Making knights relevant in worlds with magic

the following is a very very high quality and up i mean when i say high quality it's basically flawless representation of how most fights would result between a knight or warrior when they're facing someone who could actually use magic fire fire fire [Laughter] sleep yes got him hey [Music] yeah knight to screwed [Music] greetings i am shad wearing my knightly attire as is appropriate for the subject of this video i want to explore night fighting wizard but of course this is really to talk about the the larger discussion of warriors versus magic because there are issues inherent with the presence of magic and how viable and useful warriors would remain in a world with prominent magic and if it was very accessible and anyone could get it these kind of get redundant because like really think about this dude how of long did we use the sword after the gun was you know invented longer than you might think but the better the gun got right the more pointless swords became the point where they were phased out of warfare completely so depending on how developed the magic is and how available it is that could actually make the classic knight or even warrior completely redundant in your setting but if you want a sitting with warriors and magic coinciding you're going to need to justify why people are still being warriors in the sense of armor swords and also the interplay between them many different writers different fantasy settings have approached this in different ways and i want to discuss the different ways that you can use and you can either use one of these ways or a mix kind of combined to see how a warrior like a knight would really be out a stand up how how would they fight someone who's using high level magic like powerful wizard so the first one might seem like it's defeating the purpose of seeing how a warrior could still exist in a sitting if you just make it that magic is really overpowered and the reality could be that no warrior in his right mind would actually stand a chance against a magic user and it's been done multiple times i'll reference the stormlight archives by brandon sanderson where the magic users called surge binders they're simply on another level and if you have without like looking at different ways to get around it just a fair fight between a surge binder and a regular warrior the regular warrior is never going to stand a chance unless their surge binder is new untrained and the warrior is a master and all these things and there might be ways to get around but just a more fair fight it's not a chance and so there are book series and settings that exist where the magic users is way tougher there's almost no comparison and in fact i did that with my own novel in chronicles of a fall shadow of the conqueror the arch knights are just really powerful okay and a regular warrior isn't going to stand a chance the only way you can really be able to fight it is some of the reasons that i'm going to explain later on but that's like getting magic and song stuff but if you were to take away all those other ways to try and even the odds or give the warrior an edge an average warrior with a regular sword they're not going to win against an arch knight the way that you can still make a really engaging story is that of course you need to give the the magic users challenges and that can be by facing other magic users monsters and things like that and so of course you can make a workable story the other way to still have warriors play a important role in the story with over-the-top magics where even aurora would not be out of centuries against a man's user is by making it rare and hard to obtain if this type of magic is hard to team not everyone can get it what is the average person supposed to do and if someone needs to go on an adventure fight wage war well they can only get us so many magic users if it's a rare thing so of course they're going to need regular warriors that are equipped to the technological level of the setting that the setting allows and you know that's so you can still have the regular fantasy night still the problem is when the night actually comes across the magic user oh it's going to be tough now you might be thinking there are other story settings that i haven't touched on where the magic users are just completely overpowered compared to the regular warriors and a good example that kind of comes out into this is the wheel of time but the wheel of time actually does something that helps balance it and this is where we come to the first kind of thing that you can do that we're going to go through four to five primary things that you can introduce into your setting and it can be one or multiple to help balance it out and give warriors an edge make them still competent or capable of taking on one of these wizards or magic users and so the first one is the glass cannon [Applause] [Applause] so the idea that you might have been now to get from the example there is that a glass cannon type of magic user is someone who's really really powerful when they're kind of aware of the threat and they've turned on their magic but the magic is off they're a regular person as vulnerable as any other person and that's actually what they do in the wheel of time the wheel of time has two main kind of magics one for female magic users one for male magic users and they operate kind of differently it's a beautiful setting and series so eyes and eye are really powerful the thing is they are very vulnerable and what i also really like most i said i i'm not trained warriors and what's interesting is also the book series remains very true to the fact that the average woman is not going to win a fight against the average man especially one who was trained in combat men on average are stronger and there's so many reasons okay and so the book series does a really good job of showing that without their magic i said i actually very vulnerable and so the warriors still have a major role to play because they are they're also rare they know that not everyone can just be a magic user in the setting but because they're vulnerable they're aware of this and so they actually have com male companions called waters who act as their bodyguards to help protect them when they are vulnerable and there are multiple times when they become vulnerable they get in a really big magical fight with another i said i or a male yolan or else or a dark spawn or something like that their focus is locked and unless they're aware of the threat they can still be taken out by an arrow someone's hitting from from behind and there are people that are sitting that hunt eyes to die and they know their weaknesses and an arrow from a distance that they're not aware of gone okay and so because of that weakness the eyes and eye have male warriors actual warriors and some are former knights even all that stuff to protect them so there is still a major role for the knight or warrior in the wheel of time setting because of this primary thing and so you can do that as well have your magic users could be really powerful but also really vulnerable imagine a magic system that was really had incredible offensive power but no defensive capacity that would be so vulnerable and there's still a lot of ways the average warrior archer you know knife in the back anything could take out these magic users and that means they're not dominating everything really good way to do it ugh [Applause] so the next way to try and balance magic users to help warriors still be able to fight and have a chance against water thing is essentially kryptonite okay a fatal weakness that can block or turn off the magic or affect them in some way and again you can combine multiple things like this because even wheel of time they also have certain kryptonite effects against the magic that can stop someone from channeling completely and if you're in a more traditional setting you could do kind of more traditional things that can help block magic so in the book that i'm currently writing which is a medieval setting i'm actually using iron as a thing that's capable of blocking magic and also it affects fake creatures there's a lot of kind of interesting folklore around how iron affects fairies and fae and stuff i like that idea that i'm going to push it even further and have it affect magic completely that it's actually a it sucks in magic quite a lot so if you're if you're holding iron and you're a magic user any spell you do get sucked into the iron because it has this interesting interplay with magic and silver and lead also have interesting interplays with the other types of magic in the setting and so some can repel and some absorb this type of magic with interesting effects in the setting and so that has a really interesting effect okay and this will lead into another thing that's kind of related to this and it's that you can give the magic users very significant weaknesses this is related to the glass cannon aspect and it's coming off an offshoot with the kryptonite aspect by giving him significant weaknesses the warriors can exploit it to their advantage and so if you have something that nullifies their magic like iron if it's just close to them or they're touching it and that magic just gets sucked in they can't use it that's a full-on kryptonite and not only that it prevents them from wearing armor like metal armor or iron armor they might be able to find other metals like that's an interesting thing maybe they like because in my setting they'll be able to wear bronze armor it's not as strong but they could still get some measure of you know defense because the metal doesn't affect the magic but still because most armor available would be made out of steel and steel is like 99 iron nullifying the magic and so they could only wear cloth arm or other things like that which makes them very vulnerable turns them into a bit of a glass cannon aspect as well but they also have a kryptonite and you don't have to just do you know what i'm suggesting or what other people done you could make up a really interesting thing that nullifies the magic in some way one of the really cool ones that i like out of the traditional dungeons dragons one was arm movement if you were able to take like tie up a wizard in classic d d and i still think they have this aspect in the current versions that um you can't cast spells that well in 3.5 the one that i played they had i think was called a somatic component but that might be spoken but it's like it's an interplay because some spells need are moving and some spells need spoken words both those things have a kryptonite aspect to them because if you can take out the magic user from bringing how to move their arms or speak you've stopped their magic that is a type of kryptonite a type of weakness that a worry can exploit and the warrior then still has some type of role to play or has a chance in fighting the magic users because they can exploit their weaknesses because the interesting thing a warrior okay you know a classic warrior doesn't have too many weaknesses like in terms of their combative skill yeah chop and arm that that's a type of weakness but it's hard to achieve that with their armor and stuff like that they don't have such weakness you could exploit so easily in aspects of like an actual material i get it close to them and also if like for my setting wizards you know iron affects their magic that means just attacking them with steel weapons can nullify the magic vehicle close enough that's a severe weakness that of course affects how prominently wizards can logically be used on battlefields [Laughter] this guy classic well here again all right so the next thing that you can do to help give your warriors an edge against really high-powered magics in your setting and whatnot is to give the warriors their own type of magic it doesn't need to be the same doesn't need to be as powerful because if you're going the route and you don't need to do this because there are some magic kind of systems that actually involve being very capable and strong funny example dragon ball z dragon ball z actually has a lot of magic in it and it has a magic system but the magic system is directly tied to their physical strength and the stronger they get physically the more powerful their magic becomes their key right so you can actually have magic tied with physical capacity but more traditional magic systems don't have that for thematic storytelling things also for balance and i think it's very fair and good to have a balance effect like this where the people who use the magic because they're either devoting all their lives training and focus to get good at it or it actually has an effect on their physical stature and strength that they become more weaker physically that gives the warriors some type of edge but it usually doesn't get them nearly as far as counterbalancing the insane power that the magic users get thanks to the magic and so to get them the rest of the way down to a more even level you can give them just a little bit of a boost in some type of magic and it could be say a key related kind of martial arts kind of thing that way they get so good with their physical training they start to be able to achieve supernatural levels of combative ability that usually wouldn't be out of well of course we wouldn't see in the real world but you can just say because this setting is fantasy that they get so fast that they move so quickly it's like you can't even see it and they can they're jumps like so they're jumping far then because what's interesting right when you see the highest level olympic athletes perform some of their greatest feats it does appear superhuman the height that they can reach in their jumps and the speed that they can reach and so if you could make those levels a little bit more common and push them even a bit further they can you know get beyond even these levels we see at the olympics well you're giving certain supernatural abilities that don't seem completely uh like magical but still push like in this kind of supernatural martial arts thing which gives the warriors a bit of an edge against the magic users like think about an example ronnie kenshin one of my favorite animes okay i love it he's a superhuman but people don't acknowledge that he is blessed by some magical power or he well unless you consider key as the magical power or a god is enhancing him or he was bitten by a radioactive thing or there's no magic apart from that the concept of key inner power that you train so insanely good that you get to these insane truly superhuman levels of combat now i could picture someone like kenshin having a much greater chance in combating a wizard than a regular warrior because he's superhuman fast and his skills are so great and so you could marry those concepts together in a setting and the warriors could kind of get to a close level the other option is to actually give the warriors access to a type of magic in the wheel of time the waters actually physically stronger more capable than regular people because of a bond that the magic makes between them and the eyes to die they they actually have and they usually get access to magic weapons as well and things will get to magical weapons next but there are other things that you can use magic to enhance the worries in ways that a regular wizard or magic user wouldn't be able to get and that can bring them on an even level i've been doing something like that in my the book i'm currently writing that there is a separate magic warriors can access which is related to the regular magic but the way they access it through their martial training manifests in different ways so they're not like a magic user shooting fireballs but the magic manifests in certain moves that they do in their martial capacity to achieve certain supernatural powers again bringing the warrior back onto an even level with the wizard and to have a more balanced kind of thing to have more different it's kind of character class balance or really talking about here because you're sort of awesome you don't want swords to be nullified because people throw on fireballs you need a way to fix it and so the next one is somewhat related to the kryptonite one and uh but it's more direct it's more impactful and everything whereas before you need to get there you know the kryptonite to touch the magistrates or anything like that the other way is just to have anti-magic capacity [Applause] no no please please please please a special charm or something that people lift up that blocks the magic completely and protects themselves or even like an anti-magic field or even anti-magic armor that is a huge kind of kryptonite level effect that could return or to make being a magic user far more vulnerable and difficult they would have to be trying to be aware of this anti-magic that people can use now this has been used into some really cool effects in stories already i'll reference the wheel of time i won't give spoilers but a character in the wheel of time series eventually comes across a special kind of pendant that protects him from the magic completely but it does it so much that it also has some negative effects because when he's injured he can't get healed by the magic unless they people take the pendant off of him so that's a cool kind of interplay strength weakness that comes with that kind of thing but you can definitely do that and it's related to the kryptonite thing just in a more direct way and finally the last one that i'll talk about though i do want to hear other suggestions you have in the comments below is what magic items okay [Applause] you don't necessarily need to give the warriors magical capacity themselves if you have magic items that enhance their abilities increase their protection increase their offensive capacity just because it's magic and dnd we do add traditional fantasy we see that all the time even in very traditional fantasy going back look at king arthur sword and the stone okay the excalibur magic sword and this these magic items could have any number of effects related to the previous things we've talked about it could be a type of kryptonite the magic you know uses your fighting it could protect you from the magic completely okay it could deflect things it could enhance your physical capacity depending on what type of enchantments or it could just give you certain magical abilities that the magic users usually have and you have it because you have the item and classic d d has a whole host of classic magical items what are some of the classes like ring of protection the cloak of elven kind plus one sword now plus one swords if you integrate them appropriately you could make it really crazy because essentially a plus one sword is in like with classic d d mechanics it's indestructible to regular weapons except magical weapons and so if you had much more rare okay um and like the plus one sword would essentially be a sword that never dulls always keeps its edge and can never be can't be destroyed by the weapons that's insanely powerful excalibur could have been like a plus one weapon but indeed is there plus because mechanically it gives you a plus one to attack in defense but the actual integration of the how it functions in the world is really powerful stuff never rust never dulls it always keeps its edge you never need to sharpen it that's a bloody awesome weapon and you can introduce other interesting mechanics that again could favor warriors over magic users in the sense that the magic user's own capacity for the magic interferes with the enchantments of these items because they are essentially the same type of magic and it could be that they deflect or absorb or warp the magic that manages trying to project the point where the magic user can't even wear these magic items as a result but if you're not a magic user you can and again kind of balancing thing and so there we go these are the classic ones that i want to talk about with you and also give examples that already exist in stories literature world settings and stuff that how it's been employed in different ways did i miss any i'd love to hear some additional thoughts you have of ways that could help the warriors fight these magic users uh in interesting fun ways to and look again going back to the start you don't even need to do that if you do want your story where the magic users are just on another level but you do need to consider if you still want warriors how those worries would exist logically in the world what function are they fulfilling to justify their existence anyway i'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below below thank you very much for watching i hope to see you next time here on shadowversity so until that time farewell and now i got some wizards to slide [Music] you

Channel: Shadiversity

Views: 455,569

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Id: 3A73RURnw_Q

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021