Li Shenron
Legend
One thing to keep in mind is that the Sorcerer was introduced in 3ed as really just a variant of the Wizard. The idea was to try and have a Wizard-like character without the need to prepare spells.
Starting from that, a few limitations were needed to compensate for that significant advantage, and they chose to delay new spell levels acquisition by 1 character level + hard-limited number of spells known (the latter for obvious reasons!).
IMHO giving it +50% spell slots per day was a later addition to balance it back up, while the Charisma as key ability (although it's hard to tell when, during development, this came up) was chosen just because there were Int-based and Wis-based full-spellcasters in the game, but no Cha-based full-spellcasters, so this choice made Cha more important in the whole game economy and delivered a more nicely balanced set of classes overall.
Eventually the idea of a "blaster" came up as a consequence: since you had to choose a very few spells to know, it was understood that most players would have chosen spells that were often useful, and combat stuff like Fireball rarely feels useless in a game full of combats...
My guess is that all the flavor was defined as an afterthough, trying to "connect the dots" of spontaneous (i.e. natural, talented) casting, blasting Fireballs, and having high Charisma led to the idea of dragon blood.
Starting from that, a few limitations were needed to compensate for that significant advantage, and they chose to delay new spell levels acquisition by 1 character level + hard-limited number of spells known (the latter for obvious reasons!).
IMHO giving it +50% spell slots per day was a later addition to balance it back up, while the Charisma as key ability (although it's hard to tell when, during development, this came up) was chosen just because there were Int-based and Wis-based full-spellcasters in the game, but no Cha-based full-spellcasters, so this choice made Cha more important in the whole game economy and delivered a more nicely balanced set of classes overall.
Eventually the idea of a "blaster" came up as a consequence: since you had to choose a very few spells to know, it was understood that most players would have chosen spells that were often useful, and combat stuff like Fireball rarely feels useless in a game full of combats...
My guess is that all the flavor was defined as an afterthough, trying to "connect the dots" of spontaneous (i.e. natural, talented) casting, blasting Fireballs, and having high Charisma led to the idea of dragon blood.
