D&D 5E Why Has D&D, and 5e in Particular, Gone Down the Road of Ubiquitous Magic?

[discosoc]

I don't think they're best served playing a fighter or rogue if what they want to play is a magic-user.

You realize that 7 out of 20 non-magical options is about the same as AD&D, right? Let's take a look at the 2e PHB (because it's sitting next to me). Non-magic includes the Fighter, and Thief. Magical options include the Paladin, Ranger, the Mage (I won't count the specialists), Cleric (I won't count specialty priests), Druid, and Bard. So you have 2 non-magical options versus 6 magical options. Proportionally, that's almost exactly the same.

The difference is that in 2nd Edition, not many people could be a paladin, ranger, or often even a bard, due to stat and race requirements. Classes also advanced at different paces. So the ratio of magic to non magic characters might appear the same as 5e, in practice, actual group composition rarely looked that way.

Plus, gaining experience was different for each class. You didn't level up as a wizard by killing a goblin. You leveled by casting your spells. They were precious resources, at higher levels, would take weeks to fully memorize. Magic was power, unique, and definitely felt 'magical.' Now it just feels like all the classes have magic abilities, some of which are more obviously magical than others.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Now it just feels like all the classes have magic abilities

Technically, all the classes do - though a few sub-classes don't.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It's more like saying that Gambit should occasionally get to swing his staff, and Cyclops should feel okay uppercutting a guy once in a while, even though Wolverine and Colossus are better at it. Remember, every single adventurer is proficient in multiple forms of weaponry. Nobody is just a chump.

Cyclops is good at punching. He can lay out your standard evil mutant in three hits. It's impressive, just by itself. Wolverine can do it in two, though, and Colossus can do it in one.

The X-Men aren't a good example of a D&D party. The closest Marvel equivalent to a D&D wizard might be Dr Strange.

From a mechanical standpoint, the wizard has traditionally been a chump at fighting. No armor, the worst weapon proficiencies, the worst HD, and the worst Thac0 does not a great front-liner make.

The difference is that in 2nd Edition, not many people could be a paladin, ranger, or often even a bard, due to stat and race requirements. Classes also advanced at different paces. So the ratio of magic to non magic characters might appear the same as 5e, in practice, actual group composition rarely looked that way.

Plus, gaining experience was different for each class. You didn't level up as a wizard by killing a goblin. You leveled by casting your spells. They were precious resources, at higher levels, would take weeks to fully memorize. Magic was power, unique, and definitely felt 'magical.' Now it just feels like all the classes have magic abilities, some of which are more obviously magical than others.

That's anecdotal at best. I knew more than one DM who would allow you to raise your scores to the minimum in order to play a class with prerequisites. As for experience, both the bard and the cleric had fairly low experience requirements, lower than those of a fighter. By 2nd edition, experience for casting spells was an optional rule. For me at least, the slow rate of memorization way less magical and more simply a nuisance.

Some anecdotal data of my own. I've run/played about half a 5e dozen campaigns and in the vast majority of those campaigns half or more of the party was non-magical. We like to have a strong front-line. The party compositions certainly wouldn't have been out of place in AD&D.

 

[pemerton]

What did Gandalf do that was different, that none of the other members of the Fellowship could do?

He used magic.

Gandalf doesn't exactly do magic in every scene he's in, though he does do or reference something - display arcane knowledge or relate a personal experience from the distant past or whatever - that re-asserts his supernatural nature.

Gandalf provided exposition. Tons of stultifying exposition, especially in the first book. Even when he defeated the Balrog, he did it 'off-screen' and then provided exposition about it later.

I completely agree with the assertion that the D&D wizard has no real basis in any fantasy fiction. It's a self-referential trope. Gandalf is supposedly the most "iconic" representation of a D&D wizard, yet does half-a-dozen or more non-D&D-wizardly things in the first 50 pages of The Hobbit (Diplomance a high-level dwarf into letting a level 0 halfling rogue tag along with his party? Ride a horse? Succeed on several high DC bluff checks to trick trolls into staying up all night? Slay the Great Goblin with a sword? Lead an adventuring troupe overland through wilderness terrain?)

I agree that Gandalf is not distinguished solely, or even primarily, by his spell-casting. He is distinguished by his knowledge, and his ability (in virtue of that knowledge, plus his personality) to lead.

As I posted upthread, it is possible to have a FRPG in which a wizard PC has that sort of capability, and hence gets to feel "wizardly" in play without casting a spell every moment. But it requires mechanical devices that D&D has, on the whole, tended to eschew.

 

[MechaPilot]

Fair enough. And, that's precisely what I'm doing in my Thule game.

OTOH, doing so has greatly reduced the number of classes available. As was mentioned about, there's only 7 classes, and that's subclasses to be technical, out of 20 that don't have spells. I've allowed paladins and rangers in as well, since they don't have cantrips, but, we're still only talking about 10 classes total for the game. That's a pretty short list of options, many of which are very much variations on the same song. There really isn't that much of a difference between a Champion and a Battlemaster or a Thief and an Assassin. They're pretty darn close.

It would be nice if we could play D&D with the magic dialled back a bit, not all the way down to zero, but, again, back to about a 3 or a 4 without having to eject 3/4 of the PHB.

Well, we can do that if we want to. It will take some houseruling to do it, but it can be done. I have adopted the old kit/theme concept as a name for a mechanic that can be used to alter class features. A less prevalence magic kit/theme could put a cap on cantrip use in exchange for making them more powerful, or it could strip away cantrips in exchange for providing more slots or some kind of level-based scaling.

 

[Sunseeker]

I agree that Gandalf is not distinguished solely, or even primarily, by his spell-casting. He is distinguished by his knowledge, and his ability (in virtue of that knowledge, plus his personality) to lead.

As I posted upthread, it is possible to have a FRPG in which a wizard PC has that sort of capability, and hence gets to feel "wizardly" in play without casting a spell every moment. But it requires mechanical devices that D&D has, on the whole, tended to eschew.

Speaking of literature, it's difficult to emulate popular characters in a D&D game, and I don't mean mechanically. Gandalf was a plot device, more or less, the DMPC who did very little on screen and basically kept the party focused on the goal of destroying the Ring. He provided knowledge that the party could not reasonably have, he provided "DM fiat" when it was necessary and was generally more of a story telling device than an actual character.

The problem with story telling devices is that we've all played with people who've run DMPCs, and we all know they come in 3 varities:
The "normal joe" DMPC who just plays with the party.
The "Gandalf" who does very little, but serves to guide the party through the game.
The Dictator who steals the show and gets all the benefit of being the DM, with none of the drawbacks of being a character.

These aren't things you represent with mechanics. They're things you represent with role-play.

Which is often one of my gripes about people comparing this game or that game or any game to some quasi-related literature character and wondering why we can't have characters or classes that "look more like the source material". Because the "source material" is stories! They're not games. They're not defined by their rules and their mechanics. They're used to teach a lesson. That has been the basic purpose of stories for ages. Don't be the Boromir, be the Aragorn, deny power, stay loyal to your friends, know when someone in a position of power is wrong. Be the Frodo, stay strong in the face of danger, be willing to do what it takes, but don't forget your friends in the process. Don't be the Saruman, be humble, know when someone is using you, don't genetically engineer the ubermench.

D&D games don't do that. They don't teach lessons or shape minds, they are games. Hence, the characters in them don't look like the literature because they're two totally different things, it's like asking why a rock can't be like the ocean.

Anyway, at the OP: I think magic proliferates in D&D because people get obsessed with locking non-magical classes down with real-world rules, while the same people turn a blind eye to the reality-bending of magic. So when you ask a player: Do you want to be burdened by rules, or do you want to bend the rules over your knee and show it who's boss, what do you think most people are going to say? "I want my verisimilitude-obsessed DM to question my every move while Joe over there gets to literally fly circles around me and drop magic hand-grenades on the enemy!"? baugh! It's no wonder magic proliferates when they can typically do everything a non-magic user can, and also wish themselves up a ham sandwich.

 

[RCanine]

I don't agree with this. The special-ness of magic need not be connected to being "the big guns". It can be done through the flavour of magic-use, or the mechanics of magic-use, or the range of effects that magic is able to achieve.

It'd be cool to show some examples of how magic can be both ubiquitous and special using these things.

 

[RCanine]

Ah, I see. So without a universal system of risky casting, no example of risk being added on to a casting class and people not liking that option will be considered contextually valid.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

I didn't say no example of risk is a valid example, your conclusion is a (https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/false-cause). I claim that the Wild Mage is poorly designed, and as a result its lack of popularity does not indicates that players don't want risk/reward.

Which is precisely why I wasn't.

Prefixing your statement with an accusation that I didn't fully read your argument is rude, a slight

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

I reject the premise that magic doesn't feel special as-is.

I think that's fine, but it'd be nice for you to explain what makes you feel that way. To me, a firebolt doesn't feel as special as a crossbow, although if I saw one IRL, I'd probably go bug-eyed. There's a lot you can do with RP and narrative, of course, but I think 5E has made magic more mechanical than...well...magical.

 

[pemerton]

It'd be cool to show some examples of how magic can be both ubiquitous and special using these things.

I think ubiquitous is a strong constraint! I was saying that I don't think magic has to be "big guns" to be special.

If magic opens up new options in the fiction - eg levitating, or changing shape/appearance - then it can be special without having to be especially powerful.

If magic has some sort of cost for its use that reflects its supernatural nature, that can help too. Costs can be side effects, or some sort of drain/tax on the caster. The mere cost of using a slot here isn't enough: game accounting doesn't generally feel special, whereas new stuff happening in the fiction can.

 

[Hussar]

Thinking about clerics and druids, you can really see, I think, what I'm talking about here. In AD&D, a cleric didn't have any direct damage spells until 2nd level with Spiritual Hammer and didn't get another one until 5th level spells. An 8th level cleric, outside of casting reverse Cure spells, has exactly ONE direct damage spell. That's it. Cleric spells were support. Druids were a bit better off with Produce Flame at 2nd and Call Lightning at 3rd, but, still, their spells were mostly based around support.

Which was fine. Both classes were pretty capable in combat. Clerics might have lagged a bit behind fighters, but, not significantly. Druids were no slouches either - decent weapons, and a decent AC, if you had the Dex for it. Certainly both were miles ahead of the Magic User in combat.

3e obviously changed this of course. Both clerics and druids gained direct damage spells and a number of indirect combat spells even in the core rules. Add various splats and the divine classes could blast with the best of them.

Skip ahead to 5e and outside of war domain clerics, there's no reason, really, for clerics or druids to have any better weapon proficiencies than wizards. And, really, there isn't a whole lot of difference between them. The cleric and the druid are attacking with magic every single round. As I mentioned before, my 6th level Circle of Land Druid has yet to actually make a weapon attack roll. Why would he? His spells are significantly better than attacking with a scimitar or club.

With the new magic system, every caster's schtick is to cast magic as often as possible. Every round spent not casting is generally seen as a wasted round. But, these classes were never based around casting before. You didn't play a druid because you wanted to drop a Moonbeam on enemies multiple times per day. You played a druid for the shape change and the ties to nature theme. How is pew pewing away with a Thorn Whip or Produce Flame any different than the warlock standing beside you dropping Fire bolt (or whatever the cantrip is called) every round?

And this has a significant effect on the feel of the game. Whereas before, as I said, you might get a couple of spells per encounter, maybe, now you have multiple spells being cast per round. Why does having any magic at all now mean that your class pushes you to use magic as often as you possibly can? Can't we have classes with a different focus? I think Paladins and Rangers have it right. Sure, you might be dropping some spells, but, not all the bloody time. I'd love to see some class variants for core casters that follow a similar arc as the half casters.

I guess my basic question is, why does every caster have to be a full caster? Why does being a caster mean that you are using magic every single round? Why can't we get some full casters, like druids and clerics, that aren't just wizard's in drag.