D&D (2024) Here's The New 2024 Player's Handbook Wizard Art

 

[Scott Christian]

View attachment 352940​

To me, 5e nailed it the first time. I like this piece, although the glasses don't seem to fit, but overall very cool. But the original 5e wizard - perfection!

 

[Reynard]

To me, 5e nailed it the first time. I like this piece, although the glasses don't seem to fit, but overall very cool. But the original 5e wizard - perfection!
View attachment 354583

It is a cool look but he should be doing something actively magical IMO.

 

[Scott Christian]

It is a cool look but he should be doing something actively magical IMO.

I think the whole reason I like it is because he is not doing something magical. But the look in his eyes says he definitely could.

It's explicit versus implicit features in a piece of fantasy art that make me really like it. For me, I lean towards the implicit, although I am a sucker for a good old barbarian grabbing a creature twice their size.

 

[Reynard]

I think the whole reason I like it is because he is not doing something magical. But the look in his eyes says he definitely could.

It's explicit versus implicit features in a piece of fantasy art that make me really like it. For me, I lean towards the implicit, although I am a sucker for a good old barbarian grabbing a creature twice their size.

The thing about that image is that nothing about it says "wizard" except the staff. He could as easily be a merchant.

 

[Vaalingrade]

To me, 5e nailed it the first time. I like this piece, although the glasses don't seem to fit, but overall very cool. But the original 5e wizard - perfection!
View attachment 354583

Performing the iconic wizard action: absolutely nothing magical.

Also, he's still committing one of the cardinal sins of this thread: being black with white hair, which is apparently the sole purview of Storm, who apparently two of my aunts are consciously ripping off.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

I like it.

More importantly, my 28 year old daughter said (excitedly): "That's a wizard I could play!" Which, I would think, is the demographic that D&D should be shooting for. Not old, crusty bastards like me.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I am reminded of the novel Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson, which is from the viewpoint of a character who uses a wheelchair in a world of fantastic healing magic. There is a good reason in-world why the condition cannot be healed, and it ends up being a great piece of representstion.

I think the best modern example I've seen is Olli from Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series, which is itself probably the best full-on "space opera" I've come across in the last decade, maybe even longer, and far more thoughtful and complex in ideas than most space opera. Olli is a human born without real limbs and with a peculiarity about her nervous system, and so has to get around and do stuff by using various machines she interfaces with (via cyberware in her case). And the trilogy handles her really well - she's never an excessively saintly person, despite being frequently totally awesome, and it's never implied that she wants or should want to live or move or be the way other humans do/are (also some complex issues with eugenics and "fixing" people and so on addressed pretty well over the course of the books). In general the series handles a vast variety of different ways to be and think, some human, some post-human, some partly or entirely alien, really well, and it's striking that it does this whilst also being pretty high-octane action SF a lot of the time and exploring even larger concepts!

Just an absolute 10/10 recommend on that series, which starts with Shards of Earth.

(It would also make for an incredible TT RPG setting, I note, albeit there is quite a Rifts-ian level of power gap between some of the characters!)

 

[ezo]

1) This presumes every potential disability or whatever you want to call it is a illness or disease to be "fixed", not just something about how that person is. Even on a scientific level the "to be fixed" doesn't hold up - lot of things perceived as disabilities or the like are simply how that person was born or the like. There's a different between someone whose legs got chopped off in an accident or battle and a person who was born without much in the way of legs.

Not at all. People are born all sorts of different ways. People born with impaired vision or hearing, use medical advances to reduce or elimate those impairments all the time, or use prosthetics to replace limbs. Not everyone of course, but IME most do fi they can.

I'm certainly not suggesting such impairments are an illness or disease, although such things can result from illnesses or diseases I believe.

2) If everything "non-normal" can be "fixed" it acts in an exclusionary way. So people who themselves have disabilities will never see themselves represented in that fictional universe in that way.

No one is excluded from playing D&D. However, IME the point of playing a character in D&D is more often about being something you can't be or aren't IRL. Some people play blind PCs, but use rules (a feat, fighting style, whatever) to overcome it so their PC can play without any issue. I'm sure others can play with other disabilities, but will have something in place to likewise play without issue. Some might decide to embrace it and just deal with whatever issues arise. I can't say, but those are my guesses.

But, if you have something in place, all I'm saying is magic can do it, too, if it already doesn't. I had lasik 20 years ago, and have 20/20 vision still, only using glasses sometimes to drive at night. If I could have a procedure again (and afford it now) so I wouldn't even need the glasses at night, I certainly would. I mean, I look decent in glasses, but I find wearing them inconvenient at best. Why wouldn't I fix them if I could?? Makes no sense to me.

With a first post in the thread like this, it's utterly shocking, shocking I say, that anyone could possibly presume that there might be some motivations present here. I have absolutely no idea where anyone could even remotely think that this is nothing but honest, upfront, forthright, well supported criticism deserving of thoughtful and measured response.

I know, right? Crazy...

Although some of my remarks are snarky and meant to be amusing to those I was responding to, yeah, all of them were honest, upfront, forthright. If someone had asked for my reasons, instead of jumping to assumptions, I would have been happy to oblige them (in a few cases I did). However, since my reasons are my own, and not meant to convince anyone to feel as I do, and simply my opinions, I see no cause of others to become, well, a tad hostile about them. Disagree all you want, that's cool, but as for being representative of a wizard in D&D, I find this image severely lacking.

I often find that we reap what we sow.

Not always. After all, all my responses in that post were either in agreement, supportive, and/or expounding on what other people said. It is how others read them, made assumptions, and took offense to my having an opinion different from their own.

 

[Staffan]

I don't get this. 3E had tons of setting material, including bringing back old settings by third parties. 3E was focused on character options, but many of those options were directly tied to the world.

Sure, but compare the typical 2e sourcebook to the typical 3e sourcebook. 2e generally had few to no character options, unless it was a book specifically designed to provide them. You might have some spells or magic items, but not more than that. I guess part of that was that 2e in general didn't give much in the way of character options, since it didn't have feats and such. In that regard, it's more similar to 5e, where the early choice of sub-class is the majority of your mechanical identity much like the optional kit rules serve the same purpose in 2e.

But in 3e, even a regional sourcebook is something like 33-50% character options. My memory says moreso in FR than in Eberron, but I could be misremembering. BTW, I may or may not be including NPC stat blocks in that figure – in my head, they both fall into the category of "detailed mechanics" rather than "lore". 2e sourcebooks would generally just get away with writing something like "LG hf W5" (Lawful Good human female 5th level wizard) where 3e would give you a stat block half a page long.

I remember a post Sean Reynolds made in the early 00s, where he wrote in thinly veiled fashion that the bean counters at Wizards (I think they operated mostly independent of Hasbro back then) had decided that since player-facing material sold better, all books had to have a certain amount of such material. When facing internal pushback, they apparently allowed a less player-focused Silver Marches sourcebook through to see how it sold, and the post was Reynolds making the argument to the community that if they wanted more lore they should buy the book to prove the bean counters wrong. I believe that post is where the terms "fluff" and "crunch" come from, but a quick googling couldn't find it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But, if you have something in place, all I'm saying is magic can do it, too, if it already doesn't. I had lasik 20 years ago, and have 20/20 vision still, only using glasses sometimes to drive at night. If I could have a procedure again (and afford it now) so I wouldn't even need the glasses at night, I certainly would. I mean, I look decent in glasses, but I find wearing them inconvenient at best. Why wouldn't I fix them if I could?? Makes no sense to me.

Lasik is an interesting example to use - Lasik surgery relatively frequently (by surgery standards) fails or has significantly problematic side-effects (including some that manifest specifically in darker conditions). It's nice that it worked for you, but it doesn't for everyone. It's also not capable of dealing with some more extreme vision defects (but which still can be corrected by glasses), and only recently started having much success with by far the most common reason for glasses - presbyopia - it's still not ideal for that, despite a lot of advertising material/medical propaganda around it.

D&D's magic being incapable of failing or a producing a less-than-perfect result means it's a poor comparison for this. Magic in most settings can fail or produce imperfect results - it can't in D&D because there's basically never a check involved in "friendly" spells or neutral ones generally, and even on offensive ones it's usually a largely binary check, with only damage sometimes occurring anyway.

Further, being real, if you apply a real-world lens to D&D magic, then healing/mending/resurrection-type magic would be insanely more valuable than D&D presents it as, and any churches with functioning Clerics would be incredibly rich as people lined up outside for cures. A god willing to hand out healing magic in exchange for conversion and worship would immediately become the focus of most worship for most people, and whilst that's a fun conceit for a campaign world maybe (especially if that god isn't actually very nice), it demonstrates how this sort of comparison rapidly falls to pieces.

Also you're doing exactly what I said and mindlessly assuming magic can "fix" everything. It doesn't seem like any D&D healing/restoration-type spell would actually, RAW/RAI be able to say, "fix" someone born without optic nerves (which is a thing that happens), or without eyes (also a thing), any more than it could give sight to a being that simply doesn't have eyes/sight like a Grimlock. It's also unclear what you think would "cure" presbyopia or the like, short of drinking de-aging potions.