D&D 5E Low Level Wizards Really Do Suck in 5E

[Zander]

The implication being that you just suddenly became a wizard one day and had no idea that you might ever interact with magical creatures for any reason at any point before then?

D&D takes place in fantasy settings, so anything is possible. But if we use the real world as a guide to how languages are most likely learnt, then you would expect them to be picked up either through interacting with the people around you growing up or formally in primary and secondary school. I suspect that D&D's designers have generally thought of wizardry training as being roughly equivalent to university in the real world, i.e. after the age at which languages are learnt. If you imagine wizardry training starting at primary or middle school age then sure, you might be taught exotic languages as a teen (in the same way that in the real world you would learn Latin and/or Ancient Greek from secondary school onwards), but that would be exceptional (in the same way that learning Latin or Ancient Greek at school is in real life).

 

[Celtavian]

D&D takes place in fantasy settings, so anything is possible. But if we use the real world as a guide to how languages are most likely learnt, then you would expect them to be picked up either through interacting with the people around you growing up or formally in primary and secondary school. I suspect that D&D's designers have generally thought of wizardry training as being roughly equivalent to university in the real world, i.e. after the age at which languages are learnt. If you imagine wizardry training starting at primary or middle school age then sure, you might be taught exotic languages as a teen (in the same way that in the real world you would learn Latin and/or Ancient Greek from secondary school onwards), but that would be exceptional (in the same way that learning Latin or Ancient Greek at school is in real life).

The real world in a land with dragons, demons, and the like? Where men cast magic with bat guano and words? You mean that real world?

 

[pemerton]

I suspect that D&D's designers have generally thought of wizardry training as being roughly equivalent to university in the real world, i.e. after the age at which languages are learnt. If you imagine wizardry training starting at primary or middle school age then sure, you might be taught exotic languages as a teen (in the same way that in the real world you would learn Latin and/or Ancient Greek from secondary school onwards), but that would be exceptional (in the same way that learning Latin or Ancient Greek at school is in real life).

There are a lot of people (numerically, if not proportionately) who learn languages at university. One of the more famous in my own country is our former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who is a native English speaker and who became fluent in Mandarin Chinese although he did not study the language prior to university. Of all the people alive today who can read Ancient Greek or Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse, where do you think most of them learned to do so? At University. (I would conjecture that these days that is probably also true for Latin.)

Hence, if wizard college really is a university then there is no reason at all why exotic languages could not be learned there.

 

[S'mon]

The real world in a land with dragons, demons, and the like? Where men cast magic with bat guano and words? You mean that real world?

Where Men shoot fire with boom-sticks and Predator Drones rule the skies... much weirder than D&D-land, but there are still similarities.

 

[Celtavian]

Where Men shoot fire with boom-sticks and Predator Drones rule the skies... much weirder than D&D-land, but there are still similarities.

Let's just say I find D&D land much weirder. Predator Drones certainly wouldn't rule the skies in D&D. A man disintegrating a tank with a bunch of words would make modern day tech look impotent. Though a nuclear weapon and air power would still be impressive until it was wished out of existence or destroyed by a demon horde.

Though guns would be far more impressive than swords.

 

[S'mon]

Let's just say I find D&D land much weirder. Predator Drones certainly wouldn't rule the skies in D&D. A man disintegrating a tank with a bunch of words would make modern day tech look impotent. Though a nuclear weapon and air power would still be impressive until it was wished out of existence or destroyed by a demon horde.

Though guns would be far more impressive than swords.

Your version of D&d land is a lot more high magic than mine! I use the stated limits on Wish Disintegrate et al.

 

[Pickles III]

No, it isn't. I often disagree with him, but not this time. You would have to explain how and why during your life before becoming a wizard, you chose to learn a language which hardly anyone else on your plane speaks instead of learning one that lots of creatures speak just in case, at some point in the future, you were able to summon elementals and had to talk with them.

Yes it is. Conjure Elemental uses the same language as the Conjure Animal spell. While the animals are not beasts but fey transformed to work like them, there is no indication what language you might need to use to do your ordering unless it's common.
If that spell is to work at all then you do not need any language & the same applies to Conjure Elemental.

OTOH It does seem to be a pretty broken spell as you get a billion (88) free HP of wolves for an hour & they easily hit for 28 damage a round. The brokenness comes as the maths for creature XP value is very poor. Lower CR creature are more effective per CR/XP then higher CR ones while this is easy to fix as a DM (& the needlessly fiddly outnumbering rule in encounter building is partly a patch for this) it is very exposed when put to the players. As well as being ridiculously strong thy are also unfun to play with, roundly violating the action economy.

 

[Zander]

The real world in a land with dragons, demons, and the like? Where men cast magic with bat guano and words? You mean that real world?

I've already acknowledged that D&D is set in fantasy realms where anything is possible, so you're not adding anything to the discussion.

If we don't liken fantasy settings to the real world except where required, those fantasy worlds become impossible to engage with. If we start to say that air, gravity, physiology, economics etc don't operate the same way as the real world because those realms also contain dragons, demons, magic and so on, it becomes very hard for us to relate to those imaginary places and play games of shared conceptions within them.

There are a lot of people (numerically, if not proportionately) who learn languages at university. One of the more famous in my own country is our former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who is a native English speaker and who became fluent in Mandarin Chinese although he did not study the language prior to university. Of all the people alive today who can read Ancient Greek or Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse, where do you think most of them learned to do so? At University. (I would conjecture that these days that is probably also true for Latin.)

Hence, if wizard college really is a university then there is no reason at all why exotic languages could not be learned there.

I always imagined wizardry, i.e. learning magic, to be a full-time course of study. That's not to say that exotic languages aren't studied at colleges of wizardry, only that doing so is an additional course requiring more time and money. I picture young nobles or the children of wizards having the opportunity, but for the vast majority of new wizard graduates, life gets in the way. So it is possible, just not at all common and hence something players need to justify to their DMs.

In real world countries where speaking two or more languages is common, e.g. Switzerland, the Netherlands and India, those languages tend to be learnt before university age. If the same applied in fantasy realms, all the languages one was ever going to learn would already have been picked up before going to wizard college.

Of course, on both points, those are just my conceptions. There isn't a right or a wrong. Every DM imagines things as they and their players wish.

 

[pemerton]

D&D is set in fantasy realms where anything is possible

<snip>

If we don't liken fantasy settings to the real world except where required, those fantasy worlds become impossible to engage with.

<snip>

I always imagined wizardry, i.e. learning magic, to be a full-time course of study. That's not to say that exotic languages aren't studied at colleges of wizardry, only that doing so is an additional course requiring more time and money. I picture young nobles or the children of wizards having the opportunity, but for the vast majority of new wizard graduates, life gets in the way. So it is possible, just not at all common and hence something players need to justify to their DMs.

In real world countries where speaking two or more languages is common, e.g. Switzerland, the Netherlands and India, those languages tend to be learnt before university age. If the same applied in fantasy realms, all the languages one was ever going to learn would already have been picked up before going to wizard college.

I'm not sure if you're comparing "wizard school" to a modern university, a nineteenth century one, or a mediaeval one.

But whatever the comparison, I simply don't understand your argument about language learning. Of course most multi-lingual people in the world learned their languages as children. But that doesn't mean that the world isn't full of people who learned languages as scholars; to the contrary, it is. I went to university with people who learned Latin and Ancient Greek as university students, and I teach students who are learning languages as part of their studies.

In other words, the last quoted paragraph is just wrong, in moving from "tend to be learned" to "all the languages would already have been picked up". Given that that claim is just obviously wrong for the real world, why would it be true in the fantasy world?

A wizard player who wants to justify knowing some elemental language to his/her GM just indicates that s/he learned it at wizard school (when the others were studying Gnoll or Draconic, or playing quidditch, or whatever).

 

[aramis erak]

The sorcerer does have a bit more spells via sorcery points, which can be traded in for spell slots. They also allow her to swap out higher-level spells for multiple lower-level, or vice versa. That's not nothing.

The wizard gets more spells back, for a given level, than a sorc can... but the Sorc can do so as an action, while the wizard needs a rest. Plus, the Sorc can do other things.

In my sunday game this week, I used as a badguy a Neogi sorcerer... They tied him up, and so that metamagic was just perfect. 1 SP per spell. Chopped him from 4/3/2 + cantrips to 4/2/2 but no cantrips. (Still, he's no slouch - a 3rd level MM Freaking HURTS. Unless the target has a Shield to hand.)