![]() The addition of Essentials to 4e ultimately created a lot of confusion with variants of the same class existing side-by-side. This changed with 4e, an edition I’d say had lots of great ideas, but ultimately came undone through poor strategic planning, failure to close exploits, and rigidity over the “role” system. At high levels a party of clerics and mages could do just fine on their own, perhaps with a rogue to occasionally hold a door open for them. Lots of players claimed that the cleric could do the fighter’s job better than the fighter, and with spells like Destruction and Harm, clerics became killers. Oddly enough, 3e’s efforts to address likeability problems with the cleric class (many players hated being big bandaids which could get pretty dull), made the cleric overpowered as well. Wizard players felt useless at low levels, whereas everybody else resented becoming little more than arrow-catchers by the high levels. This power curve left a lot of people unhappy. This, of course, was one of the biggest controversies of the wizard class. ![]() The balance between wizard and, essentially, everybody else sort of maintained between levels 5-10, maybe, but once double digit levels came along, the wizard could sling death pretty reliably, and the rest of the part often felt like the guys and gals who held the wizards bags. Once fireball kicked in (and sometimes lightning bolt depending on how useful the edition made that spell), things changed. Sure, the occasional sleep spell could end a battle, but for the most part it was embarrassing they even got a full share of the party spoils. Early career wizards spent a lot of time tossing daggers or, later, crossbow bolts, husbanding their few spells for when they might be useful. They effectively spent 4 levels of utter uselessness, before bursting on the scene with Fireball or Lightning Bolt and increasingly dominating from that point forward. Through the first three editions of D&D (1e, 2e, 3e, and all the various Basics and Expert editions), the progression of the wizard was pretty similar. But this Vancian system became a useful platform for the wizard and, let’s be frank, one of the few limitations on their power, particularly at high level. Compare this to the more spontaneous spellcasting that seems to be portrayed in many fictional portrayals of wizards and mages, whether Lord of the Rings or The Wheel of Time. For most of its existence in D&D, wizards have kind of combined Vancian book-learning with a witch-like obsession with eyes of newts, bat guano and various other “components” that help explain why wizards spend so many of their Friday nights in the library rather than with more passionate pursuits. Or at least some interesting stuff to debate (please be kind!)įirst, it’s kind of interesting to consider how the wizard (or mage/magic user, etc.) has evolved over the various editions of D&D. Perhaps there was enough processing power somewhere in my brain to cure some disease, engineer a spacecraft that could travel to Mars without smacking into it like a dart, or figure out a way to put papercut-free rounded edges onto paper but, alas.my brain produced this instead.) At any rate for wizard players new and old, I hope there’s something here of value. This guide is mainly for me! Don’t like it, don’t read it!Īctually I’ve just been thinking a lot about these things (yes, which means I’m a bit of a geek. But I’ve always liked playing wizards, reading guides like this are always helpful for me and I just felt like it. ![]() So D&D 5e has been out for a bit now, and we’ve seen some excellent wizards guides already circulating (particularly this one from TheBigHouse which, admittedly, is very influential to my own thinking.) Does humanity need another D&D wizard’s guide the way it needs world peace, hoverboards, or a new kind of superglue that sticks to other things better than your own fingers? Well no. This is a work of passion not, admittedly, something the world absolutely needed. Feedback (particularly of the kind/constructive sort) definitely welcome. Note this is also found as a google docs, and links below in the index *should* (pardon any technical foibles on my part) take you there.
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