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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 8267407" data-attributes="member: 93670">How to implement a magic system would depend heavily on  how the rest of the system works.  Vancian is not the only way of having a system where magic feels magical, it's just one of the easy ways of doing that.  You can look at <a href="https://www.evilhat.com/home/dresden-files-rpg-your-story/" target="_blank">dfrpg</a> as an alternate example where wizards have incredibly powerful magic that is shockingly versatile  alongside noncasters who because of the quirks of the system & point buy costs excel in their own areas  in ways that leave both feeling good at the same table.  That dfrpg magic system has the downside of being pretty complex to grasp by needing to really grok how fate works  in order to leverage making it probably a bad fit for d&d without heavy reworking into fate.I agree that disintegrate being a high level slot is a bad example for comparison, but being a high level slot that is so limited it shouldn't even be in the same realm as at will damage .  I usually stick to other spells or cantrips for A:A comparisons & there's a tab with bas all of the cantrips plus a bunch of weapons & the results are pretty stark there as well.   Here's a fighter with a prison break 1d4 dagger shiv they found vrs a generic d12 cantrip[/spoiler][ATTACH=full]136620[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]136622[/ATTACH][/spoiler]That's a damage comparison that should stack up like  the three stooges vrs a heavy weapon but it's nowhere close to that with the cantrip not even beating the prison shiv until you drop to 14/16 strength & even then it's barely pulling ahead.  Things get dramatically worse when you start comparing weapons+feats & cantrips people actually use.A lot of the comparisons I make deliberately try to stack things against the fighter like that absurd maximized lucky lucky lucky disintegrate & still come out with silly results like this with the dagger.  The point isn't to argue over the numbers so much as show how far spells need to bridge the gap in nondamage areasIt's all well & good to say "Wizards do excel at casting spells: they do it much better than Fighters." While technically true it's not like fighters are limited to actor  & dagger/short word because rogues like those akin to how wizards basically share the vast majority of their spell list with sorcerer/warlock/sorlock  but cast them basically the same way unlike fighters getting extra attacks action surge etc.  Spells cast by those wizards need to stack up to being something on par with what kind of useful fighters bring to the average session game after game  & they fall far short  with cantrips likewise being such a joke that they are effectively a pointless contribution.  the occasional <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThisLooksLikeAJobForAquaman" target="_blank">This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman</a> type situation where a niche spell is both available and basically by fiat declared the only solution doesn't make up the gap either.</blockquote>

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