I'm Making a new game, about an academy for knights and warriors to defend the realm. With my original setup, there would be no playable wizards, with chemists taking a similar role. However, already people from other games I'm in have wondered if they could play more traditional sorcery wizards. I'm not totally averse to including them, but am a bit unsure if I should. What do you people think?

It's your game. If you don't want wizards don't allow wizards.

Some people like playing Knights and warriors while others prefer wizards. If you're making a game about Knights, have people play Knights. You might lose a little interest from those who are only interested in playing a mage, but there are other games for that.

Plus no matter what game you run, odds are you'll have someone asking to be something you aren't allowing. It's a weird phenomena and I'm sure I'm guilty of it myself once or twice.

If you're doing pathfinder, you could use the Alchemist class.  But as long as you state up front 'there is no magic' people should understand.

Substitute wizards for seers, sages, scholars, priests, etc. Men (or women) of learning who use words not swords. No actual magic, they would rely on diplomacy, subterfuge and other non-combat skills.

If the point of the game is knights, and people want to play wizards, then they're not asking to play your game: they're asking you to run a medieval sorcery game.

So, I'd say either run your game and don't allow Merlin and Co to join the party, or rewrite your plans. You don't want to start running a knight academy game only to find half your players are wizards and keep showing everyone else up.

You might be able to split the difference and have one or two characters that used to be magic-user apprentices, but for some reason have joined the army as knights.

Perhaps they weren't very good wizards. Or they have a future in wizardry, but that's a long way down the road since it requires years and years of training and lots of money, and the army is the quickest way to make cash in the setting short of being born into it.

Those characters could have small bits of magic.

But it does change the thrust of your campaign idea.

Depending on the system you use you could allow 1 player to have a little magic (multi-class, but their magic class must always be lower than their fighting class).  That would allow the player to be unique from the others, but also preserve the martial spirit of your game.

This multi-class player won't be as tough as the others, but he would make up for it with his unique powers.

In reply to Tileira (msg # 6):

I had a game idea once where there are no literal wizards, however each character class had very minor spell abilities to compliment what normaly comes with a class.(even at higher levels its small bonuses to actions, higher levels might allow "weak" combat magic that would normaly be usable by even low level sorcerers.

In a world with learnable magic, the army would train soldiers to use it (there is no reason why the army wouldn't take every advantage available) Though it is reasonable to have the lesser soldiers learn simple stuff and the higher soldiers (captains or specialists) learn more magic.