A Predilection for Wizards

It’s the name, really. When your middle name is Merlin you tend to gravitate toward playing sorcerous characters in RPGs. Trust me. I was fascinated with them from an early age, and as I played more and more RPGs I always wound up playing similar characters, at least in terms of party role. I generally don’t play leader-type characters. I don’t tend to play brutes in a physical sense. I play characters who use their wits and whatever force of will they can muster to alter reality to fit their needs. Wizards are a “mind-over-matter” character type. I dig that.

AD&D

The AD&D wizard was called a “Magic-User”, which lacks poetry. There’s a certain literalness to the original character classes like “Fighter” and “Magic-User”. They lack imagination, but I suppose they are at least descriptive. The original “Magic-User” was incredibly lame at low levels but gained godlike power in the later game. I never really got to the later game. It took a good goddamn long time to do so in tho’ days. For as influential as this class was, it lacked panache. 2.0.

AD&D 2nd Edition

2nd edition AD&D made wizards a lot of fun. For starters, there were multiple possibilities, such as the specialty wizards. Specialty wizards broadened the character concept somewhat, and in effect doubled the effectiveness of low-level mages without making the high-level ones too much more godlike. The complete Wizards Handbook added wizard kits to further customize the class. However, without those bells and whistles, the mage character was essentially the exact same as it was in AD&D, though perhaps a high Intelligence score would get them an extra spell. 3.0.


Rifts

The Line Walker and Shifter are the basic “wizard” OCCs in the main Rifts book. OCC stands for “Occasionally Cumbersome Concept”. These classes both borrow heavily from AD&D in that low-level magic isn’t very powerful, but the disparity between low-level mercenaries (and psychics, and racial classes, and just about everyone else) and low-level wizards in Rifts is nuts. A guy with a gun is something like 2-5 times more effective in a combat situation than a line walker at level 1. Maybe they achieve parity at level 10, like AD&D? I wouldn’t know because Rifts sucks enough ass that nobody played that long. The Techno-Wizard class is pretty cool. And the world book supplements added a lot of cool magic OCCs. But overall, Rifts wizardry is blah. 1.0

Vampire: The Masquerade

The vampire equivalent of “wizard” was Clan Tremere, a clan made up of mages who stole the “secret” of vampirism and then went on a wild diablerie rampage to become a for-real “clan” instead of a bloodline. Weird and wonky backstory aside, Tremere are kickass wizards. Their in-clan disciplines give them access to blood (and other) magic, rituals, precognitive and extrasensory perception, and various forms of mind control. Those hit most of the classical wizard stereotypes from art and literature: the mysterious power, the sinister adviser/grand vizier, the prophet, the mind-controlling powermage, the sage. They were awesome, and well designed in my opinion.

The flavor wasn’t the greatest, as the backstory made them insular and backbiting puppets within their own little “wizard towers”, Chantries, in like every city, but it can’t all be gravy I guess. 3.5

Supernatural Creature: the Gothic Noun

Mage: The Ascension and World of Darkness: Sorcerer are two supplements/games that also dealt with magic in the World of Darkness. Sorcerer is dumb as hell, and the fact that it coexisted with Mage is even dumber. Mage: the Ascension was an interesting concept that led to either incredibly creative players or incredibly weird power-gaming. I saw more of the later. The Men in Black and the New World Order Technocratic Convention almost make up for all of it, however. That’s one of the better “tradition” books out there in my opinion. Why was the technocracy the antagonists of the game? I really liked those guys. 3.0.

Werewolf: The Forsaken

There’s some kind of Theurge-analog in this game. The Theurge was the auspice in the old Werewolf game that was all shamanesque. There’s another one in this game. They get rituals cheaper. In the game we played my boneheaded character was better at rituals than our boneheaded Theurge-analog. It might not have been the rules-system’s fault. I felt that overall WTF was a little samey in that all the tribes/moons/etc co-mingled a little too well. There wasn’t a big differentiation between all of them. Also, there was lots of rituals which didn’t have big game effects, they just cost XP so that you could like, mourn the loss of a fallen comrade ‘correctly’. For reals? Experience systems are generally trhere to make your characters “better” at whatever they do, and spending points on “flavor” instead is. . .weird. 1.5.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

There’s something I like about the 4E wizard: it has some incredible combat-useless class features. It was a big complaint when the game came out. Almost every class in the 4E PHB has 3 or 4 class features that directly relate to some kind of advantage on the field of battle. Not so the wizard. He’s got one middling advantage based on whether he prefers his wand to his staff, if you catch my drift. And then he has Cantrips, which are little spells that produce minor effects, like Light or Mage Hand. These aren’t going to do much in a fight.

But there is the Spellbook, which lets the wizard powerswap his daily superspell when he regenerates it (uh, daily), basically. So instead of Sleep he could learn Flaming Sphere for a day. And then go back the next. This last feature was only useful if the players knew who they would be fighting in advance and the wizard said “shit, they have fire resistance, I’ll learn Sleep for tomorrow.” I dig that, but there were complaints. Fuck the haters. 3.0.

Apparently 4E has some new wizardyness in the works now, and it looks like the wiz is getting some bonus damage to a lot of powers. That seems alright. Apparently the haters were vocal enough.

Dark Heresy

Dark Heresy doesn’t really have wizards as such. There are scholars, who can get some psychic powers late in their career, and there are psykers proper. Psykers really fulfill the role of both wizard/artillery and healer/cleric in this system. It’s a little wonky that way. Also, psykers have a base 10% chance to interact poorly with the Warp every single time they use their powers, so it’s a risky proposition. I’m actually not a fan of the system. Psyker powers seem incredibly powerful even at the outset, and our psyker has already found a way to circumvent the whole “power has consequences” thing by using his psychic powers to reroll dice which accidentally engage the warp. So, the system is in effect made to be broken (before it breaks you), which is weak. 2.0

-Merlin out