The Mysterious Mage vs. Pew Pew

[Janx]

But playing a magic-user back then still primarily meant "I cower in the back while the fighter does all the work."

I played magic-users back then, and it mostly sucked, and most people I knew didn't do it more than once, because "I cower" is a really unsatisfying thing to announce each turn. None of my friends read Jack Vance. They certainly didn't go into AD&D thinking, "whoa, I hope I can cower and indulge in clever wordplay instead of actually fighting!"
...snip...
And "hey, if you're not having fun, it's your fault" is a pretty lame attitude, and one that smart game designers don't indulge in. Given the amount of playtesting 3E went through, I suspect they heard from a lot of people that announcing "I cower again" sucked and changed 3E wizards as a result.

I agree. I'm not sure why any 1st level party would recruit a wizard. His 1 spell for the day is likely to not be that useful compared to any other PC class taking his place.

He's basically good for ONE problem a day, assuming you happen to run into the exact problem his ONE spell is good for. I memorized KNOCK today. Too bad we didn't find any locked doors the thief couldn't open of the fighter couldn't bust in.

I memorized MAGIC MISSILE today. yay, you did 1d4+1 damage this round. The rogue does 1d6 per round with a short sword. Everybody does 1d8 per round with a bow of some sort.

A wizard should be as useful as every other PC in the party. Not one encounter per day.

When wizards can cast fireball, it's like they got a small box of grenades. They can't do it every round, but they can finally do something big in each encounter. Something that makes a difference for the party.

 

[RangerRick]

I think it probably has to do with players wanting to magic more often. people want to cast more than once and then cower for an adventure

Yup if you are running just one PC it is lame to follow the rest of the party around in the dungeon all night waiting for that one moment when you can let loose and then go back to hiding in the corner

in earlier edditions casters and noncasters tended to have inverse power curves. Fighters were great to start with but flattened out by higher levels. Mages were lousy to start with (except for brief moments of extreme power) but downright awsome by higher levels. This curve led to some strange player dynamics.

I don't have a problem with that but a lot of people want their fighter to be a big deal for as long as they play him and the wizard too

Variety and choice make the game more interesting. While the specifics of classes still vary, this type of large-scale differentiation is gone. I'm not a big fan of class homogenization.

Yeah I am with you even in computer games you want like a ranged character to feel and play totally different from your melee basher so you think about different stuff all the time. Like maybe you don't care about the armor so much any more but you are always watching the terrain and stuff to make sure you don't let anyone close and basically it feels like a different game.

When everyone works the exact same way only you call it "arrow damage" for one guy and "magical damage" for another guy it feels like just skinning the same stuff over again and thats not so fun.

 

[Mallus]

I agree. I'm not sure why any 1st level party would recruit a wizard. His 1 spell for the day is likely to not be that useful compared to any other PC class taking his place.

For his or her Sleep spell! Absolute murder, if they get it off, against swarming low-level monsters like giant rats, or the dreaded stirges, or AD&D's famous low HD critters that nevertheless had a lethally poisonous bite.

Change the question to, "why would a 1st level party recruit a magic-user who didn't know Sleep" and it becomes harder to answer. Maybe the magic-user's butt looked good in robes? Affirmative action for arcanists? It's a tough one...

I memorized MAGIC MISSILE today. yay, you did 1d4+1 damage this round.

I'll say this for MM: in a world of (mostly) 0-level humans, the spell could also be called "murder someone today and get way with it". It's fairly long range, right? Easy to conceal. You can fire it through the narrowest crack. Etc. Perfect for any number of assassination scenarios.

Could be quite powerful given a less dungeon-oriented campaign (where Broaches of Shielding are too expensive/rare for even important people to have).

 

[wingsandsword]

Why is this more plausible than WotC said "you know, there are a lot of players who don't play wizards because they don't want to stand around all evening, missing with a dagger, while waiting for their moment to shine?"

When the heck was there ever a shortage of people wanting to play Wizards?

In my AD&D days, most PC's were either single-classed Human wizards, or multi-classed Half-Elf or Elf Wizards (MU's/Mages, whatever). A typical party might be a Dwarf Fighter, a Human Wizard, a Half-Elf Cleric/Wizard, a Elf Fighter/Wizard and an Elf Fighter/Wizard/Thief. You only played a single-classed non-spellcaster if you didn't like to keep track of magic or had a roleplaying concept. Fighter/Mages were most popular since they could swing a sword and wear armor all day, and still get spells (and since non-humans would hit level limits anyway, might as well multiclass like no tomorrow).

In my 3e experience, wizards and sorcerers are still some of the more popular spellcasting choices because people like/liked the play style of the wizard.

 

[GSHamster]

Why is this more plausible than WotC said "you know, there are a lot of players who don't play wizards because they don't want to stand around all evening, missing with a dagger, while waiting for their moment to shine?"

Because most people don't really concern themselves with the mechanical fiddly-bits. If the archetype of a wizard is one who rarely uses magic, that's what is going to seem normal. If the archetype changes, then there is going to be pressure for the mechanical version to conform.

Like, exactly how is firing a dart once a round different than firing a magical missile once per round for the same damage? Yet the dart is the choice in early editions, and the magic missile the choice in later editions. But mechanically, they're very close to the same thing. A weak at-will can be more or less the same as a weak attack with a weapon.

Put another way, there was a reason that rangers moved to the dual-wield archetype in addition to the archer archetype. And it wasn't a mechanical reason, but rather a certain dark elf who dual-wielded scimitars.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

I played 1E back when it was just "AD&D."

Mark Rein*Hagen's voice hadn't changed at the time people were originally playing AD&D. There was no other game in town for people who wanted to be more wizardly.

And "hey, if you're not having fun, it's your fault" is a pretty lame attitude, and one that smart game designers don't indulge in. Given the amount of playtesting 3E went through, I suspect they heard from a lot of people that announcing "I cower again" sucked and changed 3E wizards as a result.

It's also not an attitude I indulge in. It's 2011. The secret is out, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Edition Wizards use Vancian Magic. If you play a wizard knowing you dislike Vancian Magic and the playstyle of the class, it is your fault. The strengths and weaknesses of the class are well known today.

If you crave a different wizard experience, it's there to be had. Jedi (Star Wars), Aes Sedai (Wheel of Time d20), Tradition Mages (Mage the Ascension), The Nobility Sorcery (7th Sea), 4th Edition Rituals and the AEDU System, and countless other game systems have countless other spins on magic.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I agree. I'm not sure why any 1st level party would recruit a wizard. His 1 spell for the day is likely to not be that useful compared to any other PC class taking his place.

Once we got over our initial ideas of what said wizard was, we always had 1st level parties recruiting a wizard for an investment. He wasn't worth much at the start, but if you got him up a few levels, he would pay off in the long run.

But no one wanted to play the investment. So that's when we came up with our very first house rule, which was that when you rolled 3d6, in order, for stats, the player with the highest Int was the wizard.

Only much later did it occur to us that there was pretty much always one dull character in our party, at any given situation and level. I think we stumbled into that by accident, when we ran one of those adventures for 8 characters with only 6 players. So from then on, each player got whatever they wanted for their main PC. Then we rolled up an investment or two to tag along as NPCs and round out the party. If a player wanted to switch out later, fine. Though after that, the group didn't stick around long enough to get a wizard up into the higher levels. So I'm not sure when the switch to actual wizard PC would have occurred. (We did start a few one shots at higher levels, where someone wanted said wizard PC.)

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I have heard this a lot over the years, and to this day have never seen this in actual play. I've seen a party full of rogues (3 in a party) with each one being quite different from the other. I've seen parties where the players chose characters with similar roles - defender (warden, paladin, fighter) and they all played differently.

With each role being different I've never seen a wizard play the same as a fighter.

This mythical "sameness" is only in the reading, in actual play this "sameness" never manifests.

I've seen it, quite a lot.

It's obviously not a binary same/different thing, though. It's a question of how different do classes need to be for the system to satisfy you, which is going to be different for everyone.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

When the heck was there ever a shortage of people wanting to play Wizards?

In my AD&D days, most PC's were either single-classed Human wizards, or multi-classed Half-Elf or Elf Wizards (MU's/Mages, whatever). A typical party might be a Dwarf Fighter, a Human Wizard, a Half-Elf Cleric/Wizard, a Elf Fighter/Wizard and an Elf Fighter/Wizard/Thief. You only played a single-classed non-spellcaster if you didn't like to keep track of magic or had a roleplaying concept. Fighter/Mages were most popular since they could swing a sword and wear armor all day, and still get spells (and since non-humans would hit level limits anyway, might as well multiclass like no tomorrow).

My groups almost all started at level 1. If the game started at higher level -- especially level 5 (Lightning Bolt/Fireball level) -- people were THRILLED to sign up to be the guy tossing a-bombs down dungeon corridors.

And you're right, multi-classed demihuman magic-users were more popular than straight magic-users for us.

The same held true for clerics. No one wanted to be "the medic" -- oh, those tempting lists of spells you would never actually cast, since you didn't want to use up a heal you might need later on -- but a cleric/whatever who could do something other than patch up the fighter? Bring it on. My brother played a half-elf ranger/cleric for years.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Because most people don't really concern themselves with the mechanical fiddly-bits. If the archetype of a wizard is one who rarely uses magic, that's what is going to seem normal. If the archetype changes, then there is going to be pressure for the mechanical version to conform.

When was the fictional/mythical/folkloric archetype of the wizard one where he casts one spell a day and then hides behind the no-neck former bouncer he hired to protect him? As was stated up-thread, every time Gandalf runs into trouble, he's busting out the magic. (And he also swings a mean sword, something that the Dungeon! board game allowed, but AD&D did not.)

Like, exactly how is firing a dart once a round different than firing a magical missile once per round for the same damage?

For one thing, the dart will miss, almost every time.