In my game, the effectiveness of a mage was often substantially a factor of his role-playing and cleverness in using what were objectively pretty weak powers. Cantrips got a lot of use, for example.
Most definitely not true. (Also, for the following Wizard = 3rdedition class or the 2nd edition Magic-User. Sorcerers didn’t exist back then, and I’m not going flipflop on saying Wizard vs. Magic-User because it’s obvious they’re the same thing.)
Here’s the thing: Wizards lost every. single. flaw or weakness. period. (Comparing 2nd edition to 3rd). Here is but a smattering:
(A) Spells used to be slow to cast - a wizard casting a high level spell would go dead last.
(B) Casting a spell was extremely vulnerable to interruption, and there was nothing whatsoever you could do about it.
(C) Spells had intrinsic weaknesses and flaws that a canny opponent could know and exploit - sometimes even turning the spell against you.
(D) Spellcasters and especially wizards gave up much more. There were no -25 AC wizards running around casually.
(E) Spellbooks were very limited.
This is why wizards especially were seen as so dominating in early 3.0-edition. Spells were now almost always cast instaneously, you lsot spells rarely and it was easy to tune your character to avoid it altogether, spells had virtually no weaknesses or in-universe presence except for “some artbitrary effect happens with these arbitrary rules”, spellcasters were actually much easier to mix/max and had fewer flaws relative to warrior-types, and spellbooks for Wizards became inherently unlimited except by time and money.
On that last point, note this: I have asked virtually every 3rd edition group I could find, and out of them, one and only one ever enforced or used the rules about scribing spells. All the rest presumed that wizards has unlimited free spell scribing. Many also never took any action to destroy, steal, or otherwise remove a wizard’s spellbook, despite it being a major weakness and one a reasonable and intelligent opponent would at least consider. This has the implicit efect of giving every wizard about a dozen free Spell Mastery feats.
This is not to say that the 3rd wizard is bad, and if you like the game, then you like the game. And of course, Clerics and Druids are much messier than wizards. Along the way their supplemental material got vastly less scrutiny than arcane spellcasting (likely due to having fewer Save-or-Die effects) and they ended up with insane levels of magical might.
COntrast this to a mid- or even high-level 2nd edition wizard. Any good attribute can be the difference between life-and-death, including Strength. He may have no physical defenses and there are no shield bonuses or deflection - nothing passive at all. Possibly he has Bracers of Defense, but they’re expensive. His hit points can quite possibly be eaten through in a single round of combat - there are no massive hit points bonuses he can roll over through Con-stacking. In combat, he’s slow and often ineffectual; his best spells are going to be sleep, magic missile, and similar relatively low-level fare. In fact, he may never casually cast a single 4th-or-higher spell in combat, because it’s risky and invites trouble. He can still contribute well without them, and with proper planning can utterly demolish many challenges. He’ll always be dependant on other players to defend him and offer assistance.
Back to 3rd. The wizard needs two attibutes (though Dex is helpful) and can focus narrowly on exactly what he wants to do. He’ll stack an array of prestige classes to maximize his spellcasting in a number of freakish and improbable ways. Even without those, he’s going to be stacked to the gills with magic items by the basic nature of the rulesset, and can easily make those he lacks if need be. Resistances are much more important than AC, but he’s going to come close to matching the Fighter in that regard as well. He could if he wished, build himself up to be better in melee combat, but he wouldn’t bother because he unleash instant flaming doom every single round.
In short, the 3rd edition wizard is designed to compete mathematically (because that’s how Sean K. Reynolds thinks). The game is a mathematical excercise where players compete against the power curve. You don’t have to plot different characters along axes of survivability, damage-dealing, and utility - the point is that you can. Fundamentally, any class can do what any other class can do; it just does it better or worse.
But 2nd edition wasn’t designed that way. Each class was an archetype, and they saw very little need to cross over. Fighters are entirely different people from wizards; they simply happen to share a few stats. Clerics aren’t just armored wizards with a strange spell list; they played in a completely different manner and weren’t intended to deal with the same challenges. The 3rd edition wizard was often considered OP because he kept all the advantages of the 2nd edition wizard (at first), but lost his disadvantages. And the disads were dropped because he was now a Fighter - it’s just that his Full Round Action was Fireball instead of Full Attack.
Note that I am not judging this. This is the analysis and not my personal preference. This is simply that the wizard is relatively much weaker and more powerful all at once in 2nd edition; he was the engineer with a box of specialty tools which took time and effort. But he was not an effective primary combatant. Even pretty high-level Magic-Users would get ROLFPWND by a handful of much lower-level enemies.
“Magic User” was a dumb name. 
Did you use weapon speed factors, too?
I don’t remember this EVER being a problem. I think it’s a question of what rules are enforced around the table.
This, on the other hand, I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Example?
What’d they give up except magic armor? Edit: Actually, I don’t really remember ANYONE getting past about -10.
So basically people started ignoring the rules and it’s a problem with 3rd edition?
This is contrary to everything I can remember about 2nd edition.
I have no stake in this discussion either. I’m just going by “here’s what I remember about the games I played in these systems.” and it is pretty contrary to what you’re stating.
Worse, I don’t think I have a copy of my 1st ed rulebooks anywhere I’m likely to be able to check on, though I might have 2nd edition somewhere.
A major part of the reason why Wizards are considered broken, nowadays, is the internet. Back in the days of 2e and AD&D, people didn’t go online to look up the most optimal race, stat spread, spells, etc etc… They used whatever books they actually owned, and the most help they could have in optimizing was asking the other players. By 3.5’s final days, on the other hand, people would go online, find the perfect wizard build, and pull in spells from 5, 6, 7 or more books. I have had a player whose Druid had, out of about 10 prepared spells, 8 sources. And wizards benefited from splat books exponentially, because even books geared towards fighters or rogues like Complete Warrior or Complete Scoundrel had dozens of spells. I bet that if you took the average AD&D gaming group, plunked them down in front of the 3.5 rule books (including splats) and had them play a campaign you wouldn’t see the wizards dominate nearly as much as they are supposed to. It’s just that casters benefit more from information than melee classes do, and nowadays information is practically unlimited.
My old 1st Ed. Dragonlance sourcebook has a page or two of guidelines for characters from other worlds visiting Krynn. Namely clerics/druids needing to find new deities, magic users/illusionists needing to join the Tower of High Sorcery or risk persecution and paladins/cavaliers being railroaded into the Order of the Knights of Solamnia (including a dumb rule about how they have to start as a lvl 1 Knight and can’t progress in their ‘real’ levels until they meet that level as a Knight).
So they at least acknowledged that other worlds existed (or that gamers would want to incorporate them).
No doubt this is true. Still, it always makes me a little sad to see the implication (reminder?) that everybody is obviously interested in “optimizing” in the first place.
In our game it was always clear (if unspoken) that most of the characters were sub-optimal, with respect to system mechanics. Player choices were about fleshing them out as characters, not game avatars. In the course of actual play, characters repeatedly invited danger, made things more difficult for themselves, or ‘failed’ to capitalize on opportunities for enrichment, because it made sense for who they were. The players’ objective wasn’t to optimize their chances for winning; there is no winning in an RPG. The goal was to develop great roles and play the shit out if them… in the course of helping the DM ‘write’ a great cycle of stories. Even the ultimate ‘losing’ outcome of a game session–the unrecoverable death of a beloved character with hundreds of hours of play invested in him–though hardly welcomed, was celebrated if it happened in memorable style.
I guess a lot if people played paper-and-pencil D&D with little more engagement and imagination than they’d have in a board or video game. But, damn. It could be so much more.
Everybody ? Hardly 
I’m currently GMing a Pathfinder campaign where the PC team consists of:
- a tiefling monk. He’s supposed to be the main melee guy. As a monk. That chose a subclass that doesn’t even have Flurry of Blows, but instead focuses on style feats that so far the player hasn’t gotten. So, yeah. As a tiefling, he’s also got a lot of social baggage to deal with.
- a human bard. But not just any bard. This bard is a specific subclass that doesn’t have group boosting songs at all - in return, she does have access to plenty of NPC followers (particularly once she reaches her planned prestige class, at which point she’ll pretty much be able to conjure “person who can do that shit” out of the aether, more or less), “free” money, can boost herself (but still not fight - she’s much better at pretending she can fight well than, well, actually fighting), and has very good calligraphy. Like, she can pen cover letters so neat, it’d make you cry. We tease her a lot about it, naturally. Who the hell puts points in fricking calligraphy ?!
- a human surgeon, subclass of alchemist which itself is a pretty crummy mage alternative IMO. He’s supposed to be the group’s healer, but only heals by giving people free potions to quaff. Which costs them actions. He can also throw explosives that will very quickly and very sharply drop in efficiency. I think his plan is to eventually heal people by throwing potions at them ? I dunno. He’s a funky player
- a halfling rogue. Not much to say there, but there again in this particular campaign setting, huge social drawback to being a halfling (i.e. de facto slave caste).
It’s a blast watching them play because while the team is almost useless on paper, they keep finding clever ways to deal with things and outfox the opposition :). It does help that the campaign I’m running is not *too *bash-heavy, but still, there’s hard fightin’ ahead of them. In fact, last time they got perilously close to a TPK while invading a nest of tiefling rogues and getting separated from each other… add quasi-constant Darkness and a good dose of Magic Missiles flying their way and it was pretty dicey for a while.
I run a 2E campaign with some 1E elements and one group in it is extremely high-level: an NPC who is a 19th-level mage, 17th-level fighter,and 17th-thief with psionics on top of it; a 16th-level paladin with 18/00 strength, a Holy Avenger, and an armor class of -10; a 15th-level mage with a bazillion magical items; an 11th-level psionic druid who doesn’t bother to use magic weapons; and an old-style 8th-level bard, he’s seventh-level as fighter and 8th as thief. I’ve played a few games of Pathfinder, but I must admit I know little about 3E and 4E. However, here are some things I’ve found that work against high-level characters and they might work in your campaignss:
1.) Don’t use big critters, use lots of little critters. And have those critters use some organization and good tactics and strategy. Let’s see how good a mage is when 50 goblin archers are shooting at her all at once.
2.) Invent your own monsters and feel free to modify existing ones. Adapt them from other games (I like Legend of the Five Rings.) I know there are players who have just about memorized the beasteries, but that – AND the Internet – does them little good in my world. I don’t care how high a level your character has; if you meet a nine-tail kitsune, a dread knight, or a kyoso no oni, you WILL hurt. 
3.) Intelligent monsters will fight intelligently. Fliers are going to attack from the air. Dragons can use their wings to create clouds of dust or snow. Mages and Clerics will use spells like Magic Mouth to sound alarms so they can prepare. High-level monsters will use low-level monsters to get an idea of a party’s abilities and then organize an effective attack or defense.
4.) Defense is just as important as offense. Give something magic resistance and/or a bunch of spell immmunities if you want to take the starch out of the mages. The Water Wierd from the 1E Monster Manual is a good example of a low-level monster that can be hard to kill.
5.) They can teleport unlimited distances? That’s all right. The baddies use places that are Warded against teleportation and have spells or devices that prevent scrying and detection spells. What they can do, others can do. This party twice had to fight people who could teleport into their location.
6.) Hamper the effectiveness of a party by forcing it to fight in an unfamiliar medium like quicksand or water.
7.) Attack them in ways they don’t expect. A god forced the party to dock at an island and they had to wade ashore to accomplish a task the diety wanted to perform. A couple of them stepped on stonefish and the high-level mage would have died had the druid not carried a Neutralize Poison spell.
8.) They have too many magic items? Find ways to attack them with spells and breath weapons. They may survive even if they fail their saves, but will their items survive? It is so much fun to watch a survivor’s face when his +2 long bow or her +5 Cloak of Protection is turned into ashes. “The DM giveth and the DM taketh away.”
9.)There are ways of harrassment and mental torture that don’t involve inflicting damage. As part of its quest to destroy an evil artifact, the party had to go into a swamp. There was something the high-level NPC mage knew that would have made ths portion of the adventure easier than I wanted. I decided that as a result of a past adventure with an evil demigod, he had a special type of fever and developed a mild form of insanity while he was in the swamp. He confused the other characters with people from his past and called them the wrong names and spouted crazed nonsense. I did nothing to hurt the party. In combat, he functioned exactly as he normally did; he was just unable to remember the fact that could have made things easier. Believe me, it shoots frissons of horror through players when they realize a high-level mage may not be all there.
Another group of lower level characters once rescued a woman from some ogres. She was very grateful and willing to share her favors with the willing. A few of them took her to bed and got the Ogre Clap.
That same group is defending a town from various evil beings. Some of the townspeople don’t like them because a portion of the town burned down in a fight with a dragon. They have to deal with people who accuse them of bringing bad times to the town or try to cheat them or whine that everyone is doomed. Be creative.
Thank you That’s exactly how I feel about the higher-level game… it’s up to the DM to get more creative, not simply succumb to the players’ increase powers.
Agreed. And they seemed to vary that in every book, so that depending on edition and revision and class/subclass, you were a Magic-ser, Mage, Wizard, some kind of speciliast, or whatever.
Those were always optional.
That may be your house-rule, but it was a significant point. If a wizard was interrupted during a long casting sequence a spell it automatically failed. There was no chance to keep it.
Spells often had rules on how they actually “took place” inside the game world. It was often possible to use these to stop or fiddle with a powerful spell. Additionally, the nature of the game world was less mechanical than 3rd edition, in that basically anything reasonable was expected to work. Shapechange is a good example, as if you knew how the spell workied and could find the magical gem being used in it, you could instantly cancel the effect (and leave the wizard using it in deep, deep trouble).
It wasn’t all that easy, but magic armor was frequently the only protection you could get; contrast to 3rd edition, where there are numerous forms of protection and armor is arguably the weakest.
No; I’m pointing out that it’s something of an extension of the problem. If you start ignoring the written weaknesses of wizards (and often other spellcasters), they can go way out of control.
Casting a spell required one time unit per “casting time” of the spell, which it was almost always equal to the spell level. Want to cast Meteor Swarm (a 9th level spell, for those who may know DnD)? Even if you had luck and got a good intiative, you were likely to act last, and invite everybody to kick you in the groin before you got it off.