Wizard Dogfights
No, I’m not talking about Busiek’s (excellent) Arrowsmith.
I hate mages in RPGs, for the most part. I hate them because they always work the same way. There’s some effort made to balance the power of the mage with the effectiveness of a sharp sword. Sometimes, there’s a tradeoff made — mages get to be more powerful in exchange for being fragile. Sometimes, there’s no tradeoff; in Ars Magica, mages are just better in every way (which is okay for ArM because they’re really the protagonists of the story). But the tradeoff becomes a false tradeoff. Either the mage is strong enough to withstand combat, in which case it’s irrelevant, or the mage is not strong enough, in which case who will play a character unable to overcome challenges?
I always end up feeling like ‘fireball’ is just another kind of ‘hit with sword’. Mages and warriors are reduced to the number that represents how much damage they can fling at enemies. In the degenerative case, in D&D, there are enemies that are invulnerable to all magic, and there are enemies that are (basically) invulnerable to all weapons. The mage and the warrior become useful through the crudest kind of content design. It’s like having a door that can only be opened by a halfling appear in every D&D game. You’ll get halfling characters in your game, but for all the wrong reasons.
This led me to start thinking about fighter pilots. I like this analogy, and I’ve poked at it before in thinking about science fiction, and it leaped to mind when I considered the problem of mages.
The image of the fighter pilot from WW2 is the dogfighting RAF ace, shooting down Luftwaffe fighter planes, spinning and looping in a furious battle of agility and skill. And it has been argued that Allied air superiority during the entire continental invasion brought about the Allied victory. But… no fighter pilot ever won a battle in the war. No village was liberated, no German force pushed out of France, by a fighter pilot. The war, the real war, was boots-on-the-ground. Battles were won, in the end, by infantry and armor. And mostly infantry. Until you’re standing in the center of the village, you haven’t liberated it.
So why were they critical to winning the war?
Well, fighters were there to attack other fighters, which were defending bombers. Bombers were there to destroy supply lines and infrastructure. Supply lines were there to keep troops on the ground healthy, well-supplied, and well-armed. The troops were there to hold back the Allied ground advance.
This chain of relevance starts at ‘guys with guns march into a town and shoot the enemy and retake the town’, and develops to ‘guys in tiny death machines fly through the skies nowhere near the battle trying to blow up other guys in tiny death machines.’ In the modern era, it goes even further, with ground spotters giving laser targets to air bombers, and ground-to-air man-portable missile systems targeting fighters and bombers alike.
My idea is that mages in games should serve a similar role to fighter pilots in WW2. The presence of a mage will tip the balance of any roughly evenly-matched fight. A mage can’t take the place of guys with swords, but he can enhance or support his side’s guys with swords. All other things being more or less equal, the side with a mage will win. But the real role of mages is to counter the abilities of your enemy’s mages. The mages break off from the main fight, in a sense having their own seperate battle just among themselves. If one side’s mages are victorious, they will then be able to turn their attentions to the main battle.
Some examples I can think of, off the top of my head: the role of magic in the Black Company novels by Glen Cook; the role of the wizard in Conan the Destroyer; the (poorly executed) distinction between Netrunners and other character types in Cyberpunk games; the arsenal of anti-mage spells available in the Baldur’s Gate 2 version of AD&D; Jadeclaw’s magic-oriented magic system.
What bores me is reduction of spells to a number that’s comparable to swords. What excites me is spells as a whole different layer of combat, another axis of effectiveness that may intersect the physical combat, but isn’t really part of the physical combat.
February 21st, 2005 at 10:55 am
I can imagine magical combat that mimics Torg’s Drama Deck effects. When one side is magically dominant, they get initiative more often, get extra resources, bonuses on skill rolls, and random lucky breaks. When the magical layer is more hotly contested, the effects swing back and forth, or are smaller, or are nonexistent.
Jadeclaw has a nifty wizard vs. wizard dynamic in the Aura manipulation rules, but I haven’t yet seen what effect the WvW has on regular kung fu.
February 24th, 2005 at 1:07 am
I have always really liked this analogy for D&D, especially because it helps explain why kingdoms with borders exist in a world where teleport also exists. Mages, like fighter pilots, are also crucially resource-constrained; they are extremely profligate and once their tank (of spells) is out, they are done done done. Fighters have more staying power but are still on the “armor” end of the equation.
I really like a D&D universe where the armies on the ground, the infantry and grunts, are still crucial.
A typical party with some melee characters and mages are then basically an armored, mobile scouting group with the equivalent of air support.
Some degenerate cases (teleporting in and ganking the enemy’s king) can be curtailed by MAD, good divination/intel, or other sneakiness.
That doesn’t completely change the mechanics, but it’s a useful way to look at D&D itself. I’ve read some fiction where mages are more exactly as you describe, more to counter each other, and giving an edge to their own side’s troops if there isn’t any opposition, and in general I love that. The Black Company is an excellent example (and also shows great examples of being able to get the drop on powerful wizards simply by being sneaky and quick.)