Why are wizards considered overpowered?

[Kitty Catoblepas]

Omnius wrote:

"I, the skilled warrior who has been aggressively training and fighting for over a decade, am not even close to ready to fight Steve the Necromancer, but I will be if I spend the next week on the road exhausting myself by smashing every face between here and there," sounds pretty metagamey to me.

There's no in-character reason to assume that the character who's been training and practicing for years suddenly goes through some sort of super soldier puberty where over the course of three months of adventuring, they go from rat smasher to demigod.

In-world metagaming would be getting a job working at an abattoir until you're strong enough to defeat the Necromancer. But that's neither here nor there.

[Omnius]

Fergie wrote:

[strokes preposterous philosopher beard +2]

I agree that it sounds metagamey to us, but I think you have to put yourself in the shoes of someone living in a fantasy setting. In addition to dragons, outsiders, magical beasts, etc. being super real, and part of life, there are actual people around you going on magical adventures and coming back badass and decked out in ludicrously expensive magical gear. Or getting killed. But then they get raised, because that is a part of life as well. Their existence and life experiences would be vastly different then our own, but it would be normal to them.

I recommend checking out the Order of the Stick for a fantastic imagining of what it would be like to live in the universe created by the D&D rules.

I am in the rules are not physics camp. We are playing a game that looks in on a universe, but the game's rules are not the laws of the universe. They're just a tool and a framing device.

The characters live in a world that makes some sort of sense, even if, when you zoom in with the rules to the level of granularity that they do, you often see complete nonsense. There is an economy that functions, even if the rules make money make no sense and turn currency into a secondary XP track instead of an actual setting element. And so on.

[Coidzor]

Arcaian wrote:

2: If you design the dungeons and your campaign like that, you're essentially locking out all the martials. If the only way through a dungeon is by teleportation, then the rogue and fighter along for the journey aren't going to be doing anything. Especially annoying for the rogue - they're the skill monkey, and should be able to contribute out of combat. If they can't because the world needs to be designed around how wizards...

The martials are already largely locked out of exploration once climbing and jumping have had their full song and dance and no longer are relevant anyway, and they're purely there for combat. The majority of them never had a dog in the fight with social encounters.

They already can't even without the world being specifically designed around wizards.

Also, teleportation generally isn't used in dungeons, beyond the occasional tactical teleport, but more to bypass them or to get to the edge of the dungeon's teleport interdiction.

[Blackwaltzomega]

Cavall wrote:

Well, no in character reason other than that's how they got to a level where teleport became an option in the first place.

Well, to be completely fair, some of that depends on starting levels and backstories. There are probably 10th level NPC wizards that attained the power of teleport through years of study without ever so much as casting an attack spell.

Although adventuring does make things pretty weird. You can have one wizard in the party who didn't qualify as a level one wizard until he'd gotten his Hogwarts degree and all that and then one day on a whim the rogue he's been traveling with just sort of picks up being a wizard over a couple days or weeks.

[Darksol the Painbringer]

Everyone should keep in mind it's called the Caster/Martial disparity, not the Wizard/Martial disparity, and while it's true that Wizards are perhaps the biggest culprit of creating said disparity, since they have the most fluid of options and "abilities" at their fingertips, (literally I might add,) it's very easy for a Sorcerer or Witch or Cleric or other Full Spellcaster to create an identical disparity, and the reason they can is because this game was designed to be magic-centric. Everything in this game revolves around magic. You can never go wrong with more magic. The more magic you get, the better off you are. And so on and so forth.

The factor that they made classes that have little or nothing to do with magic, in a game that's solely designed around magic, really makes you want to scratch your head and go "What the hell were they thinking, creating a class that wants nothing to do with magic, when the entire game requires and expects a modicum of magic to function?"

With the Rogue getting more "magic"-based archetypes and the Fighter getting more "magical" options, they are sucking less than they were when those options weren't available, but this only perpetuates the idea that options that don't involve magic of some sort are just garbage.

Paladins and Rangers use some magic (and the Paladin has a slew of supernatural powers themselves). Barbarians have hardly any magic, but their anti-magic options are powerful enough to make them valuable in that respect (even if it's a shoehorned one-trick pony 95% of the time). And unfortunately, all of them require magic items of some sort just to maintain their relevance in an adventure. But every full caster in the game? Nope.

They can summon everything they need, they can create the stuff they need by themselves, with little to no help from anyone (though this is optional), and their spells can accomplish anything a non-magical character can do more effectively, and without nearly as much required investment. That is the Caster/Martial disparity, at its core.