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Fighters & Weapons

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There have been many proposals over the years for making the fighter a more interesting class to play. In OD&D, fighters can use any weapon or armor (including being the only class that can use magic swords). In addition, they can make one attack per round per hit die against enemies of 1 HD or less. Supplement I: Greyhawk added a weapon vs. AC table (pages 13 and 14). This applied to all classes, though fighters probably made the most use of it just because they were most likely to enter direct combat.

AD&D added weapon vs. AC, weapon space required, weapon speed factor (PHB page 38). Second edition added weapon specialization. This is another bonus mechanic that could stack with ability bonuses and magic bonuses (did AD&D have a specialization system, maybe in Unearthed Arcana?). Third edition added combat feats which allowed further bonus optimization and access to new powers (and recast weapon specialization as a series of combat feats). Fourth edition practically eliminated basic attacks (other than for opportunity attacks) and gave the fighter a stable of spell-like powers, including stances (buff-style persistent bonus powers, only one of which can be active at a time); 4E also retained maneuvers as combat actions such as bull rush, charge, and total defense (4E PHB page 286).

The class features that distinguish the fighter are:

  1. The ability to use all weapons and armor (*)
  2. The best combat attack bonus

Practically speaking, the ability to use all weapons and armor is quite formidable. Psychologically, “lacking penalties” is not very enticing. This advantage is further eroded when players (myself included, sometimes) chafe at weapons restrictions for other classes. While it’s true that probably all characters use weapons to some degree, it is the fighter that should, in my opinion, be the “weapons” class.

Regarding the fighter having the best combat attack bonus, every other class has a combat bonus (**), the fighter just has the best bonus. This is something of a problem, as, to use Second Edition as an example, a 7th level cleric is better at fighting than a 4th level fighter (THAC0 16 vs. THAC0 17, 2E PHB page 91). At no level is a fighter ever better at spell casting than a magic-user or cleric.

Returning to the idea that the fighter is the “weapons” class: why not bring back some version of the weapon vs. AC table, but only apply it to fighters? In order to do this reasonably, the modifiers must be all bonuses, as we don’t want fighters to be worse than other classes when using a specific weapon. This gets away from the simulation aspect of weapon vs. AC, but as simulation is not really my primary motivation here, that does not bother me.

As this post has already taken me long enough to write, I’m not going to try to put together a full table right now. Most approaches to such a table have been either by individual weapon (as in Supplement I: Greyhawk and AD&D) or by weapon class (as in 2E and most house rule systems I have found). Creating a separate entry for every weapon seems like overkill. It is both cumbersome to work with, and probably redundant. Do light, medium, and heavy lances really deserve different modifiers (as they have in AD&D)? Probably not. On the other hand, the slash-pierce-bludgeon trinity of 2E also seems less than satisfactory if what you are going for is tactical variety for fighters. So, I’m going to propose five categories, with some examples:

  • Slash (sword, glaive)
  • Pierce (spear, arrow, pick)
  • Bludgeon (club, night stick, staff, unarmed)
  • Crush (flanged mace, morning star)
  • Chop (axe)

Some weapons are versatile and can be used in more than one way. For example, a sword can be used as a piercing weapon or a slashing weapon, so the fighter can use whichever category gives the best bonus. I haven’t tried matching these categories against types of armor yet, but I can’t imagine that I would need more than 5 (multiplied by 2 due to shields): unarmored, leather, chain, light plate (encompassing scale and banded), and plate. I expect that this should be by named type rather than by armor class, which should allow it to be licensed under the OGL without needing to ape the SRD. Rob Conley took a similar approach in this Grognardia comment.

These bonuses are only applied against corporeal enemies. For enemies with some form of natural armor, the referee should just make a ruling if the player asks. For example, a bear could be considered as leather or hide armor, and a dragon could be as plate. Some enemies may be so tough that they have no tactical weapon weaknesses (such as an iron golem). There is no need to be too systematic about this, as different enemies of the same type can still have some level of uniqueness. There is also no need for the referee to worry about it; it is the player’s responsibility to make sure these bonuses are active (which even makes sense narratively, if you think about it, because a fighter would have to proactively attempt to exploit the weaknesses in an enemy’s defenses).

This approach has a number of practical benefits. One of the reasons that the weapon vs. AC modifiers are ignored is that if the rules are applied generally they add complexity to almost every attack roll. Since all the modifiers are modeled as bonuses, the fighter’s player has an incentive to keep track of them. It even makes sense under this regime for the DM to ignore these bonuses for most NPCs, since most NPCs are not classed fighters. Using this rule, I would expect that most non-fighter characters would carry one or two weapons to use in a support role, but that fighters would carry a whole host of weapons so that they would have one for each possible situation. This just feels right to me. Win, win, and win.

Weapon vs. AC bonuses can be used with either variable or constant damage dice. Delta said it better than I could:

I have no problem with weapon-vs-AC being used at the same time as variable damage dice. In D&D armor and hit points simulate different things.

I am actually considering using it with class-based damage. Characters will roll their hit die for damage (there is a similar idea in this Grognardia comment). Larger or two-handed weapons will be: roll two dice and take the highest. Thus, fighters would use d8, clerics d6, elves d6, magic-users d4, etc. A magic-user can use a two-handed sword, but it would only do 2d4 take the highest damage, and the magic-user would not be able to apply any bonuses for slashing or piercing. This incentivizes smaller (for encumbrance purposes) and cheaper weapons, which seems to make sense. Why spend extra money and backpack space on a military weapon if you are not trained to use it?

Elsewhere
1975 Ryth Chronicle via Risus Monkey: Ryth Chronicle (1975-1977) Table on page 4
1976 Supplement I: Greyhawk Pages 13 and 14
1978 AD&D Players Handbook Page 38
1978 AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide Pages 28, 71
1989 Second Edition Player’s Handbook (weapon type vs. armor modifiers) Page 90
2003 05 12 Dragonsfoot Weapon vs Armor Type – Natural Armor?
2008 10 11 ODD74 Alternate Combat Matrix
2008 11 17 Grognardia Weapon vs AC
2009 02 06 Alex Schroeder’s Wiki Weapon Specialities
2009 02 09 Dragonsfoot Weapon Types versus Armour Class
2009 02 13 Grognardia Request for Assistance
2009 02 14 Delta’s D&D Hotspot Proposal: Weapon vs. AC
2009 02 24 Delta’s D&D Hotspot Proposal: Weapon Classes
2009 06 17 Akratic Wizardry Class-Based Weapon Damage
2009 08 19 The Wheel of Samsara Recreating the Weapon vs. Armour Class Chart
2009 09 05 Blood of Prokopius Another Weapon vs. AC Table (East Asian weapons)
2009 09 09 The Wheel of Samsara Some Ideas on the Weapon vs. AC Chart (for Spellcraft & Swordplay)
2009 09 24 The Wheel of Samsara Weapon vs. AC: Once More, With Feeling (for Spellcraft & Swordplay)
2010 01 30 Bat in the Attic Revisiting Weapon vs AC for Swords & Wizardry (by weapon class)
2010 02 01 Bat in the Attic Revisiting Weapons vs AC – Weapons Aspect
2010 10 14 Blood of Prokopius Weapon vs. AC (again)
2011 02 25 Dragonsfoot Weapons vs. AC table
2011 07 16 Huge Ruined Pile “Alternative Combat System” + Weapon Type vs. AC matrices – any interest?
2011 07 16 Dragonsfoot Weapon “To Hit” vs. AC Adjustment Question
2011 07 16 Dragonsfoot nagora’s Making Wep. Vs Armour easier to use
2011 07 18 The Aspiring Lich Decoding the weapon “to hit” vs. AC table
2011 09 29 Strange Magic Weapon vs Armor Tables for B/X D&D
2011 11 08 Grognardia The Articles of Dragon: “Should They Have an Edge?”

Things to check that I don’t have access to:

  • Oriental Adventures weapon vs. AC table
  • The Complete Fighter’s Handbook

One final note: the OSR Search Engine I put together was very useful in doing the research for this post.

(*) Well, in systems that use weapon proficiencies, fighters are not proficient with all weapons, but they do get the most weapon proficiencies by a large margin.

(**) – Excepting LotFP, where no classes other than the fighter ever get better at fighting. I think this is quite inspired for a number of reasons, not least of which is the way this rule combats bonus inflation.

D&D Fault Lines

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James at Grognardia just posted on cleric weapon selection. That got me to thinking about such fault lines in gamer preferences, and the evolution of my views thereof. Incidentally, one of the solutions discussed in the article cited is class-based (rather than weapon-based) damage, which I have a half-written post about (and seems to have been already extensively considered); as often, I am late to the party. 🙂

Here are all the fault lines that I could think of. What am I missing? Where do your preferences lie?

Race-as-Class
This is the probably the fault line that I have the strongest opinion on. I am in favor. An elf class is very different from a fighter class, but an elf fighter is very similar to a human fighter. Most of the specialness of demihumans bleeds away quickly, and race choice just ends up being another lever to use in maximizing your move silently check (or whatever). Also, not having race separately means one fewer choice at chargen time.
Cleric Weapon Selection
This was the issue that prompted this post, but I have no dog in this fight. I’m fine with the classic mace-wielding D&D cleric, and, as James M. notes, coming up with justifications for this restriction can be fun. There is a compromise solution where clerics are limited to weapons that are appropriate for their particular god or religion (did this start in AD&D, or 2E, or somewhere else?). I’m not a big fan of this approach, though I often played with it, because everyone wants to play a cleric of the thunder god (or whatever god allows the best weapon selection). If edged weapons are allowed, the cleric also works well as a holy knight class, obviating the need for a paladin to fill that archetypal niche. I’m much more interested in the cleric being seen as a demon-hunter rather than a parish priest that for some reason ventures into dungeons in search of treasure. I do like the idea of no weapon or armor restrictions at all, and if I opened up cleric weapon selection, I would probably go this route. I also like FrDave’s solution (in a comment on that Grognardia post) to break weapons into categories and allow fighters access to all of them, but clerics only access to one (chosen at character creation time).
Demihuman Level Limits
I’ve never played a game where these were actually a limiting factor. I am in favor though. I prefer a more human-centric campaign. My experience in 2E and later editions is that adventuring parties end up being mostly made up of elves, with humans being a clear minority. This breaks the sense of the fantastic that I think should be associated with demihumans (though maybe that is an argument for them not to be playable PC races to begin with). I also like the idea of characters retiring and the setting persisting. A level limit serves as a nice reason to move on to another character.
Alignment
In the past, I was very anti-alignment. It seemed to be a vast oversimplification, and I was a moral-relativist teenager when I started playing. Were not most people, even the villains, good from their own perspective? This is, of course, a popular trend in modern art and philosophy. Antiheroes are still tremendously popular (for example: Batman, Elric, Dexter). Alignment also seemed to get in the way of characterization, which at that time seemed like the holy grail of role-playing. I would probably still have trouble playing with a by-the-book alignment matrix, though re-conceptualizing alignment as arcane and non-arcane is interesting (as in LotFP, where working magic is inherently “chaotic”). This (Blood of Prokopius: Conan and Alignment) is the best post I have read in a while about alignment.
Save-or-Die Traps
Yes, please.
Ability Score Generation
3d6 in order. I still have a fondness for 4d6, drop the lowest die, arrange to taste. This is the way I played through most of the 90s, and it injects some randomness while allowing you to play a reasonably competent character of any class. Any method that takes longer is flawed because I value streamlined character creation. Point buy systems (especially non-linear ones) require too much time and calculation, and encourage numerical min-maxing.
Level Drain Attacks
I’m still on the fence here. They have never come up in games I have played in, either as referee or player. I’m not sure how I would react in practice, so I would like to try it out at some point. Logically, if one is okay with save-or-die traps, I think one should also be okay with level drain attacks. They are one of the few things that truly induce visceral fear in players, and that is nothing to sneeze at.

The Joker on Refereeing

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The Joker
It’s the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and uh, look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did, to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets. Hm? You know what, you know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all, part of the plan. But when I say that one, little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!
The Joker
[Joker hands Two-Face a gun and points it at himself] Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh and you know the thing about chaos, Harvey? It’s fair.
Two-Face
[with the gun in Two-Face’s hand, Two-Face pauses and takes out his coin]
Two-Face
[showing the unscarred side] You live.
The Joker
Mm-hm.
Two-Face
[flipping, showing the scarred side] You die.
The Joker
Mmm, Now we’re talking.

— Script text source (scene from The Dark Knight, of course)

Classes Overview

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This is my gloss on the main classes. It is meant for a B/X or Labyrinth Lord type of game. Not all of these classes will probably make it into the player’s document. I don’t want the number of choices to be overwhelming. There will likely be no weapon or armor restrictions (with the exception of elves, who can’t use iron). I’m taking my cue here from LotFP. Still to do: thief and necromancer descriptions.

Clerics draw power from higher beings. Some clerics will attempt to subvert this power to their own ends, but wise clerics serve their patron well, for woe it is to attract the attention of an angry deity. Clerics are armored crusaders, most often itinerant demon slayers, and are particularly skilled at banishing arcane horrors such as undead. Not all clerics have the best interests of humanity in mind though. In far off places, there are clerics that serve semi-divine witch kings, or even darker things better left unmentioned.

Elves are descendents of beings from another realm that were trapped in this world ages ago. “Elf” is a human word; they know themselves as the lothirim, which means lost, forgotten, and forsaken. Once elves could speak all the languages of nature, but time, and separation from their homeland, have diminished them. They are now a pale reflection of their former glory. Elves still speak some words in the language of creation, and this is the source of their magic. They also fight fearsomely, though they can’t touch weapons (or anything else) made of iron.

Fighters, perhaps more than any other class, have many backgrounds. To name just a few: barbarian, knight, mercenary, weapon artist, and magician’s guardian. But all fighters share a reliance on their own military skill and training. They are the only class that gets significantly better at fighting with weapons. They are the only class that can do well what they do best (fight!) while in full armor. They are the best at making their hits count, and powerful magical weapons only attain their full potential when in the hands of a fighter.

Magic-users work their will on the world by manipulating dark, arcane forces. Of all the adventuring classes, magic-users are the most feared. Many people blame them (perhaps rightly) for these evil and parlous times. Magic-users come in two varieties, magicians and sorcerers. Magicians are students of the dark arcane arts. Sorcerers have magic inside, whether from demonic blood, changeling heritage, or some other wicked secret. Wise sorcerers seek ways to control their power. Otherwise, it ends up controlling them.

Monks are masters of self-discipline. Through long and arduous training in ancient martial and mental arts, they have developed their inherent physical and mental potential far beyond most humans. Their art allows them to evade attacks, strike with lethal force when unarmed, redirect the strength of their enemies, leap fantastically high, and fall with the grace of a cat. Monks are almost preternaturally quick, and their cultivated reflexes allow them to avoid many dangers that would fell other adventurers. A monks is usually the disciple of a master, though some teach themselves from archaic manuals that they have discovered or been bequeathed.

Mad Max Meets Van Helsing

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Being a review of the 2011 movie Priest.

If you move past the awkward writing and badly-acted gravelly voices, this movie is actually pretty good, from a gaming and setting point of view.

I submit the following points as evidence:

  • The priests are clerics of the ass-kicking school. They even have a weapon restriction (though it’s against guns rather than bladed weapons, and is not explained; this restriction was probably meant as an excuse for martial arts, but it still made me think of D&D clerics).
  • There is a party of adventurers (ultimately made up of 2 clerics and 1 fighting man).
  • Vampires are nasty monsters, not misunderstood antiheroes. Since “the eyes are the windows to the soul”, vampires have no eyes. They are insect-like horrors.
  • The setting is a very good fit for a wilderness in the D&D sense. The only places safe from monsters are the walled cities, which are ruled by a corrupt priesthood.
  • The city is a self-conscious homage to Blade Runner.
  • It also brings to mind a mock-serious goth version of Trigun (I mean that as a compliment); I like the use of the Western (in the sense of cowboys and outlaws) imagery and stereotypes. (Aside: Wolfwood from Trigun is also a post-apocalyptic ass-kicking cleric.)

There are a few truly cringe-worthy scenes (for example, evil guy “conducting” the pillaging of a town as if he were Beethoven). The Matrix-inspired fight scenes are not bad, but I feel like the ambiance might have been better served by less martial arts and more gritty action. That being said, these elements are more than balanced by the beautiful post-apocalyptic grey and brown vistas. I particularly like the scene with the huge statues when the priest is first leaving the city, and the bird’s eye view shots when they are driving though the skyscraper ruins. Something that came to mind: it could possibly be interesting as a silent movie with a creative soundtrack and a few scenes cut.

One site/encounter directly inspired by this movie: ancient train, eternally moving back and forth between two ruined city sites. Train has been repurposed as a lair for something and can be included on random encounter tables for the hexes that it moves through. It is essentially a mobile dungeon. Train is large, multiple rooms per car. It is more or less linear, but in this case the linearity fits (and might be a nice change if your campaign is mostly made up of heavily Jaquayed sites). The train could be used as a mobile base by PCs if they clear it without destroying it. Compare also to the haunted train from Final Fantasy VI.

Cosmology

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The sword & planet genre is relatively new for me. I have not read the Barsoom novels. I did not know about Expedition to the Barrier Peaks before I discovered the OSR a few months ago. My fantasy has long been spiced with steampunk elements, reminiscent of the style of Final Fantasy IV & Final Fantasy VI, but I have usually pictured those as products of the current society (like magitech in Final Fantasy VI) rather than remnants of ancient advanced civilizations. I watched and enjoyed the original Stargate when it came out, but I don’t think it had much influence on my gaming. Despite that lack of experience, the science-fantasy elements of Dwimmermount’s Red Elves of Areon, modules like The Tower of the Stargazer, and the setting of Carcosa, have made me think again about introducing ancient laser rifles and robots to my fantasy games.

How would that interact with the rest of the setting though? I like my fantasy setting to feel almost radically unknown (though not necessarily surreal or gratuitously strange, though there is a place for that). Someone living in ancient Babylon, for example, would really have no idea how the universe worked, in terms of metaphysics, cosmology, and possibilities. Does the ocean flow over the edge of the world? Maybe! Using tropes from the sword & planet genre seems to automatically import all kinds of assumptions, such as, off the top of my head: spherical planets, gravity, and outer space being a void. I see this as potentially working at cross-purposes with the sense of the fantastic, even if players are not put off by the genre-bending. One way to handle this would be to just not worry at all about consistency at the beginning, and come up with interesting explanations after the fact, in the same way that one might handle a seemingly contradictory or confusing result when using a set of random tables. There is something pleasingly classical about this approach. Somehow later rationalization does not seem satisfactory in this case though.

I have been mulling over a possible solution to this dilemma: the nature of reality varies based on verticality. As characters venture deeper underground, the world becomes less mundane, and as they ascend into the heavens it becomes more systematic. In its deepest reaches, the underworld bleeds into the afterlife, the shared reality of dreams, and other weirder places. Even geometry and gravity may cease to behave as expected.

This doesn’t need to be overly schematized or communicated to players, it just serves as a set of conceptual guidelines for the referee. And it reflects many interesting dichotomies, in game tradition, mythology, and philosophy.

In the earliest versions of D&D, dungeon level was explicitly associated with threat level. It got more dangerous as you went down. This just made sense based on the needs of the game, but has since become enshrined in just about everything that has been influenced by D&D. In Greek mythology, Olympus is up, Hades is down. In Aristotelian cosmology, heavenly bodies are made of perfect substances, whereas all matter on the earth is corruptible, and this was carried over to the medieval worldview (through Ptolemy) and the thoroughly Christianized. There are many inspirational pages up on the web about medieval cosmology.

Anthropomorphic Animal Halflings

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From a comment over at Initiative One (edited slightly to make the link clickable):

I do find I hate halflings the last few years. I think Jackson killed them for me in the LOTR movies. Anyway, I’ve debated between either this look to depict Halflings that developed from a mammal not related to apes-or halflings as a catchall term/race/class for all anthropomorphic animals about three feet e.g. Reepicheep, Puss-in-Boots from Shrek etc.

I don’t think I could pull this off myself, due to my referee style, but I think it’s an interesting idea. Maybe I could do it in a really creepy Germanic fairy tale setting. (Myself, I don’t mind Jackson’s hobbits at all; I just don’t like hobbits in my D&D very much.)

Restless Dead

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Undead come in two varieties: sentient and mindless. This reflects the philosophical doctrine of mind/body dualism, and suggests that many undead may be incomplete beings. A ghost, for example, is a spirit or mind without a body. A zombie is brute flesh with animating will but no mind or soul.

What happens to the spirit when the body is called back to service in the case of the mindless undead? Does the campaign world have an afterlife or an underworld where the spirit resides? Is the spirit gladdened by the body’s return to service? What if every time a skeleton or zombie is animated, the ghost is also pulled back to the mortal realm, with no chance for eternal rest until the zombie is destroyed? Ghosts could be great allies to player characters.

Perhaps necromancy requires that the ghost be imprisoned, preventing it from reuniting with the body, resulting in necromancers collecting such trapped spirits (which would also be of interest to demons or other entities that might value such things). This would result in necromancers making many ghostly enemies, and might contribute to their terror of death and their own search for immortality and lichdom. Failing that, they would seek to escape the grasp of the underworld by true extinction of the soul. A sort of necromantic nirvana.

These trapped spirits could also be bound to objects. Maybe some or all magic items are the byproduct of such necromancy. FrDave had a post about a magic sword that was infused with the spirit of an elf-maid, and in D&D magic swords are traditionally sentient; this is another way to explain where magic swords get their sentience.

The most terrible form of zombie creation: tearing the soul out of a still living person, leaving only an undying and mindless slave.

Titles as Achievements

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One relic of the older editions are level titles. They started out as wargaming shorthand (as in, a hero is worth 4 fighting men). As video games have show, even otherwise meaningless achievements are psychologically very powerful. Rather than just hand out titles mechanically with level progression, why not make characters earn them literally?

Sample titles: champion, conjurer, veteran, journeyman, robber, baptist, demoncaller, etc. In addition, any organization within the campaign world can have a series of ranks or titles. Such a collection of titles is also a list of adventure seeds that suggests profitable courses of action to the players without compelling them to do anything.

There is no reason why a title could not also be accompanied by an XP award, optionally. It is often suggested that it would make more sense, for example, for a magic-user to gain experience from casting spells. Rewarding experience for titles gained seems like a reasonable way to go about giving experience for activities without overly changing the underlying incentive structure. And it reflects the fact that the first time you do something is special. You can get experience for killing more than one dragon, but you can only ever get the dragonslayer title once.

Don’t forget how Bilbo described himself to Smaug: clue-finder, web-cutter, stinging Fly, ringwinner, luckwearer, barrel-rider.

Maybe I’m being unnecessarily naturalistic, but doesn’t it also make more sense to refer to Felonius as a seer after he has successfully scried something?

Thief Magic

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Despite the fact that I am very partial to the LotFP specialist interpretation of the thief archetype, I just had another idea for how to do thieves after reading Matthew James Stanham’s excellent article on thieving abilities. He writes:

Moreover, and as Robert Fisher pointed out to me several years ago by ways of his writings on the subject, thief abilities are not just colourfully named skills, but frequently duplicate spell effects, such as silence, invisibility, knock, find traps, and spider climb. [Link to Robert Fisher’s page updated so that it works.]

Why not just give thieves the ability to cast those spells? They could get one every other level, or perhaps every level, either in a fixed order, or based on player choice. It would probably be better to create a fixed order, both to decrease character creation load and because invisibility at first level might be too powerful (on the other hand, is invisibility really more powerful than charm person or sleep?). Each spell could be used once per day, or maybe the total number of spells per day equal to level or level divided by 2. If you wanted to expand the list of thief spells, other candidates might include some of the illusionist spells and animal friendship (I’m thinking here of Alec from the Nightrunner series, and how he was able to pacify guard dogs by saying “peace, friend hound” in Elvish or something like that).

These abilities could either be conceptualized as an inherent ability to tap into magical power (this would result in a more supernatural thief class) or something closer to the spells of a hedge wizard, which would require the thief to keep a spell book and memorize spells in the same manner as the standard magic-user class. Idea: thief that tattoos his spell book all over his forearms. Further idea: magic-users consider thieves’ guilds to have stolen their secrets, and seek to punish magic-using thieves whenever they get the chance.

There is significant precedence for this approach, both in terms of rules for other classes and in terms of the inspirational literature. The paladin, for example, has the ability to cure disease, as the spell. Thieves gain the ability to cast spells from scrolls. And The Gray Mouser was a wizard’s apprentice before he was an adventuring rogue. Edge from Final Fantasy IV (great picture here), who was able to use ninja magic, also comes to mind.