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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6020026" data-attributes="member: 1165">I've never read a Greyhawk novel (are there any?) but in FR only some wizards run into this problem. Alas, these are the most famous wizards.Khelben has such a powerful information network (I guess it's the Moonstars) that he can tell when a single drow is visiting Waterdeep. (However, he assumes she's evil, which she wasn't, and sent some loser wizard to go kill her, and they failed.)Elminster has Mary Sue-like levels of genius completely apart from being a wizard. He pretty much never flubs, and if he does he can rely on Elminster's Evasion, or the goddess of magic herself, who didn't sleep with him (that was the previous one) will pull him out of the fire. Or the Simbul will.Khelben isn't quite up to that level, but while Mystra was alive he should have been infallible. When he and Elminster had an argument, and Khelben was about to do something stupid, Mystra visited him in his head and shut him down for a few seconds. (Same things happens with the Chosen of Bane, but then the Chosen of Bane is a cleric. Not that I've ever read about him in a novel)The problems with settings with powerful good-aligned NPCs are that said NPCs would want to help, and when the PCs become fairly high-level and start dealing with things like a hole in the sky, it makes sense to call upon the most powerful learned person who can handle it. If Elminster or Khelben or whoever knew about it, they would deal with it, or at least tell the PCs "okay, go collect for me 5000 gp worth of obsidian dust, I need that to perform the ritual..." (No one expects Elminster to kill the local kobold infestation. At least I hope not!)There doesn't seem to be space for mid-level adventurers. A lot of restrictions on these wizards (eg Queen Alustriel and Simbul run kingdoms) don't matter much when you are delegating authority anyway in order to practice your magic, and can teleport, solve a problem and come back in a few days, using Sending to communicate while you're away. If said highly-intelligent wizard hasn't set up a standard method of dealing with the occasional dimensional jaunt interfering with their work/minions/kingdoms/etc, they're doing something wrong. (Elminster supposedly visits other worlds and talks to two other wizards, and those chats don't seem like they're short. Khelben can take time to visit Elminster in a barn in the middle of nowhere.)Not that this applies to all powerful wizards even in FR, just some. I specifically applaud Gromph in City of the Spider Queen for being plausibly intelligent yet not a Mary Sue genius. Of course omniscience never applies to villainous wizards (not that I would want it to). I think FR could have been fixed just by killing Mystra and a number of high-level good-aligned NPCs.</blockquote>

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