Why are wizards so bad at being competant people? Does magic fry your brain?

This. Like, if you can generate food with a trivial spell then you are removed from the human condition. At least in character/fluffwise clerics have a strong organizational and philosophical framework for defining their interactions with society, whereas wizards are just libertarian superheroes flying around making owlbears.

Your mind-set is a product of your environment. If you've spent years in a tower with all sorts of reality bending shit, you're not going to be thinking like some farmhand.

I usually have it fluffed as conjured food tasting really bland, which keeps the human element in there and gives the party something to RP out—cooking whatever they kill, Dungeon Meshi style.

Rowling is a shit writer. It's not like she made Dumbledore incompetent on purpose.

Yes.

This. It's either I don't have a specific spell to do this, or I want to stretch the limit of a spell to do it.

Yeah it's one of those series that if you didn't get into it when you were a kid you probably shouldn't now.

Take a look at IRL professors and the like. Mad scientist stereotype has roots in reality. Call it autism or whatever, but too much knowledge on one subject kinda makes you overspecialized.

>Does magic fry your brain?
Ya, duh, have you never herd of Hyperthaumaturgical Degradation?

pretty sure that is how conjured food is surpose to be

Wizards are just spergy engineers with magic powers.

Yep, if someone doesn't have to live like a regular person, they don't understand how regular people operate at all. No friction in your life makes you retarded.

Well I know what Im using in my next game. Will explain why the bbeg is a luddite orc who cannot open a door without magic but can still destroy a city with a spell.

At least in d&d a cantrip, prestidigitation, allows you to heat, cool or even flavour food as desired.
But then d&d was never the place to look for logical sensible magic.
You can also offer minor buffs and benefits for eating better food, especially from powerful monsters, to incentivise rp. There's even a lot of mythic basis for it. Mermaid meat granting immortality, heroes gathering rare plants for charms and magic or for a witch to make a brew to help their quest.

>magical luddites
So you're making Arcanum style game where magic doesn't agree with technology?

Yes, conjured food is supposed to be boring. I make sure to emphasize that to the players and explain to them that killing and eating certain monsters will give them a minor bonus. Like +1 to hit or +1 on their skill rolls for 24 hours, something to incentivize roleplaying out cooking and eating.

Stuff like skill or save bonuses against certain things is better imo since you can factor it into your plans for the challenges they'll be facing.

Yeah, that's another potential bonus. Usually +1 to +3 depending on what they eat and how rare/magical the meat is.
I've even done some weirder stuff like giving people ethereal from eating ectoplasm.

Yeah the ethereal thing is neat, or you could do stuff like jelly made with ectoplasm granting the ability to see spirits or even invisible creatures in general.
There're really endless options to fit the theme and need.

I enjoy Adventure Time's Description

>"Magic Man" has cooked up a complicated scheme: he tricks Betty (side character) into thinking that his transmutation device will help her discover the true source of magic and, thus, allow her to save Simon (ex lover lost to the effects of magic and dementia), but in reality, Magic Man has ulterior motives, Tiny Manticore thinks he just wants to turn her into a talking skateboard. Betty has more than just luck on her side, she’s done the research. She has discovered that all magic users display magic, madness, and sadness. It’s a nice little metaphor for a creative person too. Art often comes from the madness and sadness, often to debilitating degrees. What the episode seems to ask is whether the magic is a symptom of the madness and sadness, as Betty posits, or if they are the very cause of it, as the ending seems to suggest.

Well that is a bit foreboding.

They see behind the curtain that normal people can't. They hold terrible power, but have human drives. Think about all the times you've wanted to psychicly smack someone. Or just teleport home instead of go through traffic. For a wizard this is absolutely possible. So they stop dealling with petty shit. No they aren't going to painfully explain all the fucking magic that makes something work. They are going to tell you to shut the fuck up because it's too inconvenient to explain. They will teleport away when they are done with you because why fucking walk? They are going to create horrors of monstrous size to be their guard dog because owlbears make cooler fucking guard dogs. When you don't have to deal with petty bullshit because magic makes everything convenient, you start seeing more & more things as inconvenient. Why the fuck should i spend so much time making the effort to relate to people who are so limited?

Take the pic related

Dumbledore could go into detail talking to the Dursleys about Lily's protection charm & the importance of it against Voldy, he could sit with them, & explain who Voldy is, he xould explain why they cannot just "magic" him away & about horcruxes & the prophecy all that bullshit. OR he could put Harry on the doorstep, informing that Lily & James died & they need to take care of Harry until he is at a useful age for him to indoctrinate into being the perfect weapon against Voldy.

>Hey hold this baby, Ill be back later. Thx

Have you ever heard of the Monster Menu-All? It's a homebrew thing for the mechanical effects of eating monsters that sometimes gets posted in the /osrg/.

I need this to eat monsters.

No, but it is the dullest franchise in the history of movie franchises. Each episode following the boy wizard and his pals from Hogwarts Academy as they fight assorted villains has been indistinguishable from the others. Aside from the gloomy imagery, the series’ only consistency has been its lack of excitement and ineffective use of special effects, all to make magic unmagical, to make action seem inert.

Perhaps the die was cast when Rowling vetoed the idea of Spielberg directing the series; she made sure the series would never be mistaken for a work of art that meant anything to anybody, just ridiculously profitable cross-promotion for her books. The Harry Potter series might be anti-Christian (or not), but it’s certainly the anti-James Bond series in its refusal of wonder, beauty and excitement. No one wants to face that fact. Now, thankfully, they no longer have to.

>a-at least the books were good though
"No!"
The writing is dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character "stretched his legs."

I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling's mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing. Later I read a lavish, loving review of Harry Potter by the same Stephen King. He wrote something to the effect of, "If these kids are reading Harry Potter at 11 or 12, then when they get older they will go on to read Stephen King." And he was quite right. He was not being ironic. When you read "Harry Potter" you are, in fact, trained to read Stephen King.

I've finally become a wizard today. I will let you know.

Its Plato cave all the way.

This copypasta is especially cancerous

Traditionally, wizards were equated to scholars, largely as the logical extreme of someone dedicating their lives to knowledge.
They are the equivalent of someone who has learned Latin, Ancient Greek, the Teutonic language, Ancient Sumerian, Persian, Egyptian, and probably a few more. They also have the education of a math professor, a professional meteorologist, a historian (with PhDs in half a dozen fields), an archaeologist, an architect, a cryptographer, a zoologist (this is such a weird word to spell), a botanist, and medicine. Then add on to all this the effects of reading shit like the Necronomican and dealing with all the usual spirits, demons, daemons (which are different), and fae.

Traditionally, "professor" types are expected to be married to their work, to be "above" things like love and physical attraction. Take Harvard and other Ivy League schools, as well as most British universities. Some of them STILL don't allow the wives of faculty members to live on-campus since that sort of thing has no place in academia.

Wizards are THAT turned up to 11.

There's a reason wizards are usually depicted as being incredibly old and eccentric.

I am currently seeing through the eyes of madness- I have not slept in over 48 hours and have been actively working mentally for well half of them.
That is how a wizard thinks. All the fucking time. All the disconnect from reality, all the mystic insight, all the batshit insanity.
I shall dance for you the dance of the wizards, and you shall despair with eyes bleeding green.

>god tier is 1/4th high school required reading

hmmmmmm

stop larping faggo

Aw eat shit. Whatever happened to not taking everything stick-up-the-ass seriously?

he said with a 12 foot stick skewering him from anus to esophagus

when you can magic away all your problems you tend to lose the ability to solve them without using magic.

>WIZARDS HELP ME

Literally every fighter ever

>missing art of the deal and Clifford the big red dog

So a wizard is a lot like Rick... (From Rick and morty) Ok now want to see a episode where they get stuck inside a D&D game.

>implying those aren't required reading
what kind of shit school did you go to?

>Clifford
>middle tier
What sort of heresy are you supporting here?

Can you post the homebrew, please?

SKERPLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES
coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/07/monster-menu-all-part-1-eating-ad.html

This. Well, and

The thing is, magic is a major problem. It's usually not terribly rational in its internal logic (power comes from making deals with non-human beings that usually involves doing weird or sometimes even evil stuff, or power comes from willpower and belief ie you can have something illogical become true just by wanting it enough, or power comes from strange secret knowledge or rules of the universe that aren't completely logical). So surprise surprise, people who are good at it aren't terribly logical themselves.

Then on top of that, your personal power is so huge that you get used to it. Why bother being reasonable when you can wave a wand and unreasonable things happen? Or when you can coerce someone by threatening/promising to use that power on them? The super-rich, the super-powerful, the super-famous.... what effect does that have on people in real life? Especially the ones who don't spend years working their way to the top and so have social power thrust on them without knowing how to deal with it or what limits to have? Especially when you are personally more powerful than an army and so don't really NEED to accept that your whims should have limits.

Then if you get past all that, think of the storyteller trying to include a character like this in a tale. You want them balanced enough that they can't wave a magic wand and make the rest of your story go up in a puff of smoke. So either you balance them by putting them against a peer (in which case your story is now personal rivalry) or having a well thought-out magic system that limits them (such disciplined world-building is rare), or you give them character flaws that limit their ability to use their I Win button intelligently. Most writers go for the last option.

Yeah I resemble that remark but it's true.

Fuck off Reddit

This seems pretty fun. Might change some of the save-or-die stuff though, that seems more fitting for the super-lethal earlier editions

>Harry Potter is what happens when you submit your world to meaningless whimsy
Harry Potter is what happens when you make a remarkably atmospheric and well written YA schlock and then envious people try to critique it like it's meant to be high literature.
Otherwise yeah, there's no rime nor reason to the setting, and pretty much every interview Rowling ever gave can confirm that she's literally not socially aware enough to do any better.

>coming off the back of a Discworld marathon the actual quality of writing was overly juvenile
No shit you dumbass. Try making kids read Pratchett, see how that works out.

I was reading pratchet in middle school, I started with guards guards.

Today the watch is my go to favorite discworld grouping, anything with the watch. But reaper man is my favorite all time book.

I prefer it when spellcasters are inherently evil or at least dicks.

>you can undo wizard's power utterly by using his true name in a ritual
>in Black Company all powerful wizards do the best logical thing: kill everyone who knew them during life just to be on the safe side and assume monikers

It's no surprise ancient evils in the settings are powerful spellcasters who are jacked up on magic beyond belief to a point most can't die through natural and you need to get past waves and waves of magic to dispose of them. More than one survives despite just their head remaining intact, for example.

Same mentality yes. I dont want to go too deep into the rabbit hole since Veeky Forums hates Rick & Morty for some reason, but the way Rick deals with people & problems is a good example

>8128▶
>Absolute power corrupts absolutely

This is the first thing that popped in my head. I was trying to play a lawful good wizard, but my DM gave us a harrow deck of many things at level 3. By the end of that session I was a 18th level Lich with mythic tiers and an enslaved genie.