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Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion / Re: Are AD&D magic users implausibly weak?
« Last post by Slipshot762 on Today at 05:34:30 PM »Paradox wizard; at once a 1d4 one hit wonder while also being the wise Pharoh of classes looking down on the fighters from the safety of a rope trick spell. Their abilities from our perspective are implausible to begin with and it almost feels like a patch attempt by software developers to portray them as physically weak to offset the cheat codes they accumulate.
I never took Gandalf in the lotr movies as physically weak since he fought with a sword and staff despite being old and looking like homeless magneto, and I seem to recall way back when I read the hobbit in like 5th grade that he used a sword on goblins in goblin town.
Non-wizards require magic items (which are largely dependent upon the willingness of wizards to create) to approach the power of puny wizards who gain skill in their craft, and you'd think that once you were wizard enough do such things that you'd use magic to not be puny anymore, or ugly for that matter.
Many contradictions with wizards arise upon examination of these things unless we assume a sort of sliding scale of magical availability across these stories which is then not really reflected properly by game mechanics. For example the game pretty much gives the wizard free reload of magic daily or with some rest period, whereas in the assorted literature there may be much less renewable magical powers or powers which face limitations such as not being able to cast the same spell more than once within a certain amount of time. Literature also features often enough it seems dial-a-yield magic use that was largely not featured mechanically until the end of 2e, start of 3e, with such things as meta-magic feats.
I never took Gandalf in the lotr movies as physically weak since he fought with a sword and staff despite being old and looking like homeless magneto, and I seem to recall way back when I read the hobbit in like 5th grade that he used a sword on goblins in goblin town.
Non-wizards require magic items (which are largely dependent upon the willingness of wizards to create) to approach the power of puny wizards who gain skill in their craft, and you'd think that once you were wizard enough do such things that you'd use magic to not be puny anymore, or ugly for that matter.
Many contradictions with wizards arise upon examination of these things unless we assume a sort of sliding scale of magical availability across these stories which is then not really reflected properly by game mechanics. For example the game pretty much gives the wizard free reload of magic daily or with some rest period, whereas in the assorted literature there may be much less renewable magical powers or powers which face limitations such as not being able to cast the same spell more than once within a certain amount of time. Literature also features often enough it seems dial-a-yield magic use that was largely not featured mechanically until the end of 2e, start of 3e, with such things as meta-magic feats.