D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

MoonSong said:

I had already retracted that claim.

Click to expand...

Ruin Explorer said:

Sadly this website does not auto-update so that wasn't communicated to me before I pressed post!

To be fair to you, it seems like people talk an enormous amount of smack about Skip Williams and make wild claims about what he said (never citing them or quoting them), so it may well have been something so repeated it seemed entirely plausible.

Click to expand...

Crimson Longinus said:

I am not the biggest psion fan, but I would support replacing sorcerer with a psion. The arcane caster line-up is just too crowded, there is not enough room for thematical or mechanical distinction.

Click to expand...

Ruin Explorer said:

Here here. Honestly WotC has me so broken down on Psions that I'd even accept a Psion which was just a stupid spellcaster like the rest in D&D, but that would have been the right thing to do, had 5E not fundamentally lurched into "extreme caution" mode almost at the last minute, design-wise.

Click to expand...

Ruin Explorer said:

Damn, I can't even remember what a Wilder was - was it one of the awful 3.XE psionic classes?

Click to expand...

Alzrius said:

Gotta be honest, I've never seen wizards as embodying any sort of "arcane magic is inborn" idea in D&D.

What bothers me about sorcerers is that they upend the idea of "your character class is what you do, not who you are." Every class, as I recall, was about your profession, what your character was striving to be, deliberately working to cultivate skills even before they reached 1st level. Sorcerers (again, to me) changed that paradigm, because being a sorcerer wasn't something you trained for; it was something that just sort of happened, where you woke up one day and found yourself manifesting magic power because one of your ancestors got freaky with a blink dog or something. It was like having one of the X-Men plopped down right next to Conan the Barbarian, except not as cool as the one time that actually happened.

Click to expand...

Ruin Explorer said:

Ahhh finally, a view even more cynical than mine!

And an awful lot of games - indeed almost any game which isn't fairly directly D&D-derived, either has Clerics and Wizards as the same class, or "healer caster" is essentially a kind of Wizard, and has "wizardine" characteristics (i.e. staff, robes, may owe allegiance to a supernal being but isn't usually powered by faith, and so on).

Random list of examples:

Elder Scrolls - Wizard and Clerics are the same thing.
Dragon's Dogma 1/2 - Wizard and Clerics are the same thing.
Dark Souls/Elden Ring - Classless, but they use different stats - Arcane and Faith in ER, though a lot of more powerful magic requires both Arcane and Faith
The Witcher 1/2/3 - Wizards and Clerics are the same thing.
Final Fantasy - Varies but there are none where "Clerics" are really a thing, just healing-oriented robe/staff casters exist in some - most casters in most games can potentially cast heals though.
Ultima series - Wizards and Clerics are the same thing.
World of Warcraft - Complicated because Mages can't heal - except in the new experimental version of Classic, where they can, but Priests are a weird hybrid of Divine magic, Psionic-style stuff, and Cthulhu-adjacent stuff, and Paladins are basically D&D Clerics but with the faith element turned down very low (and not required at all in some cases). There's also a new-ish class which has Arcane magic AND healing - but is only available to dragon-people race.
Dragon Age - Wizards and Clerics are the same thing.
Pillars of Eternity 1/2- Intentional BG throwback and Wizards and Priests are very much separate and somewhat D&D-like, as are Druids (who can heal), Ciphers (Psions - can't heal), and Chanters (Bards - can heal, or at least pump out a ton of THP, I forget).

I could go on. And the same is true in a lot of TT RPGs - it's rare to see anything Cleric-like unless a game is OSR or otherwise aping D&D, and even then it's no guarantee. It's an old tradition, too - Shadowrun, one of the first RPGs I played after D&D, in about 1990, has Wizards and Clerics as the same thing.

Click to expand...

Alzrius said:

Can somebody source this claim?

Click to expand...

50 Years of D&D: The Sorcerer

Hello again! Continuing on my “reading more of the classics” swing, I moved on from Jack Vance to Michael Moorcock, diving into the latest of the new Elric novels to come out: The Citad…

richardbakerauthor.com

Anyway, in looking at our draft, I realized that the most valuable real estate in D&D was simply “pages in the Player’s Handbook.” And, based on that viewpoint, the wizard class—with twenty pages of class-exclusive spells that no one else could cast—was hogging up a lot of very valuable real estate. The thought crossed my mind: Could there be another class that made use of this real estate? What would that class be?

And so the sorcerer was born.

Click to expand...

M.L. Martin said:

Straight from Richard Baker himself, only a couple of weeks ago:

50 Years of D&D: The Sorcerer

Hello again! Continuing on my “reading more of the classics” swing, I moved on from Jack Vance to Michael Moorcock, diving into the latest of the new Elric novels to come out: The Citad…

richardbakerauthor.com

Click to expand...

Ruin Explorer said:

Sadly this website does not auto-update so that wasn't communicated to me before I pressed post!

To be fair to you, it seems like people talk an enormous amount of smack about Skip Williams and make wild claims about what he said (never citing them or quoting them), so it may well have been something so repeated it seemed entirely plausible.

Click to expand...

Ruin Explorer said:

Ahhh finally, a view even more cynical than mine!

And an awful lot of games - indeed almost any game which isn't fairly directly D&D-derived, either has Clerics and Wizards as the same class, or "healer caster" is essentially a kind of Wizard, and has "wizardine" characteristics (i.e. staff, robes, may owe allegiance to a supernal being but isn't usually powered by faith, and so on).

Random list of examples:

Elder Scrolls - Wizard and Clerics are the same thing.
Dragon's Dogma 1/2 - Wizard and Clerics are the same thing.
Dark Souls/Elden Ring - Classless, but they use different stats - Arcane and Faith in ER, though a lot of more powerful magic requires both Arcane and Faith
The Witcher 1/2/3 - Wizards and Clerics are the same thing.
Final Fantasy - Varies but there are none where "Clerics" are really a thing, just healing-oriented robe/staff casters exist in some - most casters in most games can potentially cast heals though.
Ultima series - Wizards and Clerics are the same thing.
World of Warcraft - Complicated because Mages can't heal - except in the new experimental version of Classic, where they can, but Priests are a weird hybrid of Divine magic, Psionic-style stuff, and Cthulhu-adjacent stuff, and Paladins are basically D&D Clerics but with the faith element turned down very low (and not required at all in some cases). There's also a new-ish class which has Arcane magic AND healing - but is only available to dragon-people race.
Dragon Age - Wizards and Clerics are the same thing.
Pillars of Eternity 1/2- Intentional BG throwback and Wizards and Priests are very much separate and somewhat D&D-like, as are Druids (who can heal), Ciphers (Psions - can't heal), and Chanters (Bards - can heal, or at least pump out a ton of THP, I forget).

I could go on. And the same is true in a lot of TT RPGs - it's rare to see anything Cleric-like unless a game is OSR or otherwise aping D&D, and even then it's no guarantee. It's an old tradition, too - Shadowrun, one of the first RPGs I played after D&D, in about 1990, has Wizards and Clerics as the same thing.

Click to expand...

Crimson Longinus said:

Damn. No wonder the class has always felt pointless.

Click to expand...