Palladium Books gets around the play balance issue in two ways.

The first is to make direct damage spells inferior to a bow and arrow.  The best use of magic is for crowd control, not damage.

The second element is to state that balance is actually impossible, so your GM and players need to work on their scenario design skills to mitigate the impact on their game.

Vancian Magic, where the player writes down what is memorized and then cross the spells of as they cast is best for game speed.  Spell slots sucks, because players take a minute after looking at a group of spells to cast.

Spell points has the same problem as Spell Slots (takes longer to cast) + now they have to do more math for points.

My two cents, use the DCC or Shadowdark approach where they have to succeed on a spell roll to cast a spell.  If they fail, they can't cast the spell for a long rest.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 03, 2025, 10:31:19 AMPalladium Books gets around the play balance issue in two ways.

The first is to make direct damage spells inferior to a bow and arrow.  The best use of magic is for crowd control, not damage.

The second element is to state that balance is actually impossible, so your GM and players need to work on their scenario design skills to mitigate the impact on their game.

I can echo this, there were a few damaging spells in Rifts that were worth the PPE in select situations (mostly ones that let you for one or more melee rounds make attacks... one that hurled rocks for 1D6+level MD for effectively 1 PPE a shot was a solid replacement for a laser pistol), but spells like Magic Net, Blinding Flash, Cloud of Smoke, and the low level "shield bubble" (that could be cast around enemies) whose specific name I forget were always my bread and butter for combat spellcasting.

Similarly, on the negotiation part, I've never seen a campaign where there wasn't a MAD pact surrounding the use of Carpet of Adhesion; easily one of the most broken spells available (to call it a "save or die" spell doesn't do it justice... it was just "die" with the save only mattering for if it was a slow or quick death).

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Generally, I prefer mana points to the leveled spell slots approach, but I think it needs to be tied to the Mage having much fewer casting options to really balance that.

I'm talking the entire suite being maybe half-a-dozen effects. Something I really liked about how the 4E wizard was handled was that their bread-and-butter basically amounted to two attack spells, mage hand, prestidigitation, light, and ghost sound (then a 1/encounter and 1/day attack spell). It's a useful, but still limited, kit for problem solving.

A similar type of limited kit for a mana-point based caster would largely solve the "swiss army wizard" problem that simply dropping mana points onto the D&D wizards' spell list tends to cause.

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Relatedly, I think there's also something to be said for a mana point system that doesn't front load the points like the character is a battery.

Sorcery in Exalted for example is based on gathering sufficient motes to cast the desired spell because the energy isn't internal to the caster but ambient in the environment.

This largely takes the concept of the Alpha Strike off the table as any sort of "I win" spell is going to take several rounds to gather the motes for and disruption is certainly possible. Instead unleashing big spells becomes something of a team effort to protect the caster until they get their big spell off (or the sorcerer is opting for weaker spells they can gather power for in a single turn).

Mana points thereby control the flow of spellcasting with more powerful sorcerers able to build up the needed motes more quickly, but still needing that build up rather than just opening with a barrage of spells that depletes their mana battery that you see as most viable in many mana point systems.

I think that most of this discussion misses one of the critical chains of logic involved.

The critical shortcoming is actually how short combat tends to be. Most RPGs have combat take about 5 or 6 rounds, often a fair bit less, with the turn focusing on the value of the spotlight. This naturally means that combat does not last long enough for there to be an effective delayed gratification mechanic (e.g. damage over time is better than direct damage) which in turn means that pure DPS is almost invariably the best strategy.

This means that whether or not there are mana points or spell slots feels like it matters more than it does. Alpha strike gameplay is ideal in most every RPG.

For what it's worth, I tend to prefer a cooldown mechanic, which is a variant of mana points which puts more emphasis on pacing your use of magic through the encounter. A cooldown mechanic sees you recharge a set number of mana points per round. This mechanic is crunchy to play, but means the GM can tune it at the table more effectively; if the GM thinks Alpha Strike is too powerful, they can dial back on the pool's maximum depth and increase the recharge. If they want players to have an Alpha Strike or Setup phase in the early encounter, you do the reverse. The benefit of the mechanic isn't exactly that it solves the Alpha Strike problem, but that it's easy to tune how much of a problem it is to taste.

My game doesn't have a resource system at all. You can use your fun abilities as often as you want.

I see no problem on MP, but Vancian tends to be faster. I just need to use some rule that allow Magic-Users to use unprepared spells at a cost.