The Wizard and game play questions

[Daedalus]

Have the Wizard first in the lineup. He jumps in the boss room and throws Tempest at the boss then the other Heroes follow and hack down the boss who cannot defend. Or if the Wizard can cast 2 spells he follows up with the Genie and gets all the glory himself. I don't find the Wizard to be underpowered. He isn't meant for hand-to-hand combat. He can buy and throw daggers (I allow him to carry 10 - not like he has anything else to spend his coins on). He has spells like Ball of Flame, Fire of Wrath, Genie, Sleep, and Tempest that can stop a lot of monsters. If played right he can be just as strong as the other Heroes.

I agree with all of this but for the details of Tempest. While the spell causes a target to lose its turn, this does not prevent defending attacks which is a reaction on the Heroes' turns. Regardless, focusing all attacks on a boss is a sound strategy that best capitalizes on Tempest.

[Kurgan]

Tempest, Sleep and Rock Skin (even in NA) are a lot more useful than many people realize. Same with Pass Through Rock. Advanced players can see beyond the immediate usefulness of the Wizard (healing: Heal Body/Water of Healing and attack: Ball of Flame/Fire of Wrath/Genie).

Courage can be a point of contention, there's a maximalist interpretation and a minimalist. Very good points about the Order of players. Having the WIzard go last (or the spellcaster in general, since the Elf isn't forced to pick a certain spell class) does make a big difference as we've seen.

Getting the Staff early for the Wizard is a big help, plus if he searches for treasure, you can back him into a corner with the other Heroes providing a screen so Wandering Monster can't hit him (though Hazards he has no defense against, like all Heroes... except a homebrew rule like a Torch... or the Treasure Without Doom scroll in EQP expansion).

The Wizard is best for more advanced players. As a kid I hated using him, because he was so weak and it was harder to keep track of all the spells. But now I have a lot more respect for the character class and his role can be very interesting to play. Sure, the Barbarian can cut his way through monsters out of the gate and seems to be "having fun" that way the whole time but the Wizard has to bide his time until he can "shine" and save everyone's bacon. Many decide to tweak him in various ways, but even without that tweakage he can be played well and cleverly. He also keeps the game interesting. If it's just four heroes rolling to attack the whole time it's a lot less interesting than... all of a sudden, a magic spell tips the scales...!

[Anderas]

The Wizard is strong, in the beginning. He then loses out when the others get better equipment.

I've tried several changes, one of them persists now.

1. I gave him reusable artefacts. Fire of wrath, each turn. Turned out, he did nothing else anymore. If there is one hint that something's too strong, it is if someone uses only one thing all the time.

2. I gave him recoverable spells. He could choose to lose a card or lose a mind point instead.
Some spells you couldn't ever keep, like tempest or healings, as those break the balance. Some spells would cost two mind points to keep, like the fire ball. I had the cards custom printed. That worked, but was complicated.

3. I've made spell cards which allowed the Wizard to boost some spells, to make the effect stronger or longer lasting. He had to roll against his mind points and score one or two black shields, depending how strong the boost was. When the roll failed, he could pay mind points instead. Needless to say, this gets difficult quickly if you have only a few mind points left over.
This was my most-loved change, when I playtested with myself it worked perfectly. However, I was never able to explain that to someone else, so this was too complicated, too.

4. Extend the artefacts from the game system a bit. Make an artefact which allows casting veil of mist or pass through rock as part of the move action. Courage as part of an attack action. And so on - the timing is what breaks many spell opportunities, so making this better strengthens the Wizard a lot. Works! Is easy! However, I still wait for my players to discover these. So. I have yet to see if these artefacts are too strong or not.

5. What I do currently: I made 9 spells for each spell group, and a total of 9 spell groups with Slev's control group. The Wizard selects 3 spell groups, then he draws randomly 3 spells from those groups. This is a bit weaker than the original, right. But then he can go shopping: He can spend 100 gold for a spell group. From that time on he may draw one more spell from that group. He may also spend 50 gold to "specialize" on a spell that he loves or hates, he can then choose or un-choose that spell without random (healing, looking at you).
This is easy, is very close to the game system, and allows the Wizard to grow alongside his friends.

[iKarith]

I suppose the NA defense value was downgraded down to one combat die in response to a balance issue discovered in EU play. A +2 defensive buff cast on a Hero with 6 defend dice makes him that much more nigh-invulnerable against most monsters of the first two expansions.

I mis-remembered childhood (or we played it wrong) that Rock Skin ATE the damage and was destroyed in the process. Realizing that it wasn't did cause me to wonder about when and were it was actually effective at +1 to defense rolls, temporarily, but if it did eat the point of damage it'd still be worth the time to cast it, even in a game with threat cards.

[Kurgan]

The NA wizard doesn't get much stronger... he gets the Wizard's Cloak and Wizard's Staff and that's it. The other Heroes get Chain (or plate or Borin's Armor), longswords and battle axes and crossbows, helmets and shields. The other heroes become more durable and stronger fighters, while the Wizard still relies upon his spells.

The EU wizard was able to exploit the magic artifacts: two swords and a piece of armor, plus he got an extra piece of armor in the bracers. On the other hand the mechanic of surviving with a healing spell/item wasn't present there and nearly all monsters had 1 body point (making the Wizard a much more effective fighter if he got lucky rolls and his opponent did not).

I think a blending of the two provides some more opportunities. But the wizard does need some more cool magic items he can buy (that only he can use) later on, and that at a minimum will make him seem cooler. In my homebrew upgrade system I've powered up the other heroes so I've had to power up the wizard to compensate. But it's tough to make them more fun and appealing to play without breaking the game.

[iKarith]

Cool items or perhaps rethinking the spells a bit. Your homebrew helps that a bit, but the wizard is kind of a flaw in the NA rules because they basically took their cue from Gygax who hated the wizard and wanted to cripple the class so nobody would want to play it. Fantasy writers either found a literary way to balance magic (it induces fatigue or carries a risk or a price), or failed to do so and simply make the wizard unavailable for most of the quest (Tolkien).

The EU wizard isn't so bad. And I always wondered why people hated the wizard so much. He could take out any of the low or moderate level monsters without much effort, and he had one super OP attack he could use to either save his bacon if need be, or to go a long way toward taking down one of the boss-level monsters in the quest.

Except as I've said elsewhere, the NA game nerfed him. Any chance he ever had of dealing more than 1CD of damage was ripped away because Wizards Don't Fight. (And that's why it was Thorin Oakenshield who took Glamdring, The Foe Hammer, a blade feared by any servant of Mordor who fought in the Goblin wars, right? Oh wait, THE WIZARD TOOK THAT SWORD. And then he used it and the Secret Fire in concert to slay a dark fire demon servant of Morgoth who's basically freakin' Satan in Middle-Earth! Wizards don't fight my fuzzy albino a…anyway, right, so they've been known to use things like swords from time to time.)

As for attacks … he's got a pretty high chance of getting 1BP against a single enemy, but not much higher than a dwarf, barbarian, or even an elf with a weapon upgrade. And the fact he can do it at range, so can they if the weapon you upgrade them with has range.

He's got one attack that does twice that. This one is a little more powerful, because as enemies get stronger, it's hard to guarantee you'd get two hits in on them, even with upgraded stats. You'll probably get one, but you'll not get two consistently. (Of course the wizard isn't consistent either, just … more likely than not.)

And he has these unless the boss enemy uses fire magic, then most quests TAKE AWAY both of those attacks, even against the lowliest goblin.

His other attack is literally a physical attack, defended against like any other. It does 5CD of damage, which is impressive until the other characters start getting weapons that routinely do 4CD and have access to buffs that'll give them more. It does happen.

But the NA wizard still is a great support character, right? He has all these things like sleep which … works best on enemies with low mind points, which all of the high body point bosses have in abundance, and which for some reason explicitly doesn't work on undead because wE cAn'T hAvE tHe WiZaRd Be tOo PoWeRfUL…

The NA game set out to make the wizard suck to the point nobody wants to play the wizard, and they largely succeeded. Gygax failed to do it with D&D because players were so creative, but HQ is a more rigid game with codified rules of exactly what can be done and when, and they constantly put "everyone can except the wizard" on everything. They took away his equipment. They nerfed his weapons. The only reason the wizard ISN'T explicitly weaker than the other characters fighting unarmed is because they didn't come up with the metrics several players have to make him even more pathetic and un-fun to play.

And on one hand you always hear complaints of how nobody wants to be the wizard, and on the other everyone continues to play into this stereotype that the wizard has to suck that hard.

Even with your homebrew, the wizard mostly winds up a tagalong waiting for the boss fight (if there is one) and a chance where his spells might be used in a clever way at the end to actually do something cool—like that time when we all had to get that Ragnar dude out of the dungeon to stop the reinforcements coming in and overrunning the whole place. Wasn't that cool when the wizard gave him speed and the ability to walk right through the enemies to … oh wait, he didn't. That was the elf.

I mean, the wizard could've done it, and from the moment I realized that was a strategy, I planned for the wizard to do it, but turn order managed to work out to make it better for the elf to do it with items. He did get to roid rage the dwarf to just mow down a wall of orcs a turn or two later than I originally planned it, but I think that was his major spell use in the entire quest. If he had another, it was to throw a bit of fire at some wandering monster because he couldn't really defend himself otherwise like one of the actual heroes. I typed that, realized what I wrote, what it sounds like, and what it means. And that's the problem with the NA wizard: He just doesn't feel like he's on the same level as the other heroes.

Your homebrew gives him back most of what the EU wizard had for upgrades, and he starts to become pretty powerful after he becomes a champion (forget dwarf with a crossbow, what would an elemental have done to a dozen orcs if he's saved his spells to summon one?) But the vanilla game makes the wizard seem inadequate to the task, because he is.

But if you give him swords and armor, why would he not just be a more powerful but slightly squishier elf? And if he could throw a large number of spells at everything, why wouldn't the standard tactic be for the barbarian to meat shield the door while the wizard blows up everything in the room from a safe distance?

I'm not sure what fixing it looks like just yet, but I've come to some conclusions.

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[*]Magic needs to be as effective at getting you through the quest as a weapon and armor. If it doesn't, why wouldn't you just play one of the others who has those things going for them? ("Because the game mechanics say that there are three fighters and one wizard" is not a good answer—in fact, it's the problem: Someone's "stuck" playing the wizard!)
[*]If magic is MORE effective than combat, nobody's gonna want to play anything else, because the wizard can clearly just take out everything and somehow has the means to either prevent loss of BP or recover lost BP well enough to keep pace with the others. It's the same problem, in reverse.
[*]To accomplish the above, the wizard would need to have some magical ability that was either always available, but not much different than a standard 2CD attack against an adjacent monster, or which gave him some worthwhile trade for doing lesser damage. And perhaps he's only starting with two spells and must purchase others, the way others purchase weapons.
[*]The idea that he doesn't wear traditional armor might make sense, but he should likewise have magical protections that function in place of armor. Maybe with interesting effects. Like, rock skin is a spell he'd pay a more powerful wizard to teach him, but … he would prepare it in advance (so starts with it) and must spend a mind point in fatigue to re-cast it on himself or someone else. It's a buff he BUYS like the others, but there's all sorts of ways to lose a BP if you're not careful, and if you do, your rock skin shatters. Do you risk being exhausted later when you need spellcasting for things that aren't your basic magic attack?
[*]This works best if basic monsters are usually generally okay to attack with whatever you've got, but that some are strong against physical attacks but weak to magic, and others resist magic but don't resist the great spell of Stabmore very well.
[/list]

That last one poses an interesting mechanic because if you've got a basic, familiar magic-based attack or can use some basic weapons like other characters, you've got the means to hold your own. And you can have magic-based stat increases, sure. But those cast inside the dungeon are limited by your mental strength.

But this system is incomplete because the idea that some spells cost MP to cast and others do not is weird, there are artifacts that require effectively the wizard or elf to be able to use them because nobody else has enough MP, and that gets weird if you can't use them if you've cast a spell or two? No, weird. Also, the expansions add stuff to attack MP instead of BP so that they have technically sort of used MP in some way … yeah that's weird all on its own.

MP being useful to defend against spells is interesting, especially since it allows for a wizard's duel where two powerful magic users start out throwing spells at each other (along with physical attacks, maybe?) and trying to weigh: Do I use this spell? It may affect my opponent, but it will leave me more open to his spell in response… How aggressive do you feel, and how much risk are you willing to take?

I don't think this notion of fatigue being equal to mind points quite works with the HQ scale of mind points, which is why the notion that some spells would be automatic or prepared in advance. If they're not, maybe your fatigue scale is some multiple of your mind points and you spend them to cast things like your rock skin? Or perhaps they start at some fixed number, but you can spend money between quests to train for more mental stamina at ever-increasing prices? Maybe there would be potions that relieve fatigue to give wizards back some of their ability to cast? Maybe those potions are a little dangerous to use and can sometimes "relieve" your fatigue at the cost of a mind point?

Not fleshed out yet, but I think I'm starting to be on a road that will eventually get there. I don't know if I like the idea of having mind points be separate from fatigue points which serve the same purpose. I think you'd introduce a new stat which replaces mind points and have a correlation to them for the standard game.

Like I said, not fleshed out yet.

[Kurgan]

A small correction.... the "you can't use fire spells this whole quest because the boss has resistance to them" was an EU thing.

The "he is left behind in the upgrade war" is fair enough [sorry, typo there!]. Yes, he starts out with the ability to attack at range, and compared to the Elf's paltry three spells he's got quite a library, but without the ability to use those magical weapons and magical super armor, he seems kind of weak. The Fire attack spells only do 1 or 2 BP (great for EU, kind of middle of the road for NA) but they have the same defense for enemies regardless of how many dice the enemy normally has for defense.

The Wizard not being able to buy a Cloak for 350 gold was replaced in the NA by giving him a free artifact (that had the same abilities) later on (in more or less the time he could have saved up the gold to buy one on his own in the old system). The Wizard's Staff is as strong as the EU staff and is, again, a free artifact that he gets much later than if he could have just bought (or found) it. Of course if the Heroes are working cooperatively and pooling their gold then forget it, he can get all his gear early on. Yes, no bracers for the Wizard in NA edition.

It could be worse... the game could have been based on the idea that Barbarians have to go into battle shirtless (only "magical armor"?) and Elves can only use ranged weapons, and Dwarves can't spend gold, that sort of thing.

I think you'll be pleased with what I've come up with (not all of it original of course). The only concerns I had were whether the Wizard would beat the group quests too easily on his own after awhile.

Yes, once you introduce spell scrolls, anyone can be a wizard, sort of, because you can stockpile them, so what's the point? Still having exclusive gear that only the Wizard can use. In a Mind Point fight, he has the highest total, it's true, as the Barbarian would slip into a comma quite quickly by comparison (even if he has the Talisman of Lore).

[cornixt]

Yeah, I came up with a system where the number of dice/damage/etc used by a wizard in a spell could be increased with new items in the same way that combat dice increase with new weapons. So for example, the Fire of Wrath starts with inflicting on one point of damage, but increases to two if he gets the wand, and then three if he gets the staff.

[Kurgan]

Cool idea. My homebrew would be after becoming a champion, the wizard automatically gets some upgrades to spells... so fire of wrath is defending with a 6 only (twice as hard to defend against!), for example. And at Knight level he can sacrifice three spells to summon an uber powerful wrecking ball type creature that lasts for a random number of turns. I gave him black dice for his wizard's staff and a green die for his wizard's cloak. I'll have to finish up that Wizard's Arsenal special armory too...

[iKarith]

A small correction.... the "you can't use fire spells this whole quest because the boss has resistance to them" was an EU thing.

The "he is left behind in the upgrade war" is fair enough [sorry, typo there!]. Yes, he starts out with the ability to attack at range, and compared to the Elf's paltry three spells he's got quite a library, but without the ability to use those magical weapons and magical super armor, he seems kind of weak. The Fire attack spells only do 1 or 2 BP (great for EU, kind of middle of the road for NA) but they have the same defense for enemies regardless of how many dice the enemy normally has for defense.

The Wizard not being able to buy a Cloak for 350 gold was replaced in the NA by giving him a free artifact (that had the same abilities) later on (in more or less the time he could have saved up the gold to buy one on his own in the old system). The Wizard's Staff is as strong as the EU staff and is, again, a free artifact that he gets much later than if he could have just bought (or found) it. Of course if the Heroes are working cooperatively and pooling their gold then forget it, he can get all his gear early on. Yes, no bracers for the Wizard in NA edition.

It could be worse... the game could have been based on the idea that Barbarians have to go into battle shirtless (only "magical armor"?) and Elves can only use ranged weapons, and Dwarves can't spend gold, that sort of thing.

I think you'll be pleased with what I've come up with (not all of it original of course). The only concerns I had were whether the Wizard would beat the group quests too easily on his own after awhile.

Yes, once you introduce spell scrolls, anyone can be a wizard, sort of, because you can stockpile them, so what's the point? Still having exclusive gear that only the Wizard can use. In a Mind Point fight, he has the highest total, it's true, as the Barbarian would slip into a comma quite quickly by comparison (even if he has the Talisman of Lore).

I have been so far—it was just that first quest which wound up with the wizard starting what shouldn't have been a very difficult quest and … he had one moment to actually contribute something of meaning to the whole quest—he put the gargoyle to sleep, something the law of averages says shouldn't have worked nearly as well as it did (you had some lousy dice rolls) and the gargoyle who should've been most able to resist it was more or less murdered in his sleep by someone else.

Partly that had something to do with our barbarian hanging back to let the others take on FOUR STONE CHAOS WARRIRORS while he split the party, the wizard's magic proving immediately useless, and the fact that we were starting quest 7 as four fresh heroes with no equipment, etc. But … that was when I realized that the wizard was underpowered and was not intended to be able to get even a little boost until fairly late in the GS quests. What he had was nerfed, etc.

It was a pretty sudden awakening to what'd been done to "rebalance" (read: depower) the wizard, who in my opinion never really was out of balance to begin with.

Oh, and his artifacts are only free if the other players are giving the equipment to the people who can best make use of them. Like the dwarf giving Borin's Armor to the barbarian, because it's really for the best that he has it. He can use it more than the dwarf can, since there's only one in the game unless you're on PC.