I really don't understand. Tolkien's wizards cast like what, maybe 3 spells? Ever seen Gandalf hurling fireballs...

No? My point was precisely that people do it for both wizards and fighters. Thus: "To be entirely fair"

Because playing a character that casts 1 spell a session at max would be boring af

Only if you can't think of anything at all to do that isn't "use a class feature off my sheet."

>Is there even any point in being a master swordsmen in a universe where people nonchalantly hurl firebolts like pebbles?
Largely depends on whether being a master swordsman also gives you superhuman strength, speed, stamina and endurance.

>using the D&D magic system
and this is why his opinion is shit

The sword & sorcery approach is generally that magic is a shortcut to power, and is (usually) inherently evil and/or is a corruptive influence on the user. Part of the issue with "OMG WIZURD R GRATE" is that in shitty settings, magic has literally no downside whatsoever.

...

Really think about if it would be fun to be the guy that knows a lot of things, but can barely cast spells.

In most of the old myths and stories, wizards don't have particularly world-shattering powers, because most settings were pretty low magic all in all. And they were practically NPCs helping out the real martial PCs anyway - think about how Merlin or Gandalf or Allanon, or even antagonists like Morgania le Fay, Circe or Saruman are used. They're knowledgable, a little mystical, but otherwise are barely different from the average person and only use magic in small ways or with demonic aid. In making them more fun as PCs and useful in their own right, they got amped up in power to an almost stupid level, to the point that their original incarnations seem stupidly weak. And that's happened on some level with every class, otherwise levelling would be much more boring with less payoff.

We have this thread too often but I'll throw my two cents in. In DnD, wizards and martials are set up to satisfy two different fantasy tropes but both are forced to follow one. What I mean is, wizards are powerful but they are established as scholars, requiring intense research,
gathering of rare materials, and use of rituals to alter reality via magic. This is adverse to the regular adventuring formula, which is mainly -in the case of dungeon crawling - is just linear exploration and combat, which is more tailored to a martial playstyle.
Many DMs purposeful forget what is meant to balance wizards - namely things like extensive preparation of components - for the sake of stream-lining the adventure. This leads wizards to being overpowered.

>Many DMs purposeful forget what is meant to balance wizards - namely things like extensive preparation of components - for the sake of stream-lining the adventure. This leads wizards to being overpowered.
They're not forgetting anything, it's in the rules that a spell component pouch costs basically nothing and contains all components that don't have a listed price (which is basically all of them for commonly cast spells).

To contrast, you have settings where it takes extreme study and practice to perform even the slightest of magical skills.
Any schmuck can pick up a sword and graduate from meatshield within a month or two, wheras magic could take years.
For an example, imagine having to memorise the exact calculations needed to summon, contain and direct a fireball at a target so that it
>Ignited at all.
>Didnt explode.
>Didnt fizzle out before it hit the target.
>DIdnt burn you.
>Stayed on target.
Not to mention any physical components you might need depending on particular setting.
It can be a lot more complex than "I cast fireball"

Because his wizards are actually Maiar. People don't just get to magic shit up for free.

Sauron, Gandalf, Saruman, and the other wizards are all Maiar. Balrogs are Maiar. Elves were given powers from the Valar. Morgoth was an Ainu. The Witch-king was given magic by Sauron.

Short of it is that they didn't break the wizard down into different, more specialized classes. The one's they have usually fall into a solid tier 3 cause their purview isn't 'can do everything related to magic, ever'.

That only became a thing with 3E, before that you had to track what components you had and in what amounts. Obviously, that was a huge pain in the ass

It actually isn't. My first introduction to D&D was AD&D, and in that low level wizards have to scurry around trying to keep their squishy selves intact until they can unlease their one-three game-changing spells. Its a lot more fun and tense than you might think.

I always thought magic in Tolkien's universe was something much more subtle and harder to grasp than just casting spells. E.g. the ring doesn't really do much that is practical.

The thing is Tolkien wrote a novel. Gandalf knows and discovers things, and works intelligently on a strategic level over decades.

Your average DnD player is a mental 13-year old who needs to feel powerful and roll dice with his warrior and thief pals or he gets impatient and spoils the game 5 minutes into the 1st of countless random dice rolling encounters throughout the night.

None of the wizards in LoTR are players, they are guiding npcs to the party of hobbits.

>Tolkien's wizards cast like what, maybe 3 spells?

They cast multiple spells, they're just not as showy and vulgar as most settings. Gandalf knows spells of healing, and opposition, and locking, and unlocking, and summoning, and fire, and light, and protection.

>Ever seen Gandalf hurling fireballs?

Yeah. He does it in the Hobbit and in Lord of the Rings on Weathertop.

Exactly this. Magic was just an exaggerated form of art, which was just manipulation of creation (or sub-creation, as Tolkien called it). Spells are nature shaped by skilled hands. The magic of the Enemy was more brute force of that nature, like building dams or canals instead of guiding the flow of a river.

Gandalf wasn't in Weathertop scene.

>confirmed for having never read the books

There is a scene where Frodo witnessed a massive light show on Weathertop, 3 days journey away from it, too. When they get there, the place is burnt to shit and Aragorn finds Gandalf's rune carved into a rock.

What do you mean when you say the Elves were given powers from the Valar? As far as I remember, the elves are capable of crafting magical items, but are otherwise not inherently magical beings (which is why they need the said rings of power to maintain their realms)

>Ever seen Gandalf hurling fireballs?
and yet
Here he is hurling lightning bolts everywhere.

That doesn't mean that Gandalf cast fireball spells like you claimed, that's just your own interpretation not a fact.

Except he clearly did.

One of the big problems is that over editions, all the restrictions that wizards had have been relaxed and trivialised.
Spell components are now, with a few exceptions, a triviality.
Casting times and miscasts have been reduced
Levelling has been accelerated to match that of the other classes
Acquiring new spells is easier
Multiclassing & Prestige classes have been made easy and abundant ways to cover class weaknesses

user, you have jumped to being a faggot now, stop it.

Moreover, there are no trees on Weathertop.
Both in Hobbit and LotR Gandalf cannot make fire out of thin air, he needs wood to burn.
In Hobbit he lights trees on fire with a spell instead of attacking the trolls directly with fire.
In LotR when they're trying to walk through the mountain pass he admits that he cannot make fire without wood to burn.

>what is grass

Gandalf is wearing a magical sword, and it clashing with the enemies might very well caused the lightshow, much like the flash when two lightsabers clash.
Gandalf cannot make fire out of thin air, but needs wood to set on fire.

>Gandalf is wearing a magical sword

It only ever glowed in the presence of orcs.

>and it clashing with the enemies might very well caused the lightshow

Not to be seen from 3 days journey away, it won't.

>much like the flash when two lightsabers clash

Now you're arguing FOR high-fantasy.

>Gandalf cannot make fire out of thin air, but needs wood to set on fire.

Grass exists. He can burn that, and he did. Here's a quote for you:

"On the top they found..., a wide ring of ancient stonework, now crumbling.... But in the centre a cairn of broken stones had been piled. They were blackened as if with fire. About them the turf was burned to the roots and all within the ring the grass was scorched and shrivelled, as if flames had swept the hill-top; but there was no sign of any living thing...."

Looks like D&D being a Tolkien rip-off is a meme created by people with little knowledge about one or both of them!

Yeah, in a world with DnD levels of magic, anything other than wizards is a inferior being. But dnd is not a realistic setting

Two more quotes for you.

>'Perhaps,' said Strider. 'For myself, I believe that he was here, and was in danger. There have been scorching flames here; and now the light that we saw three nights ago in the eastern sky comes back to my mind. I guess that he was attacked on this hill-top, but with what result I cannot tell. He is here no longer, and we must now look after ourselves and make our own way to Rivendell, as best we can.'

>'I galloped to Weathertop like a gale, and I reached it before sundown on my second day from Bree — and they were there before me. They drew away from me, for they felt the coming of my anger and they dared not face it while the Sun was in the sky. But they closed round at night, and I was besieged on the hill-top, in the old ring of Amon Sûl. I was hard put to it indeed: such light and flame cannot have been seen on Weathertop since the war-beacons of old.'

So far that's 3 quotes directly from Fellowship of the Ring. Add in all the other connections to fire (like Gandalf owning Narya the ring of fire, telling the Balrog he is a servant of the secret fire and wields the flame of Anor, ability to increase fire until it turns blue, lighting a soaked log on fire, and burning wargs with napalm-like pinecones), and I think we can probably just put your contrarian game to the side.

You dense motherfucker.

How do you actually manage to be this dense? When I said "Gandalf hurling fireballs", I was clearly comparing it to Dnd. Putting on a legendary artefact and doing a one-time flame-shatter combo and mind you even Gandalf himself says it was hard to do it, is not the same thing as hurling fireballs at your will five times a day.

Thank you. This is what I was trying to say, being a wizard should be like this.

It doesn't help that a lot of wizard flaws also harm the whole group. Even if I'm a warrior I'll rather get rid of components than waste my time collecting it.

Tolkien dont have wizards. Gandalf and his brethren are sort of minor gods

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
― Gildor Inglorion

Would you look at that? But yeah sure I choose your terminology instead of the genre's creator. When you play as a Dragonborn Wizard, make sure to not call yourself a wizard but merely a Dragonborn.

Veeky Forums truly turned into a shithole.

In the Kalevala, a wizard sinks a continent by singing at it.

>When I said "Gandalf hurling fireballs", I was clearly comparing it to Dnd.

And he does hurl fireballs. Stop having a tantrum just because you were ignorant in your OP.

Yep.

Honestly, True Ressurrection and Wish are the only spells with material components I have ever seen enforced. The rest of the time, neither the GM nor the player have the time of day to actually look up and point out that no, your wizard can't cast this spell he prepared three times today because you don't have a branch from a tree a man was hanged from on a full moon.

Unless we know the damage output and the specifics of his spells, this article is stupid.
The DnD manual allows for players to fluff their spells as thy wish as long as the effects are the same. So I can cast a magic missile in the form of a plasma bolt, phantasmagorical shuriken, giant stone uppercut, and so on...

The problem with casters in nearly every game which has them along with martials, is that they can do everything a martial can, and more, with paltry sacrifices or risks to their person or property.

Powerful Wizards are rare as fuck, I devised a chart somewhere that showed how many people at certain tiers and levels existed in the average campaign world at any given time, PCs are atypical that's for certain.

Could you post that chart? It sounds interesting.

>9

No, Gandalf is a fucking Solar pretending to be a human and told that he can't use half of his abilities.

If I can dig it up when I get home. It was a break down of leveled characters by population in a generic DnD setting that can be adjusted for taste. I'm at work right now I'll put it somewhere if the thread dies before I get home.

What's wrong with doing cool stuff once per session/day/month? If it doesn't strip you from ability to do anything else it's pretty fun without magic users being OP fireball machines.

"Years of studies" or "only one in a gorillion has the gift" is bullshit in RPGs especially if it costs as much as having 2 months of practice with a sword in terms of character creation.

Daily reminder that is full of shit because Gandalf was, for one reason or another (mainly not sinking more continents), under heavy restrictions all the time.

I wish each school of magic for dnd had its own class.

>2 months of practice with a sword

First level Fighting Men in OD&D were called "Veterans." It was more than "two months practice with a sword."

We literally, LITERALLY, have this thread multiple times a day. Don't you people get bored with thinly veiled 3.PF whining? Why do you act like 3.5 is the only edition of D&D in existence, and that D&D is the world's only RPG system? Either play something else, or shut up about it. Do you people even play RPGs? If you did I'd think you'd have better things to talk about.

There was a LOTR game running on D&D rules that made Gandalf a cleric

Tigana had some interesting ideas about magic. A wizard can hardly project enough power to stop a falling person but they can curse whole humanity to forget about something and buff armies to superhuman levels.

He hurls fireballs at gobbos in the hobbit when they escape the misty mountians, right before the eagles take them to the bear guy. I don't recall it happening "on screen" in LotR

>He hurls fireballs at gobbos in the hobbit when they escape the misty mountians
He hurls burning pinecones you mong

>telling the Balrog he is a servant of the secret fire and wields the flame of Anor

In the book also I think it said that after he made his declaration the Balrog's fire dimmed and it became more of a creature of darkness.

Which might be connected to the ring he wore and authority it gave him.

Material component: pinecone

Gandalf is a celestial sent to help the mortals deal with their problems without DMPCing it.

You can always you know... not allow mages to have a component pouch?

congratulations, now you get to discover that there's no rules for gathering/buying components outside of said pouch, hopefully you love making boring busywork houserules.

Tbh mate Gandalf's about 3rd level, very powerful in Tolkien. When he became 'The White' he levelled up.

Obviously the D.M totally jobed that Balrog. ;-)

This is the highest degree of bullshit. Where the fuck am I supposed to carry multiple clay pots on my person during an adventure to raise the dead?

you know the wizards were angels right?
and that they only didnt used their magics because they werent allowed by their superiors?

AD&D Druid had that spell.

this is autism pure and plain

Gandalf was basically an angel and the spells miracles to minorly aid the chosen of god. His main contribution was knowledge from his long life and getting the journey started.

You're not supposed to have too many miracles in a dramatic fantasy story, it makes the heroes seems pointless.

What's with all the arguing? Are the burgers still awake?

Thread's been dead for eight hours, give it up already.

Veteran is anyone who survived a single military campaign, so it's more than 2 months of practice but not that much.

And wizards had experience penalty (more exp required to advance). So they had some sort of price to pay.

>grok
My water brother!

>using D&D to try to define Gandalf
Why'd you use an unrelated ruleset to try to define a character from a universe that plays by its own internal rules?

>writing is less than one page
>is about the biggest fantasy novel and the biggest fantasy rpg in the world
>is published in an rpg magazine in the 70s
>is only observations and nothing else
Autism it ain't.

READ
A
BOOK
>Veeky Forums now has people with the normie trait of assuming books and movies have a 1/1 correlation
fucking shoot me

Gygax said he didnt like Tolkien for a fucking reason. He wasnt joking.
His knowledge of how LotR universe works was very secondhand. Thats why his interpretation of Elves is so far off too

>Gygax said he didnt like Tolkien for a fucking reason.
Jesus fucking Christ

Did he have a specific reason?

Hippies made Tolkien popular. Gygax was more into Conan.

Huh, all right. No wonder D&D's Tolkien-esque stuff is kinda garbage.

no wonder D&D is garbage

>Why do you act like 3.5 is the only edition of D&D in existence
ive been saying this about Veeky Forums since 2009. itll never stop.

He thinks it is super slow faced, stupid and unexciting.

Look up this article;
grognardia.blogspot.com.tr/2010/01/gygax-on-tolkien-again.html

What a fucking muppet

Eru Ilúvatar granted the Elves everlasting grace, near immortality, keen sight, and unmatched skill with craft. They were magical beings in the sense that their abilities and power were tied to the state of Middle-Earth, that as Man began their Dominion of ME, magic wanes and any elf that remained in Middle-Earth would fade away entirely as their bodies were consumed by the power of their spirits

also he was a moorcock fan and moorcock wrote anti tolkien rants alot back then, probably made gygax a bit biased. his players liked Tolkien and I think Dave Arneson did

> "Tolkien includes a number of heroic figures, but they are not of the "Conan" stamp. They are not larger-than-life swashbucklers who fear neither monster nor magic. His wizards are either ineffectual or else they lurk in their strongholds working magic spells which seem to have little if any effect while their gross and stupid minions bungle their plans for supremacy. "
-Gygax

He truly belongs to Veeky Forums.

this needs to be reposted every time we have this thread from now on. it will nip these debates in the bud right away

>shitting on a setting you've borrowed heavily from whilst also misunderstanding some of it's most basic ideas
Veeky Forums indeed, user.

Read Earthsea, nigga.

One detail of the setting is that the most powerful wizards cast the fewest spells, because they intimately understand the side effects and implications of every spell they cast, and how it all relates both to the physical world and to the metaphysical cosmic balance. A good example is weather magic. If you drive away a storm cloud, it's going to rain on someone else. It's also not going to water the plants it would have watered. It's because they are powerful that they don't sling fireballs willy-nilly.

>I was only pretending to be retarded