The Gaming Den

I do not like how the classes and levels take such a wide gap in D&D, with melee fighting dominating the game at low levels, or so I've heard, with full spell casters dominating at high levels. I have been looking at other magic system that I was wondering would help bridge the gap:

I have heard of the Black Company Campaign Setting and the True Sorcery which is based off of it:
Here it is.
While it looks interesting, I was wondering how "draining" would affect casters. Instead of spell slots, casters take nonlethal damage every time they use a spell, while the Heal spells convert lethal damage to nonlethal. Nonlethal damage has to heal normally. Undead and Construct casters use a set number of "points," called a casting buffer.

Psionics: I get the feeling that Power Points are little different from magic slots, and it is a lot like the D&D Magic system. Still contains Save-or-Die, Save-or-Lose, and Buff spells. All in all, little different.

Call of Cthulhu d20:
Uses magic spells as is, with the exception of losing Sanity, which when you lose enough, you become an NPC. Insane Spellcasters do not suffer at all under this system, but being NPCs only, may give players an incentive to be careful. Doesn't bridge the gap more than it penalizes spell casters, making people even less likely to be a caster.


Wheel of Time d20: Do not know much, except that male spell casters eventually become insane. Everybody who wants to be a caster will become a female. To powergamers, gender is meaningless, unless there is a game benefit.

True20: I have only heard that spells are bought like feats, and stack in power with Adept level. Adept is the "magic" class of True20.

Star Wars d20/The Force: Skill-based casting, with all but three Force skills restricted from non-Force-Users, a.k.a. Force-Using classes, not merely Force Sensitives. Still a gap, but no bridge.

Arcana Unearthed: Heard that they do not have as much Save-Or-Die spells or spells that overshadow the noncasters/partial casters. I do not own the book, so I know little.

Iron Heroes: The magic system does not seem "complete."

Spycraft 2.0: The Channeler. Here it is. claims to be balanced against noncasters. I do not have it, but can any of you recommend if it works?

Midnight 2nd Edition: Two Core Classes:Channeler and
Legate
Spell casting is gained through taking the Spellcasting and Magecraft feats for the Channeler. The Legate is intended for the bad guys, who are almost always the NPCs. Of course, the Legate gains the standard D&D magic progression, but if they are limited to NPCs and keep it out of players' reach, it may be okay. As for the Channeler, they gain D&D spells, but the more they cast, the more attention that they draw to themselves. Best use in Midnight Campaign Setting. Both classes I would not recommend in other settings without a similar mood and mechanics.

In short, do any of you guys know if any of these systems help bridge the class/level gap, or make the gap disappear? If you know of any systems not listed here, please notify me.
Thanks!

You're missing Shadowrun, and the option of mechanically treating "magic" abilities exactly the same as "nonmagic".

The second option (same mechanics) is inherently balanced.
Shadowrun is actually biased significantly in favor of the casters. However, as long as you're free with the money, stick to the setting, and remove the few truly broken bits it works.

None of the "Casting makes you insane" systems balance anything at all. A true powergamer will charge full speed ahead. When your character becomes an NPC, you get to write up a new one which can be a spellcaster too.


IIRC WoT had just as unbalanced spellcasting as D&D, but in a different way. Overchanneling is apparently the shit.

You're missing Shadowrun, and the option of mechanically treating "magic" abilities exactly the same as "nonmagic".

Like that "Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic?"
Is the magic in Shadowrun D&D-style, high-powered, more subtle, or "play with fire and you get burned" type?

Does the Spycraft Channeler live up to its expectations? If it does, I will assuredly buy Spycraft 2.0 and the Channeler PDF.
Would Spycraft be easy to convert to genres other than Modern/James Bond Spy style, if I find that I like the system?

Also, have any of you guys seen Alderac's "Rokugan" campaign, with a Feudal Japan genre? If so, what do you think of the Magic system, if it has one? Rokugan RPG Homepage

I do not like how the classes and levels take such a wide gap in D&D, with melee fighting dominating the game at low levels, or so I've heard, with full spell casters dominating at high levels.

This is pretty much a tangent, but at low levels melee characters don't really dominate the game. The Spellcasters come in with a couple of doozies (multi-target save or dies and battlefield changing spells and the like), and thereafter they are relagated to being somewhat fragile crossbowmen. The warriors hit decently hard with every attack until they drop and are somewhat harder to drop than the wizards are. That's a potential balance point actually. If you just stuck to that, giving Wizards enough melee and ranged ability to stay only slightly behind the fighter and never really increased their spells per day at all (but kept the spells as relaively badass as a color spray vs. a warhammer), then you'd have something where casters and non-casters could stand next to one another without embarassment.

Of course, no spell slot or spell point system I'm aware of actually works like that - but it's certainly a possibility. Wizards and Barbarians really do share the stage with one another without irony at 1st and 2nd level and if you were willing to keep that sort of dynamic it would remain balanced (at least potentially) as far as you wanted to go.

Catharz wrote:You're missing Shadowrun, and the option of mechanically treating "magic" abilities exactly the same as "nonmagic".

That's a drain system which actually works pretty well. The key here is that spell effects are generally speaking no better than the regular tech effects. The caster > everyone slips in a little bit when you relaize that magicians actually can still use medkits and hot rods but their healing spells are cumulative with first aid and their spirit movement is cumulative with driving a car (thus allowing the Magician to become an invaluable party member simply by taking advantage of every part of the game where a magic bonus can "stack" with a non-magic bonus, regardless of how large those bonuses actually are).

But that's the core of the "magic" problem in every game. Even in games where magic doesn't put up big numbers (Rune Quest, for example), there's still the basic fact that non-magical solutions to problems are basically very easy to describe and perform. That means that it's really hard to keep wizards from using inclined planes and wheels and levers and shit combined with whatever pphysics altering powers they have to be better than other people.

As far as I know, the only way to keep magic from beating everything is to either allow everyone to break the laws of physics or reign in the potentials of magic to well below the outputs possible with entirely non-magical means.

-Username17

So you are proposing having the Wizards and whatnot not having spells per day increased, but have potential slightly behind that of a Fighter?
It feels like I am playing an entirely different game at mid-to-high levels with the spell caster's uber potential.
What about mechanics to bump spell casters at high levels down a peg? For example, in Dragonlance, all spell casters are part of an organization, whether a church for clerics and druids, or the Orders of High Sorcery for Wizards. Wizards must pass a test to be allowed access to 3+ level spells, while Clerics need a Medallion of Faith to be able to utilize level 3+ spells at all. Sorcerers, renegades, and others whose magic is not controlled by deities are viewed as a threat and hunted down mercilessly.
What about "Draining" effects, that tax the caster in some way?

Captain_Bleach at [unixtime wrote:1184388905[/unixtime]]
What about mechanics to bump spell casters at high levels down a peg? For example, in Dragonlance, all spell casters are part of an organization, whether a church for clerics and druids, or the Orders of High Sorcery for Wizards. Wizards must pass a test to be allowed access to 3+ level spells, while Clerics need a Medallion of Faith to be able to utilize level 3+ spells at all. Sorcerers, renegades, and others whose magic is not controlled by deities are viewed as a threat and hunted down mercilessly.

That doesn't change balance at all. Either you have world- (game-?) destroying power or you don't. If you have it, you're impacted not at all. If you don't your character is broken in the other direction.

"Having enemies" isn't really a benefit or penalty in a D&D-like RPG. Being hunted down either means that your DM has an easier time coming up with random encounters or that everybody dies and you really aren't allowed to play a spellcaster.

Captain_Bleach at [unixtime wrote:1184388905[/unixtime]]What about "Draining" effects, that tax the caster in some way?

That's what Frank and I were talking about in Shadowrun. It has to be done well to work at all, otherwise it's no worse or better than any other solution.

Let me see if I'm understanding your idea, Frank. There might be a viable balancing point if wizards were only slightly behind a fighter, and could cast a handful of spells per day, where each spell was on the order of color spray in effect?

virgileso at [unixtime wrote:1184418561[/unixtime]]Let me see if I'm understanding your idea, Frank. There might be a viable balancing point if wizards were only slightly behind a fighter, and could cast a handful of spells per day, where each spell was on the order of color spray in effect?

Pretty much. From a raw mechanics standpoint, it would probably be easiest to describe it as characters being required to multiclass out of Wizard as soon as they hit level 2 in the class - but having their spell slots continue to rise in allowed level with character level. That is, at character level 3 and 4 they could convert one of their base two slots to a 2nd level spell and at character level 9 and 10 they could convert them into 5th level spells and so on.

Seriously, you might even want spells to advance slightly faster than that, and you'd need a slightly different mechanic for getting bonus spells because while you really wouldn't care about people getting access to wail of the banshee you'd be very concerned if people got a fourth spell slot of any level.

If you were doing a complete magic overhaul, you'd want to hand out two different kinds of spell slots - invocations (which are castable in combat and are color spray at first level and black tentacles or weird at slightly higher levels), and rituals (which have casting times in excess of five rounds and are things like knock and plane shift). You'd have to prepare up both and you'd never really get any more slots for invocations.

This would put things at the level of combat effectiveness of starting characters. Maybe one to three times a day the Wizard can go all nova and take out a room full of enemies in one action, and the rest of the time he's a cohort level combatant. However, the Wizard would still have access to a small and possibly growing pile of non-combat tricks that allow him to do neat utility crap each day. And because we're basing it off of starting characters and their balance point we're taking away all of the spellcaster's buff spells (1st level wizards don't have the spell slots for that kind of bullshit).

It's really quite plausible as a balance point if you wanted to keep the D&D feel of low level wizards while still allowing character advancement to 3rd level and beyond.

Bleach wrote:What about mechanics to bump spell casters at high levels down a peg? For example, in Dragonlance, all spell casters are part of an organization, whether a church for clerics and druids, or the Orders of High Sorcery for Wizards. Wizards must pass a test to be allowed access to 3+ level spells, while Clerics need a Medallion of Faith to be able to utilize level 3+ spells at all. Sorcerers, renegades, and others whose magic is not controlled by deities are viewed as a threat and hunted down mercilessly.

As Catharz said, those sorts of effects are completely impotent at reigning in anything. Let's consider the possibilities of what happens when your Sorcerer is "hunted" for being a rogue spellcaster:

1. The character never runs into the hunters. Maybe he convinces people that he's really a wizard, maybe he only ends up casting spells in fvcking dungeons that none of the sorcerer hunters happen to be in, maybe the hunters just never happen to catch up with him. Whatever the reason, the entire thing is just backstory and has literally no effect on the game if the hunters show up.
   
   
2. Hunters attack and they are within the level guidelines of an appropriate encounter for your party. You're stooging around the inn and suddenly sorcerer hunters burst in. But... you're D&D characters, someone was going to attack the town or start a bar fight or whatever. Every session you fight something, sop the fact that you're fighting sorcerer hunters who are attacking you specifically rather than orcish raiders who are attacking the village as a whole and targetting the adventurers preferentially is again just backstory - nothing is actually different.
   
   
3. Hunters attack and they are not within the level guidelines. Big penis NPCs come over the hill and kill the party and the game's over. The players learn nothing and there was nothing to learn. You gave the PCs and option of character creation which simply had a shorter campaign associated with it. Good job.

Bleach wrote:What about "Draining" effects, that tax the caster in some way?

The way it is handled in Shadowrun, drain ramps up in severity quite dangerously if a spell's Force is in excess of the character's Magic attribute. The thing is that generally speaking characters have a Magic attribute that is in the normal range of attributes for character attributes. And spells are capped in effectiveness by the Force they are cast at. So by and large any spell you're going to cast is in approximately the range of what characters could accomplish by non-magical means.

So for example, characters might have a Magic of 5, which means that if they wanted to cast a Manabolt (basic attack spell) above Force 5 they'd be playing with fire. But Force 5 manabolts are in the general range of what you can accomplish with a sword and people in the setting have guns. To really match the effectiveness of a handgun you're usually going to want to cast that Manabolt at Force 7 or 9, at which point drain is a serious concern.

However, the fact that spells like Levitate, Heal, Shape Metal, and Trid Phantasm do things that are either not replicable with technology at all or work on a different enough principal to be directly cumulative with the technological systems means that Magicians are literally irreplaceable, while any other particular party member (except a Hacker) isn't.

-Username17

You obviously know a lot, Frank. Can you tell me your opinions on the Spycraft Channeler if you know of it's game mechanics?

Captain_Bleach at [unixtime wrote:1184442734[/unixtime]] Can you tell me your opinions on the Spycraft Channeler if you know of it's game mechanics?

Honestly, I haven't given Spycraft Channeling a thorough look over. From a cursory look-see I can say the following:

• I don't really like Spell Points. There's really only two ways that can work out. Either two first level spells are worth a 2nd level spell or they aren't. In either case it just plays holy hell with game balance. Essentially what you're doing is putting yourself on a charge system where you honestly don't know how many charges people are actually going to have available - making playtesting and balancing virtually impossible.
  
  
• d20 desn't mesh with skill based spellcasting at all. Skills are inherently off the RNG with themselves even at low levels. I can make a perfectly reasonable 10th level character with a +18 to a core class skill. I can make another perfectly reasonable 10th level character with a +38 to a core class skill. There just aren't any DCs you can set for skills that actually correspond to "easy" or "hard" at any particular level of play - and that means that making a character's entire schtick dependent upon the results of one such skill is inherently problematic.
  
  
• Allowing characters to pump their spellcasting up in real effectiveness by throwing feats down actually is just a way to exascerbate the already existant problems of multi-casters. Simply put the default assumption for a caster must be that they assign everything they possibly can to becoming a better spellcaster - the entire justification for a level-based system is to force wizards to get hit points and saving throws rather than just putting in every character point to casting more powerful and devastating magic. So if you allow another aspect of a character to be spent on "better casting" (in this case feats) you're really just making standard magicians more similar one to another. And you're punishing people who dip into spellcasting more as well (since presumably they won't have put all their feats into better spellcasting, which pushes them lower and lower on the RNG every time that happens).

-Username17

In your opinion, what is the best spell casting system to date, d20 or non-d20. If it is non-d20, please tell me the system.
What about the other aspects of Spycraft? Are all the classes balanced against each other and remain equally fun and cool to play, depending on your style?

3. Hunters attack and they are not within the level guidelines. Big penis NPCs come over the hill and kill the party and the game's over. The players learn nothing and there was nothing to learn. You gave the PCs and option of character creation which simply had a shorter campaign associated with it. Good job.

How does the size of the enemies' genitals matter?

Ever hear of men having "small penis syndrome" when they carry around large guns, drive expensive sports cars, etc? Attributing an NPC with "generous endowments" is an acknowledgement that they're just plain better than you, as such references stems from the fact our hobby is a male-dominated field.

Captain_Bleach at [unixtime wrote:1184464314[/unixtime]]

3. Hunters attack and they are not within the level guidelines. Big penis NPCs come over the hill and kill the party and the game's over. The players learn nothing and there was nothing to learn. You gave the PCs and option of character creation which simply had a shorter campaign associated with it. Good job.

How does the size of the enemies' genitals matter?

Not to sound condescending, but you should really read some old threads on this forum to get a feel for our posting style.

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1184375353[/unixtime]]This is pretty much a tangent, but at low levels melee characters don't really dominate the game. The Spellcasters come in with a couple of doozies (multi-target save or dies and battlefield changing spells and the like), and thereafter they are relagated to being somewhat fragile crossbowmen. The warriors hit decently hard with every attack until they drop and are somewhat harder to drop than the wizards are. That's a potential balance point actually. If you just stuck to that, giving Wizards enough melee and ranged ability to stay only slightly behind the fighter and never really increased their spells per day at all (but kept the spells as relaively badass as a color spray vs. a warhammer), then you'd have something where casters and non-casters could stand next to one another without embarassment.

Of course, no spell slot or spell point system I'm aware of actually works like that - but it's certainly a possibility.

I've always envisioned creating a system where you get X slots of "special" spells per adventure and then the rest of your spells are either infinite cast or ToB style refreshable casting.

RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1184515106[/unixtime]]

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1184375353[/unixtime]]This is pretty much a tangent, but at low levels melee characters don't really dominate the game. The Spellcasters come in with a couple of doozies (multi-target save or dies and battlefield changing spells and the like), and thereafter they are relagated to being somewhat fragile crossbowmen. The warriors hit decently hard with every attack until they drop and are somewhat harder to drop than the wizards are. That's a potential balance point actually. If you just stuck to that, giving Wizards enough melee and ranged ability to stay only slightly behind the fighter and never really increased their spells per day at all (but kept the spells as relaively badass as a color spray vs. a warhammer), then you'd have something where casters and non-casters could stand next to one another without embarassment.

Of course, no spell slot or spell point system I'm aware of actually works like that - but it's certainly a possibility.

I've always envisioned creating a system where you get X slots of "special" spells per adventure and then the rest of your spells are either infinite cast or ToB style refreshable casting.

That could make a workable system for every character class.

Catharz at [unixtime wrote:1184522049[/unixtime]]

That could make a workable system for every character class.

Yeah I've always thought of maybe having some universal pool of energy points or something that you use to fuel per adventure stuff, so that multiclassing wouldn't give you a ton of abilities you can use but none of them level appropriate.

It would mean of course totally dumping the idea of gaining spell slots when you level. So like a 1st level character would have the same energy as a 10th level one. It's just that his energy points could do more dramatic stuff.

MrWaeseL at [unixtime wrote:1184502825[/unixtime]]
Not to sound condescending, but you should really read some old threads on this forum to get a feel for our posting style.

I know, I was just fooling around.

Random Casualty wrote:
Yeah I've always thought of maybe having some universal pool of energy points or something that you use to fuel per adventure stuff, so that multiclassing wouldn't give you a ton of abilities you can use but none of them level appropriate.

Like FATE points, Edge, or Hero Points. Only hopefully less like any of those in that characters having wildly different numbers of them or getting them back individually "when the DM feels like it" is frustratingly unbalanced.

Giving each player abilities usable all the time over and over again (like Sneak Attack), abilities usable every encounter (like a ToB shenanigan), and finally abilities usable only once in a long time (either defined as "per day", "per game session", or "per chronicle" - whatever) would be a good start. Of course, then you're probably looking at a platform where people have a reasonably static base number system and then played abilities on top of that - like SAME or FUDGE.

-Username17

FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1184526183[/unixtime]]
Like FATE points, Edge, or Hero Points. Only hopefully less like any of those in that characters having wildly different numbers of them or getting them back individually "when the DM feels like it" is frustratingly unbalanced.

Yeah, especially when characters can get them back at uneven intervals.

Giving each player abilities usable all the time over and over again (like Sneak Attack), abilities usable every encounter (like a ToB shenanigan), and finally abilities usable only once in a long time (either defined as "per day", "per game session", or "per chronicle" - whatever) would be a good start. Of course, then you're probably looking at a platform where people have a reasonably static base number system and then played abilities on top of that - like SAME or FUDGE.

I tend to frown on per day or per session abilities since they're very highly destructive to game flow.

Per Day (or week or month) only really makes sense as a limiter when you want to restrict some non-combat ability's use during downtime. Fabricate for instance.

I'd really prefer some kind of "per adventure" mechanic for the big abilities. People tend to know what per adventure means, but per day can either mean "once a combat" or "once in the adventure" depending on the game's pacing. Having to control when people go to sleep is a pain in the ass and we probably should just eliminate that particular mechanic from the game. Per session can be even worse, as slow players actually gain an advantage over fast ones and it's all the encouragement in the world to proceed through the temple of elemental evil at a snail's pace so you get your abilities more often.

The only real disadvantage of per adventure is that it's somewhat arbitrary when an adventure ends, and thus the DM could conceivably not restore your abilities enough, but I figure it's also the toughest to break.

I like 'once per adventure' abilities as one-time abilities. You get [a] new one every adventure, because you got an item from the treasure trove or were blessed for accomplishing your quest or practiced or made it between adventures or whatever.

I always thought it would be cool to give Fighters one-a-day or so abilities like 'heal all wounds' or whatnot where they could totally go all nova, but then be back in action, and make use of their unlimited abilities.

Or bleed affects which mean that the fighter gets a higher and higher chance of totally dropping a non-immune foe every round (bonus subdual damage?)

I dunno. A progression where someone got both the monk class abilities and the fighter's class abilities at the same time never seemed unbalanced.

-Crissa

I like the idea of a draining system. In True Sorcery, they say that magic deals an amount of nonlethal damage based upon the power of the spell. The higher the spell's Spellcraft DC (which the system is based upon), the more nonlethal damage the spell caster takes. The healing magic in the game does not restore nonlethal damage, it just converts lethal damage to nonlethal damage. It makes spell casters more considerate of what they cast and how many times before they go unconscious from all the excess energy.

I'm a Spycraft fan. My name's as a playtester 2.0 and the Dark Inheritance setting, and I have an "additional writing" credit in the 1.0 supplement Masterminds. They don't employ me or anything, but I am a total Spycraft fanboy.

I'm gonna address Frank's concerns about the channeler first, since, of course, he brings up good, valid points.

Frank wrote:I don't really like Spell Points. There's really only two ways that can work out. Either two first level spells are worth a 2nd level spell or they aren't. In either case it just plays holy hell with game balance. Essentially what you're doing is putting yourself on a charge system where you honestly don't know how many charges people are actually going to have available - making playtesting and balancing virtually impossible.

I don't care for spell points, either. But the spell points in Spycraft 2.0 are decently done. They rejuvenate per scene (which in SC2 is about 3/session), meaning you'll have enough, but not so much as to be able to overshadow the rest of the folks when you whip out your big-ass spell. It's resource management, but not painful resource management.

Also, bear in mind that enemies scale to the players, not vice-versa, so that balance happens automagically. The higher level you are, the bigger your spells are, the more powerful the enemies are… organically, as that's how the game functions.

Frank wrote:d20 desn't mesh with skill based spellcasting at all. Skills are inherently off the RNG with themselves even at low levels. I can make a perfectly reasonable 10th level character with a +18 to a core class skill. I can make another perfectly reasonable 10th level character with a +38 to a core class skill. There just aren't any DCs you can set for skills that actually correspond to "easy" or "hard" at any particular level of play - and that means that making a character's entire schtick dependent upon the results of one such skill is inherently problematic.

The die roll in SC2 can be upped to pretty high, but the game puts hard limits on how much each bonus can grant--there are only about 6 different bonus types in the game, and each one maxes out at somewhere between +4 and +6, and some of those bonuses you just can't get for certain things. I'm pretty sure it's impossible at level to get a +38 to anything. You can probably hit +25 if you try really hard and devote yourself to nothing else but upping your spellcasting skill, but that's okay: the game expects you to do that, and it doesn't expect you to fail a spellcasting roll if that's what you've dedicated your character to doing.

Also, ever since I read what you said about there only needing to be a single balance point with spellcasting (you either lose fatigue or you use spell points or you need a skill roll or you have limited uses per day, but don't bother to do it in combination--that's lame), I've advocated the same thing. When Gearin (the magic author for Spycraft) was putting forth the idea of spellpoints and skill-based, I agrued against exactly for that reason. It didn't take. But I understand the theory--you really can make a valid choice as a spellcaster between more spells and a higher risk of failing to cast them vs. fewer spells and no risk of being able to cast them. That's balanced and worthwhile design goal.

Allowing characters to pump their spellcasting up in real effectiveness by throwing feats down actually is just a way to exascerbate the already existant problems of multi-casters. Simply put the default assumption for a caster must be that they assign everything they possibly can to becoming a better spellcaster - the entire justification for a level-based system is to force wizards to get hit points and saving throws rather than just putting in every character point to casting more powerful and devastating magic. So if you allow another aspect of a character to be spent on "better casting" (in this case feats) you're really just making standard magicians more similar one to another. And you're punishing people who dip into spellcasting more as well (since presumably they won't have put all their feats into better spellcasting, which pushes them lower and lower on the RNG every time that happens).

The SC2 feat system is not the typical d20 feat system. Feats are meaningful and plentiful and, really, actually do crap instead of just another +1 to attack rolls or whatever. I agree that the idea of more magic feats = higher save DCs is a bit wonky, but characters are sharply limited in spell selection anyway, so picking the stuff without saves is a valid tactic.
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I didn't mention the SC2 magic system on this thread earlier because there really is available only the channeler, which handles evocation magic exclusively. While it has a few utility spells (fly, knock), it's mostly just blaster stuff--it's interesting blaster stuff and well-balanced blaster stuff, but nonetheless blaster stuff. I was waiting for at least the enchanter knock-off so I could see how some of the noncombat stuff works.

The SC2 system is a large one and heavily nuanced with folks behind it who know what they're doing. For example (and this is just a very small example):

Saving Throws
Terminal: The spell's effect is catastrophic, and frequently game-ending, for the target(s). In the interest of fairness, each special character making a save to resist the spell's effect gains a +4 bonus. This bonus increases to +8 for a mastermind. On the flip side, under certain circumstances, the GC may determine that this spell's effect may generate a terminal situation [in which a foe is just considered dead].

…And this is in a game where +4 means something. Note that PCs are special characters. Note further that the designers recognize that resilient sphere is a terminal spell.

It's touches like this that persuade me the designers are actually thinking instead of just, I dunno, cranking out crap.
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On a final note, I started up a SC2 campaign based in the Whedonverse where I allowed magic and psionics in addition to the normal stuff. Of the four characters, one took a psionic class and the rest picked normal classes. And these characters were designed by the group's powergamer.

That's not to say magic blows, but that magic is balanced against other characters quite nicely.

The more I think about it the more I think that in order to balance non casters and casters you have to step back and think about long term checks and blances, taking into account expected encounter rates, attack powers and attack limitations and ensuring that all options have the same scalability factor.

The traditional way was not to scale at all. Wizards had a greater power factor but they had a limiting factor in that they only could do so many spells in a given day. No one thought to limit or control encounters in 1E the way people expect it to be done today. Fighters, on the other hand, had no limitations whatsoever; they could attack every round, 60 times an hour if they so desired. (In 1E the round was one minute long.)

Ironically I think this slightly inverted in 3E. Wizards can spend down time making scrolls, potions and wands; fighters can't get any benefit from saving attacks. The power factor still favors wizards and most encounters are so micro-managed that the wizard can go full bore and never worry about being out of power for significant amounts of time.

So the answer I think is to frst balance the orders of power on an average damage per round basis. (You could come up with a system for magic that does more damage but takes twice as long to cast.) The second is to introduce a fatigue system so that instead of trying to macro-manage on a mythical day's worth of encounters, one can see the results of adventuring too fast or too slow on a more immediate level. Spells should fatigue, combat should fatigue on the same order of magnitude.

Once you have that casters and non casters are somewhat balanced. You need to design a blanced mix of attack types because that is what keeps the game from being boring. Personally I think that too little attention is given to piercing/slashing/blunt in 3E compared to fire/ice/etc and that is probably a cause of fighter boredom!

"Fear my Leet mithril chain mail!"
"My rapier couldn't care less about your chain mail."
"I get you point."