In games where you can't use abilities from one class in another, I don't mind such redundancies; in fact, I actually like less specialized classes like the red mage, provided they're decent. (Final Fantasy 1's Red Mage is good, FF3's is not that good in the original (but at least you can change out of it easily) but is decent in the remake, FF5's is poor but is in a game where you *can* use the abilities in other classes). I also don't mind it when class changing is costly, like in Wizardry (see Bishops) and Dragon Quest 3 (see Sages, though that game has a unique Hero who can't change class and can't be changed into).

So for video games, I think glass cannon is still viable. Otherwise we're getting into the realm of Grim Dawn, and one of its few flaws: Rainbow damage. If the wizard has no other defining characteristics, then it's just another color of damage. Warriors deal primarily physical, other classes have different shades of it. No matter what pretty animation you put on it, it's just a matter of which color of damage you want to use. Archers are good from range, so now you're essentially (in a single player single protagonist game) just choosing the color of your damage if your class has no other defining traits. IMO that's the largest problem with GD: They tried to get cute and complicated and complicated it into oversimplification. Pick a damage color, stack that one and its resistance reduction, and stack all resistances as high as they will go. All classes play very similarly due to this.

A genericized magic system without costs or limitations leads to generally useless magic, or magic that is undefinable from its contemporary sources of damage/skills.

You asked about a mage having spells that duplicate skills causing those skills to be devalued, and in return I'll answer. Skills aren't devalued when the mage has to make a choice of using it to help at a higher chance of success for this obstacle and being weakened for another encounter/obstacle.

I'm glad you brought that up.

And different types of games require different magic systems. TTrpgs, for instance, work well with slot-based magic, but poorly with mana-based magic and especially cooldown-based magic (because of tracking it during play issues), even though they both work well in video games.

In beat-em-up type games (any fighting game, or brawler games... or "kill thousands foes" games [ARPGs, or Koei Warriors-type games]), magic vs non-magic (and even blending) is meaningless -- it's just a different visual effect on how things are done. In other games, they come up as rather distinct because of game design choices that make them that way (often, "skills" take no limits and are infinitely repeatable, but are weaker, where as "magic" is limited and stronger).

It doesn't have to be that way though. What if it were the reverse? In the "real world" [sic; I know, we're talking about games], the body gets tired, and we know a sword can cleave through a guy*, etc. What if it were physical/skillful activities that were stronger, but magic were cheap, plentiful, and weaker/non-exhaustive? Any games like that?

I know, I know. I'm not addressing directly the topic of the thread! Close enough.

See dtgreene's thread?

SaGa Frontier 2 (which I mentioned in the other thread that Cavalary linked to and which I think I already mentioned in this thread). (This is equipment dependent; to use magic constantly, you do need to be well equipped for that purpose, and you need to avoid steel (which interferes with magic, though the effect isn't as pronounced mechanically as the story would seem to imply).)

Sure but I don't know of any RPG that has made random trash mobs exciting fights after the first handful of hours. That's more a genre problem than anything.

I have seen that happen. For example:

Final Fantasy: The Ice Cave has some terrifying enemies, especially the PSX (and possibly WSC) versions. There is, for example, an enemy formation with mages, which are very likely to ambush you, and they cast Fire 3 (heavy damage to entire party) as their first spell, and Bane (don't remember PSX name, instant death to entire party) if you survive long enough to see it. Later on, you still have to fight Mindflayers (Sorcerers on NES), which have a non-elemental multi-target paralyze attack (Ribbons won't help against that), and can instantly kill you with their normal attack (again, Ribbons are no help here).

Dragon Quest 2: Cave to Rhone is one of the most terrifying parts of any RPG; you just need to hope you don't run into a group of 4 green dragons that don't let you run. Then, once you reach Rhone, instant death attacks, including one enemy with an attack that is *guaranteed* to wipe out your entire party if it gets used. (Fortunately, it turns out that that particular spell is only cast when the enemy is at low HP, and that particular enemy is vulnerable to Stopspell; unfortunately, this is of no help against a certain miniboss later.) It's a good place to get experience (except maybe in the original Famicom version, where t he priest there won't revive your party), provided you aren't afraid of getting many game overs, and it's more fun than farming XP in games where random encounters get too easy.

It's encoutners like these where, if the game makes powerful (but expensive) magic available to the player, said magic should be used.

IMO, D&D is basically the most poorly designed and badly balanced combat system to be widely used. Literally everything else I've ever encountered across every other RPG,- be it turn-based, real-time-with-pause, MMO, FPSRPG, ARPG - heck, even JRPG, is better.

Here are my biggest gripes with D&D combat:

Martial classes are basically autoattack machines. There are a few passive feats that generally do boring stuff like +1/2 to hit or damage, and then highly conditional mechanics such as Cleave that are situational at best and largely deadweight at worst. There's generally an utter lack of "special attacks", and classes that have those tend to use a charge system that recovers after resting like a caster. Outside of these, you have modes like expertise, power attack, and rapid shot that quickly get boring.

Extremely bad caster balance. There's an old D&D saying regarding "quadratic casters". I would actually argue that casters in D&D scale cubically. As a D&D caster, you get more spell slots (or charges for the spontaneous caster types) in each spell rank as you level up, you get access to higher level spell ranks as you level up (face it, anything really worth using in combat comes at rank 3+), and the effectiveness of above-mentioned spells grows inherently with level and also with the difficulty class that prevents enemies from saving.

I also don't like randomly losing spells to passive RNG-based interrupts (concentration checks)

I personally find the memorization/casting level charge system to be clunky and a poor experience compared to energy/mana systems. In most cases, it only serves to prevent people from adapting to the situation at hand.

Extremely poor support for dual-classing and hybrid characters. If you don't progress your classes evenly, you're punished with an experience penalty. Casters inherently make bad hybrids for the most part due to cubic scaling. If you dual or multi-class, you lose out on important higher-level class features. General rule of thumb is that if you want a hybrid character, you're almost always better off picking a true hybrid class such as a ranger or paladin than mixing 2 classes to get what you want.

Extreme reliance and dependence on consumables. Failing to have enough consumables can lose you the game no matter how good you are; overloading on consumables can allow bad players to skate through content they are obviously unqualified for.

Extreme reliance and dependence on resting produces an un-fun attrition-based meta. A good combat system allows characters to dynamically recover in the middle of combat instead of forcing them out through depletion of resources that will never regenerate in combat.

RNG and dice everywhere. Probably a symptom of being an outdated tabletop game. While this makes for interesting roleplaying, it makes for an extremely poor combat experience that's imbalanced at best and downright nonsensically frustrating at worst.

Too much passive event hooks from feats instead of an active-skill system like a modern MMORPG. For those of you who aren't programmers, an event hook is a function that's called whenever a certain type of event happens, and event hooks can trigger other event hooks. In a tabletop game, a poorly designed ruleset littered with a minefield of event hooks can quickly have both the DM and players tearing their hair out about the order in which such events trigger and how to handle those that conflict.

There are too many ways to build an inviable or downright bad character. Some people say that's "old-school". I say that's ridiculous, unfriendly to newbies, and a lame excuse for bad design.

Frustrating "comedy of missed attacks" at low levels. The problem is that the base chance to hit is 50% (no bonuses vs. no armor), which means that combat at low levels quickly turns into a frustrating stalemate of missed attacks where neither side can do much of anything. I much prefer the modern system in ARPGs, some JRPGs, and modern MMOs where characters hit and do damage by default except if there is some special condition that might cause someone to miss their attacks (for examples: cover, attacker being blinded, invisible target, evasion buffs, active defense cooldowns, or an exceptionally high evasion/agility value).

Too many broken, un-fun "save or die" mechanics that take your character out of the game for failing a dice roll. These shouldn't exist.

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As for what the "best" system is, I'll give the award to the best MMORPG of all time - the original Guild Wars (the modern Guild Wars II uses a dumbed-down system and doesn't count).

Mechanically speaking, Guild Wars is basically the anti-D&D.

First and foremost, my favorite thing about Guild Wars is how it effectively removes consumables. I've often said that consumables promote bad combat balance and bad gameplay. On the low end, a consumable-based meta encourages bad players to win by throwing a backpack full of wands, scrolls, and potions at enemies. On the high end, some D&D-style RPGs might include content deliberately designed to be too difficult so players are forced to rely on consumables, which means that no matter how good you are at the game, you lose simply for having an empty backpack.

In the original Guild Wars, there are generally no consumables that affect combat. You have a constantly-regenerating energy bar, a health bar that conditionally regenerates on its own, 8 active skills, and 8-10 attributes (proficiencies) that back your skill.

Regular skills have an energy cost, a casting time, and a cooldown. Warrior-type classes have special skills that charge-up when attacking or doing damage. Generally, energy costs and charge-up are used to set the pace of skill usage, with cooldown mainly serving to limit the spamming of skills that would become unfair, un-fun, or mechanically abusive if they didn't have a cooldown.

Unlike D&D and old-style MMOs that draw heavily on D&D, there are no inherent penalties or "casting pushback" for taking damage or getting attacked while casting. However, there are "interrupts" that can be used specifically to interrupt enemy skills. An interrupted skill immediately goes on cooldown and the energy cost is forfeit. Additionally, many skills impose some form of additional punishment on an interrupted enemy, such as damage or further extending the cooldown time.

Energy itself regenerates over time, dependent on the base armor value of your primary class. Health starts to regenerate if you stay out of combat for a certain amount of time (this means you don't take damage or receive hostile effects, and you don't take any hostile actions).

Importantly, maximum energy and energy regeneration in Guild Wars don't scale with level. This eliminates the balance problem of "quadratic casters" in D&D. To increase your energy regeneration, you need to put special skills on your skillbar known as energy management that help you cycle energy in more quickly or otherwise regenerate it. Some skills can even steal energy from enemies.

All classes have a wide array of choices for skills to put on their bar. Martial (fighter) characters have special attacks in lieu of spells, and the scaling for both casters and fighters is kept balanced.

Characters in Guild Wars always hit with attacks and spells by default. If you miss, it's due to some special condition. For example, blinded characters have a 90% chance to miss with attacks. Alternately, there are active defense buffs that cause you to block attacks. There are some debuff spells that can additionally cause missed or failed attacks.

Dual-classing is a fundamental mechanic built into the game. The energy system is purpose-designed to support dual-classing and keep energy usage fairly balanced for most class combinations.

The effects of RNG are kept to a minimum. Most effects are thoroughly nonrandom, and those that are can be mitigated or countered.

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Closing thoughts: modern mobile trends

I generally don't like the modern trend of removing energy/mana and using only cooldowns because it takes out a dimension of skill from the game. This trend comes from the mobile dumbing-down of everything and generally flattens the skill curve - which decrease the opportunity for good players to make a great build that maximizes energy/mana economy while bad players go OOM. The other problem with a strictly cooldown-based system is how it generally pigeonholes players into using only "regular attack" while waiting for cooldowns or the best opportunity to use a cooldown.

These two gripes are actually not present in 4th edition D&D. Then again, 4th edition is completely different from any other edition of the game, so any criticisms of other editions likely do not apply to 4th edition. (Of course, there *is* legitimate criticism of 4th edition, but such criticisms need to specifically target that edition and likely don't apply to other editions.)

This isn't so bad in 1st and 2nd edition, where non-casters don't have higher level class features, and multi-class spellcasters are never more than one spell level behind until double-digit levels.

Also, ranger and paladin don't feel like hybrids to me; they seem like just fighters who eventually get very limited spellcasting ability. A true hybrid would be more like the 3.5e psychic warrior, or perhaps a class that got the cleric's THAC0/BAB and HP, the bard's spellcasting, the ability to use equipment that a fighter can, and a few bonus feats (or equivalent). (Alternatively, in 3.5e, the Prestige Paladin from Unearthed Arcana feels more like a hybrid (and more like how I feel the paladin class should work) than the default one.)

If balanced properly, this sort of thing can work in a CRPG. It helps if enemies have varying abilities and levels of power, so that the player has to learn when it's worth using their super abilities, and when they could just use basic attacks and heal afterwords. (Remember that healing requires resources; if it's cheaper to prevent damage with a status ailment, then that may be a better strategy, or perhaps enemies do things you can't recover from (like status ailments you can't yet cure with a spell, or level draining (if you want to go down that route, which is not everyone's cup of tea).)

Well, Cleric is original hybrid class and you are right about Paladins and Rangers. About 4E, don't you think "legitimate criticism" is kinda subjective?

Sleep is almost useless against anything with a decent save.

I agree with this.

One thing I would change: In games that are commonly called ARPGs, there shouldn't be any dice based accuracy at al; if an attack collides with something, it should hit (barring things like rules against friendly fire). In particular, those special conditions shouldn't cause attacks to miss. Invisibility and blindness, for example, can be handled by simply making the AI have a harder time locating such targets (possibly going by where the last sound was made), and if the player is the one suffering from this, simply have the enemy disappear from the screen; an attack that hits the enemy you can't see should still work. Cover could be handled like in other action games; the cover would block the path of attacks except for any that are specifically able to go through walls.

One other thing about D&D: In D&D, as you get better, your attacks get more accurate, and armor makes it easier to evade attacks, which leads to the issue you mentioned, as well as other issues at higher levels (attacks either always hit or always miss, depending on how the game is balanced). A better approach is to keep accuracy relatively stable, and make damage vary; higher level characters do more damage, and better armor reduces damage received. (Don't make armor reduce evasion; that mechanic can make armor worse than useless. Final Fantasy 2 is one game that did this and suffered for it.)

Not when you get it. Also, Grease. Effective in NWN 2 from levels of 4 to 20.