Empirical Data on Spell Levels?

You know these researchers who published a paper in PLOS ONE are massive nerds. Because the paper determines how hard people think it should be to produce various magical effects. Spell levels by democracy!

D&D spell levels have remained amazingly constant over the different editions of the game -- even when they shouldn't -- so we can see that level in the game is equal parts arbitrary choices and game effect considerations, rather than how much counterfactual power it takes to actually engineer the change.

McCoy J, Ullman T (2019) Judgments of effort for magical violations of intuitive physics. PLoS ONE 14(5): e0217513. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.021751

Most of these effects are available in the more developed form of AD&D and its followers. To wit:

Conjure: 3 (Monster Summoning I; arguably, conjuring a normal frog is more of a cantrip power)

Cease: 6 (Disintegrate)

Transform: 4 (Polymorph Other)

Split: 8 (Clone)

Stone: 6 (Stone to Flesh)

Invisible: 2 (Invisibility)

Big: 1 (Enlarge)

Teleport: 5 (Teleportation)

Levitate: 2 (Levitate)

Color: 0 (Color cantrip, Unearthed Arcana)

The correlation between these numbers and the intuitive numbers?  A not very impressive r = .43, which means that if you know one of two spells has a higher D&D level, it is only 65% likely it will also have a higher intuitive rank.

This brings us to why spells in D&D from earliest editions to 5th have the level they do, if it's not through some magical model of energy. Yes, it's play balance. Making a frog-sized chunk of most creatures disappear from their anatomy would be more lethal then calling a frog-sized creature into being, even a poisonous one. The same magical physics go into turning a friend and a foe invisible. Merely doubling the mass of a person doesn't have the same delightful possibilities as creating a second, exact duplicate of them. 

AD&D spells, as I've noted before, were not always well designed in the level assigned them. There has been a curious conservatism where spells tend to keep their levels and are more likely to be redesigned to fit their level in power, than to be reassigned level, although some exceptions (like Tasha's Laughter in 5th ed.) can be found. I'm sure this can be backed up by reading Delta's individual "Spells through the Ages" posts, although that scholarly compendium is maddeningly lacking in post tags or a search tool. As an example, Shatter was re-balanced as a damage spell rather than item destruction, which although situational, was quite powerful at the right time. Sleep in fifth edition also had its power curve smoothed out -- not so encounter-ending at early levels, not so useless at late. And Meteor Swarm earns its 9th-level slot by doing five times as much damage as the 3rd-level fireball, as opposed to the AD&D spell whose average damage was not very impressive compared to the average 63 points an 18th-level caster could deal out with a fireball. 

Still, fifth edition has its shares of third-level wizard spells that are nowhere near as useful as the old standards Dispel Magic, Haste, Fireball, and Lightning Bolt, joined by the new wonder-kid on the block, Counterspell (thanks, Wizards). The best that can be said for a Sending, Leomund's Hut, or Phantom Steed is that the wizard memorization economy allows some room for them, and they can be prepared for a special need regardless. Their utility goes up the more the campaign shifts away from toe-to-toe combat and into travel and politics. In that sense, they seem vestigial only as much as difficult travel, communication with allies, and other logistical considerations are brushed over in campaign development.

Wizardry Demands Cosplay

Having discussed the armor-mobility tradeoff, another balance issue in fantasy games is whether wizards get to wear armor.

In editions of D&D up to 2nd, the explanations were as vague as hit points. The metal in armor disrupts magical energies;the encumbrance limits the wizard's gestures; you need training to wear armor, which the wizard doesn't have. While earlier editions ignored the rather obvious exceptions to the first two explanations (wear leather armor; cast spells without gestures), the third eventually became canon, starting with 3rd edition. With the rationalization of this rule came the rationalization of the way out. If the wizard becomes proficient in stomping around heavy armor, at the expense of more class-appropriate character development, he or she can certainly wear it.

These game-world reasons, though, are maybe besides the point. Their slow development over time shows that a stronger reasons is game balance. More specifically, class role protection. A wizard should have reasons within the game mechanics to act like a wizard, lobbing spells from the back row, protected by tougher characters up front. So, we make the wizard weak in single combat; fantasy artillery.

But I think there's a third reason. Wizards need to look like wizards, and the archetype of a wizard (unlike a knight, or a cleric militant) has nothing to do with armor.

Here's what convinced me: Let's accept the "game balance" reason and any of the game-world reasons of conductivity, encumbrance, or training. How would the strategic wizard dress for adventure or the battlefield?

Remember, this is a world where a spell-caster can turn the tide of battle, if not interrupted by a well-timed arrow. So your wizard is standing there like the officers of Napoleonic warfare, in a bright costume of visibility and authority, ready to be picked off. In civilization things are not much better; sometimes wizards are respected, other times they're burned at the stake. The logical, rational play is to dress your wizard normally - as a goose girl, traveling peddler, pack bearer, or whatever. Letthe magic do the talking, when it needs to.

Indeed, these considerations (or maybe just the inconvenience of flowing robes and a tall hat in a cave crawl) seem to have come into play designing the Ral Partha line of official AD&D 2nd edition miniatures. In keeping with the mundane fantasy-realism of that period, the "adventuring mages" and "wandering sorcerers" all sport practical breeches-and-jerkin combos, with nary a horned headdress or navel gem in sight,

Well, to hell with that! Wizards should be flamboyant, identifiable; that should be their mark, their pride, their penalty. It's not that armor encumbers or disrupts the magic, but it'snot part of the outfit. And the outfit is necessary for the magic to work - the wizard needs to feel like a wizard, needs the ritual vestments of the role in order to believe and have the forces of the universe believe. This is a principle of hermetic ritual magic (pdf) and it is a good reason in a game world as well.

What can wizards look like? They can go for shabby but unmistakably sorcerous, like Gandalf; they can dress like a god, a priest, a performer, an extreme dandy; they can show too much skin or cover up too much skin. This series of photo posts gives a good idea.

The "cosplay" rationale also means that there are certain type of armor wizards can wear. If flamboyant, impractical, otherworldly, then the armor can be worn, but it's likely to give less protection for more restriction of movement. For example:

I would rule this "ritual armor" as costing 10 times as much as light (leather) armor and either encumbering as medium armor, to a move of 9" (Bam and Biggs) or giving only 1 rather than 2 points of protection (Cher).

Demihumans In Hardcore Mode

The basic superiority of demihuman player characters bedeviled the first and second editions of AD&D and haunted later versions of the game. In AD&D you got a raftload of benefits for being an elf or a dwarf - languages, dark vision, special defenses. Also, there were stat bonuses and penalties you could optimize to your class so the bonuses really helped and the penalties didn't hurt, especially with the generous "4d6 drop lowest" method of generating scores.

Simply put, there were few reasons to take a human over an elf magic-user, a human over a dwarf or half-orc fighter, a human over a demi-human thief. Most campaigns wouldn't live long enough to push up against level limits, and multiclassing could soften their sting by packing as many levels as allowed into a more slowly-advancing, super-skilled character. Then there was that other curious drawback of elves, again only really relevant at high levels: the raise dead spell wouldn't work on them because they didn't have souls.

Usually (certainly, in D&D from 2000 on) the solution is to give humans extra skills, feats, ability scores to compensate. But the raise dead peculiarity suggests another solution. Most house rules I know have some way to mitigate death at zero HP, whether it be AD&D's "bleeding out" or the kind of "death and dismemberment" rules I use in my game. Why not have these options available only to humans, or at least give humans a greater chance of surviving at 0 hit points and below?

In effect, the benefits of being a demi-human would be balanced by making them like computer games' hardcore mode, where there are no saves and death is permanent. At the very least, for example, they would bleed out at -5 instead of -10 HP, or suffer a -2 penalty to a 2d6 dismemberment table. Most harshly, they would die at -1 HP, with just the tiniest saving grace at 0.

The setting rationale could go as follows:

• Elves: Have no souls, their spirits once loosed from flesh are quick to return to the great beyond.
• Half-orcs: Likewise a bit light in the soul department. If a DM really is serious about making their social stigma count in the campaign, then they can compensate by giving only 50% of the penalty, and likewise for half-elves.
• Dwarves: Are tough, but when seriously injured, have a tendency to return to the native stone; dead dwarves turn to stone statues and can be stone-fleshed back to a point where healing can work for a little while.
• Gnomes and halflings: Have really sweet afterlives full of rollercoasters and second breakfast, and don't bother sticking around in this vale of tears.
• Humans: Are uncertain about their final destination, so cling tenaciously to life against the odds.

Really, if you play by-the-book AD&D, PCs have to be handed huge amounts of loot in order to level up, so buying raise dead spells eventually fulfils a safety-net niche similar to death and dismemberment - a risk you take with the system shock roll, but by no means the automatic end of the character. In that case, the elf drawback starts kicking in around third level or so when it becomes economically feasible to buy clerical services. But my new idea is more in line with how a lot of new-old-school DMs run games, and extends to all the demihuman races.

Strong Magic Cursed

I forget where in the multitudinous blogoland, but someone posted a comment to the effect that high-level characters in Lamentations of the Flame Princess (think basic D&D with player character power dialed a bit down) don't do well in high-level AD&D modules made for more souped-up characters.That may be so - and is doubly true of my own 52 Pages rules where you can't come in with 4 magic missiles and 2 fireballs prepared at the same time.

I mean, great. The less overwhelming your high-level characters, the more you approach the ideal where big scary monsters are actually a threat to them rather than resorting to blind-tiger gimmicks ("you wake up naked and bereft in an anti-magic zone") or stupid dumb munchkin armies of 4 beholders and 20 frost giants, etc. The fewer bonuses pile up on them, the less you feel you need to compensate in an eternal treadmill of armor class and hit bonuses.

Now, another assumption of high-level AD&D, that grittier referees may balk at, is the ubiquity of magic items. A 7th level character in AD&D is likely to be tricked out in at least +2 everything, or a couple of wands and many lesser items if a spellcaster. One answer to this, of course, is the low-magic campaign where items are rare. The answer I prefer is "keep Fantasia weird" and filled with magic, but balance strong magic - most +2 and definitely all +3 and above - with the cosmic revenge of the universe on tools that so defiantly flout its laws - with the karmic debt paid for owning a sword that cleaves bronze like butter - with, quite simply, the human energy cost of a stick that shoots death. Something's got to pay somewhere.

(In effect - a shallower and broader implementation of the 1st edition AD&D "random drawback" approach to artifact-level magic.)

30 Random Drawbacks for Magic Weapons and Armor (d20, -5 at +2, +5 for each plus above +2)
"Armor" here includes shields.

0 or less: No drawback
1: -3 to a random saving throw.
2: -1 to all saving throws.
3: Accentuates your worst personality traits. -2 Charisma
4: Constant whispering sound makes it hard to concentrate. -2 Intelligence
5: Estranges you from God and nature. -2 Wisdom
6: Exhausting to wield. -1 Strength if an armor, -1 Constitution if a weapon.
7: Makes unexpected, clumsy, confining moves. -1 Dexterity.
8: Take 1 hp damage when you equip it.
9: Take 1 hp damage when you un-equip it.
10: If you die while wielding/wearing it, you rise immediately as an undead creature of hit dice appropriate to your level, and attack the party immediately.
11: Has minuses instead of pluses when fighting one creature type (reptiles, undead, humans, etc.)
12: Animals are unfriendly to you while carrying it.
13: +1 of its enchantment vanishes for the day when you hit (weapon) or are hit (armor) on a natural 13.
14: You need to eat five times as much on any day you use it in combat.
15: While wielding or wearing it, unintelligent enemies attack you by choice.
16: When you are aware of an enemy, you have +3 move to go towards them, and -3 to go away.
17: To enjoy its magical benefit, requires you to forswear your religion and follow an obscure, nearly-dead god, wearing its symbol and following its strange customs.
18: Can't heal HP while you're carrying/wearing it.
19: Glows visibly when enemies are near, within 60'... but only if you already know they're near.
20: Jealous ... drops from your grasp if you're carrying another weapon (weapon), falls off your body if you're carrying any other magic item (armor).
21: Each time you do (weapon) or take (armor) 8 or more HP of damage in one blow, you lose 1 HP.
22: Fogs your vision, you can only see 30' in dim light.
23: Makes an audible screaming sound when it hits (weapon) or when you are hit (armor).
24: Only has its magical powers each day if exposed to the rays of the dawn.
25: You must rest and not attack one round out of five while wielding or wearing the item.
26: You lose the ability to speak while wielding/wearing it.
27: Gives -1 to hit (if armor) or 1 worse armor class (if weapon).
28: You hit your nearby friends (weapon) or your nearby friends hit you (armor) on a natural to hit roll of 3.
29: Any NPC's who see it and are able to wield/wear it must save (Will/WIS/spell) or become covetous and scheme to take it from you.
30: Powerful wizard/demon/undead creature thinks the item is theirs and begins pursuing you d4 weeks after you acquire the item.

The Old One-Armed Man's Monster Guide

How to balance the need to keep a not-always-level-appropriate environment fair to players, with the need to keep a sense of mystery about the campaign? There has to be a middle ground between the monster-book memorizers and the clueless neophytes who unwisely take on a troll.

Most of the people I've been DMing for recently are new to the hobby, and I've been trying a variety of subtle and not so subtle hints. I think one thing that might work is just a simple rule of thumb based on size, with cautions about oddball monsters and special powers. This says nothing about what kind of bestiary the DM is working with, but avoids some of the more obvious mismatches, as long as you refrain from throwing killer bunnies into the mix. By the way, fighters should also be able to size up the fighting capacities of other humans and beings with levels.

I ran out of room to mention dragons on this sheet, but there's no real need to, right?

Click to enlarge. Apologies in advance for the Bush-era color code flashbacks.

Sword and Axe: Social Naturalism

The following couple of posts on social and military naturalism are a compression of recurring observations from writers on the history and recreation of pre-gunpowder warfare. I'll give a few of my key references at the end.

Axes were cheaper. There is less metal in an axehead than in a longsword. Don't think of the ridiculously inflated weapons wielded in computer or miniatures games; battle axe blades were narrower than that, playing to their main strength of delivering compressed force, as we shall see. More importantly, a longsword blade that is resilient and not liable to break has to be forged according to arts that must have seemed almost magical, with repeated layering and folding of the blade by a master smith. An axe head just has to be hammered out of a block of metal and sharpened; you can even make an axe out of stone.

Axes were more common, too, in the social sense of the word. In Iron Age societies and other places and times where metal was rare, swords required so much expense and craft that they became prerogatives of the ruling class. Looked at another way, a sword has no use except in war and dueling, while most other weapons including the axe have a civilian use, either as tools or in hunting. So, an axe is a good investment for a yeoman soldier in peace and wartime, while a sword marks you out as a professional warrior. Even when swordcrafting became more widespread and almost industrialized, as happened eventually in Europe and Japan, aristocracies promoted their association with the sword, to the point of legislating it out of the hands of commoners.

If we stop here - roughly at the point of OD&D, where axes are equivalent to swords in damage but cost less - social and material reasons favor the cheaper axe over the more expensive sword. A campaign, though, may want to give the sword some of its social meaning back to compensate. So, wearing the more expensive sword may be a claim to aristocratic status, which adventurers can buy or loot their way to. For example, axe-wielding barbarians and woodcutters may not be welcome in a certain tavern or town, while sword-wearing folk are presumed to be gentility and allowed to pass.

If social class is used to distinguish players in the game, having to use more expensive things, like swords, may be a drawback of the greater resources available to upper-class characters. At the same time, upstarts wearing swords may draw the respect or fear of common folk, but the wrath of those who feel more properly entitled by birth to do so, and may even fall afoul of the law. All these options are suitable for a campaign that wants to keep its combat simple but its social world fairly rich. As long as the advantages and drawbacks are communicated to players beforehand, that's perfectly OK.

Real commitment to super-simple combat would stop here. But I also want differences between weapons to count in combat, even if expressed in only a couple of features. So, more next time.

Balance is More than Just One in Each Hand

Putting what I've said recently a different way:

The goal of balance in an imaginative game with player-customized elements (someday soon I'll think of an elegant phrase for this) is to have players feel free to choose roughly the same range of options that exist in the shared vision of the game's setting.

The shared vision most usually comes from the fictional sources of gaming, or by now from gaming itself, the way it has incorporated and recycled its source material into DungeonWorld Standard. But it can also come from reality or from myth. Indeed, in writing my latest gaming work (the former Bag of Tricks that is quickly coming to cover a whole lot more than tricks), I switch back and forth between naturalistic and mythic perspectives. In doing this I hope to shake loose some of the fixed ideas of the adventure-game, and shake free a few ideas. So let's do that here.

Take the longsword versus battleaxe choice. Both are part of fictional fantasy archetypes. Dwarves, minotaurs and barbarians, for one, wouldn't be the same without their axes. Knights, rogues and just about everyone else live and die by flashing swords. You don't want people to feel dumb about taking an axe or a sword into a fantasy hackfest. That's the status quo of gaming, and it's easy to rest on that.

Now, both sword and axe were used historically, as well. But this might not mean that adventuring parties in your gritty, naturalistic world should freely sport axes and swords as they very well please...

Next post I'll examine the historical record. In the meantime - what was up with these guys? Which one was the min-maxer and which one was the scrub?



Indeed, there is no such thing as halfway crooks.

Power Gamers at the Gates

I should probably make clear in light of my last post that the kind of unbalanced game options I was referring to - demon bride, battle axe and whatnot - are typical of an imaginative game in the early stages of development. In this kind of game the player tends to just ignore the mechanics; he or she reaches across them and makes peace with the world being simulated. In that idyllic Golden Age, the lion lies down with the lamb; or at the very least, Cure Light Wounds lies down with Bless in perfect harmony. And then the power gamers arrive and start asking impertinent questions and tearing things up.

Alderac's Legend of the Five Rings CCG had its Golden Age roughly until the Spirit Wars expansion in 1999. The first three years of the game were an incredible high of story and world involvement for the players, culminating in the epic story-game fusion of the Day of Thunder tournament whose result determined the outcome of the storyline and the identity of the new Emperor. The temper of L5R fans was oppositional. Many saw themselves as refugees from the evil, money-grubbing power gamers who infested the much more popular CCG, Magic: The Gathering. Magic's own Golden Age of wonder, discovery, and gross imbalance in card design had been much more short-lived, and was definitely over by 1997.

In that year, the unthinkable happened: Wizards of the Coast, Magic's company, bought out the L5R property, retaining the Alderac team to handle design and story. The storyline was continued past the Day of Thunder (it had originally been scheduled to end then, with the company then focusing its efforts on a kindred Arabian Nights-style game, Legend of the Burning Sands). Wisely, Wizards chose to promote L5R as a more clubhouse, storyline game so as not to compete with the serious, high stakes Magic tournament scene, and the players went along for the most part.

1999 saw the release of the final Wizards expansion, Spirit Wars, followed by a long limbo as Alderac tried and eventually succeeded in buying back the game. In that year, too, the first signs of power gaming made their appearance. Day of Thunder champion Chris Bergstrom posted a card-by-card review of Spirit Wars, separating ruthlessly the sheep from the goats and exposing just how unbalanced and ad-hoc card design seemed to be. And the first teams based on competitive play instead of story concerns - Bad Player at first and later, The Dynasty - were coming into their own.

The rest, as they say, is history, and after a wild roller-coaster of varying power levels L5R now rests comfortably on a well-developed design template. Of course, in a game where over 500 new elements (cards) have to be released every year, absolute balance can never be achieved except by accident and even then only temporarily. The best a designer can hope for is the appearance of balance. Each option should have something to recommend it and a rough equality between drawbacks and advantages to the naked eye. Leave it to the power gamer to make the fine distinctions.

Even in a non-competitive game like role-playing - and I hope nobody out there is actually running role-playing tournaments - the options in a robustly designed game need to survive this eyeball test. Ask yourself: would you let a first-level cleric ever take Purify Food and Water instead of Cure Light Wounds into an unknown dungeon? Even if a table is full of fun-loving and setting-immersed souls, the system itself should be resistant to the power envy that comes about when you realize that your choice, as flavorful as it is, is flatly inferior to another player's choice, with no compensation.

Put another way: a power gamer is one who carefully weighs the game costs and benefits of each option on a scale, and picks only the best ratio. A regular gamer is just someone who wants to make sure there is something in each pan before picking. You can design for regular gamers without capitulating to the demands of power gamers. And you shouldn't capitulate - because you can never balance the game enough to confound them.

Back to weapons next.

Demon Bride Syndrome

Here's a story about how games with player-chosen elements - role-playing games, collectible card games, miniatures wargames - tend to evolve.

The first edition of the Legend of the Five Rings collectible card game, 15 years ago now, had a card in it called the Demon Bride of Fu Leng.

(Fu Leng, with its resonances of Rohmer and Lovecraft, was the name of the evil god in that Japanese-inspired epic fantasy world.)

The Demon Bride's stats were as follows:

Force 1, Chi 2 (very bad at combat, and not much better at dueling or resisting effects)
Honor Requirement -, Personal Honor 0 (outside the system of honor and politics entirely)
Her abilities were:
Limited: Bow the Bride to take control of and attach any one Shadowlands Follower in play.
Battle: Fear 4 (bow all Follower cards with 4 or less Force in a single opposing unit).

If you don't know the game, you'll have to take my word that these were very unimpressive abilities-particularly in the early days when Followers were seldom if ever played.

The Demon Bride's cost in the game? 12 Gold. By contrast, for half the cost you could usually get a Samurai with 3 or more Force and Chi, and a better ability, who was in your Clan (so could join you for 2 less Gold or gain you honor in the game).

What was going on with that design? For that matter (getting back to D&D) what was going on in those editions where the battle axe was clearly an inferior combat option to the longsword?

From the viewpoint of the player making choices to customize his or her game puppet (the play deck in L5R, the character in D&D), this is just unbalanced design. The Demon Bride and the battle axe form dead areas of choice. They are options never taken rationally, and in a world created by the decisions of gamers, they would not exist except as quickly discarded evolutionary dead ends.

Often, as game designs evolve, the designers become more conscious of this game layer and begin to take it into account. Both D&D and L5R over their editions have become games whose elements have consciously been maneuvered into some semblance of cost-benefit balance with each other. A card as underwhelming as the Demon Bride would not see print today - especially not as a valuable rare card.

There are, nonetheless, three answers sometimes seen in defense of a Demon Bride design.

First, they reflect that not every entity is equally balanced in life. Maybe the Demon Bride really is an inept and vain infernal consultant who charges three times her actual worth. And hey, maybe the battle axe really was a worse weapon than the longsword, and can be recommended only for its cheaper price - still more of a balancing factor than the Demon Bride's inflated cost.

Second, they cater to the flavor and roleplaying desires of the fans, so why care if they are perfectly balanced? If you want to build your Fu Leng theme deck, you will throw in the Demon Bride anyway. If you want your barbarian fighter to swing an axe, then by gum, so he will, even if he can have no shield and always strikes last. And who knows, maybe in a game you'll see one of those magic moments where a character or weapon everyone thought was worthless saves the day.

Third, the unbalanced design may revolve around factors that are not part of the game. The Demon Bride's Gold cost reflects her power and influence in the infernal hierarchy, not reflected in L5R's Honor-based  political model. The axe was great for punching through armor, especially in the late Middle Ages; but the basic D&D rule set doesn't take that into account.

As you might guess, I am not partial to any of these three excuses. But I'll leave it for next post to explain why.