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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5512585" data-attributes="member: 42582">Actually about half the Warlock and Wizard utilities in the PHB are non-tactical combat spells (I make it 10 non-combat, 8 combat for Warlocks and 10, 11 for Wizards, counting small-distance single-target teleport effects as combat and counting invisibility as useful outside combat).But that probably is not the main issue.As a Rolemaster GM one thing that I did, in the transition from our first long-running campaign to our second, and with the agreement of my players, was to significantly reduce the duration of Invisibility from 24 hours, on the grounds that our group had found it brokenly overpowered, completely dominating over other interesting options.I think this is getting closer to the main issue. As far as I'm concerned this is mere terminology, unless you mean by "standard spellcasting rules" to include the need for Conentration checks if hit while casting. If that is what differentiates spellcasting from martial prowess, in my view it's not a lot of difference that is being drawn. (And 3E has SU powers as well as SP ones, and SU ones can't be disrupted - so even in 3E disruption is not inherent to magic-use.) Well, in your list of things that magic does in your game that it can't do in 4e, I don't see anything that turns on issues like the different way that 3E presents martial powers compared to the scholarly way in which a wizard learns magic (as you suggested in your post upthread). What I tend to see is the use of magic as narrative control which is the whole premise for this thread - in a game where magic is doing those sorts of things, and in this respect is different from martial prowess, how are warriors to avoid being overshadowed? And that's fine. And probably true. Because in 4e no PC can exercise the sort of control over narrative exhibited by most of your examples. All I'm contesting is that this shows that 4e has collapsed the distinction between magic and martial capabilities. In my view, at least, what makes magical abilities magic isn't the fact that they give wizard PCs a degree of narrative control that warrior PC's can't match. And as evidence for this I'll offer LotR - as is frequently noted (eg by triqui in this very thread), Gandalf doesn't use narrative-control magic to get the ring to Mount Doom, but nevertheless there is a manifest difference in the story between (for example) Gandalf fighting Nazgul by (in 4e terms) blasting them with radiance, and Eowyn and Merry fighting them by stabbing them with swords.</blockquote>

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