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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Larkas" data-source="post: 6060550" data-attributes="member: 82123">Just to put things in perspective: to be able to cast as many spells as a sorcerer, a wizard have to forgo three spell schools. Evocation and Enchantment are pretty much a given, as KaiiLurker put, so you'll only have to think hard on the third school. Will it be Necromancy? Will it be Abjuration? Whatever your choice was (and chances are you'll never choose to ban Conjuration or Transmutation, which by itself increases your versatilty greatly), you can never cast spells of that school. Seems like a harsh requirement, right? Well, only if you're "thinking wizard". Consider the sorcerer. Every time you select a new spell, you are forgoing every other spell you could have chosen at that level. It doesn't matter if you're forgoing a Necromancy spell, an Abjuration spell, an Enchantment spell or an Evocation spell. It doesn't even matter if it's a Conjuration spell or a Transmutation spell, once you have chose one spell at that level, you can't choose another spell in its place until you gain new levels or retrain. A wizard need only prepare a different spell the following day. As a wizard, you work by choosing what you'll subtract from your list; as a sorcerer, you work by choosing what you'll add to your list. As a wizard, you may presume that you potentially know every spell in existence, and go from there. As a sorcerer, you must presume you don't know any spell, and work your way to a usable spell list.Now, don't take me wrong, I totally understand your goals. You want to simplify the game, which is a very lofty goal, and a great idea if you intend to teach new players the basis of the system. In such a game, a specialist wizard probably won't be played, let alone a focused specialist. The wizard can still prepare for any situation, but if it doesn't have those many spell slots, this won't have so big an impact, and the sorcerer will keep its turf of "spellcaster with an insane number of spells per day". A generalist wizard won't have much use for the metamagic feats it can take with its bonus feats, so in the end, it won't matter much.But the point about a sorcerer being much harder to build than a wizard still stands. Even with retraining, it can't quite have the best tools for any situation at any given time. In a way, it has a swiss army knife, not a full toolbox. It can improvise, sure. But it can't be the best always. Now, that isn't a bad thing. Actually, I think that is part of the charm of playing a sorcerer. But it goes counter to your goals of simplifying things. By using PF's sorcerer, or at least allowing the sorcerer to take a bloodline feat at 1st level, you take a bit of the load from the shoulders of the newbie: if the player decides to take the Fey Bloodline feat, for example, he can choose to learn Alter Self with a little bit more of confidence when he reaches 4th level, for example, since he will automatically know Glitterdust. That is huge, and shows how a single feat can greatly simplify character creation, management and evolution.Anyways, just my 2 cents. YMMV, and I don't intend to show you that "the sorcerer need to be balanced against the wizard". I just want to show you that, as it is, building a sorcerer can be made simpler and more fun simply by giving it a single feat.</blockquote>

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