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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voadam" data-source="post: 9163900" data-attributes="member: 2209">In Chainmail wizards were literally artillery and mustard gas stand ins with fireball, lightning bolt, and cloudkill. The base magic was explosions and lines of destruction and clouds of poison effects to take out a whole unit. Big combat stuff from the back lines. Other magic was variations on this baseline (phantasmal terrain, etc.)This carried over to D&D with individual spells (fireball, lightning bolt, cloudkill, sleep, etc.) and the vancian slot system making spells powerful but few shots of ammo for the artillery. Spells soon became different varieties of things from various sources but on those base power level (charming enemies, doing different effects)Fighters however were either the individual members of the units (level 1) in chainmail or at higher levels the elite hero leaders who were equivalent to multiple soldiers on their own.D&D magic user wizards are not primarily based on Gandalf as part of an adventuring group, but on magical howitzers as their baseline. So D&D spells are more fireball in combat as the baseline and less Gandalf style magic based.</blockquote>