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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Revised White Wizard Class

Based on a number of remarks both on the blog and off along the lines of "the White Wizard is a big fat wuss, who the hell would play him?" (or thereabouts), I have duly listened to you the peanut gallery and decided to give a little experience point carrot to sweeten the deal. The old magic-user level progression is henceforth to be replaced by the much-lower clerical one.

To download the revised character class as a PDF from Google Docs click here.

Stay tuned for my LL/AEC-friendly versions of the Mountebank and Barbarian later this week...

7 comments:

  1. I didn't even notice the XP difference to be honest. We've ditched XP for a "You show up, you level up" system instead. :)

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  2. Glad to see the Labyrinth Lord material you are posting. Keep it coming!

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  3. WotC had something similar to this - a wizard that casts divine spells through study and preparation. They called it the Archivist and it is on the web.

    I think that they published enough splat books for 3.x that they covered nearly every mechanical variation.

    If you do want something to the class besides "it's a wizard, but with cleric spells" there are some flavorful ideas there. (Careful though, I've seen the bonuses create feedback loops.)

    *

    Really this class does fit the priest/mage archetype of fantastic/sword and sorcery fiction much better than the D&D cleric does.

    Another option for this class is to riff off of the undead turning trick from the arsensonian Dragons at Dawn. As I understand, anyone can turn undead if they have a relic and faith. White wizards might just be better at it. Then you could do away with clerics entirely.

    I've always liked the mini-game of hunting for spells and lusting after books and scrolls and disliked fealty to authority, so this is a class I'd be interested in playing.

    word verification: tranaci
    One of the tribes of the Aethred Forest, who keep to old ways and tie sacrifices to trunks of old growth. The empire never penetrated so far into those dark depths.

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  4. @Stuart
    I've been awfully tempted to do this myself out of my innate distaste for record-keeping. How does it work in your campaign? Such and such amount of sessions equal such and such level advancement? I'm still likely to enamored with gold spent for experience point as a carrot to switch, but definitely curious.

    @Red
    Thanks for the heads, Jon. There are some interesting rationales--and possible crunchy additions--in the Archivist for me to mine.

    Also have to check out Dragons at Dawn as I seem to keep seeing passing mentions on the various old school-lining message boards.

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  5. We're currently using a "your character survives a game night, he levels up" system. If we were getting together more often I might have made that "every 2 game nights" or something.

    So far it's working well. Next game night we'll have two 4th, two 3rd and one 2nd level characters.

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  6. Gay half-orc fighter or this...now you're just making it tough.

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  7. "Who would want to play this guy..."

    Just make it the only magic-user option in your game, and who would NOT want to play it?
    ; )

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