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This week, by request, we see what might have happened if a few of the main characters hadn’t been happy with their class selection.
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LOL – Wizzy Bree, barby Teal and what’s that: Paladin Paraxxys of the Order of the Locked Chain? I don’t see much difference with whatever was her profession before her unfortunate transformation into a statue (apparently). What was she? Ranger, bow rogue, bow barbarian?
And what about Teal? Which was her class before being reclassed as hug-healer? She did not do much of anything other than acting as guide, assistant, slave-miner and icosahedral dice thrower (and presumably one of the many consort queens of the Lizard People, not exactly a canonic class either).
I really like Mage Bree. She should multi-class!
Mage Bree is hot. You should redesign her face and introduce her as a new companion as the party doesn’t have a mage.
Ouch, really? I wouldn’t probably be reading this comic if Bree would be yet another overpowered fireball thrower with shiny stuff for the show. Admittedly Bree is hot in anything (or in nothing at all) but that’s beyond the point. There would be no adventure if Bree was a mage: nearly all cool adventurers are rogues (sometimes a ranger or barbarian but they all have something rogueish anyhow).
Mages may be able to dish it out, but they can’t take it. Even the most OP of spellslingers can be taken down relatively easily if you can get close enough to stick a knife or a sword or an arrow in them. Without a party to hide behind, and a rogue to spot the traps, a mage would be in serious trouble very quickly. And if they get captured, they are pretty much helpless without their spell components. Heck, even turning the Rock’N’Roll up to eleven will be enough to keep all but the best mages from casting a spell.
In short, if Bree were a mage, she would likely still be stuck in Ssithikus’ harem.
That depends on the game… in my experience mages and other non-meat toons are often way too hardy, mostly because of heal and shield spells, endless mana pools, and pots to make up for when these finally end. Also nerfing of rogues: if it does not shine and bangs and can be organized into some sort of army, devs often do not care. Also preferably furry, flying (usually wings), halos and a religious-inquisitorial ideology… That’s why I lost interest in games like Shadowbane or the new related development Crowfall: I want something more “realistic”, less mega-magic and less religious.
And goblins! XD
“In short, if Bree were a mage, she would likely still be stuck in Ssithikus’ harem”.
No! She would have blown it up!
Let’s think a more specific example from that very same harem: Nefice is a mage and she had no problem beating a rogue and whatever Paraxyss is (warrior?) A bit of paralysis here, a bit of poison there, a bit of extra armored body to prevent stabs… she did not even need to resort to big fireworks at all! She was only defeated by the deux-ex-machina of a the luckiest and best synchronized mirror shard thrown ever… but that’s beyond the point.
But see, the problem is you keep peering at things through the Maju filter. Give Wormius/DM some credit in being able to write a halfway entertaining story with Bree as a spell slinger. You seem to think that the examples you listed means he shouldn’t even attempt it because its doomed to fail.
I simply don’t agree. I think he could craft something like that and have it be a heck of a ride.
No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying it’d be much less interesting at least at face value. Just imagine The Lord of the Rings starred by Gandalf! Or its prequel (sort of), the Legend of King Arthur, starred by Merlin! Nope: mages are by design exceptional and semi-divine secondary characters and not the oh-yet-another-fireball-flesh-cannon that videogames (or D&D before) have made of them. The interest of the epic character is that in spite of being a common mortal (more or less, usually a bit over the top but not totally out the league anyhow) can overcome, often with great difficulty, a series of challenges and obstacles until they achieve their goal (or die in semi-tragic double edged culmination – happy endings are not the only possible ones).
Of course, a good (and motivated) artist can twist any archetype or trope and make interesting, novel and different. But it is a challenge.
How would you do that? Personally I’d begin by making the character a low level magician, an apprentice who only masters one or a few, rather useless, spells and has a low mana pool (and a less fancy dress). Then I would also try to think of a dark side to the character or her adventure (I’ll go with the feminine form, but could be a guy as well). For example she could be selfish and power-greedy, not even blinking at the possibility of abusing magic powers, yet be gradually redeedmed (or not really?) by the power of friendship and love. Or could be bound by spells or oaths or even love to an evil secondary character, yet she’s not really evil, so contradictions arise. Or… well, I’m not too good at this stuff. You continue.
I’m just going to do a general reply here instead of messing around with seprate posts.
If we’re talking videogames, then yes, magi do tend to be on the OP side. Which is why I prefer good old-fashioned pen and paper RPGs. You start having to keep track of what spells you know, which you have prepared, all the spell components for said spells, and then whether or not you can pull it off under pressure, and the amount of damage a mage can do drops considerably. Even moreso when any one of those items goes wrong. Take away a mage’s spellbook, and they’re limited to those spell they have memorised, take away thier prepared spell components, and they’re left to scrounge what they can. Nefice pulled it off because she had spent years, if not decades using all her pull as a queen of the lizard people to scrape together all the things she needed to be an effective spellcaster.
Additionaly, magi put all their effort into being spellcasters. Get rid of the fighters acting as ablative meat-shields, and thats more spell slots that have to go toward defense rather than offense. And with pretty much any armour seriously impeding their ability to sucsessfully cast spells, most magi are physicaly frail. Any damage they take is going to be devistating. Again going back to Nefice, she got very lucky. If Bree had gone for the jugular, or the fight had gone on for much longer, perhaps because Moonblade had decided to cooperate, then that fight would have gone very differently.
As for all magi being fireball hurling, lightning spiting demigods, I would argue against that. Gandalf and Merlin are indeed semi-devine figures, but that is what they are supposed to be. Gandalf is litteraly a kind of angel, who helped sing the world of middle-earth into existance before volunteering to go live on it and keep things from getting too crazy. Both characters would be extraordinarily high-level if they were to be PCs in a game, facing foes that would turn lesser beings into a greasy scorchmark just by sneering at them. The Draco-Mage would be another example of this kind of high-level character. As you said, these kinds of characters are best used in a secondary role, (unless it’s DM staring in a slice of life comic showing the senanigans he goes through ruleing and managing the Delve.)
Mortal mages can be done, and done in a very entertaining manner however. I would list Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files as the golden standard for this. Harry Dresden is a Wizard in contemporary Chicago, and a fairly powerfull one at that. Given ample time to prepare, he can deal with just about any threat that arrises. That said, he still gets the crap kicked out of him on a regular basis because you can’t prepare for everything, and you can’t defend against or attack what you don’t know is there. He carries a large caliber revolver, because sometimes, the most effective means of dealing with an attacker isn’t magic, but good old hot lead, and cold steel. I highly recommend the whole series, if only for the humor Mr. Butcher packs into his stories.
I don’t really have an adequate conclusion for this wall or text and it is late, so I’m just going to post it and be done.
What we can conclude is that there is an evolution of the wizard character:
1. A totally exceptional being, in a wholly different league from mortals. One in a million but nearly undefeatable except maybe by another mage (Merlin vs Morgana for example). You have also elven mages in Tolkien but they are still very exceptional and do not belong to “adventuring parties” (they have other commitments).
2. The DnD mage that, as you say is much less over-powered than later gaming versions. They are no Merlins but rather petty sorcerers full of limitations. That way they become common “adventuring party” members however and pass to the league of common mortals, joining the “realist” triad of warrior, ranger and rogue. They also incorporate another class of magicians: priests or healers, that later again become common and rather annoying (IMO) in videogames (try to kill two healer bots with a poisoned dagger, no way!)
3. The often overpowered videogame wizards, who are the flashy hybrid between 2 and 3: common and mortal, yet also rather overpowered. That’s because it is assumed that at the same level all classes must be roughly equal, and “equal” for a mage is much better than the rest. Because mages are strictly fantastic beings, whose characteristic is being super-normal, while physical fighters are somewhat close to being realistic instead.
IMO this is because, unlike in classical fantasy, there is no penalty nor extra effort for being a wizard (or healer, a variant). This could be managed forcing magic characters to take a sizeable number of extra levels to reach equivalence but nobody is interested in that.