Don't you just love the mage xp table
RedWizard
Member Posts: 242
Higher when you are a mudfarmer turned wizard, then suddenly lower as you start becoming a god?
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Balance can make games better, but in a single-player game it doesn't really matter. For multi-player games it really does matter, and my table top D&D games tend to have multiple players. "The law applies equally to all men! Both kings and orphans are prohibited from begging or sleeping under bridges! Thus, the law is completely fair." -- This message has been brought to you by Lawful Evil.
In a game, rules applied equally is the very definition of fairness. You may not like a rule, if it were PNP I'd say just change it. But as it stands, many thousands of players have happily played with these rules for decades, it is hardly an issue worthy of such drama.
By the way, is there a simple way to do this? The road to modding might not be that hard at all?
I think my cleric cast more spells in the first stages of BG than my team mage has cast since joining the party. (Part of this is that my team mage is our new BGEE wild mage buddy, who has on occassion one-shotted my character while casting a magic missile on an unrelated target.) Outside of the 2-3 level 1 spells a day, my mage mostly just sits around with a sling and occassionally finds something to fling rocks at. Not very mage-y. I could get more utility out of a bonus thief or cleric, or even a bard.
What I don't get is why it becomes easy for mages to level just when they can actually start doing things that live up to the class title... it's a bit unbalancing in a game focused on a team of mixed talents when the weak link suddenly becomes a god, and I can't think of an in-setting reason for such a leap in power.
Many times this is in different stages like the Mage who is terrible at low levels, but super powerful at high levels. Mages have some balance even at high levels as they have to rest to use their spells.
Fighters are good throughout, but are never super powerful like mages end up being. They are more of a dime a dozen type class that every group needs and have in abundance.
Clerics/Druids are generally powerful at all levels, but it's rare people play them because only a few people want to heal and buff. I find the class essential to making PvE encounters interesting though.
Thieves have never been implemented well in computer games. They should be support to the group disarming dangerous traps, scouting ahead, picking pockets for rare items, etc. Generally they end up being fighters that attack from behind or even the sides these days.
Overall PvE combat is about having an important role more so than being equal in combat prowess. It's hard to have an important role when everyone is just DPS with a different flavor.
Also mage with some decent level can outshine about any class when it comes to damage, tanking or support.
Giving them a faster xp table early in the game would ruin the little game balance there is (which is quite broken as it is).
Well, to be fair Sleep doesn't really work on anything worthwhile to me, besides some spiders when you are level 1 and I guess the dreaded kobold commandos. Pretty much everything is immune to it like bosses and most named npcs, undead, bears etc...
I'd rather have Blindness or magic missile for interrupting those annoying casters. Oh, and Spook at higher levels is nice too.
I also find your analogy humorously off the mark. It's not like there's any qualitative "improvement" from one edition to the next. It's a matter of pure taste. I have played 1E, 3E, 3.5, and 4E; whatever the DM wants, a good game can be made of it. But I will only run 2E myself, it's what I like.
BG following 2E rules really only makes sense: it would take too much effort to retrofit the rules with another system. The new rules system some players seem to want can wait until the "BG: Next" project coming after BG2EE, because while they might like a new system there are people who like the old system just as much. (Also that thing about retrofitting = money/time sink.)
Anyway, I think I'm getting off my own topic... basically (back to original topic), I feel that mages in 2E start off too weak and take too long to become useful and mage-like at low levels, then become worthy of the title only later (when they start to outshine other classes...) If I wrote the XP system I'd do it differently (I may even make a mod for it if it actually starts ticking me off), but it's just based on the 2E rules.
It also has a penalty to save so it works significantly more often than blindness.
By the time you can do more than 1d4+1 with magic missile, you can web those bears, undead, most named npcs, etc.
Anyone that doesn't think mages are OP at any level isn't using them right. (This coming from someone who only rests when the party is fatigued and only in an Inn.)
Mages aren't meant to be spamming spells with wild abandon, we'd have a mana system like some other games if that was the case (or that god awful DDO), they're surgical, using the right spell for the right job, and working within their means.
(I see why mages would be powerful in tabletop where the rules came from, though... with fewer fights per day a mage could be an MVP at level 1.)