The role of magic

I've always seen the typical magic in role-playing games too powerful and having too big role. In some cases it's impossible to survive without magic in some form (magic items if the character class can't cast spells). I wanted to avoid the same mistake and for a long time I had difficulties to think about the role of magic in Kaduria.

The big problem is that you want to have "magical" things, like creatures, in the gameplay. Without them everything becomes kind of boring. At some point I decided to remove spells, but it started to seem odd, because the game world has magic in it.

I've been working on bringing spells back, but it's not going to be old school fireballs etc. It's more tricks and illusions rather than spells that simply kill everything. The way magic works in D&D based (almost all role-playing) systems is that it's fixing the balance issue coming from fighting thousands of otherwise tough creatures. Then again the combat system of D&D also has the same flaw, it makes the player eventually a godlike creature that can kill everything.

I feel like I'm now experienced enough to design spells that will work in this game, when in past I would have been only using similar spells that were in every role-playing game.