Why can't wizards behave like this in combat, why must they always be stereotyped as slow and frail?

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think back in the early days of D&D, Gygax or one of the other co-founders realized that if wizards were plentiful and powerful, that medieval tactics wouldn't be what they are; due to the advent of fireballs, or confusion, or whatever else.

So the decision was that mages needed to eschew basically every bit of physical training in order to focus purely on getting past the learning curve of magical education.

Magic is of course a very involved field, and mages that can lob fireballs with ease are old and rare indeed.

TL;DR: Wizards don't behave like that due to a desire by the co-founders of D&D to want to preserve medieval tactics as they were historically.

But everything posted is just DnD 4e.

...

>more fake 8bit shittery

That kind of magic is boring, that's just martial arts with special effects, that's Avatar shit.

Real magic practiced by real wizards is either incredibly subtle and only working on astral and mental planes, or it's gross displays effortless power uttered in a whisper. It's ingredients and incantations, bellowed words of power, rituals performed three days in advance with stat buffs up the fucking ass.

Where's my wizard vidya where I can do that, where it's all about preparation, ingredient gathering and bartering, delving for ancient knowledge, mental and spiritual journeys to learn words of power in the memories of forgotten gods, battles against powerful spirits for domination, wizard duels that normie martials can't even perceive, where staves aren't for pointing to where my fireball goes but for focusing and channeling, where the fuck is my mysticism anymore? Everything is mana potions and energy fields, it's just fakey science, not innately unnatural powers governed by capricious symbolic laws.

That's how they are in a lot of non-3.fuck fantasy systems, though.

and also in animu

Anybody have a download link for the demo?
I looked around for it, but it looks like they took it down from everywhere they put it up.

>where it's all about preparation, ingredient gathering and bartering, delving for ancient knowledge, mental and spiritual journeys to learn words of power in the memories of forgotten gods

Honestly that sounds like a game that consists entirely of fetch quests and grinding items, with a short burst of spellpower at the end before you have to do it all over again. If you can't use magic unless you're prepared, and the game is all about getting prepared, how exactly do you expect to be doing things in order to prepare if not in a mundane way? I don't really understand what you think such a game would be like without some ability to do quick and dirty problem solving.

Do you just run away from threats that pop up while you're trying to gather your magical ingredients because you can't actually cast anything yet?

This is why Gandalf used a sword.

Honestly, my favorite sort of magic(at the moment) is shit like in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell; tried and tested formulas that date back ages and are almost guaranteed to work, and then the freedom to try to do other shit if you're creative enough.
Example: youtube.com/watch?v=SxtyM9mFMQQ
Example #2: youtube.com/watch?v=WUtDkfHlzgs
Minor spoilers, of course

The closest I've been able to find for this type of thing in tabletop games is Ars Magica, or Mage: The Ascension.

(I am not the guy who ranted about magic not being magical enough these days, though.)

But they can.

Ever heard of the Gish? 3.5e had a shitton of builds for them.

Are we posting stronk animu casters now?

Because you pay attention to stereotypes in games of imagination

They look like angry old men having a bad trip togetheer

A grindfest would be the wrong way to make it. I'm no game designer, but I'll try formulate my idea a bit better.

There's no reason you can't use a sword (or your staff) or stealth it out against opposing threats while you're out doing your wizardly wandering. In my head, the whole idea is you're never not actually prepared. It's not a game where when you pick the wizard class you get a single offensive spell and shit everything else til more than halfway through the game. You would come stocked with ingredients, scrolls, things like mentioned, more commonly known tried and tested ancient formulae to draw upon until you can strike out and start making your own spells.

Someone on Veeky Forums once described Vancian magic as the wizard walking around sizzling with arcane energies, with potentially a dozen spells all but actually cast, buzzing just under the surface, prepared well in advance of use. That's how I see this, rituals and rites done, sacrifices made, words spoken and incanted - all ready to be used. Lower, or more common spells have much less to do, much less to gather or use up, things you can do in the heat of the moment, greater spells or custom spells use a variety of ingredients, spoken words and gesturing and need to be prepared any amount of time beforehand. Quick fire spells can also exist, not rapid fire energy blasts leaping around, but a quick crunch of an eggshell and powder while you call down a spirit of fire to make the fireball work, all in a few seconds.

In battle, I see the player selecting from a number of precast spells to use from a menu, some lesser and able to be done in quick succession, some more unique and single use for the time being. There might even be more than one way to cast certain spells, those are the rewards of exploration and experimentation.

Sorry for the long post, this is just an idea I've been in love with for a while now.

Considering a single round of action is like 6 seconds, and only a fraction of those six seconds is a character's sum of actions, Wizards do their shit pretty fucking fast.

The question is why can't ttrpgs represent faced paced combat accurately?

Because players are slow ass faggots and no matter the system they are able to stretch three rounds of whatever into one hour of discussion

>youtube.com/watch?v=HNv_aC7H8pY
Seems you want to add unneccessary logistics, what wrong with 'ye old magic shop' selling the things wizards need? Fighters have to do the same preparation - the metal to make their armour and swords must be dug out the ground, smelted, refined and shaped and fitted by craftsmen. Instead, they hire the craftsmen to make their tools for them, leaving them time to practice their fighting skills. Olympic athletes don't become good by sewing their floor mats or carving their vaulting poles, they get good by constant practice, offloading the craftmaking to others. If wizards are so powerful, why not just offload all the gathering, crafting, etc to a second party, leaving you with the time to become the master of wizardry?

Because I want to be my own ye old magic shop. Ideally, ye old magic shop is run by an old, experienced wizard. Wizards don't work the same way as fighters. I mean, there's no reason fighters can mine, smelt, refine and shape their weapons and armour, but that's a laborious, time consuming process. It's not an instant effect. Magic has instant effects, and magic is as infinitely more versatile as it is frustrating.

Could the wizard hire an assistant to gather materials? Sure thing, but part of the mystical wizard process is being able to know what to gather in the first place, where to gather it and how, because magic isn't a scientific method, it's symbolic and capricious. Not only would you have to learn what to do, you'd have spend years teaching an apprentice what to do. The wizard could make deals and bargains with traders and merchants who travel the land, but you run into the same problem. In the end, magic is personal and spiritual.

Gathering ingredients, journeying, exploring and experimenting are all skills to be honed for a wizard, magical practices are the end result of everything.

Running? I can teleport.
Lifting wieghts? I have telekinesis.
Fighting? I have demons doing that for me.
If you need me, I'll be in my pocket plane, researching.

>researching
>he doesn't have advanced constructs doing research for him
>he doesn't just directly implant research memospores into his brain
>he doesn't just sit in his pocket plane and fuck magical clones of himself
Shit wizard

>capricious symbolic laws
you can't really have a system of repeatable magic without some stable groundwork rules.

i actually like magic to be a law of nature, but with wizards being hackers - they make the system do what it wasn't designed for. for example it can be a law of nature that living beings are reservoirs of positive energy and powered by it. as they age they lose positive energy until there's nothing left and they die. a wizard could realize that instead of adding positive energy to prolong life, he could take negative energy from the reservoir, thus tricking reality into making the subject un-dead.
it could be a law of nature that friction generates microscopic conduits to the elemental plane of fire that close over time. a wizard can realize that he can trick reality into thinking that molecules of air between his hands generate enough friction to open a larer portal and then hurl such fireball at their enemies.

Constructs? You think I'm made of money? I have apprentices doing all that. Then I eat their souls. And fuck the pretty ones.

>That kind of magic is boring, that's just martial arts with special effects, that's Avatar shit.

How does it feel to be lame all day, every day? I often wonder what it might be like.

>Shit wizard

>you can't really have a system of repeatable magic without some stable groundwork rules.

Some of it is, though. Just not all of it. If you do a certain thing under a certain phase of the moon with the instruments, it'll work, for any number of strange reasons. And there's a dozen ways to do most things. Magic is as versatile as it is frustrating. To put it bluntly, it's magic, it's doesn't really have to make sense. Things work because of spirits, or sympathy, or symbols, or will, or something else abstract.

What you're describing just sounds like fantasy science. I feel like most things these days are just that. For magic to be truly magical, there has to be an element of mystery and uncertainty, a decentralized nature, there's no reservoirs of nebulous energy to draw from in some form that just makes stuff happen. Magic is like a great intricate web that overlays everything from the smallest bug shells and plants to rays of starlight and the alignments of celestial bodies. It's on another level of understanding from the mundane. Mysticism is what's missing from magic these days.

How does it feel to have no imagination and be so easily impressed by bright lights and flashy colours? I often wonder what that must be like.

The reason is that while mysticism is fine for stories, it's absolutely terrible for games with any kind of rules.

What you describe sounds good, but the very mystery and uncertainty you want makes it hugely unreliable, and frankly things working because of spirits, sympathy, symbols, or phases of the moon are still rules. They may not follow a logical progression in the strictest sense, but they're still "if you do x, then y happens."

Unless you want magic to just be some kind of huge table of random events that you have little to no control over, there have to be some kind of rules in place.

Mysticism can work for games, as long as the people who are actually doing the magic are still allowed to know the rules.

Look at Ars Magica, for example; your Magician is going to know that if you want to bind the ghost of a recently killed man back into his body, you need to be good at the technique of Rego, and the form of Mentem. Your Grogs and Companions, though, are going to have no idea what that means, and the best way to describe a situation like that is to have the Magician performing some memorized ritual(assuming they're using a Formulaic spell) or improvising some magical mumbo-jumbo(if it's an improvised spell) in order to draw the spirit back into the corpse. For the Grog and the Companion, all they know is Greg the Wizard started chanting, then took a knife and cut his hand, and a few seconds later, the corpse sat up and started talking.

The issue, there, being that most games are going to involve a Magician and a Companion controlled by every player, and thus it's easy to forget that the Companions have no idea how the Magicians do what they do, or how any of it works.
That, and more often than not, people are just going to skim over the details of the spooky ritual with "Okay, I'm gonna cast x spell. I rolled high enough, so it works." and then move along with the story.

>easily impressed by bright lights and flashy colours
You've just described a child