Legends & Lore #9 - Fighters vs. Wizards
April 12, 2011
No Original EN World thread found
Another contentious subject, so I ask for the same considerations as in the last entry.
In this entry, Mearls looked at the relationship of power between Fighters and Wizards. He quotes from the OD&D description of magic-users:
OD&D said:
Top level magic-users are perhaps the most powerful characters in the game, but it is a long, hard road to the top, and to begin with they are weak, so survival is often the question, unless fighters protect the low-level magic types until they have worked up.
For Mearls, this encapsulates the relationship in OD&D (and by extension, AD&D and Classic D&D). Magic-users were glass cannons. It was in the fighters' interest to protect the party's magic-user(s) so that they could release their powerful magic at the most opportune time. He draws comparisons with CCGs, where one might create an aggressive, attacking deck for a quick victory, or alternatively a slower-play deck that holds off the opponent until an unbeatable combination can be played.
I can see where Mearls is coming from here, although I think he makes it sound like fighters were expected to be magic-user caddies -- bodyguards so that magic-users could deliver the encounter-winning spell. IMO, the relationship was much more nuanced. The game originally revolved around exploration. Magic-users had some offensive spellpower, but they also had a lot of utility spells. Particularly when you recall that OD&D as originally designed did not have the Thief, the magic-user took up a lot of that slack. Consider the 1st and 2nd level spells in Men & Magic: Detect Magic, Hold Portal, Read Magic, Read Languages, Protection from Evil, Light, Charm Person, Sleep, Detect Invisible, Levitate, Phantasmal Forces, Locate Object, Invisibility, Wizard Lock, Detect Evil, ESP, Continual Light, and Knock. This is basically all the magic-user has to work with for four levels (20,000 XP worth of play!). Sure, Sleep is powerful, and Phantasmal Forces can cause some damage if the illusions are believed to be real, but the vast majority of options for magic-users deal with finding things, finding out about things, and getting past obstacles.
Now as the game became more popular, more emphasis was placed on combat, and wizards were given more and more combat options, and Mearls' take became more and more true. But originally, and for quite a while, there was another aspect which Mearls does touch upon.
The question for Mearls is, why put that kind of design in a cooperative game like an RPG? The answer he comes to is the idea of "play skill". With limited character options and capricious dice, D&D was less about character building, or expressing a character idea, but about testing the player's ability to solve puzzles and problems, finding treasure and avoiding danger.
Mearls said:
Against this backdrop, the disparity between wizards and fighters make sense. The fighter was akin to playing in easy mode. You had more hit points, better AC, and access to weapons. All things being equal, when it came time to use the rules to determine if you lived or died, the fighter had a leg up at low levels.
A magic-user had the worst hit points and worst AC. A single attack could kill a mage of even up to 3rd level or even higher (the most infamous example being magic-users slain by house cats). A duel between two casters of even moderate level came down to whoever fired off the first high-level, damaging spell. In some ways, playing a magic-user was like opting for hard mode.
I think Mearls is really on the right track here, but I don't think it was a matter of "easy mode vs hard mode". Because, again, the game revolved around exploration rather than combat encounters. Rather, I think it was a question of
kinds of play. If you liked the combat game, fighters were what you wanted. They could mix it up with a good chance to survive. Particularly with a player-base of wargamers, you could take your PC fighter and a bunch of retainers and apply real world military tactics. The kind of play offered by the magic-user, OTOH, revolved around creative use of your limited magic abilities to achieve your goals. Clerics, with less combat ability than the fighter and less magic than the magic-user, represented a more all-around style of play. To put it another way, playing fighters was like playing Bowser in Mario Kart, playing magic-users was like playing Toad, and playing clerics was like playing Mario.
The article is largely retrospective, with no real design talk in terms of might happen in the future. Mearls leaves that to the next column.
How did things end up in 5e?
While Mearls didn't talk about how the above might influence future design, as the 5e playtest was announced and implemented, it was obvious that Mearls' take as outlined in this article influenced design. Mearls and other designers often talked about having a simple, "easy" character class for beginning players to get the feel of the game with. And this class was, unsurprisingly, the fighter. The Champion subclass included in the Basic Rules easily has the fewest moving parts of any class or subclass in the game. It's entirely static, with none of its features creating any in-play decision points for the player: improved critical range, a standing bonus to Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution checks, and automatic regeneration. The loan choice a Champion player makes is selecting the Additional Fighting Style, and even here every thing except Protection involves static bonuses. And of course, the fighter has the highest HP and typically the highest AC.
That said, while the Wizard, even the Basic Evoker subclass, is functionally much more complex than the fighter, 5e eschews the drastic difference in power that characterized early D&D. Low-level Wizards may be more fragile than Fighters, but they can dish out their fair share of damage, without ever being reduced to a non-magical back-up like daggers or crossbows. At higher levels...my impression is not so much that the jury is still out as that the jury is hung. Some folks feel that high-level Wizards are too nerfed, while others feel they are still much more powerful and versatile than Fighters and other non-caster characters. The disparity is greater than in 4e but not as great as in 3e, and seems to depend much on the style of game the DM is running.
In my personal experience, I've been playing Fighters, both Champion and Battlemaster, and enjoying them both. In the old days, I liked to play magic-users (not so much because of wanting to play on "hard mode" as liking the idea of casting spells), but I find myself not especially drawn to 5e Wizards. Ironically, I'm put off by all the choices involved. In the old days, magic-users were fairly straightforward, especially in B/X. You only had a few spells to choose from, and in play it was a question of whether it was time to use them or not. With 5e, I have to select the spells I know, select the spells I've prepared, and then choose when to use them. But I'm actually thinking of making my next character a Wizard, just to get a feel for it in actual play.