Editing Wizard (section)

==In Discworld==
The [[Discworld]] Wizards are an...interesting... bunch to say the least. Born out of a mixture of parodying [[Dungeons & Dragons]] combined with Pterry's experience with British university life and his time working on nuclear reactors, the basic idea of Discworld's wizards is that they exist to gather in all the magic-using men of the Disc (magic-using ''women'' almost always become [[witch]]es instead) and entice them into never, ''ever'' using [[magic]], period.

Most of what we know about Discworld wizards specifically comes from the Wizards of Ankh-Morpork's Unseen University; there are ''other'' Wizarding schools, guilds, what have you elsewhere in the world, but we don't talk much about them, because a) Ankh-Morpork is where the stories are largely focused, and b) the Unseen University is full of arrogant bastards. They are the subject of their own distinct sub-series in the Discworld novels, which also overlaps with the Rincewind sub-series about the misadventures of the Disc's singularly most incompetent wizard.

On the Disc, the ability to manipulate magic is an inherent trait that manifests in the eighth son of an eighth son (there was that one time where a wizard passed on his staff to the eighth ''daughter'' of an eighth son, but the novels largely ignore her existence). This creates a wizard, whose sons will be wizards in turn - and if he has an ''eighth'' son himself, what you get is a "Wizard Squared", or a [[Sorcerer|Sourcerer]] - a being who ''emits'' magic rather than having to work with the existing magical field, which means they can basically rewrite reality as they see fit. For this reason, wizarding societies tend to heavily promote celibacy, because wizards are bad news, but sourcerers are ''trouble''.

Being a wizard comes with the perk of being able to use [[magic]], but also a plethora of downsides. For starters, all wizards are inherently at least a little nuts - they have a strong urge towards aggressiveness and territoriality, so without distracting them, they tend to establish lone tower bases from which they can launch vicious attacks on anyone they deem a threat - mostly other wizards. This has led to a ''lot'' of collateral damage over the years and is why wizarding academies such as the Unseen University exist. Also, a wizard who carelessly uses magic may open rifts to the Dungeon Dimensions, which is somewhere between the [[Far Realm]] and the [[Warp]] - this is only ''slightly'' played for comedy and is genuinely presented as an apocalyptic threat to reality.

So, in the Unseen University, the emphasis is largely on keeping wizards as disinterested in using magic as possible via plenty of luxuries and copious amounts of free food. The older wizards pretty much do nothing but eat, sleep, and try to wrangle their way out of doing anything even remotely related to working or teaching students.

The argument can be made that the wizards of the Discworld have actually been rendered inadvertently superfluous to the setting's very existence. [[Witch]]es have replaced them as the practical magic-workers, and even in the Unseen University itself, wizardry is largely fading away into nothing, as younger students are instead turning to [[artificer]]ing, creating stable, reliable and actually useful [[magitek]] rather than just sitting around like a bunch of pompous, overfed jerks.