D&D 5E Are there too darn many spellcasters?

My answer is that magic seems to be pretty common.

There is a risk in this. If you say yes to everyone about everything, nothing seems quite as rare or special. Conversely, restrict too much and people feel limited.

I say just dial back the non-primary casters a bit...the half casters may have a bit much (excluding the 1/3 casters)...

The answer is Yes.

Yes, there are too many spellcasters.

The caster to non-caster ratio should be at least CLOSE to, if not exactly 50-50. 5e is waaaay off.

Yes. There are too many spellcasters.

cbwjm said:

We do have those though. Some are backgrounds (commander (soldier background), spy (alternate criminal background), merchant, sailor), others are subclasses (scout, swashbuckler (for fencer), inquisitive (for investigator)), others have many applications (fighter or ranger with the archery fighting style, a shortbow using rogue, even a kensei monk can be an archer). Guard could be someone with the city watch background or maybe someone with the protection fighting style.

I don't know what a ratcatcher is in Warhammer. I'm assuming they don't just catch rats but then again, maybe they do.

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But as Saelorn says, spell casters are divided up, but we thrust fighter types into archetypes and backgrounds. Why? It's not difficult to come up with abilities for a guard which would be markedly different from an archer, just like sorcerer vs wizard. WOTC does have a tendency to use magic as a crutch when creating new classes and archetypes. At the same time, they want magic to be rare and mysterious. I'm not sure why they took this stance in a DnD game....

Anyway, I would have removed spells from the ranger and paladin. I would have focused on non-magic archetypes for non-spell casting classes before adding magical choices, that is if I wanted to stick to rare magic. If I decided that magic is my tool of design choice, I would have said the worlds of DnD are typically full of magic, and its easy to buy, sell, and trade it. Nobles might commonly send their children to wizard colleges, and cities could use magic to light the streets, talk to murder victims, determine truth in court cases etc.

Really, I would like the fluff to match the mechanics.

Warhammer is full of fun classes like rat catcher, thug, carriage driver, lawyer, slaver, demagogue...

In 5e PCs are special unlike in 3.x where there are a lot of levelled NPCs everywhere. A party can have a lot of magic without there being a lot of magic in the world.

The spell system is also just an easy way to create abilities. Look at the Ranger spell list. They're not really spells.

Fanaelialae said:

Heck, look at OD&D. IIRC, you had the fighting man, the magic user, and the cleric (thieves weren't a thing until later). 2/3rds of the classes were spellcasters!

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By another metric, the older editions were less magical because the spellcasting classes had less magic. A level 1 priest in Basic didn't have any spells yet; they were just a slightly worse fighter, until they hit level 2. Even the magic users were hitting things with a staff, most of the time, until they got to very high levels (which weren't even included in Basic).

To kind of translate into the modern language, the old editions of the game only had partial-casting classes, because everyone was expected to rely on basic attacks for a significant amount of the time.

Saelorn said:

By another metric, the older editions were less magical because the spellcasting classes had less magic. A level 1 priest in Basic didn't have any spells yet; they were just a slightly worse fighter, until they hit level 2. Even the magic users were hitting things with a staff, most of the time, until they got to very high levels (which weren't even included in Basic).

To kind of translate into the modern language, the old editions of the game only had partial-casting classes, because everyone was expected to rely on basic attacks for a significant amount of the time.

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So then, are you saying that you consider a game in which 2 out of 3 classes is a "partial caster" to qualify as low magic?

ad_hoc said:

In 5e PCs are special unlike in 3.x where there are a lot of levelled NPCs everywhere. A party can have a lot of magic without there being a lot of magic in the world.

The spell system is also just an easy way to create abilities. Look at the Ranger spell list. They're not really spells.

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But having the players, on average, being highly magical in a world where magic is rare and mysterious doesn't feel right. Of course, there should be classes with magic, but it should feel mysterious even to the other non-magicy classes. If magic is common amongst the player classes, it shouldn't be so rare in the world. 5e should have run with common magic world, if there are so many spell wielding classes. Lots of players assume this anyway.

The ranger spells often don't feel like spells, so why are they? Surely professional game designers could come up with abilities that aren't spells? Spells are a poor tool to wield as a way to generate class abilities.

Fanaelialae said:

So then, are you saying that you consider a game in which 2 out of 3 classes is a "partial caster" to qualify as low magic?

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It's all relative, but generally speaking, yes. Magic played a much smaller role in the day-to-day and round-by-round activities of the party.

That gets into the question of depth vs breadth, though. Eberron could be considered either high-magic or low-magic, depending on how you view it.

DocMoriartty said:

Spellcasters! They are everywhere.

Unless you run a straight barbarian and never multiclass you will get the option to become some degree of spellchucker in 5th edition. One thing I liked about 3.x was that an non-spellcaster had to chose some pretty specific things and develop in a specific way to join a prestige class (at the DMs approval) to become a spellcaster.

Now everyone can chose a class option and become a spellcaster and even the barbarian if he wants to can take the Mage Initiate feat and gain a some magic to throw around.

It is certainly not game breaking by any means but it is telling that every single new class that has been added since DnD was created way back when is some sort of spellcaster. Maybe it is just the easy way out compared to developing interesting and effective non-spell abilities in sufficient quantities for more non-magic classes.

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I see two issues here, with different answers.

1. Do too many class options include spellcasting? Perhaps. Maybe it's laziness - it's easier to just give a class some spells vs. create and balance new mechanics that give a character useful options. Maybe there just aren't that many non-spellcasting roles and they have been filled out already. Regardless, I don't think it matters much because...

2. Are there too many spellcasting PCs? Depends on the group. My group is always split roughly 50/50. The players like running non-spellcasters, and we've never felt that not casting spells left a character feeling outshined.

Current party: Totem barbarian, Paladin (who never casts spells, just smites), Sorcerer, Bard.
Previous party: Berserker barbarian, Rogue Assassin, Rogue Thief, Wizard, Paladin/Cleric

Bottom line, I don't see a problem with the current class options or the choices my players are making. YMMV.

DocMoriartty said:

Spellcasters! They are everywhere.

Unless you run a straight barbarian and never multiclass you will get the option to become some degree of spellchucker in 5th edition. One thing I liked about 3.x was that an non-spellcaster had to chose some pretty specific things and develop in a specific way to join a prestige class (at the DMs approval) to become a spellcaster.

Now everyone can chose a class option and become a spellcaster and even the barbarian if he wants to can take the Mage Initiate feat and gain a some magic to throw around.

It is certainly not game breaking by any means but it is telling that every single new class that has been added since DnD was created way back when is some sort of spellcaster. Maybe it is just the easy way out compared to developing interesting and effective non-spell abilities in sufficient quantities for more non-magic classes.

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Maybe a better way to state the question is:

What's the design space for new primarily "martial/non-caster" classes? Are there "martial/non-caster" concepts players have that current classes aren't meeting?

For instance, Mike Mearls once worked on Iron Heroes which created a whole bunch of "martial" classes for that game. It can be done, and one of the lead D&D designers has done. The question is would it add value to the game? Is it something we as players want? Does it fill a unique design space?

My observation/opinion is that WotC knows how to design an excellent "martial" class – the Rogue is, in my mind, the epitome of how to do it well. The Monk and Barbarian are also well done, albeit with minor flaws that are being discussed. And the Fighter's design is the most mediocre (or, a kinder way to say it: most conservatively designed) of the bunch. I think this harkens back to an ongoing shift throughout the history of the game that assumes "players find magic more interesting, and fighters are plenty popular, so we're doing fine with an abundance of casters."

My hunch is there's a bit of a chicken-and-an-egg scenario happening with this line of thought. Similar to "our statistics find very few players play high-level, therefor we don't produce much high-level content." Whereas I tend to think it's a grayer situation, where that Field of Dreams quote applies: "If you build it (well), they will come."

We've seen the Warlock (4e) and Sorcerer (3e) get added to the list of base classes over the history of D&D. I didn't realize I ever wanted to play those concepts or that there was a void in the class design space...but they seemed to be pretty popular among players. It would be interesting to dream up, say, two "martial/non-caster" concepts that might be introduced to the game, similar to how Warlock and Sorcerer were added over the years...

If you look back through the history of D&D's alternative classes, there are a four recurring themes that might provide inspiration:

1. Sages/Experts began in AD&D's Sages and Specialists which allowed you to play engineers, scribes, etc. Sounds odd for an adventurer, but I believe the concept was picked up in 3e as the Expert NPC class, and various Dragon magazine articles has "generic adventurer"/"professional" classes that followed a similar theme. Maybe the 3e Factotum class could serve as inspiration.
2. Merchants/Tradesmen-type classes have appeared in several AD&D supplements, including Birthright Campaign Setting (Guilder), Dark Sun Campaign Setting (Trader), and Masque of the Red Death (Tradesman). This concept was kind of carried into 3e with the Expert NPC class as well, and possibly with 3e Dragonlance's Noble class, though I'm not sure how it would work given 5e's adventuring class structure & fast-and-loose economy.
3. Knights appeared in AD&D's Dragonlance Adventures, there was a Pious Knight class in Legends & Lore, and it graduated to a Knight class in 3e's Player's Handbook 2. The question would be How is a knight different from a fighter in 5e? How does it justify more design space than a martial archetype like XGtE's Cavalier? And if you focus on the 3e Knight's Challenge as being a key class feature, how does that compare to the 5e Oath of the Crown Paladin's Channel Divinity: Champion Challenge?
4. Warlords were introduced in 3e's Miniatures Handbook as the Marshal and later in the 4e Player's Handbook; apparently they were so controversial during closed playtesting of D&D Next that the team decided to scrap the concept and put pieces of it into the Battle Master martial archetype. Definitely they have as much history as the Sorcerer or Warlock, so I think it's more a matter of coming up with a design that has broader appeal.

Personally, I think you could merge #1 and #2 into an interesting (if hard to design) class, and you could definitely merge #3 and #4 into a cohesive class.