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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6660194" data-attributes="member: 996">Or different powers & abilities, sure. In any given story, or even series, though you don't typically see a re-cycled character do every thing it ever did in any other story, plus some new stuff.  It doesn't accumulate the way D&D just aggregated everything remotely supernatural ever done in anything even adjacent to the fantasy genre and plopped it all into a giant list of 'spells.'That's often argued.  Hercules isn't a valid model for a D&D fighter, because he was a demi-god.  Yet you're here arguing Circe, who basically had a 1e Wand of Polymorphing, and not much else, justifies the power of D&D casters, even though she's of divine (Titan) origin, on both sides of her family.   Yep, he was on the high end of the magic power scale in a definitive work of High Fantasy, and a supernatural being (so, something D&D shouldn't even be aiming for, if Hercules if off limits), yet D&D went ahead and medeled all the powers he displayed with low-level spells.  That's straying pretty far from the genre, and in the direction of casters being far more powerful than there's any reason for them to be. You have described the failure of D&D to balance classes, yes.  You have not justified it, merely described it.  To justify it you'd have to figure out a reason that game balance is bad for games (it's not), or that the genre supports casters being wildly powerful - yet the most powerful casters in the proximate inspirations for D&D display not a fraction of the things that D&D casters can do. And, the way PCs are statted has to reflect that.  And, similarly, classes need to be balanced, because it would be decidedly un-satisfying to everyone else at the table if one of the players did everything. Another example of D&D casters being excessively powerful relative to genre, yes.  Magic in genre has many and varied drawbacks, limitations and consequences.  It takes exotic materials, long periods of time, runs terrible risks, and has dire consequences for the caster or even the whole world.  It's fairly rarely a fire-and-forget grenade.  But, D&D, for essentially 'gamist' reasons, dropped all of the consequences and most of the limitations on magic, in favor of that Vancian model - that turned out :chough:5minuteworkday<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/hack.jpg"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hack:" title="Hackmaster    :hack:" data-shortname=":hack:" /> less than limiting. Ironic, really, collect every power a supernatural being ever displayed and put them in the spell list, then eliminate virtually every limitation, risk, and consequence of doing each of those in favor of 1/day. Nod.  And one apologist theory for D&D going Vancian was that it wasn't 'really' n/day grenades, but bundled all those restrictions - the stars being right, and drained life-force and terrible prices and whatnot - for gaming convenience and playability.   To be clear, you are a self-identified caster supremacist.  4e (sorta) balanced the classes, 3e broke them worse than ever, 5e didn't break 'em quite so bad, is what you just said. Different levels handle that sort of thing.   Ah... not too consistently.  Prior to UA, 1e fighters were pretty unremarkable compared to what you could do with spells and magic items.  Post-UA and in 2e, though, DPR went through the roof, and few monsters could stand up to them.  In 3e, it took a serious power-build to really burn down monsters through damage accumulation, while SoDs made casters supreme, and damage virtually wasted.  In 4e, the damage divide was by Role. Strikers - whether Rogue or Sorcerer or Avenger or whatever, did a lot of damage - and a few wierd charge-build versions of them took the optimization crown for a while.  Defenders didn't do quite so much damage, fighters included.  5e is prettymuch back to the 2e model, AFAICT.  Which is not the worst D&D has ever been in terms of class balance - though 2e had fewer classes to balance - but still pretty effdup. Ergo, the wizard is powerful in a way that is starkly contrary to genre.   Well, you're clearly very happy with overpowered, Vancian casters, so that's no surprise.  The fact is, thought, that Vancian casting was lifted from one science-fiction setting, and never used in the fantasy genre prior to D&D, and that stood out like a sore thumb to anyone with any expectation that D&D might be a little like the genre. You keep trying that one out, it doesn't remotely fly.  You're just repeating proof that D&D casters are overpowered relative to the genre, as if it were justification.   You're like a bank robber, pointing to the surveillance footage, saying "see, that's me robbing the bank, you can't convict me, because that's what I do, I rob banks!" Game balance is critical in making games not suck, yes.  The main reason EGG went with Vancian was for that same 'gamist' reason, to bring magic up to the level of in-combat useability that would allow such characters to participate in the game, rather than watching from the sidelines - it just didn't work, and they turned out to be wildly overpowered. Look, I appreciate that you're honest enough to admit that you think casters should be overpowered in D&D, and I'm sure you've been delighted with the 38 of 40 years that such was the case.  But it's clear we're not even speaking the same language when we start referencing genre.  If you can't see how the game giving powers displayed by a semi-divine being like Circe to 7th level magic-users, while denying that semi-divine Heracles can be used as a model for fighters is a profound double-standard, you just don't want to see it.  If you can't see how giving 5th level casters all the spells (and then some) displayed by an angelic-super-being only nominally a 'wizard' might be overreaching, you just don't want to see it.   Yeah, sorry 'bout that.  It just drifted in from another thread, somehow... Hope you find some more 5e players soon.  Good luck.</blockquote>

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