My first character, the dwarf coachman, dwarf engineer, dwarf master engineer will soon be ending the Enmy Within campaign.

So am now starting creation of my new character for my next campaign.

The Light Wizard Apprentice. So I learnt they start with 4 free action cards. Channel Power, Magic Dart, Cantrip and COunterspell. Also they get a reference card called Quickcast.

I know about how easy it is for wizards to become corrupted.

Apart from training in Discipline and maybe a talent to aid with WP rolls, anything else I should think on as a wizard?

Its been 4 years since the game came out, do many wizards last to even reach rank 4?

I do not have the rulebooks available at the moment, but the Wizard starts with a couple of skills. They are listed somewhere really awkward in the magic rules.

From a roleplaying perspective consider the effects channelling a particular wind has on PC.

There are some talents that are very handy for a wizard, and one (Genius or something) good for any Intelligence based PC (use Intelligence for anything).

The Magic books are very light on information, on the College of Light. How their staff would look like for example.

It seems to suggest Light wizards love to share knowledge, but we know they are the wardens of the prison for chaos artifacts. Doubt they be sharing those.

The RP part is fine, read the effects of Light magic on the wizard. Light hair, pale skin etc. Researched some famous Light wizards and the College.

I was thinking more the how not to become a chaos spawn from casting a few cantrips.

You dont see many reports on WFRP seesions with wizards. So I am guessing they get killed off pretty quick, was just wanting to see, from people who have played so many years of games, if that is what will happen.

see also:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/94295-light-order-lore-of-light-2e-3e-lists/

I was thinking more the how not to become a chaos spawn from casting a few cantrips.

By having the GM use corruption as challange dice. Seriously, wether a character becomes mutated or not is completely up to the GM.

I do think I am somehow being misunderstood on the questions.

I just see how it goes for myself, see if I have a long and survivable life.

I just work the character around the discipline/stress/WP requirements.

There were some Light spells in the From the Grave PoD as well Emirikol , I try to find my collection when i get home.

You are asking for a survivable build are you not?

Nope. Wasnt asking for a build. I build my character mostly around RP reason during the sessions or to fill in gaps in the group. The fun in WRFP is making your character.

I was asking do wizards live to a long life in other games. Does going insane / corrupted kill them off rather than a lucky hit by a creature. I have never read, seen or heard anyone in a session play a wizard, so am wondering.

and the other question was was there anything rulewise i may have missed playing a wizard that isnt the 4 special actions cards obtained as free and the need to not get over stressed and go insane. I think i said corruption eariler, i meant insane. Even though i said chaos spawn, I got the words and resulting effect mixed up.

Corruption is the chaos dice which you have no control over.

I have read the wizard rules 4 to 5 times already.

Channel power, spellcasting, equilibruim, underpower, overpower, quickcasting.

Watched a video by "We Talk A Good Game" on Youtube on how to cast a spell. Even though I think he was using too many Purple dice on spell casting.

I dont think I missed anything. But you never know. Did spend half a year using incorrect method of using action cards, before we found out. Failures do not mean the card is used.

I know that power is used up even if the spell fails.

Add purple only if quickcasting, or card says too or GM says to, or is vrs Target Defense

I am looking forward to playing him.

Done a whole back story. Average in stats, hgher int and wp, cause he is a Wizard.

Made him slightly clumsy. Because you need to incorporate a flaw into your character to make them interesting.

Wizard rules seem to me have so much more dice management than playing any of my other careers.

No, they do not live long because they are quite frankly useless. The only real skill they add to a party is magic sight. Their spells are underpowered and over-costed, A peasant with a bow or a 2HD weapon is more effective than your average wizard in combat, and a social or int based character is better off because they are not wasting their "extra points" on useless skills just to perform their basic function.

Wizards have a couple advantages:

Attuned item

Wands

Magic sight

High WP and Int

"Being a wizard"

Oddball bizarro spells in some cases can be interesting

You start with more skills acquired and can gain more skills overall

The base difficulty of spellcasting is zero purple, which is better than entering a fight with 1 purple

Variant skill sets by color of magic

Carcosa points out some of the drawbacks, but it still doesn't hurt to consider that being a wizard is hard, but not a broken career like most of us expect them to be (compared to Ironbrokens or Swordmunchkins).

Otherwise, I never cared for magic/mana point systems.

I was asking do wizards live to a long life in other games. Does going insane / corrupted kill them off rather than a lucky hit by a creature.

Due to needing a high Willpower to maximize Channeling, Wizards aren't very likely to go insane, and they're better than average at recovering from Insanities they do acquire.

Corruption happens more often, as most corruption checks are Toughness-based, and that's at best the third-most-important stat for a wizard. There's all sorts of contagious nastiness in the setting, and the other players will be constantly asking you to use your magic sight on potentially cursed/possessed items/people.

Miscasts are the biggest mechanical threat to your character. There's a couple in the deck that can be lethal, but I don't wont to spoil any of the surprises. Part of the joy of being a wizard is those times when things go terribly unpredictably wrong. If that doesn't sound like fun to you, you're probably not going to like being a spellcaster.

And then of course there's witch-hunters. Non-casters can get away with dubious morality and a few points of corruption without much trouble. Wizards have more cause than most to worry about their reputation. You don't want to draw the wrong type of attention.

I have never read, seen or heard anyone in a session play a wizard, so am wondering.

There are 50 basic careers, and only one Apprentice Wizard, so if you're doing a random draw as the rules recommend, then very few characters would be wizards. Wizards pretty much require a lucky draw at character creation, or a very sympathetic and flexible GM.

If a player draws Soldier (or even a Commoner or Dockhand) and wants to become a Knight at Rank 2, "all" he has to do is convince an appropriate NPC (i.e.: the GM) that his actions (or political alliances) are worthy of knighthood.

If you want to become a Trollslayer, any Dwarf Basic Career will do as a starting point.

Similar things can be said about most of the other career paths; you're either free to pursue them unrestricted or at most need a bit of justification via some roleplaying.

Wizards are more complicated. If a player draws a Scribe (or whatever) and wants to become a Wizard at Rank 2, he has in-character hurdles to overcome that are probably somewhat more difficult to hand-wave than the similar challenges to knighthood (etc). Not everyone has magical talent in the first place (though the rules don't really reinforce that), you have to catch the eye of the colleges and not the witch-hunters, and then you'll need a training montage that would officially take you away from the adventuring party for years. With a generous GM (who is willing to bend canon for the sake of fun) that might be no harder than becoming a Knight, but even if so you're still losing out on a lot of free points a "natural" wizard would have gotten at rank 1.

Starting as an Apprentice Wizard gets you a bunch of free skills and actions that will cost a ton of XP to acquire if you transition from some other career into Apprentice Wizard later in the game. Wizards are very powerful in the higher ranks, but 1st- and 2nd-rank spells are often actually weaker than the non-magical actions that non-casters have access to. That's a lot of power deficit for the Fop-turned-Wizard to attempt to overcome. Even if you can do it, it feels like a sub-optimal set of character decisions and thus most people won't try it. Most players want the character that's cool or powerful now, not the character that will finally be worth it 30 sessions from now.

That said, I must confess I've read more people posting about playing Wizards than playing Burghers and Bailiffs (or even Witches, for that matter).

I was wrong. The 2 cards were duplicates

@ Emirikol

Yes, it is the power point system I think that seriously harms the Wizard and Priest classes more than anything else IMHO. After your first turn of casting a spell, more like than not you will be quick casting so the purple die you lose by casting a spell is right back there.

From a roleplaying perspective, wizards are perfectly fine, don't get my mini rant wrong, it's the mechanics of spell casting that get my goat. If my current toon dies, the next one I want to play is a Sigmarite priest, and they get boned even harder than the wizbangs do, but it will make for a fun character to bounce off the Ironbreaker and the Bright wizard.

I have a fourth rank bright wizard. I'm actually writing a document ("So You Want To Be A WFRPG Wizard") but it's not ready yet. In the meantime, here are some things to know:

* You will never be as good in combat as a fighter character. Not even close.

* You will potentially be extremely powerful in non-combat situations. This is not because of your magic, but simply because you can use your intelligence on every roll. Consider:

** talent card "Air Of Authority" lets you use intelligence for intimidate rolls

** action "Elucidate/Obfuscate" lets you exhaust to use intelligence for social rolls

** action "Feel For The Moment" is vaguely worded but useful in many situations

** talent card "Voice Of Reason" lets you use intelligence for charm/guile rolls (this is a Reputation talent; you need to take it during character creation, then slot it into Creative Thinking or the party card)

** epic talent card "Genius" lets you exhaust use intelligence for _any roll_ (with a penalty).

** all this is in addition to your great rolls on Observation, Intuition, Folklore, and First Aid, plus Magical Sight and Education when you unlock them.

Take these cards early, because you'll be sad if the other players get them first.

* Try really hard to avoid miscasts. There will be times during combat where the fighters are hitting the monsters, and they look at you and say: "and what are you doing this round?". You'll be tempted to quickcast some inconsequential spell to try to help a little. Don't -- it's not worth the miscast risk. Do a Guarded Position roll, maybe. Or just walk away from the fight and claim you're "keeping a lookout".

* Don't squander skill points on anything but Spellcraft and Channeling. Take fortune dice instead; they raise _all_ your skills at once. Try to boost your intelligence to 6.

========

You've said that you're going Light Wizard for roleplay reasons, and I totally respect that.

But even so I would like to comment briefly on wizard orders.

Light Wizard looked really powerful at first because you can cast Burning Gaze and frickin' blind people.

Then I checked what the "blindness" card actually does, and apparently all it does is it gives a purple die on Observation checks. (citation: http://www.gitzmansgallery.com/docs/WFRP3%20Reference%20Guide%20-%20Court%20Dimon%206.pdf

But at rank 3, they get some spells that are good against demons. So they've got that going for them. Which is nice.

Amethyst Order is similar to Light -- most spells are useless, a few are good against undead.

Gold Order is similar to Light and Amethyst -- most spells are useless, a few are good against machines.

(Gold Order also gets a few spells that break the economy -- most notably they get a rank 2 spell that can create superior weapons and armor very cheaply. I can imagine that being fun in theory, but in practice I suspect it would just annoy the GM.)

Jade Order does plant and weather magic. It has some spells that lock down combat -- notably the "avalanche" spell which locks down a whole area for potentially multiple turns. Also a bit of healing.

Amber Order is animal magic. I suspect that the "turn into an animal and fight" shtick doesn't work mathematically, but they have a lot of good information-gathering powers, and at rank 3 they can turn people into crows.

Celestial Order is unusually useless -- their spells are good for initiative, running away, and manipulating dice pools. They do get a real flying spell, which is narratively pretty cool.

Bright Order tries to do combat but isn't actually very good at combat. One notable exception is that there's a combo involving the rank-3 spell Flamestorm, but it's usually not playable due to high collateral damage.

To me, Grey Order looked like the best wizard order by a large margin. They get illusions, they get disguises, they get invisibility, they get long-range spying, they get pass through walls, they get immunity to weapons, they get mind control. If I had to make a new character, I would probably go for Grey Wizard.

PS. Most of the wizard orders have a bunch of useless spells -- for example buff spells that give you a few extra dice sometimes, or attack spells that aren't better than Magic Dart, or spells that let you summon a weapon. Don't waste experience on these. It's not worth taking the in-game time to cast them; it's not worth spending the out-of-game time to do all the rolls to cast them; it's not worth remembering the tiny benefit when you're doing you're next roll; and most of all, it's not worth the risk of getting a miscast.

I cannot stress how much I disagree with your perception of celestial magic and dice pool manipulation. Dice pool manip is a very good ability, especially as it does not "add a dice" It adds a *result*. As for your comments on combative magic, I pretty much agree 100%.

Wizards get punished, HARD for miscasts, yet there is no "risk V reward" benefit for comets.

But miscasts are among the most fun and warhammer-esk things in the whole game. Me, my gaming group and especially the Wizard player loves the miscast deck. They add both fun, excitement and a feeling of "anything could happend".

Also, most miscasts aren't that dangerous, at least not when rolling one chaos star. Many of them mainly add flavour to the game. The miscasts are the reward.

Bright magic was rated, by the so-called playtesters, as the most powerful career in the game. I've seen powerful builds of all cahracters. We did an excessive evaluation of an Amythest wizard earlier on the board (I'll see if I can find it) and pretty much showed that it is nearly broken (except when compared to a swordmunchkin or ironbroken).

In our group the Priest of Sigmar became the most powerful character in the group.

Wizards are simply commoners who cast spells. That's all they should be. If you want to be a Pedlar, it should be better at that thing than anyone else, but not necessarily more powerful and the same goes for spellcasters. [side note: Spellcasters are the ONLY ones that can take those actions and can also take any other action..yet, all other careers are restricted so they cannot take spells. ]

Celestial wizards are supposed to be good at what again? I don't think they're listed as 'the ultimate fighting wizard of all time.' They're supposed to be omen readers and seers.

None of them will ever be as powerful as this though:

Here's that discussion about how powerful Amythest wizards are:

http://community.fantasyflightgames.com/index.php?/topic/82000-amethyst-wizard-worth-it/

..and a nice pic of Celestial wizard (of doom!)

You all forgot the most powerful spell of them all: Cantrip

This spell alone holds so much fun/potential - ofc it is up to the GM to allow it, but it can help you boatloads

Correct: