Design Diary: Balancing Spells

The Grimoire in Seven-Part Pact is a really interesting and very dense text. It’s a 99% fictional description of a huge variety of spells, and then players interpret those spells into mechanical Impact. The Grimoire is written in a comprehensive and technical style, but obviously it still leaves a tremendous amount of ambiguity. Magic can be used at every scale of the game, from “I’m helping a local farmer find a good spot to dig a well” to “destroying an entire empire in a single instant.” Spells that would be considered absurdly overpowered in another TTRPG are commonplace here. So what does balance mean? When I’m playtesting spells, and there’s ambiguity and uncertainty and weird loopholes, how do I know which loopholes are worth closing and which are compelling empty space?

The most common and most healthy kind of ambiguities emerge around definition and category. These are situations like “is a frog a creature of Earth or a creature of Water?” These are fine and accounted for. The game is built assuming some degree of debate and discussion will emerge during play, arbitrated by the Runes-Keeper. The Runes-Keeper makes a ruling, updates the Grimoire, and play continues. Rulings are the glue that handles these ambiguities when they emerge, and I’m relieved when I encounter them because it means the game has space for that sort of healthy debate.

Ambiguities are less healthy when they would fictionally position stuff that may destroy the game. It’s pretty clear, I think, that no spell should be able to instantly destroy the entire world. These aren’t a problem when they’re obvious. But spells that secretly or covertly unbalance the game are more of a problem. To explain that, though, let’s first talk about balance.

Balance often means, in a TTRPG context, that all players are having an equivalent amount of fun. This is definitely a concern for Seven-Part Pact, especially with the keeper roles, but it’s pretty easy to adjust and accommodate for, and a lot of that adjustment occurs in wizard Codexes instead of in the Grimoire. Instead, a bigger concern I have for balance is ensuring there are, as rarely as possible, perfect choices.

If there are two ways you can Spend Time in a month, and both of them deal with the problem, but one of them also provides an additional bonus for completely free, then there’s never a reason to choose the less-optimal way of Spending Time. I want to be aware of when that’s happening, because there are still ways to make the less-optimal choice compelling and important, but it needs to be thematically important or else it’s redundant. More often, I want to avoid it entirely. So balance here means making sure all the choices available to a Wizard don’t have any stand-out best approaches, or strictly-worse avenues of action. The greatest sin of all is when something is both obviously good and very boring. It’s why I’ve made the Sanctuary spell so finicky — it would be bad if every player’s first instinct was to cast that spell around their Sanctum, or if failing to do so was considered suboptimal. I want a trade-off of some kind.

This form of balance also extends to actions which wouldn’t themselves break the game’s system, but instead break the relational (i.e non-mechanical) system I’m invested in constructing. For example, long-distance travel, creating life ex nihilo, healing someone’s sickness, and truly returning the dead back to life are all actions I’ve intentionally made really hard to accomplish within the Grimoire. They either require very specific spell applications or stringing multiple spells together to produce what you want. I struggled for a long time to make it possible to have demons get pulled from and banished to the furthest Hells without implementing a teleportation spell. Teleportation wouldn’t break anything in the game, but the sensation of travel times and long distances is a really important quality in the game that I want to preserve. 

These more “out of bounds” areas are still accomplishable, it’s just important that players know that by going there, they’re doing something magic doesn’t normally do, or struggles to do. Seven-Part Pact’s fun comes from the fact that it invites players to all be game designers, but in my experience, asking someone to do game design when they have no tools to determine if something is fun or not risks accidentally producing something that isn’t fun for the table. So I want to make sure I give them all the tools to build their own game from the materials provided, and to know when they’re stepping outside the bounds of the text as it presents itself.

Sometimes spotting these balance issues point to larger issues than the spell itself. As an easy example: it’s currently, in this draft of the Grimoire, the same Import to turn a chipmunk into stone and the sun into a giant sphere of gold. Manipulating the cosmos in this fashion should be much harder than that. Do I need to change how I approach the Limit of Observation? Do I need to change how the Celestial Bodies in particular behave? Are the transformation spells themselves weirdly written and need another pass? Maybe all three?

Each spell is composed of a ton of moving parts, and I know I’ll never catch every single loophole and ambiguous moment during playtesting. That’s not my goal! My goal is to build a robust system that maintains the core conceptual identity of the game and allows the players to sculpt the text to preserve that for them as well. I hope that’s illuminating!