dtgreene: Just wondering what weapon type would be best to give a mage.
BlueMooner: None.
This is one of my major pet peeves with how D&D has influenced fantasy games... the idea that mages need to not only use weapons to fight, but even do most of their killing with them.
No game ever asks which magic skills fighters need to focus on... their weapon is all they need in the game. Same with shooters. They have their gun/bow, and they can fire away forever. But mages continually are punished for their magic. They're presented as needing to be skilled in other stuff, which I think is completely wrong.
Every other class gets to use their main offense type without limit, but mages are crippled with mana, and then have nothing to do when their mana runs out. Games dont' have stamina bars for warriors, telling them they can no longer fight when it's empty, and now have to use only wands and spells, because that is neither "fun" nor "realistic". It's not fun for me when mages have no mana and have to use weapons. I didn't create a mage in order to play a third-rate warrior.
When you pick an archetype in a game, you should be able to deal with 95+% of opponents with your chosen style, whether it's melee, stabbing, shooting, martial arts, psionics, magic, whatever. Games that let every other class kill everything in the chosen style but not mages irritates me to no end. I've recently been watching Let's Plays of Gothic 2 and a roguelike, and I'm reminded of how ridiculous it is for mages to be expected by the devs to use weapons.
SaGa Frontier 2 does a rather nice job of inverting this.
* Physical attacks rely on WP, and most weapons have a finite number of uses before they break. Characters have a bit of WP regen, but this amount is mostly fixed per character, with the only change being that it can decrease by 1 point per round when the character gets older. (Each event takes place in a specific year, so ageing is purely plot driven in this game; taking your time won't result in characters growing older here.)
* Magical attacks rely on SP, and durability is only a factor in duels, not party battles. SP regen can be improved with the right equipment, allowing it to get much higher than WP regen. Furthermore, if you end a battle with low SP, it will be instantly restored to the minimum that your equipment provides. The trade-off is that spell arts are weaker than weapon arts in the long-run, but spell arts have the advantage of a more diverse selection of effects (non-physical damage, healing, stat chances, status ailments you can't get with weapon arts, that sort of thing).
* (Of course, there's hybrid arts, which use a weapon, but consume SP.)
* (Worth noting that equipment is *very* important for casters in SF2; you don't want steel, as that interferes with magic (lowers SP and SP regen, plus a small additional modifier), but you do need to have every anima type you need covered, not to mention good SP and maybe SP regen.)
Also, there are some games (like Dragon Quest 8/9) where staves are not meant to be used as weapons, but are more for the skills (and, in DQ8, spells) that you learn by putting points into the skill (like a free healing skill, for example). Or, you have cases like SaGa 1/2, where there's no such thing as a physical attack with a staff; using one during battle (there's no Attack/Item distinction in these two games) will have a magical effect; original SaGa 2's only practical multi-target healing ability comes from a staff.
I could also mention Ikenfell, where spells are the *only* thing you get (no normal or weapon attacks), and for most the only restriction is finding a spot where there's at least one enemy in the target area for you to use a spell. (One spell can only be used if there's both an adjacent ally and an adjacent enemy; not often that you get to use it, but it's nice to damage an enemy and heal an ally in the same turn.)
(There's also the MP regen approach that some games, like Oblivion, have taken to allow spells to be used as a primary means of attack.)
By the way, when you said "wands and spells", you probably meant something like "wands and staves". Is that correct?
Crosmando: An interesting question is why would a society with magic develop advanced technology in the first place. I mean if you can heal all wounds/disease with a cleric spell, why develop medicine? If you can use a mage spell to levitate stone blocks to build stuff, why develop masonry etc? I guess your referring to a setting where magic "came back" like Shadowrun.
Or it could be a higher tech counterpart of SaGa Frontier 2, where some people are better at using magic than others, but technology doesn't have that issue. (In SaGa Frontier 2, Gustave is disowned by his royal family and exiled from his kingdom because he can't use magic (and this is a common magic setting), so he comes up with the idea of making a sword out of steel, and uses steel in order to build an empire.)
(Also, you mention using a cleric spell to heal wounds and disease, but for philosophical/"religious" reasons, I'm thinking that should be more the province of mages, and if religion is associated with magic, it should be spells of destruction and influence rather than healing; this is another pet peeve of D&D's influence on fantasy games, along with the one BlueMooner mentioned and the low base accuracy of attacks early in many WRPGs.)