Just Spike It!
If you want to delve into specific critiques and solutions surrounding 5e D&D’s counterspell, just give this exhaustive blog from Awesomedice a once-over. If you want to get a sense for my own preferred approach, consider me aligned with Sly Flourish: “When the counterspell battles start to explode, we should pour flavor out of every orifice of our bodies while this is happening. We should be standing up. We should be pantomiming what is going on. We should be making so many sound effects that we have to wipe our spit off the table when we’re done.” In other words you want to RP it, my dudes. Because a flavorless “nope” is far more galling than a simple failed spell.
Now all that said, I’m of the opinion that this particular issue has been done to death. Happily, counterspelling is just a variation on a larger theme that I do love. And that theme is wizard duels.
If you’ve never had the opportunity, take a look at the climactic battle from The Raven. Just check out Vincent Price in all his glory! He’s out here casting shield and levitate and banishment on snakes. It’s a move and counter-move that represents the full gamut of the arcane spell list. And that’s what I tend to look for in my mage-on-mage action.
Same deal with The Sword in the Stone (although I suppose that’s more of a druid’s duel). Merlin and Madam Mim aren’t simply tossing out their biggest spell effects and hoping for the best. They’re actively trying to outthink one another. That’s the class fantasy of the caster. You’re not just fighting with raw power. You’re fighting with your brain.
That’s part of the reason I love Dumbeldore vs. Voldemore and loathe Harry vs. Voldemort. The former includes discrete magical effects, with fire elementals and aqueous orbs responding dynamically to one another. The latter is just Dragon Ball Z again: a conflict of will personified in the beam clash, but with zero finesse or strategy. To me that looks less like a wizard’s duel and more like a superhero fight.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we talk shop about our favorite mage duels? What makes a caster fight distinct from other forms of combat? And just as important, how do you get that to manifest at the tabletop? Give us all your best Gandalfs vs. Sarumans and Yodas vs. Dookus down in the comments!
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Just wanted to mention that the link about “Solving 5E Counterspell” has the author assuming the Caster being countered rolls a DC check to see if their spell gets countered, when it’s actually a roll from the person doing the Countering to see if they OVERCOME the power of the spell being Cast.
Otherwise, though, great article! I definitely think I’ll make it so that you can’t Counterspell another Counterspell; you CAN Ready a Dispel Magic for it, however…
Glad it helped. Seemed a bit silly for me to try and summarize that giant write-up in a comic rant, hence the switch to mage battles more generally.
Favorite mage duel?
Well, I’m on a reread of God Of Highschool, and it has some of the most epic and genuinely insane wizard duels I’ve ever seen. Okay, technically more like Cleric/Monk duels, with all the martial arts and borrowing power from gods, but still.
Let’s talk about the leadup to the climax of the second season (of six, IIRC?), and obviously, spoilers ahoy. The McGuffin has been revealed, defeated, and stolen, and of the major villains (the highest scope villain we’ve seen to date, in fact), Bishop Mandeok Sang has appeared to claim it. And his plan appears to be to summon a skyscraper-sized sword from the heavens to obliterate the entire stadium. Two members of The Six pin him down and hold off the giant sword with a shield spell and gravity powers, while a third uses an arsenal of 106 legendary weapons (apparently including some rocket launchers) to destroy the sword. Mandeok responds by summoning an army of angels and one titanic god we later learn is called a nephilim, which has previously been shown to shrug off literally everything the strongest characters can throw at it. Meanwhile, across the ocean, the USA has realized that shit is going down and launched *hundreds of nukes* at Seoul in an attempt to deal with the matter and prove that technology is still relevant in a world of ridiculous martial arts and actual godly powers.
It’s at this moment that Jeon Jaesan, the member of the Six known as The Archmage, decides that if he’s going to die, he’s going to make one hell of a swansong before he goes.
The Archmage magically disassembles the entire nuclear arsenal launched at the city… and then reassembles them into one super-missile. With his off-hand, he teleports the entire population of Seoul except for himself and Mandeok (or so he thinks) to a safe distance. The Bishop responds with a domed shield around the stadium, which stops the missile from being able to reach the nephilim (or anyone else). Jeon had seen this coming, though, and *summons a meteor to hit the alchemical-nuke*, driving it through the shield and detonating it. With his other hand, he at the same time casts his own domed barrier around the stadium to both contain and concentrate the the explosion, with the intent of killing himself, Mandeok, and the god all in one fell swoop. Mandeok tries to teleport away, but gets counterspelled (I imagine with the setting equivalent of *dimension anchor*).
Unfortunately, The Archmage had missed a couple of people beneath the stadium (the protagonists, another villain, and a few others). In order to save their lives, he drops the domed shield that would have concentrated the explosion, and as a result he, Mandeok, and the God all survive (though he is dying, the nephilim has been blown entirely in half, and even the Bishop is visibly on his last legs). Oh, and Seoul gets pretty much leveled by the blast.
Absolutely insane. The webtoon is well worth checking out. I’m not even sure that’s the best duel in the series, just the one that’s freshest in my mind since I’m on a reread.
Bigger is bigger. O_O
Oh yeah, spectacle is definitely the main draw of God of Highschool. The characters are loveable, the plot is good, the villains threatening, but the reason most people read is for the ridiculous martial arts tournaments that somehow keep escalating to the fate of the world being at stake, all presented in fantastic style.
I love the idea of fireball volley.
Either you’re good, or you’re charcoal. 😀
It’s a single elimination tournament.
In the context of something with slow-ish sorcery, it can be interesting if the opposed casters _don’t_ counter… both continuing to pour on more power, and _hope_ that they get their spell off before their opponent does.
Meanwhile, the non-casters on both sides have put their differences aside, and are desperately trying to find cover…
I’m having trouble picturing this. Got a specific duel in mind as an example?
Dragon Ball beam clashes.
Each “wizard” (fighter) keeps concentrating more and more “magic” (ki) into their “spell” (Energy Beam) until a “wizard” completes the “spell” forcing their opponent to “cast” his and hope is enought while everyone else tries to stay away from the explosion.
“we should pour flavor out of every orifice of our bodies”
That sounds very messy, as well as complicated to clean up.
Sounds like Kool-Aid Man would make a good GM.
Lord of the Rings Saruman vs Gandalf was boring. It was just two old men throwing each other around with invisible hands while waving their sticks at each other.
Doctor Strange vs Thanos was one of the best on screen versions of a magic fight I have ever seen put to film and one of the most influential fights for Counterspell to affect myself and my gaming group table in years.
Prior to that fight, we played a magic-off like a game of magic the gathering (so exactly like the comic shows. Counter Counter Counter infinitum nauseum.
After seeing that fight, our DM asked us to describe how we counter the spells and while this results in only pure flavor, because the effect is mechanically the same thing, the best part is using the spell being countered in the flavorful description of how you counter it because it can change the description every time.
Now as for counterspell battles, that can get “interesting” still, but fortunately it doesn’t happen often enough to be a problem, but I think every aspiring mage should watch that fight (from Avengers Infinity War) and even follow up with the Strange on Strange fight from Doctor Strange ItMoM (In the Multiverse of Madness) as well. While that one is not quite as involved, it has some really unique and interesting ideas in it that could fire the imagination for your own table games of counterspell volley 🙂
Agreed. I’m not sure what I was expecting from that fight, but it wasn’t a force push battle.
I think there were two issues with that fight.
1: it was live action and they had never really done anything like it before, so… what do they do?
2: they were working within the specific limitations they had already set of magic in this world being less overtly “D&D-like” and so with that limitation, again… what do they do?
which makes it almost doubly confusing to me that in Return of the King, we see Saruman toss a dang fireball at Gandalf and party, which Gandalf clearly counters! (tho if my memory serves that scene may have been an extended only thing, but still… it was a literal fireball, complete with the large radius and everything!)
but maybe in another couple decades when someone remakes them (inevitable), we will get a better version of that fight.
or maybe in the Harry Potter series we will get some better mage duels and not just strings of wobbly colored energy poking tips at each other XD
either way, I hope there is a Doctor Strange 3, and/or he is in another Avengers movie to do some more magic fighting, because Marvel has been making him one of my favorite characters again, just on visuals of magic fights alone!
I don’t have in-game examples of an A-class wizard’s duel, but Tais Teng wrote about some very classy ones in his book ‘Favoured of Sedna’.
The first description of such a duel says two wizards met in a tent on neutral ground, greeted one another and went inside, sat down opposite one another and held a hushed conversation. One wizard came out and asked his opponent’s seconds to properly take care of the other wizard’s remains.
Later, a full duel is described as two wizards confront one another. They exchange gifts, which are significant to themselves – thus weakening them – but also impose obligation. Fail to properly match the gift, and you are hurt. They tend hold a conversation full of verbal traps, including calling each other by titles they have gathered over long lives; every title named deprives the opposing wizard of the power associated with it.
Finally, when they run out of titles to swap, the wizards enter an illusionary world for actual magical combat. One wizard hurls a magical harpoon at the other, naming his target – and it turns back and impales him: the gift he received was inscribed with the other wizard’s True Name, confusing the harpoon.
As he lies dying, he confesses he had a similar idea: the gift he gave is inscribed with his own True Name… and long ago, he imprisondd and bound a titanic mammoth in the illusionary world. Now he’s dead, the bonds will loosen, and the mammoth is coming for the man it believes is him…
I liked the cleverness and cunning involved, having to know not only your opponent’s weaknesses but also their strengths, and how both opponents were thinking several steps ahead, like chess-players.
More battles should be resolved by spectral homing mammoths.
Oh, the mammoth wasn’t spectral. It was very, VERY solid. It was an archetypical beast from the very dawn times.
There’s a cool scene describing the chase, with the surviving wizard flying away in the shape of a crow. The wizard reflects that no matter how fast he flies, the mammoth’s sheer size means it’ll catch up by walking at a normal pace. Meanwhile the mammoth’s vast, slow mind reflects on how small and insignificant the bird is, yet it recognizes and acknowledges it as his enemy, meaning it is capable of recognizing the slain wizard’s True Name — and very slowly, it is becoming angry.
Tamora Pierce has a pretty good Wizards Duel in her Wild Magic series Book II Wolf Speaker. I don’t recall the entire thing, but I remember the Bad Guy cast a fire spell, and the good guy countered by covering himself in water. The whole thing ends with the BBEG turned into a tree, and the Good Guy standing on a narrow pillar of stone surrounded by a deep crater.
Very Duck Dodgers: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-839Jd5UpNYE/X0r8X126fZI/AAAAAAABZS8/UWsFanaH3nU4MdzGsVZRfIXLqpvvN9QVwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Duck_Dodgers_34_2.jpg
Haven’t had the chance to play it, but I like the idea of a remote duel of paranoid archmages. Both of them constantly keep effects like Mind Blank up and stay fortified in their sanctums with a bunch of other spells, enchantments, and guardians keeping the location concealed and fortified. Then they dispatch summons and minions, and cast spells trying to locate their foe and destroy them before their foe can do the same to them.
I seem to recall a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser story like that, with each man hired by a rival wizard. Seems like a solid campaign premise to me.
I admit I always had a different mental image of the Dumbledore vs Voldy duel than the way the movie did it, of less direct counters and Dumbledore being very mobile and clever in the environment to deal with the death ray.
Actually reminds me a little of Cadderly vs Aballister from the old 90s FR book series where Cadderly’s doing stuff like stone shaping walls to bounce lightning bolts back.
And making it look easy – it’s one of my favorites for what we got for absolutely cashing in the ‘Dumbledore is the one wizard Vodlemort feared’.
The movie HP vs Voldy is pretty DBZ but the way the conclusion works in the book wouldn’t make a very good shot for the trailer.
It would work better in D&D – the plots already done, this is just cleanup.
They have their place, but at this stage of action cinema I just feel like clashing beam fights are laze. It’s like trying to shoot an image of pure conflict: always emotional, but lacking in visual originality.
I tried but can’t really choose what would, for me, count as a mage duel in this context. For example, Mami and Homura (https://youtu.be/3Jm7Q8RsR_Y) are both technically mages, but they rely on a handful of unique powers each, so it looks closer to a superhero fight. On the other hand, if I had to think of a “counter and outplay” duel style… Yu-Gi-Oh! is the first that comes to mind (apologies to all wizened old wizards and witches). Then there are things like The Last Airbender where the powers are specific to each contender, but they do use it in a way that is often based on countering whatever move the other has used (mainly by shaping their power appropriately). There’s just too many things to like, I guess.
The problem with Yu-Gi-Oh! is that they won’t stop telling us how clever they are as they’re in the act of being clever. To be fair though, staging these kinds of things visually is straight up hard.
Oddly enough, counterspelling rarely came up in any 2E, 3E, or 5E game I’ve played. But I’ve rarely played a wizard, instead playing bards, clerics, or warlocks in those versions.
The 2E Al-Qadim setting has a fully detailed sorcerous dueling setup in The Complete Sha’ir’s Handbook, but it has never seen use in any AQ game I’ve played in.
I know we’ve got psychic duels over in PF1e as well:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/alternative-rule-systems/occult-adventures/occult-rules/psychic-duels/
Never played with them myself. It’s always the problem with these subsystems: If I can’t resolve a conflict through the baseline resolution system, it feels like too much effort to learn.
Interesting concept.
But you’re right about subsystems being too much trouble to learn sometime.s
Topic: DnD and dumble vs voldemort. The stars have aligned, i bestow upon you this masterpiece:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/5ksifj/dumbledore_vs_voldemort_a_case_study_of_high/
The epic duel explained and broken down as if it was a DnD fight.
I fucking love that thing
Heh. There ought to be more D&D fight breakdowns. I’d subscribe to that sub.
Wizard: I counter the countering of the counter-counter!
**BOOM!**
I don’t have any examples to add at the moment, but I love the examples that were given.
It’s always the last counterspell that counts.
Magic deck idea: Lands and counter-spells, just counter-spells 😛
Win condition: patience.
The Quest for Glory series of adventure games has some good magical duels if you play as a wizard. As an example, the third game puts the wizard hero in a test of magic against the Leopardman shaman where you have to pull out the right spells to counter every one of his (Juggling Lights to break his darkness spell, Levitate when he drops you into a pit, and so on).
Can’t remember doing the same in tabletop games too often, but it’d be fun to try. I think the key would be to use more non-instantaneous effects, such as Wall of Fire over a straight-up Fireball, so casters have more than a split-second to react to each other and can find more interesting ways to meet each other’s big spells with their own.
Might have to check out that Quest for Glory title. I do love me an adventure game.
“What makes a caster fight distinct from other forms of combat?”
It’s not a fight, it’s a duel. And the only thing that makes it distinct from other duels is the type of sparkly sfx that’s used.
“Because a flavorless “nope” is far more galling than a simple failed spell.”
I kinda disagree. Just like witht he old martial arts masters who barely move a hand or finger to block an incoming attack, I appreciate when a true master shows off by not showing off.
My favorite “wizarding duel” is from Shadowrun book, I think it was “Shaken, No Job Too Small”. [Paraphrasing from memory]
Jimmy Kincaid, elven ex-mage cop, turned burn-out mage private dick is trying to get a group of gangers to help him on a vamp hunt, cause he needs the extra muscle. The group’s Mage challenges him to a magical duel, spell v spell, till one of them drops. If Jimmy looses the punk kid gets all the bragging rights and Jimmy’s magic bling, it Jimmy wins the gang rolls as his personal back-up.
Now, what make this interesting is Jimmy used to be a “Big Man”, a real powerhouse of a wizard. Ivy-league school trained, street-cop honed combat magics, big bruiser mojo with an attitude and rep to match. But he lost most of his magic and he’s now a burned-out, washed up, has been who half of the streets figures is coasting on rep and attitude (the other half knows he still earns that rep, if not the attitude).
So the kid is chanting and yelling and waving his hands, and Jimmy just gives him a stern look, fizzles his first spell, and steps forward. The kid whoops and hollers and dances around, and spell after spell, step after step, Jimmy slowly advances, countering and unweaving spell every spell as it’s cast, because while he might just have enough power to give the kid a nose bleed, he knows he doesn’t have enough to just drop an enemy mage. So he lets the kid dance about, wearing himself out casting more and more powerful spells, because countering doesn’t take personal energy, just know-how, and that’s something Jimmy hasn’t lost. All the practice, all the knowledge, he’s still basically a “wizened old master”, so with nothing more than a look and a thought the takes the kid’s spells down until their standing a few feet apart, the kid is panting, sweating and cursing him.
Jimmy asks him “You want to concede yet?” The kid curses and reaches deep, dragging up his own life energy, he’s gonna put everything into this, a spell that will drop Jimmy even if it hurts or almost kills him in the process… and Jimmy leans forward and knocks the kid out with a savage right hook to the jaw.
Jimmy looks at the gang leader and nods, “You’ll be at such-and-such place at such-and-such time right?”
Mathematically it’s almost always worth it to counter their spell since action economy is so big in 5E, and your reaction is less valuable than their action. It’s also almost always worth it to counter a counter since in terms of resources you’re giving up exactly as much as they did to counter in order not to waste your ally’s action.
The final boss of my campaign was a huge pain because he could burn legendary actions to take extra reactions (But not more than one reaction per turn) so the conunterspells were flying.
As a Sorcerer sitting under an umbrella sipping a martini: “I’d like to Subtle Spell Counterspell a random one of those spells.”
As a red player I cast redirect to change the target of a different counterspell to the redirect itself.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair. The late Akira Toriyama could make a conflict of will incarnated into two laser beams look really cool.
Though even that is a massive improvement over the book version of the scene, which is less “DBZ without the style” and more “JJBA without the action, and also the power system isn’t complicated enough to need this much dialogue or particularly interesting”.
Making fun of Harry Potter aside, counterspell isn’t very good beam clash fodder. There’s no build and release of tension, no moment where we see how much energy has built up and wonder which way it’ll go. It’s basically just a flip-flop of the original spell working or not working. There’s not even a bit where you roll dice to see which group of casters can overpower the other.
Anything Harry Dresden. There’s a lot of subtle prep (i.e. kinetic battery rings, his model of Chicago he uses for scrying, etc) and he winds up out of “ammo” after big fights.
One note on Harry vs Voldemort is Harry has nothing but a single zot to use (as he’s a newb) and its ultimately a trap for Voldemort to pull out his “crush my enemies” spell so the Elder Wand rolls it back on Voldy. I feel it was essentially deus ex machina rather than any plan. It required soooooo many things to go right. (Malfoy disarms Dumbledore, Harry disarms Malfoy, voldemort hunts down the Wand, Voldemort ignores warnings etc)
A separate idea occurred to me: The Will-War between sorcerers and demons and/or ethereals in In Nomine. Whomever wins has psychically bludgeoned the loser into serving them, at least temporarily.
There’s always the option to test again when the participants recover. So a wise victor probably limits the amount of time the loser in thrall.
Wizard totally still has his/her reaction free to also cast counterspell, at least by 5e standards.
One fun kinda wizard duel I remember is in young justice. Ms Martian was fighting Psy-mon and basically from the outside they are just staring at each other. The fun part is that during this neither can move so Psy-mon asks his minions to attack her while she is vulnerable.
Another fun concept is from Wildbow’s Otherverse. Basically you can’t lie therefore your words have more wit. There is so many small rules in the universe pure strength is almost never the answer. One an example is when one character was possessed so the thing possessing him could control all his wards and his demesne( place of power). To defeat the enemy the protagonist had to prove to the world that the enemy was not the person it was possessing. Other things like that also exist but are harder to explain.
Re-reading the archives, this one really struck a nerve. We had pretty much this exact situation came up recently (albeit with a Destructive Wave rather than Fireball)… I cast the spell, an enemy wizard countered it, our warlock countered the counter, but their (bard, I think) countered the counter-counter.
Annoying, but it worked out well… because with everyone using their Reactions, it left the enemy wizard unable to cast Shield when one of my allies got up in their face. It didn’t quite make up for the huge amount of damage my spell would have inflicted on their entire group had it not been countered, but that wizard *really* took one of the the team…
Hopefully your wizard got a good spell-casting opportunity later to make up for the one you ended up losing to the counter-off!