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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Patryn of Elvenshae" data-source="post: 5522522" data-attributes="member: 23094">No, it really isn't.  This is a silly sidebar on the real issue.Lord Almighty, man - take the chip off of your shoulder.My point is that a well-played "wizard" (which incl. clerics and druids) can, quite easily, make having a fighter around fairly irrelevant -that a party would, generally, be better off ditching the fighter and adding another Cleric.At high levels, this becomes even more extreme.I know this because I have done it before.  In one game, I took a moderately-high-level Wizard (actually a wizard this time) and, in what was supposed to be a pretty epic series of battles, sidelined basically the entire rest of the party and "won" the encounter all on my own.This was possible due to a couple reasons:1) I know the rules better than just about anyone else at my table.2) My table's full of people who like to play fighter-types.3) The number of spells I knew, which could be put into scrolls or wands, and other pretty standard items let me punch really far above my weight class.4) The spells themselves made it easy to tell large swathes of the encounter to sit down and shut up.So, what was supposed to be a series of "fun for the whole party" encounters turned, instead, into "PoE shows off."*Did I do everything?  Of course not - the party fighters and the rogue still fought some enemies, and did some damage, but everyone at the table knew who really won the encounters.  They only fought the enemies I left for them to fight, and we bypassed a couple other encounters (where they might have played a larger role) through some scrying and transportation magic.  The other party members were, essentially, my sidekicks for a pretty significant portion of the adventure.And you know what?It sucked.It was a complete anticlimax.  Not only were the other players not having a particularly large amount of fun, I wasn't either.  It wasn't, "Hey, PoE's been holding back a bit, now it's his time to shine."It was, "Hey - PoE's been holding back a bit, now it's his time to trivialize everyone else for a bit."Which is why, ever since, I don't play Wizards to their full abilities.  Since then, I've played an Artificer who focused on improving everyone else's stuff rather than taking the CharOp route of buffing myself beyond all reason.  I've played a Fighter / Rogue duelist type with no magical capabilities whatsoever.  We played a short Star Wars game and I deliberately didn't pick a Jedi.  I'm currently playing a Pathfinder Magus because all he gets is blasty-type spells, which are by far the weakest option, along with some self-buffs to sorta maybe equal or exceed the Fighter some of the time.No, I'm not just a player; I've actually been the DM for the past two years.  No, my goal isn't to prove that the Wizard is the bestest class evahlol.  No, this isn't about me grandstanding about how I totally "won" D&D.It's just me recognizing, "Hey - there's kind of a problem here.  The easy solution is for me to just play dumb.  I'll do that."* Actually, I've done this twice.  The other time, more recent, was while playing Warhammer Quest, of all things, and I used a really good Magic Winds roll to collapse the floor of the last chamber under a balrog and send it, temporarily at least, into the pit to let us all escape.Yes, this one sucked, too.</blockquote>

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