn't want to deal with.

I mean even the supposedly good skills really are only rocking when you tack on bonuses from spells and magic items to them.

[Username17]

Is this really a laudable goal anymore?

Not even remotely. If you use magic in the game, you know what's going to happen. You are going to roll dice, and the dice you are going to roll are known to you. The results signified by the rolls likewise are known to you ahead of time.

The only way you could have "mystery" in a game, is if either:

[*] The game system is so wildly overcomplex that even the DM can't know what could happen when an action takes place.
or
[*] The game system is built with so little in the way of rules that the DM just has to make shit up when the PC tries to do anything.

No. The only meaningful way to do anything is to have a reasonably scientific and explicit set-up for magic's function. You could go on with something physically based like Shadowrun, or something explicitly game mechanical like M:tG. It's possible to do it either way, but you can't possibly fix things with more hand waving.

-Username17

[Lago_AM3P]

Liften Schwaltz is me, by the way.

It was my old WotC name before I joined the Navy.

Anyway. Why make the skill system point-based, anyway? Why not make skills a completely separate feat structure?

Like, if you have the 'stealthy' skill... when you continually take actions to hide, people can't see you at all. There might be some restrictions on it, like the person will be able to see you if you get all up in their face and start stabbing. Or they have the 'perceptive' skill feat. Or you need something to hide behind. And then you could take improvements to this skill feat that takes away the advantage. And people could counter it by taking iterations of the perceptive feat.

Or if you have the 'super jumper' skill feat, you can automatically jump to a length five times your character level in feet (minimum 10 feet) and three times that high vertically, even if it violates your normal move limit for the round. You could have the 'balancer' skill feet that automatically has you maintain your balance on precarious surfaces and then lets you stand and the second one lets you stand on things that couldn't support your weight and the third on the clouds themselves.

Just a thought.

[Maj]

Ess and I were tossing around ways to fix the bard this weekend - inspired by Oberoni's thread and a desire to get away from people who only want to play 2nd edition...

We decided that Bardic Music should just be an ability of the Perform skill once you have so many ranks in it. Those people who want to do cool stuff with the skill can take it and la around the battlefield all they want to, and those people who want to play music without special effects can just say they play an instrument (or waste skill points on Profession: Musician).

I really like the idea of skills just having X ability at Y ranks. Skills like Appraise... They just have to go. Anything where the lowest DC can be accomplished with no skill ranks at all (because the skill essentially requires that you take 10, and if you have a magnifying glass or scale, you get +2 to your check) is worthless to invest in, and there's no ability the skill ever gives you to make it worth taking. Handing out cool things to do would make investing the ranks much more possible - if you have 10 ranks in Appraise, you know exactly how much something is worth; if you have 15 ranks, you can "cheat" someone out of 10% of the cost... Speaking of which, why don't they use opposed Appraise checks when making deals? The person selling the item wouldn't be able to know how much it's worth, unless they had the skill. I mean, they might know how much it should sell for, but basic retail pricing doesn't match with value.

Is this really a laudable goal anymore?

This idea that magic is not mysterious because it's lying around everywhere is silly. And imaginary. Magic can be whatever your flavor text says it is, but once your flavor text dictates a lack of respect for magic, your PCs won't have any, and thus it becomes taken for granted; expected, not earned; and in general something exploitable, not some grand cosmological "mystery." And it's unfortunately not difficult to recognize when a player's inability to separate what they know of the rules from what their character knows of the world contributes to the problem.

[MrWaeseL]

I agree that skills should be feat-like. That's how our group handles social skills.

[RandomCasualty]

1106705951[/unixtime]]
No. The only meaningful way to do anything is to have a reasonably scientific and explicit set-up for magic's function. You could go on with something physically based like Shadowrun, or something explicitly game mechanical like M:tG. It's possible to do it either way, but you can't possibly fix things with more hand waving.

Here's the traits you attach to magic right now
-Better/Cheaper than nonmagic
-100% reliability
-Has no limitation on what it can do.
-Has no drawbacks.

As long as you hold this sort of "magic must be utterly infallible and come with no strings attached" bullshit theory then magic will be the miracle drug and everyone will want to buttfuck Mystra to get as much of it as they can. And anyone who doesn't do that is going to have a substandard character.

Look, the whole "Magic is godly" thing works assuming everyone is a caster. That's why M:tG works. Because you don't care how powerful magic is because everyone has it. And sure, you can turn D&D into that where everyone looks like a fucking caster, but that's no longer D&D. It's "War of the Wizards" or whatever the fuck name you want to give to your game about caster versus caster.

And magic can be somewhat mysterious and with some mechanics. It just involves hidden rolls. You roll for the spells range and that's variable for instance. You have a chance for a spell to botch, and that roll can sometimes be made in secret (if the botch isn't apparent). And if it botches different spells can list possible consequences of a botch. Like teleport making you arrive in a room with occupants and stunned for 1 minute. You can also have a chart that you roll where there's a chance of getting a custom botch.

Yeah, the DM would make something up in that spot, but who gives a fuck. That's what you need to make magic unpredictable and ultimately balanced.

Yes, not every possible outcome should be spelled out so it's in a book that the PCs can go out and read. Just like not every DM ends up running a module that a PC can pick up off the shelf and immediately know every secret to. Part of what makes an interesting game is having something mysterious.

We have a DM for a reason after all. We should really consider using him a bit more. Trying for a rulesset that can be run wtihout human input in an open system is stupid. If we want a pure rules code, then we have to make the system closed, like M:tG or a computer RPG. To have an open ended game, you need open ended thinking. Rules can't do that. Human beings can.

[User3]

RC, I mean no offense in saying this, but what you appear to be looking for in a magic system appears to me to be a lot like just having a commoner with a Rod of Wonder hang around your party. Now, that's kind of cool in some ways -- and I can see how that kind of thing is fun for a particular kind of player and a particular kind of game -- but it's not something I really care to set out as the way spellcasters in D&D Must Work. What's more, a surprising number of players like to have their characters' abilities be reliable, and I don't regard telling those people that they better not play wizards as an acceptable solution.

The real problem in your list is "better/cheaper than nonmagic". If everybody can have the same stuff -- who cares if it's reliable and has no drawbacks? As a game system, Champions does not disintegrate because a guy with an assault rifle can have the same 3d6 Ranged Killing Attack as a guy who has the power to throw lightning bolts and both can do it with perfect reliability and no drawbacks. On the contrary, that's why it works.

And the only reason why magic is "better/cheaper than nonmagic" in D&D is tradition. There really is no damned reason at all why the spell list couldn't just be a list of things that your character can be able to do, whether he does them through spellcasting or through divine intervention, psionic power, mystic union with the forces of nature, incredible stealth, the liberating power of rage or just plain being a totally badass fighter.

That's not "War of the Wizards", that's acknowledging that magic is just a special effect, and if it's okay for one character to do something with game mechanical effect X, it probably ought to be okay for another character to do it, too.

--d.