wizard

Message 70:

Date:     Sun Jul 16 10:38:10 2000 CDT
From:     Fo (#5036)
To:       *wizard (#1121)
Subject:  I think I gotta speak up on this one....

Let's see... 'Whine whine whine...Ravenhurst has all the spells.' Let's @finger Ravenhurst, shall
 we?
Gee, he's been on for 337 days. Something you may not know is he's the COURT MAGICIAN. Like Merlin.
 He's supposed to have every spell known to man, beast, elf and even some only known to the gods.
Now let's @finger all of you who've been whining about spells. Oldest one is about 75 days. I
 didn't have a spell untill I was about 90 days, if I remember correctly. And that was back when
 the focus average was around 40 and you actually had to WORK to get good focus.
Now think about this. You're all travelling wizards. You all have made no effort that I've seen to
 apprentice to someone. Such wizards (commonly called "hedge wizards") have very few if ANY spells
 because they traditionally had to create their own formulae. If you're playing a priest character,
 well, you should know every spell a priest should know. But that consists entirely of Restore,
 Bless, Detect, and possibly MClaws. Priests don't get good offensive spells, unless you've caught
 yourself up in that stupid, moneygrubbing debacle T$R calls Advanced Dungeons and Dragons... which
 pretty much makes anyone with magic really smackdaddy and anyone without correspondingly
 overpowered to match up.
Lastly... This begging for spells... whining that you don't have any... it's another form of
 statdemoning. So you don't have every spell in the friggin' book. So what? I had a total of two
 for a long time. I was about 200 days old, I had ONE for the first 90 days of my short life and
 two for about the next 30. Talk to good, IC wizard character like Ryken was. Like I tried to be.
 Most of the spells we could do were OOC variations of the ones we had. I had transmute... I'd go
 through 30 minutes of rather interesting pose turning a common stone into liquid malachite, or
 turning a shot of whiskey into a butterscotch candy. And it was always interesting as you can get
 for RP purposes.
So stop whining about your coded spells and don't be affraid to RP a bit. If you have 200+ focus,
 you should be able to do a lot more than has been thought about within the code. But you can't
 code things like Light, Protection from Heat/Cold and other things when you don't have coded
 darkness and coded temperature extremes. You just can't CODE everything. So play your wizard based
 on noncombat spells. Transmuters were highly prized. As were Abjurers. And all but the most basic
 abjuration spells are nearly impossible to code.