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

Saelorn said:

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.

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I agree that it's in the eye of the beholder, although IMO there has been no low magic edition of D&D. Which isn't to say that you couldn't play that way; it's simply that the class design has never done much to this end.

IMO, Iron Heroes would be an example of low magic class design. There was only one magic using class (which I think was explicitly optional), and IIRC spellcasting was risky, discouraging casual use.

Fanaelialae said:

That's simply from a player perspective. From the standpoint of setting, magic may be so rare that it is virtually unheard of. All depends on the setting.

To a soldier, real grenades are likely nothing unusual. But how many civilians can say they've seen a real grenade, much less held one? I certainly haven't.

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But we rarely see settings that hold the line about magic is rare and mysterious.
By core assumption in the dm guide player should be astonished to face another spellcaster.
So why counterspell is a top pick spell if players face so few casters?

Krachek said:

But we rarely see settings that hold the line about magic is rare and mysterious.
By core assumption in the dm guide player should be astonished to face another spellcaster.
So why counterspell is a top pick spell if players face so few casters?

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It's not a top pick spell in most of my campaigns. In the last big campaign I ran (which went to 19th level) there were a handful of caster enemies (despite that it was intentionally a high magic campaign).

IMO, it's a situational spell. Incredibly powerful in the right circumstances, but otherwise dead weight. It remains a top choice despite this because spellcasting opponents can be incredibly dangerous, and counterspell shuts them down hard (unless they can also counterspell). As just one example, a high level caster with Hold Person can single handedly render the entire party paralyzed if they get lucky.

I have taken it in some of my friends' campaigns, but not every time. In the campaign I'm playing in, my 10th level lore bard opted not to take counterspell. We've faced a few casting enemies thus far, and I missed it in those encounters, but we haven't faced enough casters to justify spending a precious known spell on it. My character has a manipulative theme to his spells, fitting his personality, and counterspell doesn't fit the theme.

Quickleaf said:

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?

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There has never been a fantasy character concept that couldn't be made to fit into one of the core classes, with minimal loss of class identity.

The real culprit here is third edition, with its flexible multi-classing. Once players had the option to change class every level, a lot of players noticed that there was no reason to continue in a non-casting class after it stopped granting new powers, which is why 3.5 (and even moreso with Pathfinder) tried as hard as it could to make sure every class gave a new power at every level. If you remember the early polls for 5E, even, one of the big demands was the removal of "empty" levels.

And that meant the creation of filler content, which served to differentiate classes in trivial ways. You could remove fully half of the abilities from every martial class, and it wouldn't change the game significantly except in reducing its complexity. But now that we've established a precedent for trivial abilities differentiating martial classes, many people seem to feel that they need new classes with different trivial abilities in order to properly represent a character concept.

Quickleaf said:

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?

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I've read through Iron Heroes, and it reminds me a lot of 4E in that everyone has a lot of decisions to make every round, and every combat would need to take several rounds in order to really explore the tactical depth that they expect you to use. I'm also reminded of the Book of 9 Swords, and the way that its myriad power options didn't always compare favorably against a PHB fighter just making a full-attack action.

Maneuvers worked well in 4E because they intended the game to be about fighting. You did some exploring and talking between fights, sure, but you were expected to have four fights per day and those fights would each take an hour to resolve. Fighters had maneuvers, and wizards has spells, and everyone's turn took about the same amount of time to resolve.

I don't really want D&D to go down that road, though. I don't think that fifth edition wants to be that game, either. If given the choice between juggling maneuvers with different cooldowns for an optimal dpr of 37, or auto-attacking for a dpr of 35, I'll choose the auto-attack because I want combat to be over so we can move on to the next thing. That's the real benefit of abstracting all of those maneuvers into a single attack roll. If there's a disparity in spotlight between the time spent to resolve the fighter's attacks and the wizard's spells, I would much rather that it be addressed by reducing the complexity on the wizard's side.

Krachek said:

But we rarely see settings that hold the line about magic is rare and mysterious.
By core assumption in the dm guide player should be astonished to face another spellcaster.
So why counterspell is a top pick spell if players face so few casters?

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Which core assumption is that?

i would read something like "relatively few" as exactly what it says - relatively few compared to the rest of the people (a really big pool of people.) Most games i have seen, in play, have been that way. You walk into your average bar or average inn and if there are maybe 20 people there when you arrive maybe one would be a caster - often none - and as often or not that "caster" would be drawn from another core assumptions - the one about gods acting to influence etc and giving their agents their own flavor of magic.

Now, switch that around to be not "relatively few" to "relatively few among the opponents of the PCs" (which you seem to have done based on your counterspell) and suddenly you have skewed the initial source pool quite a bit. if every single enemy the PCs ever faced were a spellcaster (arcane not divine) and they were only 1 in 1000 of the arcane casters in the world then unless your world pop is really really really small... they would still be relatively few.

Simple fact is the PCs go into events and select events that put them up against mostly "not the average joes" as a matter of course.

Lets put it this way... in most areas "people needing to be rushed to the hospital are relative few" would be a true statement.

But that should not be taken to mean "EMTs should be astonished if they encounter someone who needs to be rushed to the hospital."

DEFCON 1 said:

The answer to your question in your thread title is:

No.

There are only as many spellcasters in your game as you allow to be played. If you have too many spellcasting classes running around in your game, it's because you did not do your job as a DM to create your campaign setting to your specifications. You have no one to blame but yourself.

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Oh I forgot players exist to fill my story and only do what I want them to do.

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!

Of course, even then you had the option to play a party of no magic characters, just as you do in 5e. Options are optional.

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In OD&D (and Basic/Expert--the most popular selling and longest running), races were classes. So non casters were: fighting man, dwarf, halfling, and later (thief). Casters were magic user and cleric, with elf having the option if they wanted to be a fighting man or magic user every time they leveled. So that's 4 to 2 and a half.

Sacrosanct said:

Well, there are a lot of people who play AL....

So the DM can hardly be blamed. In fact, why do we like to rush to blame someone anyway? How about an opinion on the topic that doesn't blame anyone?

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Aren't you all basically passive-aggressively blaming WotC for putting out too many classes and subclasses that use magic? That seems to be the overwhelming theme here.

DocMoriartty said:

Oh I forgot players exist to fill my story and only do what I want them to do.

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If your story involves only a little bit of magic, then yes. You are absolutely correct. You only allow the players to select the options you want to have in this particular game.

If you've made a campaign that is only meant to have a little bit of magic but you then let your players choose anything and everything to use for their characters... is that supposed to be WotC's fault? They put too many classes, subclasses, multiclassing, and magic feats in the game so now you can't have your campaign the way you want it? Because you weren't willing to restrict your players? Sorry... that's not how it works. It's not WotC's job to police their design policies based on how a couple players want the book to be.

They produce what they want to produce... and you either use it, or you don't. Your choice. Always your choice.

Sacrosanct said:

In OD&D (and Basic/Expert--the most popular selling and longest running), races were classes. So non casters were: fighting man, dwarf, halfling, and later (thief). Casters were magic user and cleric, with elf having the option if they wanted to be a fighting man or magic user every time they leveled. So that's 4 to 2 and a half.

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I think you miscounted. You counted elf one whole time for fighting men, but only a half time for spellcasters.

Moreover, I've seen it suggested in this thread that a 5e class with a magical subclass should be considered a magic class. By that logic, the ratio of OD&D was 3:3, if including racial classes. I didn't include the races in my original count because, ultimately, they were just the three (well, really two since there were no race class clerics) core classes with a few racial modifications thrown on top. IMO, the races weren't fully realized as classes until BECMI.