Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-72.77.73.35-20140326142841/@comment-71.61.177.24-20140330145825

72.77.73.35 wrote: I personally think being a warrior is okay, and personally, only barbarians are mostly stupid. warriors are usually not as smart though. You wanna go look up how combat and strategy works, the understanding of tactics required to become a really good fighter, and every military commander who ever lived before trying to say that again?

Warrior-style combat - indeed, combat in general - is not just hitting things hard with a weapon. You have to know where to hit, when to hit, in some cases what to hit, and whether or not you're even going to do it yourself (as opposed to giving orders instead). And that's just the very basic and specific hitting things bit. What about dodging, blocking, parrying? There is one of those for every time and place. You might need to choose between spots to attack from, between weapons, between different uses of a weapon (Hello halberd! As a side not, polearms are amazing weapons.), between armors, between riding or on foot (if you're trained in both), between killing or maiming, and over all that, knowing how to keep the other guy from succeeding in all this stuff himself. Or herself.

And then you have the matter of strategic retreat. By which I mean getting the Oblivion out of dodge.

And then if you're in charge of a group, you have logistics and supply (planning and paperwork). Food, weapons and armor, horses and their costs if you have any (horses are expensive to maintain), possibly other animals such as dogs (depending on the group's function; if they're law enforcement, like Hold guards, you're gonna need some way of tracking perps), travel and lodging costs, and generally what on Nirn one is going to do with their group.

This gets f*cktupled when you throw in mages, because spell tomes, many alchemy ingredients, staves, magical crafting stuff, and the lot are extremely expensive - more so than the basic iron, steel, or steel plate armor and weapons that most normal warriors would probably be equipped with.

Compare the mage, who has to learn spells academically, has a million mysteries they could try to unravel for a living, and who has so many choices.

Ranged, area of effect, wall, rune, fury, calm, get some allies, frost, fire, shock, enchanted gear, poisoned gear, invisibility, whatever potions you may have made, clairvoyance to help with directions, jump or levitate, persuade or charm, kill, turn, or paralyze...

Except that besides the player character, I don't know of any mages who are jacks-of-all-trades like that.

You have enchanters, destructionists, illusionists, conjurers/necromancers (player-castable necromancy is classed as a subset of Conjuration, so I will treat it as such), alterationists, alchemists, I'm sure people who study more than one school at a time for specific purpouses.

But I cannot think of anybody in-world who learns all the schools of magic.

Which limits the decisions considerably.

I may not be accurate about this, but in essence, besides the academic requirements for learning spells, which aren't necessarily linked to intelligence anyways, mental skills/"intelligence" are not any less in warriors than in mages.

- WorshipsMeridia