"I know the spell to solve the problem!"

[Celtavian]

re

Different ways for different characters do things. I don't see a problem with it. People vastly over-rate the wizard's versatility.

Let's take some scenarios:

Locked door:
1. Rogue removes trap, picks locks, and stealths through door: Very effective. No resources wasted.

2. Wizard: Wizard uses detect magic and Spellcraft to check for magical traps. Perception for nonmagical. If possible uses dispel magic to eliminate trap otherwise probably summoned creature. Then he must use knock to unlock door. If he wants to go through without being seen, he must use invisibility. Then he still might be heard unless he casts a silence or has Stealth. A wizard to get through a locked door spends 2 to 4 spells where as the rogue spends only time. Wizards have other options at higher level, but they still waste spell slots to use them and the rogue doesn't.

3. Fighter bashes the door open. Takes whatever damage the trap has to give. Marches on unless it's a real bad trap. If it's a real bad trap, most likely the wizard is screwed too.

4. Cleric: Use find traps spell or summons creature to set off trap. Bashes through door.

Rogue still best at getting through locked and trapped door.

Getting past guards:

1. Rogue: Uses Disguise, Bluff, Diplomacy, and Stealth. None of it detects as magic or can be seen through with true seeing. His skill versus theirs. Only resources spent is time.

2. Wizard: Multitude of spells. All that detect as magic. So must have a means to disguise magic and hope they don't have a way to get past it for his stuff to work. Charm Person works on one guard. Mass Charm might work if all guards are close. Now wizard must worry about not only his own magic being seen through, but the guard's charmed condition as well. Now the guard will have magic detected on him and the wizard must disguise the magic on the guard as well. He has to waste massive resources to pull off what a rogue can pull off alone with skill.

3. Fighter: He's bashing his way in unless he has skills. Luckily he's good at bashig his way in and can usually kill tons of mook guards. But he'll have problems with the bigger baddies.

4. Cleric: Depends on domains. Definitely not the best for infiltration.

Rogue still the best for infiltration into settings with average humanoid guards.

Generally, a party is going to work together to get this type of thing done. So the wizard will use some magic, the fighter will be ready to bash, the cleric will be ready to support, and the rogue will be point as usual and deal with talking elements.

I have never much understood this assumption wizard's can pull spells out of thin air to get any job done. Usually isn't the case. Takes time, money, and careful planning for a wizard to do the same thing a skill monkey can do on the fly. A wizard will be much happier spending his spell slots on spells other than those aimed at doing the skill monkey's job.

 

[Walking Dad]

Other example:

Locked door:
1. Rogue rolls to remove trap, pick locks, and stealth through door: One missed roll and the whole effort was wasted (ok, he has multiple tries or could take 20 for the lock picking)

Getting past guards:
1. Rogue: Rolls Disguise, Bluff, Diplomacy, and Stealth. None of it detects as magic or can be seen through with true seeing. His skill versus theirs. If he looses he looses. Each roll has a flat 5% for a 1. Failure is much more likely if he has the skill not maxed out.

The thing is that the rogue has to spent his skill points at a skill every level to keep up with the DC.
And how often do you have to open a door silently in dungeon environment?
Why should the wizard cast invisibility?
Either the whole group has to go in undetected, so he casts invisibility sphere (and the cleric silence) to also cover the fighter and the cleric, or he doesn't. Let the rogue do solo stealth jobs, as he has no ability to take the group with him.And one failed check and he remembers all the monsters he passed and that are now between him and escape.

Getting past guards: Sleep spell if low level. Scry and teleport if high level. Takes the group with him.

Solo infiltration is nearly never demanded in an adventure, because most games are group efforts. Leaving the group behind means a bunch of players doing nothing.

 

[Stalker0]

You're like the guy saying, "$4 lattes every day is a trivial cost." But $1500 per year here and $1500 per year there and suddenly you're talking about real money.

But if you make a billion dollars a year, it pretty much is.

 

[Balesir]

What I'm saying is that there are sociopathic PCs who only value others as long as they contribute to that PCs happiness. Once they're no longer useful, they can be discarded. Steps in that direction may actively be taken.

Everybody else, OTOH, thinks like normal RW humans, and will base their decisions on moral/ethical considerations- is that guy my buddy? Is he my ally? Has he done things I really dislike?- all that RW stuff we use figuring out who we want to work or hang out with comes into play.

They, for the most part, will not reduce their interrelationships on the level of a pure CBA analysis; they won't be "metagamey."

Hmm. During the "downsizing" of the early '90s I saw several people who would, generally, consider themselves (and, on the whole, be considered by others) reasonably ethical make just this sort of "cost-benefit analysis" to cut loose people from their companies when they thought it was for the company's long-term good. I can almost hear the rationalisations, now: "why risk more people down that dark, dangerous dungeon when we can get the job done with fewer?" "We're giving you a bonus share in the last treasure, you know, to tide you over until you get hooked up with a new group..." "If you need any references that you aren't really, you know, a "thief", as such, you can absolutely send them to us"...

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

True, but a band of adventurers has less margin for error than a typical company. Often, it is possible to downsize a company and make it more efficient. Cutting a party from 5 to 4 or from 4 to 3 can only be done with careful planning and teamwork.

 

[Rogue Agent]

But if you make a billion dollars a year, it pretty much is.

If your players have a billion gp, then the wizard isn't the source of your problem.

 

[Stormonu]

If your players have a billion gp, then the wizard isn't the source of your problem.

If the players have a billion gp, they probably aren't adventuring - though they may send someone else.

 

[Celtavian]

Other example:

Locked door:
1. Rogue rolls to remove trap, pick locks, and stealth through door: One missed roll and the whole effort was wasted (ok, he has multiple tries or could take 20 for the lock picking)

Getting past guards:
1. Rogue: Rolls Disguise, Bluff, Diplomacy, and Stealth. None of it detects as magic or can be seen through with true seeing. His skill versus theirs. If he looses he looses. Each roll has a flat 5% for a 1. Failure is much more likely if he has the skill not maxed out.

The thing is that the rogue has to spent his skill points at a skill every level to keep up with the DC.
And how often do you have to open a door silently in dungeon environment?
Why should the wizard cast invisibility?
Either the whole group has to go in undetected, so he casts invisibility sphere (and the cleric silence) to also cover the fighter and the cleric, or he doesn't. Let the rogue do solo stealth jobs, as he has no ability to take the group with him.And one failed check and he remembers all the monsters he passed and that are now between him and escape.

Getting past guards: Sleep spell if low level. Scry and teleport if high level. Takes the group with him.

Solo infiltration is nearly never demanded in an adventure, because most games are group efforts. Leaving the group behind means a bunch of players doing nothing.

A rogue has to spend skills to keep up with the DC? This is your argument? What else is a rogue going to do with his skill points but keep up with the DC on key skills.

If the wizard uses invisibility sphere, you're not making it in anyhow. Most likely the cleric, fighter, and wizard himself can't stealth, so someone will pick up on them. Any worthwhile high level enemy domain is going to see through invisibility pretty easily, so you're out of luck anyhow.

And how are these wizards getting away with easy scrying? It's never been a problem in my campaigns because you can't scry on places and people you've never seen. If you have pretty much zero idea of the interior of a place, how exactly do you know where to scry and teleport to? I can't be the only DM that doesn't allow players to scry and fry places they don't even know about. Or the only one that uses heavy scry countermeasures for powerful bad guys. There have to be plenty of others doing the same thing.

My biggest problem with wizards is not versatility. As I stated early, the majority of wizards do not like using spell slots to accomplish what a skill monkey can do with mundane means. Memorizing a knock or invisibility when they can memorize a more useful spell because the skill monkey isn't good enough to get it done makes them unhappy.

My biggest problem with the wizard is the no save spells like maze or prediction of failure or excessively high DCs with spells like clashing rocks that make fights trivial by eliminating enemies piecemeal. That's the harder part of dealing with a wizard. "Gee, the wizard opened the door with knock" is the least of my concerns with arcane casters.

 

[Stormonu]

For the most part, spells should be something that gives the wizard the option to do something, not to "do everything better" or by himself.

For doors:
The rogue has his lockpicks.
The wizard has knock.
The fighter has his trusty axe or shoulder.
The cleric has his mace.

For traps:
The rogue disarms or bypasses them.
The wizard dimension doors past the ones he suspects are nearby
The fighter takes a few hit points damage and pushes through
The cleric follows the fighter's trail and heals the damage taken

Out of the four options above, the wizard is the only one who is really at risk of not having the option available at the right time (didn't memorize the spell, no scroll or wand, etc.), or running out of the resource along the way.

Wizards, like everyone else, are part of a team. In my experience, those wizard characters who go around thinking they can do everything by themselves ("Oh, I'll just cast Fly and Invisibility or Polymorph into a magpie to bypass his guards and go face the BBEG by myself") usually end up dead.

A spellcaster's motto is certainly "be prepared". However, while many of us have certainly heard how in any given theoretical scenario how a wizard can use a single spell to dominate the encounter, I've never seen in practice where a single wizard has dominated every - or even most - encounters in a given adventure. Furthermore, wizard only has to guess wrong once about what spell he needs to get himself and the rest of the group killed.

 

[Elf Witch]

I'm more talking about PCs having a special skill - but other PCs having that same skill or its equivilant and then on top of that having many other things they can do. If magic allows for a wizard to have enough utility to marginalise a rogue and still do his schtick effectively - then IMO that's a bug.

I believe 3e lends itself too easily in this direction. There are certainly ways around it and it can be dealt with, but if A DM isn't looking for it magic can easily marginalize a rogue's role in the party.



3e went quite far in making sure this was not a frequent occurrence - especially in later iterations (reserve feats etc.) Frankly I don't remember the last time a mage was out of resources in 3e before the fighter was too low on HPs to continue. Whereas I seem to remember it happening in 1e and 2e all the time (not that I remember the mages complaining much, a 1e or 2e mage was only out of resources after making a serious contribution to the adventure).

We played tonight and we were talking about this. And we agreed that any player building the right build can marginalize another character and this is a bug because the rules allow it. One player brought up a tricked out rogue who was outfighting the fighter and doing far more damage and once he got high enough level he was not taking damage from spells with his good saves and his use magic device was obscenely high and he started getting a hold of wands and scrolls and being as good as the party wizard. It was obvious he didn't really need the rest of the party. He could fight, cast spells,heal from a wand and disarm traps and pick locks.

No other class has this versatility and yet you rarely read about rogues stepping on other classes toes or reading how use magic device makes things to easy and makes the rogue able to do what the party wizard does.


In our Age of Worms campaign the rogue often gets all the limelight with his damaging ability and now that he has reached 11 level he is getting good with use magic device. The only thing stopping him from marginalizing my sorcerer is that he does not have access to wands and scrolls of course neither do I.

Again I think this is more of a player/DM problem then a rule issue. It is really very simple don't design your character to be a dick.

When I play a wizard I rarely take the knock spell I don't go looking for wands or scrolls of it. Not if we have a rogue in the party who has been designed to pick locks and disarm traps.

In the games I play in and the games I run mages run out of spells all the time. It is really quite easy to do if you have a lot of encounters with a lot of mooks that just eat away at the mages resources. And since most of our clerics make the party buy wands of healing and potions the fighters have an easier time staying in combat with healing replacing lost hit points.

Another way to control this is to limit how many wands and multi use items the party finds. In my game wands found in loot are never fully charged and you can't just walk into a town and buy one they usually have to be special ordered and even then they are hard to come by. I tend to put in a lot of scrolls an potions use once and then bye.

I do think magic items are to easy to come by in 3E and don't cost enough and I think that is far more a problem then wizards being able to open door with magic better than a rogue with pick locks.