Wizards: Mages and Specialist Wizards Who May or May Not Be Illusionists- Ah yes, wizards. The PHB spends several paragraphs detailing the reasons why wizards are allowed very few weapons and no armor, yet oddly enough I find one of the explanations the book automatically discounts as the most compelling. The PHB essentially says that wizards can't use armor or more than a few weapons because they can't be bothered to learn how. Isn't that the player's decision? Besides, as academics out to explore tombs and catacombs in the search of knowledge and riches, this makes wizards just sound either incredibly lazy or terminally stupid. The book debunks the explanation that armor disrupts magical energy. I think that makes perfect sense; if a wizard is weaving eldritch patterns to warp the fabric of reality, might not metal links and plates on her body disrupt these patterns and cause her spells to fizzle - or worse, go out of control? This explanation might lead to allowing wizards to wear leather or hide armor, but I'm fine with that since it's not exactly unprecedented (I may cover this later when I get to druids).
- Wizards can't make scrolls until 9th level, but they can copy spells into their spellbooks from 1st level on. A bit of rules dissonance, here.
- Wizards are cursed with the dreaded d4 hit die. You can offset this with a decent CON, but 2 extra HP a level can only do so much. However, considering the wizard regularly makes causality his bitch, this is seen as acceptable for many years. Doesn't necessarily excuse the fixed 1 HP per level after 10th though.
- Taking what one has read from the PHB up to this point with the wizard spell progression table, a 1st level wizard can cast one 1st-level spell. From the accompanying paragraphs, however, it seems that the wizard can read her spellbook and make that spell available again immediately (or, at least, once the fight is over). This can't be the case, though that would help those lower levels out considerably were it true.
- Humans, elves, and half-elves can be mages. It's cute that the book pretends there's a meaningful choice here.
- A mage's prime requisite is Intelligence, but even with a 16 a mage can't cast her highest level spells. That's almost like saying fighters can use chainsaws with a 16 STR, but can't use lightsabers at 17th level unless they have an 18 STR.
- The Schools of Magic, 2nd paragraph: "You'd think someone could start an academy like Hogwarts to teach future magic users, but this is unnecessary so long as the young'uns can be taught by magic hobos."
- There are nine schools of magic, except one kinda sucks and is just the beginning levels of study of one of the others. Lesser Divination could have easily have been Lesser Invocation, or Lesser Transmutation, except the game designers couldn't come up with enough spells for divination so it got the short straw.
- Confession time: I didn't really understand what abjuration was or its purpose until I read Complete Arcane for 3.5.
- Elves can only be diviners or enchanters. Apparently getting freaky with the humans opens up your magical pathways, as half-elves can also be conjurers and transmuters. Gnomes can be illusionists - and only illusionists. I still can't shake the feeling that these restrictions are completely arbitrary, and the ability score requirements reinforce this. Why would a conjurer need a 15 CON as opposed to, say, CHA? Why does illusionist have a DEX requirement at all? Doesn't an enchanter with a 16 CHA kind of defeat the purpose?
- The illusionist class is just a reiteration of the specialist wizard rules, possibly for padding, possibly to keep the gnome players happy.
Priests: Clerics and Druids
- …Why are there 16 priest spheres? Did they just kinda stop there, or did they stretch them out for the sake of symmetry? Oh, major and minor access to spheres sounds like oodles of fun. Hey, why did they come up with minor sphere access when they could have just as easily made the spheres Lesser Charm and Lesser Sun? Nah, 32 spheres would be too many, now that I think about it; 16 keeps it nice and simple!
- The magic of wizards is divided into nine spell levels, with each spell level beyond 1st accessed at wizard level *2 - 1. The magic of priests is divided into only seven levels, with the same spellcaster level algorithm, so priests begin to top out four levels before wizards.
- Now that I think about it, demi-human spellcasters can't cast anything beyond 7th level spells at best (unless you use the optional "exceeding level limits" rule in the DMG, which is also where I found the level limit table when it should be in the PHB to begin with; seriously, screw this system mastery zeitgeist BS and put the level limits in the PHB and the optional rules - all of them - in the DMG where they belong).
- It's odd that the class description doesn't limit clerics to being good or to specific gods/mythoi, but assumes that all clerics "combine military and religious training" like "the Teutonic Knights, the Knights Templar," etc. It's also strange that all clerics are "granted power over undead" when a cleric of, say, a harvest god or spirit of civilization might not have anything to do with them.
- As an aside, the book's use of the term "mythos/mythoi" makes me want to play a cleric of Azathoth.
- As we journey into the "Priests of Specific Mythoi" section, I'd like to briefly reminisce on my character from the only Forgotten Realms game I've played for more than an hour. After a somewhat exhaustive question and answer period with the DM about what I wanted to play, I was given free reign to play a specialty priest of Tempus. Tempus is (one of the many) god(s) of war within the Realms, and my DM had some sort of unrequited crush on the fictitious deity. My cleric (and yes, it said cleric on my character sheet) had a fighter THAC0 and attacks per round, wielded a two-handed sword, and could incite a berserker rage in a number of people per day equal to my level. Eventually, after a brief sojourn into Barovia, I picked up the fully powered sun sword from the Castle Ravenloft module, which doubled my attacks per round (that's three attacks, by the by) and did like triple damage to undead. I was level 8, I think. From the fact that I was a raging badass, and that the powers and abilities I've recounted here are by no means exhaustive, you might be able to see that specialty clerics, depending on DM, setting, and splatbooks, can get pretty sick.
- That said, the section on specialty priests should either be transplanted into the DMG or filled with more specifics along the lines of specialist wizards in order for them to be remotely useful. In the era of "NO" DMGing, giving players a toolbox to build their own class is pretty much a waste of page count.
- Why can't elves be druids? This seems counterintuitive to their "one with nature" shtick. On that note, why can humans (traditionally viewed as the natural predator of forested areas) be druids?
- Why is it that druids are limited to natural (read: non-metallic) armor, yet half of their available weapons (scimitar, sickle, dagger, possibly dart and spear) probably have a good amount of metal in them?
- Druids are the only class that have to beat others of their class to advance in level. There's two pages worth of information about the life of druids past 11th level that assumes that they're cognizant of metagame concepts. For example, there can only be nine druids of 12th level within a geographic region, and if the player is number 10, someone's gotta throw down, with the loser reverting to 11th level. First off, how does any of these druids know what character level their peers are? "My name is Grim Feathertail and I just dinged 12th level." Second, why nine? If we're going to be arbitrary, why not 57, or 23 - hell, make it just one so you can turn it into Highlander: the Treehugging! Third, this implies that, in any geographic region, there are nine 12th level druids that do nothing but sit around when they could be out solving any of the problems the party comes across (however, see the Forgotten Realms NPC problem). Fourth, what if the druid doesn't want to be part of this particular region? What if he just moves to another one? Can he just set up an enclave in the Hidden Valley (there's a ranch there!) and chill, or does this count as a forfeit and he shimmies back on down to 11th level. This is just the first step of this nonsense; at 15th level, the up-and-coming druid is required to take a desk job, which is not exactly conducive to an adventuring career. Oh, and the whole druidic advancement hierarchy is bookended by the druid's class abilities and only lasts from 12th to 16th level.
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