AbdulAlhazred
Legend
It is the whole notion that the DM HAS to 'give the non-optimized characters' something to do, and that the only logical optimization path is to be a caster. This was true even in AD&D much beyond 3rd level.Well, I don't know how this compares to 4e casting, because I've never played 4e, and also I wasn't fond of the idea of 4e dumping Vancian magic in the first place. Anything that Mearls is working on comes from the experiences of 4e as well as prior editions, so there's elements I'm not aware of. Mearls is good at analyzing the game and how things work, but I don't always like his approaches to fixing things. It might be because sometime during 3e, the optimization approach started becoming popular and reduced a lot of the game to number-crunching. This is where wizards and CoDzilla were considered the absolute best classes, while everything else was being seen as increasingly worse. That's fine for something like a videogame, but in a tabletop setting, it shouldn't need to dominate, especially if the DM knows what he's doing and gives the non-optimized characters something to do.
4e wizards are really not as much different from pre-4e wizards as many people have tried to make out. They have generally weaker defenses, lower hit points, less surges, etc. While magic is not strictly 'Vancian' by pre-4e standards it is not really that much different. A level 1 4e wizard has one powerful daily (basically this works exactly like pre-4e spells), an encounter spell (you could still consider this 'Vancian' but just requires only a couple minutes to re-memorize). Beyond that you have 2 at-will powers and several cantrips (all at-will but none of them do any damage). Then you start with 2 rituals, which cost gold (components) to cast and mostly have 5-10 minute casting times. You also have Arcana replacing Identify and Detect Magic, so you can use those pretty much whenever but it requires passing a check for Detect Magic to work.
4e scrolls simply allow anyone to cast a ritual from the scroll (at 50% normal casting time). Any ritual caster can make them for a modest fee. Casting most rituals requires some sort of skill check, so any PC can try to use one, but in many cases won't get great results. Their main use is carting around a spare Raise Dead in case your ritual caster buys it.
4e wands can carry any at-will or encounter attack power, besides being an implement that grants a to-hit bonus if it is magical, which it almost always is. At-will powers become encounter item powers on a wand, and encounter powers become daily wand powers. There are also many other implement enchantments which are often better than a power, but a caster could invest in a couple. There's no real point in making a quiver full because the cost would be too high. You could do it, but the enhancement bonuses would be so low they wouldn't really be useful unless you're playing with a Monty Haul DM...
Other consumables in 4e are generally limited in utility. Alchemical stuff (oil flasks and such basically) have mediocre to-hit and don't do enough damage to be super options. Potions are quite handy and not hard to make, but they tend to all be defensive/protective in nature (no flying or invisibility, more like healing or resistance). Crafting items is fairly non-restrictive, but it is harder to make really exciting items and the idea is that the DM keeps it in check by not giving out a megaton of treasure as costs are relatively high.
The problem, if you consider it one, is that "weak at low level, strong at high level" is a kind of a dorky way to do things. For instance we played AD&D for about 20 years. Our campaigns went up to high level a couple times, but the VAST majority of play was always in low to mid levels. The wizard is always in that "paying for what I'll never get" mode, or else in the mid levels where he's still really the most vital PC in the group (really, consider adventuring without a wizard, possible but highly unfavorable to the party). If you then DO happen to get to high level you're even better off and frankly a party of all casters is probably the best option past 6th level. An MC thief to cover those skills is quite handy, but you can live without it. The whole followers thing was dubious. Basically the fighter can PAY and work to build a stronghold and get a bunch of considerably lower level (mostly 0 level) followers. ANY PC can spend a few gold and get a henchman that is basically as good as the 'captain' you get. The 0 level guys are pretty useless to a level 9 fighter. On top of that clerics get better followers than fighters do!Caster dominance doesn't bother me, but since wizard is my favored class, I could be a bit biased. That doesn't matter to me though. The issue here of course is of the quadratic wizard, and this has long been the case. It doesn't bother me because I remember the old school wizard (M-U or mage if you prefer) well. The wizard was a powerful class, but had to earn that power, it was weak at low levels, and had the slowest XP progression in early levels. The eventual payoff had to be earned. The good wizard players knew how to play at low levels, use oil or assist in non-combat ways, do what needed to be done while the fighters were fighting. Of course combat was shorter in the past, monsters had less hp without Con bonuses kicking in, and there weren't things like powers and AoOs and feats and stuff going off. That is when players risked combat, because the big xp payoff was in treasure, and not slain enemies. Then again, the game really only assumed about 10 levels of play while 3e upped it to 20, and really most of the complaints about 3e is how stuff starts to break down in the mid teens. Also, one bonus the fighter gained at high levels was the ability to attract followers. That was in 3e too, but shifted off to the optional Leadership feat, which I'm sure a lot of optimizing number crunchers considered a waste.
4e cantrips are at-will but can do no damage at all. It is hard to tell exactly what Mike is referring to when he talks about cantrips.At will cantrips sounds a bit over powered at first, but consider that 3e cantrips do only 1d3 damage. That is comparable to the damage wizards could do with what few simple ranged weapons they had in the past. Crossbows do better damage, but the wizard still has to make an attack roll. So this doesn't bother me too much I guess.
The problem is that you have a fighter who can admittedly do nice damage, but as soon as any situation is actually dangerous (IE when it really matters at all) the wizard steps in and poofs the threat out of existence or provides some spell to totally bypass it. This leaves the non-casters feeling like the ditch diggers. They do all the uninteresting minion slaying and the important stuff is handled by someone else. Also, there's really nothing clever about casting Grease or whatever. It is just all rote past a certain point.Keeping spells under control I think gives a bad example. Sure that cleric might be wearing full plate and have a big penalty to save against grease, but really at level 15 he should be able to dispel the effect anyway, so why is it a problem?
Yeah, but there's nothing WRONG with having spells fizzle. It certainly isn't 'dangerous' as described. I got the impression they were considering something more like a misfire chance, but he didn't delve into that.Dangerous spell casting is a misnomer. This sounds a lot like how it's always been in the past. In Basic and AD&D, taking damage fizzled the spell and it was lost. In 3e it worked like this:
Oh look, it's fizzle and loss again, though any wizard who's built at all sensibly will have a decent chance to make the Concentration check. Here the spell fizzles, but it isn't lost, so really it's more generous than the game was in the past.
Because the XP cost thing was a royal PITA and made no sense. In 4e you just kept the amount of treasure in check and the monetary costs created the limitation. This allowed it to be fun to make items (vs the AD&D "walk through hell to make a potion, forget it" solution) and yet kept crafting them in check. Again, the 4e wand solution (once per encounter/day use, attack spells only) worked pretty well. OTOH consuming slots to cast from wands/scrolls sounds feasible to me.Don't like the idea behind scrolls. Again, I can't say what things were like in 4e, but if 3e wizards were cranking out too many of them, then why not do something like up the XP cost? I remember that low level scrolls at least had a very trivial XP cost, like 1 XP for a first-level scroll. That's not a huge sacrifice at all even at first level. Wands sounds like it goes back to 2e and earlier wands, which weren't necessarily bad, but again I liked 3e wands. Again if things need control, then make them more expensive so that a wizard isn't just cranking them out at will but must consider the cost.
My experience in AD&D is that now and then a fireball or lightning bolt was pretty handy but they weren't the best use of a wizard's spell slots. By high level direct spell attacks were pretty hard to pull off. Half damage from attack spells wasn't really enough to justify them. My 14th level wizard had one fireball memorized. It could do pretty decent damage, but was mostly handy as an emergency way to clear out some mooks.It might also be because monsters have more hp in 3e (again the Con bonuses kicking in), so blasting is considered inefficient. A fireball in 1e and even 2e could clear out whole groups of monsters at once, particularly since 1e did not have a damage cap on it.
Creative use of spells I'm somewhat cautious about, but then I'm also seeing it from an older point of view. I remember how Skip Williams used to advise DMs heavily against this in Sage Advice and the High Level Campaigns book, because creative use of magic could easily lead to abuse.
Truly creative use of spells is nice, but most clever uses were pretty much rote by year 3 of AD&D (like 1981 basically). Outside of combat there were more interesting and creative uses of magic. Of course 4e's ritual magic is exactly designed to recreate that. You can whip out any of your rituals and use them whenever you need, but they aren't cheap to cast. So you aren't going to be constantly trotting them out for routine situations, but OTOH when you come up with a really clever use for one you don't have to lament the fact that you didn't happen to memorize it.
Depending on what else 5e's casting system has in it, it could be good. Seems to me that the whole thing can be reasonably pleasing to all.