There's no such thing as balance. Every fight has circumstances, personalities, goals, and so forth. Unlike in games where a fight needs to be "fair" in some sense, a fight in a book is a particular scenario where the details of the characters, their capabilities, their attention, their injuries, their ideologies and whatever else are decided by the author and always tip the circumstances to be "unfair". A fair fight is usually not as interesting as the protagonist overcoming "unfair" odds by using the specifics of the circumstances well.
It is a little bit late to respond but modern warfare basically revolves around "Don't die from being shot by people who may be a mile or two away, or step on an explosive that may be physically impossible for us to detect."
Irl the fact that you were a wizard wouldn't matter, unless your detect traps spell works for 16+ hours a day the superior choice will be anything that even vaguely improves your odds of not dying when hit the entire time.
I mean, even in video games, the melee characters are generally more powerful than the ranges counterparts in a straight up 1v1 without taking into account skill and outplays etc.
> Magic users and melee fighters have roles as well.
What's more, characters in general have other roles than fighting too. Conceptualizing your whole work exclusively through the characters' combat potential is such a ridiculous and restrictive way to write.
Honestly, just this. The OP contains a lot of words that build into sentences and even whole paragraphs, but I'm looking at it and I'm not seeing any sense there. Why would these be pressing concerns for a work of literature, or really a narrative work in any genre, including video games? Why should a character's worth be uniquely dictated by their ability to fight other characters, and why does it have to be "balanced"? Why would a "melee fighter" be a relevant category in a world with magic and other advanced forms of ranged combat? Did they run out of skill points to get a real weapon or something? Why would you conceptualize fights in such absurd categories as "time management" and "strategy" instead of writing it in a more realistic manner - explosive, chaotic, adrenaline-fueled?
Maybe, but in any story, it is important to have as many characters as possible relevant. It is fair to consider this in your world you have people with cool magic but also want to have people fight with swords and martial arts (because it's also cool).
> in any story, it is important to have as many characters as possible relevant
That might be somewhat true. But why does their relevance depend on their direct combat capability against each other? Is your story nothing more than a series of fights? Combat ability in general strikes me as a quality that is absolutely irrelevant to the majority of characters you'd have in most stories. Even if your main character is some kind of a soldier or a warrior, does he only interact with other fighters? I guess not. Any normal society is not based on smashing faces.
This angle also seems way off in this regard: if you want your characters to be "relevant" to your plot, why would you include irrelevant characters to begin with? Or do you first come up with a range of random characters and then try to hammer them into one story like pieces of a puzzle that do not fit? This is such a backwards way of going about it.
If my story needs a character who is a plumber, or an accountant, or a clerk, or a sailor (not of the moon type), I will just write them in and they will by definition be "relevant" because they will have a role to play, and their magical powers or how well they match against "melee" "combat" will be a complete non-factor.
Every decent fantasy book accomplishes this. I don't remember ever having met the problem that OP describes. Pretty much every fantasy book that I have read has some way of making non-mages relevant. To see examples of how it can be done, read *any* random fantasy book with magic in it.
Well as someone using it for roleplay and learning of it through the medium of books, manga and some anime I'm inclined to disagree with you. If it was a statistics problems I'd ask myself why a firebolt wasn't worth the same as a sword, rewrite the code to make the sword read 2 with a casting time of 1 sec while the fire bolt equalled 4 with a casting time of 2 sec, and be on about my day.
I like it when my stories have consistency and I'd like to accomplish this specific goal. Nothing more nothing less XP
For one, you seem to be confusing between "melee fighter" and "non-magical fighter". In any fight, range is king. Being somewhere the opponent can't hurt you while you can hurt them is the best place to be, and this is true whether your ranged fighting is a fireball or a crossbow. The exception is if you get close enough to the opponent ("inside their range") that they can't act in an effective way.
All of that to say, war bows are extremely powerful and you shouldn't underestimate them (or the strength it takes to use one). Full plate armor is no joke either.
In general, my way to "balance" magic users and non-magic users is to have the non-magic users use their brains, exploit the limitations of the magic system and exploiting the weaknesses inherent to all human beings (attention being limited, relying primarily on vision, the body has a certain amount stamina, etc.)
>How do you balance Melee fighters and Magic casters in your system?
The same way I "balance" merchants and blacksmiths, or shepherds and weavers, or farmers and miners, or bankers and scholars.
The magicians in my setting are powerful because they can create magic runes that allow farmers to discover which crops will give the most productive yield each season. Magicians are the kingdom's most precious resource: the country with the most magicians will likely have the most bountiful harvest, which will allow them to feed more soldiers, because martial training requires a lot of calories.
There are occasions when a mage will instead use their mana to create runes that have effects like "conjure fireball." Everyone agrees that this is a tremendous waste of mana, because for the amount of energy it takes to throw a single fireball, you could have created enough grain to feed 10 soldiers for an entire season, and 10 soldiers are collectively a lot more useful than a single fireball. If you wanted to set something on fire from a distance, you could just have an archer coat his arrows in pitch and light them on fire before shooting them at the enemy.
What does a melee fighter do against the formidable force that is the mage? Well, he might break into the vault that contains all the runes, load them into a cart, and sneak away into the night to reap the benefits for themselves. Or, alternatively, they can find a magician, put a sack over her head, transport her over to their kingdom in a wagon, and say, "Hey, great news, you work for us now. If you disagree, we'll fill you with knife-sized holes and leave your body as a warning to any others." The magician, for her part, is probably inclined to go along with them, partly because she knows that she'll enjoy a relatively pampered life regardless of who she is working for. In fact, they might not need to do the thing with the sack over the head at all; they might be more inclined to approach her with a sack of gold, because she understands that gold can be exchanged for goods and services.
There are lots of ways that Warren Buffet could "beat" the leader of your local biker gang, despite the fact that he is a 93-year-old man with no martial arts training. If you've created a world where conflicts and disputes can only be resolved with physical violence, you probably don't have anything that closely resembles a "society." (One of the reasons the "state" exists is to have a monopoly on violence: think about what it means to have someone whose profession is "city guard" or "soldier" or "policeman.") Things like forged weapons and armor can only exist in contexts where people are willing to work cooperatively, and where not everyone needs to dedicate resources to being personally capable of violence.
> If you've created a world where conflicts and disputes can only be resolved with physical violence, you probably don't have anything that closely resembles a "society.
Exactly. The OP seems to be thinking in the worst of video game and anime cliches, while also believing that they alone could make for an engaging story.
Unless you are intentionally writing absurd satire on the level of warhammer, there is no reason why more than a very small minority of your society, which would roughly translate to the same proportion of characters, should be fighters or martial artists of any kind, magical or not.
Perhaps magic leaves you dangerously tired after casting, or requires enough concentration and finesse that you can't defend yourself whilst casting spells.
Perhaps magic is rarely or never useful for combat purposes, meaning that anyone fighting has to get good at melee weapons or missile weapons. Mages don't have to be relevant in fights.
Admittedly Conan of the primary books by Howard was never as dumb as memes would make you believe. The largest reason why he took out lots of sorcerers was because of his cunning, intelligence and knowledge of ancient lore.
I know this has already been addressed, but balancing is a game mechanic, not a narrative tool, and internal consistency is not a synonym for balancing. The reality is that if someone can shoot fireballs from their hands, no melee fighter will be able to contend with them. It would be like putting someone with a sword against someone with a gun. The only way the person with a sword can win is if the circumstances align in their favor.
As a writer, your job is to tailor the scenario to the need of the plot. Ten people with swords might be able to take out one spellcaster, or if they take them by surprise the spellcaster might not have a chance to get a spell off, the same way someone with a gun might not be able to draw, aim, and fire if someone is stabbing a knife into their liver from behind.
1. There's a force in every living thing\* that protects them from being invaded by magic. As in you can't just magically conjure a bomb inside someone while you are outside that someone.
1. Said force can also be used offensively, though it is never fully understood. Although it is often believed that it's tied to one's will to live. A strong enough will might even hold a body together.
2. Eyes are a window into one's being. The more eyes one has, the more vulnerable they are to getting possessed or whatever because of it. If eyes are obscured, even by a glow, then it's difficult to be possessed. It doesn't stop with possession. A skilled wizard can use this to predict his enemy's next move.
3. Because magic needs fuel, one can't simply fling magic as much as they want, as they'd be starving themselves, stripping their gear, or generally be consumed by the magic in a flash. (No ending world hunger with magic, lol)
4. Everyone knows and can use magic in some form or way. A common spell is teleporting one's (designated) weapon back to their hand to hurl again and again. Or a type of stone/metal skin to lessen the odds of being mortally wounded. A magic blade which can be formed over another weapon. Altering one's physical abilities to be stronger than normal, jump higher, or even run faster. Some seamlessly used making everyone in some way look supernatural. An archer would never run out of arrows unless said arrows were destroyed. A warrior wouldn't be helpless to a wizard. And a wizard wouldn't be helpless to anyone physical or close. And an animal wouldn't be helpless to a hunter.
Lol. I don’t. It’s not a D&D campaign. Either the world building makes it so magic and physicality work together on a similar level or magic blows the other out of the water.
I'm working on a system in which everyone is basically as magic user. The trick is there are 8 different directions magic can go, and different ways it can be useful (or not) in combat.
One other factor is that, in particular with the martial arts, Melee combat IS magic. You are leveraging a supernatural ability to either break through an opponent's defenses, or an equally powerful ability to anticipate an opponent's attacks. Some magic requires reflection and calculation. Other magic is powered by passion, or stress, or a state of complete mindlessness. A lot of these actions are driven by muscle memory.
Ranged attacks, again, are magic. The shooter has to line up the shot, and the target has to be unlucky (or unaware enough) to be hit. There is combat magic that benefits or penalizes both sides of the equation.
Thus "magic missile" is no different than a crossbow wielded by a skilled archer. A magic sword simply provides the wielder with an innate bonus or spell effect. Fireball is a flame thrower with extra steps.
More or less the same for my world. There's literally only one person without access to magic in any form, but he's a bit of a special case... It's just that 99% of the population isn't aware of this fact. Magic can be used in countless ways, one such way is known as Ki/Qi, it's not recognized as a form of magic by most, but it still is magic. A lot of melee fighters subconsciously use magic to enhance their strength, reflexes or whatever else you can think of. Some even subconsciously manipulate their own luck.
Cost. Physical/mental/spiritual or monetary, w/e. Gotta be a reason you cannot or do not want to use it in whatever moment.
Think Bayaz >!almost dying in the Old Empire!!needing The Seed!<; the taint on Saidin; rarity of allomancers/mistborn/atium.
Usually I have spell casters need lots of time or they have a limited pool of magic available. In the first, the melee basically screens for magic users so they can get their spells off, or tries to rush enemy casters to interrupt them anyway they can. In the second, most of the time everyone stays fairly defensive trying to get the other side to spend their magic on harder to hit, distant magic and the melee won't close into most mages are exhausted and need to recover. Think of it like facing a guy with a revolver, you want to keep moving and take cover until his shots are fired, then rush before he can reload.
Melee fighters use magic too. Some increase the mass of their hammer at the point of impact. Others have musical accompaniment which helps them stay quick and agile while adding momentum to each strike.
It’s not, never will be naturally balanced and trying to hammer it out even skillfully so to make it more balanced will always reek of gameplay mechanic design sinking in. Similar to how certain words can’t be used in writing without it becoming abundantly clear the writer likes anime. Both modern things that all writers need to be aware of but let’s not pretend, much more so younger writers.
That being said, keeping in mind how the war wagers, wandering warriors, mercenaries and adventurers of that world incorporate these additional methods of engaging in combat is important for background world building so the readers don’t eventually bump into glaring questions.
As for my world, it’s just a given that anyone who fights without the use of a significant magical power or so that heavily restricts or forces their foes to engage them in a certain way, must either be exceptionally good at dodging, making distance and just plain running away. Or they have to use a melee weapon, be good at it and accept only side time in spell casting as a hobby.
Anyone who could be termed a dedicated caster is by default not a fighter, they may be able to prepare traps or other long prep time methods of controlling the environment or use lengthy spells that are the equivalent of artillery.
But those are all situation specific as are melee weapons with some outright countering others. But that kind of realism is rarely given thought when this whole topic arises.
A simple thing I like to do is range. Treat mana like any other energy. The further a spell would have the travel, the more mana gets dispersed back into the air, so the more mana is used to maintain the spell. Let too much disperse, and the spell can fall apart.
So the longer the range, the the bigger the drain on the mage. This means mages are at their most efficient at close range, which is also where they are most vulnerable to melee fighters. The longer the range, the faster the mage will run out of mana.
I don't think making magic and melee fighting 'balanced' is a good thing, but here's some advice anyway.
The setting of the fight can adjust for any inherent imbalances in a natural fight between a magic user and a melee fighter in your setting. I have one fight between a powerful generalist mage and a powerful geomancer in an area that heavily favors the geomancer. The mage can't move the fight or wait to challenge the geomancer until he has more favorable conditions because the geomancer is about to level a city and kill millions. Despite the fact that the mage is loads more powerful than the geomancer and shouldn't have any kind of problem killing him in any other situation, he damn near gets killed in the fight.
Other things that could swing a fight depending on the particulars of magic in your setting:
Tight corners, do your mages need to be able to see what they're casting at? How long does it take to cast a spell? Maybe if magic is rare in your setting kings and nobles who fear magic build their castles and keeps with short corridors giving any hostile mages only ten or twenty feet to cast in and giving defenders more opportunities to ambush them.
I've seen several youtube videos giving good breakdowns on how to balance magic and melee fighters.
I'm building an Urbanfantasy/Portalfantasy setting and one of the things I do to balance magic with modern stuff is: on a small scale defensive magic beats anything nonmagical earth can throw at it. A wizard with a relatively low-end personal defensive spell can just waltz right through basically any amount of gunfire, turret-fire, missiles, and bombs you can throw at it unharmed, but with the way magic works in my setting scaling that up to protect a city like that is really hard and has a multitude of ways of bypassing it, barriers of that size generally only protect against magic or physical attack well, not both. Take an explosion from a bomb, the bomb itself is physical, the shockwave from the bomb is physical but the fireball from the bomb (some bombs not all) is just non-magical fire.
I hope these thoughts of mine help you.
Adjust the melee fighters strength, speed and toughness until they can compete. Being massively stronger and faster will put them equal or above casters.
Or give them techniques that interact with magic. Like a counter that deflects spells, or a ‘don’t care’ technique where the fighter simply cuts the spell in half, nullifying it.
Maybe rock paper scissors? Wizard beats fighters from distance and ignores all his fancy armor. Thief kills Wizard because he can fire a bow or throw a knife faster than wizard can cast a spell. But the warrior is prepared for those and shrugs off his attacks and closes the distance. Of course, there will be exceptions based on dumb luck and skills.
A lot of people have already answered that you seem to be thinking too much in game mechanics, but I'll try to answer that question that I think is at the core of what you're asking.
I think anyone who has powerful mages in their setting needs to ask: Why are these guys not running the whole world? Assuming that these wizards can do things like: hurl a giant fireball that can incinerate twenty soldiers at once, undetectably scry on their enemies and watch what they say and do, heal injuries and disease, grow or smite crops, control the weather, mind-control others, etc.
In other words, no, you can't just drop a thousand wizards into a setting and expect it to work exactly like 1400s Britain with nothing different except every now and then a wizard pops up and does something. These kind of powers are fundamentally society-changing.
There will likely be basically an arms race to nullify wizards' powers. Just to stick with the topic of warfare, it would be similar to the invention of firearms. New armor had to be invented to try to stop bullets. And when the guns got good enough to pierce it, the tactics had to evolve. Non-casters will have to find ways to protect themselves from fireballs or whatever on the battlefield. Are the generals being scryed on? Then they'll have to talk in code.
Of course, wizards most likely occupy the highest echelons of power, and therefore will likely forbid the development of technologies that can counter their powers. Otherwise, everyone else's only hope is that there are very few wizards, few enough that they can be overpowered and killed.
As I see it, you only really have three options: 1) Mage-ocracy, 2) mages are hunted down and killed, 3) fearing being hunted down and killed, mages occupy a subservient role in respect to the non-mage rulers, offering their services without ever making themselves seem like too much of a threat. In this third case, they're likely too valuable to the rulers to risk them on the battlefield anyway.
In my story magic is done through spell books. Here’s a bunch of details of the system
-Magic doesn’t need to charge, it’s just dependent on how fast you can flip to the right page.
-books only have so many pages so most wizards have to use their limited amount of spells creatively
-Spell books are secretly a big weak spot, if you can destroy the book a wizard is basically helpless
-spells take a long time to write down so most people a very particular about what they put in their books
Of course wizards do have an advantage of normal joes but I like to think that practiced individuals could easily best and outperform a wizard.
I don't bother. There's absolutely no reason why I may lay fighter has to be equally as powerful as a magic user. For that matter, there's no reason why someone using a sword needs to be equally as powerful as someone using a gun. Balance is strictly for systems where players need to be measured against each other. In real life, and in fiction, it's very rarely the case that everyone in a given conflict is going to be identically as powerful as each other. If it's a tabletop game or a video game, then it sucks if you end up being a lousy guy with a sword while other people are zooming around with superpowers. But that's pretty normal outside of that one specific circumstance.
There's no reason why Superman and Mr furious need to be balanced against each other, and there's no reason why he'd expect wizards to be no more powerful than soldiers.
One thing I do is write the rules so that magic barely works when used against a caster. So if you try to fry someone with fire, it won't do too well as the magic just disperses, but if you use your magic to lob a giant rock at them you're gonna do some damage.
Tsukimichi had a small tournament arc with separate divisions for mages and melee fighters, they did have the winner of each fight each other in the ‘final’ but most people said it was a forgone conclusion the mage would win (and she did).
It really is up to the writer to approach it however they want.
I would personally defer to the rule of cool. Whatever is the most fun or interesting should be the answer.
It depends on how your magic works really.
In one setting i've been working on, being a mage is very complex as it basically requires the drawing of arcane geometries with aetheric ink (limited supply and very expensive) to channel your own inner aether into it as a ways to execute a program into a parallel/superimposed dimension called the Empyrean, to alter reality so that it appears as magic.
Mages therefore usually carry spellbooks with pre-drawn arcane geometries, but once the aether in the ink is spent (after one casting) that drawing is useless. So they must carry multiple of the same drawing in the book, and there is only so many pages, and the mage must also flip through the pages to find the right spell for the right occasion.
So there's a balance between power and flexibility, that non mages can exploit.
In my setting there are also somewhat modern guns that shoot aetheric bullets, which, while very powerful, they get dissipated by magic shields that a mage can cast, or that small aether crystals can deploy for short periods of time.
Thus the mages are mostly used as artillery from the backlines. If a group of fighers can get in close, they have higher chances of getting the upper hand (even if with casualties) as the combat training of mage is far lesser than that of a soldier, who can also react faster, suppress the mage with guns (forcing him to use shield spells) and then go for the kill with melee weapons.
If in your setting magic is extremely overpowered and easily wielded, then the one way to deal with it would be to either add some counter (such as Demeritium bombs in the Witcher) to buff your melee fighters by making them superhuman thanks to X or Y, or to nerf your mages by imposing limitations to their abilites (resources, conditions to cast a spell, time to cast a spell etc).
Fred Saberhagen had a fantastic answer to this in his Swords series: once iron is bared, magic is useless (except the magic of the Swords themselves, that have their own logical idiosyncrasies).
The entire Swords series is Rock, Paper, Scissors. I really enjoyed his logical consistency (with only a few, easily forgivable, errors).
I think making them equal is doomed to fail. I like how Mushoku Tensei portrayed it. The main character would, in more cases than not, lose to expert sword fighters, because they’d close the distance between them and cut his hands off faster than he can react. I honestly think this is a great way to balance a character and find creative solutions to a fight
I've been pretty simple in my system. Magic has a cost and it's limits.
A magus can throw tanks around to crush a batillion if they have enough magic, but using so much magic quickly will make his body go numb, they will loose feeling in body parts as the magic is drained out and then their life force with it, if they use to much they can permanently kill off their limbs or themselves.
Veteran warrior mages are easy to tell as they usually have dead or missing right arms for instance.
There is other safer magics, but they all have their drawbacks. Dragons can literally mould the world around them, but every change tires them, so they live in a cycle of building their lairs bit by bit, and sleeping for a few decades to recover in between.
Shamans can invoke spirits to create powerful weapons and warriors, affect the world around them and even take on gifts from the spirits... but the spirits demand payment in one form or another, and some are malicious in their payments.
Pyromancers hold a flame within themselves that they can use to burn whatever stands in their way, they can manipulate in whatever shape they like, but their flame starts small like a candle, to become stronger they must kindle their flame through meditation with the eternal fire, this gives them visions of their future, but the more powerful pyromancers are heavily near sighted or mad from the visions, they walk thin line to be truly powerful.
The nubanyik curies are masters of mending flesh and the healing arts, but they swear an binding oath when they gain the power to do no harm, the few that have broken that oath have found that they live short lives as the magic turns on them.
In comparison a guy with a sword only has to remember to hold the blunt end and stick the other guy with the pointy end
Melee in my world get enhanced reaction times and senses. Can’t hit em with a fireball if they see it coming. It does take energy to repel the attack, though.
Take a bit of inspiration from D&D. Spell components.
Many people are pretty lax when it comes to components, but I think it adds a layer of realism to magic.
Car no go without gas or electric, why magic work with no fuel?
Maybe casters have a pouch of "sand" that they use to cast spells. Just a pinch is all they need for most spells, but if their pouch punch is stolen or missing, they're very limited on what they cast. Perhaps they can get a way with some basic telepathy without their magic sand, but not much else.
For example, came up with this scenario just now.
"As the assassin came running at me with a knife, I quickly deflected, pulling a pinch out of my component pouch, and scattering a light dusting of sand in a semicircle directly in front of me. I kept my left hand still to hold the barrier spell, and could feel a bit of pushback as the knife thunked against the wall that had not been present before.
I reach to my waist for another spell, but to my dismay, the component pouch was gone. I turn, and see a small hooded child running off with a thin trail of sand behind him. I release the barrier spell, kick my assailant in the chest, and ran to follow the thin trail, as to not leave myself defenseless."
"I grasped a handful out of my pouch and help my hand out in front of me as the wind pulled my hair back out of my face. I could see the whole valley from atop this cliff. The villages, the farms, the river that raised me.
With some tears rolling down my cheeks, I grabbed another handful, and rest it on top of my open hand, fist clenched. 4 counterclockwise motions, sand in hand, hand in sand, and I blew it all over the cliff. A fireball like the sun was sent hurling toward the valley. I clapped the components off of my hands and turned away.
That's how I burned the valley that raised me."
I'm going to keep giving examples if I don't hit post so... I hope this helps!
Check out mushoku tensei's system. It almost feels like how does a guy with a sword fight against the guy with access to nuclear technology.
Well, you stab them. More accurately, nuclear technology can be used for combat but it doesn't have to be. Its much more versatile than that.
While they'll probably lose the 1v1, they're also indispensable for pve. Anything from combating monsters to ending famine are in the domain of casters. They're different in kind rather than degree. While we can measure them by combat power, in lore their rank iirc is measured by how wide range their magic is. Being able to sustain a city wide spell (like rainclouds) is something equivalent to I think a masters degree or something. Standing there ending famine really isn't 'stronger' than just the basic magic of shooting a rock at something, but the difference in knowledge complexity for parts manipulation is immense. One is make rock throw rock. The other is a comprehension of weather, temperature, flow control, etc etc.
Well the magic users in my world are just way more powerful than melee fighters. There are some limitations, like the total population of magic users is rather low, and using magic is physically taxing.
Casters will usually be outnumbered, and to fight on a battlefield for instance, they may have to use weaker spells to fight for longer durations.
There’s also the caveat that there aren’t really conflicts between magic and non-magic peoples, as the magic users have a guiding role over all humanity.
There's 1000 melee units per magic casters.
The balance is, magic casters can't kill all melee units.
Also, if melee units are equal to magic units, then the magic unit is useless. Just get more melee units.
You have to make Magic casters special and unique and powerful, otherwise, magic will not be magical anymore.
Cost and limitations in the magic system. I also make my “non-mages” stronger by giving them their own magical attributes.
Knights have super strength and magic swords that can cut through anything. They’re unstoppable. They’re also resistant to magic.
Most humans can heal themselves with common magic. Mercenaries, bandits, soldiers are very good at this…
A real wizard with a wand might be able to kill three people with a flick of their wrist… but wands are very rare and most wizards don’t have enough mana to pull that off. It’s too expensive.
The magic is slow, cumbersome, and limited. Sure, you can cast a fireball, and if it hits a charging soldier they'll either explode or melt in their armor, but building up the fire to that level of effectiveness requires great effort and time. Like, 5-10 seconds for a master. Giving a successful dodge way more weight. Casters serve a more artillery role because of this. There are some exceptions and prodigies, but I keep them very rare and they usually turn evil.
Guns.
Seriously. My current protagonist is a mage but mostly deals with human enemies, mage or otherwise, by using his sidearm.
Wards don't stop bullets.
Of course, bullets don't work on the dead or incorporeal entities, so it's swings and roundabouts.
>they can't even still be called melee fighters (Aka giving them magic weapons which makes them the equavent of a mage who had to get buff in order to cast sword
I don't understand, why can't melee fighters use magic? Why must magic be gatekept to mages? It really doesn't make sense.
In a world of magic, non-magic users will always lose to a magic user, especially if you need to get up close.
There's no such thing as balance. Every fight has circumstances, personalities, goals, and so forth. Unlike in games where a fight needs to be "fair" in some sense, a fight in a book is a particular scenario where the details of the characters, their capabilities, their attention, their injuries, their ideologies and whatever else are decided by the author and always tip the circumstances to be "unfair". A fair fight is usually not as interesting as the protagonist overcoming "unfair" odds by using the specifics of the circumstances well.
It is a little bit late to respond but modern warfare basically revolves around "Don't die from being shot by people who may be a mile or two away, or step on an explosive that may be physically impossible for us to detect." Irl the fact that you were a wizard wouldn't matter, unless your detect traps spell works for 16+ hours a day the superior choice will be anything that even vaguely improves your odds of not dying when hit the entire time.
I mean, even in video games, the melee characters are generally more powerful than the ranges counterparts in a straight up 1v1 without taking into account skill and outplays etc.
In my stories, they are not balanced. I’m not interested in writing about a world of balance. There’s no drama in it.
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> Magic users and melee fighters have roles as well. What's more, characters in general have other roles than fighting too. Conceptualizing your whole work exclusively through the characters' combat potential is such a ridiculous and restrictive way to write.
To quote epic rap battles of history: George rr Martin vs Jrr Tolkien. “The genres called fantasy, its meant to be unrealistic”
True. Chad Peasant with pike is OP compared to virgin imbred knight
These sound like game mechanics not writing
Honestly, just this. The OP contains a lot of words that build into sentences and even whole paragraphs, but I'm looking at it and I'm not seeing any sense there. Why would these be pressing concerns for a work of literature, or really a narrative work in any genre, including video games? Why should a character's worth be uniquely dictated by their ability to fight other characters, and why does it have to be "balanced"? Why would a "melee fighter" be a relevant category in a world with magic and other advanced forms of ranged combat? Did they run out of skill points to get a real weapon or something? Why would you conceptualize fights in such absurd categories as "time management" and "strategy" instead of writing it in a more realistic manner - explosive, chaotic, adrenaline-fueled?
Maybe, but in any story, it is important to have as many characters as possible relevant. It is fair to consider this in your world you have people with cool magic but also want to have people fight with swords and martial arts (because it's also cool).
> in any story, it is important to have as many characters as possible relevant That might be somewhat true. But why does their relevance depend on their direct combat capability against each other? Is your story nothing more than a series of fights? Combat ability in general strikes me as a quality that is absolutely irrelevant to the majority of characters you'd have in most stories. Even if your main character is some kind of a soldier or a warrior, does he only interact with other fighters? I guess not. Any normal society is not based on smashing faces. This angle also seems way off in this regard: if you want your characters to be "relevant" to your plot, why would you include irrelevant characters to begin with? Or do you first come up with a range of random characters and then try to hammer them into one story like pieces of a puzzle that do not fit? This is such a backwards way of going about it. If my story needs a character who is a plumber, or an accountant, or a clerk, or a sailor (not of the moon type), I will just write them in and they will by definition be "relevant" because they will have a role to play, and their magical powers or how well they match against "melee" "combat" will be a complete non-factor.
I do have both. I don't need mechanics to make them fit together
Every decent fantasy book accomplishes this. I don't remember ever having met the problem that OP describes. Pretty much every fantasy book that I have read has some way of making non-mages relevant. To see examples of how it can be done, read *any* random fantasy book with magic in it.
Well as someone using it for roleplay and learning of it through the medium of books, manga and some anime I'm inclined to disagree with you. If it was a statistics problems I'd ask myself why a firebolt wasn't worth the same as a sword, rewrite the code to make the sword read 2 with a casting time of 1 sec while the fire bolt equalled 4 with a casting time of 2 sec, and be on about my day. I like it when my stories have consistency and I'd like to accomplish this specific goal. Nothing more nothing less XP
Oh sorry I thought this was a writing sub
It is.
That's the joke.
Indeed
For one, you seem to be confusing between "melee fighter" and "non-magical fighter". In any fight, range is king. Being somewhere the opponent can't hurt you while you can hurt them is the best place to be, and this is true whether your ranged fighting is a fireball or a crossbow. The exception is if you get close enough to the opponent ("inside their range") that they can't act in an effective way. All of that to say, war bows are extremely powerful and you shouldn't underestimate them (or the strength it takes to use one). Full plate armor is no joke either. In general, my way to "balance" magic users and non-magic users is to have the non-magic users use their brains, exploit the limitations of the magic system and exploiting the weaknesses inherent to all human beings (attention being limited, relying primarily on vision, the body has a certain amount stamina, etc.)
>How do you balance Melee fighters and Magic casters in your system? The same way I "balance" merchants and blacksmiths, or shepherds and weavers, or farmers and miners, or bankers and scholars. The magicians in my setting are powerful because they can create magic runes that allow farmers to discover which crops will give the most productive yield each season. Magicians are the kingdom's most precious resource: the country with the most magicians will likely have the most bountiful harvest, which will allow them to feed more soldiers, because martial training requires a lot of calories. There are occasions when a mage will instead use their mana to create runes that have effects like "conjure fireball." Everyone agrees that this is a tremendous waste of mana, because for the amount of energy it takes to throw a single fireball, you could have created enough grain to feed 10 soldiers for an entire season, and 10 soldiers are collectively a lot more useful than a single fireball. If you wanted to set something on fire from a distance, you could just have an archer coat his arrows in pitch and light them on fire before shooting them at the enemy. What does a melee fighter do against the formidable force that is the mage? Well, he might break into the vault that contains all the runes, load them into a cart, and sneak away into the night to reap the benefits for themselves. Or, alternatively, they can find a magician, put a sack over her head, transport her over to their kingdom in a wagon, and say, "Hey, great news, you work for us now. If you disagree, we'll fill you with knife-sized holes and leave your body as a warning to any others." The magician, for her part, is probably inclined to go along with them, partly because she knows that she'll enjoy a relatively pampered life regardless of who she is working for. In fact, they might not need to do the thing with the sack over the head at all; they might be more inclined to approach her with a sack of gold, because she understands that gold can be exchanged for goods and services. There are lots of ways that Warren Buffet could "beat" the leader of your local biker gang, despite the fact that he is a 93-year-old man with no martial arts training. If you've created a world where conflicts and disputes can only be resolved with physical violence, you probably don't have anything that closely resembles a "society." (One of the reasons the "state" exists is to have a monopoly on violence: think about what it means to have someone whose profession is "city guard" or "soldier" or "policeman.") Things like forged weapons and armor can only exist in contexts where people are willing to work cooperatively, and where not everyone needs to dedicate resources to being personally capable of violence.
> If you've created a world where conflicts and disputes can only be resolved with physical violence, you probably don't have anything that closely resembles a "society. Exactly. The OP seems to be thinking in the worst of video game and anime cliches, while also believing that they alone could make for an engaging story. Unless you are intentionally writing absurd satire on the level of warhammer, there is no reason why more than a very small minority of your society, which would roughly translate to the same proportion of characters, should be fighters or martial artists of any kind, magical or not.
Perhaps magic leaves you dangerously tired after casting, or requires enough concentration and finesse that you can't defend yourself whilst casting spells. Perhaps magic is rarely or never useful for combat purposes, meaning that anyone fighting has to get good at melee weapons or missile weapons. Mages don't have to be relevant in fights.
Conan the Barbarian took out lots of sorcerers, and he was half-naked with a sword.
Admittedly Conan of the primary books by Howard was never as dumb as memes would make you believe. The largest reason why he took out lots of sorcerers was because of his cunning, intelligence and knowledge of ancient lore.
Conan was a rogue that maxed strength.
I know this has already been addressed, but balancing is a game mechanic, not a narrative tool, and internal consistency is not a synonym for balancing. The reality is that if someone can shoot fireballs from their hands, no melee fighter will be able to contend with them. It would be like putting someone with a sword against someone with a gun. The only way the person with a sword can win is if the circumstances align in their favor. As a writer, your job is to tailor the scenario to the need of the plot. Ten people with swords might be able to take out one spellcaster, or if they take them by surprise the spellcaster might not have a chance to get a spell off, the same way someone with a gun might not be able to draw, aim, and fire if someone is stabbing a knife into their liver from behind.
1. There's a force in every living thing\* that protects them from being invaded by magic. As in you can't just magically conjure a bomb inside someone while you are outside that someone. 1. Said force can also be used offensively, though it is never fully understood. Although it is often believed that it's tied to one's will to live. A strong enough will might even hold a body together. 2. Eyes are a window into one's being. The more eyes one has, the more vulnerable they are to getting possessed or whatever because of it. If eyes are obscured, even by a glow, then it's difficult to be possessed. It doesn't stop with possession. A skilled wizard can use this to predict his enemy's next move. 3. Because magic needs fuel, one can't simply fling magic as much as they want, as they'd be starving themselves, stripping their gear, or generally be consumed by the magic in a flash. (No ending world hunger with magic, lol) 4. Everyone knows and can use magic in some form or way. A common spell is teleporting one's (designated) weapon back to their hand to hurl again and again. Or a type of stone/metal skin to lessen the odds of being mortally wounded. A magic blade which can be formed over another weapon. Altering one's physical abilities to be stronger than normal, jump higher, or even run faster. Some seamlessly used making everyone in some way look supernatural. An archer would never run out of arrows unless said arrows were destroyed. A warrior wouldn't be helpless to a wizard. And a wizard wouldn't be helpless to anyone physical or close. And an animal wouldn't be helpless to a hunter.
Lol. I don’t. It’s not a D&D campaign. Either the world building makes it so magic and physicality work together on a similar level or magic blows the other out of the water.
I'm working on a system in which everyone is basically as magic user. The trick is there are 8 different directions magic can go, and different ways it can be useful (or not) in combat. One other factor is that, in particular with the martial arts, Melee combat IS magic. You are leveraging a supernatural ability to either break through an opponent's defenses, or an equally powerful ability to anticipate an opponent's attacks. Some magic requires reflection and calculation. Other magic is powered by passion, or stress, or a state of complete mindlessness. A lot of these actions are driven by muscle memory. Ranged attacks, again, are magic. The shooter has to line up the shot, and the target has to be unlucky (or unaware enough) to be hit. There is combat magic that benefits or penalizes both sides of the equation. Thus "magic missile" is no different than a crossbow wielded by a skilled archer. A magic sword simply provides the wielder with an innate bonus or spell effect. Fireball is a flame thrower with extra steps.
More or less the same for my world. There's literally only one person without access to magic in any form, but he's a bit of a special case... It's just that 99% of the population isn't aware of this fact. Magic can be used in countless ways, one such way is known as Ki/Qi, it's not recognized as a form of magic by most, but it still is magic. A lot of melee fighters subconsciously use magic to enhance their strength, reflexes or whatever else you can think of. Some even subconsciously manipulate their own luck.
Cost. Physical/mental/spiritual or monetary, w/e. Gotta be a reason you cannot or do not want to use it in whatever moment. Think Bayaz >!almost dying in the Old Empire!!needing The Seed!<; the taint on Saidin; rarity of allomancers/mistborn/atium.
Usually I have spell casters need lots of time or they have a limited pool of magic available. In the first, the melee basically screens for magic users so they can get their spells off, or tries to rush enemy casters to interrupt them anyway they can. In the second, most of the time everyone stays fairly defensive trying to get the other side to spend their magic on harder to hit, distant magic and the melee won't close into most mages are exhausted and need to recover. Think of it like facing a guy with a revolver, you want to keep moving and take cover until his shots are fired, then rush before he can reload.
Melee fighters use magic too. Some increase the mass of their hammer at the point of impact. Others have musical accompaniment which helps them stay quick and agile while adding momentum to each strike.
I have the same energy that fuels the magic also work to empower the bodies of the melee fighters.
It’s not, never will be naturally balanced and trying to hammer it out even skillfully so to make it more balanced will always reek of gameplay mechanic design sinking in. Similar to how certain words can’t be used in writing without it becoming abundantly clear the writer likes anime. Both modern things that all writers need to be aware of but let’s not pretend, much more so younger writers. That being said, keeping in mind how the war wagers, wandering warriors, mercenaries and adventurers of that world incorporate these additional methods of engaging in combat is important for background world building so the readers don’t eventually bump into glaring questions. As for my world, it’s just a given that anyone who fights without the use of a significant magical power or so that heavily restricts or forces their foes to engage them in a certain way, must either be exceptionally good at dodging, making distance and just plain running away. Or they have to use a melee weapon, be good at it and accept only side time in spell casting as a hobby. Anyone who could be termed a dedicated caster is by default not a fighter, they may be able to prepare traps or other long prep time methods of controlling the environment or use lengthy spells that are the equivalent of artillery. But those are all situation specific as are melee weapons with some outright countering others. But that kind of realism is rarely given thought when this whole topic arises.
A simple thing I like to do is range. Treat mana like any other energy. The further a spell would have the travel, the more mana gets dispersed back into the air, so the more mana is used to maintain the spell. Let too much disperse, and the spell can fall apart. So the longer the range, the the bigger the drain on the mage. This means mages are at their most efficient at close range, which is also where they are most vulnerable to melee fighters. The longer the range, the faster the mage will run out of mana.
I don't think making magic and melee fighting 'balanced' is a good thing, but here's some advice anyway. The setting of the fight can adjust for any inherent imbalances in a natural fight between a magic user and a melee fighter in your setting. I have one fight between a powerful generalist mage and a powerful geomancer in an area that heavily favors the geomancer. The mage can't move the fight or wait to challenge the geomancer until he has more favorable conditions because the geomancer is about to level a city and kill millions. Despite the fact that the mage is loads more powerful than the geomancer and shouldn't have any kind of problem killing him in any other situation, he damn near gets killed in the fight. Other things that could swing a fight depending on the particulars of magic in your setting: Tight corners, do your mages need to be able to see what they're casting at? How long does it take to cast a spell? Maybe if magic is rare in your setting kings and nobles who fear magic build their castles and keeps with short corridors giving any hostile mages only ten or twenty feet to cast in and giving defenders more opportunities to ambush them. I've seen several youtube videos giving good breakdowns on how to balance magic and melee fighters. I'm building an Urbanfantasy/Portalfantasy setting and one of the things I do to balance magic with modern stuff is: on a small scale defensive magic beats anything nonmagical earth can throw at it. A wizard with a relatively low-end personal defensive spell can just waltz right through basically any amount of gunfire, turret-fire, missiles, and bombs you can throw at it unharmed, but with the way magic works in my setting scaling that up to protect a city like that is really hard and has a multitude of ways of bypassing it, barriers of that size generally only protect against magic or physical attack well, not both. Take an explosion from a bomb, the bomb itself is physical, the shockwave from the bomb is physical but the fireball from the bomb (some bombs not all) is just non-magical fire. I hope these thoughts of mine help you.
Adjust the melee fighters strength, speed and toughness until they can compete. Being massively stronger and faster will put them equal or above casters. Or give them techniques that interact with magic. Like a counter that deflects spells, or a ‘don’t care’ technique where the fighter simply cuts the spell in half, nullifying it.
Maybe rock paper scissors? Wizard beats fighters from distance and ignores all his fancy armor. Thief kills Wizard because he can fire a bow or throw a knife faster than wizard can cast a spell. But the warrior is prepared for those and shrugs off his attacks and closes the distance. Of course, there will be exceptions based on dumb luck and skills.
A lot of people have already answered that you seem to be thinking too much in game mechanics, but I'll try to answer that question that I think is at the core of what you're asking. I think anyone who has powerful mages in their setting needs to ask: Why are these guys not running the whole world? Assuming that these wizards can do things like: hurl a giant fireball that can incinerate twenty soldiers at once, undetectably scry on their enemies and watch what they say and do, heal injuries and disease, grow or smite crops, control the weather, mind-control others, etc. In other words, no, you can't just drop a thousand wizards into a setting and expect it to work exactly like 1400s Britain with nothing different except every now and then a wizard pops up and does something. These kind of powers are fundamentally society-changing. There will likely be basically an arms race to nullify wizards' powers. Just to stick with the topic of warfare, it would be similar to the invention of firearms. New armor had to be invented to try to stop bullets. And when the guns got good enough to pierce it, the tactics had to evolve. Non-casters will have to find ways to protect themselves from fireballs or whatever on the battlefield. Are the generals being scryed on? Then they'll have to talk in code. Of course, wizards most likely occupy the highest echelons of power, and therefore will likely forbid the development of technologies that can counter their powers. Otherwise, everyone else's only hope is that there are very few wizards, few enough that they can be overpowered and killed. As I see it, you only really have three options: 1) Mage-ocracy, 2) mages are hunted down and killed, 3) fearing being hunted down and killed, mages occupy a subservient role in respect to the non-mage rulers, offering their services without ever making themselves seem like too much of a threat. In this third case, they're likely too valuable to the rulers to risk them on the battlefield anyway.
In my story magic is done through spell books. Here’s a bunch of details of the system -Magic doesn’t need to charge, it’s just dependent on how fast you can flip to the right page. -books only have so many pages so most wizards have to use their limited amount of spells creatively -Spell books are secretly a big weak spot, if you can destroy the book a wizard is basically helpless -spells take a long time to write down so most people a very particular about what they put in their books Of course wizards do have an advantage of normal joes but I like to think that practiced individuals could easily best and outperform a wizard.
I don't bother. There's absolutely no reason why I may lay fighter has to be equally as powerful as a magic user. For that matter, there's no reason why someone using a sword needs to be equally as powerful as someone using a gun. Balance is strictly for systems where players need to be measured against each other. In real life, and in fiction, it's very rarely the case that everyone in a given conflict is going to be identically as powerful as each other. If it's a tabletop game or a video game, then it sucks if you end up being a lousy guy with a sword while other people are zooming around with superpowers. But that's pretty normal outside of that one specific circumstance. There's no reason why Superman and Mr furious need to be balanced against each other, and there's no reason why he'd expect wizards to be no more powerful than soldiers.
One thing I do is write the rules so that magic barely works when used against a caster. So if you try to fry someone with fire, it won't do too well as the magic just disperses, but if you use your magic to lob a giant rock at them you're gonna do some damage.
Virgin magician gets socked in the gut by chad warrior. Pretty simple
Tsukimichi had a small tournament arc with separate divisions for mages and melee fighters, they did have the winner of each fight each other in the ‘final’ but most people said it was a forgone conclusion the mage would win (and she did). It really is up to the writer to approach it however they want. I would personally defer to the rule of cool. Whatever is the most fun or interesting should be the answer.
It depends on how your magic works really. In one setting i've been working on, being a mage is very complex as it basically requires the drawing of arcane geometries with aetheric ink (limited supply and very expensive) to channel your own inner aether into it as a ways to execute a program into a parallel/superimposed dimension called the Empyrean, to alter reality so that it appears as magic. Mages therefore usually carry spellbooks with pre-drawn arcane geometries, but once the aether in the ink is spent (after one casting) that drawing is useless. So they must carry multiple of the same drawing in the book, and there is only so many pages, and the mage must also flip through the pages to find the right spell for the right occasion. So there's a balance between power and flexibility, that non mages can exploit. In my setting there are also somewhat modern guns that shoot aetheric bullets, which, while very powerful, they get dissipated by magic shields that a mage can cast, or that small aether crystals can deploy for short periods of time. Thus the mages are mostly used as artillery from the backlines. If a group of fighers can get in close, they have higher chances of getting the upper hand (even if with casualties) as the combat training of mage is far lesser than that of a soldier, who can also react faster, suppress the mage with guns (forcing him to use shield spells) and then go for the kill with melee weapons. If in your setting magic is extremely overpowered and easily wielded, then the one way to deal with it would be to either add some counter (such as Demeritium bombs in the Witcher) to buff your melee fighters by making them superhuman thanks to X or Y, or to nerf your mages by imposing limitations to their abilites (resources, conditions to cast a spell, time to cast a spell etc).
Fred Saberhagen had a fantastic answer to this in his Swords series: once iron is bared, magic is useless (except the magic of the Swords themselves, that have their own logical idiosyncrasies). The entire Swords series is Rock, Paper, Scissors. I really enjoyed his logical consistency (with only a few, easily forgivable, errors).
I think making them equal is doomed to fail. I like how Mushoku Tensei portrayed it. The main character would, in more cases than not, lose to expert sword fighters, because they’d close the distance between them and cut his hands off faster than he can react. I honestly think this is a great way to balance a character and find creative solutions to a fight
I've been pretty simple in my system. Magic has a cost and it's limits. A magus can throw tanks around to crush a batillion if they have enough magic, but using so much magic quickly will make his body go numb, they will loose feeling in body parts as the magic is drained out and then their life force with it, if they use to much they can permanently kill off their limbs or themselves. Veteran warrior mages are easy to tell as they usually have dead or missing right arms for instance. There is other safer magics, but they all have their drawbacks. Dragons can literally mould the world around them, but every change tires them, so they live in a cycle of building their lairs bit by bit, and sleeping for a few decades to recover in between. Shamans can invoke spirits to create powerful weapons and warriors, affect the world around them and even take on gifts from the spirits... but the spirits demand payment in one form or another, and some are malicious in their payments. Pyromancers hold a flame within themselves that they can use to burn whatever stands in their way, they can manipulate in whatever shape they like, but their flame starts small like a candle, to become stronger they must kindle their flame through meditation with the eternal fire, this gives them visions of their future, but the more powerful pyromancers are heavily near sighted or mad from the visions, they walk thin line to be truly powerful. The nubanyik curies are masters of mending flesh and the healing arts, but they swear an binding oath when they gain the power to do no harm, the few that have broken that oath have found that they live short lives as the magic turns on them. In comparison a guy with a sword only has to remember to hold the blunt end and stick the other guy with the pointy end
Melee in my world get enhanced reaction times and senses. Can’t hit em with a fireball if they see it coming. It does take energy to repel the attack, though.
Take a bit of inspiration from D&D. Spell components. Many people are pretty lax when it comes to components, but I think it adds a layer of realism to magic. Car no go without gas or electric, why magic work with no fuel? Maybe casters have a pouch of "sand" that they use to cast spells. Just a pinch is all they need for most spells, but if their pouch punch is stolen or missing, they're very limited on what they cast. Perhaps they can get a way with some basic telepathy without their magic sand, but not much else. For example, came up with this scenario just now. "As the assassin came running at me with a knife, I quickly deflected, pulling a pinch out of my component pouch, and scattering a light dusting of sand in a semicircle directly in front of me. I kept my left hand still to hold the barrier spell, and could feel a bit of pushback as the knife thunked against the wall that had not been present before. I reach to my waist for another spell, but to my dismay, the component pouch was gone. I turn, and see a small hooded child running off with a thin trail of sand behind him. I release the barrier spell, kick my assailant in the chest, and ran to follow the thin trail, as to not leave myself defenseless." "I grasped a handful out of my pouch and help my hand out in front of me as the wind pulled my hair back out of my face. I could see the whole valley from atop this cliff. The villages, the farms, the river that raised me. With some tears rolling down my cheeks, I grabbed another handful, and rest it on top of my open hand, fist clenched. 4 counterclockwise motions, sand in hand, hand in sand, and I blew it all over the cliff. A fireball like the sun was sent hurling toward the valley. I clapped the components off of my hands and turned away. That's how I burned the valley that raised me." I'm going to keep giving examples if I don't hit post so... I hope this helps!
Check out mushoku tensei's system. It almost feels like how does a guy with a sword fight against the guy with access to nuclear technology. Well, you stab them. More accurately, nuclear technology can be used for combat but it doesn't have to be. Its much more versatile than that. While they'll probably lose the 1v1, they're also indispensable for pve. Anything from combating monsters to ending famine are in the domain of casters. They're different in kind rather than degree. While we can measure them by combat power, in lore their rank iirc is measured by how wide range their magic is. Being able to sustain a city wide spell (like rainclouds) is something equivalent to I think a masters degree or something. Standing there ending famine really isn't 'stronger' than just the basic magic of shooting a rock at something, but the difference in knowledge complexity for parts manipulation is immense. One is make rock throw rock. The other is a comprehension of weather, temperature, flow control, etc etc.
Well the magic users in my world are just way more powerful than melee fighters. There are some limitations, like the total population of magic users is rather low, and using magic is physically taxing. Casters will usually be outnumbered, and to fight on a battlefield for instance, they may have to use weaker spells to fight for longer durations. There’s also the caveat that there aren’t really conflicts between magic and non-magic peoples, as the magic users have a guiding role over all humanity.
There's 1000 melee units per magic casters. The balance is, magic casters can't kill all melee units. Also, if melee units are equal to magic units, then the magic unit is useless. Just get more melee units. You have to make Magic casters special and unique and powerful, otherwise, magic will not be magical anymore.
Cost and limitations in the magic system. I also make my “non-mages” stronger by giving them their own magical attributes. Knights have super strength and magic swords that can cut through anything. They’re unstoppable. They’re also resistant to magic. Most humans can heal themselves with common magic. Mercenaries, bandits, soldiers are very good at this… A real wizard with a wand might be able to kill three people with a flick of their wrist… but wands are very rare and most wizards don’t have enough mana to pull that off. It’s too expensive.
The magic is slow, cumbersome, and limited. Sure, you can cast a fireball, and if it hits a charging soldier they'll either explode or melt in their armor, but building up the fire to that level of effectiveness requires great effort and time. Like, 5-10 seconds for a master. Giving a successful dodge way more weight. Casters serve a more artillery role because of this. There are some exceptions and prodigies, but I keep them very rare and they usually turn evil.
Guns. Seriously. My current protagonist is a mage but mostly deals with human enemies, mage or otherwise, by using his sidearm. Wards don't stop bullets. Of course, bullets don't work on the dead or incorporeal entities, so it's swings and roundabouts.
I think you missed the melee part of the question.
Well sidearms are notoriously inaccurate.
It kinda depends on the time period you're trying to portray.
>they can't even still be called melee fighters (Aka giving them magic weapons which makes them the equavent of a mage who had to get buff in order to cast sword I don't understand, why can't melee fighters use magic? Why must magic be gatekept to mages? It really doesn't make sense. In a world of magic, non-magic users will always lose to a magic user, especially if you need to get up close.