Lich-Loved's page

Then again, I don't think about being politically correct as a binding dogma, it is just something to keep in mind: You are not the center of universe and not everyone is like you, nor do they all secretly want to be like you.

I agree with you here, but perhaps not in the way you may initially think.

Your point is spot on. However, not everyone is like you either (and I don't mean you personally, of course). The burden of politeness lies on all parties in the conversation, not just the speaker. Perhaps the speaker has a different set of life experiences that the listener. So what? The speaker may bring a different perspective, with different biases to the conversation. Again, so what? This is diversity in action. Both the speaker and listener need to thicken their skins a bit and accept that not everyone sees the world the same way. When one asks a speaker to change his phrasing to avoid upsetting the listener, he is upsetting the speaker's sensibilities just as much as the speaker is upsetting the listener's.

What makes one's viewpoint more important than another's viewpoint? I think the answer is "nothing". There exists a great deal of common ground where persons of differing backgrounds can speak. We need to stay in that common ground and keep in mind that the speaker as well as the listener bring different backgrounds to the conversation. Outright declaration of one manner of speech as superior or "less offensive" is in itself offensive to the rights of the speaker, it biases the conversation toward the listener, as if they were inherently more important to the discourse.

Shador is quite concerned for his skin at this point and is willing to stay out of sight and out of mind. I was ordered to be quiet, so quiet I shall be!

Discretion is the better part of valor! Huzzah!

I am a huge Lovecraft (and his derivatives) fan. You can always tell you are reading Lovecraft when you come across the word cyclopean.

In fact I kind of think the whole debate comes down to - I hate wizards and here is my justification for why. Which is not quite the same thing as saying their really bad. Of course I love Sorcerers and Wizards and therefore don't think the class is unbalanced.

Wellllll... I do not hate the class, I really do not. I want to see the class played in my games and I want to see it handled as close to RAW as possible. What prompted me to write this was this odd feeling of (I am searching for the right word here)... weakness ... in the class as it is designed when I last played it and the sudden realization that no one in my group of six chose a wizard to play in the last four of our campaigns. Those two events sent me searching for answers, and I had to dig back to 2005 and a discussion on the Warlock to get to the heart of the matter.

In my playing experience, I found that all my extra gold went to buying and scribing spells (to take advantage of my vaunted diversity) instead of to stat boosters, wands and nifty wonderous items. However, when I actually tried to put my diverse spellbook into action, I found that I did not have enough spell slots to make this work. I would leave spell slots open at each level, which helped some, but since I had so few spells at each level, this meant I had fewer combat spells (of any power level) available when we were attacked. I guess one analogy that hasn't been made that may describe this situation is that if, at every other level, the fighter faced higher and more specialized DR monsters. To combat these, he would have to buy new types of magic slashing and bludgeoing weapons and new magic armor to be effective. That is how it felt to me as I played the Wizard. I needed to buy and scribe as many spells at my new level as possible to have the right spell on hand for a situation.

A second issue, that of hitpoints, was really troublesome to me. My stats were not great and I had an average CON. I looked over my old sheet just now and saw that at 6th level I had 19hp (better than average, btw), which meant that a single fireball or lightning bolt cast by a caster of my level would drop me to negatives on an average roll (6*3.5 = 21hp) if I failed my save and a second would will drop (or kill) me regardless of my saves. Since we faced BBEG's of level +1 or +2, death was a constant fear and since it could come in so many ways and I had so few spells available to protect myself, I was left feeling very vulnerable. Maybe that is how a 6th level wizard is *supposed* to feel, I do not know, but it was not a comfortable feeling.

Regarding solutions proposed thus far (and their relative deviation from core RAW), we have:

Simple: use Craft Points to augment XP expenditures, provide downtime between adventures for the wizard to research and craft items, follow the wealth-by-level guidelines to make sure the wizard has access to enough gold to accomplish at least some of his desires, provide spellbooks as part of treasure occasionally.

Moderate: Introduce splatbook classes and Unearthed Arcana options for the class to provide flexibility and address player's perceived weaknesses with the class. Increase spell lists to include new spells from these sources.

Complex: move to a spell-point system or otherwise redevelop the mechanics associated with arcane spellcasting, provide free feats or other customization to fill in gaps in the class.

Is this a fair summary? Did I miss anything?

One suggestion regarding crafting and xp expenditure is to add treasure of some form that can be used for crafting. It's an idea I stole from Ars Magica/Mage where you can find magical power in physical form. You could have it be something like the tears of a basalisk, which can be used as the equivalent of 50xp, but only for the purposes of crafting items relating to stone to flesh/flesh to stone. This makes crafting more palatable.

Unearthed Arcana has a whole list of magical and rare components that can be used to apply metamagic feats to spells without the corrisponding increase in spell slot use. While I do not use this system, the list is extensive and could serve as a basis for this kind of idea.

Supply the essence of a salamander and your wand of fireballs costs xx less XP to create. I like it.

Back in October 2005, James Jacobs was commenting on Warlocks and was asked by Saern why James has a problem with the Wizard class. James replied:

I do use different rules in my home campaigns for wizards and sorcerers. (I'm one of those DMs who has a home-brew that fills dozens of notebooks).

My main problem with wizards boils down to the following concerns.

1: They get too few hit points.
2: When a wizard (or sorcerer) runs out of spells, he stops being a wizard since he has NO other abilities that set him apart from the rest of the classes. He turns into a commoner. No other class aside from these two has this problem
3: Among the four spellcasting classes that get spells up to level 9, the wizard gets the stingiest amount of spells per day. A 20th level wizard has only 4 spells per day of each level before his Int bonus, compared to a sorcerer's 6 per day, or a cleric's or druid's, for that matter.
4: The "benefit" of potentially being able to cast every spell in the game is a hollow, false benefit. Clerics and druids get this already, plus all their other abilites. And see #5 for the hidden kicker of this supposed "benefit."
5: Finally, the kicker. All of the wizard's abilities require them to spend money, time, and XP. His bonus feats are often item creation feats. Learning new spells can be prohibitively expensive (to say the least of paying to scribe them). Even his familiar costs money to get, and if (WHEN) it's killed, yup. It costs XP. In a campaign that doesn't allow for down-time, the wizard turns into a limited version of the sorcerer.

Where wizards shine is as NPCs or as PCs for one-shot adventures, since they can sidestep much of these issues and build their spells and abilities from scratch. Still... I think that just brings them close to being viable with other classes.

In every campaign I've seen a wizard played (which hasn't happened often—they're not popular choices for campaign play), that player has hit all five of the above problems and it's been a MAJOR source of concern.

My gaming group has ignored wizards in the last several campaigns, choosing sorcerers instead. In two of the last four campaigns, no one could be enticed to play a wizard or sorcerer at all. Eventually one person in each of the last two campaigns ended up multiclassing as a mage to fill the critical role simply because completing Dungeon adventures was nearly impossible without the abilities an arcane caster brings. However such multiclassing was done out of necessity rather than desire and the overall character suffered for it.

I posted James' comments to my gaming group and asked for their input on the issue. I learned that people pretty much are in agreement with him, especially when the wizard is compared with the cleric (such comparison was done in another thread here but the cleric is clearly superior in many though not all ways). I then went through as many archives here as I could looking for a solution to this problem. I reviewed Spell Point (Unearthed Arcana) threads, house rule threads and general comments on Warlock vs. Wizard vs Sorcerer. I could not find anything that seemed to be "the answer".

My question to the community is this: has anyone managed to fix the wizard class so that it is comparable to the other classes without breaking the game in some way? Or conversely, are James and those in my group just off base in some way and the wizard is a fine class to play?