Destructive Forces
I ask this because I'm working on a character who's essentially a mage-hating knight with magic-resistant armor. I honestly like the idea of playing a character who brute forces his way past magical woo-woo powers but at the same time it's hard to find the line where people stop going "okay I need to work around this" and they start going "OMG ******** MANGINA ICEFROG NERF PLSSSSSS".
Plus considering how massive the varieties of magic are it's pretty much impossible to come up with a method that protects against them all. Soak's osteomancy (for lack of a better term) is pretty much impossible to mitigate supernaturally because all she's doing is spawning extra bones into weapons.
So it's hard to figure out how to make a legitimate counter to mages without making it... faggy.
Before I make my post, a small disclaimer: My main character in a private RP I have been doing for years is the Ertai of anti-magic. He is broken, OP, cheese, faggy, etc. I know this and acknowledge the fact that in most settings he is ridiculous. So when I make this post most of what I say is from experience.
The first thing to consider is does your character want to use magic and magical/power items to meet his goal of kill all mages? The average mage in a role-play is average in melee to help mitigate the magical ability they have. You also run into a lot of magic/power users whose powers are used to enhance their own physical abilities. Any character who comes up against a magic-resistant/immune opponent will if possible start to focus the energy to enhance themselves most of the time. This becomes a big issue when a normal human fighter is pitted against someone whose melee skills are lacking, but is now blinking and moving twice their land speed and striking three - four times a post thanks to hasting ability, and has a supernatural armor or protection to help mitigate and deflect incoming attacks. Your character may have resistances against your chosen range of killing, but those resistances don't typically apply when they are enhancing the physical tools that are gutting you.
So I will write this post under the assumption that your character will have energy sources/items that are supernatural in effect somehow to help reach his goals. I will just s**t out some ideas here, take em or leave them.
If you are looking for something that can help you get in close and quickly, I would suggest abilities/tools that provide distraction. A character who can run and throw javelins can keep at bay most stronger attacks for example since standing in one place or doing light walking while casting would become a liability when charging up larger attacks. Just being in their face alone will mitigate the use of such abilities in most settings.
Smaller blasts of energy like fireballs, ice spikes, arcane blasts, flamethrowers, whatever that most mages/powers can s**t on you in a single post need a bit more care to handle. These kind of attacks for most characters are the bread and butter of the profile, the main striking ability for damage output next to CQC (which is usually avoided). Resistances help but if you are going for a mage killer theme you need a system that helps completely mitigate this using your physical skill, while allowing your opponent a chance to shine without having to resort to improvising s**t on the fly.
On another forum I had a character whose sword had physical cartridges that stored a small charge of energy. These carts were stored in the handle and were 'activated' by pulling a trigger/plate on the handle (think chain sword). During combat, if he was at range and his opponent had fired off an arcane sourced projectile, he could pull the plate and swing the sword in front of him to attempt to knock the projectile aside. The downside to this was his sword could only hold three carts in the handle, and to reload was to take the handle off and manually shove in the carts. This meant that the sword was his oh s**t button in the event he could not close the gap, due to summons/entanglement/whatever.
For abilities used up close you could look to off-hand equipment that allows you to keep up some form of offensive/defense while providing a chance to avoid being destroyed by up close blasting. A device that provides you with a medium sized shield of light on your off-hand wrist that can take only a bit of damage that worked on a cart system could be used since it would require good positioning to allow the arm to get into position, and would only be 100% effective against stuff that you see coming such as a mage constantly backpedaling while holding an arm out and blasting away. It can also help protect you against long term drain/damage effects such as flamethrower style spells. Sure your character will get hit a bit but once the shield is active you can disengage long enough to re-group and get out of the way of the cone attack.
When thinking of ideas remember that at the end of the day just keeping most mages arms busy is the key to success. Staying in close, throwing s**t at them, punching them in the mouth are all viable ways to shut a mage down. Focus on how to get close, and how to stay there without issues and you will find a good, clean system on how to do things.
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