Too Many Power Systems

Divine Magic from 1,000 gods!

Infernal!

Arcane Magic from infinite sources!

Nature!

Music!

Sorcery!

Battle Magic!

Elements!

Ancients!

Ki!

Psionics!

Crystal Magic!

Dragon Magic!

Storm Magic!

Shadow Magic!

Fae Magic!

Undead Power!

Ley Magic!

Superpowers!

Mutant Powers!

...and on, and on, and on.

I am sick of games with too many power systems. No choices or complex decisions exist, and the world has too much power. Fantasy is a far worse offender than sci-fi or even super-heroic worlds. Some games have over a dozen magic sources, and new ones appear daily.

High fantasy turns on the firehose, and suddenly, everyone can perform magic.

Imagine a world with one source of magic, an evil force known as The Dark Eye. You would need to pay tribute for power, and there would be no gods or other ways to "get magic power." That is an exciting world. The cost of magic is steep, and there is no other place to get it.

Today's high fantasy games are cereal aisles in a supermarket and hundreds of brightly colored boxes of carbs and sugar. Very little of it is different and meaningful; most are the same ingredients with minor chemical differences in flavoring.

You get a game with over a dozen power systems, and I bet it uses those as system lock-in. Great novels usually never have a dozen power systems; they are typically one and rarely two or three. Any more power types become meaningless, and any hard choice evaporates since there are too many options and paths to power. Too many power systems in a game is a terrible design choice and does not lend to great storytelling.

And then you have multiclassing, where someone can master six different power styles and break the rules because a bonus action granted by a martial source was never intended to be used for arcane casting.

Double fireball!

Double lighting bolt!

I cast wish! Twice!

These games do not appeal to me anymore, and I am selling them all off. I get this trash feeling when I see a lazy design like this, like designers trying too hard to appeal to everyone, making the referee's job impossible to tell great stories. At most, I like two: divine and arcane, and those magics have a heavy cost. Or I want a generic game engine that lets me add and remove power systems at will.

There is such a thing as too much power, and we are hitting it in many of today's games.