Keeping the Magical Balance

[Suicide King]

My group is putting together the next setting we're going to play in. It's going to be a magical postapocalyptic setting. Meaning that society was once highly magically advanced (early renaissance tech, magic similar to Eberron and Forgotten Realms). We brainstormed up all these interesting things for magically inclined characters to do - recovering and tinkering with magical artifacts, draining magical items to boost their power and risk addiction (http://www.burningwheel.org/forum/showthread.php?t=6506), create new magic that doesn't risk causing a new apocalysm, etc. However, we didn't make up much for non magical characters to do.

How to solve this in game? I think we want to keep the option of making a non-magical character and having him be part of the group. The group will probably be a group sent out from a surviving enclave of the olden days - to find a great trove of magic items, recover useful resources and send them back, unearth lost knowledge, etc. Magically challenged individuals certainly have a place in such stories.

So how to balance out the nonmagical character in the group of magical characters? We'll likely be 3-4 players and it looks like at least 2-3 of those will want magicians of some kind.

I've been thinking of these options:
Give the non-magicians an extra lifepath. It makes sense, to take care of your valuable specialists, you send an expert in the world with them. Someone who is really good at keeping himself and others alive.
Raise the exponent limit of the non-magical characters, perhaps combining that with the extra lifepath above. If the enclave sends out it's magical experts (exp 5), then it certainly sends a master swordsman (exp 6) with them to keep them alive.
Don't do any of the above and just make sure that the non-magical character are essential in other ways. Make sure that they take affiliations that none of the magicians have, that they have essential skills they just can't do without (eg. Foraging, Survival, Mending). Make them essential to the group and the story, just not mechanically more powerful.

This is not concern about traditional game balance (of course the sorcerer can kill anyone with White Fire), but more about everyone having an equally interesting role. The magicians are going to get all these new interesting options and ways to influence the game, I want that to be balanced.

So am I just overthinking this too much? Should this simply be solves on the belief/situation level - making sure everyone has a role from the beginning, or is boosting the non-magical characters the right way to go?

[DreamSpawn]

On the top of my head I don't really see the necessity for boosting non-magical character. IMO it should be possible to create a character that has some practical or theoretical knowledge that will be needed by the group for instance; basic wilderness survival, social interaction with the small and/or weird societies out there, haggling with roaming traders, cataloguing/keeping track of items recovered, navigating the wilderness (cartography), defending the loot, scavenging use full equipment, mending and/or jury rigging stuff, surveying, scouting and perhaps stealing important artefacts, deciphering old cryptic recepies, instructions, warnings or testimonials, gather rumours and tales and decide which is worth pursuing and which is just unfounded myths and last but not leas, it would be good if somebody knew the right people in the right places.

Of cause if we all sit at the table and nobody wants to play a 'mundane' character, we should consider giving the 'mundane' characters a cookie if that's what it takes to get the group well rounded.

[Suicide King]

Well, if no one wants to play a mundane character, then the problem is moot. No reason to make them interesting as player characters if no one is going to play them. Unless we really think it's

But you are right, if someone has a concept for a mundane, we just have to make sure they are essential to the group. That's always the case, but I think we have to pay a little more attention with all the magical goodies in the Magic Burner we want to try out.

[Episkopos]

In the non-BW games I've played, the character with "useful skills" was as valuable if not more so than the spellcasters. Of course, this seems very dependent on group dynamics and game setup.

A mundane character with great skills in your game should be in the running for the Workhorse artha award every game without trying too hard. That's not bad!

Cheers,
Billy

[stormsweeper]

The most useful thing the non-wizards can do is to have resources spent on things other than spells.

[Suicide King]

Well, I think your guys are right, it probably won't be a problem. With all the fiddling around with magic and some of the new stuff in the MagBu I'm itching to use, I was afraid the campaign might end up forcusing too much on sorcerous conflicts to be really fun for non-sorcerers.

Most of the sorcerer lifepaths tend to be heavy on academic and sorcererous skills (well duh...), so there should be a good chance for mundane characters to pick up far more useful skills. The mundane characters will also be spending more rps on stuff like affiliations and relationships (hopefully), so they have that as well.

I think the most important thing is that during burning, we just make sure that the mages in the group can't do everything better than the mundane characters in their fields - if someone builds a travelling merchant with lots of circles and social skills, a sorcerer with arcane kindness and lots of social skills might not be that good an idea :P Business as usual I suppose, thanks for the input guys!