Make weapons, on average, do more damage, but give magic the ability to deal out horrible damage with good rolls.
That would require a lot of math to figure out how much magic is supposed to deal. In some ways it'll already be like that, as a good magic spell can light people on fire, bury them alive, or otherwise do horrible things to people.
Give spells a lovely Luck roll (we all love our luck rolls, right?).
Make it so higher level spells have more penalties (which is what I'm doing in my RTD. So far it's keeping players somewhat at bay).
Already planning to. (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!) Incidentally, higher-level spells will go all sorts of wrong when miscast, but... well, I guess that might be sort of a balancing factor.
Make it so players have a Magic Pool and it regenerates slowly instead of just letting them cast at will. Make the regeneration too slow to let a spell be used every turn.
Blegh, I don't want to bother with that. Besides which, it just means mages have to be gishes, not that melee people are on par with them.
QFT. This is always a good universal fallback; a fighter is more damage-per-second while a mage is a nuke. That's how I see it.
Ah, but how to make that happen? I suppose making mundane combat more reliable, whereas magic damage might massively overkill or fizzle out (or blow up yourself and others) is basically what I'm already doing, but I'm uncertain of the exact numbers.
Don't do that. It feels random and arbitrary, even though everything is decided by RNG anyway.
Like an arch magi failing a cantrip random.
I don't use Luck rolls for a reason, is all I'm saying. Like the example Ochita pointed out, it doesn't matter how skilled you are, all it takes is a single roll to make it where your Legendary Swordsman cuts his own leg off, misses entirely, kills an ally, etc. I guess I wouldn't mind Luck if it applied when you were unskilled at something, but after a certain point you really should be skilled enough that you can eliminate most random elements.
Too late. If it's any consolation, spells can get pretty powerful when they do work, and luck rolls won't apply to most mundane skills. A Legendary Pyromancer is always in danger of lighting
himself on fire, yes, but he can also raze entire villages to the ground. Even an unskilled swordsman isn't actually in danger of cutting his own legs off, however. Well, unless I add counters back in and he attacks a Legendary Swordsman, in which case that'd sort of be the case.
Still, maybe I'll consider some way of letting extremely high-skill individuals sacrifice some of it to avoid luck rolls (unlikely). And certainly I'll think about making basic attack spells function more like weapon attacks. Hm...
I could only imagine using lucks rolls on casting if the players are entirely inept magic users.
Quiet you, you're running some dignified Jedi campaign. I wanna see Caligula in a wizard's hat.
For example, in Westlands RTD, it makes magic pretty much worthless, for anything but GM cruelty potential.
Then why is everyone a mage?
Really, you can almost hear Tarrans pained sigh every time someone rolls a 3,3 on a spell roll.
To be fair, he couldn't have been the
only one laughing hysterically every time I stuffed a portion of my soul into a rock.
Anyway, I hope you guys will be happy to know the luck rolls every spell will be gone in the next edition.
On the other hand, you'll get far lower bonuses to the first roll. But so will the enemies.
But... but how will I stuff my soul into rocks? How will my golem go berserk and murder us all? How will I become a Cheddarius?
You've just given me a good counter strategy. Every time you do a luck roll, I'll come up with a relevant TVTropes page. We'll see who's laughing in the end... >:3
Huh. That'll be interesting... but it'll almost be like you're doing my work for me. Wanna come up with appropriate music as well?