D&D (2024) Wizard (Playtest 7)

[mellored]

Is it me, or is the Wizard now the only one who can cast spells as a ritual?

Anyone can cast prepared spells as rituals. Now part of the ritual rule.

Wizards can cast any spell in their books as a ritual. So they effectively have more.

 

[homunculus23]

Anyone can cast prepared spells as rituals. Now part of the ritual rule.

Wizards can cast any spell in their books as a ritual. So they effectively have more.

Ah, I see. Thank you for pointing that out

 

[Yaarel]

The Abjurer Wizard should access healing spells, which are a central aspect of the Abjuration school that protects, restores, and defends.

A convenient way to do this is via the Abjuration Savant feature.

LEVEL 3: ABJURATION SAVANT
Choose two Abjuration spells from any spell list, each of which must be no higher than level 2, and add them to your spellbook for free. In addition, whenever you gain access to a new level of spell slots in this class, you can add one Abjuration spell from any spell list to your spellbook for free. These are Wizard spells for you.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

One of my longstanding complaints about the entire illusionist archetype comes down to, "why are you wasting time creating pretend spells when real spells exist" and "if it's possible to conjure a horde of pixies out of thin air with one spell, why would anyone disbelieve you creating an illusion of a pixie horde?" (and yet, the NPC's seem to do it every time, lol). Even other game designers have noted this, AD&D Illusionists eventually learned real spells at their top spell levels so they had some real magic to use in case everyone figured out they were an illusionist and disbelieved everything, and the Earthdawn Illusionist similarly had a few spells with real effects to mess with people who had a similar thought process.

I mean, sure, in theory, you could fool people by disguising low level illusion spells as higher level real spells, but I've never seen that work out well in live play, only in stories about awesome illusionist characters, lol.

I think Illusions need a feature where if someone disbelieves one of your illusions, you can deal them Psychic damage from doing so.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

The obvious use for Malleable Illusion is quick changes and saving spells. The Disguise Self spell will only change your appearance once. A wizard with Malleable Illusion can play silly games by changing their appearance every time they go round a corner without utterly burning through their spell slots. Of course a warlock can simply take an invocation to cast a new disguise on themselves at will - but both of them have a substantially increased range of options over an ordinary caster who can just disguise themselves once per spell slot.

Also if you can Phantasmal Force, you can switch targets for the spell, like your OG target is near death, switch to a new target.

 

[Charlaquin]

Yes. But.

A passive check is problematic in the sense, characters (PCs and monsters) with high Intelligence become defacto immune to illusions.

Ideally, I would like any character to potentially fall for an illusion.

Most helpful is determining when a character becomes suspicious.

Dealing with illusions is similar to dealing with traps. I dont want traps to be auto-detected. But also, I dont want a game of paranoid "ten foot poles".

I want rules that are clear but excellent.

Telegraphing solves the problem both for traps and for illusions.

 

[Charlaquin]

To me, the question of when a character becomes suspicious of an illusion is a simple one to answer: the PC becomes suspicious when the player decides they become suspicious. For this reason, a DM or adventure designer may want to include something in the description of the environment for the players to potentially become suspicious of (i.e. a telegraph), though maybe not in all cases. Often the circumstances alone will be enough to raise suspicion.

As for NPCs and monsters, that’s where I think a saving throw should be used to determine if suspicion is raised. The DM knows if something is an illusion, so they can’t be unbiased in deciding if the NPC or monster is suspicious or not, but by the same token there is no concern about a saving throw tipping the DM off about an illusion because they already know anyway.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

I’m honestly at the point where I don’t think Wizards need or quite frankly should get anything new in the revision. They are the bland, boring overpowered pick and it was shown that trying to reduce things or expand the spell lists of other classes is not desired. It still upsets me that all the other casters, mostly the Sorcerer, Warlock and half casters will go back to their pitifully limited spell lists. I was so excited to pair more thematic spells with those two but now it won’t happen.

I’m sorry for the salt but the change back to class spell lists and the reason why still leaves me frustrated.

 

[Charlaquin]

I’m honestly at the point where I don’t think Wizards need or quite frankly should get anything new in the revision. They are the bland, boring overpowered pick and it was shown that trying to reduce things or expand the spell lists of other classes is not desired. It still upsets me that all the other casters, mostly the Sorcerer, Warlock and half casters will go back to their pitifully limited spell lists. I was so excited to pair more thematic spells with those two but now it won’t happen.

I’m sorry for the salt but the change back to class spell lists and the reason why still leaves me frustrated.

Yeah. If they were really insistent on the wizard’s identity being “the class with the longest spell list” () they could have just made the arcane list smaller and given the wizard one or more class features that expand their spell list. Like, that’d be a great way to express school specialization - you can add any spell of the specialized school to your spellbook, even if they aren’t on the Arcane list. And then the wizard could have four real subclasses!

 

[homunculus23]

I’m sorry for the salt but the change back to class spell lists and the reason why still leaves me frustrated.

My understanding of the reason why is that too many young players are complaining that they still want their 5e the same. Never saw a game before Bards being a common class.
The more they are introduced to all classes, the more the "5e only" community complains.