D&D General Why Do You Think Wizards Are Boring?

[Mind of tempest]

I don’t see why wizards get damage spells plus cantrips. You’ve already got decent damage with cantrip. Why then get this huge bump with endless damage spells.

So much of the game would be better if casters lost all damage spells

some days you just want to blow stuff up in dnd I would rather restrict it to envocer wizards(they need a cooler name) and gives others higher damage options when needed but it needs to be re-done badly.

 

[Mind of tempest]

That would be correct, yes.

There are many otherwise excellent tabletop roleplaying games out there that I refuse to touch so long as they have corruption rolls for magic.

curruption really feels like an idea from when magic was seen as way more evil and satanic I am not against consequences but I do not get why arcane magic should make you inhuman.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

curruption really feels like an idea from when magic was seen as way more evil and satanic I am not against consequences but I do not get why arcane magic should make you inhuman.

Excellent way of putting it.

I prefer magic that stands with one foot in the miraculous and one foot in the scientific. Which is quite precedented: the purpose of magic, even back in Roman days, was to control reality and produce desired effects! To the Romans, witchcraft was a civil crime, but the difference between "witchcraft" (criminal behavior), "magic" (debatable behavior), and "religious ritual" (approved ot even required behavior) was extremely context-dependent and very much subject to interpretation. Apuleius, for example, successfully defended himself against a charge of witchcraft by effectively saying, in modern terms, "Look, I'm a scientist. I have to be able to experiment in order to find out what is true! That doesn't mean I'm a bad person hurting people with magic. It just means I keep an open mind and, when possible, try to test the outlandish claims we all hear from time to time."

So, while it should have wonders and things that can't be explained, it should also have some powers that are genuinely pretty well-known and perhaps even understood. And it is that precise ambiguity, that failure to fall cleanly into either "unexplainable" or "perfectly well-explained" that D&D magic is at its finest. Magic as a game where you only know half the rules.

 

[Neonchameleon]

curruption really feels like an idea from when magic was seen as way more evil and satanic I am not against consequences but I do not get why arcane magic should make you inhuman.

It's not "when", it's play style. Corruption is an idea for a game with long term consequences not a game where you are fully fit and able to act on 1hp, and have no injury rules.

 

[Mind of tempest]

It's not "when", it's play style. Corruption is an idea for a game with long term consequences not a game where you are fully fit and able to act on 1hp, and have no injury rules.

long term consequence need not be turning only one class into a monster, beside the ideas predated the games with it in the old fantasy novels put the idea in people's heads

 

[Neonchameleon]

long term consequence need not be turning only one class into a monster, beside the ideas predated the games with it in the old fantasy novels put the idea in people's heads

The thing is that D&D doesn't have any inherent long term consequences besides death and levelling up. There are games I absolutely run with corruptive magic, but D&D is not one of them because as you say it's few classes and doesn't fit anything else.

 

[Cruentus]

long term consequence need not be turning only one class into a monster, beside the ideas predated the games with it in the old fantasy novels put the idea in people's heads

Totally depends on what and how magic is described. @EzekielRaiden talks about his conceptualization of it. Depending on campaign or theme, I go between magic being part of the natural world and something that can be tapped into with no problem or it is something dark and dangerous that has a drawback. You want the power it brings, then you deal with the consequences. But again, its all theme, and all about how the table wants to approach it. DCC and similar take the latter approach - power corrupts, and magical power can turn you into a monster.

As someone who plays Wizards, and my last being a F2/W14 over a 2.5 year 5e campaign, I overall found the mechanics to be boring, the spells to be fairly uninteresting but super impactful, the "resource management" to be nonexistent, and "resource tracking" of abilities, background abilities, species abilities, feats, and the kitchen sink to be onerous. Oh, and the ability to just gain two new spells on level up or research spells for paltry amount of coin was yawn inducing. Its why I also stopped playing 5e and won't be looking back.

 

[Clint_L]

Wizards would make a great and popular subclass of sorcerer in 5e. But thematically their subclasses leave a lot to be desired because the wizard class is too domineering both mechanically and thematically.

The wizard is the arcane caster who gets their power from learning and investigating magic, and because of this they gain an unrivalled flexibility with arcane spells (which of course are the most flexible type of magic), able to scribe them into their book and change their spells on a daily basis as well as learning more new spells than other arcanists and being able to learn spells from other wizards' books. This is great! It's got the power and specificity of a strong subclass.

I see this as exactly the opposite: sorcerers feel like they should be a sub-class of wizard. So do warlocks. You have the folks who acquire their ability through years of study and training, and then a few who have it through a shortcut, either by some freak of nature or magic, or through a pact with a powerful entity. But I guess that's just a matter of taste.

 

[Hussar]

It is a bit weird that arcane caster gets three full classes. Sure “martial” gets five (barb, fighter, ranger, paladin, rogue) but those archetypes are very wide apart and the classes in play are very different.

Sorc and wizard? Those are very close together. Warlock? Fair enough. That’s pretty different. But remolding sorc and wizard into new classes would be great.

I’d much rather they went the shadow caster route from 3e’s Tome of Magic. You can either be deep or broad. Not both.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I see this as exactly the opposite: sorcerers feel like they should be a sub-class of wizard. So do warlocks. You have the folks who acquire their ability through years of study and training, and then a few who have it through a shortcut, either by some freak of nature or magic, or through a pact with a powerful entity. But I guess that's just a matter of taste.

I want the folks who acquire their magic through books and study to be a subset of those with full caster arcane magic through some means, yes. Having sorcerers be a subclass of book learners makes neither thematic nor game balance sense.