OSR Old school wizards, how do you play level 1?

[James Gasik]

Really? What is everyone else?

Fighters.

 

[Lanefan]

Really? What is everyone else?

Usually a couple of Clerics, a Thief or two, maybe a Ranger, and a bunch of front-liners.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Usually a couple of Clerics, a Thief or two, maybe a Ranger, and a bunch of front-liners.

Yeah. Lot of fighter types in groups like this.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I always felt that with the classic vancian system, many of the spells you'd prepare would be useless during the typical adventure

That's the idea,
classic Vancian memorization was meant to be actually limiting ... and could be, at least, at the lower levels.

so you tend to go for spells which you know you'll get some use out of, meaning that some which are more specialised are left out.

That was not the idea. Rather, you were meant to develop rarefied "player skill" that would allow you to predict which more-specialized spells would be useful in the coming adventure or/and find creative uses for such spells in situations they weren't obviously perfect for.

It was with 3e that we got both spontaneous Sorcerers and scroll-scribing-from-1st-level Wizards who(respectively) had no choice but to take a slate of generally-useful known spells and prepped caster-level dependent spells while scribing infrequently-useful spells to scrolls.

(And, of course, 5e Neo-Vancian slotcasting is as unrestricted as can be short of just casting any spell from your list, every round.)

If you don't want casters to just utterly dominate in D&D outside of the lowest levels, you need either tremendous player restraint in 3.x/PF/5e, or an experienced/genius/fiendish DM in TSR/OSR (both is good in either case, too).

Spoiler

(Technically, briefly, you could have played 4e and had natively balanced martials and casters, but that's just the exception that proves the rule.)

 

[Mannahnin]

It was with 3e that we got both spontaneous Sorcerers and scroll-scribing-from-1st-level Wizards who(respectively) had no choice but to take a slate of generally-useful known spells and prepped caster-level dependent spells while scribing infrequently-useful spells to scrolls.

Technically J. Eric Holmes gave us 1st level M-Us scribing scrolls a lot earlier than 3rd ed did it, but yeah, 3rd made it more common and cheaper.

One house rule I've seen for old school D&D which is very much in the spirit of Vance (and more intuitive to the concept of spell "memorization)" is to allow a caster to only have a single iteration of any given spell memorized at one time. No doubling up on Sleep, for example, unless you bring a second mage. This forces more variety in spell prep and usage as well.

 

[bloodtide]

Adventure.

Most Old School gaming is about adventure, not endless mindless combat. In a typical group only the fighter and cleric fought all the time: the wizard and thief did anything except combat.

The idea that a wizard must blast away with a 'pew pew' blasting attack spell Every Single Round All Day Long, does not come around until 4E.

Though, most Old School wizards did not blast all that much. Sure, most had fireball for and attack spell: more specifically for a large group of foes, far away foes, and powerful foes. And a wizard might have a couple more attack spells, but mostly they had lots of utility spells to use as needed.

And Old School wizard did not feel the need to blast away with attack magic in every single encounter. Quite often they would save magic for big targets. Wizards would often fill the ranged attack "sniper role" and take out Targets of Opportunity. And the wizard was ready to fight magic foes with magic.

Few Old School wizards would load up on all attack spells and then "go nova" and cast ALL their spells on the foes in the very first encounter of the game in the first five minutes of the game......but it's not like it never happened.

 

[Tony Vargas]

One house rule I've seen for old school D&D which is very much in the spirit of Vance (and more intuitive to the concept of spell memorization) is to allow a caster to only have single iteration of any given spell memorized at one time. No doubling up on Sleep, for example, unless you bring a second mage. This forces more variety in spell prep and usage as well.

Spoiler

Ironically, 4e dailies worked that way, too: no doubling up.

And Vance's mages memorized fewer spells than D&d magic-users or wizards, too (though it wasn't clear how often they could re-memorize, IDT?)...

IIRC, Vance's Mizirian the Magician, greatest mage of his generation, prepared & cast, by dint of great effort, 6 spells at one time...

Making him 5th level in TSR D&D, or 3rd in 5e (or, in 3.5, either 4th level with an INT of 12, or 3rd level with an INT of 20 ... oh, or a 3rd level Specialist with an INT of 12, I suppose....?)

 

[Riley]

One house rule I've seen for old school D&D which is very much in the spirit of Vance (and more intuitive to the concept of spell memorization) is to allow a caster to only have single iteration of any given spell memorized at one time. No doubling up on Sleep, for example, unless you bring a second mage.

My 1e DM houseruled or interpreted the rules that way back around 1983.

It led to an odd sub game in our years-long campaign:

We players responded by trying to research ‘alternate’ versions of existing spells so we could memorize both versions. Then at some point our DM decided we weren’t the first magic users to do this (or to try to create a ‘new’ spell based on seeing another magic user casting a spell), so there was an X% chance that any newly-encountered magic user’s spell was already a “sufficiently different” version from the one we knew that we could learn/memorize both….

 

[Baron Opal II]

IIRC, Vance's Mizirian the Magician, greatest mage of his generation, prepared & cast, by dint of great effort, 6 spells at one time...

Making him 5th level in TSR D&D, or 3rd in 5e (or, in 3.5, either 4th level with an INT of 12, or 3rd level with an INT of 20 ... oh, or a 3rd level Specialist with an INT of 12, I suppose....?)

Well, one of the spells was The Excellent Prismatic Spray, so...

 

[Mannahnin]

My 1e DM houseruled or interpreted the rules that way back around 1983.

It led to an odd sub game in our years-long campaign:

We players responded by trying to research ‘alternate’ versions of existing spells so we could memorize both versions. Then at some point our DM decided we weren’t the first magic users to do this (or to try to create a ‘new’ spell based on seeing another magic user casting a spell), so there was an X% chance that any newly-encountered magic user’s spell was already a “sufficiently different” version from the one we knew that we could learn/memorize both….

Yup. I would definitely allow researching new versions, but I wouldn't allow them to be functional duplicates. They'd need to be meaningfully different in some way. Maybe "Mannahnin's Magic Arrow" does d6+1 at first level vs Magic Missile's d4+1, but it won't give you multiple arrows at higher levels, as opposed to Magic Missile.

I would assume that the basic spell list were all the standard versions, known magical formulae. I could see individual casters having different "color"/visual and sensory tweaks in their spells, but I wouldn't want the "sufficiently different" threshold too low.