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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 938614" data-attributes="member: 2013">An EXCELLENT question.  Here, in approximate order of importance, are the reasons...Reason 1: Because many of their spells are area-effect spells.  You can catch 40 5x5' opponents in your 20' spread fireball.  In other words, the 10th level wizard doesn't do, on average, 21 points of damage in a round to the orc horde rushing at him; he does 840 points of damage in a round; meanwhile the 10th level fighter is hacking away for his 10.45 points of damage.  However, twenty rounds later, when the wizard is flush out of spells and has to pull his dagger out and wade into melee, the fighter is still doing his 10.45 points of damage.  Again, this becomes a balance issue - the wizard can blast more foes at once, but he can't keep up that rate of fire for as long.Reason 2:  The fighter, being involved in melee, has a much bigger chance of being "hit back," thus shortening the effective amount of time he can keep swinging that sword.  Remember, it takes on average 4-7 rounds for an equal opponent to bring him down.  That means that the fighter CAN'T go on swinging his sword all day... he dies well before he gets to "all day" - so the fighter is not an "unlimited source of continuous damage." Reason 3:  The wizard CAN pull out a sword and put on armor after he runs out of spells... though he won't be quite as effective a combatant as the fighter.  It's not like the wizard runs out of spells and then just has to stand around waiting for them to "recharge."  The fighter, however, cannot withdraw, shuck his armor, and start launching spells at big groups... it's a trade-off of "phenomenal cosmic powers" for "itty bitty longevity in blasting." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  After the 10th-level wizard blows through his retinue of fireballs, having inflicted thousands of points of damage, he wades into battle with armor and sword... and will be about as effective as a fighter 1/3 his level (not 1/2 like BAB would suggest, as the Wizard lacks the attack-bonus-boosting magic swords and Feats).  That has him doing another 2-3 points of damage per round for the rest of the day.  Keep in mind that it takes approximately 160 rounds - or over fifteen minutes - of the fighter and wizard hacking with swords side-by-side for the fighter to make up the "total damage differential" resulting from ONE round of sword vs. fireball against an innumerable horde.It actually balances beautifully - it's balanced when you're blasting away at a single target - because on average, that target drops in 4-7 rounds, so there's no real danger of running out of spells in a single encounter.  And capping the spells per day balances out the ability of the mage to affect multiple opponents at once - where the fights last longer, the mage DOES have to worry about running out of spells - which balances his ability to hit multiple targets at once, thus making his average damage over an entire day of combat against thousands of foes closer to the fighters.  I haven't crunched the exact numbers, but an order of magnitude guess - 15 minutes of swordplay per area spell times 40 spells per day for a 20th level wizard tells me that it takes about 10 waking hours of continuous swordplay for the fighter to make up for the spells the wizard can fling... which is pretty close to the normal "8-hour working day" I expect of my characters.  (8 hours working, 8 hours sleeping, 8 hours cooking, eating, sharpening swords, and doing other off-camera stuff - total of 24 hours).--The Sigil</blockquote>

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