Quote from: Headless;1016564Post links or you are just being a duck.  

Those do sound interesting though.

Well, links defeat the object of testing people's memory (or at least Google skill), but okay - http://muffinlabs.com/2011/05/03/what-is-dungeons-and-dragons/

What is Dungeons & Dragons was a book popular in the UK in the early 80s for people trying to get into RPGs, specifically B/X D&D, without someone to show them the ropes. Butterfield and his Etonian co-authors introduced some interesting house-rules and a neat little sample dungeon. Colleges of magic-users were a feature, with two rival examples given. That has coloured my perceptions of D&D magic-users ever since, the ideas that there were formal institutions training magic-users, and that these were at least in competition, and possibly even deadly enemies.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1016525I tend to prefer having just one class, and then having different magic-using organizations or schools or sects or what-have-you in the actual setting, that may modify how the class works.

That is my preference. I don't have strong feelings on the matter, and specialty classes can have their uses in certain campaigns. I just think the basic magic-user offers a lot of interesting plot potential that is lost with narrower magic users.

If different types of magic users are purely a social construct, it means that there is potential for spell trading and spell theft between those social groups. A PC can attempt to gain the favor of a magic-user of another tradition in order to learn from them. Some traditions can be ruthlessly protective of their spells, seeking to kill other wizards using "their" magic, even if the wizard independently developed the spell that the tradition claims as their own.

You can even have variations of common spells from tradition to tradition. The eerie, green glow of the Light spell in the ransacked room suggests it was cast by an adherent of the Seven-Fingered Wisdom of the Soldaroon Tablet. Or was someone using a stolen version of the spell to implicate the sect?

Many of these emergent plots are less likely to happen in a campaign where wizards have different classes. Even with specialties in AD&D 2E, feeding the characters extra spells makes them less hungry for gaining spells.

I'm not really a fan of the underlying metaphysics of the AD&D 2E specialty classes. Necromancy is the opposite of Illusion magic? That doesn't make any kind of magical sense to me. It also removes the archetypal image of rotting wizard cloaking his true visage with magic. Divination and the opposite of Summoning is another odd one. A subtle wizard relying on divination and summoning seems such a natural pairing to me.

The explanation of magic that Estar gives above makes immediate sense to me, but the one for 2E specialist magic-users just seems arbitrary.

It also feels like a forerunner of the system mastery traps built into 3E. A generalist magic-user is ultimately able to have a wider range of magic with the potential power that implies, but when you are making your character, you are bribed with a free magic spell now if you are willing to throw away future versatility.

There really isn't any addition of flavor. You get a +1 to save against your school, and other get -1 to save against your school spells. You get a free spell per level. Those are mechanical benefits, but they don't really add flavor.

Once again, I think that specialist classes can be interesting in the right campaign. I just think that the default magic-user is more interesting in a general D&D campaign.

My old group played mostly 1e. We never really got into 2e, aside from setting stuff. When the Player's Option books came out though they were useful. I ran Psionics so Skills and Powers was a given. But we did get some mileage from Spells and Magic, which helped making reverse engineering of things like the 2e Druid and Wizard specialty schools much easier. I liked having the options. Prior to that many spellcasters were brought in from old Dragon Magazines.

That said, I do like the Sorceror and I am pretty fond of the Warlock from 5e. I'd certainly play an old school game that reverse engineered those classes. However, it would really be easier just to run 5e stripped down, maybe using the Basic Rules as a Base because of how much time it would save.

Quote from: Telarus;1016663estar, that is some grade AAA metaphysics tied into your setting/game-rule conceits. Bravo. That is what I like about Earthdawn and the other games that bend the game-rules towards their setting/metaphysics. Well done. I should go and find an overview of the history of magic in Earthdawn...

Thanks and I appreciated the compliment. I think what makes magic for games like Ars Magic, Earthdawn, and Harnmaster so flavorful is the sense of history behind them. However outside of Ars Magica I rarely seen that history expressed in the mechanics in the form of "historical" magic or alternate paths that went down a blind alley. Granted there are only so many pages for a book but still I would be interesting to have notes on how magic was in the setting "bronze" age compared to the present in the core book.

I am working on the Lost Grimoire of Magic which expands a bit on the magic sections no of the MW supplement. In this one I do mess around with spells mostly in the form of additional notes. For example the Order of Thoth has the Shield of Magic which makes them immune to spells that effect a person directly like sleep or charm. But not spells that deal damage by creating something like fireball or lightning bolt. In the supplement I just have a general guideline. In the Lost Grimoire. I explicitly note which spells are effected by the Shield.

Another addition builds on the Chromatic Crystals. Each of the surviving gods made a crystal that was used to seal the abyss. Mana that flows through a crystal is more attuned to specific spells as result. This manifests itself as an increased effect when one is specialized in a art associated with a crystal. I am not keen at the moment on the idea that you become less capable of casting spells of other arts and still mulling over how this actually works if I was witnessing mages learning and doing research.  I am sure that for clerics that they get the boost for the art associated with their deity with no downside.

For me it really is setting specific.  It can be enough for me just to have different lists of spells available to different schools.
Beyond the Wall divides magic into Cantrips, Spells, and Rituals with casters having access to different combinations of these. I like this because it makes different sorts of magic mechanically different This is in sharp contrast to old school D&D where Magic Users, Illusionists, Druids, and Clerics have different sell lists, but the magic all works on the same mechanics.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1016025So, when you're running an OSR game, do you just want all your wizards to be the same, and distinguished mainly by what spells the Player chooses for them?

All this time I thought characters were different and distinguishable based on how they were played and what they did rather than what stats were written on the character sheet. Just like we don't  need 47 variations on fighter. No two wizards need be the same even if the ref is injuducious enough to pass out new spells and scrolls like favors at a child's birthday party. It's on the  players to make their characters interesting.

We had some testing with custom classes for AD&D, but not many as almost the whole group was since the start heavily book/rule dependent. I think it was not even D&D but M.A.G.U.S. where I had fun with a mage based on the concept idea of a Time/Chrono Mage.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1016525I tend to prefer having just one class, and then having different magic-using organizations or schools or sects or what-have-you in the actual setting, that may modify how the class works.

I'm usually interested in elemental mages, but not fire or wind (electricity) ones. I started with AD&D but I don't remember any mage in any edition which would fit the image of a Water Wizard I had in mind. Clerics and Druids had some water related spells, other spellcasters barely any, and spells like one that would allow you to surround the head of an opponent to silence it and make it roll checks for underwater suffocation checks as time passes is unheard of. The closest I could get to it would either be an 'Ice-caster' arcane user, or a Priest (dividing water or walking on it, ect). I think there was something in 3.5 that allowed a blood manipulating caster to be made, which had some similar effects I had in mind. Do you know of any class in osr/ad&d that would work well for a Water Elementalist?

I know there were some rules on creating your own spells but none of my GMs agreed to work out new water-type spells, even when I offered that he himself fully decides on the spell stats and spell level based on a description. This was the case all up to 3rd Edition when I stopped trying to persuade anyone in my group. At that time I was basically the only GM and couldn't play a Water Elementalist myself anyway. There are a LOT of fire spells but I feel the lack of water ones disturbing.

No wizards, no magic, no monsters. I found (B/X-derived) ACKS is pretty serviceable for straight historical, as long as you manage levels appropriately.

I dislike magic users so never really spent any energy on it.  If somebody wanted to play an Illusionist, though, I'd let them, since I've made the entire AD&D spell list available in my campaign.

Of course, other than your starting 1st level spells, all spells must be found or taught, so good luck...

I vastly prefer having a single wizard class, and then various in-setting styles of wizards.

Of course, in Lion & Dragon, magisters are all the same class, but they all end up differently because of randomized/selection-based advancement.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1016858I dislike magic users so never really spent any energy on it.  If somebody wanted to play an Illusionist, though, I'd let them, since I've made the entire AD&D spell list available in my campaign.

Of course, other than your starting 1st level spells, all spells must be found or taught, so good luck...

This is me playing BECMI/RC D&D in Thyatis. Almost the entire campaign had little to no magic at all. I miss my Ochalean Thief.

Quote from: Krimson;1017141This is me playing BECMI/RC D&D in Thyatis. Almost the entire campaign had little to no magic at all. I miss my Ochalean Thief.

You should have defected to Alphatia.

Quote from: estar;1016575For a long time I had different orders of magic for the Majestic Wilderlands. When it came time to write this stuff of for OD&D in the form of Sword and Wizardry, I opted to handle it the differences by having different magic user classes.

My first major design principle was not to screw around with the spells themselves. There are dozens of spells and if I did something that caused me to have to touch each and every spells that would be a major downside for the supplement.

I concur, and this is similar as to how I made my guilds.

There is only one class, but each guild has a selection of spells that can be learned or discovered at half the research price. All spells, save a few, are available to all magicians. There are a small number of spells that are guild secrets. If you learn them, it is best to cast them discretely. Each guild also has a significant ability learned at 3rd level, such as the Magi of the Pearl Tower are able to know any general spell for a casting by sacrificing 1d3 + spell level in CON. If they really need web or polymorph right now, they can get it and cast it.

This allows for rivalries and mysteries that Vile and Baulderstone mentioned.

Quote from: Baron Opal;1017878I concur, and this is similar as to how I made my guilds.

Cool, the default spellbook mechanic and the need to copy spells from somewhere is a good way to add color without adding any new mechanics. You can inject a sense of history by making a basic chart of when certain spells were discovered. And the magic users living in the isolated uplands only just caught with previous century's spellbooks.

It doesn't entirely satisfy me, but I appreciate how the AD&D spell "knowing" mechanics meant that there were limits, in both total numbers and on particular spells.  I'd rather have something like that than special classes or even fixed lists by specialists.  But then I enjoy the image of the wizard that doesn't quite fully understand how magic works, and thus can run into spells that can't be learned.