Friday, November 2, 2007

Hints about the nth-level wizard

Griff and I had a brief discussion about the latest Rodney Thompson blog (I'm still refusing to link to the Gleemax horror), where he talks about his wizard in a new 4th edition playtest.

He didn't mention the level of his character, but we started guessing based on the few hints given. The start-up seemed to hint that they were newer characters, but I guess introductions among the characters need to take place even in higher-level campaigns.

The "short teleport" is what made Griff think that this wasn't a first-level character, but then the wizard stuck to casting Sleep and Magic Missile, which reeks of low-level arcane blustering.

The critical hit that this wizard takes, though, doesn't kill him outright, so this made me suspect that either his attacker criticalled with minimum damage, or the party's not first level after all.

My take on the "short teleport" is that it's a fine power for a first-level wizard to have, perhaps as a 1/day ability, but maybe even more often than that; if it's only a 30' jot, and perhaps line-of-sight, then it's not going to be too powerful for the sake of getting around traps and such, but lets the wizard avoid melee combat, which is what they're likely looking for.

So in the end, we couldn't really decide what level this wizard was. Just tell us, Thompson! Then we can take these little bits of info you've given and know something about the nth-level wizard.

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