D&D lovers who hate Vancian magic

[Mercutio01]

Personally, I have a much bigger problem with Vancian clerics and druids than with wizards. At that point, it just doesn't seem to make any sense to me. "Oh, Great Graznock! Smite the enemies of thy Faith! *fizzle* Oh, well, I guess we're only allowed to smite one enemy of the faith today."

OTOH, clerics, as a class, have no real counterparts in any genre fiction.

Fair enough. I think Vancian clerics could at least make more sense as the powers are literally granted by gods. When you call upon a spell, you are using your limited direct line to a god to grant you a power. Gods are busy and fickle and they don't have the power to give you everything you want, so choose what help you want from them wisely.

That at least makes more sense to me than magic that erases itself from your memory (which I don't actually recall from Vance's books or from the game mechanics--it just seems like hyperbolic shorthand).

 

[Dausuul]

So, if the specific problem is the wizard class in D&D, what do people who don't like Vancian magic think of sorcerers and warlocks? (I'm thinking specifically as they were implemented in 3E). Also, does the same anti-Vancian feeling apply to clerics, who work essentially the same way as wizards do, mechanically at least?

I love sorcerors. I like warlocks in theory, although they're severely underpowered and rather boring in practice. (They don't get enough invocations IMO.)

Vancian clerics seem even sillier than Vancian wizards to me.

 

[Mercutio01]

I love sorcerors. I like warlocks in theory, although they're severely underpowered and rather boring in practice. (They don't get enough invocations IMO.)

So how do you justify the fact that sorcerers run out of spells?

Also, is your only objection, then, to the memorize and forget mechanic? As opposed to the mechanic whereby after a certain point in a day a wizard/cleric/sorcerer becomes essentially a useless pawn with a crossbow?

 

[Hussar]

So how do you justify the fact that sorcerers run out of spells?

Also, is you only objection, then, to the memorize and forget mechanic? As opposed to the mechanic whereby after a certain point in a day a wizard/cleric/sorcerer becomes essentially a useless pawn with a crossbow?

I'm obviously not Dasuul, but, I'd like to take a stab a that if I may.

For me, it's the memorize and forget mechanic mostly, which is why I think sorcerers and other alternative casters (the Shadowcaster and the Truenamer both were fantastic ideas, although the mechanics were a bit... bleah). The M&F mechanic is just so problematic IMO. I listed the issues before, but, I'm going to be a bit more specific here:

M&F magic means that general purpose spells will always trump specific purpose spells. No one will ever memorize Illusory Script before Fireball. There are a handful of spells that might as well be class powers because every (or virtually every) caster of that class takes them (or something close) because they are just that much more useful than the other choices.

The only thing worse than having severely limited spells/day is having spells that only function in very limited circumstances, most of which are beyond your control. In most D&D campaigns, it's usually not a big stretch to think that you might need to fireball or lightning something today. OTOH, Water Breathing is taking up a slot and, unless you know you're going to need it today, it might still be there when you go to bed tonight.

Which rolls me back around to the sorcerer. The sorc solves so many of the issues that I have with casters in 3.x. Give him a few more Spells Known and I'd happily eject clerics and wizards in favor of a Sorcerer that chooses either arcane or divine magic. The Favored Soul fills this role perfectly.

If I played 3.x again, I would eject all three of the core casters and replace them with sorcerers and favored souls.

 

[Mercutio01]

Which rolls me back around to the sorcerer. The sorc solves so many of the issues that I have with casters in 3.x. Give him a few more Spells Known and I'd happily eject clerics and wizards in favor of a Sorcerer that chooses either arcane or divine magic. The Favored Soul fills this role perfectly.

If I played 3.x again, I would eject all three of the core casters and replace them with sorcerers and favored souls.

Even assuming a larger number of spells to know, don't you still wind up at the same place? No one is going to use one of their known spell slots for Water Breathing when there are other more general spells available. This solution doesn't really seem to answer the problem of spell selection.

I know I've read about a variant somewhere that meshes together wizard and sorcerer. Everyday you memorize certain spells (but only one of each) like a wizard, but cast them like a sorcerer using up spell level slots instead of individual spells. I just don't remember where I read that. Does that still suffer from the same sorts of problems with fire-and-forget spells?

It seems to me that something like the above should solve the complaints against D&D-style Vancian magic. I think the major concern with that would be giving casters even more power, which is definitely a bad thing.

 

[Desdichado]

Weren't many writers of D&D novels both players and game-designers of D&D itself?

Yes. D&D novels were written by guys like Bill Slavicsek, Rich Baker, James Wyatt and others as often as by folks who were not in the game design industry.

And of those not in the game design industry, I'd venture an awful lot of them have (or at least had) gaming as a hobby.

 

[Janx]

Which rolls me back around to the sorcerer. The sorc solves so many of the issues that I have with casters in 3.x. Give him a few more Spells Known and I'd happily eject clerics and wizards in favor of a Sorcerer that chooses either arcane or divine magic. The Favored Soul fills this role perfectly.

If I played 3.x again, I would eject all three of the core casters and replace them with sorcerers and favored souls.

In 2e, we had house-ruled that casters didn't have to memorize (worked like sorcerors, but this predated 3e).

it worked great, and our non-fireball spells actually got some use and our problem solving became more varied.

3e kinda hurt that, because with splitting the arcane caster into Wizard and Sorceror, we saw it as a design choice not to mess with.

With 4e (the pre-release rumor of it) it looked like they split the spells into the immediate blasty stuff and rituals for the pokey, rare stuff that you don't need to cast in a hurry.

the immediate stuff makes sense to me. archers and fighters can keep doing the damage they do every round. Yet a wizard has a few good shots in him, with the rest rapidly diminishing in power. So fixing things that a wizard can make a useful contribution every round (that shouldn't overshadow anybody else) sounded like a good thing.

But the vancian system itself? I found that it stifled creativity because a fireball is more useful in more cases than most other 3rd level spells. This meant that the chances of the player memorizing a special purpose spell was lower, let alone that being the right special purpose spell you would need today.

Some folks talk about those heady days that wizard players would just plan this stuff out and KNOW they would need a waterbreathing spell when they reached level 3 of the dungeon today. My experience as a player was more akin to Jack Bauer. A metric crapton of action and plot twists packed into a short time frame with little time to predict, let alone prepare in advance. As such, you prepped general purpose spells and worked with the situation at hand.

When we opened up the gates on casting any spell known, suddenly I had way more options on how to solve problems. I stopped throwing as many fireballs around and got to use my special purpose spells in creative ways.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

what do people who don't like Vancian magic think of sorcerers and warlocks?

While I do love Vancian magic, I'll still answer: I like the Sorcerer, but not the Warlock. But my dislike of the Warlock has almost nothing to do with the class' mechanics. Personally, I think the way 4Ed reworked the class is one of the true bright spots I the game...so much so that my first 4Ed PC was a Warlock.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

No one will ever memorize Illusory Script before Fireball.

Let's scale that back to "Very few will ever memorize Illusory Script before Fireball." because I know people who will....like me.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I never thought of resurrection magic as all that common, honestly- in 30+ years, I've only seen a handful of PCs get brought back from the dead...and one of those had an artifact fused to his skull that did it automatically. Otherwise, its too costly.

This has not been the case for any of our games. Following the wealth by level guidelines in 3e or 3.5e meant that every group would have enough money to raise dead someone starting at about level 2(a group of 6 adventurers that are level 2 have 900 GP a piece and therefore could get 5400 GPs together...the material cost of Raise Dead is 5000 GP). More practically, a group of 5 PCs had the money to easily bring someone back by 6th level, where 10% of each character's wealth pooled together was 6500. Enough to pay for the material cost of the spell and a generous fee for a cleric to cast it.

At level 11 and higher in 3.5, 10% of any one character's wealth is enough to bring someone back from the dead. Also, at 11th level, an encounter with 4 enemies should drop enough treasure to pay for a raise dead. So, you should be able to bring one member of the party after each combat at 11th level and higher. Especially considering the party likely contains a cleric who can cast the spell, thereby only needing the 5000 GP and not having to pay a cleric to cast it.

The cost is only 500 GP in 4e to bring someone back in Heroic tier. Most people have that amount of money by level 2. Though, in 4e only "heroes" can by brought back at all. So Raise Dead isn't an option for anyone but PCs, in general.

In 1e and 2e it's a little more difficult to judge, given there were no guidelines for how much wealth a group should have other than what the DM thought was appropriate. Still, in all of my 2e games that were over 5th level, we considered Raise Dead an appropriate spell to cast when someone died. Below that, it was a little too expensive.

I've had PCs who were working on their 6th or 7th return from death. If you totaled the party, it would be closer to 30. That was just in one game.

It's been part of the "signing agreement" for every adventuring party I've ever been in that should any member of the party die, that all of the remaining members would pool their money to have them brought back and that each member had to agree to it before joining.

I'd be extremely surprised if a character ran out of magic over the course of a novel unless all of the action took place in a day or less.

I've read a couple of D&D novels where a caster explicitly ran out of a certain spell at a dramatically appropriate time. And a couple more where a caster mentally took an inventory of the spells they had available before choosing what to cast. It's been a while since I read any of them, but there was even one where a caster completely ran out of spells in a day.