AMOUNT OF MAGIC IN FANTASY

Honestly, magic needs some limitations to be useful in a story, but gameplay-wise, if you're going up against gods and dragons and demons, magic is just another way of dealing damage.

Fantasy writers have spent a lot of time creating intricate magical systems and working out how they factor into their worlds, how they're limited and what, exactly, the conditions of use are.

Games, however, always ask for some suspension of belief in some way, shape or form, no matter what the game is. So much more so when it comes to battle aspects, so it's not a huge deal to be throwing whole planets around at your enemies - you know it's not real and it's not supposed to be.

Frankly, if you want to go realistic with magic, you'd better go realistic with physical damage too - so I should be able to kill the flimsy mage with a bow shot or cut their limbs off if I get close enough.

bahleted

So, I've been tossing a game idea of this style around for years, and considering the sort of graphical and coding investment it would take to make it as I'd like to, I'll probably continue to kick it around for years, but I think LightningLord's comment has a lot of sense to it.

It's not that there aren't ways to justify using both warriors and mages in combat within a single game's setting, but there's an almost complete absence of games that don't use these kind of justifications, even though they don't necessarily make much sense. Lots of the ideas we have about balancing the usefulness of magic and martial skill originate with tabletop roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons which offered players the chance to imagine themselves as adventurers in a variety of styles. They're designed for balance in a game which incorporates both kinds of combat, they're not explanations for why magic and martial skill logically have to be balanced in usefulness.

Considering how many JRPGs feature magic wielding teens and children, those games have already discarded the idea that magic takes long years of dedicated study to learn. The idea that mages are comparatively frail is usually preserved for game balance, but the same logic implies that there should be no buff college students. The idea that mages can't wear heavy armor is likewise a kludge- the original explanation is that it interferes with their concentration, and yet nothing prevents them from casting spells in the middle of a pitched battle surrounded by screaming and clashes of weapons. The real reason is that heavy armor is one of the main incentives to play a warrior-type character, and so it has to be restricted even though realistically speaking it's not that difficult to wear (a suit of full plate armor weighs about the same amount as the backpack overstuffed with textbooks I carried to and from high school, but the weight is much better distributed.)

If you stop deliberately making arrangements for balance, it's easy to envision a setting where magical means of warfare render skills like swordsmanship obsolete. I'd be interested to see a game where combat is all magic-based, and instead of HP, you have points representing the strength of the barriers standing between you and magical obliteration. Barriers could be shifted through a distribution of damage type affinities, so for instance if you expect to be attacked with a fire spell you can funnel most of the strength of the barrier into protecting against fire, even to the point that it'll absorb fire damage, but then if you get blindsided by another type of spell, it'll do massive damage. Healing magic only exists in a plot-based rather than mechanical context, and if any of your characters are attacked past the limits of their barrier, it's Game Over (which means the combat naturally has to be calibrated according to the assumption that a single character getting knocked out is a failure condition.)

author=TC
Just not in RPGs. They want us to believe that a lightning bolt does less damage than a whack with a wooden club.

This is a broad overgeneralization. It depends on the RPG; sure, there are games where magic is 'eh' at best, but there are others where magic is completely a force to be reckoned with, and the gameplay, plot, or both reflects this. Final Fantasy VI and Dragon Age are two good examples.

The quote in the OP reminds me of the myriad powergaming douches in the tabletop gaming scene who are so mad that magic users aren't basically God incarnate and capable of destroying everything with a single breath, and instead must suffer the indignity of having other party members being able to do things- occasionally things the magic users can't do! THE GALL! DO THEY NOT KNOW I AM MASTER OF FORCES THEY CANNOT CONCEIVE OF?!

Frankly, I'm 100% fine with settings that allow all the party members equal access to awesomeness. These are (usually) heroes, and thus deserve to be equally heroic, whether their abilities come from eldritch forces, zappy shit, or amazing muscles. It'd be just as crap to state that the magicians can't win because they're wimpy nerds who never exercise. They're not normal doodz, they don't need to be constrained by normal doodz logic!

tl;dr- approaching the question as though it were godlike magician vs. normal thug is dumb and shortsighted.

I think that when magic in a world is everywhere and is taken for granted, like it is in the Dragon Warrior series or the first five Final Fantasy games or Warcraft or a lot of other medieval RPGs, it loses its meaning and becomes pointless. It provides a functional gameplay device to allow healing in combat, but that's about it, and you can do that with first aid kits or lots of other methods.

The downside of adding fantasy into a story is that it feels less like a real world, but the upside is that the fantastic elements are compelling; people are drawn in because they want to see where those things come from and where they lead. One or the other of those pieces of information is typically good enough; Final Fantasy 6 builds its conflict around where magic comes from, while Dragon Age goes into great detail about the path it leads the world down. Final Fantasy 10 barely provides even a taste of either one - everything supernatural is just ignored and taken for granted with the exception of Sin, and the end result is that you get the downside of a fantasy setting without getting the upside. What's the point? Congratulations, you made magic mundane and boring.

There might not be any good quotes to illustrate it, because games which are that magic-centric are so rare. I picked up the intended meaning because I've had thoughts along the same lines, but I've never seen a game which actually runs with the idea before. It probably would have been clearer if he had described the idea himself.

It's a good way to turn fantasy back into something which gives the player a sense of being exposed to a new and unfamiliar world. Generic medieval fantasy is too overexposed to cultivate curiosity at this point, but what about a setting where armored knights ride into battle and blast each other with thunderbolts, because the usefulness of magic completely supercedes weaponry, and magic-based troops are the core of armies. It gives the player reason to wonder what else about the setting is different from their usual experience, whereas in a conventional fantasy setting there's no reason to ask.

Yeah honestly I can't think of a game off the top of my head that HASN'T at least made vague hints about the fantastic elements being included in the worldbuilding. I suppose there's something to be said for the magic-based worldbuilding question "Why haven't magic users taken over the world?" but otherwise... vOv

author=LockeZ
Tales of Seriesia

Pretty much every Tales game I know of (Symponia, Vesperia, Graces, and the Xillias) have their plots revolve HEAVILY around the world's mana-equivalent, often treating it like any other non-infinite energy source such as fossil fuels. In Graces literally everything in the world is made of some combination of primal "magic" elements. Often the end of the games involve radically changing world by either revitalizing or removing the source of it all, or something more complicated.

The games also have your "thunder axes" and whatever in the form of the Artes attacks, and most playable characters will know at least a minor healing spell or something. They'll also have magic-based guns and tanks sometimes (which I'm pretty sure are also common in a number of other RPG settings), but some games restrict the access to magic by requiring some kind of trinket, like Blastia or Lilium Orbs or Mana Lobes etc.

Though, I guess these games still don't take things as far as some people in this forum are talking about.