Will Wizards Still Lord it Up?

[RangerWickett]

1. Any teleportation over long distances should require ten minutes to cast, so the wizard can't flee in the middle of combat.

2. Everyone at high levels needs to be able to fly. Not automatically, like wuxia flying, but everybody needs to be able to hop on a pegasus or something and chase down the flying wizard without worrying that the wizard will put the kibosh on the horse-bird with one spell.

3. Perhaps have a limit to the number of active magical effects one can have at a time. And let non-spellcasters recognize, "Oh, he's got stoneskin, blink, and fire shield. I'll peg him with cold iron arrows (since cold iron can hurt incorporeal critters). Sure, the stoneskin will stop some of that, but I'm high level, and each attack does about 50 damage anyway."

 

[Kintara]

I always imagine "high level" Wizards as being extremely powerful at macro-level stuff, but Fighters have an implacable determination and tactical power. A Wizard vs. Fighter fight, if they are both equally powerful, would be one where the Wizard manipulates the overall situation to his advantage, while the Fighter overcomes the barriers in his way. The Fighter is an equal challenge because he is tough as hell and very savvy when it comes to the split second tactical decisions that make the difference in a chaotic battleground. If I was going to design a game where a Wizard battles a Fighter, I'd make it so that the Wizard sets the "board" up, and the Fighter plows through it. Who wins depends on the Fighter's tactical smarts, the Wizard's strategy (and positioning would probably be important for both).

That said, the designers aren't balancing the PC classes for deathmatches, but for tactical team-based adventuring. That means that the Wizard needs to be plenty tactical with his spells. I'm definitely interested in how they constrain the Wizard's ability to bend the universe to change the situation to his advantage without alienating people's expectations about what a Wizard should be able to do.

Edit: If you like comics, another way to look at a Wizard versus a Fighter is as a Mastermind fighting a Brick. It's the same thing, really.

Edit2: Note: This isn't to say a Fighter can't out think a Wizard to set himself up for an easier victory, but it's just that the Wizard's strength is that he has a lot of tools for doing that sort of thing.

 

[WyzardWhately]

I always imagine "high level" Wizards as being extremely powerful at macro-level stuff, but Fighters have an implacable determination and tactical power. A Wizard vs. Fighter fight, if they are both equally powerful, would be one where the Wizard manipulates the overall situation to his advantage, while the Fighter overcomes the barriers in his way. The Fighter is an equal challenge because he is tough as hell and very savvy when it comes to the split second tactical decisions that make the difference in a chaotic battleground. If I was going to design a game where a Wizard battles a Fighter, I'd make it so that the Wizard sets the "board" up, and the Fighter plows through it. Who wins depends on the Fighter's tactical smarts, the Wizard's strategy (and positioning would probably be important for both).

I once considered making a game, sort of a tactical boardgame, based on this precise scenario.

 

[Kintara]

I once considered making a game, sort of a tactical boardgame, based on this precise scenario.

You should do it. =) You'd have one customer, anyway.

 

[Simon Marks]

WyzardWhately's idea that fighters should own combat while wizard's own everything else is a good one, and retains the distinctiveness of each class.

(My emphasis)

huh, so what does everyone else do?

Part of the issue with wizards is the idea that
1) Magic can do anything, and
2) Wizards can do magic

Which leads to the Batman Wizard issue, namely at high levels magic can replicate and outperform all other classes.

Thieves get dropped fairly quickly (in 3.5 we found wands of Knock, Charm and Find Traps replaced any rogue - Silence and Invisibility did the rest)
Clerics are usually safe because Arcane Magic cannot do curing (for no good reason except
to protect Clerics).
Fighters stop being relevant as well once Overland Flight, Imp. Invis. and suchlike become commonplace.

For D&D to work well, Wizards have to be less... awesome at everything. Hell, simply being worse at the stuff other people do at equivalent levels would be enough.

Charm Person has to be less effective than the Party Face man.
Knock less effective than the House Breaker.
Magic Missile less effective than a bow.
Fireball less effective than a Berserker.

D&D has to decide what Wizards are good at and be bad at everything else. 4.0 may actually expand this beyond "Bad at healing, good at everything else".

For reference, Good at means "better than someone not specialised in it" and Bad at means "worse than someone not specialised in it" - I guess.

 

[Sanguinemetaldawn]

3) Source fantasy material often depicts the world-shakers as mages. How many ancient, lost empires do campaign worlds have that were dominated by cabals of high level thieves? About one for every one hundred lost empires noted for their mighty arcane might. Again, this goes back to point one. It's much easier to come up with plot hooks and concepts around ancient powerful magic gone awry than from some kind of ancient thief lore.

While these are fair points, it seems like there is one thing being lost in all this discussion about wizards in D&D. Wizards have low HPs, bad AC, and require lots of XP to level. Assuming a character was actually played (not just made up by some DM/designer with a DMPC fetish for mages), getting a wizard to high enough levels to actually become powerful was a long struggle in survival, creativity, problem solving, and running away when it became clear that staying would be just a quick death. And remember at first level a mage could cast one whole spell and some retarded cantrips, and couldn't do much of anything else.

It started to change at 4th level, got significantly better at 5th, but even then, there was the problem of being just dangerous enough to kill the entire party accidentally via Fireball over-blasts and Lightning bolt ricochets.

At 7th a mage started to really mature, but it took a long time to get there.

The point of this post is: done right, you had to start a mage at 1st level, and getting a mage from 1st level to a level where they really started to be powerful (7th level) was very hard.

Usually mages got killed one way or the other, if not from arrows, then from being backstabbed by an enemy thief, getting splattered by a thrown boulder, an enemy AoE spell, poison, or a dragon breath.

And if a mage did make it that far, it was almost always because of his friends.


This was one thing that irritated me about FR, and still does, at least a bit in the Conan d20 game.

In FR, how did all those mages get all that experience? I looked at it, and even if they all got together and killed every one of the named devils and demons, on thier own planes (thus killing them forever and getting XP x 10), I don't see how this could account for more than 5 levels each. Its not even about DM PC. Its just straight up stupid.

In Conan d20 it seems like EVERY evil wizard is a 13+ level wizard, and the rules are structured to make these way more effective than lower levels. Beginning Scholars are so weak, they are like 1st ED, except far worse. Such that I again find myself asking: "How did any of these wizards ever survive the 10 crap levels they have to go through before they suddenly get all the powerful spells?" The Conan d20 rules on spell access and selection only make the problem worse.


The archetype the OP references are nearly always NPCs, to the point where it is frustrating for a player who thinks it might be fun to be such a wizard to actually become one.

But to answer the original post, wizards will always have that bit of "Lord it over everyone" simply because of the powers they command. Exactly as another poster commented, and in keeping with my comments above (i.e. the real world shaking ones will be the NPC wizards).

 

[WhatGravitas]

From a literary point of view, I think the idea of more prominent wizards makes sense. As others have said, they have the ability to change the world; power no fighter will ever have. Sure, a fighter can become a king and have worldy influence, but a wizard can have that level of influence, and more without all the hassle and overhead of armies, courtiers and the like.

From a literary point of view, the problem is: Fighter = Meathead. If the wizard commands reality, then the other way to power is influence, politics, trickery, intrigue, wit, intelligence.

A wizard is in terms of personal power no match for the noble, but in terms of influence, they're equal - the wizard can probably erase the noble, but then the wizard will be hunted down for decades.

In D&D, the social faces (bards, rogues) can partially fill that role - especially the trickery-&-negotiator roles. Fighters could fill the loyal-followers-and-wit-and-political-power role, they're perhaps even famous, just as some legends of knights or heroic fighters - but why can't they? Because we have the stereotype Fighter = Meathead.

But if we allow them to amass political power, we get King Conan.

Do something about that stereotype, and give Fighters more non-combat abilities, and we could break up that stereotype.

And I'm only talking about non-combat. In combat, balance (as in equal spotlight distribution) should be very important.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Thieves get dropped fairly quickly (in 3.5 we found wands of Knock, Charm and Find Traps replaced any rogue - Silence and Invisibility did the rest)
Clerics are usually safe because Arcane Magic cannot do curing (for no good reason except
to protect Clerics).

Good point.

This is a legacy issue going all the way back to OD&D where the only classes were Fighting Man, Cleric and Magic-User. Clerics got niche protection because they were there from the beginning. The thief class was introduced in a supplement, so entered a world where wizards already had knock, invisibility, fly, etc. In other words, the thief was a flawed concept from the start.

Magic-Users were supposed to be balanced by starting off weak and reaching godlike powers at later levels, but this doesn't work. It means the game *must* be played from 1st to around 10th or so (and no further) in order to be balanced and this is far too restrictive. A lot of games cover a narrower, or greater, level range.

 

[FourthBear]

Usually mages got killed one way or the other, if not from arrows, then from being backstabbed by an enemy thief, getting splattered by a thrown boulder, an enemy AoE spell, poison, or a dragon breath.

This would be balancing the mage from the non-mages by making them much weaker than the non-mages in battle. A lower levels since 2e days, that's pretty much how it went. You "earned" your unbalanced high level archmage by being so much weaker and more vulnerable than the other classes at lower levels. Of course, this only really "worked" if everyone played from 1st level to 18th. In my experience, most campaigns from 2e and prior didn't really go much past 10th level, so the balancing was pretty much from 1st to 10th. (This lack of high level adventuring also tended to eliminate the supposed balancing effect of racial level limits. Who cared that you topped out at 9th, when your demihuman multiclassed characters would never see that level anyway?)

In 3e, the designers tried to even things out a bit by giving low level mages a few more spells and options and giving the non-spellcasters more options at higher levels. I think what this thread demonstrates is that the underlying character concepts (As a mage, I can do anything with magic! vs. As a fighter, my combat skills are great!) inherently result in disparity in a character's influence and scope. While diplomacy and role-playing can even this out a bit for non-spellcasters, this seems to assume that the spellcasters are somehow prohibited from doing the same diplomacy and role-playing work, thus gaining both full advantages.

 

[AllisterH]

3. Perhaps have a limit to the number of active magical effects one can have at a time. And let non-spellcasters recognize, "Oh, he's got stoneskin, blink, and fire shield. I'll peg him with cold iron arrows (since cold iron can hurt incorporeal critters). Sure, the stoneskin will stop some of that, but I'm high level, and each attack does about 50 damage anyway."

This IMO is the easiest way to keep mages in check. Slayers is known for having one of the most powerful mages in anime Western/medieval fantasy in the form of Lina Inverse. This is a mage that can smash ENTIRE mountain ranges and can even END the universe.

However, in a fight between her and her sword-wielding boyfriend, the smart money is on the sword-slinger since he'll never let her get the time to actually cast the big enough spells AND the fact that in slayers, you can't simply cast "Fly, Greater Invis, Fireball" even though those spells are there since any magical effect requires concentration.