Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Witch, the Cleric, and the Magic-User

One of the central design ideas behind Advanced Witches & Warlocks is something that, in retrospect, seems obvious to me.The Witch is not a Magic-User in a black dress. She is also not a Cleric with better eyeliner.I have joked about that distinction before, but there is a real design issue behind it, one that gets to the heart of what I want the Witch to be in Advanced Witches & Warlocks.From its very inception, Dungeons & Dragons has had two principal modes of spellcasting at its core. Later editions were more explicit in codifying the divide between these forms of magic, but the separation was always there. A Magic-User wields Arcane power; a Cleric has Divine. The former will study a spell, commit it to book and memory, experiment with it, and come to see magic as something to be grasped by way of knowledge. The latter relies on faith and service, on a connection to powers beyond the mortal realm and the authority they confer.Even if the outcome is sometimes the same (often the…