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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6030427" data-attributes="member: 42582">Happily I didn't canvass either such thing. I simply canvassed the wizard not adding every spell to his/her spellbook that s/he is entitled to upon levelling up.As I said, this is analagous to being proficient in some armour but nevertheless not wearing it.My priest build is proficient in medium armour and has no DEX bonus. The reason for not wearing armour is because I am going for the archetype of non-combat sage. You can have knowledgeable sages who don't use magic, just as you can have skilled swordsmen who don't wear armour. My point is that those sages are not better sages than the most knowledgeable wizards, just as those swordsmen are not more skilled than plate-armoured fighters.I explained, in my earlier post, why I don't agree with this. For a wizard, being knowledgeable shouldn't require trade-offs. In a gameworld in which magical ability is the acme of knowledge, it shouldn't require sacrificing scholarly ability in order to build a spell-using character. Spell-using PCs (or, at least, a certain subset of them - clerics, wizards and warlocks) are the most knowledgeable around.If you want to build your non-spell-using sage so that s/he is functionally equivalent to a diviner, but his/her divination magic is flavoured in some other fashion (a PC who bears roughly the same relationship to a wizard as a warlord does to a cleric), that is fine - it won't crowd out other essential archetypes, though is at the margins of the fiction in my view (because of the link between learning and magic) - but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for such a build in D&Dnext!The option hurts me by changing the underlying fiction, and potentially the tightness of the scene-framing and action resolution mechanics.In the fiction of D&D, magical knowledge is the pinnacle of knowledge. If the game makes room for your sage, it loses that fiction.D&D is a party game. Given that it won't have the sorts of mechanics that support disparate PCs in games like HW/Q, BW etc, if it permits builds of the sort that you describe it is likely to have watered down or ineffective scene-framing mechanics, and possibly also the same in respect of action resolution mechanics, in order to make Shadowrun-style parties (as per [MENTION=6694877]slobo777[/MENTION]) work within more-or-less simulationinst scene framing and action resolution conventions.Problem not solved. I'm still stuck with crappy action resolution and scene-framing.4e is, in my own view, far and away the best version of D&D to date in part because of its tightness and focus in these two respects. And that tightness and focus is predicated on the PC build rules that produce a wide variety of PCs (in terms of colour, capability, etc) who nevertheless are able to engage in party play across the spectrum of fiction from social intrigue to exploration to vicious combat.I already have a game like the one you're describing - it's called Rolemaster, and there is currently an open playtest on for the new edition - and it is sloppy at precisely the points I'm talking about: wonderful PC build, but pedestrian action resolution (except for its melee combat and some aspects of spell casting) and no support at all for scene framing. And these things are not unconnected, for the reasons I've given above.I don't object to the sage per se - I set out 3 builds for it above!But the sage needs hit points, and probably some combat-useful social skill (charm person, diplomacy, or something similar). And the sage can't be better at lore than wizards, clerics etc as that is stomping on the well-established D&D trope that spellcasters are the best scholars.</blockquote>

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