/v/ - Video Games

>Why is magic in video games always so much more powerful and fun than their melee or ranged counterparts?

That's only a case in games with abhorrent combat, like skyrim.

Magic tends to bend the rules of the game, and with some more abstract mechanics (eg position or taking extra actions) it can be very difficult to perfectly balance. But if you balance it too much, then it just becomes another case of "it doesn't matter what I do, because I'll still get the same result" which is the opposite of fun and makes a game very boring.

That is, by having different amounts of power levels, you can make the good ones stand out more. But it also allows you to soft select difficulty as well.

>>16896103

But I'm still after a game that has the fun options like magic has, but without breaking the game or making it easier like what tends to happen.

>>16896103

>Magic tends to bend the rules of the game

This. Game rules are designed around traditional melee/ranged combat. Magic is almost always designed to break those rules. Magic lets you ignore a few pages of text regarding death. Magic can remove a trait's ability to protect you from damage, or generate new ones. Magic can send you to places you're not supposed to be able to reach.

The real problem is that games have tried to dumb everything down to such a mindset where we look at things as "melee/ranged/magic". It's trained people to look at a spellsword and think, "well, he's a hybrid melee/magic user, so he's probably not good at anything." Under these draconian rules that most developers insist on following, the best games of this type you can find will most likely be party-based games. If you have 6 characters, it's certainly easier to rationalize specializing one as a dedicated party protector. Alternatively, since I don't know exactly what kind of game you're looking for, older ARPGs might fit the bill. Most of them have good amounts of melee/ranged powers that are fully competitive (if not better than) magic. Newer games that might fit that bill would be things like Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and Low Magic Age, simply because the overpowered magic lists they are based on (D&D 3.5) aren't correctly or fully implemented into the games. There are also older games you play solo or with a set party, like Light Crusader, which implements both magic and melee combat.

What kind of game are you even looking for? There are dozens of categories of RPG/adventure games that could be discussed in this regard. List some of the games you've liked.

melee:

click button, attack

ranged:

click button, attack

magic:

think about what effect this thing will have, maybe position the fireball, maybe stand in the pool of blood to make it easier to cast necromancy, buff yourself with stoneskin and haste

Obviously some games are different.

Dark Messiah was more fun to kick and melee.

Guild Wars, it was more fun to use interrupts on casters to disable their good skills. And you got to use fun stuff like stances or traps.

>>16896102

>like skyrim.

Wut? Melee and archery is about a hundreds times stronger than destruction magic in that game. Morrowind was probably the the last TES game where magic was objectively better.

Because they're all inspired by D&D when you drill down far enough. The difference is that historically in D&D, if you rolled a mage, you had a guy with at most 4 hit points, which means he could easily die from any melee attack from a goblin. Typically, magic users die from a single mistake before they hit level 7 or 9, whichever it was that lets you get a tower and apprentices and really start being a pain in the DM's side. If they detoured to take levels in a class that gives them hitpoints, it takes them even longer to get to that point, especially with the way "dual classing" used to work. In most games, it's way more forgiving than that but the magic is still nearly as good. In CRPGs usually the behavior of the AI accounts for enough leeway for mages to get ahead due to not worrying about being attacked or something similar, without even taking other factors into account.

>>16896322

melee:

get within danger radius of monster to attack

ranged:

stay at a safe distance and attack with weak long-distance projectiles

magic:

stay at a safe distance and attack with powerful nukes, can also heal and buff yourself

Fixed.

>>16896322

Part of the issue is the fact that melee/ranged, and warrior/thief get split up into separate classes while the Wizard often gets to be pretty much every fucking mage archertype and flavor besides healer in one class.

Combine warrior, hunter, barbarian and rogue all into one multipurpose badass martial class, and you then have a strong melee character that can sneak, use non combat skills, set traps, use a bow against flying enemies, track, maybe have an animal companion and have various dirty fighting techniques that debuff a target, and basically be nearly as much as a walking toolbox in a game as a wizard is.

>>16896353

melee:

Click button, attack

ranged:

Click button with arrows equipped, attack

magic:

Click button with runes in your inventory, attack

Fixed.

I miss runescape for whatever reason.

>>16896097

You've got to be retarded to ask why a ranged option of combat that's based on mystic supernatural forces that bend the laws of the universe is more powerful than melee. Jesus Christ.

As for why it's more fun, that's bullshit. Magic in Soles games is way less fun than melee.

Roguelikes usually make magic tied to a rare resource or consumable item like a wand, or require a heavy XP investment in a genre where XP is itself a resource that has to be used carefully, and being a late bloomer might cause you to take many tries to reach lategame where a melee character might coast through the early game and worry about the later levels when they get there.

It being so easy to die in roguelikes, a melee class character with the raw power to outlast enemies can be a great help, especially when there are usually enemies designed to rush at the player in a single turn and overwhelm them in melee.

>>16896102

being this fucking stupid.

literally not having a fucking clue

opens mouth and lets fart out

skyrim melee - 1 shot dragons (with blacksmith/enchant)

skyrim mages - 10 mins to kill dragon (weird cap on destruction magic made it shit, limited to specked elements)

>>16896635

Dying isn't even a big deal, you can just load a separate save again

>>16896663

How is that any different from Morrowind?

>use a noncombat skill to enhance your abulities

>abuse the game to push yourself past the developers limitations

>can only do 100 damage with magic at a time

>get so many increases to your strength you can punch the strongest enemy to death with a lockpick

Applies to both games

>>16896668

I wasn't the one who said Morrowind had strong magic, I never touched destruction except for training in Morrowind. I can say without a doubt that magic in Daggerfall, due to the open nature of it's spell maker is totally badass. – but in all these games it was just easier to swing a sword.

>>16896675

You said Skyrim was bad, but if you actually compared it to Morrowind, you'd see it's the same fucking thing. I like Morrowind, but at the end of the game loop where you're abusing stat gains, you're still using melee to kill shit in one shot

>>16898298

At what point does magic stop being "magic" per se and just start being another type of fancy skill? New versions of Tome give every character the same number of skills, some of which are lorewise explicitly magical and some explicitly nonmagical, but most of them are things that mundane humans could probably never do. It's really kind of a fundamental question. Archers in Tome are a good and fun class that do all of their tricks at range, and yet none of it is magic. Maybe Tome's just an outlier and a "mage" class there is just one whose melee attack is never worth using, as opposed to the other two where you might use it or your basic ranged attack while another skill is cooling down.

Anyone ever actually play Last Remnant? I hear it sorta hybridized its characters, too, so that you didn't really have strict mages or strict fighters, or the fighters got worthwhile skills, or something like that.

>>16898305

>Terraria

>Magic starts off weak, but has niche uses

>Breaking Shadow Orbs will yield a magic, ranged, or melee weapon which does well against segmented enemies (eg next boss)

>Lategame, melee is arguably the strongest (yoyos) but it's a projectile on a string or else spams projectiles itself, and isn't really "melee"

>>16898305

The best way to describe The Last Remnant is as an abstraction of RPGs. You have your army with tons of characters and heroes in it. You arrange them into up to 5 or 6 Unions total, up to 30 characters in total. Each Union averages the stats of its units or something like that, and becomes analogous to a Party Member in other RPGs.

As your Unions move across the battlefield, they gain the ability to use certain attacks, based on their own, enemy, and ally status and position. So far example, say you specialized in some mages and you put 3 or 4 of them in a Union. You have them stand back and spam Caustic Rain, an AoE attack (which hits all members of one enemy Union).

There's a lot of subtlety I'm not explaining, such as different Formations that affect Union stats, as well as specific arrangements of formations that upgrade the effect, and the requirement for those is based on invisible stats of the units that make it up. It's a great JRPG in terms of complexity but it suffers by being a JRPG and not explaining the stuff ingame in detail. You need a wiki to enjoy the game properly, I think

>>16896160

>spellsword

Funny way of spelling "indecisive faggot".

>>16898366

>not a frail faggot like wizards

>but full of magic unlike warriors

>warriors try to kill me as if I was a mage

>I deal more damage since I can add magic to every swing and have the armor to resist them

>wizards try their funky shit on me

>pikachu.face when I dispel it

Hybrid classes are the Enlightened Centrists that take the best of both worlds and make up for their weaknesses.

Rogue or Wizard? Shadowblade! Use magic to stealth like never before and your rogue abilities to kill everyone before they know what the fuck is going on!

Divine Spellcasting or Fighting? Be a Paladin and do both while broing it out with your fellow Paladins!

Why be really good at something that works 30% of the time when you could be good enough at 2 things and win 80% of the time instead!

>>16898416

>>16898366

He's mostly right, D&D-derived games are about having a wide variety of tools to deal with an unpredictable array of monsters. However, spellsword is kinda shit most of the time because going full wizard is usually objectively better. It depends on the game in question, obviously, but clerics usually have a better array of spells to synergize with melee fighting than arcane-type casters do, so multi-class fighter/cleric is really where it's at for melee. A notable exception is Pathfinder with the magus class which is literally a spellsword, including the ability to channel touch spells through your sword, and gets tasty spells like haste. But traditionally, arcane spellsword is one of the weaker combinations

>>16898452

That anon was probably talking about a series other than D&D or its derivatives, because all of those games would call them fighter/mages so that D&D players understand intuitively that they're useless because of what you described. Spellsword is more of a TES term in my mind, and in that game a non-dedicated mage actually has a chance of, say, dispelling a full-on mage's spell like that anon described, and the arcane/cleric distinction largely doesn't exist.

>>16898452

>spellsword is kinda shit most of the time because going full wizard is usually objectively better.

That heavily depends on the available spells and the situations you're put through.

Take for instance NeverWinter Nights (1 or 2) where most of the utilitarian spells a mage can get come really early. Get Knock and you basically don't need lockpicking anymore, for instance.

A Spellsword will take a bit longer to get there, but he will. What he won't get is some of the later stuff like Ray of Desintegration, Power Word:Kill and similar massive damaging spells.

A Mage is really only a better choice in these situations if you're making him a glass cannon and it only works because you have someone else tanking for him, however a Spellsword can still work if he uses mostly support spells to complement his fighting and can easily end up doing more damage with every attack than a Fighter will, keeping at it for much longer than a Wizard can.

Hybrid viability mostly comes from the difficulty of obstacles you find and your party composition. If you have enough members to spare, obviously everyone should specialize, but otherwise if you don't have enough people to bring a mage, the fighter could multi-class into a spellsword and cover that field too.

If your DM or the game keeps throwing high DC stuff at you, Hybrids will obviously not work. But if it's mostly medium DC with a few high DC for some rare stuff, you'll get most of the rewards anyway, potentially more than if you had specialized.

Also don't forget that hybrid classes often bring some weird tricks to the table because why the fuck not? Nightblades (or whatever they were called) could actually STEAL a spell from a Wizard and cast it right back, much better than a dispell.

>>16898482

Kinda like you and that other anon said, though, a lot of those situations really depend on knowing exactly what's coming up in a game. I don't think hybrid casters could do the silly contingency or globe of invulnerability or whatever memeshit made wizards so stupid in BG, for instance, and how that worked depended on how BG implemented the D&D rules. Even your tabletop example relies on knowing what your DM or the adventures he likes to run will be likely to throw at you as far as DC goes. The hybrid tricks, too, can end up being just useless gimmicks–look at the crap that bards get in most games that's supposed to make up for being masters-of-none. Sometimes it's useful stuff, and sometimes it ends up being useless–but it depends entirely on how it gets implemented.

With video games it's actually almost useless to try to talk about these things in broad terms since almost every specific RPG has broken crap that players will find and exploit, and for non-casual players that tends to make a lot of the more marginal strategies invalid because they're not optimal any longer. Look at how people talk about Morrowind, for instance, where it's at least understandable that nobody wants to deal with the clumsy spells or janky ass you-hit-but-really-you-missed melee when you can just kick the difficulty curve into the trash can with the completely broken alchemy system. Trying to take generalized discussion into that game is useless because you have to throw in "ignoring all the unbalanced alchemy" or "this strategy only works in conjunction with the broken alchemy" caveats.

>>16898492

Remember that D&D was at one point at least nominally about playing characters rather than minmaxing. I know it's passe these days, but just because someone on the internet proved that a certain build is objectively the most powerful in the book doesn't make the others worthless unless you play tabletop RPGs strictly for the sake of having the highest numbers.

>>16898475

>>16898482

If you're talking about a solo game, like TES, then yeah having hybrid skills is almost a necessity. And yes, prestige classes are godly, such as arcane trickster which I believe gets sneak attacks on spells. But there are specific hybrid combos which are traditionally weaker than others is all I was getting at.

>>16898492

Even more laughably you can take domains that will give you spells wizards get anyway.

>>16898497

>I know it's passe these days, but just because someone on the internet proved that a certain build is objectively the most powerful in the book doesn't make the others worthless unless you play tabletop RPGs strictly for the sake of having the highest numbers.

I play RPGs with people who always do a significant amount of role rather than roll playing, but it becomes extremely hard to ignore once you get to around level 10 or so and realize your character is just not very useful in fights compared to another character. That makes you want to not play that class or class combination again and just play proven classes like cleric. Pathfinder rogues are notoriously weak, and after losing two of them in a campaign I just said fuck it and rolled a half-orc fighter/cleric with the murder and destruction domains.

>>16898497

>Remember that D&D was at one point at least nominally about playing characters rather than minmaxing

It's not even just min/maxing, it's about how long it takes and how many hoops you have to jump through just to get a basic version of the character you want to play.

"I want to play a warrior mage dude"

'okay, great. Well then to play an eldritch knight you'll need to spend three levels in this class, at least one level in this class, make sure you take these skills, then take this sub class, and to wear armor while casting you'll need these three feats, or another sub class, and blah blah. You should finally be able to play the character you want by level 10… or you could just play a cleric and have all that at level 1.'

>>16898500

I guess I can see how that would be problematic, yes. I'd lay that at the feet of the devs not doing a good job giving every role something useful to be doing, which is pretty much what you were saying. There's an argument to be made that a rogue, specifically, is supposed to have most of his utility in non-combat situations, but I have no idea how Pathfinder operates and if that's a valid idea over there. This thread sorta makes me think about Red Mages in FFXI. In most other FF games they just ended up being shitty spellcasters overall by the end of the game. If they were useful it was because of some specific special skill they'd give (and then you'd dump them) or some end-game equipment they could use. So if they were actually generally useful it was early on. In the MMO, though, I vaguely remember that they either got useful spells out of order, or had unique spells, or had a useful 2-hour ability that gave them unique utility even though they were nominally and more-or-less in reality a shitty-melee shitty-spellcasting class. Anyone able to speak to that better than I can?

>>16898509

But that's where the whole "history of the character" and roleplaying thing comes in. There's at least nominally a big difference between someone who was a fighter for a few years then shifted for some reason into arcane magic and someone who started off their life as a cleric. Remember that in the really early D&D days you might not, if you really followed the rules, even successfully roll a character that qualified to play the type of character you were wanting to play. There was an element of dealing with the cards you'd been dealt and making fun happen even if it would be suboptimal rather than picking ahead of time what you wanted your character to be and to be doing. I don't pretend that everyone or even the majority of the players played that way, but that was pretty clearly what was intended in the earlier editions to the point where they talked about it in the DMG or player's handbook–I don't remember which. See, it was the DM's job to adjust the adventure if the characters were just too weak for the players to have fun playing it. If the players made obscenely bad choices along the way, now, that wasn't necessarily something the DM should fix, but in a tabletop game tweaking things so that it's not constantly frustrating or boring was always how things were intended to work. Players getting too powerful and bored with adventuring–the kind of power treadmill problems that made the old editions need revision in the first place–was largely the fault of DMs not wanting to put in the work of balancing adventures for their characters and/or letting players always get away with maximally optimal play.

>>16898522

Pathfinder is just a clone of D&D 3.5 with changes that the devs thought would make it better. Namely, there's no cross-class skill penalty (so rogues are theoretically even stronger in that regard) and you just get a flat bonus to your class skills at level 1 instead.

The problem with rogues in PF is hard to describe because if you come at it as a newbie to Pathfinder and just read the rogue class description, they look like a great and fun class with lots of neat little abilities that might set them apart from D&D rogues. However, the other classes outshine them in every individual regard. Alchemists have significant skill overlap along with a lot of elemental damage and potentially crowd control as well, along with amazing utility like invisibility. But the real rogue killer in Pathfinder from my experience are Bards, specifically the "Archaeologist" archetype (aka subclass). This subclass, which should have been a rogue subclass, drops all of the performance related shit in exchange for "luck bonuses" that apply to virtually everything you do, but only you individually. One of my tablemates made an archaeologist that ended up being one of the most powerful characters he'd made named Cordango. There's a feat called Antagonize that essentially gives you the "Taunt" ability from World of Warcraft – you force them to make a Wisdom check and fight you if they fail, taking the most direct route possible with consideration for hazards. This was utilized frequently in fights. He was also better at every non-combat task a rogue was supposed to do in every way because of the luck bonuses to his skill rolls, along with a spell called "gallantry" or something similar which lets you instantly add d4 to someone's d20 roll – even after you saw the result. And finally, an absolutely retarded spell called "Sift" which is a cantrip and allows you to search an area (as for traps) from a distance. That may have been a third party one but we were using the SRD, so we weren't paying very close attention. Their damage is not that great either compared to a sword saint cavalier or even just an archer fighter using the Deadly Aim feat (it's ranged power attack), primarily because they are too fragile to stay in melee combat without risking their lives.

>>16898532

So, I stopped reading tabletop books at D&D at 2nd edition, so my only exposure to later editions is through barely-remembered video games and people mostly complaining about them on the internet. My views are a little skewed and I probably shouldn't talk with authority about anything. That Architect thing, though, sounds like something that landed in a splatbook that nobody really thought about or tried to balance. It seems to be tacked-on subclasses that end up being gamebreakers, doesn't it? But anyhow, people making a tabletop game ought to realize that generic bonuses to everything a character is going to do will either be stupidly exploitable or ridiculously useless just because they'll want to put out stuff later that they won't be able to balance it against ahead of time. It's almost inevitable. Look at TCGs like Magic: their whole problem is starting with simple and broad rules, adding more cards with more broad rules, and slowly degenerating into a nightmare of addenda and special exceptions to try to keep the game in some kind of functional order. Tabletop games don't have the problem to that extent, but they do have it in a much slower fashion. But anyhow, even if that wasn't a latter-day problem it just sounds like fundamental bad balancing–like that Sift thing. If a "cantrip" means what it did in D&D at all, which I always understood to be a level zero spell that wasn't supposed to do anything well except maybe for roleplaying purposes, then it really shouldn't be in any way better than or a replacement for a basic class ability like "find trap." If that's the kind of stuff they were putting in their books (doesn't count if it was third party, I guess) then they were setting themselves up for balance problems. Then again, I don't design this stuff and so it's pretty easy for me to sit and say that as a reaction to how you describe it. I can imagine, though, why later editions of games seem to want to move to more rigid rule systems, because every developer has these balancing nightmares from their earlier editions plus content released later. Doesn't mean it makes the game better to do it, just that the devs inevitably take the human (easy) way out of the balancing headaches that they have learned they're going to confront if they don't do a lot of careful work upfront. And since when has anyone ever done a lot of careful work upfront when they can just take shortcuts, even if the end product ends up shallower?

>>16896663

You forgot your meme arrows. Here let me help you

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>>16898532

>you just get a flat bonus to your class skills at level 1 instead.

you get a 3 point bonus to class skills upon investment of your first skill point, not a flat bonus. This is analogous to how 3e/3.5e gave you 4x as many skill points and capped class skills at 4 points invested at level 1

>The problem with rogues in PF is hard to describe because if you…

play Unchained Rogue. They are now fun and properly versatile

>Alchemists have significant skill overlap along with a lot of elemental damage and potentially crowd control as well, along with amazing utility like invisibility.

Gee, it's almost like they were a codification of the flask rogue playstyle. Plus a little Jekyll & Hyde

>>16898574

>That Architect thing, though, sounds like something that landed in a splatbook that nobody really thought about or tried to balance. It seems to be tacked-on subclasses that end up being gamebreakers, doesn't it?

Not really. Not as much as it seems anyway. Archetypes in Pathfinder are intended to be a tweak, both in flavor and mechanics, on a class when your intended character breaks the written mold. IIRC 2e's class kits work in a similar manner. You give up class feature A to gain alternate class feature B. You can't stack archetypes for a given class if one of the new features replaces the same thing that the other archetype's features replace

It's true that a some archetypes are unreasonably unbalanced, but that goes in both directions. For example, the archetypes for the Vigilante class (basically Batman/The Scarlet Pimpernel. Archetypes for this class tend to have a superhero inspiration):

There's one that turns you into a beam-spam magician. The beams aren't as powerful at high level as you could get with weapons, but it's shooting beams out of your hands for free.

At the same time, there's one that turns you into the Incredible Hulk. After combat you have to make a will save to calm down or you turn on your friends (widely considered the single worst archetype in the game)

Hell, there's one that turns you into magic Spiderman. It's so-so.

All of these archetypes give up some features for others in the name of flavor, and some are more or less powerful as a result. Think of them instead as a matter of focus for the character; archetypes can pigeon-hole the way you play.

>>16896334

id 6832fd

>>16896675

id b74d67

>different ids..

I think that when it comes to magic in games and "balance" it's almost always more powerful to go with a hybrid in single PC games, while games with multiple PCs controlled by a single player usually get a mix of straight melee and magic and hybrids usually suck. In these games bards, paladins and rangers should usually be dropped for pure classes. – Ultimately though that still makes the party a hybrid party because of the access to melee and magic as a party. Few rpgs will forgive an attempt at an all melee or all magic group.

>>16898522

>Anyone able to speak to that better than I can?

In FF1, they cast black magic equally as effectively as black mages due to stats being so poorly programmed that they usually didn't do anything. They didn't have the white magic group heals, and weren't quite as durable as a pure fighter but had roughly the same melee damage.

In other words, they were the best class by a fucking mile. A fighter two reds and a white or three reds and a white were the best party combinations. This got even worse on the remakes when the buff spells had effects instead of doing nothing, so now red mages can buff up and outperform fighters in melee while still being as good at casting as black mages. No group heals though.

>>16898740

>play Unchained Rogue. They are now fun and properly versatile

Didn't exist or didn't know about it when we were playing. Nobody told me about Unchained until well after I did this campaign and it wasn't on the SRD.

>you get a 3 point bonus to class skills upon investment of your first skill point, not a flat bonus.

Uh, you just described a flat bonus, but sure whatever.

>>16898574

2nd edition was more "balanced" in my opinion. Not necessarily from a "by the numbers" perspective but from a more holistic experience perspective. You didn't feel like a do-nothing faggot when you were a fighter like you do in 3.5, because you got that sweep attack against annoying enemies that keeps the party alive at level 1, and later you automatically get a keep and land. Not to mention you level up decently fast. I think I mentioned it in my earlier post, but magic users usually died before they could get powerful because the margin for error in playing them was extremely slim. Clerics were still fucking amazing, though.

>>16896097

>why is summoning a meteor stronger than shooting a gun?

Are you retarded?

>>16898772

>Uh, you just described a flat bonus, but sure whatever.

the way you had phrased it implied that you got those 3 points for free at level 1 just for having picked your class. You don't; you have to invest a skill point for it

>>16898774

The "of course magic is cooler, it breaks reality" argument just reinforces bad game design. There is no reason that a fighter can't be a Greek hero, throwing boulders up huge cliffs, leaping over chasms and bending reality in other feats of superhuman strength and prowess. But you're still limited to 18 strength because "you're just a dude who swings a sword, duh."

>>16898770

In FF1 red mages could not use all the black spells nor get as many of them, they couldn't use transport spells either. Red mages were decent as a 4th pick but could never replace white or black mages.

>>16898790

Hear, hear!

On the flip side, magic doesn't have to be some overpowered shitshow. I prefer systems where it amounts to an alternative energy source, and your mastery of it just lets you use more, like attacking spells that are about as strong as arrows, or movement spells that are about as good as riding a horse. Just different ways to crack the same nut. Things that are straight reality warping teleporting/phasing/cloning/snap of your fingers kill moves should be impossible or at least unheard of.

>>16899003

>like attacking spells that are about as strong as arrows, or movement spells that are about as good as riding a horse

The problem is that these spells are boring compared to something like "instantly create a 10 foot pit underneath somebody." It's a delicate thing to balance when it comes to classes or archetypes, which is why many good RPGs eschew an archetype-based system entirely. My view is that numbers-based balance should be ignored in favor of "coolness" balancing. It should provoke the childish sense of competition within you: "I can make myself fly whenever I want to." "Fuck off nerd, come back when you can crush rocks with your bare fists." Players who are invested in the game will find story-worthy ways of using these types of abilities.

>>16898305

I quite like all of ToME's different "mana" bars, the stamina used by melee classes basically being just another mana pool if you think about it. They all have different ways of recovering them which affects your overall strategy, and some never "run out" but have other effects that let you keep casting forever if you're willing to take the risk. Depending on the class you play and what generic skill trees you find you might even have multiple resource bars at once.

>>16898790

ToME also does this, to an extent. One of the class trees available to most warrior classes has a skill that gives you a 1000% movement speed boost for a couple steps after killing an enemy, so fast you can walk around projectiles in midair. Even the time traveling classes don't get to walk quite that fast.

>>16899013

Aw man, numbers balancing. The sheer volume of arguments I've gotten into over how "realistic" something is versus how balanced it is… especially /tg/ related Truth is, being a game mean mechanics come first and style comes second. Every provided option should be viable (don't punish a player for playing the game), which means either magic is as weak as convention, or convention is as strong as magic.

>>16899088

>Convention is as strong as magic

This is what I prefer, personally.

>Mechanics come first

I would agree with you normally, but the problem is that tabletop roleplaying has s specific purpose, depending on who you ask. To me that purpose is to create an interesting story that you can think back on in fondness later. That usually doesn't happen when you have a bunch of abilities that are all the exact same across different classes. Do you like D&D 4e?

>>16898913

>could not use all the black spells

They couldn't use the 7th and 8th level damage spells that except for flare/nuke were all worse than their attack, they couldn't use the high level instant death spells that didn't work on actual threats and were worse than damage spells, and they couldn't use high-level buffs that didn't do anything due to glitches. They can learn the transport spells from both schools when they class change to red wizard.

In the remakes, they can use the high-level buffs and flare via items like the giant's glove. If you're actually trying to petrify or instantly kill enemies in FF1, you're a retard. Kill/XXXX only works on a single target with less than 300 HP, and if it has that little HP then a red mage can kill it just by attacking. They are the better version of black mages because the black spells they can't learn are bad to begin with.

>>16899130

Fair point. I guess options should have their own specialty/use, but generally games get overshadowed by combat, and if you're not useful in combat you end up being not useful. It's a game design problem, really. Not easily solved, sure.

>>16898770

Grand. Could you or someone talk about them in FFXI as I asked? I was specifically hoping for that because in that game they actually played a little differently than just a mage with both black and white magic, probably because it was an MMO. I can't remember for the life of me what was supposed to have been different about them.

Looking at all the complaints towards mages being too good, it appears that too often classes are made based on themes (martial theme, subterfuge theme, diplomacy theme, magic theme) without actually considering the class's role. It's not surprising wizards are better, if they get tools to deal with everything just because it's all magic spells.