Spellcasters are button mashers.

Comments · 391

• AN

  @anachronisticluke · 9 months ago

  Mage: The Ascension is a great example of a magic system that lacks paper buttons (barring metacurrencies that can be used for magic) and requires the characters to interact in some way with their environment and/or explore their own paradigm to justify their magical effects. It's also a system that assumes all the players are going to engage with the magic system by default so it doesn't even have the problem of a martial/caster divide.

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• JE

  @JeanPhilippeBoucher · 9 months ago

  I think part of the issue is that most martial &quot;ability trees&quot; or power progression systems makes the character more specialized by promoting some of the always available options to be better than the other ones. <br><br>As fighters gets better at tripping people with polearms, they start experiencing the game through a narrower pool of meaningful choices. They kind of coalesce around one or two generic game option and are discouraged from diversifying.<br><br> I think that&apos;s because the martial abilities are often scaling up damage and efficiency or tackling on rider effects that then establish the baseline for enemy scalings - so anything you don&apos;t upgrade falls behind the curve.

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• AN

  @AndreGMTips · 9 months ago

  You&apos;ve expanded my game design lexicon yet again (and helped me understand better why I prefer the styles that I do!). Thanks as always, Peter!

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• TR

  @troytucker339 · 9 months ago

  I find Dungron Crawl Classic&apos;s warrior and their Mighty Deeds ability fills the hole of martial characters&apos; adding &quot;effects&quot; in combat.

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• TO

  @torilantrip4412 · 9 months ago

  You aren’t wrong! One of the perennial home brews that pops up every few months on the SD subreddit is how to give martial more paper buttons.

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• DN

  @dnd402 · 9 months ago

  I tried making a version of my RPG where fighters had more <b>sauce</b> to them, cool powers, sweeps, ect<br>and my martial players <b>haaaaated</b> it. the casters who tried martials in the playtests liked them more, but not as much as playing wizard or cleric.<br>Meanwhile the martial players had far less fun, so after a lot of grumbling on my part, i looked through Mythic Bastionland, Mothership, and Troika, and eventualy made a fighter that had functionally no features, who really just liked to make ability checks better than everyone else and hit things; and players LOVED it, across the board.<br><br>I think as designers, we have a lot of fun designing things, so it is easy to think &quot;ahh, the solution must be to do more design here!&quot; but sometimes simplicity lets the mechanics get out of the way for players who want to focus on the more core rules.<br>Keeping things simple for those who wanted it simple, while getting complex for those who wanted it complex let everyone have something in the game they enjoyed, rather than trying to make each class for every type of player. Its definitely not the only solution here, but is certainly the direction that worked best for me; though i do have a bias towards over complexity.<br><br>Many of these martial players had more fun with DND 5e&apos;s mechanics than Pathfinder 2e, even though they were significantly weaker in 5e, as they felt they had too much in the way when playing pathfinder, having to intimidate and roll past people and grapple and flourish, ect, they want their mechanics simple so they can focus on the narrative and have fun that way, rather than trying to figure out if a spell could help here, they can jump in and take care of trouble more directly.<br><br>I don&apos;t think there is a wrong way to do this, but I think its worth considering keeping things simple.

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• EL

  @ElderGoblinGames · 9 months ago

  Valid points as always. It&apos;s funny, I tend to be someone who likes loose narrative frameworks, that being said, I&apos;ve always enjoyed magic classes in games because they push the envelope of what&apos;s possible into the fantastical.<br>I love my clerics, druids, and wizards in part because those paper buttons allow us to see the vision of cool ideas that we may not have initially envisioned for ourselves.<br><br>Sometimes it&apos;s fun to have have those precise wordings of spells because they tell us what ways we&apos;re allowed to break the rules, which if you consider the fundamental fantasy of magic, that&apos;s exactly what it does, it breaks the laws of nature or the game.<br><br>Recently my favorite magic systems have been games like Cairn and Knave that just give you an evocative narrative idea to springboard off of. But I will always have a soft spot for wildshape, dimension door, and all the classic favorites that did the groundwork for those more loose ideas of magic.<br>Great video Peter.

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• TH

  @TheRansomed55 · 9 months ago

  My game is all paper buttons. 😂 I like them - I think they make TTRPGs more like board games and make it easier for players to comprehend what they can do. And it is fantastic when martial get them too - it makes each combat style feel comparably engaging.

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• GR

  @Grimmlocked · 9 months ago (edited)

  4e came out when i was in 8th grade and i loved that system. I REALLY liked how while the wizards still got to play merlin the martials got to play gilgamesh

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• TI

  @TimothyWeinell · 9 months ago

  You&apos;re really pressing my buttons with this video.

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• AL

  @Almanach_der_Abenteuer · 7 months ago (edited)

  I love learning about new Terminoligy for things I had merely implicitly understood up until now, thank you for expanding my horizon with &quot;paper buttons&quot;!<br><br>My main PnP experience revolves around TDE, a vastly complex German TTRPG that I have come to love more than any other (although, needless to say, it still has many flaws, even to someone as obsessed as me). Perhaps this is interesting to you? <br>It&apos;s a little more nuanced than this, but basically TDE gives everyone and anyone &quot;paper buttons&quot; - clerics, wizards, martials etc. etc. - but in quite a diverse way. All divine or magical spells have sort of &quot;extensions&quot; you can learn, with which you can slightly amplify your supernatural ability in different ways (which I think is a pretty cool way of progressing an individual ability), but there&apos;s also this seperate feat called &quot;Reversalis&quot;: you have to learn this for each spell seperately, but once you do, at some additional costs, you can Invert the effect of the spell, which gives an amazing diversity to magical abilities. If you use the - let&apos;s call it &quot;Sectumsempra&quot; spell, just pure damage - and you invert it with the &quot;Reversalis&quot;, it&apos;s suddenly a healing spell.<br>What is more, martial leaning characters have a similar amount of weapon maneuvres as the casters have spells. Unfortunately, a lot of them are quite useless, but it allows for an incredible versatility. Especially because you can combine some maneuvres with each other, creating sort of &quot;new&quot; ones.<br>There is even the possibility of removing all paper buttons and constraints for your magic, which is called &quot;Free Magic&quot; or &quot;Freizaubern&quot; in German. You have to learn this for each &quot;Domain&quot; individually and allows you to describe a magical effect you would like to produce, and the DM then decides how much &quot;mana&quot; it should cost you. However, this is not officially intended to be put into player&apos;s hands and requires probably decades of dedicated study. But I still think It&apos;s interesting to think about :)

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• JJ

  @JJamesDeVoe · 9 months ago

  I really needed this video at this time. I am “designing” a “system” to play with my brother and sister, right now it looks a little like TFE and SWADE had a baby. My brother loves hating spellcasters in every game he plays. And my sister hates going through spell lists. Making a “class” for my brother was easy, I just took the flavor and Anathema of the PF2e Superstition Instinct Barbarian, said that it must make two successful strikes to enter a rage (inspired by your barbarian video), buffed rage to completely ignore magical effects, and grant an AOO on spellcasting actions. But I’ve been toying around with how to make a fun, dynamic caster that rewards creativity. And you’ve convinced me that maybe less is more. I’ll just make two or three base spells for each type of caster that allow for lots of creativity and see where she runs with it.

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