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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6313925" data-attributes="member: 29398">Which means you'd never play a Thief (find and remove traps doesn't always work, and the consequences of failure can be deadly). For one thing, the chance of deadly failure isn't 5%; it's maybe 5% of 5% of 5% of 50-60%.For another thing, messing with arcane powers is (or should be) *much* more complicated and dangerous than walking.  More like operating very finicky and not-always-reliable heavy machinery on a job site that has never heard of the terms "health and safety".Oh yes they would, because if they didn't die they'd do (or could do) great things.Getting into melee combat has (or should have) the possibility of killing you each and every time you do it, but characters still wade in on a regular basis.  Why should magic be any different?That's the risk of having wizards in the party.  Send them home...your band of fighters will do just fine until you hit some magic you can't handle. In real life people take up all sorts of dangerous professions.  Magic by its very nature should be more dangerous than any of them...and yet people will still try to learn it.In small part, yes.In 1e and 2e magic wasn't easy to cast.  You had to be completely uninterrupted (*any* interruption cost you the spell to no effect), you had to have room to wave your arms around, there were casting times involved, fireballs and lightning bolts sometimes ended up going where you didn't expect, etc.  (the one thing they missed was that many area-effect spells, like any ranged thing, should have needed a roll for aiming or placement)  2e introduced wild magic as well.3e brought in combat casting, concentration checks (often trivially easy to make) if interrupted, no casting time for most spells, metamagic to allow still-silent-quick-max.effect casting, guaranteed placement (no expanding fireballs or rebounding lightning), and so on - no wonder mages got out of hand!  All the drawbacks were gone, but the benefits remained.I as a Fighter have been fireballed and bolted so many times by my own side I've lost count!  It's not always the caster who's at risk.Where wild magic comes in as yet another risk (and balancer) is that if a caster gets interrupted in mid-spell there should be a chance of a wild magic surge (WMS) that can do just about anything from the extremely beneficial to the mind-numbingly mundane and-or foolishly humourous to the awfulest of deadly; with the more extreme effects being much less common.  And this also applies to Clerics, who got off easier all along.Lan-"for comparison check out DCCRPG, where any caster inevitably ends up as a twisted deformed husk by campaign's end"-efan</blockquote>

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