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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
On whether sorcerers and wizards should be merged or not, (they shouldn't)
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<blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7915982" data-attributes="member: 6683613"><p>That depends. If sorcerers are akin to Marvel mutants, then the limited but sometimes eclectic repertoire of powers at their disposal could be right on the money.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Later 3E was doing this sort of thing with a number of classes like the warmage, dread necromancer, and beguiler. Just pick a theme, give the class every spell in that theme, and let them access their whole spell list spontaneously. It's balanced in principle by their total lack of access to off-theme magic, and they never got anywhere near the wizard or cleric on anybody's tier list. (Like seriously, I speak from experience: it's all fun and games with your warmage out-novaing any other class against almost any target, until the bad guys cast something that needs to be dispelled.)</p><p></p><p>Though you might see the design trouble already: each of these is a whole distinct class. At the very least, it'd be a whole distinct spell list. Printing a distinct spell list for every possible sorcerer theme would be quite demanding on the page-count front. And then you have to decide how expandable all these spell lists are with further releases. Maybe you could get around it by tagging spells with different keywords and telling sorcerers to pick a keyword, but that gets cumbersome too. I'm certainly not saying the problems are insurmountable here, of course. But the route WotC took instead with the sorcerer has the advantages of being simple and open-ended, allowing players to build their <em>own</em> themes and decide for themselves whether they want to be hyperspecialized or branch out a bit. Maybe they didn't get it perfect, but let's not lose sight of those virtues.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="TheCosmicKid, post: 7915982, member: 6683613"] That depends. If sorcerers are akin to Marvel mutants, then the limited but sometimes eclectic repertoire of powers at their disposal could be right on the money. Later 3E was doing this sort of thing with a number of classes like the warmage, dread necromancer, and beguiler. Just pick a theme, give the class every spell in that theme, and let them access their whole spell list spontaneously. It's balanced in principle by their total lack of access to off-theme magic, and they never got anywhere near the wizard or cleric on anybody's tier list. (Like seriously, I speak from experience: it's all fun and games with your warmage out-novaing any other class against almost any target, until the bad guys cast something that needs to be dispelled.) Though you might see the design trouble already: each of these is a whole distinct class. At the very least, it'd be a whole distinct spell list. Printing a distinct spell list for every possible sorcerer theme would be quite demanding on the page-count front. And then you have to decide how expandable all these spell lists are with further releases. Maybe you could get around it by tagging spells with different keywords and telling sorcerers to pick a keyword, but that gets cumbersome too. I'm certainly not saying the problems are insurmountable here, of course. But the route WotC took instead with the sorcerer has the advantages of being simple and open-ended, allowing players to build their [I]own[/I] themes and decide for themselves whether they want to be hyperspecialized or branch out a bit. Maybe they didn't get it perfect, but let's not lose sight of those virtues. [/QUOTE]
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