Sfdwhf

Spells in this world is broken down into several categories, each designed to fill a certain niche:

Enchantment Spells

• These are spells designed to capture cosmic power within a crafted item, so that its power can be called upon in times of need.

Protection Spells

• These are spells designed to ward a user, object, or location against a variety of possible harms

Transmogrifcation Spells

• These are spells designed to fundamentally alter or control another living being or creature.

Transmutation Spells

• Changing the makeup of different materials or combining them with others to make new forms of matter.

Divination Spells

• These are spells designed to allow a user to perceive in ways that go beyond his five senses.

There are two kinds of magic systems: sorcery and druyadism. Sorcery involves using the individual's own finite mana (life energy) in order to create effects in the physical world, and must be replenished after long periods of use. This form of magic requires circles, various materials, and can take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Druyadism doesn't use the person's mana, but involves the mana of nature itself, which is infinite. This form of magic is more ritualistic, requiring hours to setup, and requires certain steps in order to work.

I need for both of these systems to be able to perform the kinds of spells I mentioned. However, I need them to be used for different purposes for different reasons. People should need to choose between one of these forms depending on the situation. How do I design rules that that revolve around balancing these systems, so that they are capable of doing the same things but used for different needs?

Different methods take different time or effort.

Lighting a fire to cook your dinner might take an hour of chanting with druyadism, or 3 seconds to snap off a quick fireball via sorcery. Harvesting apples from a tree may require targeting every fruit individually using sorcery, but druyadism lets you ask the tree for sustenance, and run around catching the produce as it all falls down.

People who know how to use both sorcery and druyadism will look not just at the end result (which would be almost the same for both spells) but for the time, effort, energy and complexity required to get there. The cost-benefit may vary based on which of those you currently value the most (e.g. a long-but-easy spell is fine if you have a lazy afternoon free, but if you are rushed for time then the faster hard-and-draining spell is better)

Imagine you want to boil some water to brew some tea. How can you achieve it?

• You can put the water on some fire to supply energy


• You can use an electric resistance to supply energy


• You can dissipate mechanical work to supply energy


• You can drop some radioactive element to supply energy


• [...]

In all the above cases the effect is the same (the water boils), but the mean is different. If one has wood, it makes sense to use fire. If one has electricity, it makes sense to use electric resistance.

Use a similar approach with your magic systems.

The less symmetry the better.

For any kind of real, robust balance, you basically need things that one kind of magic is compeletely incompetent at, that the other isn't. And the set of such areas needs to be broad and important.

If there isn't a lot of symmetry, then one of the two will turn out to be more useful. If you then add in any kind of iterative improvement/investment possibilities, investment in the more useful one is going to make it blow the other one out of the park.

As an example, the rotary or Wankel car engine. It has a number of fundamental advantages over the cylinder engine we use for cars, and for a long time it competed. But the advantages where not asymmetrical enough, resulting in far more investment into optimizing the cylinder engine. Even in areas where the Wankel engine is theoretically better, the heavily optimized cylinder engine can match or exceed actual Wankel engine performance.

Find some split in the set of problems. Maybe Sorcery magic doesn't work on "organic" matter (including plastics) directly, while Druyadism doesn't work on metals directly.

So a Sorcery protection charm would work on Chainmail, while Druyadism could protect a human directly, or work on relatively normal clothing.

Sorcerers would harvest apples by enchanting scissors and metal baskets. Druids might directly enchant the trees and some plastic bags.

Sorcery doesn't work well in areas where the world's magic is strong.

Kind of like trying to connect to WiFi near a microwave oven, sorcery can't be used reliably in areas where the world's mana interferes with a person's internal mana.

This unreliability can be accounted for in a few ways. If you have enough people casting the spell together, it will work if their combined mana can overcome the mana of the surrounding area. You can also cast simpler spells fairly well, since there isn't much room for error. In either case, you'll use much more mana than you would otherwise. Very complex and powerful spells are almost never going to work correctly and can't be cast without extreme risk.

This also helps you explain the difference in casting times and methods between your two systems. A person has control over the flow of their own mana, but the complex patterns of the world's mana can't be controlled or predicted by people. Thus, your caster has to spend extra time attuning themselves to the world's mana flows. Since the flow can't be directed the way the spell typically demands, druyadism casters have to modify the spellcasting technique to utilize what's available. Changing up the recipe like this means that natural mana influences the spell in subtle ways, but the caster can still achieve the exact effect they want.

This also means that druyadism has issues in areas where the world's mana is weaker. Amassing more casters won't help here like it does with sorcery. Instead, the caster needs to expand his ritual area, and spells might require even more extra steps to compensate.

I don't recall the system, but there was one I played years back that had a similar differentiation between magic that they called rituals and rotes. Rotes were spells that you memorized ahead of time to perform exactly the same way every time, so they were very specific. Casting a rote spell was pretty much guaranteed to succeed, and only took a moment and some mana to cast.

The second you wanted to change a detail about the spell, it had to be treated as a ritual. You would have to sit down and plan out all of its details for several minutes, hours, or even days, to be able to cast it depending on how extravagant the spell is, and how similar it is to your existing rotes.

As your mechanic stands, a person would typically be compelled to use their mana to do things faster since they could just fall back on the power of nature when they need to. But memorization takes a lot of time; so, wizards would have to be mindful of what's worth putting that much time into learning, and what's worth doing ad hoc at a disadvantage.