If one of the biggest issues with Wizards is that they get both

>>54776368
Making more powerful spells take up more spell slots would be the easiest solution.

>>54776368
Making the spells not break the game.

>>54776368
I once attended a LARP that used a point-buy system for spell slots and restricted how you could use them. Basically each level of spells had their own pool of spell slots capped at 5 slots, your number of spell slots per level could not exceed the number of spell slots purchased in levels below it, and spells could not be slotted in spell slots of a lower level.

>>54776368
not playing d&d

alternately, playing 4e

>>54776368
the latter could be balanced, but it would also take away a feeling of progression, since casting more magic missiles isnt as rewarding as shooting a fireball

>>54776809
You could counter that with feat taxing or specialization.

I played around in my head with the idea of wizards depleting magic in an area. Like, within this room, or house, or city block there is only a number of spells worth of ambient magical energy, if there are other wizards using it up there may even be none left at all.

>>54776859
That sounds like a frustrating mechanic for a tabletop.

>>54776859
That here is called Dark Sun, so>>54777022 there are rules for that already, and from what I heard they are not bad

>>54776368
>If one of the biggest issues with Wizards is that they get both stronger spells as well as more spells as they get higher level;
The issue isn't that the wizards gain both strength and endurance as they level up: After all EVERY class gets that. The issue is that wizards scale faster than most other classes. The proper solution is not removing one of those factors, but tempering both of them.

>>54776859
>some guy does nothing but cast spells all day to deny wizards power

the DM might just claim that the janitor kept casting spells, so the players are conveniently without magic

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>>54776368
I want wizards to get their power by doing stupid and completely nonsensical things

for example
>you can't wear pants. if you wear pants you lose your magic for a week.

they should also only acquire new magic through absurd trials.

>>54777099
>wizard janitor
>his entire job is to cast spells all day

I actually want this now. "Goddammit George, stop slacking and get your ass up on the second floor, it's swimming in magic up there!"

>>54777161
One suggestion for a trial - you have to beat an ogre...while unarmed, without magic and only in your robes.

And no help from the party - good luck

>>54777182
He said absurd, not idiotic.

I like the idea that wizards need to cast spells through some kind of associated medium like a staff, spellbook, familiar, etc. Part of the problem really is that wizards tend to be able to just "memorize" spells and then cast them on the fly, which cuts into the roles of other traditional classes.

It also kind of depends on how magic-heavy you want the setting to be. In a high-magic setting you should expect wizards to leverage a large amount of power and social influence.

The solution to fix wizards has always been the same

Don't assume wizards can learn any spell in the rulebook

Spells are rare and finding an overpowered spell should be a quest in itself

>>54777878
alternatively, you can find a vending machine that sells you spell books if you are a wizard and weaboo fightan magic if you are more of a knight

one on every street corner

>>54776368
As far as D&D is concerned? I'd like to see wizards have entirely different spell levels based on their specialization.
>Evokers get fireball as a 3rd level spell, others get it at 4.
>Diviners get access to some divination spells that other wizards never get access to, borrowing from cleric spell list.
>Abjurers get all those defensive/counter spells earlier than anybody else.

>>54776368
Ditching vancian casting completely

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So, you have a spell point system, but the wizard keeps spamming his most powerful spells. What's a GM to do? Well, have I got the solution for you: the Segmented Mana Bar™, the dumbest solution to spellcasters ever conceptualized!

You see, in order to perform magic, a wizard must tap into the fundamental forces of the universe: the cyan, the yellow, and the magenta. These forces, however, are disproportionately difficult to control. The more complex a spell, the more it will draw from more limited resources. A spell will draw from one segment as well as every segment preceding it. So while the weakest spells will draw only from the cyan pool, a more powerful spell will draw from both the cyan and yellow pools, and an even more powerful spell will draw from all three pools. Further, mana can be traded down, but not up. A number of magenta points is worth double their value in yellow points, which is worth triple their value in cyan points.

The purpose of the Segmented Mana Bar™ is to limit the ability of wizards to cast their most powerful spells while still allowing for the flexibility that a spell point system provides. In practice, it just makes things needlessly complicated because I just made this up two minutes ago.

>>54776368
>Same number of spells per day, but they get stronger

There can be some progression in spell slots, but not much

just do what 4e did

>>54777182
>be me a cleric
>pray once a day and my lord grants me miracles
>turn to my wizard "friend"
>he's drinking another vial of poison
>saying something about how Hell Scorpions venom sacks won't kill you if you drink it while high on some other poisonous animal
>the fighter ask him why he's doing this particular self harming ritual
>i'm going to wrestle to a ogre later
>all of us confused why any of this is happening
>he clarifies its to learn how to cast Malkan's Breathe or more commonly refered to as fireball
>he starts stripping and I notice the flower growing on his spine
>I look into the sky and thank god he just requires me to kill a heretic every once in a while.

>>54776368
Instead of learning new spells, gain new spell modifiers. Wizard has to make the spells, using the pieces they have. Pieces can be repeated for added effect. Limit the number of total pieces used across spells per day.

>2017

>DMs can explain the positive wizard effect on food shortages, dry seasons, healthcare, logistics etc... All I'm depth with charts using energy conservation calculations and energy expendure per mage capita

>DM still shits himself the moment a wizard does well in combat

???

>>54777161
That's a Wu Jen.

>>54776368

More powerful spells

But fewer spells

Wizarding should be a serious investment, expecting a wizard who knows how to stop time to also be able to animate dead bodies is like expecting a theoretical physacist to be to perform post-mortem nerve puppetry on a person's brain.

Sure, in COLLEGE, you might have been on the up and up on both physics and biology, but that was small potatoes

>>54778146
So...AEDU?

The solution is to remove the bullshit 20 level system, and make it 50, where you go up a spell level every 5 levels or so, or even more gradually after each level.

More levels to give more individual buffs to the martials to keep up with them.

Magic is bullshit, afterall, you can be a 20 year old noobie and gain 10 levels inside of 2-3 year s of in game time, whereas there are supposed to be old, grissely bastards who have made the same progress by the age of 50 or more.


More, fucking, levels. Also, let martials accomplish 'unbelievable' things like being immune to magic or munitions in certain situations, or pushing over castle walls, a warrior should be hercules by the time a wizard is mass teleporting or turning invisible. A rogue at that point should essentially BE invisible.

I love the fun that 3.5 can be, but its fucking horrible sometimes. I had a DM that said 'no' to every feat of strength or daring our level 12 characters wanted to try (swinging from a chandelier, jumping a 20 foot gap) in the name of 'realism', while the two clerics were spamming flame strike every combat encounter and demanding we rest twice a session.

Also, don't tie spell progression so closely to base stats, don't give an extra spell for every two points of intelligence, that keeps us from saying things like ' my level 14 barbarian is twice as strong as he was at level 1!', even though the barbarian NEEDS that strength, where as doubling a cleric's wisdom hastens them to godhood.

>>54778309
>energy conservation
>with magic
????

>>54778120
I say go back to vancian wizards completely. Make them not entirely useless without their spells and give them 3-5 powerful spells at most. They should also be charismatic and rely more on guile and trickery. Also >>54777878

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>>54776368

And now in high res.

>>54776368
For 5e:
On level up, at least one of their two new spells have to be from their chosen school.

Dials back the versatility quite a bit.

>take all the spell slots they have, higher slots are worth more
>add them together to get 1 number
>divide it by 2 or 3
>that's their mana bar
>they recover mana by spending mana die, which are d4+int bonus, and gain 1 die per level or two

Tabletop games should just fucking use a manapool.

>wizard has 100/100 mana
>does he cast 100 fireballs for 1 mana each?
>does he cast 10 fireballs for 10 mana each?
>does he cast 1 fireball for 100 mana?
>does he cast 34 fireballs for 1 mana each, 24 fireballs for 2 mana each and 1 fireball for 12 mana?

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>>54785502
this desu
it makes no fucking sense that a powerful wizard can spend less than 10 minutes casting spells, then have to spend the next 23 hours doing nothing to "get his spells back"
in that same breath, it makes no sense that a wizard can use spells as ridiculously powerful as time stop three times in a row back to back, then go on blowing through his 8th level spells and so forth. a regenerating mana pool would not only limit their omnipotence in a single encounter, but it would also enable them to freely cast spells throughout the day without having to ration them like they're precious over the course of 23 hours

>>54785502
>>54785862
Every single game with a simple mana system ends with spamming the most optimal move 100% of the time.

>>54785917
As someone who's played a homebrew game with a mana system for many years; honestly this.

>>54785917
then have repeated casts of the same spell increase the mana cost until you let that spell cool off

>>54785917
And that's a problem why?

>>54786294
That's just an extra step of math.

>>54786324
It's boring. It leads to degenerate gameplay by removing interesting decision making.

Of course, this comes with the caveat that not every system has to focus on those things, and it can do other things instead (work as a sort of slider like Dark Souls 3 where you have to decide how much of your resources you spend on mana/HP). If you just want to go "hey, I want to have a classic JRPG/CRPG flavor, how about mana bars?", that's fine too.

>>54785917
This is isn't a bad thing. It also assumes the player and wizard know what is the "optimal" amount to cast.
>>54786488
It only comes up in the first place in Degenerate boring games where there is no reason to make decisions in the first place.

>>54785917
And this also ignores the issue with Vanician systems where players will just take spells that are universally useful. There's a reason why Summon Monster and shit is so powerful.

>>54786656
>This is isn't a bad thing. It also assumes the player and wizard know what is the "optimal" amount to cast.

Depends on the exact mechanics. Sometimes it's harder to determine.

>It only comes up in the first place in Degenerate boring games where there is no reason to make decisions in the first place.

It's natural that if options exist, one is going to be the best.

The same way you shouldn't be able to fill your MtG (insert any other cardgame here) deck with the same cards, you shouldn't be able to cast the same spell over and over, because it leads to samey and boring fights.

>>54786719
>And this also ignores the issue with Vanician systems where players will just take spells that are universally useful.

I didn't say vancian systems where utility spells that can do everything exist are good, only that Mana systems that are just straight spend mana->get spell with no "spin" on it usually end up boring with few decisions to make.

>>54786879
>It's natural that if options exist, one is going to be the best.
this is a completely self defeating argument that you're making here, because you're assuming that somehow in D&D this problem doesn't exist for casters. It totally does, and there's nothing preventing them from spamming the same spells over and over again until their daily casts for the level run out, then go to the next level's spam spell.

against enemies that are weak to fire, wizards will always cast fireball or something similar. what other reason would they have to 'spice up' their casting with inferior spells? literally every reason they could possibly have is just as easily transferable to a mana pool system.

ran out of spell castings = ran out of mana, meaning you can't spam the same spell, you'll have to resort to weaker or different ones sooner or later.

>>54787619
>this is a completely self defeating argument that you're making here, because you're assuming that somehow in D&D this problem doesn't exist for casters. It totally does, and there's nothing preventing them from spamming the same spells over and over again until their daily casts for the level run out, then go to the next level's spam spell.

FFS, stop going back to D&D (especially the shit editions of D&D, i.e. anything with a number that isn't 4). Just because some D&D does it bad, doesn't mean mana systems will do it good.

You are committing 2-3 fallacies in one argument, not even grasping the basics of logic while trying to discuss a casting system that had been done to death. The thought that you think yourself competent enough to analyze this shit while you can't even make a fucking case for it without messing up is making me see how pointless this whole exchange is.

Have a nice day, I'm done.

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The problem with wizards isn't that they get good, it's that they get good at too many disparate things because in many games/settings (most notably D&D) there is a vast array of pre-packaged spells that can do almost anything.

The solution to the wizard problem is playing in a setting that limits what magic itself can do, not necessarily what the wizard can do with magic. There is no reason a wizard should have spells like wish, time stop, true polymorph or power word kill at all, and many of their lower level counterparts are questionable at best.

>>54787874
>i'll call him a retard with an eloquent sentence and offer no valid criticism, that'll show him!
please just stay done

>>54777764
alternately, wizards charge their magic by entering in comunion with other people and with nature- that is having sex and aorgies in the woods.
The more powerful they get the more sex they need to have to maintain their top power.
Essentially growing more powerful simply means the amount of magiv they can accumulate is higher.
You can substitute sex rituals with other stuff if you're worried about your players being immature about it and turning it into their magical realm.

>>54776368
The solution is to have everyone have powers and to give wizards a subset of those powers. Ideally, your specialization defines what you can do; a necromancer *only* gets necromancy spells, an enchanter *only* gets enchantments, etc. Then you give martials abilities that aren't strictly spells, but are on par with them. Then you stop thinking in terms of "uses per day" and get on board with designing uses per encounter, so you're not throwing meaningless makework fights to whittle down the PCs' good powers and/or slogging through shit just to waste time.

>>54787987
>There is no reason a wizard should have spells like wish

There's a great reason: plot device. This also fixes the question of availability to PCs.

Of course your wizard can cast wish once he has lied, cheated, sweated, and inveighed his way to a copy of the spell. All it takes is a few years off your life-force, a once-a-century astronomic conjunction, and a small forest of rare incense sticks burnt in a shrine in a forgotten city.

>>54786879

Magic; the cat has both vancian and a mana system.

>>54788750

4e added wish back as the last thing, and had it be a generic one use spell that any PC could use.

>>54787987
>The solution to the wizard problem is playing in a setting that limits what magic itself can do, not necessarily what the wizard can do with magic.
Or limit what kinds of magic a given wizard can cast. Make them choose a magic school or two and disallow them from casting spells in the other schools.

>>54789607
3.5 does that and it is still the posterchild for caster supremacy.

>>54789700
It has 8 schools, and specialists only give up one or two.

Make it so every wizard specializes and can only cast levels 0-9 in their one school. Then let them access a restricted progression in one or two other schools at higher levels.

>>54777022
>>54776859

That's canon in warhammer. Winds of magic are shared. Bringing more than one wizard only add versatility, not power. Power only depents on the individula caste lvl.

Humans can only learn one school of magic. Only elves have enough time to master everything.

>>54791983
Using 3.5 mechanics, I'd start wizards out with only being able to choose from one school but able to add schools through feats.

>>54792081
Elves like to say that, but most "powerful" Elven wizards only know three or four schools and master maybe one of them. Liches though, they got nothing but time on their hands which is why they're a big fucking deal.

>>54778146
underrated

You can limit the wizards or you can make all the other classes better to keep up.

People are going to bitch no matter what you do.

The wizards, who are accustomed to cheap and easy metamagic and getting to hop dimensions and scry and throw down heightened maximized instant giant fireballs and craft crazy magic objects, are going to bitch and moan if you yank that out from under them. Doesn't matter how you do it - You can limit their spells, you can make spells cost more (in time to learn and cast, material resources, character HP, etc), limit the spells they can learn, change magic so it's less powerful. They're always going to bitch because they got used to ruling the roost and now they've been taken down to a level at which everyone can compete.

The wizards AND some of the other classes are also going to bitch if you acknowledge that a world that has magic and multiple intelligent humanoid species and real gods and demons is not remotely realistic, and that reality need only apply to the extent that you need it to keep your disbelief suspended or the actions taken don't break from previous in universe precedence. Hercules gets bandied about a lot, and I think he's a good example - but your guy need not have godly patronage or anything like that.

But anyway, no matter how you justify it - maybe the fighters are using "magic" or a different kind of magic too, maybe the laws of physics are just flat out different, maybe you can cultivate anti-magic effects through strength of will, whatever - the wizards are going to bitch because they again are being brought down to something approaching an equal standing with everyone else. And if you implement it poorly you end up with the book of weaboo fightan magic, which will cause more of the rest of the playerbase to bitch than just the background bitching that occurs whenever a change to the formula is made.

>>54793482
I feel like part of the problem with being a wizard (at least to me) is that a huge draw is the utility. Playing a wizard is about having "ALL OF THESE OPTIONS." Sure you limit yourself to some, but the appeal is that you get to play taxi service with teleports, fly, summon something, buff, debuff, throw fire/ice, and change the area. Which is what makes wizards so broken. Because a wizard is basically magic batman, they have whatever tools are in their book to overcome challenges, and spend time and money to make that book have THE BEST TOOLS.

Which is really hard to balance terribly well, in theory the only way it works is if you change the way characters are supposed to work at high level.
>The Fighter is SO GOOD AT FIGHTING he can solve almost any problem with it
>The rogue is SO GOOD AT SNEAKING she can solve almost any problem with it
>The Wizard has SO MANY OPTIONS, they can solve almost any problem with it... as long as they are prepared for it.
But that's a format that honestly suites a solo game more than anything else, because who wants to go on a quest purely so the party wizard can get a second movement ability, because Fly is good, but it doesn't help everybody breath underwater.

In theory the way it should go is that the fighter jumps over the rapids, the rogue does some acrobatic shit across the rocks/steals money to pay for passage, the wizard hopes he's got waterwalk prepared otherwise he's going to get wet. Unfortunately some spells are just better, and why prepare waterwalk when you can just prepare fly?

And that's actually a big part of the wizards identity. Sure, some people want specifics because the wizard is too generalist for them, but part of the appeal is the utility offered. The end-goal for a wizard seems like it should be "one spell of every damage type, and one spell targeting each defense" and throw in a couple utility here and there.

>>54795310

I don't have such an identity for wizards. Granted, D&D has never been my source of inspiration so my wizards come from a different tradition. For me, wizards must be specialised in some role.

>>54788037
You know he's right, right?

The only argument for mana bars you made was "Vancian with overpowered spells is worse or at least just as bad!".

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>>54776368
Have three classes of spells:
>Simple cantrips that can be cast in a matter of seconds and some small components or conditions, like wands and gestures. They are useful and unusual but not much more powerful than what could be done by a proficient individual.
>Bolts of lightning and moderate fireballs, vanishing, mind tricks, human-level telekinesis, making birds suddenly appear (and then disappear in a few seconds)

>More complex spells that take a minutes to hours and require small offerings, magic circles and focused chanting. These can turn the tide of skirmish if properly prepared or give a party a meaningful boon for a day.
>Short lightning storms and huge fireballs, concealing a group under a particular condition, old-school charm person, titanic telekinesis for one particular task, conjuring the aid of a spirit for several hours

>Grand spells that take days to weeks and might require blood sacrifice, the offering of precious treasure, the construction of alters and the work of teams of followers. These can create effects that stretch across several adventures
>A storm that lasts as long as condition is fulfilled, meteor shower, hiding a castle, subtly brainwashing a small army, making a castle float, making a castle suddenly appear
Each spell type is a different skill if that's applicable.
As a mage advances they have to choose which types of spells they will learn. A high-level battle-mage may know many cantrips and one, maybe two complex spells but no grand spells. The Dark Sorcerer may know several grand spells and two complex spells (charm and turn-to-giant-snake) but no cantrips.

Assuming he gets all the material the Sorcerer will have a flying castle and army of mooks and will be in the process of casting darkness over the land. The Battle-Mage will be swooping about throwing fire left and right, mowing down mooks to get to his hypnotised GF. The Sorcerer best hope his boys can wear the mage down because he's useless in a fight.

>>54795454

And the examples the guy gives for working mana systems... are card games, which have a vancian element built in.

... And the mana system is more like an action economy system them a CRPG mana bar system.

>>54795700

... Making casters into NPCs doesn't seem like a good system.

You are also dedicating a lot of power to a system that more than half of classes won't really interact with.

>>54795763
Well at a certain point of power a caster would be like an NPC. Nuking a city should be something a character works towards. If a warrior wanted to sack a city it would be something to work toward too.
For grand spells they ether are something the NPCs use OR they are something PCs use when they are stocked up on resources and have some downtime OR something that the PCs work towards over time, finding offerings, getting the loyalty of other wizards and what not. In the same way it mirrors warlords building up armies, finding legendary weapons of doom, earning the blessings of gods and what not.

While it may be powerful and it's own thing I'd use it as a template for modelling other class abilities and systems.
A fighter gains abilities for ether raw personal combat, rallying hireling and party members and performing temporary feats of superhuman stength, speed and will or raising up and rallying armies and building castles. A rogue has his prowess as a thief or sudden temporary moments of ridiculous stealth or perception OR abilities in managing and extracting networks of information.
Keep the systems somewhat symmetrical and add a bunch of restrictions and increased durations onto magical abilties because they are incredibly flexible.

Have a loyalty/hireling system for fighters and rogues and use it as the core model to determine how well a mage can control a summon. Use hypnotism as a modifier on that same system. Have some basic rules for mass construction and use it's table as a basis for difficulty on mass spells. Keep the spells relativly simple and let the core systems do most of the work.

How about spells that do 4*1d10+4 damage every hit having a chance to be critical, dealing another 1d10 damage, which PC min/maxed and lucky too can at most have 22 hitpoints and 13 damage reduction, but even a lowly fireball has the chance to open a rift to the realm of the Far Realm that sucks you in so your ass can be eternally fucked by Cthulhu?

>>54795414
Which is fair too. I mostly play D&D, and I'm honestly not sure where my source of inspiration for wizards came from. I just know I didn't really delve into Tolkein and such until I was a bit older.
When I do my NPC's I typically have them fill a heavy specialisation. But as a player, I definitely like the appeal of having a "book of many things". The only time I don't is when I want to go heavy on a single specialisation but the game seems to nerf me hard when I try to.
>Diviner wizard, clerics get access to most of the mid level diviner spells.
>Transmuter wizard, not too bad, but you really need to split between shapeshifting and controlling the environment, at which point there's not a lot of decent spells at low level in the latter.
>Conjuration wizard, summons can be OP, but are typically mid-to-late game when they become good in combat.

Honestly, I do think the game would probably stand to be improved by splitting them up into individual classes, and only having a few "universal" spells to round out spell selection (honestly, even IC the idea of exclusively focusing on one school seems like a mistake doomed to fail). But then you risk ending up with 8 different "mage" classes.

Frankly anything extremely powerful should require time + possibly other wizards + possibly expensive materials.

The problem is letting a character warp reality in a way that trivializes any challenge and any other skill set -as a standard combat action.-

Wizard combat options should be the equivalent of high tech gadgets or specialized man portable weapons not the equivalent of "My team is now wearing gas mask and there's double mustard gas in a 20 mile radius" or "That other guy just has an aneurysm and immediately dies."

That shit should require prep work. And not just fifteen minutes of spell memorization. Prep for THAT specific spell. It should be relevant enough to happen"on screen" just like if the rogue created an elaborate trap.

Just make non-martial characters just as powerful.

When a wizard can learn to fly, mundies can learn to superjump.
When a wizard learns to fireball, mundies learn to call down a hail of arrows.
When a wizard learns to plane shift, mundies learn to punch a hole between dimensions - or if that's too much, are able to rip open existing holes and find them easily.

Problem solved, just scale up power evenly.