D&D 4E: Of Wizards, Coastal And Otherwise
May. 14th, 2009 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinThere was a passing mention on a MU story discussion thread of how much more appealing the Wizards class is in 4th edition D&D than in previous ones, which reminded me of my own thoughts on the subject.
My first experience with D&D was in the late 1980s, with the versions of Basic that were available at the turn of that decade... and while I loved the idea from the start, there were a few "culture shocks" I had in going from fantasy literature to the tropes of fantasy roleplaying as they existed then. In particular was this strange creature that back then was called "magic-user". I didn't recognize it at all. This was a fragile being with enough HP to die reliably in one hit, who could cast a single spell once per day.
Does such a creature exist in the annals of fantasy fiction? Of legend? Is there any historical forebear or precedent we can find for this strange lifeform?
Of course not.
The "memorized magic" model is drawn from the works of Jack Vance, but there's nothing archetypal or iconic about it. It doesn't match some cultural understanding of what magic is or how magic works. The rulebooks would assert that you've spent xty years training under a master learning how to cast a single spell and now you're ready to go out and see the world and adventure and your further magical education is your own lookout.
Except by "ready to go out and see the world and adventure" meant "ready to die the first time something hits you." By selecting magic-user as your class, you were saying "I choose to roleplay as the idiot who left/flunked out of magic school after learning one spell and decided to become an adventurer, despite having no ability to defend myself." It was possible to write a convincing and compelling fantasy story about a fighter or thief at the start of their career, or even a cleric (since the classic cleric class was presented as a "fighter cleric" with healing spells as a bonus), but if a magic-user showed up in a D&D spin-off novel or comic you can bet they'd be higher than level one*.
Was there some code of conduct or professional rule that required master spell-casters to kick their apprentices out as soon as they managed to learn any magic at all? If not, why wasn't it possible to roleplay a mage who spent a few more years at the master's feet? A weak argument could be made that book learning was no substitute for experience... but "experience" means "killing orcs", and for a low-level magic-user, that actually means "not dying while your teammates kill orcs." That's a better way to learn magic than... studying magic?
The only possible defense of the old magic-user model is that truly wizardly wizards should be rare, that they can't be cranked out factory style and the game thus requires you to grow into the role of one by first having an exceptional intelligence roll that gives you more spells per day from the get-go and then surviving to the higher levels.
And that's valid, from one point of view... but it's not a point of view I cherish. The PCs are already exceptional by virtue of being adventurers... they aren't just farmers who decided to pick up a sword. If it were otherwise, there would be no villages menaced by goblins because the villagers would pick up swords (or just use their farm implements, since polearms have such favorable stats) and clean out the goblins themselves. The fighter isn't somebody who got up in the morning and strapped on a sword, the thief isn't somebody who just the moment before play started decided it might be fun to try to open a lock without a key, the cleric didn't just wake up with an idea to praise Crystal Dragon Jesus and see if any undead were turned by it. They're heroes.
Newly-minted heroes, aspiring heroes, whatever you want to call them... but just as the narration of a book wouldn't be following a band of schmucks who set out to the moldering Mines of Moulderainia just because they're the eighth in a series of nineteen bands of schmucks who will try to remove the curse of the moldering mummy, you wouldn't be sitting around a table pretending to be these people if they weren't the heroes. Yes, failure should be a possibility and death should be a legitimate threat, but remember: fourteen heroes (fifteen, counting Gandalf) set out from the Shire in The Hobbit and onlyone three of them died. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser didn't always get the gold or the girl (and they rarely managed to keep either), but they were still larger than life from their first adventures onward and they still overcame terrific odds and terrible foes time and time again.
So bring it back to Wizards. In 4E, when you play a Wizard, there is no doubt that you're a Wizard. The new implement system means you're going to have a wand or staff or orb or tome in your hands at all times... and these items are not a ray-blaster-thingy that lets you cast a single spell (or a small selection of them) x extra times, making you marginally less useless until finally it becomes useless itself, as they were in original Basic D&D... they're part of your schtick, part of your character, an extension of your magical abilities and a tool for extending them. That's a Wizard. That's Wizardly.
Yeah... when I got my first taste of D&D, the wands were a big "WTF?" moment to me. The whole charge system was familiar to me in a video gamey kind of way. It was a limiting factor. I got that. I just couldn't wrap my head around its inclusion in an imagination game that didn't have a set ending like a console game and where nobody benefited from you plunking in quarters like an arcade game.
I mean, imagine a story where the hero is told, "Beware the witch's wand! The wand is the source of her power. With it she can shoot a line of frost maybe, I don't know, three or five times, and then it's dead." or "The evil wizard is invincible as long as he has that staff, and as long as he doesn't use it too often. Unfortunately, we only have 49 men in the royal army and we're pretty sure he's got at least fifty charges in the thing."
Later editions of D&D made it increasingly routine to recharge a wand or similar magical implement, but it still struck me as being a lot of artifice. In many other games, notably GURPS and even D&D's poor step-cousin Tunnels and Trolls, wands and staves served first and foremost as as wizardly tools for channeling magical power and that rang a lot truer to me.
In 4E, wands, etc., give you a prop that adds flavor. The Wizard's "implement mastery" feature gives them a reason to favor certain spells, or changes the use of the spells they pick, making a staff-wizard different from a wand-wizard, which is an interesting twist. Different specific wands and staves often give persistent bonuses to types of magic or they give you an extra spell you can throw in once per day, which is enough for it to become a particular Wizard's signature, thus making "beware the wand" warnings a little more plausible in-universe.
All in all, it's something I can get behind. It's something I can point at and go "That's a Wizard."
Then there's the At-Will Power system. All Wizards have at least two spells that can be cast, as the name implies, At-Will. No dithering over whether or not the minor menace you face is worth expending one of your precious starting spell slots. You're a freaking Wizard. If there's a rat, you can slay it with a bolt of eldritch energy as casually as you like because there's more where that came from. It's not that these spells are uberpowerful, but they're yours to call on at-will... because you're a Wizard.
Then there's the cantrips. Cantrips have been a part of D&D for a while, and they were a good effort at making up the gap between fantasy conceptions of what it meant to be a wizard and the game mechanical facsimile we were given. "You can tell I'm a wizard because I can make twinkly lights appear. I can clear these cobwebs away without getting my hands dirty. I can light or snuff out candles for dramatic effect." Things that say, in effect, "I am a wizard". Except in previous editions they were tied into the spells/day system, so it's "I was a wizard but now I am le tired and must take a nap." With 4E giving so much more rule focus to combat than everything else, they could have skipped on these, but instead they made them broad enough to cover an awful lot of low-level utility effects and made them at-will.
More dramatic mystic attacks and effects are covered by encounter, daily, and utility powers which the Wizard accumulates with levels, or with rituals if they involve more of a persistent effect. It's a workable system and it makes for good story-reality. You can have a Wizard at level one who can throw off a couple of simple spells as easy as nothin', make a light at the tip of a staff or floating in air at will, every once in a while put a batch of monsters to sleep or throw a ball of fire, and... with great ceremony, enough time and the right reagents, restore a broken crown or sword or lock or whatever from a piece of its mangled remains.
So, yeah. A lot of attention has been given to the fact that Wizards have at-will spells at all and how this changes the paradigm of playing one at lower levels, but equally important for me is the fact that they seem like more than Wizards in name now.
One thing I will say... and this ties into WotC's marketing model... is that they're better the more books you have: Adventurer's Vault gives you the alchemy option and many more choices of implements, Arcane Power gives you more spells to choose from, including illusions and summoning magic, an additional option for orb-wielders, and the option of using magic tomes as an implement (and the image of a Wizard holding a book of eldritch lore while casting a spell is terribly appealing to me), familiars, etc., and just about every book includes some more rituals. The options in Player's Handbook are a nice start, but they can only be combined so many ways.
But that's the closest thing I can offer to a criticism for it, really... they've got to make their money somehow, though, and they can realistically only fit so much in one book, so it's not a huge one.
*Edited to add: I just thought of a D&D spinoff story that's all about a wizard at the start of his career: "Elminster: The Making of a Mage". Now, Elminster is one of *D&D's canonical archwizards, the archetypal sage of the Forgotten Realms setting. He is not an NPC, he is a deus ex towera. When he shows up in your fantasy adventure, it means the same thing as when Uatu shows up in your X-Men adventure: things are fucking heavy.
His origin story, "The making of a mage", is actually all about him being a mercenary fighter and a thief and a cleric... the three original standard classes that are distinctly not mages. Why? Because he's the smartest freaking man in the world and he knows better, that's why. Because not even Ed Greenwood could have written a convincing and compelling story about a D&D pre-4E canonical magic-user/mage/wizard who hits the road at level one and lives to become an archmage.
My first experience with D&D was in the late 1980s, with the versions of Basic that were available at the turn of that decade... and while I loved the idea from the start, there were a few "culture shocks" I had in going from fantasy literature to the tropes of fantasy roleplaying as they existed then. In particular was this strange creature that back then was called "magic-user". I didn't recognize it at all. This was a fragile being with enough HP to die reliably in one hit, who could cast a single spell once per day.
Does such a creature exist in the annals of fantasy fiction? Of legend? Is there any historical forebear or precedent we can find for this strange lifeform?
Of course not.
The "memorized magic" model is drawn from the works of Jack Vance, but there's nothing archetypal or iconic about it. It doesn't match some cultural understanding of what magic is or how magic works. The rulebooks would assert that you've spent xty years training under a master learning how to cast a single spell and now you're ready to go out and see the world and adventure and your further magical education is your own lookout.
Except by "ready to go out and see the world and adventure" meant "ready to die the first time something hits you." By selecting magic-user as your class, you were saying "I choose to roleplay as the idiot who left/flunked out of magic school after learning one spell and decided to become an adventurer, despite having no ability to defend myself." It was possible to write a convincing and compelling fantasy story about a fighter or thief at the start of their career, or even a cleric (since the classic cleric class was presented as a "fighter cleric" with healing spells as a bonus), but if a magic-user showed up in a D&D spin-off novel or comic you can bet they'd be higher than level one*.
Was there some code of conduct or professional rule that required master spell-casters to kick their apprentices out as soon as they managed to learn any magic at all? If not, why wasn't it possible to roleplay a mage who spent a few more years at the master's feet? A weak argument could be made that book learning was no substitute for experience... but "experience" means "killing orcs", and for a low-level magic-user, that actually means "not dying while your teammates kill orcs." That's a better way to learn magic than... studying magic?
The only possible defense of the old magic-user model is that truly wizardly wizards should be rare, that they can't be cranked out factory style and the game thus requires you to grow into the role of one by first having an exceptional intelligence roll that gives you more spells per day from the get-go and then surviving to the higher levels.
And that's valid, from one point of view... but it's not a point of view I cherish. The PCs are already exceptional by virtue of being adventurers... they aren't just farmers who decided to pick up a sword. If it were otherwise, there would be no villages menaced by goblins because the villagers would pick up swords (or just use their farm implements, since polearms have such favorable stats) and clean out the goblins themselves. The fighter isn't somebody who got up in the morning and strapped on a sword, the thief isn't somebody who just the moment before play started decided it might be fun to try to open a lock without a key, the cleric didn't just wake up with an idea to praise Crystal Dragon Jesus and see if any undead were turned by it. They're heroes.
Newly-minted heroes, aspiring heroes, whatever you want to call them... but just as the narration of a book wouldn't be following a band of schmucks who set out to the moldering Mines of Moulderainia just because they're the eighth in a series of nineteen bands of schmucks who will try to remove the curse of the moldering mummy, you wouldn't be sitting around a table pretending to be these people if they weren't the heroes. Yes, failure should be a possibility and death should be a legitimate threat, but remember: fourteen heroes (fifteen, counting Gandalf) set out from the Shire in The Hobbit and only
So bring it back to Wizards. In 4E, when you play a Wizard, there is no doubt that you're a Wizard. The new implement system means you're going to have a wand or staff or orb or tome in your hands at all times... and these items are not a ray-blaster-thingy that lets you cast a single spell (or a small selection of them) x extra times, making you marginally less useless until finally it becomes useless itself, as they were in original Basic D&D... they're part of your schtick, part of your character, an extension of your magical abilities and a tool for extending them. That's a Wizard. That's Wizardly.
Yeah... when I got my first taste of D&D, the wands were a big "WTF?" moment to me. The whole charge system was familiar to me in a video gamey kind of way. It was a limiting factor. I got that. I just couldn't wrap my head around its inclusion in an imagination game that didn't have a set ending like a console game and where nobody benefited from you plunking in quarters like an arcade game.
I mean, imagine a story where the hero is told, "Beware the witch's wand! The wand is the source of her power. With it she can shoot a line of frost maybe, I don't know, three or five times, and then it's dead." or "The evil wizard is invincible as long as he has that staff, and as long as he doesn't use it too often. Unfortunately, we only have 49 men in the royal army and we're pretty sure he's got at least fifty charges in the thing."
Later editions of D&D made it increasingly routine to recharge a wand or similar magical implement, but it still struck me as being a lot of artifice. In many other games, notably GURPS and even D&D's poor step-cousin Tunnels and Trolls, wands and staves served first and foremost as as wizardly tools for channeling magical power and that rang a lot truer to me.
In 4E, wands, etc., give you a prop that adds flavor. The Wizard's "implement mastery" feature gives them a reason to favor certain spells, or changes the use of the spells they pick, making a staff-wizard different from a wand-wizard, which is an interesting twist. Different specific wands and staves often give persistent bonuses to types of magic or they give you an extra spell you can throw in once per day, which is enough for it to become a particular Wizard's signature, thus making "beware the wand" warnings a little more plausible in-universe.
All in all, it's something I can get behind. It's something I can point at and go "That's a Wizard."
Then there's the At-Will Power system. All Wizards have at least two spells that can be cast, as the name implies, At-Will. No dithering over whether or not the minor menace you face is worth expending one of your precious starting spell slots. You're a freaking Wizard. If there's a rat, you can slay it with a bolt of eldritch energy as casually as you like because there's more where that came from. It's not that these spells are uberpowerful, but they're yours to call on at-will... because you're a Wizard.
Then there's the cantrips. Cantrips have been a part of D&D for a while, and they were a good effort at making up the gap between fantasy conceptions of what it meant to be a wizard and the game mechanical facsimile we were given. "You can tell I'm a wizard because I can make twinkly lights appear. I can clear these cobwebs away without getting my hands dirty. I can light or snuff out candles for dramatic effect." Things that say, in effect, "I am a wizard". Except in previous editions they were tied into the spells/day system, so it's "I was a wizard but now I am le tired and must take a nap." With 4E giving so much more rule focus to combat than everything else, they could have skipped on these, but instead they made them broad enough to cover an awful lot of low-level utility effects and made them at-will.
More dramatic mystic attacks and effects are covered by encounter, daily, and utility powers which the Wizard accumulates with levels, or with rituals if they involve more of a persistent effect. It's a workable system and it makes for good story-reality. You can have a Wizard at level one who can throw off a couple of simple spells as easy as nothin', make a light at the tip of a staff or floating in air at will, every once in a while put a batch of monsters to sleep or throw a ball of fire, and... with great ceremony, enough time and the right reagents, restore a broken crown or sword or lock or whatever from a piece of its mangled remains.
So, yeah. A lot of attention has been given to the fact that Wizards have at-will spells at all and how this changes the paradigm of playing one at lower levels, but equally important for me is the fact that they seem like more than Wizards in name now.
One thing I will say... and this ties into WotC's marketing model... is that they're better the more books you have: Adventurer's Vault gives you the alchemy option and many more choices of implements, Arcane Power gives you more spells to choose from, including illusions and summoning magic, an additional option for orb-wielders, and the option of using magic tomes as an implement (and the image of a Wizard holding a book of eldritch lore while casting a spell is terribly appealing to me), familiars, etc., and just about every book includes some more rituals. The options in Player's Handbook are a nice start, but they can only be combined so many ways.
But that's the closest thing I can offer to a criticism for it, really... they've got to make their money somehow, though, and they can realistically only fit so much in one book, so it's not a huge one.
*Edited to add: I just thought of a D&D spinoff story that's all about a wizard at the start of his career: "Elminster: The Making of a Mage". Now, Elminster is one of *D&D's canonical archwizards, the archetypal sage of the Forgotten Realms setting. He is not an NPC, he is a deus ex towera. When he shows up in your fantasy adventure, it means the same thing as when Uatu shows up in your X-Men adventure: things are fucking heavy.
His origin story, "The making of a mage", is actually all about him being a mercenary fighter and a thief and a cleric... the three original standard classes that are distinctly not mages. Why? Because he's the smartest freaking man in the world and he knows better, that's why. Because not even Ed Greenwood could have written a convincing and compelling story about a D&D pre-4E canonical magic-user/mage/wizard who hits the road at level one and lives to become an archmage.
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Re: few thoughts...
on 2009-05-15 07:24 pm (UTC)I think that D&D often has worlds that are too populated with monsters, and yet not populated enough. Actually, this is an easy thing to fix -- have magical monster repelling charms for towns, that wizards have erected, and that span the fields required for living in said towns.
This world we live in is a really soft world. Most women can't fight (least I can't fight). I think you can probably say that Japan makes for a baseline of "nonfighting world"... on the other side, you have a hunter/gatherer culture under constant assault from monsters. That's the endpoint for "fighting world"
If we make the assumption of a moderate amount of monsters, we also can make the assumption that most towns will fall under attack at some point, so militias will form (soldiers hired where affordable -- depending on their skill and average success rate, you'd see different amounts of training for commoners).
Panicking can help in certain situations, as well ;-)