Wizard Class - Class Identity of the Magic-User

What is a wizard? You're probably thinking about this right now. When you overthink things like I do, meanings of concepts get overworked until they're not recognizable.

Nomenclature

In English (the official language of space and time according to Doctor Who), the "-ard" suffix is attached to the end of a word to denote when someone is of a condition. Example: dullard, drunkard, and wizard. If dullard comes from dull, and drunkard comes from drunk, where does wizard come from? Wiz?

Wise.

Literally, wizard means someone who is wise. A class of the wise. That's a heck of a label for a class. Is this the intelligentsia class?

Wizard as a word originally described a learned person. The association with magic or the occult came later, but that's outside my area of expertise.

Original D&D Classes - Origins of the Modern Wizard?

The original D&D game had only three classes: Fighting-Man which later became the fighter, Cleric, and Magic-User which has since become the wizard.

Classes in Advanced D&D 1e had level titles, which, at least aesthetically, resembled ranks. The titles got more prestigious as you leveled up. Fighter earned titles like soldier, knight, then lord (or lady). Clerics earned titles like acolyte, village priest, bishop, and patriarch. A magic-user enjoyed various titles that don't immediately denote more prestige, and they weren't called a wizard until level 11.

If the rules of the game describe the setting, and by some interpretations they do, classes might describe social classes within the setting rather than just character classifications within the rules. This is actually a very good way to ground the mechanics of your game within the world. Fighter resembles the military class. Clerics resemble the clergy class. Magic-Users resemble the, what, class of scholars? Arcane? Mystics? Sure.

In classic D&D, there was an assumption that when you reached your level cap, the game changed from adventuring to domain play. I have no idea how it worked, but each class secures land, builds its own stronghold, and earns its own followers.

Here's the caveat, there appears to be differences in roles for domain play depending on your class.

While fighters were the sort of military commander, the wizard was more of an advisor or strategist. The sounds like a mentor archetype in fiction. The mentor character is typically a supporting character in fiction; not the main character. Oof. Ouch, Gary.

What is a Wizard, Really?

See, here's the thing. There's no real-world equivalent for a magic-user or fantasy wizard. It's made up. That makes it an abstract concept. Even if we all think we understand what a wizard is, someone else can come along and redefine what a wizard is for their game or fiction, completely turning the concept on its head and subverting all conventions, and they're technically not wrong to do it. You would simply say their version of a wizard is different.

In fiction, wizards are typically the mentor, advisor, scholar, or villain rather than hero.

Who are the famous wizard-mentors of fantasy? Merlin. Gandalf. Dumbledore. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Yes, Obi-Wan counts! Watch Episode IV, A New Hope! He totally counts!

Also, Dumbledore is in there now. Good on you, JK Rowling. You know you are successful as a writer when one of your characters can be counted among classical archetypes. Respect.

What happens when the full-fledged wizard becomes the protagonist?

Doctor Who?

The Doctor is a fully-fledged wizard-protagonist. He's a scholar, a traveler, a keeper of obscure knowledge, someone who understands things ordinary people do not, he solves problems through knowledge rather than force, he mentors younger companions, and he seems mysterious and supernatural from the perspective of ordinary people.

Just replace his sonic screwdriver with a magic wand. Replace the TARDIS with a wizard's tower. He doesn't perform spells, but he has the wisdom to perform scientific feats that are like magic to others because no one else can replicate them.

D&D says wizards are magic artillery. Literature says wizards are wise.

The Doctor is often the most powerful person in the room because he understands the situation better than anyone else. That is a wizard according to the classical definition.

Magic isn't what makes a wizard. Wisdom is. It's in the name!

What Kind of Magic-User Are You?

Circling back to classic D&D, the old name for the wizard class was Magic-User and wizard was a high-level class title. They chose magic-user as a class name because they weren't concerned with what kind of magic-user you were, like illusionist, necromancer, wizard, warlock, or sorcerer. They were only concerned that you were a magic-user.

In this line of reasoning, what kind of wisdom does your wizard possess? What kind of wizard are you, and how does your wisdom fit into the setting? Are you an occult scholar? A sage? A scientist? A strategist? A seer? A teacher? A healer? Yes, I'm counting healers!

D&D 5e Wizards Are Still Wizards (Kind of)

Modern D&D distinguishes wizards from other spellcasting classes by the source of their magic. Wizards learn spells through study, practice, and mastery. They can research spells and add them to their spellbooks. They're categorized into arcane traditions which focus on specific schools of magic (abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy, and transmutation).

The D&D 5e wizard is relatively in line with the concept of a wiz-ard. I would tweak it by giving them more utility spells and less damaging spells.

Conclusion

The identity of the wizard is wise one rather than powerful one. You're more than your spells. When you play a wizard, figure out how you fit into the setting. You start out as an apprentice wizard at low levels. Your experience makes you wiser. Your growing power is an expression of that wizening. By higher levels, get an NPC apprentice. Pass it down. Your wisdom is who you are. It's your legacy. And put a little bit of the Doctor in your character!

Fighters are Universal - Class Identity

Having played enough D&D 5e and having lurked in enough internet spaces where people discuss the game, I can tell you that human fighters are statistically the most commonly occurring characters in D&D 5e (according to some old, published data from D&D Beyond here and here), but also the most criticized as being really basic, simple, or vanilla.

I take issue with this criticism. The fighter is not basic. It's a blank slate.

The Classic D&D Fighter

Classes in classic D&D determined your playstyle and your role in the party. Classic D&D did not balance the classes so that everyone was equally valuable in every situation. If you wanted to excel in combat, you picked fighter. No one else had as much HP, could hit as well, could get their AC as high, or use magic swords.

Fighters were the all-star in combat. Everyone else was back-up. Modern D&D powered everyone else up. The fighter doesn't stand out anymore. They lost their niche a hardest to hurt and hardest hitting to the Barbarian.

Every Culture has its own Fighter 

The word fighter means one who fights. That's it. It's intentionally vague. It doesn't prescribe what kind of fighter you are; it just describes you as a fighter. It's up to you how you want to flavor your fighter within the setting. Are you an Amazon warrior, a Roman Legionnaire, a Samurai, a Knight?

What is a kung fu practitioner or a shaolin monk, what D&D effectively calls a Monk, but the fighter of its own culture? What is a Barbarian but a fighter from a technologically underdeveloped culture? What is a Paladin but a religious fighter? What is a Ranger but a fighter who traded heavy armor for outdoor survival skills?

If you're not sold, Barbarian, Paladin, and Ranger began conceptually as sub-classes of fighter. Barbarian appeared in issue 63 (1982) of Dragon magazine published by TSR. The Paladin first appeared in Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975). The ranger first appeared in a newsletter called Strategic Review (1975), published by TSR. All specifically as fighter sub-classes.

Fighter means fighter. Whatever your cultures' concept of a fighter is, that's what your variety of fighter is. You are your culture's warrior class. That's all. Sub-classes rather than separate, distinct classes, are a great way to capture that flavor and mechanical variety.

Military or Warrior Class

If you're a fighter, how do you fit into the setting? The easiest way to insert you into the world as a fighter in a way that makes sense is to decide that you are somehow a part of your culture's military or warrior class. This is easily done as many cultures have required men of fighting age to be able to fight. Where you a militiaman? Were you a soldier? Where you a conscript? Where you a knight? Did you become a mercenary when your service was done?

Lots of men went into military service, either as a rite of passage, societal duty, or by force.

Very rarely did some farm boy pick up a sword for the first time and go slay some monsters as some fiction will depict (Lunar the Silver Star anyone?).

The Fighter's Place in Society

Defending the homeland has always a need of civilization regardless of the size or scale of the home. This was the job of the soldier or warrior. Chances are that veterans are seen as protectors, valiant, strong, tough, and tested. They put themselves in danger for everyone else. They are typically worthy of some amount of respect, and they probably had a few inspiring stories to tell that each matched a mark on their body.

Fighters are the heroes of society whose deeds are rarely witnessed by the people they love, and some of those deeds come with aches and pains and nightmares that never go away. This is why they are respected.

When a Fighter Turns Rebellious

Deserters and traitors are what first come to mind when you think of a rebellious fighter. Deserters are the ones who ran. Traitors are the ones who sold out their homeland or their fellows for some reward, or to avoid pain. These are bad, but what happens when fighters turn their sword arms on the people in their own homeland?

A brigand is a soldier who came home, found it unrecognizable, banded with others like him, and they turned their violence onto the innocent. A dark knight is a knight lost his lord and so he painted his armor black and began to work for himself. The same goes for a ronin. These men are dangerous because they don't have the mentality to stop themselves, and their skill with arms and experience means they can't be put down except by seasoned soldiers.

Invaders are most likely to be fighters.

In fiction, we also like to romanticize a fighter who turns evil and comes back to punish society for stealing his life and deciding his fate. Maybe this is an evil paladin or a Sith warlord, or an ordinary man who became extraordinary through his trials and sheer willpower.

These are all fighters.

The Difference Between Fighters and Normal Men

Fighters are all men who have been initiated into a new world of violence. The reasons might not always be the same but are always justified to someone. Maybe you needed to eat. Maybe you needed to serve society whether you wanted to or not. Maybe you're rather join Gangis Khan's army than be slaughtered. Any reason is justifiable to someone who wants to be able to sleep at night. Even the ones with the most justifiable reasons may still struggle to get a wink.

Fighters are the ones who carry the mental and physical wounds of society for the greater good of society. Whether it catches up with all of them or not is uncertain. What makes the wounds worth enduring? Is does the individual glory? Is it the salvation, fortune, security, or prosperity you earn for yourself or others?

Some fighters fight for duty, some don't. Either way, I think what defines the fighter is resilience. Every soldier I've ever met has this one quality. They've gone through the initiation, and they've come out tougher. They know that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. They've taken wounds and they recovered. They've lost brothers and they've mourned. They've taken life and reconciled it.

The fighter isn't defined by weapon mastery or their cool armor. They're defined by this intangible thing: resilience. You are the one who gets back up.

10 Simple Reasons to Play a Game Other Than D&D 5e

I often say that I vehemently dislike D&D 5e, but that's not entirely true. Mostly I've moved on. There are specific design choices in 5e that conflict with the kind of TTRPG experience that I seek and enjoy. This post attempts to explain those differences.

1. Advantage / Disadvantage

Advantage and Disadvantage is unintuitive. A normal d20 produces a flat distribution where every +/- 1 is worth a +/- 5%. Disadvantage produces a curve distribution where success changes in a non-linear way. The result is that dis/advantage does not have a consistent numerical value. Sometimes feels like a +/-4, sometimes like a +/-5.

Here's where the mechanic really loses me. Rolling a natural 20 with disadvantage becomes a 0.25% or 1 in 400 chance. Meanwhile, rolling a natural 1 with disadvantage becomes a 9.75% or a 39 in 400 chance. I think this spoils the excitement of d20 system where you always have a 5% chance to roll a nat 20 and succeed.

If your design goal is simplicity while preserving the spirit of the d20 system, a straightforward change to the DC or a flat modifier like in Index Card RPG (ICRPG) is easy to understand without spoiling natural 1s and natural 20s. This is why I prefer fixed modifiers rather than advantage and disadvantage.

2. The Catalog

D&D 5e is the culmination of 40 years of D&D. They came up with a lot of bloat in those 40 years, and a lot of it made it into D&D 5e as standard content. I call this the catalog, and it means the list of fantasy races and sub-races, character classes and sub-classes, backgrounds, feats, and spells. There is a lot of stuff for players to choose. All of these player options are expected to be available whenever they receive an invite to join your game. Taking any of these player options away for any reason, such as making a more coherent or cohesive game, presenting a different genre or subgenre, pursing a different setting, etc., is perceived as nerfing or restricting players. They tend to dislike it.

The catalog is a kitchen-sink. It is all the toys in the toy-box. You don't have to play with all the toys, but existence of options creates expectations of availability. Restricting some of the toys can allow you to curate the kind of game you want to play. You can play a slightly different game or a very different game. If you just want to play with just the army men, there are 5e players who want to add power rangers and sailor moon. They will never be content to just play with the army men. You are stuck playing the kitchen-sink version of the game.

I wrote more about restrictions here: 5e House Rules - High Immersion, High Discipline, GM Curated Style of 5e. I also wrote about why human-centric settings better preserve the tone of your game here: Human‑Centric Fantasy Settings: Why Monster PCs Break Tone. I also wrote about how class designs in D&D 5e are a mess here: How to Fix Modern Class Design. 

3. Alignments

I'm not sure alignments ever made sense, and I don't think E. Gary Gygax ever really did a good job explaining it. By the time we get to D&D 5e, most players view Alignment as a personality type. It's not, but that's not what I don't like about alignment in D&D 5e. There are no built-in restrictions on player character alignment, so inevitably you have one player who chooses one of the butt hole alignments. This leads to a group of players that are less cohesive, less cooperative, and maybe even a little adversarial. I've never liked player vs player conflict, and I never found it fun. Any rule that passively encourages or permits it needs to go.

I wrote about what alignments are very simply here: D&D Alignments - How to Use Them! Read this and tell me I'm wrong about what alignments are. 

4. Player Skill vs. Character Skill

I don't like rolling for everything. It's not fun to roll dice and fail. I want the things I say or do in-character to have their own merit and be worthy of success or failure by the logic of the fiction or setting. I can show you where in the 5e DMG (2014 version) that it says the DM can decide to not use the dice except for in combat. It's page 236 of the DMG, under the section The Role of the Dice.

Quote: "One approach is to use the dice as rarely as possible. Some DMs use them only during combat and determine success or failure as they like in other situations."

That's rules as written, and that line says that the literal written word of the rules is not Rules As Intended (RAI). 

In 5e, everyone seems to think you have to resolve everything with dice. I've played with multiple GMs. They want you rolling for everything. It's ridiculous, it discourages players putting in any kind of effort, and it slows the game down. What I'm subtly referring to is a concept called player-skill-forward which I wrote about here: Player Skill vs Character Skill - Managing Expectations. I also wrote a Primer for No Speech Mechanics in TTRPGs and How to do Speech in TTRPGs (without dice!) which requires a player-skill-forward playstyle.

5. Hard to DM

I would argue that this game is harder to DM than other games. When running Index Card RPG (ICRPG), I could easily keep all my notes to one or two pages and comfortably improv. Prep was a breeze for ICRPG too, and it didn't take a lot of my time.

Also reference: The DM Shortage - Why 5e Doesn't Have Enough, Cognitive Load for GMs, and The Authority of the GM / DM.

Adventures, Not Campaigns.

6. Hit Points in 5e Suck

In GURPS, the rules of the game are intended to model real world physics. There are pros and cons to this, but in attempting to model real world physics, the game is intending to describe objective reality. A GURPS human has 10 HP by default, and there is an upward limit on how much HP a GURPS human can have. 18 is a lot of HP for a GURPS character. This makes damage proportional, objective, concrete, and intuitive. You know if you do 6 points of damage that you've done a lot of damage no matter what scope or scale you're playing.

There are also rules for recovering lost HP that are intended to model real healing and recovery. It makes the in-game world easy to understand. Anything that makes the game easier to understand makes playing the game faster, even if you need to handwave five or ten in-game days to recover after a fight.

Meanwhile, in D&D 5e, everything is a damage sponge, and so combats go on and on and on. Within the narrative, you can stab someone with a spear, and then they can nap it off, which is absurd and immersion-breaking. Tension is difficult to have in a game like 5e, and combat is a slog. It's suits a cinematic style action game but with cartoonish rules.

I wrote about this here: Scaling Problems in TTRPGs - An Argument for Small Numbers. 

7. Combat Is Boring

Combat is boring and I'm tired or politely accepting it; But if it's not boring, it's because the GM went and threw some bonkers-high CR monsters at us. Part of the reason why D&D combat is boring is because of HP which I just commented on. The other reason why D&D 5e combat is boring is because it's just too slow.

I would first suggest simplifying turns. Every player gets only one thing they can do on their turn, and they can move up to their normal movement as part of their action. Say what you do, say how, roll your dice.

I wrote a few blog posts about why the game is slow and how to speed it up:

Why TTRPG Combat Feels Slow (How to Fix!) and

House Rules for Faster, More Immersive Games and 

Flow State to Speed Up TTRPG Combat - Game Design & Managing Expectations

8. Fantasy Ruined Monsters

There are two kinds of monsters: horror monsters, and monsters as exotic people. I think all monsters work best as horror monsters and were probably intended to be horror monsters until twentieth century children's books softened them. Somehow, modern fantasy has inherited the softer version of monsters, and you won't often find the horror monsters in D&D 5e. They're just exotic kinds of people now. I don't like it.

Almost everything gets humanized except maybe zombies and aberrations.

I wrote a few things on this: Monsters in Fiction, Modernity Ruined Monsters, and 

Seven Rules for Monsters in TTRPGs - Your Fun is Wrong.

9. Setting

The setting by default makes room for everything in the catalog I addressed above in item 2. This necessarily means the setting must include things that don't feel like they belong. That means the setting lacks cohesion and a feeling like it makes sense. 

Fantasy doesn't mean anything goes; I don't need a realistic setting, but I do need a setting that feels like it makes sense. The default assumptions about a game influence its tone.

I wrote a few things how elements of the setting conflict with each other here: Human‑Centric Fantasy Settings: Why Monster PCs Break Tone and 

The Problem with the Fantasy Monk.

10. Tone

I have been hinting at it, but I haven't said so explicitly. The tone of 5e games is cartoonish. It's hard to take seriously. When normal people watch you play your modern 5e game, you all look goofy. You're playing a game where paladins, a class described as a "devout warrior" and "standing against forces of evil", can use a divine smite on a bugbear, where a divine smite is literally named divine and is described as dealing radiant damage, meanwhile a bugbear is described as a goblinoid which is described as mischievous. It sounds like a misuse of divinity and I think by the giggles and cackles from the other players, they agree.

Tone means the mood or atmosphere, or, how the audience / participants should feel. How are we supposed to feel?

• You get stabbed. You take a nap and you're all better.
• Characters can take a lot of damage and keep going, and they seem to do so without regard for their safety.
• Monsters aren't monsters, they're just misunderstood people.
• Elves are just humans with pointy ears. Fish people, mushroom people, and fire people can just live in the same village.

At the end of the day, D&D 5e feels silly.

Conclusion

Every gamer wants to play D&D 5e and are reluctant to find another game. Therefore, if you want to play any other TTRPG, you'll have no one to play it with. This frustrates me because I don't want to play D&D 5e. There's a lot of games out there and I want to encourage everyone to find one other game they like. Just one! Here's a short list of free alternative games and games like D&D: How to Play D&D for Free.

Also reference this blog post from 2024: 5 Things I don't like about D&D 5e

If you're looking for a suggestion to get your players to try another game, read this: How to Convert 5e Players: The World Within a World Strategy.