OpenQuest Rules Question: Battle magic overpowered?

[Jakob]

Hi folks,

I'm kind of back to the BRP familiy - I played a lot of Stormbringer and CoC back in the 80s/90s and kind of lost sight of the systems family ... I've been reading RQ/Mythras stuff for a while now to get back into it, but don't have the time (or the players) to really get into such an extensive rules set, so I thought I might give OpenQuest a spin. Did that a few days ago with the wonderful "Life & Death" setting and a one-shot adventure with the pregens it provides.

The system worked pretty well for me, but one thing surprised me: Battle Magic seemed to be awfully powerful in combat, especially Multi-Missile and Weapon Enhance. One of the pregens had it with magnitude 4, which meant that he fought pretty much any fight with an attack of 90% (+40) and +4 magical damage. (He still died, succumbed to a critical hit from a ghoul queen, but he did a heck of a lot of damage before that!).

In the long run, this seems a little overpowered ... did I miss something in the rules? Or ist this simply intended this way?

Edited June 6, 2016 by Jakob

[Joerg]

There usually are no items giving permanent magical attack or damage bonuses as in other rpgs, including D&D. The player has to spend a combat action to activate this magic, too, and has a chance to fail his roll. After the spell, his spell resistance is reduced by the amount of magic points invested (unless he used an external source or battery).

If the opposition is using some battle magic as well (say protection 4), the damage bonus can be cancelled out. If the opposition uses magic actively targeting the player character, the weakening will come into play, too.

You can adjust your tougher opposition by spicing them up with a little battle magic, too. Especially when their magic is cast by some flunkies, leaving their own magic point score full.

[Jakob]

35 minutes ago, Joerg said:

There usually are no items giving permanent magical attack or damage bonuses as in other rpgs, including D&D. The player has to spend a combat action to activate this magic, too, and has a chance to fail his roll. After the spell, his spell resistance is reduced by the amount of magic points invested (unless he used an external source or battery).

If the opposition is using some battle magic as well (say protection 4), the damage bonus can be cancelled out. If the opposition uses magic actively targeting the player character, the weakening will come into play, too.

You can adjust your tougher opposition by spicing them up with a little battle magic, too. Especially when their magic is cast by some flunkies, leaving their own magic point score full.

Hm, even given all that, it seems like a pretty big thing if a spell nearly doubles the to-hit/parry chance of a fighter for a whole combat - and if the characters have a few rounds to prepare (like when they are seeing a horde of zombies shambling closer), it is really not that difficult to manage casting one spell...

I don't get the reference about the lowered spell resistance, however - I'll have to read up on this.

Anyway, I never really played any of the systems where items give you huge bonuses (and never really liked the concept ...). So to me, this seems pretty powerful - still, not a gamebreaker, and if I continue disliking this element, it is easy to houserule (making Weapen Enhance 2 spells, for  example, one enhancing the skill, the other one the damage, or doubling its cost ...).

[Whisker89]

Battle Magic is indeed powerful, that's why in my OQ campaign no character can raise anyone of his battle magics above Magnitude 2 without finding a proper master and/or getting on an important quest... Never allow a player to instantly raise his spells'magnitude "just because they have expendable improvements"!

Also, I tend to encourage skills raising instead of getting new spells.

Finally, as the old cyberpunk 2020 manual said: if your players want to be powerful, give them very powerful enemies to clash against

[Jakob]

6 hours ago, Whisker89 said:

 

Finally, as the old cyberpunk 2020 manual said: if your players want to be powerful, give them very powerful enemies to clash against

I think I'll go with your solution of restricting Battle Magic. Of course, more powerful enemies are always an option, but frankly, that's not the playing style I'm looking for in a BRP game.

[Mankcam]

I used to restrict it based on POW minimums. 1PP for POW 10, and raise that by 1PP for each additional 3pts of POW.

Of course the other restrictions are narrative, such as teacher availability, cult/guild requirements, etc

Edited June 12, 2016 by Mankcam

[Newt]

On 06/06/2016 at 8:13 PM, Joerg said:

There usually are no items giving permanent magical attack or damage bonuses as in other rpgs, including D&D. The player has to spend a combat action to activate this magic, too, and has a chance to fail his roll. After the spell, his spell resistance is reduced by the amount of magic points invested (unless he used an external source or battery).

If the opposition is using some battle magic as well (say protection 4), the damage bonus can be cancelled out. If the opposition uses magic actively targeting the player character, the weakening will come into play, too.

You can adjust your tougher opposition by spicing them up with a little battle magic, too. Especially when their magic is cast by some flunkies, leaving their own magic point score full.

Joerg pretty much sums it up.

OQ Battle Magic is modeled after my memories of playing RQ 3 pretty much consistantly during the 90s, with Spirit Magic (Battle magic under a different name) as the magic of choice because EVERYONE got some at character gen. Magic is powerful, but only in the absense of the opposistion using magic. Which means if you use the Monsters as People principle, the aquistion of magic by NPCs and the advancement of maginitude by the PCs in response can rapidly become its own Arms Race

And this is before we even get to characters using Sorcery and Divine Magic...which I deliberately left out of OpenQuest Basics and Life and Death to keep things simple