It’s the 30th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons today. In honour of the date, we’re having a session over at Gerry’s house. The other hard core gamers were strongly typecast during their days at watsfic, and so the party ended up needing a mage (and a cleric) to complete the set. So I volunteered to be the mage. Oops…

It occured to me after we’d created a character that I’ve never actually played a D&D magic user before. We’ve always replaced the D&D magic system with Spell Law. It never made sense to me that you had to “memorize” spells to cast them (and if you wanted to cast them more than once, you had to “memorize” them more than once!. The most recent D20 explanation at least makes some logical sense, although it still doesn’t mesh with my personal opinions on magic.

I started reading science fiction and fantasy in the early 1980s; a teacher handed me “A Fall of Moondust” by Arthur C. Clarke and I was hooked :-). I quickly formed my own mental model of magic, and it aligns fairly well with the Rolemaster magic system (then Spell Law, part of xLaw). You either know a spell or you don’t, and with practice you get better (and faster) at casting it. As you use magic you get tired, and as you get tired you start to make mistakes. You can cast spells gagged and restrained, its just really hard. And so on…

Spell Law made a lot more sense to me then (and still does :-), which is probably why I’m currently in two Rolemaster campaigns, playing mages in both. So it should be interesting to play D&D magic for a change…

Happy Anniversary!

Update: I had a lot of fun. We consumed vast quantities of pop and Doritos, told way too many puns, and it only took us two hours to get out of the inn! We even made it two rooms farther into the dungeon than the party Gerry ran the evening before…

On the other hand, I still dislike D&D mages, especially at low level; they’re wimps!