D&D 5E On whether sorcerers and wizards should be merged or not, (they shouldn't)

[Tony Vargas]

I could just as easily say that sorcerers reflect an inherent position of privilege because they're literally born into power and hence obviously constitute an arcane aristocracy,

Wouldn't even be that revolutionary(npi) an idea.

As part of the official game? I tried to restrict it to official game material but if you go outside that, people have been unhappy with the magic system since it was introduced and have howebrewed a variety of systems to replace it.

I can't recall if anything resembling a mana system snuck into Tome of Magic or some Player's option thing in 2e, but no, nothing official, just very common variants...

… and well-regarded, by some at least, as alternatives to Vancian... though also regarded as crazy-broken compared to the heavy restrictions inherent in Vancian, by others...

… now, of course, 5e has removed so many of those restrictions that it can casually present a similar spell-point variant in the DMG without much comment at all.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I have been tempted to scrap the PHB sorcerer, and build out the playtest sorcerer, continuing what they were doing way back in August 2012. They seemed to have been going for a melee sorcerer with the dragon heritage. It gave d8 HD, proficiency with all armor and shield, allowing you to cast spells while wearing armor, and proficiency with martial melee weapons. Spending Willpower gave cosmetic (and mechanical) changes that lasted until you complete a long rest.

The Willpower system was a little more granular than it needed to be. If I were going to build a class with this transformation theme, I'd just give it warlock spell slots: spend one slot, get transformation A, spend a second slot, get transformation B, and so on.

 

[Don Durito]

I'm pretty sure at least one DMG has had some kind of spell point variant.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I'm pretty sure at least one DMG has had some kind of spell point variant.

5E does. Or do you mean further back? 4E definitely didn't (what would that even mean in an AEDU world?), and I don't think 3E did. I'm not as familiar with the 1E and 2E DMGs, though, and they were full of surprises, so maybe there.

 

[MoonSong]

My largest issue with the sorcerer class is that everything about it is riven from the Magic User. Splitting ‘bloodline magic’ from ‘School Magic’ has narrowed the theme of each class, to each classes detriment.

In my opinion, a class should have a broad theme, with subclass narrowing the theme down.

Sorcerers do the opposite, and by their existence turn Wizards into the bookish perpetual college student..( how magical).

The bloodline is superfluous, important but not fundamental. Wizards, they always were the bookish perpetual college student. In thirty or so years of D&D Wizards never became anything else. (For real, show me one character, one character from 2e or before that was illiterate and dumb yet had magic that was a part of the self and not taken from a book)

I'm not sure your account is accurate. Development during the Beyond era did focus on the "Core Four", and they did adopt a "we'll get to them eventually" attitude towards the other classes (which seems to have been to the detriment of the ranger in particular). But if I'm recalling correctly, a version of the sorcerer was one of the first if not the first playtest class we saw outside the Four, long before we saw a paladin or druid or monk, and it had very distinctive mechanics and identity. Negative feedback on that version resulted in them dialing the class back to the more 3E-ish look in the final product.

Yes, we had an early sorcerer, which had good feedback, just an undercurrent worry that the particular subclass was too big a departure. They didn't stop development on it for bad feedback, they stopped because wizard players started demanding all of the toys -the neovancian spellcasting that clerics had just received-, and the designers responded by withholding further development "until wizard was right". Then they changed the name to mage and later announced the purpose of killing sorcerer and just have it be a subclass under mage. That didn't go well at all, because that one was 90% wizard at the base and the feedback showed it. Only then they agreed to have a sorcerer class, but it was already to late to have it in the open playtest, and it was only tested internally with no feedback from the community. And it wasn't properly tested either, as the final result was beta at most.

At any rate, even if my memory is totally wrong, the final proof is in the pudding: the sorcerer exists. If Mearls and Co. didn't want it, it wouldn't be there.

They had to have it in some way or shape, it would have been bad PR not to. For better or worse it qualified for the "gnome effect". They still delivered a bad product, we just didn't noticed because we were playing it wrong for about a year and a half -then errata happened and dragon sorcerer was nerfed-.

 

[Doug McCrae]

This passage from Demons in the Middle Ages (2017) by Juanita Feros Ruys about the differences between common magic and learned necromancy seems remarkably similar to the contrast being drawn between sorcerers and wizards. "Necromancy" at this time meant summoning demons rather than spirits of the dead.

When we look at the sorts of spells that learned practitioners were seeking to implement we can see where their desires lay. Whereas for the non-literate population key issues were health, fertility, and survival, for those practising necromancy the priorities appear different. The books of learned magic show that a necromancer was likely to hire out his skills, using the demons’ knowledge of secret things to locate lost and stolen property and identify thieves. Other spells are clearly self-interested, aiming to secure the love of a particular woman, find treasure, develop power and authority, or gain civic honours. Intriguingly, however, love and money do not appear to be nearly as common objectives for necromancers as occult knowledge.​

 

[oreofox]

The Willpower system was a little more granular than it needed to be. If I were going to build a class with this transformation theme, I'd just give it warlock spell slots: spend one slot, get transformation A, spend a second slot, get transformation B, and so on.

The willpower system was an early form of sorcery points. Spend 1 willpower, gain "dragon strength", letting you deal an extra 2d6 damage on your next melee attack. Do that 3 times in a day, your hands become claws and you deal +2 damage on melee attacks. It's the same as sorcery points. Only difference is, sorcery points are only used to use Metamagic or make new spell slots, and might have some use for a subclass ability. I could see giving it warlock spell slots, but being able to change them into willpower/sorcery points. But as it is, in the PHB subclasses, sorcery points are used for metamagic and being turned into spell slots, with having extremely limited use outside of those 2 things. It's worse than monks and their ki points.

Of course, not sure what the powers and such would have been like for wild magic, or shadow, or favored soul (aka divine soul), etc. WotC just focused on dragon, like always.

 

[FrogReaver]

I don't understand the focus on sorcerers needing to have vastly different underlying mechanics than a wizard. Why is this a good thing, why is it even necessary?

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Yes, we had an early sorcerer, which had good feedback, just an undercurrent worry that the particular subclass was too big a departure. They didn't stop development on it for bad feedback, they stopped because wizard players started demanding all of the toys -the neovancian spellcasting that clerics had just received-, and the designers responded by withholding further development "until wizard was right". Then they changed the name to mage and later announced the purpose of killing sorcerer and just have it be a subclass under mage. That didn't go well at all, because that one was 90% wizard at the base and the feedback showed it. Only then they agreed to have a sorcerer class, but it was already to late to have it in the open playtest, and it was only tested internally with no feedback from the community. And it wasn't properly tested either, as the final result was beta at most.

They had to have it in some way or shape, it would have been bad PR not to. For better or worse it qualified for the "gnome effect". They still delivered a bad product, we just didn't noticed because we were playing it wrong for about a year and a half -then errata happened and dragon sorcerer was nerfed-.

Well, that is certainly a... motivated perspective on events. But it doesn't make sense for WotC to have killed the playtest dragon sorcerer if it got broadly good feedback. And I don't see how "wizard players" come into the picture at all -- that sorcerer didn't have Vancian casting, neo- or otherwise, and none of its "toys" showed up in the final wizard class any more than in the final sorcerer. This is the back-and-forth as I reconstruct it:

WotC: We've been thinking about sorcerers a lot and we've got a bold new idea for it. Check it out. Is this direction you want to see the class go?
Community: Not really, no.
WotC: Okay, noted. Too far out? Let's go in the other direction and merge all the arcanists into this mage. Is this the direction you want to see the class go?
Community: Definitely not.
WotC: Okay, too far in the other direction. So we're going to go down the middle now and write a sorcerer mostly like it was in 3E.

Nobody with an axe to grind against the sorcerer, no mean old wizard players ruining everything, just some game designers exploring the two poles of the lumper-splitter axis in a limited amount of time.

 

[tetrasodium]

I don't understand the focus on sorcerers needing to have vastly different underlying mechanics than a wizard. Why is this a good thing, why is it even necessary?

if the sorcerer is not different from the wizard, why is it justified existing. Barbarian fighter rogue pally & ranger are all very different with very different abilities of their own. Wizard and sorcerer are mostly their spell lists but those lists are almost entirely overlapping but the sorcerer has a more useful prime stat and almost all of the wizard's skill options plus a few social options, all of the wizard proficiencies plus many more, etc.

Yes it is necessary for sorcerer to find its own place & that place needs to be something other than "social but almost everything meaningful or class defining a wizard can do plus some extra stuff"