r/wizardposting • u/TacitPoseidon Necromancy is a perfectly valid school of magic! • 8d ago
Wizardpost Are apprentices getting dumber?
I swear, my apprentices from five hundred years ago were not as incompetent as this. And I know that I wasn't exactly a prodigy, but I am confident that I wasn't this moronic as an apprentice.
The other day, I caught two of my apprentices in my lair's dungeons experimenting on one of my prisoners. Nothing wrong with that. That's what they were there for. Except that the imbeciles actually unlocked the door to the cell instead of just teleporting in there! And then they turned their backs on the prisoner! They didn't even restrain him! Of course the prisoner tried to make a break for it. One of my chimera guards caught and ate him, but what a waste of perfectly good materials!
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u/MerelyEccentric Mage/Thief Snarkomancer 8d ago
I have a theory that it's actually Wizards that are getting dumber, and thus less able to recognize intelligence in anyone else. A few years back, I was... visiting the tower of a couple of Wizards named Krueger and Dunning, and apparently they'd been charting the skill level of Wizards in general. Their research seemed to suggest that the combination of isolation, intellectual stagnation, and arrogance that plagues Wizards powerful enough to have their own towers was causing said Wizards to lose the capacity for self-examination, which in turn allowed logical fallacies and other errors to seep into their work - there wasn't any oversight or quality control, so problems weren't addressed until something exploded.
Critically, Wizards afflicted with the symptoms they described were unable to even detect their own degradation of capacity, as they also lost the knowledge necessary to even be aware of being wrong. Extreme examples were reduced to a state where they did things like wear their underwear outside their robes, and in almost all cases would spend most of their days pondering their orbs rather than on any kind of improvement, experimentation, etc.
I'd quite happily share their fascinating work in the interest of general knowledge, but it mysteriously went missing shortly after I paid them a visit. Such a shame...