D&D 5E Companion thread to 5E Survivor - Subclasses (Part XIV: Wizard)

[Tonguez]

And we're down to the Top Five. They are, in descending order:
Abjuration > Enchantment > Conjuration > Divination > Transmutation

Vote #407 has gone wonky so needs numbers checked.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

This is the single worst aspect of the 5e warlock class design, a the biggest culprit in making the class not feel like the concept. It should be absolutely clear that the patron is not giving you the hex spell when you cast it, you gave or promised soemthing and they gave you the means to take the power you needed and do whatever the hell you want with it.

The fact that people seem to see warlocks as more subject to their patrons will than clerics to their gods is an egregious absurdity.

I feel quite strongly that the reverse should be true tbh. It bothers the everliving !@#@$ out of me that BOTH warlocks and clerics are not explicitly expected to be following will of their patron or divine force, respectively. Or at least that there isn't more narrative room for the Patron to demand direct in-game service as condition of the pact. An adversarial role (i.e. trying to beat the Devil at his own game) should be fine. Deliberate, egregious disobedience not so much.

In some cases it absolutely SHOULD be the patron giving you the Hex spell IMO. We have this tendency in modern fantasy to view magic as some sort of external physical force that can be directly manipulated. But one of the earlier, faerie-tale style conceptions of magic was that it was merely a means of persuading supernatural creatures to act on your behalf. As a DM, I'd personally prefer to leave my options open as far as how the game world works.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah, no I agree with the bolded part, but if you aren't doing what you gave/promised, why is the Patron "powering" you. What? You have them "power you up" once and they leave it at that? What is the point of them "giving you power" if they have no way of ensuring you will do what they want... other than showing up and just killing the PC?

Because they made a deal. There is, IMO, literally no point in the class existing at all if it is required to do the bidding of some otherworldly being, begging it for every spell and powerup. If the Warlock must have a "patron" (and IMO they don't need to have one), then they should absolutely be able to act against that "patron", and face the reprisal of that patron in the form of external danger, not "oops no powers lol".

If that means that the warlock should be assumed to have already paid for the power, or owe a debt such as their soul, or a deed done in turn, or that a little bit of the spark of life and soul is siphoned from each creature the warlock defeats and sent to the patron, whatever, great!

As for "ensuring you do what they want", there should be something you are expected to do, sure, but that doesn't mean you are their servant, it means you owe them a debt that must be paid, sooner or later, unless you can find a way out of your bargain. Murder a specific person at a predetermined time, which yo uwill be informed of when the time comes. Bring the lost love of the Prince of Frost back to him (or the Lady of The White Well, for a less sinister story). Sow chaos, most especially bringing woe and destruction down onto the powerful and abusive on behalf of Hyrsam, go insane or whatever GOOs want, etc. Whatever it is, yes, the consequences for not doing it are existential threat rather than just...not being able to do anything. Because you aren't a servant of a god.

To keep the invocations, which IME is the only reason someone plays a warlock. The spells on a short rest is a nice second point, but not the major attraction.


Because it is the subclass that uses metamagic and none of the others do. What "theme or premise" are you even talking about?

Metamagics are a deeply secondary part of the class, after the origins, and the sorcery points themselves, and are part of the class only as a way to try and represent that the sorcerer as tapping into the weave directly, and thus they break the rules of spellcraft, casting spells by force of will and instinct, not by memorization or learning. What of that even survives making it a type of wizard?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I feel quite strongly that the reverse should be true tbh. It bothers the everliving !@#@$ out of me that BOTH warlocks and clerics are not explicitly expected to be following will of their patron or divine force, respectively. Or at least that there isn't more narrative room for the Patron to demand direct in-game service as condition of the pact. An adversarial role (i.e. trying to beat the Devil at his own game) should be fine. Deliberate, egregious disobedience not so much.

Yeah this is totally incompatible with how I view the warlock tbh. But again, I don't even think they should have a patron in the sense that 5e does it.

In some cases it absolutely SHOULD be the patron giving you the Hex spell IMO. We have this tendency in modern fantasy to view magic as some sort of external physical force that can be directly manipulated. But one of the earlier, faerie-tale style conceptions of magic was that it was merely a means of persuading supernatural creatures to act on your behalf. As a DM, I'd personally prefer to leave my options open as far as how the game world works.

That's great for a game based on those ideas. DND operates on the assumption that magic is an external force you manipulate. In 5e, they even made The Weave, as such, how magic works.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

That's great for a game based on those ideas. DND operates on the assumption that magic is an external force you manipulate. In 5e, they even made The Weave, as such, how magic works.

The Weave comes from the Forgotten Realms. And predates 5e. But it's entirely possible to have something like the Weave in a game world. Yet still have a "Hex spell" really be the signal used to get a tiny servitor demon, that your patron commanded to obey you, to pop into this reality for a moment and cough on the foe you're trying to curse.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The Weave comes from the Forgotten Realms. And predates 5e. But it's entirely possible to have something like the Weave in a game world. Yet still have a "Hex spell" really be the signal used to get a tiny servitor demon, that your patron commanded to obey you, to pop into this reality for a moment and cough on the foe you're trying to curse.

you can homebrew anything, sure. but the weave is part of the 5e dnd multiverse, now, not just FR, per the PHB.

edit: also, yes, I and everyone else that has ever posted here knows where the weave comes from and that it predates 5e.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah I’m constantly asking whats the difference between a cleric and a celestial warlocks patron, it seems they ought to be the same thing.

I disagree strongly, but then again, I see a valuable difference between Cleric, Paladin, Celestial Warlock, and other things.

Clerics and Paladins share the devotional aspect, but Clerics are shepherds, advisors, tenders. They do not lead, they advise. Paladins, on the other hand, are leaders (generally combat leaders),

Warlocks are neither wise nor exemplars. They're contract workers--quite literally--and effectively self-employed consultants. A deity would only use warlocks when they need plausibly deniable assets, people who aren't officially on the payroll but still have the clearance to access important things and Get naughty word Done. This is the reason why almost all Warlock pacts are with tricksy, duplicitous, or outright dangerous/malicious forces: lords of the fey, dukes of hell, demon-princes, Lovecraftian horrors. Because you need a contract if you're going to work with beings like that. That's the warlock protecting herself from her patron's shenanigans. Deities? They're protecting themselves through said contracts.

Anyway taking the fact that a Warlock has better damage output than an Evoker maybe

Warlock (War Mage) = Evocation, Abjuration
Scorcerer = Conjuration, Transmutation
Psion/Illusionist =Enchantment, Illusion
Necromancer
Divination (Sage?)

If we're going to split things up, I'd do the following

Warmage: Evocation, Abjuration, Divination
Thaumaturge: Conjuration, Transmutation, Restoration (creating, modifying, and restoring things)
Occultist: Enchantment, Illusion, Necromancy (deception, coercion, and manipulating dark forces)

Each has a school for doling out punishment (Evocation, Transmutation, Necromancy), a school for manipulating the environment (Abjuration, Conjuration, Enchantment), and a utility school (Divination, Restoration, Illusion.) Subclasses can start with "best at exploiting one school" stuff, and then branch out into more creative or extended senses, e.g. a melee-focused Occultist could be a "Reaper," focused on dealing death and absorbing power from the slain, while a melee-focused Thaumaturge could be a "Metamorph," hyperspecialized in transforming her own body as tool and weapon both.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I disagree strongly, but then again, I see a valuable difference between Cleric, Paladin, Celestial Warlock, and other things.

Clerics and Paladins share the devotional aspect, but Clerics are shepherds, advisors, tenders. They do not lead, they advise. Paladins, on the other hand, are leaders (generally combat leaders),

Warlocks are neither wise nor exemplars. They're contract workers--quite literally--and effectively self-employed consultants. A deity would only use warlocks when they need plausibly deniable assets, people who aren't officially on the payroll but still have the clearance to access important things and Get naughty word Done. This is the reason why almost all Warlock pacts are with tricksy, duplicitous, or outright dangerous/malicious forces: lords of the fey, dukes of hell, demon-princes, Lovecraftian horrors. Because you need a contract if you're going to work with beings like that. That's the warlock protecting herself from her patron's shenanigans. Deities? They're protecting themselves through said contracts.


If we're going to split things up, I'd do the following

Warmage: Evocation, Abjuration, Divination
Thaumaturge: Conjuration, Transmutation, Restoration (creating, modifying, and restoring things)
Occultist: Enchantment, Illusion, Necromancy (deception, coercion, and manipulating dark forces)

Each has a school for doling out punishment (Evocation, Transmutation, Necromancy), a school for manipulating the environment (Abjuration, Conjuration, Enchantment), and a utility school (Divination, Restoration, Illusion.) Subclasses can start with "best at exploiting one school" stuff, and then branch out into more creative or extended senses, e.g. a melee-focused Occultist could be a "Reaper," focused on dealing death and absorbing power from the slain, while a melee-focused Thaumaturge could be a "Metamorph," hyperspecialized in transforming her own body as tool and weapon both.

I get the suspicion that clerics and other religious classes should in hindsight have been far more optional as they are just hard to work out

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I get the suspicion that clerics and other religious classes should in hindsight have been far more optional as they are just hard to work out

Main problem is, religion remains a hugely important force in human society. Between Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, two-thirds of all human beings are religious and at least partially theistic, and more than 83% follow some form of religion (whether or not it is theistic, e.g. Buddhism or various non-theistic folk religions.) Gods and faith are a staple of fantasy literature; to ignore them completely is likely no more tenable. Compromise solutions like 13A's approach are probably the best of a bad bunch. In 13A, there are two groups of deities: the Gods of Light and the Gods of Darkness. The former are the "good guy" deities that most characters revere, the latter are the dangerous/evil/corrupting ones that want to rule. Neither are ever specifically named nor enumerated, and the narrative keeps them both at arm's length to avoid excessive entanglement. Thus, the gods exist, but they never get particularly involved in anything unless DMs (and, ideally, players) specifically want them to.

The space usually taken up by deities is instead filled by the Icons. This serves the double purpose of keeping overt religious components out of day-to-day play, and making sure that the "movers and shakers" of the setting aren't at the enormously-cosmically-powerful deity level, but instead relatively mundane and even killable without upending the setting. The loss or altering of an Icon is a major, perhaps even age-defining event, but it's not something that will cause the world to end, generally speaking.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

you can homebrew anything, sure. but the weave is part of the 5e dnd multiverse, now, not just FR, per the PHB.

edit: also, yes, I and everyone else that has ever posted here knows where the weave comes from and that it predates 5e.

The conceptual problem I think you are having here is that the Weave is NOT actually the definitive way in which magic works in 5e. It's just a Forgotten Realms conceit; one specific way of visualizing magecraft. The ONE place it is mentioned in the core rulebooks explicitly calls this out. From the sidebar on p.205 (of MY phb at least) that mentions it:

Mortals can't directly shape this raw magic. Instead they make use of a fabric of magic, a kind of interface between the will of the spellcaster and the stuff of raw magic. The spellcasters of the Forgotten Realms call it the Weave and recognize its essence as the Goddess Mystra, but casters have varied ways of naming and visualizing this interface.

The core books describe the variability of magic in many places. For example "Wild and enigmatic, varied in form and function, the power of magic draws students to seek to master its mysteries" (2nd heading, Wizard class description, PHB). Or the opening chapter of the DMG which talks about animism - the concept that spirits are everywhere and that everything has a spirit - as a cosmological viewpoint. Convincing supernatural creatures to affect the world for you actually fits this model of interface between caster's will and raw magic just fine.

To go back to the example of the coughing servitor demon (Hex spell) - that demon would be the "interface between the caster's will and the stuff of raw magic". The caster is informing the demon what he or she wants, and the demon is manipulating the "stuff of raw magic".