Editing Middle-Earth Role Playing (section)

===Magic===
This is probably the most skub aspect of the whole system. It was not that magic was overpowered or messy or defective, but something about it didn't sound really right.

If you've read [[The Lord of the Rings]] (and if you have not, leave '''NOW''', as you don't belong to this Wiki at all), you will remember that Middle Earth is a very low-magic setting: even Gandalf was pretty much into hack'n'slash rather than spamming fireballs and magic missiles, so blasting your way through a dungeon casting thunderbolts left and right didn't really fit into the setting well enough to satisfy purists. Tolkien was a old schooler that took a lot of inspiration from classical sources, so being able to heal people by imposing your hands on them was sufficient to identify you as King of the most powerful nation in existence - remember Aragorn? - and being able to outclass him with low-level spells is surely odd.

That said, magic was a straightforward affair: you had 1 type of full magic users and 1 type of "half" magic users for each of 2 schools of magic, and a bunch of classic spells. You could optimize your characters to cover all the classic roles that are normally covered by magic users - from the wacky fellow who likes to blow up stuff to the healer and so on. And, because you can transfer the Development Points you got when levelling up, all classes had the possibility to multiclass as a magic user. 

The progression was the same as many other games: a 1st level wizard was about as useful in combat as a wet sponge, then it started getting better and better until it had a spell to solve every situation. Magic is learned by Lists, and when you have learned a list you continue to acquire spells in that list. So at 1st level you had 1 spell, then you got 4 spells at 2nd level, 9 at 3rd and so on. [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards You see where this leads.]

However using magic is risky, bringing the eye of Sauron and his agents. Players take a risk every time they cast a spell which can lead to encounters with dark forces.