[...} A wizard has NO HELP to master magic. NOTHING but sheer determination and their wits. Think about it. They must be obsessed with magic, in a way most other casters don't have to be. In what strange ways do they have to warp their mind to be able to grasp magic? What ritual must they do? Trepanation? Days of meditation? "Herbs"? Magic is not science. The mental habits and practices scientists develop (and try to apply, it's hard) may be COMPLETELY DIFFERENT for wizards. There is no guarantee of rationality here.
[...]
So next time you play a wizard, consider the strong possibility that by the standards of mere mortal, your PC may be utterly bonkers.
Yes, that's a fun take on wizards. I like particularly like the
Goblinpunch version of it, which doubles down on the strangeness of Vancian casting:
"Memorizing a spell is not like memorizing a series of noises and hand motions. It's like inviting a spell into your brain by creating a suitable environment for it to reside. [...] To put it another way, it's like weaving a netted bag (out of your neurons) to catch (invite) a fish (spell). [...] Because spellcasting requires a very specific microenvironment in a very small part of the wizard's brain, the act of "memorizing" a spell requires cultivation of certain mental traits. Not only must wizards learn otherworldly esoterica, but they must also believe some of it as well. [...] And so wizards believe such strange things because they must. If they stopped believing in these things, they would cease being wizards. [...] They guard their thoughts by following strange traditions. They filter their perception of reality by isolating themselves in towers and in monasteries. In their books they have built a false history of the world with false maps and false assumptions. And yet the same wizards who can level a city block with a few words are also the ones who have no idea how boats float or babies are concieved."
But, you know, that's a little avant garde for most players (as is almost all of the creative genius on that blog), and I'm fine with the more banal interpretation of wizards, that magic is a scholarly discipline and that you can study it.
However, I also have some objections to the common interpretation.
Nah, never been impressed by this take. Wizards study repeatable actions within a rational system. What they have helping them are the generations of wizards and arcane theorists and archivists that have come before them. Like scientists.
It's less that the wizard is not rational or scientific.
It's more that the logic of wizard's magic is weird. As if it was designed for beings to not accidentally figure it out or do by happenstance.
Wizards are scientists. It's just that most of it is bonkers, barely relates with each other, and attempting to understand what you do know requires strange actions and habits.
Making the jump from wizards are scholars to wizards are scientists, or even physicists, always seemed like a mistake to me. Most academic disciplines rely on rationality and the cumulation of decades or centuries of theory and academic tradition. That wizards study spellbooks and have schools doesn't require them to be scientists. It makes as much sense to compare them to philosophers, theologians, Jungian psychologists, and English lit majors as to physicists.
Though wizard magic in D&D follows consistent and
generally replicable patterns (oops, he made his saving throw), its logic is symbolic. If you look at 5e's spell components, they are all silly medievalisms. And though they are
presumably based on past empirical observations--i.e. using a pinch of fine sand, rose petals, or a cricket is known to allow one to cast sleep--spells don't connect to anything or cohere in any cosmologically meaningful way.
In my mind, 5e wizard magic is an academic discipline (or guild profession), built upon inexplicably functional cargo cult thinking, that is practiced as an applied science, like medicine, but with (probably) many traditions of pseudoscientific nonsense built around it, like new age medicine
.
