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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grydan" data-source="post: 6040499" data-attributes="member: 79401">See, I find myself agreeing with so much of this that I get a bit of mental whiplash when you come to a conclusion so different from where I get from the same starting points.To me, the difference between wizard magic and sorcerer magic is like the difference between cooking from recipes or cooking from scratch. The wizard's a recipe follower: the instructions have been written down, and as long as they are executed properly they get the expected results. The sorcerer cooks from scratch. They have an intuitive feeling for the results they want to get and how to get there, but as they're not following set rules sometimes you get the inedible and sometimes you get the incredible.Or it's like the difference between a trained classical musician and an improvisational jazz musician. The classical musician reads the notation and makes their best attempt to follow the composition faithfully. The jazz musician plays around, with the piece, keeping the core of the melody but intentionally deviating from a faithful reproduction.So the idea that sorcerers would and should have a narrower and more rigid set of magical abilities seems entirely counter-intuitive. The wizard is the structured, ordered, magic user. The sorcerer is the chaotic and fluid one. The word locked should come nowhere near any description of a sorcerer's magical ability, except as part of the word unlocked.I honestly hope (though I think it's a vain hope) that the final version of the sorcerer doesn't share spells with the wizard's spell list. Sorcerer spells should never look exactly like a wizard spell. If you ask the recipe-follower and the scratch-cooker to prepare dinner, you'd be very surprised if they produced identical dishes. If you asked both the classical musician and the improvisational jazz player to play a piece of music, it would be perplexing if they produced performances that you could not readily tell apart.So why then when a wizard and a sorcerer's attempt to produce the same general effect produce exactly the same effect?Sure, the wizard might know a spell for every situation, if he's studied enough, and prepared the right ones. But he's rigid: he has to follow the recipes. The arcane is a mystery he studies, not something intuitive and intrinsic. He cannot improvise. If he doesn't know the right spell for this situation, he cannot adapt on the fly. The sorcerer shouldn't know any spells at all, at least in the sense that wizards know spells. The sorcerer should know what effect he's trying to obtain, but unless it's one he tries for all of the time, he's running on instinct and improvisation to get there. Magic is his lifeblood. To him, it's about what feels like it will work rather than what some old fogey wrote down in a book 300 years ago. There should be no preparation, no locked lists.A different mechanic to access the same list of abilities (or a subset thereof) does not, to me, justify the existence of a class. The mechanics should fit the flavour, rather than having the flavour be something grafted on to justify a set of mechanics.Like I said, though, I don't really expect I'll see what I want. It requires far more effort for them to make and balance, and doesn't have that mechanical efficiency of using stuff developed for another class. (I do find it amusing that while 4E is often accused of "samey-ness", its wizard and sorcerer shared no spells at all, while 3E's sorcerer was an alternate method of casting wizard spells masquerading as a class.)</blockquote>

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