Ruminations on the Arcane: Balancing Magic in your game

System agnostic musings on Magic

What we mean when we say balance

One of the bigger complaints I have heard throughout my GMing career is the balance between magic users and everyone else. A lot of systems have tried to solve this in one way or another with differing levels of success.

Magic is supposed to be powerful, if it wasn’t why would people want it. However there are ways to have it in a game and have it be powerful without totally robbing other players of their perceived role.

This can happen when you have a fighter who is worse at fighting than a mage who may have buffed themselves up, or just used an area effect fireball to clear a room. There is nothing wrong with this happening occasionally but if this is the default there is no reason for the fighter to play a fighter. You can swap this out for an outdoorsman character who is made obsolete by easily creating food and water by a mage.

So how do you achieve this balance? Well there are a few ways.

Everyone has magic

This is a highly genre dependent solution, but it is accomplished by either having everyone be a magic user or, alternatively, giving martials and other classes such cinematic abilities that they are effectively magic. For example you can have a fighter who can cut an illusion in half, or a Wuxia fighter jumping in a way that is effectively flight.

This balances things because there is no longer a difference. The downside is that you have likely left realism far, far behind. For many games this does not matter and Reality is often unrealistic so YMMV. However I feel that this solution has its limits when trying to tell more grounded (I prefer using that word so much more than using the word realistic) campaigns.

Magic has weaknesses

This one makes things more tactical. Now when I say weaknesses this can vary from material weaknesses such as magic not working against specific materials, magic takes a long time to cast and can be interrupted, to limits on what magic can and cannot effect. You see lots of examples of this from completely anti magic materials to specific styles of magic having specific weaknesses.

The advantage of this is that Magic is now simply another tactical choice. You can use the fireball to take out the army, but if anyone gets to you in the 30 seconds it takes to cast, the whole thing could be lost. This allows the fighters to have a role which is the defense of the caster in this scenario. Also if the fighter gets the drop on the wizard in this case they have a good chance to take them out before the death spell goes off. The time example makes the mage have to be prepared and the fighter more flexible. In the material example you get the opposite, now the fighter has to be prepared to have the advantage. You can set up the tactical rock paper scissors to whatever level of complexity you want.

The disadvantage of this is, obviously, the fiddly work of figuring out all the weaknesses and making sure they aren’t too debilitating. You also don’t want the weakness to be so trivial that it doesn’t matter. Unfortunately, often the only way to determine this is through a decent amount of simulation and playtest but it can lead to decent balance if done right.

Magic has a cost

This goes beyond the basic energy cost which is probably just another example of weaknesses. When I talk about cost this is more the casting of magic does great harm to the caster, has lingering corruptive influence, or gets the attention of otherworldly beings. This kind of balance takes a bit more time to really show up, so if this style of magic is used in a one shot, it likely is not going to matter.

This allows more narrative weight to magic as it asks of the players, how far are they willing to go for power, and what they will give up. The cost could even be living beings which will challenge the morality of the player. This style of balance is one I enjoy because of the narrative tension it adds.

However, if you have players who don’t necessarily care about the narrative weight, or don’t care about corruption or moral cost, who are happy to play a villain, you have given them carte blanche to unlimited power. This is why going to the dark side in the old Star Wars revised game also had a literal physical debilitation that also came with it. Oftentimes you need to add a more mechanical stick to match the narrative stakes. Which leads to the next point.

More than one?

Sure, why not? Honestly for an interesting game you are likely going to want to mix and match. Maybe everyone has magic, but it has established weaknesses which allows big flashy combat and tactical stakes as well. Maybe everyone has magic but also everyone is fighting over how to use it because of its corruptive influence. You can also have different methods of balance in the same game if done carefully. One style of magic is very powerful but very costly while another is not corruptive but is easily countered.

At the end of the day your goal with balance is to allow your players meaningful choices. Will they need to bring their heavy countermagical amulet on this long journey in case they meet a magical enemy rather than other equipment? Is this spell going to help enough to risk the long term consequences? These are questions that you want to give to players because it makes them feel like what they are doing matters.

At the end of the day we are all at a table pretending to do magic, but we don’t need to make it less meaningful.

What magic systems do you feel fall into one or another of these categories? Are there other methods I have not discussed (of course there are!)? Leave some comments!