D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

[Chaosmancer]

Fair enough. Supernatural power source then.

The internal magic inherent in all living bodies then. You don't have to study it and know its name to use it.

 

[FrogReaver]

Sure, but that boat sailed over a decade ago. That ship sailed the minute a wizard could be a street urchin who is good at math and pick-pocketed the correct book. The moment magic was simply a skill that could be learned, this concept that skill is magical was true. It is the source of the Bard, whose music is magical, and the source of the monk, whose martial arts are magical.

The game itself doesn’t say these things. They are all setting specific elements and will vary from setting to setting.

Does it mean some people can't have the fantasy world they want? Yes. But that is just something that was true the moment DnD was created.

Not to the degree you are advocating for.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The internal magic inherent in all living bodies then. You don't have to study it and know its name to use it.

Sure seems like you do...

Of course, in your own game you can do what you want.

 

[FrozenNorth]

If it's relevant for anyone, and supports a mundane class narrative many people want that also appears through genre media, then it matters.

Tyranny of the unpopular, then? Sounds worse.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Not to the degree you are advocating for.

On the contrary. D&D has never been a generic game. But what happened was a massive worldbuilding change with the publication of D&D 3.0

Before D&D 3.0 almost everybody was hard-locked in terms of who they could be. Once you picked your class at first level your destiny, other than for a very few humans, was set in stone. If you were a Magic User/Cleric/Thief then that is what you would be until the day you died. Frankly I find that sort of worldbuilding with a system mechanics enforced caste system frankly morally repellent.

From 3.0 onwards once you set out on the path of the fighter you will always have been a fighter going forward, and it will always be a part of you. But in 3.X and 5e you can change your classes pretty freely and in 4e and 5e you can pick up features of other classes as you level up. Your past is fixed - but your future has multiple paths.

Frankly I find the worldbuilding of the more recent half of D&D's life where you could learn to be something other than what your birth and early years overwhelmingly better than "you are your class and that is that and if your class has no magic then it sucks to be you". The idea that people couldn't get what they want out of D&D's worldbuilding is frankly false. And I'm prepared to bet that many many more people are happy with WotC era worldbuilding here (including supernatural fighters) than were ever fans of the TSR hard-locked class system.

And the TSR era class-locked worldbuilding didn't just make people unhappy, it made large numbers of them unhappy enough to walk. You're complaining that the shoe pinches your foot when the old ones lead to masses of active amputations. Yes people were unhappier with the tighter restrictions in the old days even if you were among the few who actually found those one-size-fits-all shoes comfortable.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Faith in what? Where does the power come from?

Does it matter? If I say it comes from the positive plane, that doesn’t work in settings that don’t have a positive plane. Leave it open, let each table decide.

The metaphysics of spellcasting don’t have to be set down to play the game, and they certainly don’t have to be set down for all settings in the PHB.

 

[Yaarel]

I agree with the concerns about AD&D 1e and 2e. But I feel the characterization about them are unfair.

D&D has never been a generic game.

AD&D is a "generic" game. It encouraged and even required DMs to invent their own settings. I have played old school games. They can be anything from Tolkien to amusement parks to the exploration of a scifi 4-dimensional hypercube.

But what happened was a massive worldbuilding change with the publication of D&D 3.0

Before D&D 3.0 almost everybody was hard-locked in terms of who they could be.

Actually the opposite.

What 3e introduced, was "simulationism", where fantasy flavors acquire mechanics to quantify and actualize them.

Before 3e, with little exaggeration, if one wanted to play a character that could fly, one simply pretended it could. One "roleplayed" a character that could.

Flavor was everything.

In AD&D, the mechanics were simple rough approximations without any expectation that they could adequately represent fantasy concepts.

Once you picked your class at first level your destiny, other than for a very few humans, was set in stone. If you were a Magic User/Cleric/Thief then that is what you would be until the day you died. Frankly I find that sort of worldbuilding with a system mechanics enforced caste system frankly morally repellent.

From the point of view of the AD&D players, it was mechanics that were problematic. They characterized the ethical problem as "roleplay" where unfettered imagination triumphs, versus "roll-play" where the limitation of dice and obsession with mechanics constrained everything.


Personally, I find the old school AD&D ignoring of mechanics to be maddening. I appreciate the effort of 3e to quantify fantasy concepts mechanically. I even appreciate how 4e made mechanics everything, while making flavor fungible. With adequately sophisticated mechanics available to represent various fantasy concepts, it was viable to "roleplay" anything. If one wanted to play a bear, in 4e one can use the mechanics of the Monk class to represent it (or various other suitable mechanics), and it would work well. The imagination of the player is free.

My experience of 5e is a synthesis of "roleplay" and "simulationism" − the flavor and the mechanics are equally important. As DM, flavor comes first to determine the outcome of an effort, and then mechanics shows up only if the outcome of the narrative is in doubt, and could go either way. The mechanics are vital but flavor is the context for interpreting the mechanics. Mechanical text is in a flavor context. This 5e approach can only work well when the flavor is suggestive rather than baked into mechanics, so players can use the flavorful mechanics for diverse concepts. Fantasy concepts have 5e mechanics to actualize during gameplay. But each DM or player still has much freedom to determine what the flavor of a mechanic is, exactly, likewise the conceptual flavor of an entire mechanical character.


The main point is, for AD&D 1e and 2e, the "primitive" rules that were written down that we can point to today, were not the game its players were actually playing. The only way to understand what the AD&D players were doing then is to experience the oral tradition of a living AD&D tradition that survives today. Even the "old school renaissance" that exists today with its updated and clarified rules systems is nonidentical to the original AD&D experience where the rules simply didnt matter, in the way that gaming rules matter today.

 

[FrozenNorth]

If I wanted my fighter to leap over a 40 ft gap and slice the warlock... well, how am I supposed to justify that, does he have magical leaping powers, why can't I just be satisfied with a man capable of being normal, If I really want to do this, why don't I get magical boots of leaping. Why do I want to pull of such crazy stunts, the game was better when a fighter was a farmboy who picked up a sword and refused to back down...

And this is... rather consistently occurring. So, I can see a potential in finally putting the label on and saying "yes, fighters are supernatural, just like everyone else" and opening that door. I think with the side benefit of actually solidifying the fighter and rogue archetypes a little bit, but giving them more thematic bite at higher levels.

I can see why you would want to do it, I just don’t see Ex and Su enabling this sort of play.

Take your example. There isn’t a fighter ability that permits you to leap 40’ and attack. You could fall back on the Jumping rules to argue that with a sufficiently high Athletics check, you should be able to make a 40’ leap. But the Jumping rules apply to everyone, so they are tagged Mundane.

So either way, it just comes down to the DM. Meanwhile, at the next table over, the player’s fighter is Mr. Mundane (by which I mean, he’s just a regular farmboy who’s strong and good at wielding a scythe), but has no trouble clearing the leap because D&D is a game of heroic fantasy. That’s what it says right on the cover and several times in the book.

 

[Remathilis]

People don’t want to play npc classes, they want to play mundane non-powered heroes who still do extraordinary feats of strength, skill and heroism on the level of all the rest of the classes and not get told ‘oh 10th level, better join team magic now cause skill wont cut it from here’ because that is what those class’s fantasies are.

It’s really not that difficult a concept to grasp is it?

The Internet ate my well crafted response, so I'll just sum it up here:

You can't be a mundane hero in a game where 80% of your allies and enemies are not mundane. Eventually, you fall behind. And when you do, you start to rely on magic as a crutch. There is functionally little difference with a fighter who has a flame tongue sword, adamantine armor, and boots of flying and a dragon knight who has hardened scales, coats his blade in dragonfire, and manifests wings except the former was gotten out of a box of DM charity and the latter is a part of the characters identity and abilities. There is no mundane fighter, only one who gets his power in loot boxes.

I'd rather that power be part of the class and since weakening casters is out of the question, let's give the warrior classes what they need to survive. And if that means all farmboys end up the heirs to a mystic tradition of magic knights, I can live with that.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Except there's no mention of magic or the supernatural in the description of either the fighter or the rogue. There is no evidence for your argument.

The point is that wizards can cast magic because the PHB says they can cast magic is an equally circular argument. You are applying a different standard to certain classes rather than others.