D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

[Yaarel]

Regarding an actual superhero game, the classic Marvel "FASERIP", the superhero rankings roughly equate to the following 5e tiers.

5e Tier: Superhero Ranks

• Levels 1 thru 4: Poor and Typical
• Levels 5 thru 8: Good and Excellent

• Levels 9 thru 12: Remarkable and Incredible
• Levels 13 thru 16: Amazing and Monstrous
• Levels 17 thru 20: Unearthly and Shift-X

• Levels 21 thru 24: Shift-Y and Shift-Z
• Levels 25 thru 28: Class-1000 and Class-3000

...


The middle tier of levels 9 thru 12 initiates the superhero genre.

Remarkable and Incredible is when the titular superheroes start to happen, like Cyclops and Jubilee from X-Men.

Amazing and Monstrous are the "standard" superheroes, like Thing and Invisible Woman from Fantastic Four.

Unearthly and Shift-X are the most powerful superheroes, like Storm, Professor-X, and the teleportation of Nightcrawler.


Above these three tiers is the crazy stuff that is beyond the superheroes.


Every defacto 4-level tier in D&D 5e, is a separate genre of fantasy.

Level 9 is the perfect bright line between "mundane" versus "extraordinary". Heh, or in this case, "remarkable".

 

[Neonchameleon]

The sorcerer isn't three things. Its three shards and half-ideas all jammed together. There's no point to a "caster but not wizard" just sitting there and taking up word count with nothing else added to it. These are not tropes in their own right. There's no class fantasy, no vibes or story behind them. At best, its its the power point system in the DMG, and the class gets wiped out from existance. And even that's reaching.

The sorcerer is one core idea: Someone whose primary thing is casting self-powered magic. It's not "a caster but not a wizard"; there's little point to the wizard sitting there as "a caster through books" sitting there with eight tedious subclasses when they really have the things of just a subclass. The wizard is a hat on an idea - and a spell school specialist is a hat on a hat.

Metamagic is not a class either. Its traditionally a feats every caster has access to. The sorcerer is literally stealing the concept from everyone else and making them worse, just to give themselves something special to do. IF you take it away from sorcerer, its not going to be a class. Its going back to being a feat.

Metamagic is something that before being given to the sorcerer is exclusively a 3.X thing. "It was done in 1.5 editions" doesn't make it traditional - just ideas from a seven year period which deliberately made the sorcerer as a sockpuppet excuse for the wizard to have more spells.

A gishy dragon class would ... end up not having anything new ever made after the dragon part is done. And, hells. Druid and barbarian might even do a dragon class better than the sorcerer does. Meanwhile.... we have at least three dwarfy themed subclasses across all classes, multiple elf / fey themed ones, the Warlock's got the fiends locked down, Fighter's got the giants... sorcerer isn't bloodline. Bloodline is spread across all classes.

Indeed. Sorcerer isn't bloodline. Sorcerer has never been bloodline in D&D; that was a Pathfinder thing. Sorcerers are more the "Mutants/bitten by a radioactive spider/the shadow seeped into my bones" types.

Splitting up the sorcerer leaves you with nothing to build a class on.

So put the wizard where it belongs and there is plenty.

 

[Minigiant]

Where's the discussion of "just that good" in the books? As far as I can tell, vanilla 5e keeps pace for the "just that good" classes through the power of "number go up" alone. Not exactly inspiring.

That is the problem.

The high level mundane warrior isn't a big dumb "I attack a lot" guy.

They look more like comic book and anime warriors. But that would upset old school grumblers.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Right, and that's an error worth correcting.

Why is it an error? You said yourself that mechanically they don't need supernatural power to keep up until at least level 5 or later. Also all that character narrative stuff you'd be losing that I mentioned earlier but hasn't yet been responded to.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That is the problem.

The high level mundane warrior isn't a big dumb "I attack a lot" guy.

They look more like comic book and anime warriors. But that would upset old school grumblers.

I think the issue is more WotC's lack of creativity on their drive to write a simple class. I started in BECMI, love the OSR, But am fine with complex classes. It depends on the game.

 

[TwoSix]

That is the problem.

The high level mundane warrior isn't a big dumb "I attack a lot" guy.

They look more like comic book and anime warriors. But that would upset old school grumblers.

Exactly. Contrast Ryu and Ken's Hadoken (which is just heightened technique) with M. Bison's explicit channeling of the Psycho power, which is obviously intended to be "supernatural".

 

[Neonchameleon]

That is the problem.

The high level mundane warrior isn't a big dumb "I attack a lot" guy.

They look more like comic book and anime warriors. But that would upset old school grumblers.

There is no room at high level for a mundane "big dumb "I attack a lot" guy. There's probably room for a smart prepared borderline-mundane Batman-type (although even that falls off) and a big dumb "I attack a lot including rearranging the local buildings into rubble" Hulk type. But the combination of "big, dumb, mundane" got left behind at level 5.

 

[Minigiant]

Indeed. Sorcerer isn't bloodline. Sorcerer has never been bloodline in D&D; that was a Pathfinder thing. Sorcerers are more the "Mutants/bitten by a radioactive spider/the shadow seeped into my bones" types.

Sorcerers were hinted as being dragon descendants since 3e

 

[Neonchameleon]

Sorcerers were hinted as being dragon descendants since 3e

They were hinted as that was one possibility in 3.X. It was never clear in 3.X - and it has been completely clear since 2009 that that is only one subset of sorcerers and there are more.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Exactly. Contrast Ryu and Ken's Hadoken (which is just heightened technique) with M. Bison's explicit channeling of the Psycho power, which is obviously intended to be "supernatural".

Ryu and Ken shoot fireballs. How is that not supernatural? What do I, or anyone else on Earth, need to do to learn how to throw fireballs?