D&D 5E D&D Magic: Does it Feel Magical to You?

[DEFCON 1]

And see, there's a really big reason for that. "The people have spoken," as it were. You call it "sanitization," but consider all the stuff spellcasting used to have that it has slowly shed over time: hugely long memorization times (major inconvenience), risking serious harm by casting (random nastiness, and the "random" is equally important), having no control over what and sometimes whether you learn new magic (major inconvenience), complex rules for how particular effects alter due to current situation (too fiddly/complicated/wastes time)...

Just about the only limitation on spellcasting, outside of daily resource expenditure, that hasn't been removed or radically weakened is expensive material components (even 4e included them--for rituals). Concentration has technically stuck around in some form, but I hazard to say that 5e Concentration rules are much more lenient than they were previously.

And none of that even takes into account the plain fact that the relative incompetence of frail cloth-wearing gits in (physical) combat has steadily decreased with time due to other Quality-of-Life tweaks to the rules with time. They're still the bottom of the heap, most definitely, but it's been a long time since a Wizard could be killed by a housecat--and general public opinion seems to be that that was a good move.

I think this is spot-on.

Magic was "magical" because it was huge effects that were completely overtuned to what the "normals" were doing because there was so many chances for things to go wrong. But that only happened after months and months (if not years) of adventuring doing jack-all because they had barely any magic to speak of. So yeah, those eventual big-ticket spells seemed more "magical" nine months down the road... because the spellcaster hadn't done crap before then except throw a Magic Missile once or twice in the afternoon or maybe Identify that dagger the group found.

Doing barely any noticeable magic for so long before finally reaching a level when you could actually throw spells relatively consistently throughout the adventuring day certainly gave the entire group the feeling of "Wow!" But I can only speak for myself when I say that all those adventuring months you as a player had to go through to get to that point could really, really suck and be boring as hell. And is exactly why there were so many Fighter/Wizard and Thief/Wizard multiclass characters back then... because every player knew they needed that second class in order to actually DO STUFF during a normal adventuring day (cause god knows they weren't when they were only leveling as a Wizard.)

So I for one think the exchange of "more frequent" instead of "large" makes playing a Wizard much more viable and interesting and I'd never want to go back to the old days of playing a wizard. And if I had to... I'd be a multiclass every single time.

 

[Eric V]

Feels like magic as technology. D&D has always felt like magic as technology.

I think this is the crux right here. Even the rules make it wonky and understandable only as technology.

E.g. The Hold Person spell, which Bards, Clerics, Druids, Sorcerers, Wizards, and some types of Paladin can cast. Look at the varied power sources for those classes...yet they all require the same straight piece of iron to cast the spell.

Really?! The gods, the force of nature itself, the power of Oath and arcane study and they all need the same stupid material component? Why would the gods demand this? Why would nature?!

Because magic isn't really magic in D&D; it's much more like some form of science.

 

[Eric V]

A first step in addressing this issue would be, IMO, separate spell lists for each caster, with no duplicates.

I know people are going to groan, but what made the casters feel magical for me in 4e was the separate power lists and then seeing in play how different they were...the illusionist type wizard played very differently from the blaster type...and so they both felt special.

Someone above mentioned how monsters and villains in 4e didn't conform the the standard spellcasting that PCs used...that was also a huge help in making magic feel magical: Even if you pegged that guy for an arcanist of some sort, you really didn't have any idea what eh was going to hit you with.

The ritual system too.

 

[MechaPilot]

I think if each spell had more of this "make up your own cool visualisation" text baked into its description - and the intro section flagged that each caster draws upon the magic of the weave in their own way and much like a Patronus charm, each spellcaster's manifestation of magic is unique - perhaps with some more 'vanilla' naming conventions to force the issue ('magic missile' lends itself to interpretation more than 'melf's minute meteors'), then magic might feel more magical.

While I am in favor of that myself, I have run into people (all online, of course) who say that altering the fluff of the spell changes what you can do with it because the spells have no fluff, only mechanics. That's a position I disagree with, but I've seen people advocating it.

 

[Hussar]

Magic was "magical" because it was huge effects that were completely overtuned to what the "normals" were doing because there was so many chances for things to go wrong. But that only happened after months and months (if not years) of adventuring doing jack-all because they had barely any magic to speak of. So yeah, those eventual big-ticket spells seemed more "magical" nine months down the road... because the spellcaster hadn't done crap before then except throw a Magic Missile once or twice in the afternoon or maybe Identify that dagger the group found.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...es-it-Feel-Magical-to-You/page7#ixzz41VmvYCZj

Hang on a tick here. Let's not get too far down the road of hyperbole. Years of adventuring? To hit 5th level? How slow is your campaign? Never minding that the Magic User got Sleep at 1st level. He had a "Make the Bad Mens Fall Down" spell right out of the chute. What he didn't have was unlimited lesser power magic. There's a number of big ticket spells at every spell level - Sleep, Web, Stinking Cloud, Fireball, and so on. Your Magic User should be owning about one encounter every session. Now the cleric? Oh yeah, his magic was pretty darn limited. But, then again, he was standing shoulder to shoulder with the fighter and contributing just about as much. He didn't really need flashy magic.

If your Magic User adventured for years before making his first big effect, there's something seriously wonky going on.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Hang on a tick here. Let's not get too far down the road of hyperbole. Years of adventuring? To hit 5th level? How slow is your campaign? Never minding that the Magic User got Sleep at 1st level. He had a "Make the Bad Mens Fall Down" spell right out of the chute. What he didn't have was unlimited lesser power magic. There's a number of big ticket spells at every spell level - Sleep, Web, Stinking Cloud, Fireball, and so on. Your Magic User should be owning about one encounter every session. Now the cleric? Oh yeah, his magic was pretty darn limited. But, then again, he was standing shoulder to shoulder with the fighter and contributing just about as much. He didn't really need flashy magic.

If your Magic User adventured for years before making his first big effect, there's something seriously wonky going on.

I suspect [MENTION=7006]DEFCON 1[/MENTION] is counting all of the time spent on Spuriously Named Magic Users #1-5 that died depressing and ignoble deaths first. (Also, I think next time I play an OSR-type game, if I can remember since I very rarely play such games, I'm going to play a Wizard or MU named Spunamu IV.)

 

[Hussar]

But even at levels 1-5, the mu has encounter ending spells. So an mu should be having fairly major impacts at least once per session.

 

[Leatherhead]

Fireball has never been "magical"

Not once, not ever.

It's just throwing a Molotov cocktail out of a spell component pouch. And HP damage is basically the most boring of effects possible.


There are plenty of other things that do feel magical, however. Most of them tend to have interesting and dynamic interactions with the world.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Hang on a tick here. Let's not get too far down the road of hyperbole. Years of adventuring? To hit 5th level? How slow is your campaign? Never minding that the Magic User got Sleep at 1st level. He had a "Make the Bad Mens Fall Down" spell right out of the chute.

If his DM was such a soft touch as to let him pick that spell, sure. Otherwise it was a 1 in 10 chance on a little chart in the DMG. You might get Magic Missile or even Push instead.

What he didn't have was unlimited lesser power magic.

No, he didn't, which made him look decidedly un-wizardly tossing 3 darts or 2 daggers or a flaming oil most rounds. But those were just the dues you paid (alone with a series of dead PCs) to get to almost unimaginably high levels, like 5th.

There's a number of big ticket spells at every spell level - Sleep, Web, Stinking Cloud, Fireball, and so on.

Certainly, 2nd level had some amazing spells. By 3rd a 1e magic-user should be solidly contributing with each spell in the dungeon, and systematically casting some useful 2nd level spell on every off day they're waiting for the fighter or rogue to finish his 1 wk negative hp vacation.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Hang on a tick here. Let's not get too far down the road of hyperbole. Years of adventuring? To hit 5th level? How slow is your campaign? Never minding that the Magic User got Sleep at 1st level. He had a "Make the Bad Mens Fall Down" spell right out of the chute. What he didn't have was unlimited lesser power magic. There's a number of big ticket spells at every spell level - Sleep, Web, Stinking Cloud, Fireball, and so on. Your Magic User should be owning about one encounter every session. Now the cleric? Oh yeah, his magic was pretty darn limited. But, then again, he was standing shoulder to shoulder with the fighter and contributing just about as much. He didn't really need flashy magic.

If your Magic User adventured for years before making his first big effect, there's something seriously wonky going on.

So we're talking one encounter out of a string of encounters in your typical dungeon crawl... which is what quite a number (if not in fact most) of your adventuring was back in the early 80s. So great... *if* your Magic-User prepared Sleep (over the other 30 spells he could have taken)... he could put that group of kobolds down that one time. But what about the other six to twelve encounters against a pair of kobolds here or a trio of goblins there that the group would face before finally decides to rest overnight? Crossbow city. No magic whatsoever. Fighters and clerics in melee, rogues sniping from the sides, and the magic-user in the back needing to roll like 16s or higher with their crossbow in hopes of actually accomplishing something. At least... that's was my experience. And which is exactly why our magic-users more often than not were multiclassed fighter/magic-users, cleric/magic-users or magic-user/thieves... so they have something to do in those other six to twelve encounters that they didn't cast Sleep.

And as far as the "years" of adventuring... that's a combination of both how often you get to play (if you're only playing once a month, getting a character to 5th could indeed possibly take a year or two depending on the DM), and what [MENTION=6790260]EzekielRaiden[/MENTION] said about your MU getting ganked over and over again until you finally lucked out reached a point your MU got to 5th. So no... in my personal experience a Magic-User never seemed all that *magical* until he finally reached maybe 5th level or so and had enough spell slots where he could throw hopefully at least one spell every fight before resting, plus had a magic item like a wand that would allow him to supplement his personal spellcasting with item casting.

If you felt differently... if you felt that lone Sleep spell once or twice a day was enough for you... then I can certainly see why having a Fire Bolt at your disposal every round as your back-up action (should you not want to cast another slotted spell) might seem like too much. But I'm willing to say you and others are in the minority, seeing as how WotC went through the two year playtest to find out apparently that at-will spells were wanted, true Vancian casting was not, and a class like the Bard was more interesting and usable as a full caster than a half-caster. Meaning that more people wanted more available magic.