I have two kinds of characters I generally never play – thieves and wizards. Not sure about thieves, I guess I’m just not much into hiding and sneaking and spying on people and intentionally trying to stay unnoticeable, though I play normal characters as mostly support roles for other players.

Wizards, on the other hand, I avoid because of the game rules – I make sure to look games over, check out their sections, get ideas, and one of the things I do IS check the magic section, to see if “this one might have a neat magic section… nope.” It’s like you hit the “Wizard” class or career, and you can almost audibly HEAR and see the giant dusty tome with arcane crap all over it being slammed down on a table.

You are ALWAYS having to pour over game books for all the wizardly stuff you can do, as a player IRL, just like your wizard is in the game, I might as well BE Debbie in Dark Dungeons, learning to cast my first REAL spell – which isn’t even Mind Bondage, because that’s one of those Advanced High-Tier spells.

I want something fast, simple and varied, sure I can see magic being a bit less smooth and instant than normal physical combat and such, but it should be practical and able to be used (maybe not successfully but still used) reasonably easy and quickly in any given situation, not bogged down with flipping hurridly through your spellbook, muttering babelfish moonspeak, directing an orchestra and burning whale penis. Just point-and-shoot (or do) – willpower and intent, more like psychic powers or the Force I guess – a bit of gesture is fine, actually “throwing” a fireball, but the rest of this stuff? All the reading glowing sigils off of scrolls and chanting stuff – you can have it.

In fact our group now in WFRP2 has no wizard, except the one I finally decided to make, taking one for the team – and of course you get a few petty magic spells but don’t get anything much useful until you play your way up to actually getting to learn a color or sphere or whatever from a college, so my most potent and versatile spell at this point is Magic Dart – woo – okay for combat – everything else is of limited use even non-combat.

At any rate, I’ve pretty much always been dissatisfied with magic systems in anything I’ve so far gotten to play or run. In a way I wish more stuff was similar to HERO/Champions where you can just setup a framework for a spell yourself, or even better (if the system were faster and more intuitive) one that you can come up with a new variation of that spell each time you want to cast, like I’ve seen some of your describe a few games have, a fluid, narrative hand-wavey “ok makes sense, try it” style. Even Feng Shui isn’t horrible, with a few very broad effects-as-spells examples without spell points and once-per-day limitations and such – I was honestly surprised.I hate spell lists except as suggested example spells, not concrete curricula and extremely limited step-system hierarches.

I haven’t had quite as much resistance to clerics and maybe druid types, because I can kinda see them as more residual in their abilities – healing, blessing, divination, all stuff that can be done out of immediate action, as preparation or planned out ritual – I can deal with that IF I am in the mood to play that kind of character, that I just see as being more drawn-out and elaborate – as long as I at least get the POTENTIAL to also make sure they have good physical skills, to make up for this.

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This entry was posted by J P on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 5:01 pm and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.