The (un)usefullness of mages

[Alexjh]

The thing is here, personally I am strongly in favour of a system whereby how useful a wizard is when out of spells is entirely dependant on how the player builds them.

 

If you transcribe the concept of "Wizard" onto, being a professor of Science at a University, to be such a professor requires a basic level of competance which represents this person being a level 1 Science Professor with all the skills required for that.  However, if a pair of identical twins are both equal level/payscale Science Professors that gets them so far, but it's the "extracurricular" stuff which differentiates between them.  This extracurricular stuff is what is equivical to the player choices during levelup - so, in the case of of Twin 1, he might love science so much he just reads about science all day long, and as such, be pretty much incompetant at anything else, while his brother might go camping, woodwork, shooting and campaigning as his hobbies.  This means that although as a scientist he isn't as knowledgable as his twin, he's a lot more versatile and isn't stuck any time he is in a situation that isn't about science.  

 

The players choice is deciding where on this spectrum they want to be, a specialist or a generalist - as long as Obsidian give you the options to place yourself on this scale they shouldn't and probably won't be perscribing where on it you are.