The Man Keeping the Martial Down

[Quertus]

I really hope there are more examples. It'd be really quite sad if there aren't.

"Fighters" being bad outside of combat is often assumed with a lot of TTRPG systems, yet the idea of a "Wizard" being worse in combat than "Fighters" is apparently very rare. It makes sense, considering that's the reason for this whole thread, but a bit sad that many game developers haven't recognized the bad trend.

Or maybe game developers don't consider anything that's not combat to be relevant. 4e did that, and the disparity between Fighter types and Wizard Types were actually extremely low.

Maybe that's the solution: If you care about balance, make the game only about combat; otherwise, don't.

[Edit] I guess the Warhammer 40k TTRPG is kinda like this, where Spess Mahreens were deathbots and everyone else were cannon fodder with backstories.

There was a Diablo-like cRPG (Dark Stone, maybe?) where the Wizard had cool out of combat utility, but the Fighter was so much better & easier to play in combat.

I think "making the game be only about one thing" *may* make it less likely that you'll get complaints about balance. But that might be overly optimistic.

On a related note… Are the colors in MtG really balanced? Do people complain about color balance, or just the balance of individual cards?

Hm, ok, two things:

The argument is mostly about the difference between internal and external power sources and by extension, having to rely on the GM. You might know from past conversations that I don't differentiate too much between having the Gate spell, owning a Candle of Invocation, paying a NPC for the service to cast Gate (maybe from a scroll) or simply looking for a permanent gate somewhere. For me, knowing that there are multiple ways to reach the same goal is enough and as a GM, I tend to include anything in a module or scenario that might be needed to succeed, more or less independent of the characters involved (as in, doors without keys are a bit weird, magic traps without deactivation words, too...). For a lot of others, tho, it is absolutely important that they have a secured internal access to such things, as it forms the basis of their whole planning and interaction with the game world.

The other thing is that I question a bit whether you have stayed up to date in regards to how to handle a Wizard. I don't mean the whole theory-talk about what could be possible under an extremely lenient GM and some such, but simply best practices how to build them and manage their resources, especially how to stay flexible and how to use stable multi-functional spells to gain access to support or i-win-buttons on the fly. A rather simple example would be using feats that rapidly speeded up the time it takes to fill a slot on thy fly, or swap out prepped spells or knowing which summons will grant access to certain SLAs/SUs and so on. That's not exactly high-OP stuff, but rather part and parcel of what can be found in the more up to date guides.

Well, IMO, that's not "best practices", it's "optimization". If what you care about is table balance, it's arguably worst practices. Of course, I'm advocating making all spells be usable at will, and then dragging the Fighter kicking and screaming up to the Wizard's level.

For that first bit… I find your stance (and analysis) most reasonable.