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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ralif Redhammer" data-source="post: 8083168" data-attributes="member: 30438">With Gary Gygax, one has to try to square the two facts that 1 - he said that he didn't like wizards and never understood why anyone would play anything but a human fighter and 2 - that his most famous character is Mordenkainen, a human magic-user. How that ended up informing 1e design is certainly a complicated legacy.Playing a magic-user in 1e was an arduous task. I did so once. In all the characters we made back then, numbering in about 15-20 or so in total, there were but three magic-users, none of which were considered our "mains." It just wasn't fun to crawl through those brutal early levels (though I would argue that in fact the thief had it the worst of all).As for spell memorization time, one thing to keep in mind is that 1e was absolutely predicated on longer periods of downtime. One of the reasons people had multiple characters is that after an adventure, it could conceivable take weeks to month in-game to recover from your wounds, lacking magical healing.</blockquote>