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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6077617" data-attributes="member: 1165">From reading lots of RPG game novels, I've come to the conclusion that, after D&D came out, no one knew how to write a wizard.For instance, I recently read the D&D comic (the one from 2011 with Fell's Five). One of the main characters is a warlock (note, no wizard and no cleric!) and all of the main characters had their character sheets (PC-style, not monsters) given in the comics.While the plotting and art were great, I couldn't tell the warlock was a star warlock until I read her character sheet. I never saw her use any ability but Eldritch Blast.In various other D&D-based works, I've seen the same thing. Parties rarely have a wizard, and clerics are even rarer. Spellcasters are underrepresented (if you have 7 main characters, maybe one will be a wizard), and "full" casters are rare (more likely you'll have a bard or monk/artificer than a wizard or cleric). Spellcasters are often weakened in some way (the wizard character in Threats from the Deep is flat-out stated to be a weaker wizard who seemed good only for making ships move faster), they run out of spells very fast (often a 400 page book will take place over only one or two days, so mages can't recover spells), clerics never cast healing spells in battle and out of battle, healing is slow and never complete, etc.Although on occasion an RPG book will swing the other way. You have casters who never run out of magic, are all smarter than Stephen Hawking with a time machine, and use a wide variety of never-been-seen before spells to solve each and every problem. You'll have the Chosen of X whose priest spells don't work like anything in the books.The War of the Spider Queen series was one of the few exceptions I've seen to this. There were six main characters. One was a wizard, and all the female characters were clerics (at least one was a full cleric), although Lolth was asleep at the time, so all the healing had to come from a wand.The characters were quite high-level. The wizard, Pharaun, was stated to be 19th-level in Dragon Magazine. He was written as if the author were familiar with D&D, a complex task as the series was six books written by six different authors. The spells were virtually never named, but the descriptions made it clear when he was casting things like Power Word Stun, Wail of the Banshee, Passwall or Sending. (Unusually for a FR novel, when Archmage Gromph receives a Sending, he wasn't able to reply properly. Wording a response of 25 words or less with virtually no warning is difficult, even with brains and experience. Glad to see someone writing realistic wizards.)Pharaun could run out of spells, but that took a while (19th-level wizards don't tap out that fast). There were a few utility spells he tried to avoid using. He didn't want to Teleport to the destination because he wasn't familiar with it, and he avoided using Shadow Walk at first until things on the Prime Material became so bad he thought the risk was worth it. (It wasn't!)A few other good examples, although they don't involve parties (being pre-D&D, mostly) were The People of the Black Circle (a Conan story, there was a bunch of wizards, but the one who killed the barbarians with Cloudkill is the one I'm thinking of) and Hristomilo from the Grey Mouser series (he could cast Web, and apparently also Cloudkill... what is with that spell?).</blockquote>

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