Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 176951" data-attributes="member: 2013">My 2 cents...Here's my two cents...I think it is perfectly fine that sorcerers use material components, somatic gestures, and verbalization identical to wizards, even for aesthetic reasons.  Here's my analogy...Using magic is like speaking a language.  There are two ways to "learn" a language - you can either be a native speaker and just grow up assimilating it or you can be a non-native speaker who studies it and learns it in a rote fashion (at least initially).  Both methods can lead to complete fluency in a language, but the approach is vastly different.I happen to know English as my native language.  When I speak, write, or otherwise communicate in English, I never think about conjugating verbs, I don't worry about sentence structure, and so forth... I know what the correct conjugation and word order is "just because it feels right."  I would be hard-pressed to explain the rules for why a sentence is conjugated the way it is, I would have to say, "because that's just the way it is."I happen to know German and Hungarian as second/third languages.  When I speak, write, or otherwise communicate in these languages (even though at one point I was so fluent in Hungarian that I have been mistaken by native speakers for a native speaker), in the back of my conscious mind, I am doing conjugations and making things fit together by the rote rules of language that I learned.  I could dissect a sentence and tell you exactly what grammar rules lead to each conjugation.I expect the reverse is true - a native Hungarian speaker fluent in English as a second language would have a tough time explaining all of the conjugation rules in a Hungarian sentence to me but could dissect an English sentence without difficulty.The point is that the end result - a fully conjugated sentence - looks identical but the mental processes "under the hood" leading to the sentence are quite different.In my mind, sorcerers represent the "native speaker" of magic.  They "speak" the language of magic from childhood.  The discovery that "I need a pinch of bat guano and then I contort my hand this way and say 'alakazam'" is as natural to them as discovering that when I pick up a rock and let go, it falls to the ground.  It's not "getting lucky" so much as just having a natural feel and inclination that "this is how to do it."  They literally never think to question it, they just intuitively know, "this is how it's done."  This explains why they have more spells per day than a wizard... magic is more comfortable for them.  It also explains their restriction on total spells known - they don't really know the "rules" of magic because they have never had a reason to learn them.  Why study what comes naturally?On the other hand, wizards represent the "non-native" speaker of magic.  Through memorization, study, and other methods, they learn the "rules" of magic, then apply that knowledge to allow themselves to cast spells.  They learn that bat guano is needed because the magic draws on the combustibles present, you have to contort your hand a certain way in order to focus the magic, and 'alakazam' is the thing that acts as the trigger to release the magic.  Since they're not as comfortable with magic as a "native speaker" would be, they get fewer spells per day than a sorcerer.  However, since they know all the rules, they have a much easier time putting new combinations together to generate new effects (they can know more spells).The results end up identical (using V/S/M to generate a spell effect) just as a native and non-native fluent speaker of a language will use the same sentence structure and words to communicate an idea.  This is why I don't have a problem with sorcerers and wizards casting spells in the same way.  It's "what's going on under the hood" (i.e., mentally, how do they arrive at the decision to use these gestures/words) that makes all the difference between the two.Obviously, at some point down the road, the native speaker will probably gain a pretty good grasp of the language rules and the non-native speaker will gain such a "feel" for the language that is *almost* intuitive, but hopefully the general example stands.As far as spellcasting demons and other such creatures go, I figure they are even more sorcerous than a sorcerer and because of this attunement to magic, figure out ways to spontaneously apply metamagic feats to their spells without raising the spell level, much as someone who is truly in touch with a language can say the same thing a hundred different ways, each more eloquent than the last.  Not a perfect analogy here, but oh well.--The Sigil</blockquote>

Verification