D&D (2024) The sorcerer shouldn't exist

[tetrasodium]

Even so, the PF1 Sorcerer has it where their innate spellcasting ability is the result of a magical being one of the character's ancestors. You can even have it where a sorcerer is born to wizard parents.

I think that the critical difference with pf1 sorc/wiz & the 5e versions is how different they are with spell lists and slot progression

 

[Micah Sweet]

Incorrect. Game lore is made to justify the rules, not vice versa. The sorcerer was created because the designers wanted an alternative to the wizard for spellcasting and the whole "blood of dragons" lore was added afterwards. When they did Races of Stone, they didn't create an entire culture of competitive nomadic mountain dwellers and then create stats for them, they created a "mini giant" race and then went back and filled in the gaps.

Lore is always secondary in D&D. It has to be, y'all won't give up on the notion the PHB has to fit perfectly with every D&D setting ever designed past, present and future.

I reject this (mostly). I'll give you the sorcerer, but is there an interview somewhere that tells us the goliaths were created to fill a mechanical niche, and they just came up with a story afterwards?

Taken as a general statement about games it's even worse, about the most cynical thing I've ever heard on the subject. Gaming seems like a monumental waste of time and effort if the lore only exists to dress up the rules. If that's how you feel about the hobby, I'm very sorry.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yep. The lore emanates from the game to make it playable, not vice-versa.

The only time that flow is in the opposite direction is in IP-based licensed games, or in some original games. But definitely not D&D.

I don't believe that. Most of the time, the rules emanate from the lore to make the fantasy gameable. Otherwise, you're basically saying Gygax and Arneson thought to themselves, "Let's mess around with math...now that we have all these numbers and formulae, let's throw a veneer of fantasy on top for fun!"

 

[Alzrius]

Incorrect. Game lore is made to justify the rules, not vice versa.

Only Sith deal in absolutes.

Slightly more seriously, if you're creating your own campaign setting using a "toolbox" set of rules, there's absolutely room for going the other way. A while back, for a PF1 game I was thinking about running, I wanted to create a desert region famous for the fire elementalists that it produced (i.e. I came up with the lore first). Under the standard rules, there wasn't much to justify such a thing; a place full of monsters with fire resistance and fire immunity would likely produce more ice and water elementalists, since those monsters are vulnerable to cold damage.

What I did instead was tinker with the underlying game rules to justify the lore I'd come up with. I decided to change out monsters' having fire immunity to instead having degrees of fire resistance (a la an old article by Sean K. Reynolds) and had the entire region be under certain magic traits that augmented fire magic and limited/negated other types of magic (under the idea that if "dead magic" and "wild magic" are planar traits that can nevertheless be found in limited areas on the Prime Material Plane, e.g. in the Forgotten Realms, there's no reason other such traits can't be found).

The result was a region whose rules operated to justify the lore, and it worked out great...or at least it would have, if the group hadn't decided to go in a completely different direction, meaning that the campaign was never implemented. But the larger point is that you can come up with lore first and then have the rules justify them; I see that as being one of the major benefits of a modular, "toolbox" approach, where you have a large amount of rules at your disposal, and so can make whatever lore you want first, mixing and matching the mechanics to implement that lore on a mechanical level.

 

[Flights of Fancy]

The only wordplay here is by you, insisting that there is no gift or special event involved in a wizard becoming a wizard despite what the text directly says. You have pulled this out of, as far as I can tell, a flight of fancy and are then insisting that everyone must follow your arbitrary distinction that isn't based on any explicit text you have provided.

No it is your wordplay. I do not insist no gift (chance to learn, get apprenticeship, non-magical. NOT the magical innate gift of Sorcerer) or "special" event for wizard (not special at all), I say the gift or event does not create innate magic. Your wordplay is to connect non-magial injecting gift with magical creating innately gift. Please stop.

I do not insist as you claim. You can follow as you wish. Here is text from PHB:

Scholars of the Arcane
"Wild and enigmatic, varied in form and function, the power of magic draws students who seek to master its mysteries. Some aspire to become like the gods, shaping reality itself. Though the casting of a typical spell requires merely the utterance of a few strange words, fleeting gestures, and sometimes a pinch or clump of exotic materials, these surface components barely hint at the expertise attained after years of apprenticeship and countless hours of study.

Wizards live and die by their spells. Everything else is secondary. They learn new spells as they experiment and grow in experience. They can also learn them from other wizards, from ancient tomes or inscriptions, and from ancient creatures (such as the fey) that are steeped in magic."

STUDY, LEARN, APPRENTICESHIP. All there.

And yet the text of D&D 5e itself insists there must be an extraordinary event for a wizard to become a wizard.

Non-magical creating event.

All a sorcerer needs is an extraordinary event. A wizard explicitly needs an extraordinary event that dominated their backstory.

This is funny. A simple phrase mentioned once used as proff compared to my words which are used more.

By the explicit rules it is no harder or easier to move into one class than the other other than stat spread. By the descriptions wizards have backgrounds "dominated by at least one extraordinary event". Something extraordinary needs to happen for a wizard to become one.

Wrong. The event is not what to become a wizard. Study, apprenticeship, stuff is how they become one.

Indeed. You just repeating your erronious headcanon that attempts to invent a difference is a waste of everyone's time.

As you waste my time? You want option 1, but option 2 is how wizards work by rules. They have no magical gift or event that lets them cast spells. They can cast spells because of study, apprenticeship, and stuff. I cannot be more clear. Nothing about wizard in the rules say they have an innate gift for magic--that is sorcerer.

If you want to play option 1, wizard as sorcerer subclass is good. But that is not the rules now, so not how wizards work.

 

[Flights of Fancy]

Because I wouldn't call any of "born the kid of a doctor, got great grades at school, then made it into med school" to be outright extraordinary.

I would not call the extraordinary events from wizard text outright extraordinary either. They are not special ore magical to create innate magical casting. Work and study and stuff is what wizards use.

 

[Neonchameleon]

If they're going to be a compelling character in a story? Yes. That's the point. That's why that line is there.

No they don't. Most will - but a compelling character does not require a compelling backstory. In fact the point of some characters (including the LotR hobbits) includes not having their backstories dominated by specific events. Sometimes the most compelling thing to do for a story is take a deliberately fairly ordinary person and have the extraordinary events happen after the story starts.

Also, everyone wants to get paid. The fact that not everyone is in a high paying job is proof that just wanting to is not enough of an explanation as to how they got where they got. Even 'born the kid of a doctor' has more implications than they just 'wanted' to become a doctor.

That doesn't make anything actively extraordinary.

 

[Campbell]

I don't believe that. Most of the time, the rules emanate from the lore to make the fantasy gameable. Otherwise, you're basically saying Gygax and Arneson thought to themselves, "Let's mess around with math...now that we have all these numbers and formulae, let's throw a veneer of fantasy on top for fun!"

There is not just one reason to create a rule or a piece of lore. Sometimes one comes first and justifies the other. Sometimes its uno reversi. One is not more valorous or normative than the other. Roleplaying game design is about synthesis of these things to create both compelling gameplay and compelling situations to play through.

It's also probably not the best to tell people who engage in the medium for reasons you do not that you feel sorry for them. It comes across as very elitist. The medium is not one thing. It is many things.

 

[James Gasik]

It works both ways: lore can follow mechanics, mechanics can follow lore. Or as it's better known, "top down" and "bottom up" design.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There is not just one reason to create a rule or a piece of lore. Sometimes one comes first and justifies the other. Sometimes its uno reversi. One is not more valorous or normative than the other. Roleplaying game design is about synthesis of these things to create both compelling gameplay and compelling situations to play through.

It's also probably not the best to tell people who engage in the medium for reasons you do not that you feel sorry for them. It comes across as very elitist. The medium is not one thing. It is many things.

Fair enough. I just can't understand how D&D could be seen to be created rules-first across the board, as was claimed. Occasionally, sure, but not as a general thing.