D&D 5E On whether sorcerers and wizards should be merged or not, (they shouldn't)

[TheCosmicKid]

Thematically there's a niche for Sorcerers. They form a trinity with Wizard and Warlock of learned power, borrowed power, and inborn power. The big question is if there's a mechanical niche for Sorcerer that's both distinct from the other two and still robust enough to support an entire class. Evidence for that is scarcer and more conjectural.

I have no objection to the Sorcerer existing. In fact, I rather like the concept of its flavor. But there's very little history of D&D being able to deliver a Sorcerer that's not living in the shadow of the Wizard, and it doesn't have a strong enough legacy to justify keeping it around for that alone. So many you kill some sacred cows and reinvent the Sorcerer. Maybe you merge it with the Warlock and include a toggle option between inborn and patron power sources. Or maybe you just cut it. I don't exactly have a horse in that race, besides the mild annoyance of occasionally trying to play a Sorcerer and being disappointed.

If I were designing "inborn power" mechanics from a blank slate, they'd look more like the warlock than the sorcerer. And "borrowed power" wouldn't look much like the warlock at all. In fact, in a 2E-like paradigm, you could have a single low-level wizard spell that contacted a fiend willing to teach other spells at some grave cost, rather than having to dig spell scrolls out of dungeons like an honest mage.

 

[cbwjm]

The spontaneous casting was part of the image or idea that wizards couldn't have. Wizards had spellbooks, copied scrolls to books, prepared spells to mental slots over night. Spontaneous casters did not of this.

Now an option for it could have been made for wizards. But for one reason or another, no one wanted to do it until after the sorcerer was made and started getting flavor. And by then it was too late.

Options for spontaneous casting existed in 2e, players option spells and magic had magical options some of which enabled the wizard to retain their prepared spells when casting them. Granted this was towards the end of 2e and I believe that the players option series was considered a testbed for some 3e concepts (or just outright panned by many players). You also had Arcane Age for wizards that could cast any spell they knew though that supplement was, I believe aiming at making magic overpowered due to the setting. So although not standard, the concept existed.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Options for spontaneous casting existed in 2e, .... So although not standard, the concept existed.

OK. For that matter, mana systems had been floating around for 0e & 1e for years, too.

 

[Ratskinner]

The only reason I think not to merge wizard, sorcerer, and warlock into a single customisable class that lets you create the spellcasting class you want is complexity. There would be a lot of moving parts in the base class to customise your magic-user that it might be off putting to new players. As is, I have used the wizard to create a "sorcerer" an Oracle with innate divination abilities. I just ignored the spellbook part of a diviner wizard.

Well...that's if you want to keep all the "moving parts". Personally, I could do with a few less by a fair sight. I like 5e overall, but I find a lot of the different specialized fiddly bits to be really a little too picayune. I could really be happy with a thinner base "Magic User" class with meatier subclasses to cover Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer, and maybe even Bard, Cleric and Druid, then toss in Illusionist, and maybe Necromancer.* As it is, I think most of those base classes are a bit bloated and the subclasses thin (not necessarily weak, per se). I think one of the few missteps of 5e was not realizing the full applicability of the Feat mechanics WRT to casters, which created an overabundance of casting classes and subclasses.

Of course, there's a bunch of concomitant mechanical changes I would make to go along with these, but that would be a lot for a post.

*To be "fair", I'm also one of those who would have wrapped Paladin, Ranger, and Barbarian into Fighter Subclasses as well.

 

[Ratskinner]

Even then it was too late. If anything the kits clearly show the thematic limits of the wizards. There are variants of course, but none of them could really break from the "book holding scholar of difficult to use arcane knowledge" mold, they all are just another coat of paint that does nothing to change the core. The designers really trusted in the wizard genericness and blatantly avoided any evidence to the contrary. 30 years ago was still 20 years of inertia. I'd argue that we haven't really broken from the "wizards are generic" mindset yet.
(Though it might be surprising to learn Warlocks actually originated as a wizard kit).

Sha'irs (2e Al-Qadim) might argue against that point. Even as a kit, they broke a lot of the "wizard" mold.

 

[Ratskinner]

I don't think it needs to be point buy, but I would prefer just three classes : martial, arcane, & divine and every concept branches from those.

I lean similarly....except that the obvious division should be Fighters, Magic-Users, and Thieves. Choose your weapons, ser!


....I kid, I kid....



....a little.

 

[Monayuris]

Modern D&D created the Sorcerer to implement a different style of spell casting mechanic. They wanted to introduce a spontaneous spell caster in 3rd Edition, and so the sorcerer was created to implement it.

It was a class that was created to justify the existence of these new mechanics.

Previous versions of D&D had the Magic User. Magic User was a generic term which allowed the player to decide their own idea about their character's path to magical power. They could be a wizard, warlock, sorcerer, witch, etc. as they deemed best fit their concept of their character.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Magic User had already been renamed Wizard by 2nd edition.

 

[dave2008]

I lean similarly....except that the obvious division should be Fighters, Magic-Users, and Thieves. Choose your weapons, ser!


....I kid, I kid....



....a little.

Well, I could see it being just two: Martial and Magic, but personally I like the idea of divine and arcane magic being truly different.

 

[dave2008]

Interestingly I've never run across a sorcerer in our games. I've played a wizard, and in 4e we had a Tiefling Warlock, but I've yet to see anyone want to play a sorcerer. Now my exposure is pretty limited, but the vast potential power of the wizard


OD&D. Fighting-man, Magic-User, Cleric.

Pretty much, it is just that we would need a lot more options to customize each class than back in OD&D