Balancing wizards and warriors
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I like what you're hitting with the restrictions on the Aes Sedai. I would take it a step further. How many places were they flat out hated? How many were they mistrusted? Really outside of the halls of power (where their influence was feared) they were not liked. There wasn't some upswell of Oh Good the Aes Sedai are here! It was always fear and apprehension, even when they helped you it came at a price.
I had a long debate with a friend and I took the position that the Aes Sedai in many ways are the villains of the story. Yes, there is the outside threat of the Shadow, but within the internal structure of the main world in the Third Age they were the veiled threat that everyone disliked.
So (in my opinion) that is your balance of power in regards. Because I think the base question is neglecting the third sphere which is social interactions.
Warriors have strength of arms.
Wizards have strength of magic.
Thieves (Think Mat) have strength of social.Instead of trying to balance on a two pronged stool, add that third leg and suddenly you can get closer to balance. Or in the classic team, you have the Looks, the Muscle, the Brains, and the Wildcard Bitches!
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@paradox said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
I had a long debate with a friend and I took the position that the Aes Sedai in many ways are the villains of the story.
I mean -- yeah. I'm gonna second this one.
You not only had all the nonsense that the One Power had done to the world, now burned into legend and faded into myth more than memory, you also had the fact that anyone that showed any hint of the One Power was forcibly kidnapped and dragged off to a militant training facility, where any deviation resulted in being Stilled and forced to swear an Oath that shortened your life like woah.
They were corrupt and power-hungry and paranoid, and when the Black Ajah came in, none of them even noticed. They were so tied up in their other petty squabbles.
The Aes Sedai in any other setting would be monsters. It's only the Shadow and the Black Ajah and the ... invading power from across the sea whose name I forget, now, that puts them into any sort of redeeming placement. They're, at best, antiheroes.
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@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
However outside of that example I'd urge us to consider more common scenarios in current MU*. For example in comic book games are people not choosing to play Robin/Hawkeye as opposed to Superboy/Thor? In Star Wars games are other types of characters than Jedi or Sith popular and successful as archetypes?
My thought is, basically, that the big question of balance is just having an answer to "why would someone not choose this."
Someone clever once defined games as "a series of interesting choices." Generally speaking, "do I take the objectively better option or the objectively worse option" isn't a very interesting choice. And yeah, if being magic is just flat-out better than not being magic, a whole lot of people are going to be magic.
It's not universally true, so you do get people, say, playing mortals in WoD games, because they want to play through the process of learning about the supernatural, or they think it's fun to play someone at a major handicap, or they want to RP being magically enslaved to a hot vampire of their sexual preference (no judgment), or whatever. Even so, most players are going to play supers, so a given mortal in the game is likely to wind up having their best friend, their significant other, and their boss all be supernatural horrors by random chance even if they aren't keyed in to the secret whatnots.
Social consequences for magic, too, are kinda hard to enforce, because no matter how common that sort of prejudice is supposed to be in-setting, most people (reasonably!) don't want their avatars in the setting to be shitheads in that sort of way. The opprobrium of the hypothetical background NPCs isn't really going to be meaningfully felt by the players, unless they're in an actual staffed scene. (Which might be a limiter right there--no magic use except in staffed scenes, PRPs, or the like, where throwing around magic can have appropriate consequences enforced?)
Another thing is that, in terms of RPG mechanics, it might make a difference whether PCs are mechanically balanced even if they aren't narratively balanced. Talking about superheroes specifically, my favorite of the genre (Masks) uses the same mechanical spread the PC whose whole deal is that they're too powerful to feel safe with themselves and the PC who's really good at karate. The goal/scene resolution is equal between the two, even if narratively one of them is using cosmic elemental powers that could level city blocks and the other one is hitting problems with a stick. The Buffy RPG gave the Slayer mechanical superpowers, but gave the Zanders luck and narrative control mechanics to balance things out. This can work really well, but it might require a lot more of the structured TTRPG environment than the more freeform MU* set-up.
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So my first question on this topic is always: What does the setting and theme say?
The original subject, Wheel of Time, says that channelers can defeat non-channelers with a snap of their fingers (without even snapping). So in my opinion (as someone who played on a couple of the same WoT games as @Arkandel -- almost always as a non-channeler), they shouldn't be balanced. Or rather, they shouldn't be //mechanically// balanced. Like @Devrex said, there are a lot of setting-specific downsides to playing a channeler that are rarely actually implemented. In Star Wars, it's the rare non-Force User who can defeat a Force User -- but they do exist (hello Cad Bane), so why shouldn't they be PCs and actually balance things?
In home-brew settings, I believe that either everyone should have the capability for magic (that's what we did on The Savage Skies) so you don't have to worry about balance //as// much (except those people who like to play non-magical characters), or magic users and non-magic users should be balanced.
If you're going to balance magic users and non-magic users, you have several options for how to do it on a MUSH:
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Resource Management: A warrior can swing a sword (nearly) all day, but a magic user either uses up their mana, or gets tired, or can only cast a certain number of spells per day. We took this route on The Eighth Sea. This method feeds into @insomniac7809's point about interesting choices -- it makes every use of magic an intentional choice. It requires some very careful testing to see how your theories work out in practice, and it will still make it so that when you absolutely, positively need to drop an MFer, you turn to a magic-user (as long as they haven't already burned their mana/spell slots/reserves/whatever).
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Specialization: A magic user might be able to nuke a room with a fireball, but they can't wear armor, so they're a glass cannon, while the warrior can tank hits like nothing else. It might be armor, it might be something else, but this method just means that magic users literally can't do something that non-magic users can. Again, it has to be balanced carefully, and it means limiting character concepts -- you're not going to be able to make a defensive magic user in the example I used, for instance (or it's going to be either very difficult or sub-optimal).
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"Weapon" balance: Spells look awesome, but they aren't any more effective than weapons which are available to non-magic users. This is the route that we took on The 5th World. It can be dissatisfying because there isn't a whole lot of mechanical difference to how an archer or a magic user works, but it's certainly the easiest to balance.
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Requirements: Magic users just have more skills/attributes/advantages/whatevers to spend points on, so they'll never be as good at everything else as warriors. This has the benefit of leaving niches for non-magic users, but it still means that in combat, magic users are royalty. Also, deity help you if you get a creative player playing a magic user (and you will) and they come up with all sorts of arguments about how they should be able to use their magic to do the things the other skills cover.
There are lots of other methods (@Ominous mentioned a bunch of them) that can work great in TT games where it's a small group of players with an omnipresent GM, but I think that for the reasons @Devrex and @Arkandel mentioned, social restrictions or those based on IC traditions just don't work very well on a MUSH, because players want to play the interesting types that can do more than most humans, and they want their characters to be able to be involved in all the things (and to be rebels who break tradition).
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I don't know much about the WoT setting, so I can't speak to it in specific, but when I think about balancing 'wizards' and 'warriors' in a more overarching sense, it comes down to making sure that every character type can contribute in a fun, flavorful, and effective way in a combat situation, and to do so roughly to the same extent as any other character type.
One part of this is that while wizards/magic users might have spells that do Really Cool Things, they probably shouldn't have spells that can end a typical combat/conflict flat out with a single action or roll (unless other character types also get that). You have to think about how you're defining the bounds of magic in your setting, and what you want your spells to be able to do, or not do.
A second part to this is making sure that fighter/warrior characters also get Really Cool Things to do that aren't just "I roll to attack". Consider the purpose that you want warriors to serve in a combat scenario - are they bodyguards for physically weaker characters? Then give them 'tanky' abilities that allow them to grab and hold the attention of enemies. Are they single-target destroyers? Then make sure their damage scales with it, and consider giving them abilities that let them demonstrate their might - destroying weapons and armor, intimidation effects, powerful grapples and throws. Are they meant to be weaponsmasters who excel in one style of combat but are flexible enough to deal death with anything that comes to hand? Then make weapons flavorful and distinctive, with powerful special effects in the hands of skilled fighters that become even more awesome when the fighter invests their training in a particular weapon or style.
Likewise, really think about who your "wizards" are, or are supposed to be. There's something to be said for distinguishing between, say, a ritual magician who won't be casting spells in battle, but rather casts rituals at the beginning of the day to create favorable bonuses and special effects for the whole party, vs. an elementalist who flings fire and ice in the heat of the battle. Any wizard-type should be able to do some contribution in combat situations, because it's no fun for a player to sit twiddling their thumbs while everyone else smashes things, but you have to be careful not to let magic dominate the field. As such, I'd avoid spells that do a lot of damage to a large number of foes, spells that get categorized as 'save or die' (or be turned into a chicken, or whatever), and any sort of spell-casting resource that can run completely out so that wizards are reduced to hitting someone with a stick if you have multiple combats before rest/recharge.
Outside of combat, I'd recommend eschewing the 'dumb fighter/warrior' stereotype in mechanical benefits. Magic users get a lot of utility abilities in almost every system - they can read minds, or speak with extra planar entities, or fly, or teleport, or find lost objects, or WHATEVER. Make sure to give your warriors cool shit outside of fighting to do, as well - don't stiff them on skill points/backgrounds/whatever just because they swing a sword, and if your other character types have Cool Utility Powers, consider writing some in explicitly for your warrior types. A knight should be able to handle themselves in a court setting, a duelist might have the ability to size up other people's competence or abilities, a mercenary might have a an excellent understanding of tactics and geopolitics.
In my experience, most players aren't so much interested in total mechanical parity as they are in feeling as if their character meaningfully contributes to whatever scenario they're in, in a way that feels true to what the character should be able to do.
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@pyrephox said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
I don't know much about the WoT setting, so I can't speak to it in specific, but when I think about balancing 'wizards' and 'warriors' in a more overarching sense, it comes down to making sure that every character type can contribute in a fun, flavorful, and effective way in a combat situation, and to do so roughly to the same extent as any other character type.
I do agree with the post as a whole, I'd just quibble with this in particular, depending on how things are supposed to work.
In a game like D&D where the mechanics are basically a combat engine interspersed with improv freeform, yeah, I'll agree that everyone needs to be able to contribute meaningfully to combat. But in a system where, say, investigation and diplomacy are given just as much mechanical weight as the murdery bits, there's nothing wrong with having the PC who kills things real good getting to dominate the scene, in the same way Sherlock Perot gets to shine in the locked room murder scenario and Wilhelmina Foppingtin XIV gets to rock in the socialite ball.
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@insomniac7809 said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
But in a system where, say, investigation and diplomacy are given just as much mechanical weight as the murdery bits, there's nothing wrong with having the PC who kills things real good getting to dominate the scene, in the same way Sherlock Perot gets to shine in the locked room murder scenario and Wilhelmina Foppingtin XIV gets to rock in the socialite ball.
The typical issue with this scenario is that in scenes your diplomat and my fireball-bot will both end up socially engaging other PCs, discussing politics, asking for favors, etc - and typically players don't throw dice for these.
However come time for combat guess who's gonna throw the biggest fireball, baby!
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When the PCs won't enforce a theme you sort of have to balance it back out with the NPCs in the stories you run. A lot of times we forget all those other people exist out there and so it becomes "oh all I ever meet is..."
In WoT specifically another thing I thought of this morning was about power level. A lot of games let you play Big 3 Special Girl Power Level that was just exceedingly rare. But even they could only "split the flows" (cast simultaneous spells for those who don't know the theme) 4 times. Most people could do ONE flow at a time. Then there was your sort of upper echelon (call it, perhaps, the 'PC' echelons) that could, before Protagonist Gals came along, do two. At most.
And usually in that theme, an average channeler could with one flow or spell impact one line-of-sight target at a time. That's plenty of time for a group of armed men to rush them...which is why they surrounded themselves with bodyguards.
So another method might be to choose your era carefully...or if you're going to put them in the area where a 4-way simulcast is going to be available to most PCs...then your NPCs have to get smarter and mob them with 12 instead of 4. And if you do that on top of no you don't get any kind of melee, you don't get any kind of physical skill...well you're squishy, it only takes one person punching you really really hard to make you lose the spell, you'd better hope your armed men are getting it done.
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@insomniac7809 said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
@pyrephox said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
I don't know much about the WoT setting, so I can't speak to it in specific, but when I think about balancing 'wizards' and 'warriors' in a more overarching sense, it comes down to making sure that every character type can contribute in a fun, flavorful, and effective way in a combat situation, and to do so roughly to the same extent as any other character type.
I do agree with the post as a whole, I'd just quibble with this in particular, depending on how things are supposed to work.
In a game like D&D where the mechanics are basically a combat engine interspersed with improv freeform, yeah, I'll agree that everyone needs to be able to contribute meaningfully to combat. But in a system where, say, investigation and diplomacy are given just as much mechanical weight as the murdery bits, there's nothing wrong with having the PC who kills things real good getting to dominate the scene, in the same way Sherlock Perot gets to shine in the locked room murder scenario and Wilhelmina Foppingtin XIV gets to rock in the socialite ball.
This is fair! When I said to the same extent, I was more thinking of 'has something to do that's interesting and effective at each phase' of a given scene. The warrior might be best at smashing heads, but that doesn't mean that she should just have to stand there and do nothing (or make things worse) in an investigative scene. Likewise, your clever wizard might excel in a scene about uncovering a mysterious writing and translating it on the fly, but they shouldn't be so useless in combat that their job is basically 'stay out of the way', either. Even if it's 'realistic', it's not typically very FUN for players to be Sir Not Needed In This Scene.
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@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
The typical issue with this scenario is that in scenes your diplomat and my fireball-bot will both end up socially engaging other PCs, discussing politics, asking for favors, etc - and typically players don't throw dice for these.
However come time for combat guess who's gonna throw the biggest fireball, baby!I mean, yes, if the social/diplomatic mechanics are completely vestigial and every scene that's run comes down to a slugfest, sure. But if the wizard, the diplomat, and the thief are all getting to do cool stuff in their respective areas of expertise, Beatstick McHardcase deserves to be the best at fight scenes.
@pyrephox said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
This is fair! When I said to the same extent, I was more thinking of 'has something to do that's interesting and effective at each phase' of a given scene. The warrior might be best at smashing heads, but that doesn't mean that she should just have to stand there and do nothing (or make things worse) in an investigative scene. Likewise, your clever wizard might excel in a scene about uncovering a mysterious writing and translating it on the fly, but they shouldn't be so useless in combat that their job is basically 'stay out of the way', either. Even if it's 'realistic', it's not typically very FUN for players to be Sir Not Needed In This Scene.
Oh, absolutely, and I'm not saying PCs should be uninvolved or useless in scenes that focus on someone else's specialties. Just that having them be the best at their specialty in scenes revolving around their specialty is good actually.
So just going to the "interesting choices" thing, if buying "Stab Shit" lets me kill things, and buying "Magic" lets me scry on distant locations and enter the spirit world and talk to the dead and also kill things just as well as Stab Shit, there is no reason to take Stab Shit.
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@insomniac7809 So let's use a specific scenario from a Wheel of Time setting as an example case of how these principles should be applied.
In that universe there are two closely allied factions: Aes Sedai and Warders. The former are witches who are literally unable to use their magic to harm anyone other than the Big Bad's servants, and the latter are elite warriors acting as their bodyguards.
Therefore what theoretically keeps Aes Sedai in check are social reasons (mobs with pitchforks - the superstitious populace will turn against usage of magic), magical (their power won't work against regular people) and other enemy factions who'd love to burn dem witches.
In practice as was mentioned earlier in the thread players skirted the lines fairly regularly:
- Aes Sedai PCs used loopholes they didn't in the books. "I can't burn you alive but I can immobilize and gut you with this here sword", "I'll use magic to throw a boulder at your head, how's that?"
- Skewed demographics: The prevalence of magic users weakened anti-magic user factions who should have been far more populous, but which in practice was never the case on the grid.
- This all weakened Warders' niche as bodyguards.
Balancing the reality of the game versus the atmosphere we wanted based on the book series the setting was derived from was a common debate.
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A large number of people almost always want to play the coolest character archetype. In settings with magic users and non magic users, that designation almost always goes to the magic users.
Especially in a set up like that - it doesn't sound like the Warders have any sort of purpose other than 'follow around the Aes Sedai and keep them from being ganked' if it comes up. And if you're letting magic user players apply magic freeform and creatively? Any magic system WILL be broken in a large group setting. It's a little different in a tabletop where you have a GM who can just say, "Jeez, Sam, no. That's not the intent and you know it."
Large settings where players may be dealing with multiple GMs or running their own scenes, really need to have magic with more structure and firm boundaries. Otherwise, it's forever at the mercy of player creativity and people can be VERY creative.
It doesn't really sound like a WoT setting is the best for a MU*? That doesn't make it unique, of course. But if you're wanting to expand it and you're not chained to a tabletop system, then you might want to spend some time really thinking of Cool Things that Warders and non-Aes Sedai characters can do that don't require Aes Sedai. And knowing that a lot of people are still going to want to play Aes Sedai, a major focus of GM time/effort probably needs to be devoted to making those mobs with pitchforks matter.
This could be by making sure that a large number of your important, active named NPCs are magic-hostile, if that's in theme for the setting. This could also be by establishing firm boundaries - even if they weren't in the books - for what magic can and can't do to keep it from being the Swiss Army Knife of abilities. If you don't want the artificial barrier of just saying, "The intent of the setting is that the Aes Sedai don't use their magic to cause harm to non-X targets - thus, any spells of hostile intent will fail on those targets, whether it's throwing boulders or just holding them down for stabbins'" then you probably need a system that can measure power and resistance to magic, and make sure that the 'average angry human' has a resistance against magic that is high enough that it's comparable (or even more) than their resistance to being stabbed by your warrior.
It's a lot easier to do these things, of course, when you're building a custom setting. Novel settings usually aren't meant to be balanced - they have protagonists who exist to stretch the 'rules' of the setting to their limits, either through natural talent or cleverness. And it works, because a fantasy protagonist often exists to be an agent of change or herald of revolution.
It works less well with 50 protagonists.
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@arkandel Yeah, I'm not super familiar with WoT (just never got into it), so grain of salt as far as all this goes.
The first thing you bring up, well, it doesn't surprise me at all. Players getting around restrictions by trying to find edge cases and loopholes is as old as RPG gaming. The three ways around it are players who are willing to buy in to the spirit of the rules, arbitrators who are willing to shut down attempts to bypass them, or rules that explicitly disallow that sort of shenaniganary. (On a MU*, the first is basically impossible, just because most don't have enough of a screening process to enforce that sort of things.)
The second comes down to the "interesting choices" thing I keep going on about. Why, as a player, would I pick "not-wizard" over "wizard"? How is "not-wizard" something other than "the PCs who are wizards can do whatever you can, but also they are wizards and can get up to wizard shit."
If you want "not-wizard" to be regularly played, you need some good answers to that! Otherwise it gets to be like the oWoD games I mentioned, where even though vampires are supposed to be vastly, vastly outnumbered by the mortals, the assumption is explicitly that PCs are vampires and playing not-a-vampire is a niche option.
Also, yeah, more or less everything that @Pyrephox said. Novels don't need to worry about balance because it's by design that someone is just cooler and hotter and better than everyone else, that's why they get to be the protagonist. Even TTRPGs can be fine focusing on two to six of the specialist snowflakes in the world. When you get to 20+ players, things start to shift.
So asking about WoT specifically (with, again, stressing that I'm not overly familiar with the setting), I might well start by saying something like "you can't buy combat skills if you're a Channeler, maybe there are in-universe ways that someone could have but your PCs didn't." A little harsh, but sometimes you need to be. And/or maybe saying that magic can only be used in a scene with a runner, where the pitchfork mobs present a real threat. Or maybe a more FATE-style narrative system that doesn't bother with the physics simulator aspects. Something where in-universe the wizard can throw up walls of fire while the warrior has a knife, but mechanically they're rolling more or less the same "Overcome Obstacle" dice.
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@insomniac7809 said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
If you want "not-wizard" to be regularly played, you need some good answers to that! Otherwise it gets to be like the oWoD games I mentioned, where even though vampires are supposed to be vastly, vastly outnumbered by the mortals, the assumption is explicitly that PCs are vampires and playing not-a-vampire is a niche option.
That's a good point. And although I agree with it, I am often reminded that on comic book and Star Wars games people do play other stuff. So they must be doing something right!
What is the secret recipe? Why do folks play a Robin-type (let's assume original characters here just to remove the 'well I like Tim Drake' copout) when you can play a Superboy-type? Or if you can have a Force-user why pick an engineer, or a smuggler with a blaster?
(These are not rhetorical questions - my experience with these kinds of MU* is very minimal)
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel Sometimes it has a lot to do with the culture of the game. I spent a lot of time playing Coulson on superhero games, and of course his superpowers are leadership, mundane spy crap, and being Best Dad Ever in a world where everyone else is throwing cars.
But I was in a culture where there was a lot of emphasis on "selling" each other's special. So the people I was playing with would make room for him to resolve situations with words, or would make room for him to sort of leadership them into a bigger better team, or the GMs would vary up the threats or indeed make "overcome obstacle," in a very freeform way, basically the same thing. For example they might have a giant thing that needed a car thrown at it up there defending the giant bomb that Coulson needed to be down there disarming, and so I'd get to dart in to do that while Superman or whomever was up there lobbing Priuses at dinosaurs. (While making Dad jokes about it. Which is key).
It was nothing that was put in policy, it was just how people played, it was just the culture that was fostered, and it was a lot of fun.
If I were standing in a very different culture where doing that relegated me to being the "guy with no purpose in this scene" I wouldn't do it. I don't need my character to be the biggest badass in the room, I just need him to have a function in the story that matters to that story in a way that I can identify and that I feel like other players can recognize. And I'm pretty big on designing my character to match the play experience I want so I take those things into account.
But that gets into a whole other area of discussion about how to build a game culture intentionally, and unfortunately that's an area where you can only foster-not-force.
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@arkandel Legit questions!
In the case of Star Wars games, I think that's actually been something a lot of SW properties have tried to work on. The simplest, usually, has been to either make it explicit that the protagonists of the property are Jedi, or make no one Jedi. A few, like one of the really early Star Wars MMOs (maybe the first?) went by blocking off Jedi as an option except through a long and convoluted process of unlocking the class.
Otherwise, mechanically, the go-to has usually been to try and roughly balance the "mundane" skills with force powers, whether that's in point-buy or level systems. And with SW, none of the force powers we see are that overpowered compared to "dude with gun" or "hotshot pilot."
On top of that, being a Jedi comes bundled up with the whole quasi-monastic obligate good guy thing, unless you want to turn into a strutting vaudevillain (which might not be playable in the system). So that is a choice, there: do you want to move stuff with your mind, or do you want to get to be a seedy gunfighter with a heart of gold?
And then, for all that, I do know people who basically felt pressured into turning their non-force-user PCs into Jedi in MU*s because, essentially, that's where all the good shit was, plot- and RP-wise. Even in the interquel period, you tend to get a lot of Jedi running around, where "remnants of a vanquished order driven to hiding under the relentless threat of pursuit and extermination by all the powers of the galaxy" and "literally anything else" wind up with rough parity.
More generally, though, and also as far as superhero stuff goes: I think that a major part of it, as applies to RP, comes down to using more narrative or freeform than what I called "physics simulator" mechanics upthread. When the whiz-bang powers come with quantifiable mechanics on a sheet, providing options that the wizards get and the warriors don't, you actually are hindering yourself by not getting wizard powers. When the power levels are all narrative, and either you're setting it up by group consensus or "roll Forceful to Overcome Obstacle" or whatever, everyone has the same... I dunno... "meta-narrative(?)" involvement in the outcome, even if in the narrative Thor is slugging it out with the whole CGI army while Natasha is running the goober to the skybeam to shut it down or whatever.
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@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
- Aes Sedai PCs used loopholes they didn't in the books. "I can't burn you alive but I can immobilize and gut you with this here sword", "I'll use magic to throw a boulder at your head, how's that?"
This one, at least, sounds like you can nip it in the bud with a "don't be a jerk" rule:
"You can't magically throw boulders at humans. Your magic can't harm humans."
"It's not harming a human! It's just throwing a boulder! GRAVITY is hurting the human!"
"Don't be a jerk."
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The Star Wars MMO (ignoring that they're changing it), the reason people play non-Jedi is because the non-Jedi have as much value as the Jedi and their stories are as good (or in the case of the Imperial Agent, better). It is just as cool in that game to play a Bounty Hunter as it is to play a Sith, no kidding. Not "almost as cool" or anything, but literally straight up just as cool. I think this would apply pretty much directly to the topic; give cool things to do, give equal story weight, get people playing things that aren't Jedi.
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@arkandel said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
- Aes Sedai PCs used loopholes they didn't in the books. "I can't burn you alive but I can immobilize and gut you with this here sword", "I'll use magic to throw a boulder at your head, how's that?"
That looks more like blatant oath breaking then loophole to me.
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@arkandel I play character types that I like, not power sets that I like (usually). I often play troopers or pilots in Star Wars games, I played Children of the Light on WoT games, and I play Punisher, Arsenal, etc on superhero games. I do it because I like being sort of "the default," something that helps reinforce the setting. Also, I like having to think of a creative solution rather than just throwing a big fireball. I also enjoy being set up to be JUST THAT AWESOME //despite// not having powers. When the Clone Trooper can drop the Dark Jedi Acolyte because the Clone Trooper is just that badass (and that high level), it's a lot more awesome than when the Jedi can drop the Dark Jedi Acolyte. When Frank Castle figures out a way to take down Abomination, it's a lot more impressive than Hulk doing it.
@greenflashlight said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
"It's not harming a human! It's just throwing a boulder! GRAVITY is hurting the human!"
This one is even easier: "Are you telling me that your character is stupid enough to think that dropping a boulder on that human with the One Power (magic) isn't going to hurt them? Because your character is actually magically bound to not hurt humans with the One Power."
