The Man Keeping the Martial Down

[CharonsHelper]

Unfortunately there are no such obvious limits for magical powers, so that part gets neglected, often with a 'well wizards are super-rare' dodge.

I do think that it would be POSSIBLE to allow much of this sort of stuff - but you'd have to have major weaknesses to wizards which D&D has never had (though earlier editions had some of them).

1. Have major drawbacks to the biggest spells. Make them take multiple rounds in which the caster is vulnerable etc. Early D&D did some of this - but they often left backdoor methods to plug those holes for the caster.

2. Have high level martials be inherently resistant to magic - which could lead to a RPS scenario between badass martials, casters, and armies. Armies can overwhelm any martial, high level martials can power through spells to take down casters (hopefully a martail & caster are about equal for the same leveled character - but the martials are much more common in lore) while casters can nuke armies. As an example - the martial could gain some sort of magical resistance pool which would have to be beaten through before SoD/SoS spells can do anything - in D&D terms without extra rules, the spells which require the target to be below X HP are a decent way of doing it.

3. Possibly make casters be able to more easily counter each-other, where (for example) a level 6 caster could mostly shut down a level 10 caster for a short time (though would run out of juice) giving his martial allies a chance to stab him while he can't cast. (I always WANTED 3.x's counterspelling system to work - but even after spending major character resources it was always mediocre. About the only way to do it decently was for a bard to counterspell with Dispel Magic after he'd already gotten Inspire Courage and a couple of buffs up - since he'd already done his job and even a 50-60% chance to shut down an equal level wizard was worth it.)