Quote:
Originally Posted by Calliban
My question is - what is a reasonable (or bare minimum) value for the starting character points that would allow cinematic martial artists to work, but would not let wizards to get out of hand?
|
It depends a lot on what you mean by wizards getting "out of hand." The wizard will never be able to do what the martial artist can do, even with 500 points. A wizard can't do much damage (missile spells are slow and inaccurate) and is easily stopped by countermeasures such as Magic Resistance, no mana zones, meteoric materials, countermagic, etc. The Martial Artist will be able to dish out massive amounts of damage with extra attacks, rapid strikes, power blows, etc., and no wizard will come close to that.
I've seen wizards get totally out of hand in two major ways: buffing allies (your wizard will turn your martial artist into a superhero with buff spells like Flight, Great Haste, Haste, Partial Shapeshifting (Spider Arms), and many others) and short-circuiting the adventure (flying the party over obstacles, divining the location of the McGuffin, turning the whole party invisible to circumvent enemies, mind-controlling key NPCs, etc.).
If you really want to restrict your wizard, make your world low mana. The player of the wizard might expect some compensation for this. One way to compensate is to make countermeasures very rare in the world due to the low prevalence of magic, so enemies don't have Magic Resistance and sky-high resistance scores, the villain isn't prepared with Mage Sight to see what you're up to, Suspend Mana to turn off the mana around you when it's most inconvenient, Scryfool to mess with your divinations, etc., and in general NPCs aren't prepared for what magic can do.
Alternatively, leave the world as normal mana and make liberal use of such countermeasures!
And finally, don't be afraid to ban or house-rule problem spells. I have a whole document filled with house rules and homebrew spells that I've created over the years to customize Magic for my games. A lot of these aren't bans or nerfs but the opposite, as many spells in Magic are really bad as written but can become playable with a few tweaks.
If you're looking for a number, I would say 250 is good (DF1 has helpful templates for such characters at 250 CP), but it leaves Martial Artists a bit weak--I think they come into their own at around 400 CP, because it's really hard to have cinematic skills that are based on IQ/Will and roll successfully when you're at -10 for instant use. Here, I'm using "Martial Artist" to mean "PC with Trained By a Master." If you're focusing on Weapon Master and don't plan on using Flying Leap and Power Blow, you can definitely get by on 250 CP (see other DF1 fighter templates: Barbarian, Holy Warrior, Knight, Scout).