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You’re looking for opinions? I got opinions.
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The Chosen One who gets dragged around like a sack of potatoes until they Come Into Their Own and go on to Turn The Tide.
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The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.
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The Sharp-Tongued Princess.
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The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.
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Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes.
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Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements.
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Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.
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Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you’ve ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author’s not plagiarising their own favourite author.
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Yep!
Treating wands like guns in fights instead of using spells creatively
They actually pull this off well in Frieren. There are tons of different and unique spells but the one the MC always uses is the basic magic attack spell because she is stupidly overpowered she doesn’t need to be creative.
To me that is lazy writing. Specfic spells should have a set damage unless they are upcast. Maybe this is just the dnd player in me that thinks that though.
I think the other person doesn’t word it well. First, the fighting isn’t the main plot of the story, its more about everything in between. The MCs are powerful, but still need to be careful in their fights. or they will die.
The story doesn’t want dragon ball fights that are 20 chapters long, or have an impassible monster that de-rail the goal for 20 more chapters. Their obsticals are more about the world and people they interact with.
The magic combat system is pretty well thought out, but not complex.
The MC basically has lots of mana. That’s their “op” trait. They developed a stragedy to spam cast the basic damage spell.
I’m making up some numbers here to kind of paint a picture of how this “basic spell” work.
Attack spell =
- 1 second cast time
- 1 damage to defence spell
- 10/10 damage to unprotected person. (Can do 9/10 depending on what the plot needs)
- Can be cast in a variety of directions. (I.e it’s not a gun, its a targeted missle)
- cost more mana than the defence spell.
Defence spell =
- .5 second cast
- Can absorb 100 hits
- low mana cost for small area over a short period of time, high cost to do “full coverege”. Its essentially a sheild they move around and resize to block attacks as they come. Fully protecting yourself burns too much mana and you’d lose.
For most hitting the defence spell a hundred times is a stupid stratagy, so everyone came up with different spells that break through it in a few hits.
Out MC instead trained the basic spell so much, they can cast it 20 times a second over a long period of time. This forces the opponent to burn mana trying to maintain defence. The opponent is overwhelmed and get hit. However the stratagy only works if they back the openent into a postion where they can’t counterattack or have a buddy attack MC from behind.
So its kinda like they have infinite level 1 spell slots and they are just spaming magic missile over and over?
Pretty much, yes, but infinate isn’t quite true.
(The magic system isn’t DnD, so I’m spending way too much time making up a lot of shit here to give a general idea that no one really asked for. (And because its fun to brutely mash one magic system into another)).
Let’s say your average mid to high level mage has 100x spell slots (and for now assume all other stats are also equal). In this system, there are no spell levels. Instead, more complex spells require more slots to be used at once.
The basic defence and attack spell are 1 to 10. 1 defence spell blocks 10 basic attacks. However, you can’t attack and defend at the same time, and 1 defence is only for a small area. Full 360° coverage would cost a lot of slots per second. You conserve slots by precicly blocking the opponents spells as they come.
To break the defence you need to to be able to hit it really hard and follow up before they can cast more defence or counter attack. To do more damage in a spell, it costs more slots. This is where things like the other stats, skills, refelx time, unique spells, and combat stratagy become deciding factors in fights. Slot count also varies, a young mage might start of with one slot, but can become a very high level mage with 300 slots.
MC has 200 slots to start with and trained to get a very fast cast per second rate for both basic attack and defence. They are so proficient in the spell, it’s the equivelent effort of you or me walking.
While MC’s magic mistle does little damage, they can cast the spell 20 times in a second from multiple directions. This forces opponents to use up all their slots to defend until they run out or get overwhelmed by the numbers. The only defence is to do 360 defence, which can’t be maintained for long. (For simplicity sake, assume all the magic is a one shot kill. If you don’t defend or dodge, you die).
To make things more fun, MC has no idea they are insanly strong because their only reference growing up was their mentor who has the 5000 slot cheat code.
Yes, I am over thinking this. And yes, I should be sleeping right now.
This is specific to the videogame-ish sub-genre, mostly Isakeis…
But you go out of the way to include RPG mechanics into your story… but the only real influence it has on the storytelling is spending an inordinate amount of time grinding… a mechanic explicitly added to RPGs to pad the game.
There are good video game based stories, Survival Story of a Sword King and Dungeon Reset both immediately come to mind… but I feel like this is a widespread problem.
The Wandering Inn handles this well, where to hit large milestones you need not just xp but self development.
Is The Wandering Inn this one https://wanderinginn.com/ ? Can’t find anything else .
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