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

[Tony Vargas]

The 5e Sorc, stole metamagic, from everyone.

Well, some metamagic. Everyone essentially has Heighten for free, for instance, not just in the sense of having it, in the sense of it not costing anything to use. And, up-casting is essentially metamagic for all, too.

Just like everyone has the 3e Sorcerer's Spontaneous Casting.

Again, if the ability to use bows and crossbows was taken from all classes and given to an Archer class, people would be outraged.

Meh. Whacked hyper-specialization in martial classes is not too unusual for D&D.

A Wizard’s spellbook is as much a bane then a boon. The book can be stolen, destroyed, scry’d upon etc.

… that really doesn't seem emphasized in 5e the way it was in older eds... also, it's not the money-pit it used to be, and one significant downside, that, while you can learn new spells, you got none automatically as you leveled, has been gone awhile, too.

A Wizard’s Ritual Magic is easily replicated by the Ritual Magic feat or a Warlock pact of the book.

Sorcerers aren't Warlocks. Feats are optional, and ASIs a high price to pay.

So is all the Sorcerer love more about ‘wanting to play an X-man’ or being more powerful with Metamagic?

Surely, fans of the 3.x Sorcerer are more interested in being Magical Marvel Mutants, with cool/powerful focused abilities that fit a theme of their choosing - the 3.x sorcerer delivered that, the 5e sorcerer only if your theme has a sub-class, and the spell-list supports it - or they'd've been fans of the Class-Tier-1 Wizard of 3.x, instead.

If WOTC announced the Sorcerer class was going to be retired, unless Metamagic was removed from the class, and replaced with say all the ‘toys’ the Wiz has, that you referenced earlier, and let us assume for the benefit of the thought experiment, that these replacement ‘toys’ are a perfect fit thematically for the Sorcerer, do you take the change?

A lot of the wizard's toys aren't such a great fit, thematically, but, sure, if the prepped casters went back to prepping into slots, so spontaneous meant something again, and the Sorcerer got better thematic support with greater player control & build flexibility, then metamagic going back to being feats or something'd be just fine.

 

[Todd Roybark]

Yeah, it's just the wicked Sorcerer's fault, isn't it? Poor wizards, ever the victim of those nasty, power-gaming Sorcerers.

Poor class design, is still poor design, even if the ‘thing’ so designed is itself blameless for it’s faults.

I actually like the look of a 1971 Ford Pinto, but it has a design flaw. You can apply this to all Ford vehicles, because historically Ford vehicles have a tendency to catch fire.

The 5e Sorc class is fun in play. Yet to my mind, the class does not have the same level of singular identity that a Druid has vis a vis the Cleric class. I also don’t feel the Druid steps on the toes of the Cleric, ( or steals their stuff ).

 

[tetrasodium]

@MoonSong It's possible to get lost in a concept & champion a munchkinized implementation without stepping back to look outside the tunnel of a concept, the everything a wizard does but just born with it concept is just that & it's good that you seem to have realized it.

You keep bringing up ritual magic like it's far more than it is. @Todd Roybark nicely pointed out the nonexclusive to wizard aspect with two of the actually improved versions. There's a critical point you are missing unaware of or just ignoring though & I brought it up earlier. Flatly there are not enough meaningful ritual spells to build a character or even a concept around & a wizard is still required to take the "right spells" or face the same useless feeling as a sorcerer who does not take them.

• 1st: Comprehend Magic, Detect Magic, Find Familiar, Floating Disk, Identify, Illusory Script.
• 2nd: Gentle repose, Magic Mouth, Skywrite
• 3rd: Feign Death, Tiny Hut, Phantom Steed, Water Breathing
• 4th: Zero 4th level ritual spells on the Wizard list
• 5th: Contact Other Plane, Telepathic Bond
• 6th: Instant Summons
• 7th Zero 7th level ritual spells on the Wizard list
• 8th: Zero 8th level ritual spells on the Wizard list
• 9th: Zero 9th level ritual spells on the Wizard list

Sure there are a couple sometimes useful spells there, but as a whole they are incomplete and far from sufficient to build anything around. Take out Tiny hut & detect magic the whole thing.

Multiple settings differentiate magic along lines of things like draconic/demonic/infernal/daelkyr/etc magic, but sorcerer stole & copied so much from wizard that it's difficult for wizard to have truly viscerally different archtypes because all that's left is a spellbook and sorcerer has archtypes that are already everything wizard plus most everything of this theme so any attempt to make a wizard archtype for them would amount to but copy $abilities from $sorcererArchtype.

@Aldarc funny you'd bring up mage armor given how dragon sorcerer & more than one sorcerer UA has base 13+dex ac without needing to cast mage armor. You say that you've read the overlap yet keep questioning if there is overlap and implying that wizard has massive amounts of wizard specific stuff so lets chase this rabbit hole you seem so desperate to dive into... What are these toys you were talking about when you said "The wizard gets more toys than the sorcerer" Be specific & try to limit yourself to the few core class things that wizard has but sorcerer does not.. if you say "ritual spells" be specific about which spells or how a wizard can build a distinct theme around them with more depth than "guy who casts tiny hut for the scorlock". The fact that sorcerer can choose nearly all of the skills wizards can choose plus some extra social skills and has a virtually identical spell list. Yes in 3.5 the two had the same spell list, but in 3.5 sorcerer had a casting mechanic that was different from every other spellcaster and Intelligence as a stat as well as int based skills were far more valuable making them play out differently at the table.

 

[Todd Roybark]

Meh. Whacked hyper-specialization in martial classes is not too unusual for D&D.

As a Particular Character, yes, as a class, no. 4e tried this, every class was a super specialised particuliar...Ranger, Seeker, Slayer Fighters with no Ranged Weapons etc, there was no real good way to play a generalist.

5e seems to have more general base classes with more specific sub-classes.

If one started a thread asking opinions regarding consolidating all range attack ability into an Archer class, we can already envision how much dissent that would cause in the ‘Fighters are underpowered crowd’.

Since that ‘crowd’ tends to think all spellcasters are overpowered, we don’t see them in these type of threads.

Your arguments, Tony, in the post referenced seem to be predicated more off objection for objection sake, than presenting ideas, which strikes me as a bit unusual for you.

 

[Tony Vargas]

As a Particular Character, yes, as a class, no.

Sure as a class, lots of past editions went there, either officially or off in the boonies. There actually was an Archer class for 1e -"unofficial NPC class" in the pages of The Dragon - early attempts at modeling some sort of swashbuckler or duelist were classes, the Cavalier was a class, etc. It was only with 3e that we even started to get some build flexibility with martial characters, even then, we seemed to need, Knight and Scout classes.

4e tried this, every class was a super specialised particuliar...Ranger, Seeker, Slayer Fighters with no Ranged Weapons etc, there was no real good way to play a generalist.

Actually a Slayer could be lethal with a two-hander in melee, and a longbow at range. Rogues worked fairly seamlessly at melee & range, and while, as a V class, Rangers were a little fraught in doing so, they could combine the two, as well - and there was a build for just that. Even an MP2 Warlord build could do melee or ranged from round to round with little issue.

It was really the fighter that went from un-supported at many things to really good at it's traditional meatshield role - glorified, in 4e, as "Defender" - with the side effect of making it very melee-focused.

5e seems to have more general base classes with more specific sub-classes.

Not too consistently, no. Monk, Ranger, Druid (TBH, even though it's my favorite 5e class), Barbarian, Sorcerer, Warlock - all could as easily have been sub-classes.

If one started a thread asking opinions regarding consolidating all range attack ability into an Archer class

As it stands, if you use feats, anyone w/o Sharpshooter might as well not use a bow, at all, by comparison, so it wouldn't be that big a difference, functionally. So if you created an Archer that was as good with a bow as that, feats or no feats allowed, it wouldn't break the game. It'd just be untenably narrow.

 

[Minigiant]

You all know the reason why wizards don't have metamagic is because the designers wanted to give wizards schools, right?

There is no way they could have specializations, domains, and circles with metamagic. Not again.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You all know the reason why wizards don't have metamagic is because the designers wanted to give wizards schools, right?

Did not know that. What do you mean?

There is no way they could have specializations, domains, and circles with metamagic. Not again.

What? Why not?
(I mean, it's not like specialization with no opposed schools is really specialization, anyway, but...?)

 

[houser2112]

Well, some metamagic. Everyone essentially has Heighten for free, for instance, not just in the sense of having it, in the sense of it not costing anything to use. And, up-casting is essentially metamagic for all, too.

Just like everyone has the 3e Sorcerer's Spontaneous Casting.

5E's upcasting mechanic is more akin to the 3.5 psionic power augment mechanic, which is how psionic powers scaled instead of 3.x's spells auto-scaling with caster level. 5E's magic system doesn't have the equivalent of Heighten Spell, since 5E has a single DC for all of a caster's spells, regardless of spell level. All Heighten Spell did was increase the effective level of the spell, and thus the spell's save DC; it didn't affect the spell in any other way (range, duration, damage, etc).

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Having int + spellbook makes wizard a poor fit for the "I was born with magic" background. The siloing started before sorcerer was a thing. Even if it wasn't the case...

I can't quite agree with this. As has often been observed, the irony of D&D's wizard/sorcerer split is that mages in most modern fantasy works are both: you have to be born with the "gift", but you also have to find some schooling to learn to control it. This is true of characters from Harry Potter to Yennifer of Vengerberg. In a 2E world, a backstory like "I was a seventh son born on the night of a Witch-Moon, which gave me the blessing and the curse of magic" might continue "Through long hours of practice, I learned to shape my magic into spells, and kept careful notes of my techniques."

 

[Tony Vargas]

5E's magic system doesn't have the equivalent of Heighten Spell, since 5E has a single DC for all of a caster's spells, regardless of spell level. All Heighten Spell did was increase the effective level of the spell, and thus the spell's save DC; it didn't affect the spell in any other way (range, duration, damage, etc).

Exactly: relative to 3.x metamagic, that's Heighten for everyone, for free.

5E's upcasting mechanic is more akin to the 3.5 psionic power augment mechanic, which is how psionic powers scaled instead of 3.x's spells auto-scaling with caster level.

3e spells scaled with level, to a cap, that could be boosted with metamagic, consuming a higher slot, 5e spells tend to have fixed damage above where 3e would have started, but below that cap, then can be boosted with up-casting. So, yeah, up-casting is analogous to ubiquitous metamagic, just what sort of metamagic depends on the specific spell.
FWIW.