D&D 5E (2024) Mearls has some Interesting Ideals about how to fix high level wizards.

[Tigris]

So you been dumping hard on PF2, but your conclusions are quite strange compared to my experience. PF2 may look complex, but everything is so completely silo'd that its actually rather simple. The engine doesnt allow "build absurdities" because its so tightly bound. It does a great deal to go out of its way to stop multiclass building to the point doing so is going to make underpowered PCs. PF2 is not complexity at all.

I agree with you that I dont necessarily think its the solution to D&D, but what you state is not actually how the game presents or plays, ime.

"Not allowing build absurdities" is exactly the lack of depth i mean. Whatever you do will end up mostly the same or maybe a bit underpowered, maybe you can get dome conditional +1 to some rolls if you are good.


In comparison building A character in bescon is A LOT simpler, but a good built character might easily become 50% stronger than a badly built one or even more.


In the end your decisions rarely matter in PF2, but boy do you need to read a lot of rules and content to know what all your decisions are.


Especially as a spellcaster not only do you need to know dozens of spells (to choose from) no also 30+ conditions are needed to know.


Just to make a level 2 fighter with intend which only has +2 to attacks and an opportunity attack, you need to understand dozens of keywords. And you need to look up 20 levels of class fests because feats have dependencies on one another, so your level 1 or 2 choice could deny you later an option which you might want.


Or the fact that PF2 is balanced around players healing full sfter each fight, but players are required to read through 1000s of options to find some way to get their "free" out of combat healing. Beacon had the same requirement and just easily allows you to heal full after combat.


Even if there is some clear overlap, there is still a big difference between people who like to feel clever by knowing lots of stuff by heart. And people who are clever in heavily tactical combat where you must adapt to varying unpredictable situations.


These are 2 different axis, even if they of course have some correlation.

 

[mamba]

I don't feel I could seriously play either 3e or Basic. 3e is too fiddly for me now and Basic doesn't have enough meat to keep me interested.

I am in the same boat, but 5e does not hit my personal sweet spot anyway, I want a somewhat simpler version, and grittier. Still the best D&D edition though

 

[payn]

"Not allowing build absurdities" is exactly the lack of depth i mean. Whatever you do will end up mostly the same or maybe a bit underpowered, maybe you can get dome conditional +1 to some rolls if you are good.


In comparison building A character in bescon is A LOT simpler, but a good built character might easily become 50% stronger than a badly built one or even more.


In the end your decisions rarely matter in PF2, but boy do you need to read a lot of rules and content to know what all your decisions are.


Especially as a spellcaster not only do you need to know dozens of spells (to choose from) no also 30+ conditions are needed to know.


Just to make a level 2 fighter with intend which only has +2 to attacks and an opportunity attack, you need to understand dozens of keywords. And you need to look up 20 levels of class fests because feats have dependencies on one another, so your level 1 or 2 choice could deny you later an option which you might want.


Or the fact that PF2 is balanced around players healing full sfter each fight, but players are required to read through 1000s of options to find some way to get their "free" out of combat healing. Beacon had the same requirement and just easily allows you to heal full after combat.


Even if there is some clear overlap, there is still a big difference between people who like to feel clever by knowing lots of stuff by heart. And people who are clever in heavily tactical combat where you must adapt to varying unpredictable situations.


These are 2 different axis, even if they of course have some correlation.

Sure, I get now what you are saying. PF2 is an encounters game thinly veiled as an adventuring day attrition one. PC building is simple, and combat is bump, set, spike, hidden behind walls of text. Which is pretty much how 4E was for me which is why I dont play either of them.

 

[HatWearingFool]

I am in the same boat, but 5e does not hit my personal sweet spot anyway, I want a somewhat simpler version, and grittier. Still the best D&D edition though

I know you aren't looking for a recommendation here, but Nimble

Way simpler, slightly grittier 5e

 

[jolt]

Every table is different, but this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem. By the time you hit high level, you had a lot of gradual time to learn the spells as you go. Forgetting your spells or abilities is something I've rarely seen outside of the newest players to the hobby. The bigger complaint I've seen is that too much magic stops being viable as you go up in level.

 

[HatWearingFool]

Every table is different, but this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem. By the time you hit high level, you had a lot of gradual time to learn the spells as you go. Forgetting your spells or abilities is something I've rarely seen outside of the newest players to the hobby. The bigger complaint I've seen is that too much magic stops being viable as you go up in level.

I'm not sure about that. I think a lot of people start at a higher tier when they want to experience high level play.

Actually, I was going to suggest in order see part of what is wrong with wizards create one at level 1 and simulate play to level 15 and see what that guy looks like compared to someone you create at level 15...

I think you will find they look quite different when you don't actually play the lower levels of the character and it says something about the system. Not sure what, but something

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm glad all of your players have read the PHB and memorized their class features. They can probably even level up their characters away from the table and not during game time. Congratulations! That's not a universal experience. If fixing the interface and data presentation prevents some players from being locked out of playing 50%+ of the classes in the entire game, then it's time to fix the interface. It's certainly simpler than re-writing the rules!

I never said anything of the sort. Those players tend to play warlocks or sorlocks in my closed games and they have exactly two abilities. You quoted those italicized abilities I'll be honest and admit that there was a Ravenloft campaign where one of them included the celestial warlock healing breeze nonsense the time I banned healing word.


I feel like my experience is plenty broad enough to be confident in my earlier statement though given that I ran AL twice a week for years though and had dozens of not hundreds of players as young as "not yet able to read but [relative] is there helping them with the sheet" all the way up to literally taking the paratransit to the shop because they are no longer legally allowed to drive due to age.

New players who show up to AL new to d&d needing help creating a character don't get pointed to wizard and rarely seem drawn to cleric. I'd attribute that to most of them agreeing when me or whatever player is helping them says that it's probably best to stick with a class like fighter barbarian rogue or maybe warlock while starting out alongside a quick descriptive overview of each.

The fact that players like you describe exist is not in dispute. The dispute is over those players generally being special circumstances like starting off with a high level PC they don't know how to play or not bothering to read the relevant sections of the phb with neither of those types of reason being ones that justify rebuilding wizard to address that edge case rather than to address what actual wizard players who do feel the class needs∆


∆ multiple posters beyond me have mentioned examples and there is pretty strong similarities among them

 

[Horwath]

The logical answer is

More Classes​

D&D has long time missed a simple Intelligence based cantrip class that can cast high level spels 1/day.

Like a warlock but no Invocations but more cantrips.

Need to finish my "cantripist" class.
just cantrips that scale to 10 dice of damage or 10× basic effect and ritual spells from the ritual tome.
kind of version of 3.5e warlock.

 

[Distracted DM]

Playing at high levels reveals with casters rooted in how the rate of complexity and power increase of levels 1 to 10 continues through levels 11 to 20.

Imagine a player who doesn't care to optimize. They play the game for the story and pick options based on what sounds cool, interesting, or thematic for their character. My experience is that about 50% of players fall into this category. I think of them as action figure players. They want to imagine a cool action figure they can design using the rules, then play that person in the game.

These players probably can handle the first 10 levels of the game, though by level 7 or so they might get frustrated. A good rule of thumb in game design is that you can give players up to seven options to choose from. After that, they struggle unless you find ways to break those options up into categories. For instance, a player with five attacks and four defenses is probably OK. They look at their attack options when it is there turn, and sort through their defenses when it's not. Realistically, though, keeping options in the two to four range keeps the game moving.

Looking at a wizard, by 11th level they have 5 cantrips, 16 prepared spells, and 16 spell slots. There is no hint of an organizational scheme, other than the hierarchy of slot levels. At 18th level, they have 5 cantrips, 23 prepared spells, and 20 spell slots. If we assumed that each spell was a quarter page, the spell descriptions they need to understand run about 7 pages. That's longer than the rulebook for many boardgames!

I think about 20% of players feel comfortable and have fun with this cognitive load. Even then, though, it comes at a price. We only have so much energy to put into the game. Spending this much time and effort on magic detracts from other parts of the game.

Based on responses in this thread, the majority of posters' experiences here don't match Mearls' experience. I don't know if his experience is based off of his own personal tables, all the playtests he's been part of, convention games, or based off of WotC's own studies on the matter.

If this is an actual problem, that there's a significant number (or majority in Mearls' experience) of players that want to play a wizard but don't, or don't have a good time doing so, because of the admittedly large number of options the wizard acquires over levels.. yeah it doesn't hurt to look for a solution. If this were the case I could see a product in it; but would it be for all classes, or just the ones deemed very complex at higher levels? Are we looked at a 5e Essentials?

 

[mamba]

If this were the case I could see a product in it; but would it be for all classes, or just the ones deemed very complex at higher levels? Are we looked at a 5e Essentials?

he is working on his own game(s), not D&D. Those seem to go to level 10, with this being their progression to higher levels, so I assume we will see the others eventually, but obviously the mage needs a solution more than the fighter does, so that was the starting point