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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ZombieRoboNinja" data-source="post: 6023097" data-attributes="member: 54843">No offense but I really disagree with this idea.First off, there HAS to be a default that all the classes are written up with. You want to at least pretend that a beginner can pick up the PHB and write up his first spellcasting character without making complex decisions about mechanical playstyle. In fact, forcing this kind of purely mechanical decision on the player at character creation undoes a lot of the good work WOTC has done in packaging backgrounds and specialties that take a lot of the nitty-gritty and guesswork out of character creation.And despite the OP's suggestion, I'll argue that they can't just have the class description say "The wizard is Vancian Prepared by default; see page 207 to figure out what that means." A new player (or for that matter any player) wants to see what their character gets all on one page, preferably on one table, so they know how their character grows at each level. So then you're stuck arguing about what the default for each class should be, which is where we're at already.OK, moving past that. There are only a handful of magic system that we can even pretend are this interchangeable: Vancian (prepared, spontaneous, or whatever the 5e cleric is) and spell-point are the main ones I've seen in D&D. A system that relies primarily on encounter powers or at-will powers requires a completely different spell list (like the warlock has) for it to be balanced at all. You can't just say, "A Prepared Vancian character gets three 3rd-level spells as dailies at level 6, and a Encounter character gets a single 3rd-level spell as an encounter power at level 6." That might possibly work to some degree for a spell like Fireball, but what about Cure Serious Wounds or Fly or Invisibility? Pretty much any healing or non-combat spell can only be balanced with the assumption that there is a daily limit on use.Plus, a lot of the most interesting spellcasting systems make use of spells that can't be socketed into the standard 9 levels a wizard or cleric uses. Some, like the warlock's incantations, scale with level; others can be custom-scaled based on what resources you expend to use them (like spending psionic points in 4e).  With the current 5e core I could easily write up a Pyromancer class who only gets one "spell" (Fire) and learns new and more powerful uses for it (heating metal, enchanting flaming weapons, etc) as he levels up. That wouldn't fit into the rubric for spellcasters the OP has outlined.People are arguing in other threads about exactly how Vancian wizards should be. Nobody seems to be arguing that sorcerers can't use spell points (even though they never have in any other core edition of D&D) or that warlocks should get tons of daily spells. This tells me that we're really arguing here specifically about the wizard and his juicy list of classic D&D spells, and there's no reason to throw out the baby with the bathwater by screwing up every other spellcasting class to fix the wizard's identity crisis.Here's an alternate wizard solution: make the school specializations specialties, and make the "arcane traditions" give you options as to how Vancian you want to be. (Make a "wild mage" tradition that works like a 3e sorcerer, and a "favored spell" tradition that gets one or two encounter spells, and so on, along with the standard Vancian wizard.) This way people who want to play a pure-Vancian Illusionist can do so, and those who want a non-Vancian wizard get it.</blockquote>

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