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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 501330" data-attributes="member: 2013">Lots of people locked into the 1e/2e mentality here.Wizards do not memorize spells.  They PREPARE them.Think of it as follows:When the Wizard wakes up in the morning and PREPARES his spells, he is coding up the spells into a magical matrix around himself.  When a spell is discharged, it is "fired" from the matrix - and therefore gone from that matrix (which is why he can't throw another one if that was the only one he prepared).It's not that the wizard can't remember the spell, he simply hasn't properly aligned the energies needed to fire it off again.  The need for spellbooks IMO represents the enormous complexity involved in properly aligning and preparing a spell - a wizard, unlike a sorcerer (who does things by "feel") has to do things by rote - incredibly complex rote.  Think of it as incredibly complex mathematical integrals - figuring them out takes so fricking long (days to months researching a spell) that it can't be done "on the fly."  The wizard has to look in his "table of integrals" (or use Mathematica LOL) instead.  It means once he gets the answer (researches the spell) he has it in his spellbook (writing the solution) but it doesn't mean he can derive it from first principles any faster.  It's the same philosophy I was taught in my college physics courses - "with the really hard stuff, we don't expect you to derive them from scratch every time - we expect you to know where to go to look up the answer."By extension, the sorcerer is the savant who is exceedingly good at a certain type of integral (say, integrals on spherical coordinates where the radius is some power of 7) and can spit out the answer (align the energy) almost instantly - but take him out of his savant area (spells known) and he can't figure it out from first principles (add to his spells known list by research) because he lacks the proper training.I could go on, but I have to go to lunch.  My point is that anyone who says, "I don't like wizards because it's unrealistic that they forget spells" hasn't updated his process to 3e.--The Sigil</blockquote>

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