D&D General Making Spellcasters feel Caster-y without actually Casting?

[Horwath]

Or if you want martials that don't suck and aren't lame.

there is a problem in that, and that is complexity,
so you either have Bo9S "martials" or you have champion-fighter or maybe barbarian.

 

[A_Carrington]

Why do you think a complex system is required?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

There was an article in Dragon Magazine back in the day called "The Color of Magic" that handled this kind of idea. In a nutshell, it suggests reflavoring spells to suit a specific theme (the example it uses is an ice mage whose magic missile looks like icecicles and similar reskinnings) and also allowing a wizard to use minor magc to do anything they'd normaly be able to do without magic; the examples it gives are lighting a pipe, shuffling cards, etc. At the time, there were no cantrips or at-will magic the way we have it now, and those cantrips and such really fill in a lot of these spaces, but it's still an interesting article.

The magazine is long out of print, of course, but by sheer luck it seems someone has posted this particular article online: The Color of Magic

I definitely like the idea that Wizards should simply have abilities that let them mundane things just as well as mundane people do, but they do it with a subtle magic spell.

For the example of senses someone else brought: When a Wizard uses "Perception", they close their eyes and speak an arcane rhyme and suddenly point to whatever they found.
If a Wizard jumps over an obstacle, he's making a tiny hop with an an arcane gesture and floats over the obstacle.

But that of course alone isn't yet anything mechanical. I suppose mechanically speaking, you could give Wizards the ablity to use their Arcana skill for some skill checks or substitute the regular ability modififer with their Intelligence modifier, but that's kinda boring and also means that their Arcana and Intelligence become just more important, turning everything else in more of dump stat.
Maybe there could be some compromise approach: "Roll Athletics as normal, but if your result is lower than your passive Arcana check, you can reroll, taking the better result." So someone that is actually good at Athletics still gets better results, but at least they aren't hopeless (but if the Wizard, for some reason, is really good at Athletics, they're better than someone just good at Athletics.)

 

[A_Carrington]

You could just buy Levitation and actually be a wizard instead of being a normal guy who pretends that jumping is magic.

 

[DeviousQuail]

I definitely like the idea that Wizards should simply have abilities that let them mundane things just as well as mundane people do, but they do it with a subtle magic spell.

For the example of senses someone else brought: When a Wizard uses "Perception", they close their eyes and speak an arcane rhyme and suddenly point to whatever they found.
If a Wizard jumps over an obstacle, he's making a tiny hop with an an arcane gesture and floats over the obstacle.

But that of course alone isn't yet anything mechanical. I suppose mechanically speaking, you could give Wizards the ablity to use their Arcana skill for some skill checks or substitute the regular ability modififer with their Intelligence modifier, but that's kinda boring and also means that their Arcana and Intelligence become just more important, turning everything else in more of dump stat.
Maybe there could be some compromise approach: "Roll Athletics as normal, but if your result is lower than your passive Arcana check, you can reroll, taking the better result." So someone that is actually good at Athletics still gets better results, but at least they aren't hopeless (but if the Wizard, for some reason, is really good at Athletics, they're better than someone just good at Athletics.)

This reminds me of a funny homebrew item. The dimension 20 show misfits & magic used the kids on brooms rules for their game. Whenever you used magic you rolled the appropriate die and a d4. The system uses exploding dice so that d4 was really handy. Anyway, they would use the term "do magic about it" as a shorthand for using the d4. I wanted to emulate that a bit in 5e and created a ring that was effectively guidance on self as a reaction. You had to declare it before any rolls. If you did then you "did magic about it" and rolled 1d20+1d4+mod and if the magic die got a 4 then it exploded and you could roll it again. However, this was also clearly very powerful so there were two things added to balance it. In-game the action you took is obviously magically enhanced. Which could be negatively looked upon by others. Using the ring also meant that any roll of a 1 on the d4, at any point, was an automatic failure.

Tying it back to 5e and non-spell slot magic, I would have this as a magical effect a player could take. At it's base form I'd do something like d4 as a reaction on self, auto fail on a 1, no explosions, and can only be used on a subset of skills. Str/Dex/Con, Int, Wis, or Cha. From there it can grow to add explosions, bigger dice, more skill subsets, target others, remove the reaction cost, etc.