Is Your Magic Balanced?

One of the most difficult “systems” to get to work in a FRPG is the balance between magic and melee.  If a mage can attack multiple people while doing more damage than a warrior can and to each of them, then it seems obvious that magic is over powered.  But magic can be restrained by allowing the warrior to attack every combat round, but the mage only has a certain number of “shots” in him.  So when does it balance?

Well, let’s look at a couple of examples.  In Legend Quest, the least powerful fireball can be cast by a mage who is not an absolute beginner, but isn’t some super experienced guy either.  That least fireball will do 2-15 points of damage to people who most commonly have 24-36 Life’s Blood.  While this doesn’t seem like a lot, LQ does have bleeding damage too, so once you’re below half, you’re in ever increasing some serious trouble.

Far more importantly, a spear in the hands of someone with a Strength Attribute of 4-6 (humans are 1-10, with 4 or 5 being average) will also do 2-15 points of damage.  So the mage does the same damage, but can hit multiple people with one spell.  So right now, the mage is definitely more powerful because it is the same damage to multiple people.

But the warrior can attack every turn until he exhausts himself.  Now in LQ the warrior (assuming a Strength of 6 and an Endurance of 6 - most warriors would have these or slightly better) would begin to exhaust himself after eight attacks.  The ninth attack would cause 3 points of Fatigue damage, and so would every other attack after it.  But he would probably have a Willpower of 4 or 5 (again, average), so assuming the lower 4 - he has 24 Fatigue points.  That means 8 turns before getting tired and then 8 more turns (3x8 = 24) of exhausting himself.  16 attacks seems to be quite a few.

The mage is going to take 2-15 points of Fatigue in casting the fireball.  Now he’s probably got a Willpower of 6 for 36 Fatigue points.  But with an average 8.5 Fatigue points, he’s only got four spells in him before he will pass out from exhaustion.  Four spells vs. 15 attacks (the 16^th one would have driven the warrior unconscious, so we’ll call it 15 attack attempts).  The four hit multiple people.  The fireball is 20’ in diameter.  So is the mage hitting four people?  Depends on the circumstances, but that seems pretty reasonable.  So all in all, it sort of seems even.  Granted, the mage can get all of his guys beat up in four turns, and the warrior gives them a lot more opportunities to attack back, but in the end, it does still sort of feel pretty fair.

Now, not every game allows you to make easy comparisons.  A lot of games, especially those using character classes, have lots of stuff mixed into experience and advancement.  Having more points of damage you can take matters too, so if that is part of your advancement, then you have to understand the differences between glass cannons and tanks.  But!  We can make some comparisons by pitting them against each other.

As the level of experience increases, so do the factors of divergence.  In other words, comparing higher “level” characters gets really complicated because of the variations in characters as well as the way different groups might apply optional or variant rules.  Now I pretty much just play LQ now, so I sat down with players of the fifth edition of that other game to talk through how the characters shape up.

I remain skeptical because I saw the way that the more military classes progressed in this sort of straight line fashion and the mage classes progressed in what has normally been considered a geometric progression, so that by the time you got to the higher levels, the mages did everything and the warriors just tried to keep them from getting killed.

But we did some compares with ninth level characters, and it didn’t turn out that bad.  We found pretty much the same type of thing we just described - The mages did about the same damage as the fighter types, but did it faster, but were done with their spell casting while the fighters were still going.  Overall - not too far off each other.  I have to admit - I was pleasantly surprised that it was even close.

Now, let’s not be silly.  If a mage can “charm” an enemy and turn him against his friends (charm, dominate, possess, etc.) then that mage has shown a level of power that just might be over powered, but a lot of that comes down to role-playing situations or defenses, and not pure numbers.

So with both games seeming to be fairly balanced between magic and melee, there remains a point that really matters:  magic items.  The items given to the various styles of play can have an enormous impact on the game, no matter how balanced they might be when the rules were written.  Giving a PC a wand that removes his restriction of only so many spells per day changes the game.  Giving a warrior a sword that increases his damage to mage levels without restricting his number of attacks changes the game.

So what’s the right way to go?  Well, the problem is that game balance rests in the hands of the GM.  Tip the scales too far one way and you can ruin your game.  Tip them the other, and ruin the game.  We’ll give you advice, but it is really going to come down to experience.  You will (or already have) get to the place where you can sense the disturbance in the force.  You know what is going to happen if you give that character that item.  So don’t.  Or at least, after you do, learn from this mistake and don’t do it in the next campaign.