Today I was chatting with Nathan about magic fights. It's something I've vaguely thought about for a while - in RPGs (at least the ones I'm familiar with) fights between wizards tend to manifest as one of the following:
- Casting the most deadly spells every round you have until one of you fails a crucial saving throw. Essentially a brute-force slugfest.
- Casting an assortment of powerful buffs before an anticipated fight, then sneaking up and casting that Most Powerful Spell with every possible bonus while the enemy is unaware.
Now to be fair, this is partly an artefact of how RPG fights tend to go; everything's over in a few rounds, if not before a fight even starts. In some cases it's because combat is lethal and players who want their characters to survive long-term have to play tactically, minimizing the risk of an actual fight. In other cases, it's because PCs can unleash appalling devastation in mere seconds. Earlier today, Iris (see Necropolitans posts) inflicted well over 100 damage to one of my NPCs in a single round of combat where several of her attacks missed. There's also received wisdom, perhaps true, that damaging the opposition trumps just about anything else. Certainly in D&D-type games, there's a widespread perception that healing during combat is a terrible waste of time, for example. People rarely seem to duck behind barriers to reload or neck a potion, perhaps worried about what the opposition will do with that time.
