Hey quick question.

>>53295976
>Why don't wizard's wear armour?
Who said they don't? In some settings they do. Different settings have different wizards.
>Any reason?
Yes, but you'll have to specify which setting you're talking about.

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>>53295976
They're all fuckin weak nerds that aren't cool enough for armor.

>>53296015
Lets say it's in the land of Clichea.
Where every single Cliche is hit on the head.
Hard.
Why wouldn't mages wear armour?

>>53296090
If every single Cliche is hit on the head hard, how are any of them mages?

>>53296109
I...
What?
Say that I again I didn't get it.

>>53296124
If every single Cliche in Clichea has been hit hard on the head, how are any of them mages?

>>53296124
He means the inhabitants of Clichea, the Cliche, are all dropped as babies so their INT score is 3

>>53295976
Armor interferes with spellcasting aby limiting the amount of arcane power they can access and limiting the fine movements needed to cast. Well that and they usually use magical wards and stuff to protect them from harm which done work as well when they are put on heavy armor.

>>53295976
Because while they may have been smart enough to study magic they weren't smart enough to think of lifting while doing so.

>>53296259
Why doesn't armor penalize the fine movements needed for melee combat?

>>53296181
>>53296200
There's got to be mages for the Epic quest that saves the world!
Theres the Human Male Fighter that's the chosen one.
The Female Half-elf Thief that's an orphan.
The nerdy human mage.
The fuckhuge orc barbarian that's the only adult.
The other female that's a bard but ends up with the mage.
It's like you don't get cliches.

>>53295976
i know this is bait, but however:

in folk tales they don't wear armour because they don't need them because they are fucking wizards who command supernatural powers at will.

in most rpgs which want to make wizards playable for players they have to be somewhat vulnerable, so ingame reasons for them being bad with armour have to be found.

>>53296290
it does though in nearly every system, including d&d.

>>53296341
I don't remember armor penalizing to-hit in D&D...

>>53296324
I didn't try to make it bait.
Am I that shit at making threads?
I just thought that mages would be smart enough to...I dunno enscribe runes on armour to make it easier to wear and use or something.

>>53296367
It penalized DEX-based AC

>>53296367
then your memory is flawed. every combat involving 'fine movements' in d&d is penalised by the fact that the wielder doesn't have access dexterity boni.

>>53296290
It does? Fighters lose all their agility upon wearing armor.

They're not trained in it's use by default, and so are not used to casting wearing it.

In D&D 5e, if a wizard takes an armor proficiency, or knows it from a previous class, they can cast while wearing armor with no penalty.

>>53296290
The movements needed for casting spells are very fine and the smallest mistake in a gesture can cause the spell to fail.

>>53295976
Balance, mostly. If wizards didn't die in one or two hits, why would anyone play anything else?

>>53295976
Normal pansy-ass wizards? They're old men, or they're in too much student debt from wizard school to afford armor.

But any wizard that survives long either wears armor or has a magical alternative.

>>53295976
Retard, wizards spend all their life in the library. They can't wear armor because they are weak pieces of shit, like you (except they are smart unlike you)

Also armor is encumbersome and wizards need their body freed to connect more easily with the elements and extraplanar magic.

Also, because they have fucking magic, what do they need armor for?

This is the shittiest thread on /tg/ of the entire week, made by an obvious 12 year old.

>>53295976
Do you want an answer that sounds smart because "Well, duh, it's so intuitive?" but doesn't actually make sense upon examination, do you want the reason why the cliche was developed that way, or do you want an explanation for why a magic user wouldn't wear armor?

>>53296504
Well no need to be rude.

>>53296551
Second one please.

>>53295976
they often can, but somehow they rarely do
like in 4e wizard can wear and cast in any armour he cares to become proficient in so very likely from the get-go they could wear more than robes but in my group nobody ever did that because they were coming from 3.5 and dead set in their ways

Lad, do you know what it means to be a wizard?
I'm willing to bet you don't have a bloody clue. If you were a complete dullard you might think being a wizard is raising your hand and shouting so fire comes out but I'll assume you know better.
Instead perhaps you thought that being a wizard meant reading about circles and demons and weak points in reality until you work out that a bit of grave dust here and 15 rats eyeballs there and with a bit of chalk you have an on demand poison cloud miniature ritual, or spell. And you know, that's part of it so you're not entirely wrong.

But I'll tell you what's at the core of being a wizard. It's taking the body you were born with and rejecting it. Working out how it works from top to bottom and not being satisfied, and then improving on it. Bones infused with sacred salts, flesh with elemental silver and dragon tears in such a way as to be benefital and not just destroying you. And your brain too, pickling it in potions and applying natural magic sources to it so that you break it down and yourself to make it better. Make it magical. And yes, this can drive us insane. Rarely leaves us as we were before, but we perform the rituals knowing that we as we are then will not emerge on the other side.
There's a reason why the body of a great wizard has value, we pour our craft into ourselves. Tattoos, implants, infusion.. we've done it all to make ourselves capable of breaking reality when we desire. Sorcerers naturally have a body that can force the world to obey them in one way or another, never understanding how but only that they can. There are also those daft magic fighters in the east that have traditions that roughly equate. Eating herbs with "spirit energy", meditating and infusing themselves with magically powerful monster remnants, to reinforce their body to use their abilities. Sound familiar? There's little actual thought behind the how of it there either, so they make up for it in martial ability.

>>53296633
But now, you take a wizard, one who has forced magic against it's will into a body that could never hope to contain it and cheated reality into accepting this unnatural state of being. Stolen, borrowed and found magic in the wizard's bones and breath; amplifying or cancelling each other out according to a grand design of the wizard, slowly built on as he discovers more magic and lore of the world.
And then. AND FUCKING THEN.. you want to slap the entire unstable gestalt magical mess in human form into a shell of metal. Metal, really? Do you know how many ways metal can effect raw magical energies?! Energies plural, for we wizards have to manipulate dozens of them in small ways to create a magical self that equates to what bloody sorcerers are born with in one magic type.
But metal, really? It has magnetic properties, which is already magic. Then it is of the Earth, which effects wind magic, other earth magics, plenty of veiled spirits too. And after that, it's of the forge and industry, which effects EVEN BLOODY MORE kinds of magic. Wild magic, nature magic, binding magics, plenty of divine sources the list goes on and on..
So that's why wizards avoid coating themselves in sheets of metal. It's already hard enough remaking your mortal vessel into something that can withstand cloth and still be viable. Which has aspects of nature, plantlife, industry, and don't get me started on dyes. But we've got to wear something so we make sure we can wear it without messing with our internal magical currents. Now, there are ways to avoid this of course if you make yourself a wizard while planning to climb in a big metal shell. It's never as good or as strong as only cloth immunity so most don't bother and just use more magic as defense.

So next time you ask "why don't wizards just wear armor", believe me we bloody well considered it but it's not as easy as that!

>>53296633
Jaysus anon.
Where's that from?

>>53296647
Alright nevermind.
10/10 Writefagging my dude.

>>53295976
In the GURPS default spellcasting system, you use fatigue points to cast your spells. Wearing armor or carrying heavy loads causes you to lose fatigue points, as well, so you don't have as much juice to cast your spells.

Do you want to spend character points to increase your fatigue points so you have more to spend? Increase your strength so armor and other burdens don't use as many fatigue points? Or do you want to spend character points learning how to tell the laws of physics and causality to get the fuck out of your way?

>>53296295
Anon it's like you don't get jokes

>>53296566
>why the cliche developed this way
I don't know the exact reason, sorry. No one really does.

I'd imagine it probably has something to do with the meta-imagery of magic users being "wise men" carried over from many mythologies and folk lore reiterating itself. It was likely a purposeful design decision, intended to invoke sensations of the eclectic and mysterious that are frequently associated with those kinds of monks, mystics, and other such found in humanities stories so that the new reader wouldn't be totally lost on the idea of a "wizard" when it was introduced.

The same mechanism is the most likely the cause for why the image perpetuates itself--authors, artists, and creators of all sorts attempting to evoke imagery of something you already have in your own mind so that they don't have to provide an in depth explanation every time.

Essentially, "old man" is the prototypical and quintessential imagery in the greater meta-language of human society of "mystic" or "shaman" or "medicine man", etc. and that imagery has shaped our expectations. Content creators take advantage of that expectation to both save time and get your attention.

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>>53296706
I literally felt this.

>>53295976
You mean in D&D?

Originally Gygax hated the ideas of wizards getting the same cool things as warriors. Why continue the practice because aside from slight thematic it accidentally works as a game balance.
>Theoretically, this is putting aside the normal D&D and caster issues

>>53296665
Made it up.
I just figured it made sense. I mean, that's basically what wizards are in d&d. People who weren't born with magic but figured out how to cheat reality into both giving them magic and doing magic by itself on demand.
So how else is that going to work? There has to be something special about wizards or the simpler and more useful spells would be known by everyone.
Plus it explains the various flavor of spellsword, less powerful internal magic but more resilient to armors.

>>53296676
Thank.

>>53296777
Nice trips.

>an ancient evil awakens

This isn't actual particularly uncommon. The world is old enough that there are quite a few ancient things, and morally diverse enough that there are many evil things. Overlap is inevitable, and they have to sleep sometime. Just count our lucky stars that sometime so happens to be most of the time. There are hundreds of thousands of ancient evils slumbering beneath the earth. Every few years, one stirs, and someones gotta stab it with a magic sword, imprison it in a crystal, or some such thing. There is a vast archeological discipline that is devoted to recording and studying these sleepers. Researching those that wreaked havok in the past to prepare for their next coming, or noting the methods used to defeat recently awakened ones to ease the way for future generations.

>>53296647

Unless you are in Gielenor. The mages there wear armor that laughs at the face of a sword swipe. Mage armor in that game is designed around being rigid yet soft materials like mutated fungi, bone from powerful undead creatures to weaving together energy from the lifeforce of a god to make a stoneflesh style armor or magically attuned ore.

So base armor around that. A mage who weaves his robes with impact resistant armor that would be suspectable to bows because arrows tend to just puncture the armor easily

>>53296942
This premise makes me want to run a medieval fantasy meets Super Sentai campaign, where all Ancient Evils are technically the same species and serve as MOTW, and it's just an ability of that species to hibernate for centuries instead of dying.

>>53296633
This bro iso pretty close

In old occultism, iron is the essence of our world & basically reality, it grounds out magical energies. That's why demons & fae cannot abide iron, they are creatures of magic & so it's anathema

I love a good armored wizard/mage though

>>53295976
Energy is conductive. You'd smoke yourself while casting mayhaps?

Because they are not warriors, they're hermits

>>53296633
>>53296647
>you can stick all kinds of weird crap inside your own body
>but metal is the only thing you can think of to armor yourself with
Someone's not wizarding hard enough.

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>>53299797
And note how non-metal armors are far more commonly associated with wizards!
Although needing armor of any kind is unnecessary to a properly prepared wizard, it remains in this hypothetical setting that large amounts of metal forces the wizard to dramatically alter their magiphysiology to accommodate it and as a consequence suffer a reduced thaumic current.
Bone still requires the wizard to put thought into it, generally re-attune and likely reinfuse their skinnbut it's a piece of piss compared to steel plate.

Any pure wizard will simply use their unmatched power to weave protections from the arcane skein. Those who choose to become armoured wizards will choose materials that impact their delicate internal balance the least or require the least adjustments.
And the ones that actually wear metal are either more than a little bit shit, more insane than usual, or have reworked their body specifically to REQUIRE metal at all times to suppress their magiphysiology from unravelling.
Don't usually last long, but fairly impressive before the howling voids they kept chained to their animus burst free without the bite of terrestrial metal binding them. Last metal-clad I heard did exactly that, took out a handful of buildings when their chestplate was destroyed.

>Now I've started writing on it, I love the idea of wizards being tattooed, surgical scarred, branded madmen who fear wearing certain materials, seek out more reagents to add to their hoarded magic and basically find ways to nail more bits of magic to their body and soul without causing it to explode.
>Epic level wizards being one sneeze away from re-enacting Hiroshima due to having nailed dozens of devil's to their soul. Not necessarily metaphorically either.

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>>53300238
>oh, and the unofficial motto of wizards is "fuck natural spellcasters"
>to them having a naturally stable and powerful pool of magic is just complete bullshit when they put everything they had into making an unstable one
>it's like the difference between paid and free players in the very worst free2play games
>except in this instance the free players have done insane amounts of grinding and cheesed their way into stacking buffs to levels they were never supposed to have

>>53296436
Which in no way impedes your ability to hit someone with a sword unless you go out of your way to make that be the case.

>>53295976
Because Gygax thought it was a decent idea for balance reasons and D&D is like religion when it comes to holding on to ideas for no other reason than tradition.

5e has moved away from this with proficiency removing all penalties for casting in armor.

Most other games that do it are trying to fit into the tradition of D&D, those that do not thought about it for a minute and realized the idea doesn't make too much sense.

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>>53295976
>Whenever someone makes a post about a barebones rule that is part of a detailed section of lore because once upon a time, functionality was an adaption and interpretation of the fluff itself as to buffer player understanding of the lore.

Because, every fucking day for eight Hours a wizard shoves what amounts to computer code into a fucking spell book, which he has to ritually memorize without distraction in mental exercises, whilst understanding how this ties into an invisible force in tangent with all planes of existence knowing the entire computer language, other languages, a motherfucking shitload of precise handsigns, formations and the like to weave this spell, next to incantations, because the spell memorization process is literally him just FINISHING the casting of a spell, the spellbook crap is literally every other part of the spell he just cast, in addition to this, having physical spell components to cast the spell in question.

Bet you didn't know any of this because you're a fucking faggot. For fuck sakes, there's a fucking reason why Wizards don't wear armour, because Wizardry requires High Int, and the patience to carefuly word out an incantation, using hand formations verbal components, and doing this all in a timely speed.

So you want to put on armour which hinders and LIMITs this shit, sound of the armour itself being a potential factor for fucking a single line of code/spell you took up almost all of your morning (if you got up early) to do.

I fucking hate you newfags so goddanmed much it's unreal, I fucking hate nuD&D and it's lack of attention to detail, I fucking hate people who can't give this in-depth understanding of the Arcane to new players to D&D and they literally think wizard is Mana-spam garbage like in "Nomura's lasr minute cash-cow worse than any d20 unnofficial supplement trying to avoid copyright Final Fantasy."

Casulizard magic is the cancer killing roleplaying.

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>>53301219
You sound upset.

Well, don't be. It's true that in "nuD&D" a fighter2/wizard18 is incredibly strong, but it's more a conceit of the system than people being influenced by Final Fantasy.

>>53300238
I'd read it.

>>53295976
Don't wanna electrocute myself when I cast ZAP!

>>53295976

They spent all their salary on magic trinkets rather than a good serviceable amor.

I don't know and I fucking hate it.

Anyone expecting fights should armour up. Wizards should wear some mail or plate. They hardly have any CON so they need all the armour they can get.

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>>53295976
Shitty game design

>>53301257
The biggest and most disgusting part of FF is that the very concept of Ecology, lore, and anything else that populates it's settings especially humanoids against non-humanoids in almost any Japaense esque setting is that everything that occurs is horrendeusly once sided.

Enemies with abilities that are not used strategically, enemies that are not PC's, subject to many ailments they are, like the idea that they don't have finite MP, use potions themselves, and render otherwise useful abilities useless because of this, PC's garnering little respect that pays off, decent reputation, cohorts, things like that.

FF series is usually chocked full of what amounts to linear gameplay, and tunnel-sighted story progression, where many things are Point A to B with side attractions existing to make thing easier for those willing to grind.

Level scaling, for example is one of the things that is hit and miss in FF and many JRPGs, with situational random encounters that can vanish from the game entirely after a point, or end up there own thing in a desginated "safari" zone, as if to remove any merit to revisitng an area.

Acquirement of equipment becomes a passing iconic standard with no depth behind it, get a new sword? No one discusses it, no one knows the cultural standard, no one explains what the monsters are doing there in the first place or why they exist, The monsters are all centric to a singular BBEG and vanish when he's beaten for some really lackluster reason.

FF is just a setting built on a horrible set of standards taken from a poorly translated D&D splatbook like a good chunk of fantasy anime, like Loddoss, resulting in many issues that always plague Japanese trying western fantasy in media today. There's a fucking reason why X setting has Dark Elves that are not Drow in any sense of the word for the last "Since for fucking ever" and Loddoss was to blame for it with a depthless following the elves from it. Barebone as fuck.

>>53301219
Vancian casting is literally just telling elementals to fuck with reality. Wizards understand a bare minimum of what's actually going on

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>>53295976
Wear anything you want, just think about it logically.

>>53295976
Spell casting uses a lot of stamina so it's not ideal to be marching around in a full suit of armor

>wear armor
>3p
>full plate
>140p
That is why

>>53296290
This is just another bait thread by someone who clearly never played any TTRPGs or even bothered reading any rulebook.

>>53301889
It's the manipulation of dimensional bundles, some of which are elementals. Wizards don't understand it all, but advanced mathematics is considered relaxing in comparison.

Have you read the Dying Earth, or Lyonesse?

>>53301692

>>Not using Slayers as the example to animu D&D
>>Do you even murderhobo bra?

>>53301443
>D&D was heavily based on pulp fantasy books
>in those pulp fantasy books a magic user had to do several things in order to cast a spell: speak the magic words, do gestures, prepare the materials, use a magical item as focus, etc
>gygax thinks that's cool and realistic because that's how magic users are portrayed in real life
>decides to incorporate that as the spell components mechanic
>verbal: you can't cast spells underwater or when muted because you need to speak the magical words
>somatic: you can't cast spells properly when using heavy armor because you need to perform intricate gestures
>you have to maintain a stock of magical materials for the spells that need them

The cliche developed from somewhere, its right the in the recommended books section of the rulebook. Spellcasters in classic literature or in old folklore were derived from real druids, witches, alchemists and other mystics of old who were always portrayed as using magical words, hand gestures and magical materials/items in spellcasting. If you ever read any modern books with wizards on it you would notice almost all of them feature spells with components in the same way D&D does, because guess what, they're also based on classic folklore wizards.

Now go back to playing your retarded videogames, because wizards wearing huge armor wasn't a thing until WoW came along.

>>53295976
Balance.

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>>53295976
>>53303369
>Balance
I'm going to bring up some old 3.5 D&D dirt for a second. If I remember correctly, by the end of it, if you used your resources correctly. You could in choosing the right feats, no shenanigans, make a wizard that could walk around in fullplate made by the correct crafting materials and he would only incur a spell failure 25%.

As amusing as a commentary over balance in 3.5 is, I don't recall doing better then this, but I also don't know everything about that old ass shit system anyway so I'm sure there was a way to get to 0%.

>>53303428
I never said good balance blinki

>>53303428
Only a murderhobo would do that.
Also, only a murderhobo would complain about balance.
Murderhobo should be discussing videogaymes, not ttrpgs.

>>53303458
>I never said good balance blinki
Fair point
>>53303467
>Only a murderhobo would do that.
Nah, I was DM'ing at the time and wanted to make a douche wizard rival for one of my players.

In my setting there's a nation run by a lich who basically uses roman army structure, but instead of 8 dudes forming a contubernium, it's 7 undead and one necromancer handler, and the handlers form a unit together under the equivalent of a necromancer centurion.

Over time the old way of the phalanx and pike formations gave way to firing lines, and now all living members of the White Legion wear a simple breastplate and burgonet over their standard padded coat.

White Legion is mass skeleton infantry organized and deployed under necromancer control. Black Legion are living auxiliary volunteers for roles unsuited to skeletal puppets, like cavalry or ship crew.