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Spellcasters in the PartyJust One More Thing Before I Go... (Part I)0[This is the first of a short series of articles revolving around game design ideas and observations. These are the kind of things I might file away and eventually use as an inspiration for a product or part of a product. While that's still possible, it's far more unlikely now that I've decided to concentrate on novel-writing for a while. So I figured I'd just share them with you here.] Sometimes, when you're working as a game designer, you have to divorce yourself from thinking like a gamer. At first that might seem like a bad idea, but hear me out. A game player looks at a game from the bottom up. He looks at the individual pieces (in the case of D&D, the classes, the spells, the feats, and so on) to determine his choices. That's his "job," if you will. A game designer should, at least some of the time, look at the game from the top down. He looks at how the system itself works, and -- just as importantly -- how the system encourages certain types of play. That's his job. A game player might observe
the way many spellcasters use their spells and conclude from their observations
that certain spells are unbalanced. While that might be true, a game designer
might look at the same situation and realize that it's the game system itself
which is truly causing the problem. Rather than altering the spells (or getting
rid of them) he sees that it's the system that must change. The Evolving Spellcaster In older editions of the game, wizards (or magic users) and clerics (or priests) had so few spells that they had to manage their resources very carefully. It took a completely different outlook to play a wizard than a fighter. Arguably, the wizard player needed to be more careful, more thoughtful, and more judicious, even at higher levels. Wizards that cast their spells haphazardly or without a lot of thought led to a poorer play experience for everyone involved because they didn't have the right spells at the right time and they exhausted themselves too early and were left with little to do. Throughout 3rd Edition design, fellow designer Skip Williams made a very good case that the previous editions' ways trained players of spellcasting characters to act intelligently and with forethought and planning, not only in deciding what spells to "memorize" but in when to cast them and how. I didn't disagree then, and I still don't. However, it was an assumption, particularly in early D&D, that everyone started out being a fighter and only much later did anyone choose (as their second, third, or seventeenth character) a spellcasting class, after they had experience with the game. We couldn't make that assumption in 3rd Edition. No class should be more or less challenging to play well, if possible. Using the old paradigms, a spellcaster is just plain less fun to play for the typical player because you get less stuff to do. The challenge of knowing when to use your abilities and to come up with options of actions to take when not casting spells is something that only a subset of all players find enjoyable. There was also a balancing mechanic inherent in the system that we didn't care for. It was deliberately set up so that spellcasters were more powerful than other classes at higher levels, and were less powerful at lower levels. You had to slog your way (and find a way to survive) through wizard levels 1 to 4 or so before you got really good stuff at level 5. This "delay of the fun" is a poor design choice. So we gave spellcasters access to more spells, even at lower levels. We gave them easy-to-use options that expanded their abilities (metamagic, item crafting, etc.). Then we tried to balance out the game at high levels so they didn't have to be cheated at low levels. In short, we made spellcasters fun for most people to play, regardless of level. The Result of the Change I think that what we did was the right thing to do, and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I think the 3rd Edition spell system is fun to use and I've had a great time with it. In retrospect, however, we could have done even better. We could have gone further. What we created, inadvertently, was a sort of halfway point toward the real solution, still hanging on too much to the older design paradigms. 3rd Edition spellcasters now had enough spells that they could entirely abandon the judiciousness encouraged by earlier versions of the game but not enough to be as capricious as many are. Far too often I've watched as a caster wielding some "buff" spells casts them all on himself and his party members, leaving himself with only a couple remaining spells, which he casts in the first encounter or two. Then he declares that he's out of spells so the group should rest. But resting means leaving the adventure, and therefore it means stopping the fun. This method of playing hurts the overall play experience as well as the flow of events in the fictional story within the game. The group, resonating with magical might and backed up by impressive firepower, carves its way through one or two encounters and then is done. (The shortened durations of many spells in the 3.5 revision only compounds this problem.) The extra spells we gave casters didn't allow them to play in the adventure longer, it allowed them to look at spellcasting differently. Buff spells of various types existed in previous editions of the game, but they were used only rarely because the resource of available spells was more precious than the benefits they offered. And buff spells are only one symptom, not the cause, of the problem. Offensive spells, originally balanced with the assumption that they would be used only rarely, were often "end the encounter" effects. But the game has changed over time. While fireball damage is no longer so great (compared to monster hit points) that it pretty much ends the encounter, the power of a spell like confusion still does. No longer does a spell like fireball need to be regulated in the same way that a spell like confusion does. A Solution The 3rd Edition spellcaster has enough spells so that he need not be miserly but not enough so that he can cast them with real abandon. Just enough to encourage him to be imprudent but not enough to actually allow him to back up that tactic. So, then, why not just go all the way and create a balanced way for spellcasters to do some amount of magic "stuff" all the time? It wouldn't be hard, for example, to create balanced magical attacks or defenses that were on par with other classes' offensive and defensive abilities. In other words, the rogues' sneak attack is designed so that it's balanced even if he gets to make one every round. Surely the wizard can be balanced so that he gets a magical blast of some type every round. However, resource management isn't a bad mechanic. Quite the contrary. It leads to very interesting play decisions. In fact, it's interesting enough that I often wish that all classes had access to some form of it (that why I created the ritual warrior for Arcana Evolved). Getting rid of it completely would be a mistake. Imagine, then, a magical class set up with two different kinds of magical powers. Some things characters could do all the time, without cost. These aren't spells so much as just "things they've learned to do with magic." Call them magical disciplines. The other things they could use in a limited fashion, or were costly to them for some reason. Call them spells. Disciplines would include simple, straightforward magical attacks and defenses. In the current game, mage armor is so ubiquitous and lasts so long that you might as well just say all arcane casters get a +4 armor bonus to AC and just be done with it. These disciplines could be selected more like feats than spells, with the choice being permanent, or they could be chosen like spells, on a day-to-day basis. On one day a spellcaster could select a decent touch attack that inflicts cold damage for his offensive magical discipline (or one of them, depending on his level), and on another day he selects a ranged attack that conjures sharp thorns and hurls them with force. (Disciplines able to affect multiple targets could be balanced so that they come into play at about the same time as fighters get multiple attacks, Cleave, and so forth.) Disciplines might also include things that affect the caster's ability scores, grant resistances to energy, and so on. Like the defensive disciplines, they would just be ongoing, without need to track durations. Ongoing disciplines could be suppressed, but not permanently dispelled. They would otherwise be treated as supernatural abilities. Instantaneous disciplines could be countered. They would be spell-like abilities. Spells would be powers that alter the environment or other people. Most would not be strictly offensive or defensive, although when they were they would be very significant. Spells would include things like passwall, teleport, rock to mud, summon monster, wall of fire, and so on. These are things you don't want the caster to be able to do limitlessly. You want, for example, the spellcaster to use his teleport spell to get himself (and his friends) out of danger only when it's most crucial. There's drama and tension in that decision then. However, even after all his spells are exhausted, the wizard (or cleric) could still participate meaningfully in the game, using disciplines, without forcing everyone to stop and go home to rest. One more thing that I would do is to not only limit the number of spells that can be used in a day but I would also limit the number that can be in effect at any one time, further extending the long-term usefulness of the mage and also providing the system with another balancing factor for spells. So a caster might be able to cast a fair number of spells in a day, but not all of them right away at the beginning. This change alone would extend the adventure (and therefore the fun of the game) for longer periods between periods of downtime. All this attention on spellcasters
and in particular giving them unlimited numbers of minor abilities might seem
like it would make them even more dominant in the game. This wouldn't have to
be the case, however. In fact, the problem with the system now is that their
effects are so dominant that the party members don't want to go on after they've
depleted their magical resources. A well designed system could scale back the
power of the more straightforward effects while letting spellcasters use them
more often (as disciplines), and reserving major effects for the strictly regulated
spell system.
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