At what point does the M-U become overpowered?

[kaomera]

I have often seen the idea that the old-school Magic User becomes at some level outgrows the need for the rest of the adventuring party, becoming an unstoppable force that can plow through dungeons solo and generally makes all of the other classes redundant. Now the basic purpose of the M-U is to gain access to powers not available to others, but I've always found that their own peculiar frailties balanced this out nicely, and that if anything they where a bit too much of a "glass cannon" for their own good, as follows:

• Very few hit points, even at higher levels. Many traps or special attacks could be generally counted on to either take an M-U completely out of the picture or reduce them to running for it lest a strong breeze do them in...
• High AC, exacerbating their fragility.
• Spell disruption, which made casting spells from anything but a well-defended position or absolute surprise risky.
• Small number of spells memorized from any given level means that you lack the ability to simply throw your more potent / significant spells at a whim.
• New spells to learn generally in short supply, the chance of ruining valuable scrolls and / or wasting time and money on research if you failed your spell knowledge % roll, and the difficulty / impossibility of ensuring knowledge of a particular spell.
• Spell books (one for each spell level!) are cumbersome and prone to loss or destruction, as well as being a general pain to replace.
• While there where a number of ensorcelled items usable only by the class, it was rare that the effects of such items would not be applicable to other party members, and anyone getting an earlier choice of treasure might well grab one to secure control of it's use.
• I do assume that magic items are in a somewhat short supply, I suppose that if you are just rolling in enchanted do-dads then some or all of these difficulties may be mitigated or even sidestepped entirely.
• Being (potentially) able to wield such magic as the dreaded "fireball" with the potential of wreaking mass destruction in a manner unreasonable to the sensibilities of the general populace, the M-U may have a hard time fitting in to common society / politics.
• The above results in the M-U spending much of her time secluded in research, a solitary vocation that tends to be very draining on the character's resources.
• Such a lifestyle has a tendency to breed a bit of paranoia as the character must ever be on the look-out for enemies (or even allies with "unreasonable" requests on the M-U's time and talents) who might prefer to come upon the character while her friends are absent...

Now, I can see where the above may be a result of a particular (and possibly peculiar) play-style, but IME the idea of the invincible Wizard seems to come from a combination of a general trend to view the old-school experience primarily through those examples aberrant enough to warrant widespread repetition (ie: the gazebo incident) and some deliberately high-powered play (which may actually also fit into the first category). There where certainly adventures where players where meant to create high-level characters and outfit them as they saw fit, but I'm wondering when / if others may have encountered actual cases of the "invincible magic-user" in games where characters worked their way up? My own experiences topped out at about 12th to 13th level (well specifically one character, a magic-user actually, gained enough experience to raise to 13th but died before training could be completed), and I have the feeling that magic items may have been a bit rarer than the norm.

[Dyson Logos]

Two answers: Never and Always.

Always: At level 1 magic users carry a no-save spell that wipes out 2d8 hit dice of opponents. With no save. It's only once a day at level 1, but that can be 32 kobolds out of action. Basically it will end any one level 1-2 encounter with one spell and a guaranteed victory.

Never: They never have enough hit points to survive an encounter with another magic user. A pair of level 10 magic users blast each other dealing 35 damage on average. The average level 10 magic user has 23.5 hit points. If he makes his save he takes 17-18 damage. This gets worse at higher levels... by level 15 the average fireball damage is 52 / 26 while the average hit points is 28.5. By level 20 the average fireball damage after a successful save is 35 damage, and the magic user has 33.5 hit points. Even making his saving throw isn't enough anymore. But then again, even a level 20 fighter only has 52 hit points (hopefully 61 or even 70 because of Constitution bonuses), meaning that two fireballs is enough to drop him even with saves made. Which leads back to the "always" argument.

[Brad]

I addressed this very topic on my blog yesterday..."overpowered" is a loaded term. If you think the MU is overshadowing your fighter character, you need to play better. Mechanical advantages can never overcome player skill.

[Dyson Logos]

I disagree with Brad on this point. If you have a mechanical ability that says "this ability instantly kills", it will overcome player skill. Any situation where there are abilities, there are situations where that ability can and might overshadow the skills of players who do not have said abilities.

[Dyson Logos]

All that out of the way though, I think the B/X Magic User (core Labyrinth Lord rules is close enough for this discussion) is the least of your worries when it comes to outplaying the other classes. With only 12 spells at each spell level to choose from, they don't have the massive versatility that they get in other editions. This remains one of my favourite selling points of LL and B/X D&D - the restrictive spell lists.

[kaomera]

Always: At level 1 magic users carry a no-save spell that wipes out 2d8 hit dice of opponents. With no save. It's only once a day at level 1, but that can be 32 kobolds out of action. Basically it will end any one level 1-2 encounter with one spell and a guaranteed victory.

nitpick: It will end many level 1-2 encounters, there are some where either the monsters will not be affected by the spell, or where the number of hit dice present can exceed the maximum affected by the spell, or where circumstances arise that do not allow the party to fully capitalize on the situation. And that's for normal number encountered, not "in lair". It may also be noted that creatures with less than one hit die are treated as 1HD by the LL version of the spell, as written. In the 1e version it is possible, depending on the reading of the spell, to affect a larger number of creatures if several types with differing hit die values are encountered at once.

However, in general your example is valid. A standard encounter would include at most 16 kobolds, so the spell treating them as full hit die avails them not so much. I would say that the sleep spell is singularly powerful; would you expect that it should generally be typical for a 1st level M-U to know the spell? I would think that, given a normal mix of encounters, it would be likely that a well-used sleep spell would allow a party to deal with one additional encounter per day. So certainly very significant. Did you / do you find that this creates a real disparity in the importance of the various members of the group?

I would suppose this depends a lot on how many encounters the party is dealing with. My personal experience was that the players wanted to get as much done as possible, except in a few specific circumstances, and had to be prepared to deal with additional complications beyond their preferred stopping point. This creates the quandary of "do I use my sleep to completely take out this patrol of orcs, or save it for if things get hairy in a bigger fight later".

Never: They never have enough hit points to survive an encounter with another magic user. A pair of level 10 magic users blast each other dealing 35 damage on average. The average level 10 magic user has 23.5 hit points. If he makes his save he takes 17-18 damage. This gets worse at higher levels... by level 15 the average fireball damage is 52 / 26 while the average hit points is 28.5. By level 20 the average fireball damage after a successful save is 35 damage, and the magic user has 33.5 hit points. Even making his saving throw isn't enough anymore. But then again, even a level 20 fighter only has 52 hit points (hopefully 61 or even 70 because of Constitution bonuses), meaning that two fireballs is enough to drop him even with saves made. Which leads back to the "always" argument.

Well, what about an encounter that isn't with another magic user? If you can get your fireball off before the enemy can get on top of you, and can get all of the enemy with the blast radius, then many encounters are going to be over. Protection from normal missiles and fly (assuming you have both available) plus a significant open area can allow you to pelt your enemies with "death from above" for quite a while, and then quite likely get away (assuming there are no enemy fliers to mess your plan up - I think this is why EHPs seem so enamored of gargoyles as bodyguards...). But it still seems like, without the assistance of the other classes you're asking for a rather abrupt end to your adventuring career when something goes wrong.

It was my experience that if a magic user was to be at all effective, they required the support of the rest of the party, and that the party gave that support because they expected the magic user to support them in return. My whole 1e experience was basically built around the idea that you "never split the party" (despite the fact that the party was invariably split anyway...) because you needed the efforts of the group as a whole to succeed and any single character attempting to adventure alone was pretty much committing suicide.

What I'm wondering, basically, is: was my actual play experience different? I can see where the M-U's power was acknowledged and in some ways dealt with by the way that we played, would other groups have found this abusive or obnoxious? Or was the situation that similar play led other groups to notice / experience an imbalance that just didn't seem significant to us? I think we may have read the rules to significantly reduce the chances that the M-U would have access to any given spell, or to limit the total number of spells she would know, but I always thought that we played that pretty much by-the-book.

I think it is interesting, now that I think back on it, that the highest-level characters I can remember include a disproportionate number of magic users. I think this is a matter of two things: One, that the M-U was the character most often "in the rear" or otherwise in the most protected position (which sometimes included leaving the group altogether if out of spells, so as not to be a further burden), and this made them not any more likely to die off early than any other class. And two, that they where the characters who, at any level, most called out for another level gain. Therefore they where the most likely to be pulled out of "retirement" if a replacement character was needed, which in turn would mean that they would come in at a level equal to the highest level character in the party at that time (but with a larger number of XP).

And, as there have been further posts while I have been composing this reply: I will say that if there are situations where mechanics will overcome player ability, then there are also situations where player ability will overcome mechanics, and therefore which side of the equation a group or DM favored would make a huge difference. I think that for the groups that I played in, the ability to bypass a small number of encounters / obstacles was viewed as perhaps less significant than it could have been simply in that the actual "spotlight time" granted by those wins was less than for other classes. When the fighters took out a group of enemies while the M-U helped out, or when the thieves dealt with a trap etc, it tended to take much longer and be more detailed in resolution than "I cast my sleep spell. >dice roll< Guys, clean up this mess, 'k?".

[Lord Kilgore]

Mechanical advantages can never overcome player skill.

Never? Seriously? No mechanical advantage can ever be enough to to allow a bad player to defeat a good player?

I think you're overstating things a wee bit.

Edited to correct a punctuation mark.

[Brad]

Never? Seriously? No mechanical advantage can ever be enough to to allow a bad player to defeat a good player?

I think you're overstating things a wee bit.

Oh, come on...it's the INTERNET! Hyperbole is a requirement. Anyway, of course there are situations where mechanics could trump the skills of even the best player; but not every single case. I have no problems with some character classes being pretty awesome at some things, but MUs aren't the end-all of power. High level monsters usually have magic resistance, other mages use anti-magic shells. You're going to need those Lords and Rangers to defeat golems. Etc., etc. And, no, I don't think a bad player could ever overtake a good player, regardless of in-game advantages IF you have a fair DM. If your DM sucks, you're going to run into all sorts of problems.

[Lord Kilgore]

Anyway, of course there are situations where mechanics could trump the skills of even the best player; but not every single case. I have no problems with some character classes being pretty awesome at some things, but MUs aren't the end-all of power.

That's quite a long, long ways from "No mechanical advantage can ever be enough...." If you don't mean something, why put it in writing? Even on the internet.

And, no, I don't think a bad player could ever overtake a good player, regardless of in-game advantages

Again with the (n)ever.

Take an 8th-level fighter played by a good player vs. an 8th-level magic-user played by a "bad" player. No magic items or special abilities beyond native class and race mechanics. Typical spellbook for the magic-user. Start separated by 100 yards on an open field.

I don't think it's a guaranteed 10 wins in 10 fights for the fighter. Not even close.

The game is more than just player skill. Game mechanics actually DO matter, in my opinion. Player skill is very important, crucial even, but skill won't *always* trump the rules of the game.

I happen to think that magic-users as designed are too weak compared to other classes at lower levels and too powerful compared to other classes at higher levels. Especially at lower levels, the PLAYERS of magic-user characters are, I think, sort of shafted when it comes to actually PLAYING the game. They have one spell at first level. The question keeps popping up "What do 1st-level magic-users do when they aren't casting their one spell?" and someone usually answers something to the effect of "Hold the torch. It's vital that the others can see during combat."

Sure, but that's not really a lot of fun for the PLAYER, is it?

I wish the game gave magic-users a bit more capability at lower levels and slowed the rate at which they advanced in power. Exactly where the line to "overpowered" gets crossed probably vaires quite a bit. I actually think that the game is best in the 3rd-to-8th level range, and I suspect that 5th-level spells at 9th level (and the fact that the number of known 3rd and 4th levels spells has probably increased) might have something to do with my opinion.

[Blood axe]

I dont think a M-U ever becomes over-powering. What about a spell-being disrupted?? I always played that a M-U starts casting- so if an enemy gets initaitive and the M-U is hit- the spell is disrupted & lost. Intelligent enemies will target the Wizard first. Send a bunch of small minions to grapple the Wizard. If he's being grabbed/wrestled- its very difficult to cast at the very least. At higher levels many enemies have magic resistance. If a Wizard gets too cocky- have him meet an enemy with a Ring of Spell Turning- limited charges of course....
Dont get me wrong- an M-U can be essential- but he needs support.