Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
The itemlessness is precisely what makes the cantrip feel innately magical.
To use an item like a mundane crossbolt or even an enhanced crossbolt feels more like buying hardware, and feels less like doing magic.
The always-on capability of cantrips actualizes a talent for magic and helps the character feel personally magical.
I stopped playing 3e for two reasons: convoluted gaming imbalance generally, but also its lack of cantrips specifically.
I like magical characters and require a game whose mechanics express magical flavors well.
The Damage-Over-Time spells are inherently problematic because focus fire is a more effective tactic, by far.
There can still be − and are − spells that grant or swap one kind of damage type for an other.
If a "consumable" magic item has charges, such as ten uses of a specific cantrip, that would be valuable enough. As a player, I would appreciate such an item as a treasure.
As a DM, its consumability allows for a less personal more industrial magic, that magic items can purchase. It is an expendable resource.
A one-time scroll use, for a noncombat ritual or even a combat slot spell that any character can cast, can be purchasable as a service. A player character can go to a Sage to prepare such a scroll for a fee. And if the Sage is willing to do the magic, then the item from this Sage will work for the character as a consumable magic item. One would still need to attune to the magic from the Sage to cast such a scroll successfully.
If a character finds such a scroll randomly, one can try attune it, to see if it will work. DM decides. This allows Rogues and Fighters the opportunity to one-off spells.
A caster can first see if it is possible to attune a certain scroll, and if so, attempt to translate its magic style into the ones own personal magic style, in order to acquire it as a known spell for the spellbook or its equivalent. Normally, spellbooks are for noncombat rituals. But the Wizard class specifically can add combat slot spells to their spellbook.
Personally, I would use certain skills to determine if the character can cast certain spell themes successfully, from any ritual instructions or scroll:
• Arcane: force, force constructs, telekinetic flight, metamagic
• Nature: elementalism (earth, water, air, fire)
• Survival: plant
• Animal Handling: beast, shapeshifting, body, athletics
• Medicine: healing
• Insight: mind, enchantment
• Religion: divination, teleportation, planarity
I see two kinds of magic items: permanent and consumable.
A consumable wand can run out of charges − something like a magitech memory stick for several scrolls.
A permanent wand is an inherently valuable magical item − an entity − an event.
Cantrips are valuable. There are many good ones to choose from. Even high level casters only have a few cantrip. Magic items that grant cantrips are useful and valuable.
But the ability to cast cantrips without items is what makes the character oneself feel magical.
Recently but strongly:
I want spell descriptions to delete the spell components. These Verbal-Somatic-Material components are normally ignored, inflexibly precise, convoluted, and obsolete.
Instead.
There should be only the "spell focus". There can many different kinds of focuses.
• Implement (such as magitech wand, mentally imbued item, etcetera)
• Symbol (holy symbol, tattoo, etcetera)
• Familiar
• Ingredient (material components, classical protoscience, plants, rocks, animal products, potions, herbal bags, etcetera)
• Gestures (somatic components, dance, handsigns, nose-wiggle, etcetera)
• Thought (visualization, prayer, trance, etcetera)
• Voice (spontaneous song, artistically crafted poem, traditional verbal formula, etcetera)
Each class or character concept can have signature method to cast spells: a personal spell focus.
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