jethro

Exactly. You had no problem to "fix" whatever reality problem was there with a (in this case somewhat bigger) change. It has to have a semblance to reality, the more the better, but not follow reality exactly. What I don't like is that the phrase "because in reality" is too often used as an argument and often to limit the range of possibilities. That an adventurer has a problem of being master in fighting AND blacksmithing at the same time is a (tiny) detail that a game designer can avoid if the opportunity presents itself, but if not, so what. 90% of PRGs break this detail, not only with blacksmithing, but also with thief skills or persuasion skills. My gritty fighter also knows how to talk and charm people in high society while robbing their purse. If he can do that, master blacksmith is really not that far off. Reality should be the source of our inspiration, but it should not limit it before we have even created something that is fun and works What you've seen is an instance of it. I've seen a bridge collapse. I was short in my reply because we have discussed the advantages and disadvantages of crafting special things versus craft anything in other threads extensively. I don't want to rehash all the arguments, just state my opinion that craft-anything is not necessarily the golden way out of bland. I believe what was missing in most of those RPG crafting systems was exploration and experimentation, irrespective of craft-recipe or craft-anything. Both of our proposals try to address these points it seems.

Or they are a sub-contractor of the NSA (come one, a name like "Obsidian" practically gives it away) and can't talk about stuff anymore because of the whistleblower paranoia in US agencies. But they still listen (it's in their job description) and store every post in huge databases

I don't care about reality. Crafting has to be fun, an explanation using magic can always be found afterwards. I've seen the you-can-construct-anything (except special weapons) approach in NWN2 and MOTB and it was bland as hell. Other than that full ack.

To enable difficult fights. Every fight has the potential to get your stamina near zero making it a near loss without forcing you to rest after every fight To enable players to concentrate on the fun instead of managing inventory after every third fight. You decide when you want to visit a town, not your inventory To make every play style balanced, whether you want to solve the game mostly diplomatic, or stealthy, or fighting. All excellent choices in my opinion.

I like the idea of items not being worth money. I try to restrain myself but I always end up playing RPGs partly as a pack mule between dungeon and merchant. The difference between an RPG and minecraft is that crafting is 50% of the game. You have an elaborate and complex build tree. And you literally have to build anything you need. That is why redundancy doesn't hurt the game, you always need to build more. In an RPG stuff you want is already there, building it is in conflict with your motivation to quest for treasure. And if you built the limited stuff you could want you are finished, fast. That's why I think RPG designers should concentrate on the finding/experimenting part of crafting because the need to craft is a relatively weak motivation. Open world RPGs try to make it work by enabling you to build your house or castle and it mostly works, but it is a whole mini-macro-game inside a game.

Here is another proposal: By asking around, reading books or researching the materials (thanks for that idea, Lephys) you get hints what raw components combined might produce something interesting. You find lots of those raw materials and can try to combine them. The better your crafting skill the higher your chance to get a break through and construct the item, but with lousy stats. Through further tries you get better and better at crafting this item. And only with an actual recipe hidden somewhere in the world you are able to eventually make the perfect specimen of this item. Any further information you find in books, research or by asking your friendly blacksmith also improves your ability to craft a better item. The interesting thing about this is that you could look for crafting information anywhere in the world and it would always be helpful (until you finally can craft the perfect specimen) Furthermore: There should also be recipes that build on basic recipes. If you can build the basic item perfectly you can start to look for hints about how that item combined with more stuff gets you item++

"Patt" is the german word for stalemate.

Seems that way. But I would consider that a good thing as powerful abilities should have weaknesses you have to tactically circumvent. If you go against a powerful enemy and minions the cipher will have to attack the minions first and save his focus for the boss. If that is not possible the cipher might have to use an ally, in which case a strategic thinker could hopefully level up a designated focus battery ally by making sure that that ally is not hindered much by that soul whip.

Why should all large quests follow the same mould? WW2 had a "happy" ending too. The worst Obs can do is to limit the variation in quest structure and tone. I played Witcher1 and my choice between the two warring factions was to not choose a faction because I didn't like both of them. If the choices are between pest and cholera the danger is that the choice becomes ulitmately meaningless to the player and he looses the incentive to choose at all. Hard choices are necessary but only as one ingredient of many.

Well, that goes both ways. And it means we start from different preconceptions/axioms and/or use words with different definitions, and draw necessarily different conclusions from them. We could list our preconceptions and compare them. We could make a long list of detailed assertions we think to be true and ask the other to either say "yes", "no", "depends". We would have to define every word we use in detail, for example instead of using the word "power" like a nebulous concept define exactly what we mean by it. We probably would also have to enumerate the set of all possible "strength==damage" systems and find out their characteristics. Only then could we get to the ground of our misunderstanding. But that would be a ton of work, especially without direct communication. And the moment Josh Sawyer produces his system all that work becomes meaningless in the face of the actual system we are hypothesizing over. So my advice is: Lets wait for Saywers system and talk about that instead of the set of all possible systems that have a detail in common with Sawyers system.

You presumably did miss the smiley at the end of the sentence. The problem is we don't bring new arguments but just reword the previous. It isn't a race for the last word, but it doesn't look that different from it.

A contest of who has the last word. The result is still out ;-) Seriously: It is obvious that Lephys and I arrived at a patt situation. I already had intended to end this soon. Even though I still have fun discussing this in detail.

You think it astethically wrong. It doesn't make sense to you. Accepted. So while reality is everything but fair, the fantasy world has to have poetic justice built in? It can't be that there are losers by birth and inequality? Is that an arbitrary world design? Is gender inequality and people who are born poor or rich equally preposterous? I might have misunderstood your point here. But you seem to ridicule world design because it has inequality??? Ahh, so because I said "everything is possible with magic" you read my words so literal that I now have said "everything must be possible with magic, you can't have rules or limitations". There are so many ways out of this paradox (implementation-wise): A) A Strength spell doesn't boost your inner strength B) Strength only influences damage, not the bonus of morph spells like the strength spell C) There is no Strength spell Even if we allow it there is an effect of diminishing returns. Lets assume a strength spell gives 1 strength for every 4 strength you have. Someone with strength 16 could boost his strength by 4. Now he has 20 and the next strength spell makes that 21. Another strength spell and we are at 21.25, then 21.31, 21.32. We never ever reach 21.5 and definitely not infinity, even with unlimited mana. It would probably still be a bad idea to have such a str-spell, but it hardly is the end of that world

But the same can be said about that STR->damage system. It influences damage. It is nowhere fixed that nothing else can influence damage or that there is no base damage. It isn't fixed (and I would guess highly unlikely) that STR influences range, area of damage, spell duration, spell cost, speed of casting, and casting power (what is needed to overcome target magic defense). You are trying to draw conclusions about imagined stuff like magic by going down to the molecular level! Consequently your conclusion that blood cells can't carry both oxygin and made-up stuff is made out of hand-waving and make-believe, it is like magic ;-) 1) From Wikipedia: "Each human red blood cell contains approximately 270 million of these hemoglobin biomolecules, each carrying four heme groups; hemoglobin comprises about a third of the total cell volume. This protein is responsible for the transport of more than 98% of the oxygen". This means only one third of a blood cell volume is used for oxygin transport. 2) Is mana a new element, a molecule or something like ghostly energy existing in a parallel ghost world but bound to a human in a similar way like his soul? I don't know. But I know that I will land in lala-land if I try to look too deeply into the physics of made-up stuff. This is why magic systems are abstracted and no physics major writes papers about them. 3) Quantum physics says a particle can be at many places at the same time until you measure it. Most particles are simulataneously a wave and a particle. In those regions you can fill your truck with corn and hay at the same time (by that I mean there are effects in quantum physics that don't follow conventional logic). And this is reality, what miracles are possible when you allow magic to happen? Not in J.Trudels proposed system, not in mine. It is no wonder that we go in circles when you make statements that have been disproven already many pages before. Which just happens to coincide with reality. At least before guns were invented. Neither did our real world destroy itself nor did it conflict with telling a good story.

But we don't only draw our experiences from physics, we also draw them from imaginary systems like for example RPGs we know if it concers magic. And even if we didn't our sense of what is right is often fooled by physics alone. I'll just point at your previous paragraph with the radio-ants and the power of the atom, then ominously drop the words "relativity theory" and "quantum physics" and rest my case. Incidentally a lot of movies change reality so that the movie makes more sense/behaves to the expectations of the average viewer despite being physically wrong. Noises in space, the sound a silencer makes, mainframe computers with blinking LEDs over the front... So yes, it has to make sense to us, live up to our expectations, but that is because we are used to it not because it is necessarily true/real/logical. What that means to me is that our sense of what makes sense is adaptable. Bring a good explanation, show that our expectation was wrong, or hide the no-sense-stuff in a black box and people will accept it. Especially when it is about magic where we accepted kilotons of senseless stuff already. Look behind your reasoning. You state this as if it was a law of physics, but it is just what you are used to from other imaginary magical systems. Real world physics doesn't demand that at all. Your sense of right is mostly quoting literary and RPG precedent, like "Zombies don't run", "Vampires don't like light". Sure, breaking conventions is not without risks, but sometimes necessary. Watch an asian Jet Li movie with wire-fu magic. You will often see Jet Li (or some other wizard) making a martial arts move (with seemingly a lot of strength behind it) to thin air. Wooosh, walls in the direction of his gesture break down, enemies are thrown back or engulfed in debris. Now asian audiences know a lot about this magic from their own fables. Strength influencing magic might fit very well with their mingling of martial arts and magic, or not. But my main point is: western audiences didn't have knowledge about their martial magic and got used to this. Without any explanation why this is or how this works. I recognize this problem too (the acceptance problem as well as the implementation problem). It is just that I'm more confident that there exist workable solutions (the muscle contraction explanation isn't the only one after all). If you can sell it to the customer, it's good. If the system is fun (like D&D) nobody will look too close at the justification.

We have a mismatch of axioms here. In the middle ages everyone believed in the concept that there was a soul, something non-physical in a seperate domain that allowed us to think and feel. This also is the view that is used in many RPGs. I would say that you view this or a similar concept as an axiom or a necessary component of any magic system. Because it allows the hand-waving to happen disengaged from the physical world. Because it allows a separation where magical "energy" simply comes from that other domain, hiding the hand-waving somewhere else. Because of this axiom you think magic systems can be consistent. Whereas I and probably Fearabbit too think of magic as starting in a physical world, then either crossing into another domain or sourcing effects from that other domain back to our physical world. Both views need hand-waving to happen, just that your axiom allows more of that to happen in a dark corner where nobody can really look. Well, here we see the different axioms in action: In D&D INT is a measure of your intelligence, for example how fast you learn skills and how gullible you are. Also it is the magic power. Coming from my axiomatic system I would clearly say that INT does things simultaneously both within pysical laws AND outside of physical laws. So D&D makes no sense either, hence hand-waving in the light has to be accepted. Let's not forget the similar cases of wisdom and especially charisma ("Charisma (Cha). Charisma measures a character's force of personality, persuasiveness, personal magnetism, ability to lead, and physical attractiveness". Citation from the D&D Wiki, no idea how accurate that is). You as per your axiom put the soul/mind outside the physical domain disengaged from physical means. INT comes from that non-physical domain (where hand-waving is hidden much better) and crosses over into our physical domain as character traits but also as magic force. STR on the other hand is illogical because in this axiomatic system it would have to cross into this other domain first where the mental skills already are. That is the distinction between INT and STR you are making and we don't. In our view INT also crosses the boundaries and in your view it doesn't Sure, mana is a concept where (if not influenced by INT or something similar) you really have a non-physical domain (ghost world for example) and all magic starts from there (you only need some ghosts who read your thoughts or a parallel you in that other realm, like a soul). I didn't play one recently so can't much comment on actual implementations. But it would be interesting to look at it and check if there is no physical stuff involved in spell casting. If you have to move your hands or there is a somatic component or you can't wear metal armor then oops, they still have that influence thing going. But if you avoid all these mistakes you really could design a system that has no obvious physical starting point for the magic. This reminds me, I'm just playing Arcanum again. Lets see, the "mana" in Arcanum is called fatigue and it literally is the very physical fatigue that is used. Do you call Arcanums magic system crazy? If not, why not? (if you want to argue that concentrating on the spell is tiring the mage please also explain how concentrating for a few seconds is a tiring activity, especially to your muscles) You do realize that now we are talking about "how to implement/balance it" again instead of the "how to conzeptualize it, make sense to it, explain it" of the previous paragraphs. Also you are talking about our long-running examples, but we had a few, some with power, some with strength, some with a separation of magic and non-magic users, some where everyone has magic... If we try to talk about them all then it is no wonder that we don't get a consistent argument going. I'm not sure you still like to continue arguing about this (you sound slightly frustrated), but if you want to, please attack a specific one. The last two were J.Trudels and mine and they were different enough to make meaningful statements about them both difficult. The first three sentences don't talk about my system for example (and probably not even Trudel's system as there wasn't a restriction for fighters to do magic as well) and the last sentence doesn't say what is wrong with the alternative. Intruding on your dialogue with Fearabbit, you were saying I would like to ask you one question: The only obvious difference between D&Ds moving with your hands to cast a spell and for example the proposed system of contracting your muscles to cast a spell in terms of physics->magic is that in the latter case spell damage is depended on how good you can contract your muscles. Would you (in terms of believability/making sense) accept a system where a mage needs to contract his muscles to cast a spell too, but it wouldn't influence the strength of the spell? Or do you alternatively see D&D as broken too?

Well, (lets substitute God with Mage to make it more sensible) the wind will hinder the duelist, fatigue him a bit, but if the wind isn't stopping him from reaching the mage the mage will die, fast. So the answer is it depends, on how strong the wind ist and how good the mage can concentrate it on the duelist and stay out of it himself. You are assuming quite a lot if you think you can give a definite answer to that question, for example that the same amount of learning wind spells will produce as much deadly wind force as a fatal hit with a weapon I didn't say that magic had no physical consequences. But obviously magic doesn't follow physical laws, there are so many contradictions that finding holes is outright trivial. You should ask any magic system in existence how it works. If magic can create physical things from air and move physical things, then ANY mage would simply create a knife before the enemies throat and move it forward a bit. In any RPG magic system this isn't possible because otherwise magic would be overpowered, so there are strange limitations. Limitations that don't follow any physical rules I don't see how this example is very relevant to the issue at hand. An engine powering a saw, and a completely separate engine powering a computer... A more apt analogy for everything I've been getting at this entire time would be a saw, and a magic saw, hooked to the same generator. Every time you turn on the gernerator, it makes power for both saws. So, you can either use the physical saw, and hope you get a nice cut, or you can use the magical saw (with the exact same power source) to cut in a magical way. Does one render the other obsolete? I should hope so. Sorry, this might be my fault with english technical terms. I was assuming that the diesel engine drives the electrical generator to convert the motors movement to electricity. So I had only one engine, powering the saw and a converter. Now, you propose the magic saw. But in every magic system ever used in any RPG it never was a magic saw, but only a magic can opener or a magic cutter. Magic never worked exactly the same as physically hitting things with swords. There still was a physical effect but it never followed the same rules as a physical attack. And you seem to be saying because magic is now powered by muscles, it must follow the same rules now. But it doesn't. If it did you couldn't make the wind blow with a spell because you can't pysically. The atomic bomb looks like magic but even when it looked like it you couldn't produce a paradox that would violate physical laws. If it did you would have had to change the pyhsical laws because there was a bug in it. The bomb is and was never paradoxial All magic used in RPGs had paradoxes or it wouldn't have worked, it wouldn't have been balanced. You might postulate a magic system that was paradox-free and still not overpowered but this has no relevance to D&D, PE or anything else out there. Your ideal was never reached in RPGs. PE shouldn't have to as well. Do you want to say that the verisimilitude of the strength->magic system is weaker than with a mind->magic system? Sure, nobody denies that. Do you want to say that a strength-magic system is outright impossible to explain with the usual hand-waving done in all existing magic systems? Wrong. And you certainly can't prove it with examples that create paradoxes. Because every magic system in existence has them.

There is the third possibility: That magic does totally different things than physical excertion and can't replicate what you can do with your arms and legs and vice versa. With magic you might be able to grow plants but with your arm you can hit an enemy with a sword. How do you compare the usefullness of these two things? Even if we compare things with a similar effect the comparision isn't easy: Man with bow will do a lot of damage to normal enemies but much less to skeletons and none to ghosts. The same mans fire bolt spell might make much less damage but will hurt skeletons and ghosts. You can have 40 arrows with you for a fight but only 5 fire bolts before your mana is spent. The range may be different, fire bolts might ignore armor... How do you compare their usefullness/potency ? You might have a spell to throw a rock much farther than you could physically, but the same spell could do nothing with a piece of wood or metal. It might even be that the rock must have a specific shape to be affected by that spell. It might be that you can throw that rock only at specific things... D&D magic worked this unphysical way. PE magic probably too. Consider a diesel engine powering a saw and an electrical generator that drives a computer. The saw can cut almost anything to shreds. If the engine generates more power the saw can cut faster. The computer on the other hand can't cut anything, it's abilities can't be compared to the saw. It doesn't even run faster if the engine generates more power. It works different to the saw. Is it more powerful? Depends on the job. Does saw or computer make the other obsolete? No.

Why should someone with neither physical nor mental abilities be good at anything, especially adventuring. The malnutritioned village idiot has not much of a career choice, no surprise here. That is just what "no dump stats" also means, it is the inherent disadvantage. It means that you can play a jack of all trades who is good in everything but excellent in none (but you will not win difficult fights with a party full of jacks). It means that if you have a *strong* deficiency in any stat (not only strength) you have an achilles heel. In D&D terms it would mean the best mage builds would select attributes that are important for his school of magic and an Illusionist would need different attributes to be at max than a fire mage. Similarily the best fighter build for using a hammer would push (probably) strength, while a fencer would push Dex and a dual-wield fighter Dex and Int. They usually would leave least important stats at 6 to 8, anything below would constitute a hindrance, deficiency, a crippling disability. But to directly answer your question: A strength check would still make sense, but you can't expect the class to tell you who is the weakest. The fire mage would be stronger than the agile fencing master (as well as the illusionist mage). If you find that unbelievable then you have played too much D&D (as we probably all did) ;-) Well, this is actually true for your heart and lung muscles. They allow you to think. How silly is that eating and drinking allows you to think? Before you answer, yes, not exactly the same, not a direct relationship, but it is in the same ballpark. Concentration is impossible when you have a fever, your body influences your mind. When we think about the somatic component of D&D mages we have a direct example of physical effects doing magic. Explanation? You mean as in D&D "physical muscular strength always = fighting potential"? We know that isn't true. And again, what we know about PE is only that "physical musculature always = magical potential damage". No, we don't even know that, we only know "physical musculature + X always = magical damage". You try to get a detailed picture of how magic works. Did you realize that you have accepted many magic systems without this stringent cause and effect chain? For example, if magic is the recitation of some textual formula, why isn't any idiot who can remember these phrases able to do magic? Oh, he is if someone just gives him the spell book? Strangely that doesn't work in D&D, a warrior can't use a spell book. Not even with high INT, so what's keeping him off? Doesn't that sound strange. Doesn't it also sound strange that the uttering of some silly words creates a magic effect? Where's the logical explanation for that? Sound begets magical effect, physical sound waves somehow becoming magic. And it really is the sound wave (it isn't just a helper to make your thoughts coherent) because you can't cast the spell when you are muted. Simple, there is no explanation for that. The disconnect you are critisizing is not in some small gap, the disconnect is all there is and we all accept that. Hey, it's magic. And we accepted it long ago and just don't realize anymore what logical conundrum it really is. ------ Now why is "strength influences magic damage" so hard for us (yes, we probably all have a problem to get used to that) to accept? The most important reason IMO: Just like Tolkien planted Elves and Dwarfs into fantasy and set our expectations, early fantastic literature (wasn't it Tolkien as well?) told us how magic works is and we all have that picture of the studied bearded fellow in a long robe ingrained in us. What Tolkien planted, D&D cemented. We often analyze PE magic by using assumptions we got from magic as known from Tolkien or D&D. Not only that, PSI and wish fullfillment (religious or genie in a bottle) works the same way. The other reason is that combining body with physical fighting and mind with magic is such a convenient, natural fit. It has a lot of advantages, for example that "mind workers" have a use as adventurers (in reality "mind workers" in a medieval era would simply don't do combat or adventuring work). It made it easier to *not* explain magic, the mind is still a mystery to us. Naturally there is a risk involved in not using the established and doing something against the users expectations. If the user doesn't adapt he won't like it. But the same can be said about movies and if no one tried something new we would watch "Ben Hur 53: Ben is back with a vengeance" in cinemas right now In the end explaining how magic works is secondary in importance to the internal consistency of the magic and should PE work well as a RPG system nobody will make much fuss about explanations (after all there are other accepted RPG systems with weird/unusual attributes). If not, this will be just another nail to seal the coffin.

Yes. Absolutely. While the two problems I mentioned are concrete problems, this is a meta problem and as you correctly state we have to see if it translates to real problems: Well, here is the crux. Holding up heavy things isn't a problem in the system where the attribute strength really means physical strength and your magic aptitude (i.e. magic damage) is *also* influenced by your strength. Can he hold up that heavy boulder? Strength check -> Yes. Does the boulder revolt because your strength also influences magic? Obviously not. So before I accept your meta problem as a problem I'd like to hear about a concrete example of a check that would be nice to have but can't be done in such a system. Obviously a system that defines "strength" as "soul strength" would be different. A boulder lifting strength check would be at least problematic (maybe need an extra skill or some reality-defying handwaving to explain that your soul strength lifts that boulder).

Yes, but I would argue that we can and should use effectiveness in the case that someone wants a physically weak but magically strong mage. Whereas for a pure strength check you might as well use strength even in the case that it also affects magic. These are two separate problems and they are solved by the proposed systems as long as we don't demand them to be solved by the exact same measure.

As I said the last option was just mentioned for completeness sakes. Mathematics does that to you ;-) Ahh, but if physical strength begets magic power, then we're back at "you can either be physically AND magically powerful, or physically AND magically feeble, but never physically feeble and magically powerful or magically feeble and physically powerful." In other words, there would be no functional distinction in the game's design, even if all characters still technically possessed individual physical capabilities AND magical capabilities. No. It means you can't be magically powerful in the same way a standard wizard does it. My example attribute/skill system allowed a mage with low strength but fairly high magic power. With advantages against animals and clothies/other mages and disadvantages against armoured targets. If you put that mage against the standard mage he would probably win. In the case of PE we only know that the attribute strength influences, maybe even defines magical damage, but not that magical damage is the only stat influencing magical power. I.e. magical damage is not equal to magical power. Compare a machine-gun to a high-caliber rifle. Shot for shot the rifle is much more powerful, but under normal circumstances the machine-gun is. Well, I would interpret Sawyer as saying "one stat for damage for all classes", not potency. That could be a big difference Even devs make mistake. In rare cases even big barn-door mistakes. So our discussion has the same value as every experiment that tests the speed of light. Even if all the previous experiments have shown the assumptions to be correct it is better to test one more time from a different angle. If our problems are solved in Sawyers system he and his henchmen surely have long abandoned reading this thread. If on the other hand someone here found a weak spot he might have silently revised his system. Or silently concluded that the positive features of his system are more worth than that one weak spot. No system will be perfect after all. I don't care about the "silently" at all, we all win if the system is well designed.

Yes, you are making sense. But the simple truth is if you don't have a strength attribute that only measures your physical strength you can't do a simple pyhsical strength check. You can do one that tests strength as represented by the strength/power attribute. And this could still be just physical strength if the magic power of a person in this magic system somehow depended on his physical strength. Or a system might be possible where you can use a combination of attributes and skills to calculate a number that represents your raw phyiscal strength with the magical strength part excised. But I don't think that very likely, I'm just mentioning it to be thorough.

You can sort of. Put less points in Strength, more in Accuracy and Int, so that you can cast faster and hit more often. And make sure "Ignore Armor" skill is as high as possible. He would only be 90% (or even 80%) as good as a pure mage build (dependent how much Strength damage bonus adds to the base damage) and less efficient against high armour targets. On the other hand he would be better against unarmored targets and much better against targets hard to hit (ghosts,shadows, thiefs). And I see no reason that a weak mage i.e. a mage with a handicap should be as good as a fit mage. We accept that a dump fighter would have a disadvantage against an intelligent fighter, the same could or even should happen to a mage. How to reason out why Strength does damage bonus to both melee and spells is a different problem. If I had to, the first thing I would do is rename it Sorry, I don't understand the last sentence. In the system I proposed the mage can wield a sword. What makes you think he can't? You still can't be physically weak yet do massive damage with a single spell. You also said that spells have to be casted empty handed, which prevent mages who would use staffs, swords etc etc. Ok. But wouldn't it be enough to have a physically weak but powerful mage, independent of how this power manifests itself ? I put that in to avoid that a mage could use his spell-downtimes to hack at enemies. It's just a simple weapon-switch, like a fighter who switches between bow and sword. The mage switches between spells and sword. This could be handled differently, for example that the mage can't do anything else (like hitting people) while he is casting. Mmh, sounds ok as well, but depends on how spell cooldown is handled.

You can sort of. Put less points in Strength, more in Accuracy and Int, so that you can cast faster and hit more often. And make sure "Ignore Armor" skill is as high as possible. He would only be 90% (or even 80%) as good as a pure mage build (dependent how much Strength damage bonus adds to the base damage) and less efficient against high armour targets. On the other hand he would be better against unarmored targets and much better against targets hard to hit (ghosts,shadows, thiefs). And I see no reason that a weak mage i.e. a mage with a handicap should be as good as a fit mage. We accept that a dump fighter would have a disadvantage against an intelligent fighter, the same could or even should happen to a mage. How to reason out why Strength does damage bonus to both melee and spells is a different problem. If I had to, the first thing I would do is rename it Sorry, I don't understand the last sentence. In the system I proposed the mage can wield a sword. What makes you think he can't?