Has the Vancian Magic Thread Burned Down the Forest Yet? (My Bad, People)

[ProfessorCirno]

Does everyone always have to be involved in everything? Of course not.

The Thief goes off and scouts - and does a little quiet pilferin' in the process.
The Magic-User blows up what needs blowing up.
The Fighter chops down what needs chopping down.
The Cleric bats cleanup while providing support and cover.

Sometimes things don't need blowing up. Sometimes there's no scouting to do. Sometimes there's nothing to swing a sword at. And sometimes the Cleric is a 5th wheel.

Know what? As long as "sometimes" never becomes "all the time" there is no issue.

Lan-"sometimes you just gotta sit back and enjoy the ride"-efan

Yeah, classes are there to fill roles. I'll never understand this one character has to do everything attitude, or that all classes has to be the same.

See, this just gives me flashbacks to pre-4e Shadowrun where everyone would go out for pizza while the GM had his hour and a half one-on-one session with the Decker.

It wasn't fun.

It wasn't fun for anyone.

Also, Magic-Users stopped being "guy who blows things up" long, long ago. They've been "Guy who has a spell for goddamn every single little thing" for awhile now. That's the problem with Vancian - you change your spells every morning. You can specialize in "being specialized in anything"

 

[broghammerj]

It's a classic problem with that stuff. The players who've invested the time to know that Sleep, for instance, is way way way more useful in play than Rope Trick or Ventriloquism, *want* their abstruse knowledge to stand them in good stead. It was not easy to figure out what all those spells did when THEY first started playing, so they want that feeling of privilege that comes with knowledge learned through long experience.

Terrible design.

Although I agree with your points on their technical merit, I must disagree on the personal appeal. Of course sleep was the best spell. That didn't mean I didn't enjoy fun and creative uses of ventriloquism or rope trick to help make my play experience unique or fun. Casting sleep repeatedly in combat could get boring real fast.

 

[Ulrick]

Vancian magic is a fine system. Not perfect, but fine. And it works.

 

[Diamond Cross]

Also, Magic-Users stopped being "guy who blows things up" long, long ago. They've been "Guy who has a spell for goddamn every single little thing" for awhile now. That's the problem with Vancian - you change your spells every morning. You can specialize in "being specialized in anything"

So what exactly is wrong with that?

What about that exactly bothers you so much?

Wizards haven't stopped being the guy who blows thing up. They still pretty fill the role of artillery in 3.5e.

And some players can be very creative in this approach as well. Is that's what bothering you so much about this approach? That a player has to be creative?

 

[Mort]

Also, Magic-Users stopped being "guy who blows things up" long, long ago. They've been "Guy who has a spell for goddamn every single little thing" for awhile now. That's the problem with Vancian - you change your spells every morning. You can specialize in "being specialized in anything"

Actually that's not quite it - not entirely. The mage became the "I can step on anyone's toes and fill anyone's role" primarily in 3-3.5e it didn't happen so much in 1e-2e (sure the mage became powerful at high levels but the niche encroachment was not as blatant).

The big change was the 3e mages ridiculously easy access to scrolls and wands (heck scribe scroll is a free feat for the mage!). With this simple feat, the well played mage is rarely unprepared and more importantly has many more spells than his level would indicate (and it's pretty cheap; when I played a 5th - 12th level mage I don't ever recall running low on funds to scribe scrolls even though the DM was fairly stingy).

So it's not Vancian spellcasting it's the easy endrun around it provided by 3e that caused the problem - at least IME.

 

[broghammerj]

What non-Vancian systems are there? I can only think of a few:

1. Some sort of fatigue or life draining spells ala Shadowrun

2. Some sort of point pool (ie mana, etc) ala psionics

3. Some sort of unlimited casting but limited spell selection ala sorceror

Without getting edition wars going, the issue I have with 4E is that it is Vancian for everyone. Also, I have never found the appeal of having a power I can use at will.....it seems well, non-magical. While I see the inherent benefit for balance if all characters have a base combat option that does a finite damage, I just find it personally boring.

To me a fighter swinging a sword for d8 damage every round is no different than a mage firing a magic missile for d8 every round. Yeah, they're described differently in game play but mechanistically the same.

 

[nightwyrm]

The viability of the whole idea about different character being in the spotlight in different times is completely dependent on how long it takes to resolve each character's spotlight moment in real time. If character A's spotlight moment takes 5 minutes to resolve while character B's take 2 hours to resolve, there's going to be a problem.

In more recent editions (3.x and 4e) combat has taken the lion's share of the game time, so characters who either cannot contribute to combat or who can dominate combat will tend to stand out more. However, this problem doesn't have to be limited to combat oriented games. If there was a game where the diplomacy portion takes two hours while combat takes 5 minutes, a character who is built for combat and ignores diplomacy will also not end up well either.

I hypothesize that the idea of separate spotlight worked better in earlier editions because those editions relied much more on player skill than character skill. Players can still have an opportunity to contribute in any situation. An AD&D fighter player can still come up with a clever idea to bypass a pit trap. A thief player can still come up with a good speech and impress the king. But modern D&D has a lot of these abilities codified into skills, abilities, feats etc. Doesn't matter how good a speech your fighter's player can come up with if his character has a Cha penalty and no ranks in diplomacy.

In 3.x, the only RAW mechanic that can break all of these limitations are spells which are designed pretty much to do anything. Hence the "wizards can do anything while fighters can only fight (and not well)" problem.

 

[Mort]

So what exactly is wrong with that?

What about that exactly bothers you so much?

Wizards haven't stopped being the guy who blows thing up. They still pretty fill the role of artillery in 3.5e.

And some players can be very creative in this approach as well. Is that's what bothering you so much about this approach? That a player has to be creative?

What's bothering him is that as you get up in levels in 3.5 a well played wizard can marginalize the other roles - specifically the non-casters.

 

[broghammerj]

With this simple feat, the well played mage is rarely unprepared and more importantly has many more spells than his level would indicate (and it's pretty cheap; when I played a 5th - 12th level mage I don't ever recall running low on funds to scribe scrolls even though the DM was fairly stingy).

So it's not Vancian spellcasting it's the easy endrun around it provided by 3e that caused the problem - at least IME.

While I agree with you that that particular style of play is certainly valid and within the confines of the rules, I just never saw it at my table. For one, it's not the spirit of the rules so I didn't keep 20 copies of all my spells. That could become game unbalancing which I didn't want to do to my friend the DM. Much the same way I didn't want to become the utili-wizard with a solution to every problem. Why didn't I decide to stealth better than the thief? Well I didn't want to encroach on his moment to shine. We are creating a collective narrative and play together for the fun of the game, not to beat the game itself.

 

[lutecius]

I'm wondering where the idea that 4e did away with Vancian casting is coming from. It's just reduced the amount of spells used in that way down to dailies, which means your fireballs are still cast in a Vancian manner.

yes. and the main reason I don't like 4e is that it made every single class vancian-ish. essentials changed this a bit for a couple of martial builds but there is still no real spontaneous caster.

To the OP, why not just use psionics and drop magic? This seems like more of a houserule than a direction the actual game needs to go in.

I mean, what you're looking for already exists. Why not just houserule that "magic" = psionics?

I love 3.5 psionics mechanically. their flavor, not so much. the effects aren't always identical either and completely replacing d&d magic with psionics without changing the feel of the game would be some work.