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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6557649" data-attributes="member: 6787650">No, I didn't even look, since I'm not defending a positive claim there and I don't think the question is even well-founded. (E.g. Turjan can memorize three spells in his story, but that doesn't stop him from casting a fourth spell called the Call to the Violent Cloud which he has not memorized.)I wasn't aware that the "genre" we were discussing was specifically "heroic fantasy", since AFAIK that genre is pretty much a synonym for "D&D-inspired fantasy." If so, "no heroic fantasy wizard is more powerful than a D&D wizard" becomes a truism. In any case, the Midkemia novels with are far closer to D&D scale and scope than to Lensman. Pug does amazing things on occasion, and destroying Kelewan is probably the biggest of those things, but in Lensman they throw antimatter planets at other planets at lightspeed as a matter of course. Later on you refer to Pug as a "science fiction character" but he isn't except inasmuch as all wizards who follow rules are science fiction characters, which includes all D&D wizards.Ehhhh... I'll grant that. I guess you could move between planets in D&D just by plane shifting twice.That still makes it something beyond the scope of what any 5E caster can do... but I suppose you did say you're not really talking about 5E so we don't have to pursue that. For similar reasons, I'll *snip* discussion of Harry Potter and the Warlock and the others--they may be more powerful than 5E wizards but I could buy them as similar in power to AD&D wizards. Well, I will address this Warlock-related question although it's a tangent not relating to D&D:Foretelling the future, called down a baseball-sized meteor (presumably moving at 20 to 70 miles per second, as meteors are wont to do) aimed at the back of Hap's head, set up an open-ended kinetic sorcery which used up all the mana in the vicinity (permanently creating a magic dead zone), which destroyed the magic sword and incidentally undid all of the Warlock's youth spells causing him to revert to a 200-year-old bald guy who can barely breathe and quickly goes blind. There's no reason to doubt his word about what he's capable of. The story is mostly about "mana as a non-renewable resource" anyway, so unlike most wizard stories there's no reason to limit the protagonist's magic in order to keep the tension high. It's not that kind of story.Now back to D&D:Arguendo, AD&D high-level wizards are the stars of the show, and everyone else becomes a mook. Does that have anything to do with 5E? 5E amped up the fighter-types (in most ways) and amped down the wizards; it's hard to tell where clerics and druids are w/rt AD&D but we can use wizards as rough proxy. Since D&D's essential story is and always has been "all the world's important problems are at least theoretically solvable through controlled application of violence," this actually leaves fighters in a pretty good place w/rt player agency. I think there are fun things to do in D&D that don't directly involve violence, but if you were actually planning to center your game around nonviolent pursuits, you'd probably be playing a different game like GURPS. Most complaints about fighters' limited utility outside of combat seem to be veiled complaints about utility within combat, and 5E has quashed those complaints pretty thoroughly by making fighters fun. We just saw a poster today who feels inspired to play Conan in 5E based on discussion in this thread!5E already did both of these things. It's not a be-all end-all edition, especially for people who want and like powerful magic, but it's certainly doing a good job at the design goal of making fighters and wizards both fun and attractive classes with independent niches, who work well together. If you re-do your analysis with 5E instead of every-D&D-edition as your baseline you may come to different conclusions as to the worthlessness of fighters. And isn't that a more useful analysis in a 5E forum anyway?</blockquote>

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