D&D (2024) My wishes for 6e: less dark vision and spellcasting classes

[Minigiant]

Fan of

Darkvision: sees in dim light as if it were bright light and sees in darkness as if it were dim light
Elfsight: sees in dim light as if it were bright light, bonus to perception in bright light
Nightvision: sees in darkness as if it were dim light
Heatvision: sees hot things as red and cool things as blue in darkness and dim light
Devilsight: sees in dim light as if it were bright light and sees in darkness and magical darkness as if it were dim light
Farsight: ignores penalty to perception in bright light and dim light due to distance

 

[EzekielRaiden]

See, I actually hated the fact that the World Axis was specifically designed to cater to adventuring. It felt very gamey to me, while the Great Wheel felt like something wizened sages who only kinda know what they're talking about would come up with, based on the information they had.

But my opinion on these things is well known.

For my part, the Great Wheel's "a place for everything and everything in its place" thing makes it much more gamey, despite being less adventureable. IRL cosmologies weren't clean, neat, and (most importantly here) precisely comprehensive. The Norse had nine realms--about which very little was known. The Greeks knew the world was round by 500 BC, but had Ultima Thule with some crazy stuff said about it, and (at least by the 2nd century AD) were comfortable with what we would call blatantly sci-fi elements (alien races living on the Moon and Sun, e.g. Lucian's satirical True Story.)

As I see it, the World Axis isn't "made for play" (though that is the Doylist reason it exists.) Instead, it represents Watsonian imperfect knowledge. We know a bit about the Elemental Chaos...but who the frig knows what's beyond the edge of the parts people have seen? We know there's a "Feywild," but a fixed map thereof? Hilarious, pull the other one. The ignorance and incompleteness makes it natural--much more like real medieval maps (the hic sunt dracones, or leones if you prefer more historical prevalence.) To have an understanding as precise and comprehensive as the Great Wheel, where anyone with even a little education on the topic can know the precise layout and (in most cases) composition of literally every plane except the Abyss (since its structure is infinite layers and thus...can't be fully spelled out)...just feels really, really artificial. It feels much more like "I have to have all these planes existing, because the alignment grid requires it." For all the complaints 4e got about "grid-filling" with its classes, the Great Wheel should really get some flak for grid-filling planes.

If the Great Wheel were explicitly given as a best-fit approximation with either known exceptions, or outstanding questions left unanswered, it would feel a lot more like the best-effort attempt to understand the cosmos, not a perfectly-comprehensive atlas of the cosmos with no parts left out or unaccounted for.

 

[James Gasik]

Adventures on the Outer Planes are a fairly old school concept, and the Great Wheel was intended as the next logical destination for high level play. Planescape monopolized on this, as, basically, ANYTHING GOES on the outer planes. The sub-layers of different Planes could provide their own unique problems. A Plane where Magic doesn't work? Check. A Plane where coming in contact with a river will make you forget who you are? Check.

A Plane where the atmosphere ends 10' up? Check. A Plane that consists of an endless battlefield full of warriors who come back to life no matter how many times you kill them? Check. A Plane where time flows backwards and players run the risk of becoming so young they are helpless, or even ceasing to have ever been born? Check.

When the time came to explore the Planes in 4e (like in the later stages of Scales of War), a lot of what had been established in the old Great Wheel was recycled. I found myself piloting the head of a dead God through the Astral Sea to a Citadel run by the Arcane from Spelljammer (now renamed the Mercane) to bring the fight to the Githyanki Emperor (who had imprisoned the latest incarnation of Gith, who we had to free). And it was awesome, but ultimately, it made me really wonder why they had bothered to change the Planes at all if you were just going to have the same adventures. Even the Feywild wasn't a new idea- Fey had long been said to come from an Alternate Prime Material Plane.

And even when I visited the Shadowfel, it really felt more like Ravenloft to me- to the point that there were "Domains" in the Shadowfel ruled by Dark Lords (Scales of War had me visit the Domain of Betrayal, where we fought Kas- the legendary warrior who had betrayed Vecna).

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I’d be ok with all the spellcasting classes if they made each class choose spells from a unique list. Too many classes pick from the wizard list and the sorcerer list is identical to the wizard list except it has less spells and bards get all the illusion enchantment spells that wizards get along with some Druid spells. I’d even be ok if their spell lists were shorter. Just make them unique.

I’d be happier with dark vision if it gave more penalties to other things: like ranged attacks and other ability checks. People don’t care if they get an occasional penalty to perception. Give them a penalty to attack and sure as heck they’ll make sure they have a light source.

 

[James Gasik]

They really should care about the penalty to Perception. I'm happy to use ambushes and traps to make them care!

 

[tetrasodium]

Because players don't use darkvision as a cool but limited back up to having light, they use it as a replacement for having light. And then get surly when you enforce the difference. Eventually, it gets exhausting and you start to feel like the bad guy.

This is my experience as well. Players flatly refuse to use anything but dark vision. If I put in silly traps that require color to solve then I'm the bad guy beings unreasonable punishing them like that & the game devolves into a tedious tomb of horrors style poke everything with a ten foot pole twice slog.

 

[Undrave]

Totally agree on less spells and bringing back the interesting 4e Monster designs!

And speaking of spells, I feel like rituals are underused. Would be great to have more subclasses that get some flavourful rituals the way the Totem barbarian does, but we'd need more rituals for that. And we could use a Ritual focus Wizard or Cleric.

Warlords, oh, and also Warlords.

If we can't have a separated Warlord class, then I just want the Warlord to skin the Fighter and wear his name. The 'basic Fighter' should just be a single build, and the Fighter should go back to its roots as the mundane leader of men like back when it became the lord of a castle.

The way the Paladin is built, a non-casting version would have to have a totally reworked smite, and it would lose a ton of utility- most noncasting Paladins I've seen just give them the ability to replicate things they could do with spells x/day anyways.

How about, instead of 'spend Spell Slots to Smite' they went the other way around? Spend Smite charges to cast from a subclass specific set of spells? Then, if you want a more spell caster Paladin, you can give them a subclass with actual spell slots to use on a curated list of utility spells? While the more warrior-like subclasses just get more bashing-heads-in stuff.

It does feel sometimes like every edition is more and more "Dungeons and Spellcasters". I get it, people like the idea of flexibility even if most people end up relying on a handful of spells in my experience. You can do cool stuff with magic. But when at least 5 out of 6 PCs is a spell caster of some sort in every game it does seem excessive.

An don't forget the HUGE section of the PHB dedicated to spells, and how every single book seems to add spells (especially to the Wizard list!). 'Make it a spell' seems to be the default for any interesting action in the game.

A lot of people liked the World Axis cosmology.

I was just glad to be rid of the Wheel.

I LOVED the 4e cosmology! It had so many interesting adventuring locations! And it was fairly simple to remember how it worked.

 

[Undrave]

Like, honest to goodness, has the difference between Gehenna, Hades, and Carceri ever really mattered for your games? Have you ever actually used the para-elemental or quasi-elemental planes?

Is the elemental plane of cheese (or elemanthal plane) a para-elemental or quasi-elemental plane?

Yikes! The 4e cosmology was one of my favorite things about the edition (and I fantasized about the great wheel in the 1e Deities & Demigods for many years as young man/boy). The 4e cosmology was a breath of fresh-air and I loved the Dawn War as well.

I loved the cosmic lore of 4e and all the cool gods. Felt very MYTHIC because not everything was clear cut. Like in the Dawn War, where a traditionally evil god like Bane was instrumental in the Gods' victory over the Primordials. There was interesting alliances and you had gods like Erathis who had more grey areas. The Plane Above is literally my favorite 4e book and I urge everyone to read it jut for the lore.

 

[Undrave]

I’d be ok with all the spellcasting classes if they made each class choose spells from a unique list. Too many classes pick from the wizard list and the sorcerer list is identical to the wizard list except it has less spells and bards get all the illusion enchantment spells that wizards get along with some Druid spells. I’d even be ok if their spell lists were shorter. Just make them unique.

I’d be happier with dark vision if it gave more penalties to other things: like ranged attacks and other ability checks. People don’t care if they get an occasional penalty to perception. Give them a penalty to attack and sure as heck they’ll make sure they have a light source.

I feel like most issues with spell casting come down to the Wizard being too damn flexible and being too vague of a concept. Picking a specialization as a Wizard doesn't really mean much beyond the first few levels.

I think a 6e Wizard should have a small base list of generic utility spells (Light, Tenser's Floating Disk, Feather Fall, Sending, that sort of thing, maybe Magic Missile and Shield) and have all their cooler spells based on their chosen specialty. So, yes, you can build a Wizard in many different ways, but you can't just pile up all the BEST SPELLS on the same character because some of them would be mutually exclusive.

But I bet Wizard fans would riot and apparently they're the most important fans so we HAVE to bend over backward for them.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I feel like most issues with spell casting come down to the Wizard being too damn flexible and being too vague of a concept. Picking a specialization as a Wizard doesn't really mean much beyond the first few levels.

I think a 6e Wizard should have a small base list of generic utility spells (Light, Tenser's Floating Disk, Feather Fall, Sending, that sort of thing, maybe Magic Missile and Shield) and have all their cooler spells based on their chosen specialty. So, yes, you can build a Wizard in many different ways, but you can't just pile up all the BEST SPELLS on the same character because some of them would be mutually exclusive.

But I bet Wizard fans would riot and apparently they're the most important fans so we HAVE to bend over backward for them.

Yeah, WotC is not going to nerf the wizard to the degree many people around here seem to want.