D&D lovers who hate Vancian magic

[Desdichado]

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.

I'm with you there. I actually prefer a lower magic type game, with something more like rituals or incantations making up the majority of the magic in the setting, but for a more D&D-like experience, I would never play a wizard or cleric when I can play a sorcerer or favored soul instead.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Not a fan of the Favored Soul, either. In fact, beyond the Cleric, OA Shaman, and Paladin, I'd be hard pressed to think of a divine casting base class in 3Ed-3.5Ed I do like.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Actually, it's not. Game fiction is never worse than when the mechanics of the game are obvious in the prose.

I think this is a case of talking past each other.

Your objection is to one where if someone drove to work instead of writing that, the author wrote "I sat in the driving seat and turned the key. This caused the ignition to trigger, igniting the fuel in the engine and starting the pistons pumping providing the force to allow the car to go. I then put my foot on the clutch, the gear stick into the reverse slot while keeping the clutch down, and my other foot on the gas. Taking my hand off the gear stick I put it on the handbreak and depressed the button with my thumb." That's making the mechanics obvious and is boring as hell.

Danny's objection is to something more like "I drove the thirty miles across town to work in just under ten minutes. Not a bad start to the day." An average speed across an urban area of 180mph that the protagonist doesn't consider especially remarkable. There had better be an explanation.

You don't have to hit people over the head with the mechanics to stick to them.

 

[Desdichado]

I think this is a case of talking past each other.

Not entirely, but partly. While I freely admit that one of the main problems with the fact that the fiction showing game mechanics is the terrible way in which it's frequently executed, at the same time, I'm really struggling to think of an evocative way to explain, in verisimilitudinous language, the concept of, "I'm out of 3rd level spells for today." For example.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

"I'm out of 3rd level spells for today."

How about, "The Third Path of Nine is barred to me for the remainder of this solar cycle..."

Or

"Until the sun rises tomorrow and my mind is refreshed, I can cast no more spells of the Triadic Seal,"

Or some such. If a professional fantasy writer can't do that or better, perhaps he should change jobs...

 

[Janx]

How about, "The Third Path of Nine is barred to me for the remainder of this solar cycle..."

Or

"Until the sun rises tomorrow and my mind is refreshed, I can cast no more spells of the Triadic Seal,"

Or some such. If a professional fantasy writer can't do that or better, perhaps he should change jobs...

"I needed to think quickly. I had already used up my most powerful spells I had prepared. What remained were minor cantrips and illusions. My mind raced to find which spell I had empowered in my mind that could help us now against this challenge. If only I had time, to sleep and rest, I could re-prepare my most devestating magic."

That doesn't even involve talking about game mechanics, but clearly indicates that magic users must prepare spells in advance in order to cast them, and that certain spells had already been used and couldn't be used again for a while.

 

[Desdichado]

:shrug: I guess I don't find those examples very evocative. They sound to me exactly like game mechanics. Lipsticks and pigs and all that.

Then again, maybe I'm just biased against the whole affair anyway since I don't like Vancian magic. It sounds like game mechanics to me because that's the only place I'm familiar with these kinds of concepts in the first place.

But I don't think so. I think that the game mechanics came as an attempt to be game mechanics and only later when it was attempted to turn game mechanics into solid worldbuilding (Gygaxian naturalism, as I've heard it called) that it started getting wonky. I don't suppose that Gary Gygax ever literally intended that wizards can only cast a certain amount of certain spells in a given day; that was just a convenient way to represent wizard capabilities in a way that was conducive to playing a game with them.

 

[SSquirrel]

"I needed to think quickly. I had already used up my most powerful spells I had prepared. What remained were minor cantrips and illusions. My mind raced to find which spell I had empowered in my mind that could help us now against this challenge. If only I had time, to sleep and rest, I could re-prepare my most devestating magic."

That doesn't even involve talking about game mechanics, but clearly indicates that magic users must prepare spells in advance in order to cast them, and that certain spells had already been used and couldn't be used again for a while.

I won't even bother trying to quote all the various times they club you over the head in Chronicles and Legends how Raistlin has to study daily, how he loses a spell once he casts it and until the end of Legends, he can't cast more than 1 or 2 spells over the course of an entire day w/o wearing himself out completely. Heck, just the story of his Test in the Tower has him down to his last spell. Raistlin is about the most obvious example I can think of where a caster runs themselves down with their casting and can run out of spells easily

 

[Janx]

:shrug: I guess I don't find those examples very evocative. They sound to me exactly like game mechanics. Lipsticks and pigs and all that.

Then again, maybe I'm just biased against the whole affair anyway since I don't like Vancian magic. It sounds like game mechanics to me because that's the only place I'm familiar with these kinds of concepts in the first place.

But I don't think so. I think that the game mechanics came as an attempt to be game mechanics and only later when it was attempted to turn game mechanics into solid worldbuilding (Gygaxian naturalism, as I've heard it called) that it started getting wonky. I don't suppose that Gary Gygax ever literally intended that wizards can only cast a certain amount of certain spells in a given day; that was just a convenient way to represent wizard capabilities in a way that was conducive to playing a game with them.

Well, I'm sorry my hastily assembled prose disappointed.

I don't disagree with your logic on how Vancian magic came about. I don't like the mechanic myself, and it seems it was invented to serve the game's purpose.

But I don't see any particular problem explaining in a literary fashion why the protagonist can't just blast the bad guy one more time with a fireball, yet has a few other spells up his sleeve.

to me, Vancian casting sucks because it neutralizes the value of the spells my PC knows because the odds of me memorizing a special purpose spell is unlikely to coincide with when I actually need it.

 

[Mercutio01]

it neutralizes the value of the spells my PC knows because the odds of me memorizing a special purpose spell is unlikely to coincide with when I actually need it.

And thus came about the tactic that I've seen fairly often where players deliberately left open a few spell slots. Say journeying through a dungeon and coming to a room with a big lava flow. The group would stand in relative safety of a cleared room for a few minutes while the wizard prepped Protection from Elements, or something like that.