D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

[James Gasik]

I agree with a lot of this, and this is a much more balanced and nuanced take. I have had plenty of times, while playing a caster, that I didn't have a spell to solve the problem. However, I can see how a Vancian style would make that even less likely, and make it easier for a DM to play into that style of challenge.

That being said, I wonder about a nugget of wisdom I picked up once in a discussion of traps. If noticing the trap makes the trap trivial to overcome, it was a bad trap. And I think this might apply to the design of monsters like werewolves and trolls. If they are only challenging if you are ignorant of how they work, or lack the resources to handle their gimmick... maybe they aren't well-designed. Thinking about it, I have almost never used a Troll, and the few times I did, they were modified trolls. But I have used regeneration, and I have often set the counter to be something OTHER than fire. And generally, those fights were planned to be tough for other reasons.

I think I agree with you that WoTC needs to pick a lane, to a degree. I think this idea of challenges being trivialized if you figure out the secret information may be too rampant. It is good occasionally, but most fights shouldn't be that way. I think we are slowly moving away from that paradigm though, one limping step at a time.

I agree that trolls, traps, and werewolves have kind of cursed design in this regard. How much of a threat they pose is really tied to what you're allowed to know about them. In games with monster knowledge rules, you can really easily find that the difficult of many encounters boils down to "roll a die, success cuts the challenge in half".

And I like having dedicated monster knowledge rules, but so many classic monsters (and many new ones) seem to be designed with issue. Players walk into encounters predisposed to be wary of statues, beautiful women, and unassuming treasure chests- to the point that many a GM grumbles annoyed that the players are "metagaming", but the situations where the players are right to be cautious keep coming up!

5e claims to be a game where you can run it just like the old school games of old, but the options it gives to players fight against that notion every step of the way. Or alternately, there's too many "old school" challenges cluttering up a game that is designed for a different paradigm. It comes to about the same thing.

I remember my brain exploding when someone dug up that developer post about monsters being designed around simple hit point vs. expected damage and not things like accuracy vs. AC. I've yet to see a PC Wizard with less than 15 AC, but there's tons of monsters running around with +3 to hit at low levels, when a 1st level Cleric could have an AC of 18 (or more!).

(As an aside, I'm about to start DMing again, and I decided to convert some old 2e modules. Every time I get to an encounter with some classic monsters in it, my head hurts. I have medium encounters that look like meat grinders and hard encounters that seem like they'll be a speed bump. It really makes me wonder who exactly, WotC thinks is playing this game and how they're doing it!).

 

[Minigiant]

Give me an example.

I want to play a Harry Potter/Dresden mage. A mage who is scholarly but of an arcane bloodline, knows a lot of spells, can alter them on the fly, can take a breather to get all their magic, and use ritual and potion magic..

I want a mage that has the earth magic to turn into a defensive warrior.

I want to play a shapeshifter and shapeshift 20 times a day

I want to play a warrior that is focused on momentum and combinations.

 

[Scribe]

I want to play a Harry Potter/Dresden mage. A mage who is scholarly but of an arcane bloodline, knows a lot of spells, can alter them on the fly, can take a breather to get all their magic, and use ritual and potion magic..

So you want to be a Wizard/Sorcerer/Warlock/Artificer.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And I like good food, therefore I must want a 5-star chef to hand-make every meal I ever eat, right?

No, I don't want the DM to micromanage everything, but there is a reason that Vancian casting was abandoned. Because it fundamentally DOES require that. Why did the Vancian system in 3.5 allow cleric's to substitute any spell for Cure Wounds? Because cure wounds can be necessary, and it was impossible to know HOW necessary. It made the game less fun and forced people to play in ways they didn't want to play. Therefore, they had to find a solution. And the solution was to make an exception for Vancian casting.

If memory serves me, in 3.5, there was never a spell like Revivify. Why not? Because it would never be prepared. Or if it was, it would only be prepared once. After all, if you are spending three or four slots on preparing for someone to die, you could instead spend them on preventing the death.

Frankly, the only people I ever see supporting a return to Vancian casting at those who are convinced they are smart enough/skilled enough/cautious enough/good enough planners to never run into the problems the system imposes. Look at your last two posts, in this one you accuse me of wanting the DM to coddle me to prevent me from making mistakes, and in the last one you sarcastically set the dichotomy between any level of planning, and just charging in like "a herd of nigh immortal magic slinging bulls with red bandanas covering their eyes". Because of course, I could never sit and plan things with my party, aware I don't have the full information, and therefore be painfully aware that if I had to predict the exact number of times I have to cast a specific spell, I would be setting myself up for failure. I must play like a fool with no regard to plans, because I'm aware that no plan is perfect and setting up Vancian casting encourages nothing but the safest most perfect plans.

I would be quite happy if no edition had a spell like Revivify.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure, it is subjective. And subjectively the VAST VAST majority of people have rejected Vancian casting. And that isn't because they want to be coddled like CreamCloud0 suggests.

Appeals to popularity don't work on me.

 

[Minigiant]

So you want to be a Wizard/Sorcerer/Warlock/Artificer.

It should be it's own class.

The Potter/Dresden/WOW mage is more iconic that the D&D Wizard in real life.

But we pretend it isn't.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Fine. I did some research. Other than the game Invisible Sun, every single game I looked at talked about using something other than Vancian Casting.

Morkbork, Blades in the Dark, Dungeon World, I know not all of these are OSR games, but if it was a game I had heard of before, it used a different casting style. Usually rolling skills to cast spells.

So, unless you are going to require a bibliography of every source I looked at and copies of the rules, I have done the research and found no evidence of Vancian casting in OSR games. Excepting Invisible Sun.

I have never heard of Morkbork, and Blades in the Dark and Dungeon World are not OSR games. Both in fact have a decidedly narrative focus and have little to do with Dungrons and Dragons at all mechanically. I reject your premise.

 

[Scribe]

It should be it's own class.

The Potter/Dresden/WOW mage is more iconic that the D&D Wizard in real life.

But we pretend it isn't.

I will have to admit that as my son is approaching 20, and we watched the Potter movies when he was a kid, I'm not fully versed in what makes a 'Potter' mage. WoW Mage? Depends on the era and abilities I guess but, D&D Wizard/Sorc/Warlock, are distinct, and as 5th is evergreen for a bit here now, I dont think what you are describing is a class, its an uber-Mage.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sure, but if someone isn't a game designer and capable of making an entire warlock but not a warlock class... then the reflavoring is worth it rather than abandoning the concept.

If I didn't want to make it myself, I'd look for 3pp. It's a big world out there.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I want to play a Harry Potter/Dresden mage. A mage who is scholarly but of an arcane bloodline, knows a lot of spells, can alter them on the fly, can take a breather to get all their magic, and use ritual and potion magic..

I want a mage that has the earth magic to turn into a defensive warrior.

I want to play a shapeshifter and shapeshift 20 times a day

I want to play a warrior that is focused on momentum and combinations.

Awesome! Those are great ideas. Do you also need WotC to make them?